If you can scrounge enough gold for an early thaumatorium, you can easily transmute metal into almost any other metal. Including alloys- which'll mean any metal source will suit your needs, rather than spend ages hunting down a tin vein.
Use gold coins as lucrum- you'll get 3 nuggets instead of smelting them for 1.
Wheather you consider the forming press an exploit or not is up to yourself- personally I think its thematically appropriate to produce counterfeit coins for the sake of greed.
You can also make a rather useful cobble gen (stone extruder), and easily crank out useful building materials like glass and quarried stone. If you have tenebrae you can make abyssal stone- useful for railcraft boilers. (not useful for building- tenebrae is a pain in bulk quantity).
Its worth grabbing all the transmutation recipes; quartz, (slimeballs, clay, inksacks ect might be useful).
Alumentum is a decent fuel source, but you can also make coal coke.
You can automatically fill buckets with lava. Later on you can (MV) centrifuge it into metals- giving a source of metellum from some very accessible essentia. (you can also extract piles of rare earth metals if you get into beekeeping)
Alchemical boiler is a good source of aqua essentia.
A tiny pile of anything contains 1 perdetio; ash, wood pulp, and stone dust can be put to good use here.
You can make zTones garden soil- which gives you farming without a water source nearby. (giving rise to your first fully automatic fuel supply via vanilla-esque piston harvesting)
Alechemical steel is useful, requires more expensive materials than the BBF, but overall uses significantly less metal. A few vanilla hoppers can make for a
gravity-fed automatic system thats very cheap to run.
The infernal furnace runs fairly quickly when boosted with ignis.
If you're feeling particularly ballsy, you can move a bunch of sinister nodes under your workshop area, and harvest endless zombies.