I'm sure others have noticed this behavior, and I cannot – for the life of me – find a solution to stop it.
If you have a compressed file (such as a .zip or .tar.gz) on your desktop (or any folder that you're displaying as icons (rather than details or list), when you expand the compressed file, the files from within are placed on top of the compressed file (the files/aliases/etc. overlap each-other). How do you get this behavior to stop, and have the expand process place the files either into a folder named after the compressed file or have the files listed in a column on the desktop, rather than overlapping like they were a stack of cards?
Not that it matters, as this has been the way it is since forever, but I'm running macOS Mojave.
Best Answer
It will drop the expanded file about a 'quarter icon' to the lower right unless you have some kind of 'Sort by' set in Finder; then it will move everything to a new position to make room, as appropriate.
The Archive Utility itself does have settable prefs, but none of them includes what the Finder will do with the positions afterwards...
Personally, I just have it set to always Trash the archive after expansion, which at least moves them out of each other's way.
Archive Utility is in
/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/If you launch it from there it will stay open so you can set prefs.