Yes, I put down the drill, attached conveyors going to the factory. Then it gave me assemblers. I then put down conveyors going to the assembler and set the recipe to factories, since the quest says Assemble Factory. Nothing progresses after that.

Yes but I'm at the point in the game where I have to put down an air extractor and I can't place anything because my "inventory" is out of resources. So how do I pick stuff up from the assembler. I feel like this is a common thing in a factory game to pick up stuff from a conveyor or a machine, or at the very least, some type of storage but I have not unlocked any storage yet. Again, if you click on assembler, the info panel says Items in Depot: x where x is the number of items. So again, how do I get stuff from the depot to my inventory, otherwise I cannot progress because I have nothing to use to place further machines.