Sandustry takes factory games into a new dimension

Sandustry doesn’t make a great first impression. My initial thought on seeing the screenshots was ‘it’s just Terraria with more conveyor belts’, and that’s not something I thought I needed in my life. But once you go hands-on with the game, you start uncovering hidden depth and systems that you’ve never thought about before in a video game, and now I’ve lost hours of my life because I can’t stop playing it.

The basic core of Sandustry is that you’re a little guy that looks a bit like a frog on a big sandy planet. You can smash things up with your fists and move the debris around with your… I don’t actually know how you’re moving things around, but it just works, so let’s ignore that. 

You can also hover about and clip through walls – this isn’t a game where it pays to think too much about how it relates to real life. This is an abstract video game and it works well like that. But I digress, you’re a little guy smashing the ground up and moving the little bits of ground around. If you pick up sand and put it in some water, you get wet sand. So it’s an immersive sim! If you shake the wet sand, you might get some gold from it, like you’re panning for gold on the frontier, and if you pick up that gold, you can buy upgrades.

The problem is that this process is incredibly slow and you get very little gold out of it. So just like in other factory-building games like Satisfactory or Factorio, you can automate it. Early on, you can build lifts out of the water that will spew out their contents in whichever direction you want. You can build special conveyor belts that shake their contents, with valuable gold dropping through the gaps. You can build collector boxes that can store all your gold. So before long you’ll be throwing sand as quickly as you can into a big pond, where it’ll be hoovered up by your lifts, thrown onto a shaker to be panned for gold, and then the gold will be deposited into your collector.

Now you have a new problem: all that panning is creating waste, which is building up in a huge pile at the end of your collector. Sandustry is unique (as far as I know) as a side-on 2D factory-building game. Where Factorio is top-down, allowing for complex networks of snaking production chains, and Satisfactory is 3D, allowing for huge structures that can be as chaotic or organised as you’re willing to design for, Sandustry’s vertical play area is all about gravity and that makes for an interesting set of puzzles to solve.