Sandustry Buildings Guide

Buildings in Sandustry are how you escape manual shoveling. Once research unlocks logistics and refining tools, you assemble lines that wet sand, shake out gold, burn slag, pump water, and haul leftovers with drones. This hub covers every major building category referenced in demo and Early Access previews, with links to focused pages for each system.

Refining buildings

The Shaker is the first machine that feels like a factory. Built on a diagonal frame, it separates Wet Sand into Gold (~twenty to twenty-five percent yield in community tests) and Slag. Feed consistency matters more than raw volume—a shaker starved for input wastes screen space, while one overloaded with dry sand produces nothing useful. Pair shakers with Conveyors and Launchers so Wet Sand arrives from your water line and both outputs route to storage or the slag burner.

Downstream, slag processing uses heat to create Burnt Slag, then a Kinetic Slag Press for advanced outputs. Those steps live on the materials side in Gold and Slag, but the building layout—burn zone placement, press infeed height, slag backlog buffers—is pure logistics design.

Sandustry factory automation overview

Logistics and sorting

Conveyor Belts move piles horizontally; Launchers throw materials up or across gaps. Together they bridge dig sites to processing floors without you carrying every pixel. When belts choke, the fix is usually width: wider intake or a launcher clearing a cliff edge.

Filters exploit density differences between Sand, Wet Sand, Slag, RedSand, Lava, and Gold. Community density charts place Lava between RedSand and Gold, which informs filter tier choices when mixing biomes. Read Filters before you pipe random pit dumps onto one belt.

Fluids and farming

Pipes, Pumps, and Liquid Vents move water, steam, and later lava where buckets cannot. Planter boxes need Soil and steady water for Flowers that drop Amethelis (Flowers and Planters). The Pipes and Pumps page covers vent placement, head pressure tricks, and why steam backflow ruins wet-sand ratios.

Flux Emanator and botanical refining

The Flux Emanator is a single placeable building per factory. Feed Voidbloom from above; Fluxite crystals grow below the tile and must be harvested. Only Voidbloom — not raw Amethelis — feeds the emanator. Leave clearance beneath before flooring the basement; use Ctrl replace (Hotfix 8) when retrofitting funnel tiles (Flux Emanator, Demo Patches).

Drones and utilities

Digger Drones and Hauler Drones automate bulk relocation when conveyors would require heroic bridge builds. They shine in late-demo pits where vertical distance beats belt length. Lights extend workable depth and mark hazard zones around lava or fire. See Drones for task priority and power considerations.

Planning your factory layout

A workable early layout runs: water source → wetting pool → shaker bank → gold chest plus slag burner → press line. Mid-game adds redsand filters, Flowers → Voidbloom → Flux Emanator → Fluxite harvest, and drone-fed overflow pits. Cross-read Material Ratios when balancing inputs, How to Get Gold for research pacing, How to Get Fluxite for the botanical wing, and Research Priority Tier List for unlock order.

Explore each building page

Start with Shaker if you are new, then Conveyors and Launchers once Refining 1 and Logistics 1 are unlocked. Add Filters when mixed piles appear, Pipes and Pumps when water misbehaves, Flux Emanator when Voidbloom is ready, and Drones when manual hauling dominates your session. Material behavior for each input is documented on the Materials Hub.