Is it normal to start from scratch?

[Tanker23600]

Hey, so I've played factorio a few times but I've always ended up hitting a wall and stop playing but on this playthrough I've really got into the swing of things! Just starting to play around with nuclear materials which I've never done before.

However... I'm walking around my map and I'm frustrated by how inefficient it seems and messy.... is it a normal feeling to want to just delete everything and start from scratch? Not start a new game just delete and rebuild? I'm trying to complete it without tutorials for the super efficient things I see online.

Thanks!

[jodokus31]

I think, many people are thinking like that.
But maybe it helps, to give you some arguments, why it isn't the best idea to always start over from scratch:
- You are never faster to build a better base by starting from scratch. You can just build a new base somewhere on a free space. (Biters could be problem, but you can also decide to delete them at some point, because they don't add much to post rocket endgame...). Building a new base has the advantage, that you don't destroy your old messy base, before the new one is functional, and therefore you can produce the material for the new base.
- The technology progress is something you always loose on restart. That can be painful to research it all over again. Unless you really like the progress-gameplay to build the base from scratch again and again.
- Rebuilding and changing builds is easy and costs not much except time, esp. if you have construction robots.
- If you don't want to rebuild, you can try to embrace the spaghetti and have fun, nothing has to be perfect

My biggest problem, which often drives me to restart is, that
- I really like the early gameplay
- i don't want to look back onto too much wasted time, where biters got stronger.
- I want to maintain my replay, which breaks, when you change mods or mod settings

First one might be valid, but 2. and 3. are a bit stupid on my side, I guess.

[FuryoftheStars]

You're definitely not alone. I often restart, although in my case, I do restart the entire game.