How to Stop Shakers and Filters From Clogging

The rule that governs the whole game

In most factory games throughput is a machine-count problem. In Sandustry it is a flow problem, because material is physical particles falling through space rather than abstract items on a belt.

That produces one consistent failure mode across every machine in the game:

Too much material arriving at the same moment defeats the machine, no matter how many machines you have.

You can see the same root cause in three different places players complain about:

• A shaker fed too much wet sand at once exceeds capacity and clogs.
• A filter line fed by a full-force launcher cannot process the volume, and density-based sorting degrades because everything arrives mixed together.
• A Kinetic Slag Press fed a thick slug of slag misses pieces and cascades into a pile.

Three symptoms, one disease.

Throttle at the source

Turn the launcher down. This is counter-intuitive if you are used to maximising throughput, but players deliberately reduce launcher force. Full force delivers more than the sorting line can handle, and the sorting itself gets worse when materials arrive as one mixed slug rather than a stream.

Cap the material height on belts. Limiting how deep material rides on a conveyor — around two blocks is the figure players cite — physically prevents the belt from delivering a large slug at once.

Use filters as regulators, not just sorters. A filter set to a single material both cleans the stream and paces it. This is the standard fix players reach for, and it is why Filters are worth researching early.

Sort in stages, not all at once

The approach described for a working line: regulate the flow first, then place several filters in sequence, each dropping out one material other than the one you want to keep moving.

The order matters more than the count. A short, well-paced line with three filters in series outperforms a wide bank of filters all fed from the same overloaded launcher.

Build the shaker on a diagonal

Players build shakers on a diagonal and drop wet sand onto them, so gold falls through while slag carries on downstream. That geometry is what gives you a clean split to feed the rest of the chain.

Checklist

1. Reduce launcher force rather than increasing it.
2. Cap material height on the belt feeding any machine.
3. Filter first to regulate, then filter again to sort.
4. Sort in series, one material dropped per stage.
5. Shakers on a diagonal, fed a steady stream rather than dumps.
6. Fix flow before adding a second machine.