Sandustry Tips

The best Sandustry tips are the ones that fix the first hour: learn the copy/paste hotkeys before you build anything big, angle your Shakers instead of laying them flat, keep gold and Residue on sorted lines, and treat Residue as a second gold stream instead of garbage. The tips below come from the official Hooded Horse beginner's guide, community factory guides, and the sandustry.wiki and sandustryguide.com tip lists where they agree.

Learn the interface before you expand

Time spent learning the interface pays off the first time you rebuild a line — community guides agree this is the highest-ROI early move.

• Use the Objectives panel with the minimap's yellow arrow — they tell you what to build next.
• You have 10 hotbars of 10 slots; switch with Alt + number or Alt + scrollwheel, keeping tools, transport, and production on separate bars.
• C selects a structure; Ctrl + C / Ctrl + V copy and paste whole systems — conveyor segments, launcher wells, and repeatable lines are best.
• Hold Ctrl (default replace modifier) to upgrade to Mk2 belts and launchers without rebuilding.
• Core keys: S (descend), R (build), X (remove), Shift (box-select, launcher skip); U opens the upgrade panel.

Angle your Shakers and protect your Collector

Laying a Shaker flat is the most common first-hour mistake. The grate needs a slope so gold falls through and Residue slides off — and gold only counts when a Collector catches it.

• Feed a Shaker diagonally, not flat. One or two well-fed diagonal Shakers beat a row of starving flat ones — the standard is sand plus water (commonly cited as 1 Sand + 1 Water = 2 Wet Sand) on top.
• Gold only counts when it lands in a Collector — yellow pixels on the ground, on belts, or under the grate never reach your wallet.
• A Collector needs a solid foundation — one on a hanging half-finished platform can look full while producing nothing. Put one under every Shaker drop and later under your Kinetic Press.
• Expect roughly 20–25% of wet sand passes to drop gold, per multiple community sources — the exact odds are unofficial (verify in current build).

Keep materials sorted

Mixed piles cost more time than any missing upgrade. Denser materials sink, reach a Filter first, and arrive more stably — the community settling order confirms this, so process the denser material first.

• Route solids on belts: Conveyor for horizontal runs, Launcher for vertical or diagonal moves with the high end as the exit.
• Don't stack everything into one tall column — light material on top never reaches the Filter. Wide, tiered lines are easier to debug.
• Keep fluids on their own pipelines: Pump input, Pipe to carry, Liquid Vent to output. A Vent vents whatever liquid is nearest, and mixed fluids can damage a line or waste a finite resource.
• A Basic Filter handles one resource with Allow/Block rules, and a filter block is the standard way to separate byproducts. Since every basic logistics building — conveyors, launchers, filters, pumps, pipes — runs without electricity, a clean layout beats an early power grid.

Never delete Residue

Residue (called slag in some older guides) is your second gold stream. Vacuuming it into a void is literally deleting research progress.

• Burn Residue with a flamethrower (Tools 1) or magma into Burnt Residue.
• Feed Burnt Residue into the Kinetic Press (Refining 2) for gold back, plus a byproduct some guides call Spore and others call Seed — the official Early Access term is Wet Seed — that feeds the flower line later.
• Keep the Residue exit path open from the start. If the Shaker's Residue side backs up, the whole machine stalls.
• The settling order groups Cinder, Residue, and Burnt Residue on the same layer and notes that some materials react when mixed — another reason to keep these lines separate.

Steam is your water pump before pipes

Water is finite and is the early-game bottleneck. Until you research Pipes, steam is the cheapest way to move and multiply water.

• Boil water into Steam with a flamethrower, or a rocket launcher with the napalm upgrade.
• Steam rises, collects at the ceiling, and condenses into rain in about 30 seconds if it has no exit (community-reported timing — verify in current build).
• Guide the rain with blocks so it falls toward your wet sand pool — this replaces the demo-era "rocket dupe" trick.
• Community reports say burning snow produces water, one of the few renewable sources — but keep snow out of your wet sand pool, since snow dropped into water freezes what it touches.
• The community standard opening is a lake-plus-Launcher: throw sand into water, lift the wet sand with a Launcher, drop it on a diagonal Shaker, and belt Residue toward a future press. It needs only Logistics 1 and Refining 1.

Research the bottleneck, not the toys

The community research consensus is short: Refining 1 (Shaker) first, then Logistics 1, then Filters, Pipes, Tools 1 (flamethrower), and Refining 2, with Drones last. Water a problem? Research pipes. Residue a problem? Research the flamethrower.

• Spend the first Fluxite on game-changers: the Material Scanner (hover to see what pixels combine into), Grabber capacity, and Hover — not small speed boosts.
• Upgrade the Grabber early for unblocking jams, testing lines, and moving small batches — but automate once a route works.
• Exploit reactions, not just belts: heat moves materials solid to liquid to gas, cold reverses it. Hard-to-lift resources can be moved in another phase and converted back to solid near the downstream structure.
• For magma, the official chain: freeze with a cryo gun into Scoria, dig loose as Cinder, move with normal logistics, then re-ignite at a heat source.
• Energy has two independent branches — a Florinol Battery (dry Amethelis petals charged into Florinol) and a power brick (copper mold plus liquid copper). The Corraller captures creatures into lines; community reports use Lumlings to produce water (verify in current build).

FAQ

Q: What are the most important hotkeys in Sandustry? A: C selects a structure; Ctrl + C / Ctrl + V copy and paste whole systems; holding Ctrl replaces belts and launchers; Alt + number switches hotbars. S, R, X cover descend, build, remove.

Q: Should I use flat or diagonal Shakers? A: Diagonal. The grate needs a slope so gold drops and Residue slides off — flat Shakers are the most common first-hour mistake.

Q: What do I do with Residue? A: Never delete it. Burn it into Burnt Residue, run it through the Kinetic Press, and it pays back gold plus a Wet Seed byproduct.

Q: How do I get more water before pipes? A: Boil water into Steam with a flamethrower, let it condense into rain at the ceiling, and guide it back to your wet sand pool.

Q: What should I spend Fluxite on first? A: The Material Scanner, Grabber capacity, and Hover — the game-changers — before small speed upgrades.