Sandustry Beginner Guide

Sandustry is a factory automation game where every pixel of a fully destructible planet is a resource. You start with a shovel and a patch of sand, and within a couple of hours you can have a conveyor-fed factory sifting gold, refining residue, and heating water into steam. This beginner guide walks you through the exact first two hours: the core production loop, the right research order, and the mistakes that trip up new players.

The core production loop

Everything in Sandustry revolves around one loop: turn Sand into Wet Sand, run it through a Shaker, and collect Gold while Residue slides away. This is confirmed by the official Hooded Horse guide and every major community source.

• Dig sand with your shovel (or later, guns, drills and vacuum).
• Bring the sand into contact with water to make Wet Sand. The commonly cited ratio is 1 Sand + 1 Water = 2 Wet Sand pixels.
• Drop the wet sand onto the top of a Shaker. Gold falls through and collects below; Residue (also called slag in older demo material) moves off the top or sides.

Your first goal is to make this loop automatic — a conveyor feeding a Shaker while a Collector catches the gold, so the only thing you do is keep the sand coming.

Your first 10 minutes

When you land, your hotbar holds the essentials: a shovel, a gun, a grabber, and a few early structures. A few things worth knowing immediately:

• Gold is your currency. It unlocks Research. Every upgrade starts with gold, so your first job is always "sift more gold."
• Place water deliberately. You want a controlled water lane, not your whole base flooded. A filter keeps wet material from drifting into your gold storage.
• Build cheap, build free. Early structures (Shaker, Conveyor, Launcher, Gold Collector) can be placed freely and don't need power. Logistics — conveyors, launchers, filters, pumps — run indefinitely with no electricity.

Useful hotkeys from the official guide: C selects a structure, Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V copies and pastes a whole system, Ctrl (hold) replaces belts and launchers without rebuilding, and Alt + number switches hotbars.

Research order that works

The research tree is unlocked with gold. The ordering below is the one recommended by sandustry.org's factory guide and matches the official "first loops" advice:

1. Shaker — always first; it's your gold generator.
2. Logistics — unlocks Conveyor Belt and Launcher, letting you separate mining from processing.
3. Guns — an upgraded gun is a far better mining tool than the shovel.
4. Filters — needed once mixed streams start clogging your lines.
5. Refining / Kinetic Press — turns Burnt Residue into more Gold and Seed.
6. Tools — flamethrower and vacuum for steam and cleanup.
7. Pipes & Pumps — unlock water transport (~1,000 gold per sandustry.org; exact costs vary).
8. Drones — the late-game automation layer (Hauler, Digger, Recon, Sweeper).

Common beginner mistakes

These five mistakes come straight from community guides and the sandustry-wiki.wiki beginner page — each one ends a first session early:

1. Flooding every bit of sand instead of controlling water. You want a wetting lane, not a swamp. Over-wetting wastes sand and muddies your belts.
2. Expecting every wet sand pixel to produce gold. Early Shakers have a real failure rate — around 1 in 4 pixels yields gold per multiple community sources (exact odds are unofficial).
3. Letting Residue pile up until the Shaker stalls. Give Residue an exit path from the start. Slope it, belt it away, burn it later.
4. Attacking Crackstone with a shovel or gun. It will just waste durability — you need the rocket launcher (see our Crackstone guide).
5. Scaling up before you understand what's clogging. If the line jams, the cause is almost always one of: wrong filter rule, blocked belt, or overflow. Fix the cause, then expand.

Keeping the factory fed

The moment your first Shaker loop runs, a new problem appears: water. Water is finite and is the single biggest constraint in the early game. Drips from cave ceilings are too slow to scale. Your options in order:

• Small pools and cave water — fine for the first loop, exhaust fast.
• Steam rain — heat water with a flamethrower; steam rises, cools and rains back down. Slow but free.
• Pipes — research Pipes & Pumps (~1,000 gold) to route water from further away.
• Infinite water — artifacts trigger earthquakes that crack open sealed springs; the napalm-rocket steam method also multiplies water (details in our Infinite Water guide).

The same "bottleneck first" logic applies to everything: when a Shaker stops producing, check whether the input (sand/water), the machine, or the output (gold/Residue) is blocked.

Should you buy or play free?

Sandustry is in Early Access on Steam at $14.99 (launch discount -35% to $9.74), and it is included day-one on PC Game Pass. There was a free demo on Steam and itch.io ahead of launch. Note that demo-era guides use older names — for example, Residue is the current official term for what many guides call "slag," and Seed / Wet Seed is the current term for the old "spore" chain. We use the official Early Access terms throughout this site.

FAQ

How long does it take to get your first automated loop? Most players have a conveyor-fed Shaker within the first hour, and a small factory (mining, refining, water) in the first two.

What's the fastest way to get more gold early? Mine sand and keep the Shaker fed. Spend early gold on movement, map, and sorting upgrades before hoarding a big stockpile — a working pipeline beats a pile of unspent gold.

Is there multiplayer? Not yet. Sandustry is single-player in Early Access; follow the official Discord for roadmap updates on co-op.