Factory games have always felt like homework to me. I bounced off Factorio twice, both times around the moment someone in a tutorial video said the word “throughput” without laughing.
So I don’t know how to explain what happened this week. I watched some sand fall through a machine in Sandustry and then it was midnight.
If you’re anything like me, meaning you like watching things happen more than you like optimizing them, this one might sneak up on you too. Here’s everything I wish I’d known in my first hour.
What is Sandustry about?
Sandustry is an automation and exploration game from Lantto Games, published by Hooded Horse. It hit Steam Early Access on August 13, 2026 at $14.99, and the plan is to stay in Early Access for about a year.
The pitch that finally got me: it’s Factorio’s automation living inside a Terraria-shaped world. You’re on an unexplored planet, everything is destructible, and every single pixel is simulated.
That last part is the whole game, honestly. Sand piles up and slumps. Water flows downhill and finds gaps. Ice melts, seeds sprout, dry sand soaks up moisture and gets heavy.
The loop is simple to say and endlessly fiddly to do. Dig, refine, move, research, dig deeper.
Your first hour is just dirt and water
Here is the least intimidating opening move in any factory game I’ve tried. Take your shovel, dig up some dirt, and throw it in the water.
That’s it. Dirt plus water gives you wet sand, and wet sand is the raw material for basically everything early on.
I spent my first twenty minutes convinced I was missing a step. I wasn’t. Flailing around with a shovel near a pond is genuinely the correct thing to be doing.
Wet sand plus a shaker equals your first gold
You never mine gold directly in Sandustry. You make a situation where physics hands it to you.
Run wet sand across a shaker and roughly a fifth of it separates out as gold. Put a collector box underneath to catch what falls, and you’ve built your first production chain.
Gold is your research currency, so this humble little setup is what pays for every fun thing later. It’s worth getting it running properly before you wander off exploring.
Place your shakers on a diagonal
This is the mistake almost everyone makes, including me, twice.
Shakers laid out flat don’t do their job. The whole trick is the angle.
Set them on a diagonal and gravity does the sorting for you. Gold falls straight through the shaker while the leftover material slides off sideways where you can deal with it.
If your collector box is sitting empty and you’re sure you fed it wet sand, go look at your angles first. It’s almost always the angles.
Don’t throw your slag away
The stuff that slides off your shakers is called slag, and it looks like trash. It is not trash.
Burn it, using either your flamethrower or a convenient pool of lava, and you get burnt slag. Feed that through a Kinetic Press and you pull even more gold out of what you were about to discard.
Once you’ve got the hang of it, put a thermal buffer on the conveyor carrying your slag. Now the burning happens on the way to the press and you never have to think about it again.
This is the single biggest jump in early income I found. Same amount of digging, noticeably more gold.
Pick your spot before you build anything
I built my first factory somewhere charming and regretted it within the hour.
What you actually want is a big body of water sitting next to plenty of diggable dirt. Everything else is a logistics problem you’re creating for yourself.
The layout that clicked for me: a launcher pulling from the water, feeding a row of shakers, collector boxes underneath them, and a long conveyor belt carrying slag out to a couple of Kinetic Presses at the far end.
Then you just keep digging dirt and tossing it over the launcher. Simple, ugly, works.
Spend your first fluxite on the grabber
Fluxite is a separate currency from gold, and it upgrades you rather than your buildings.
Put the first of it into expanded capacity for your grabber. Picking up material three grains at a time is the fastest way to fall out of love with this game.
After that, digging speed, because digging gates everything else you do. Then the material scanner, which lets you hover over any material and see what it’s actually for.
The scanner sounds boring next to a flamethrower. It’s the one I use constantly.
Research hover as soon as you can
Getting around is half of Sandustry, and walking is slow.
Hover turns mining and building from a chore into something you barely notice doing. Grab it early and you’ll wonder how you managed before.
The flamethrower and the Kinetic Press round out my early research picks. Between them you unlock the slag chain, which pays for the rest of the tree.
Learn the copy and paste keys early
This is the tip that saved me the most actual time, and it’s the least exciting one on the list.
Press C to select a structure, then Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to duplicate it. When you’ve built one shaker setup that works, you can stamp out five more in seconds.
There’s also a replace hotkey, bound to Ctrl by default, for upgrading a layout in place instead of tearing it down.
And you get ten hotbars with ten slots each, swapped with Alt plus a number. Sort your building pieces onto their own bar early, before your inventory becomes a junk drawer.
Keep your liquids in their own pipes
Fluids move through a pump, pipe, vent chain. Pumps pull liquid in, pipes carry it, vents let it back out.
Don’t mix different fluid types in the same line. It will make sense for about four minutes and then it very much will not.
Watch your overflow, too. Flooding your own factory is a rite of passage and nobody enjoys it.
Filters are the fix for messy solid lines. Allow mode lets one material through, block mode lets everything except one material through, and either way you can pull byproducts off a busy belt before they clog something.
Waste is usually an ingredient
The thing that made Sandustry click for me is that almost nothing here is actually garbage.
Heat turns solids into liquids into gases, and cold runs it backwards. Changing a material’s state is often the easiest way to move it somewhere awkward, since a gas will go places a pile of rocks won’t.
So when a process spits out something useless, assume it’s the key ingredient for a process you haven’t unlocked yet. It usually is.
And if a puzzle stops you completely, just leave it. You’ll come back later with a drill or a grappling hook and solve it without noticing.
Build small and messy before you build pretty
My instinct was to plan a beautiful factory. My factory instead looks like a raccoon organized it.
Build compact and close together while you’re learning. It’s easier to spot what’s jammed when everything is within one screen.
You also can’t really automate this game and walk away. Residue backs up, launchers get blocked, and a line that ran fine for ten minutes will quietly stop.
Wandering over to poke at a stuck belt turned out to be my favorite part.
I still don’t think I’m a factory game person. But I’ve got a jar of gold, a machine that mostly runs without me, and a small pond I’ve been slowly relocating one shovel at a time.
There’s something calming about a world where every grain of sand is doing its own thing and you’re just nudging them into a shape. I keep opening it to check on one belt and losing an hour.
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Images are from the Sandustry page on Steam and used under Fair Use.