How to Build Your First Automated Gold Line

The core loop

Everything early in Sandustry hangs off one chain:

Sand → wet sand → shaker → gold

Sand is mined from sandsoil terrain. Combined with water it becomes wet sand. Dropped onto a shaker — built on a diagonal — the gold falls through while slag carries on downstream.

That is the whole first-hour objective: make that loop run without you standing in it.

Step 1 — Build it at the source, not at your base

The single largest time sink early on is carrying material by hand. Put the shaker as close to where you are digging as the terrain allows. A short conveyor between the dig site and the shaker removes the walking, and it is cheap.

Resist the instinct to build a tidy central factory first. Distance costs more than untidiness at this stage.

Step 2 — Get water to the line

Wet sand needs water, and carrying water is as slow as carrying sand. Once you have pipes, run water to the shaker rather than hauling it.

Remember the pipe rule: a pipe alone does nothing. You need a pump block to absorb and a vent block to eject — see pipes that do nothing if the run sits dead.

Step 3 — Control the feed before you scale it

The mistake almost everyone makes next is feeding the shaker harder. A shaker fed too much wet sand at once exceeds capacity and clogs.

Put a filter upstream to pace the flow, and keep the material depth on the belt low. This is worth doing before you build a second shaker, because a second shaker on the same overloaded feed clogs exactly like the first. The full reasoning is in stopping shakers and filters clogging.

Step 4 — Add the slag branch

Your shaker line produces slag as a by-product. That slag is the input to your second gold source:

1. Burn slag into burnt slag with a flamethrower or by running it over lava.
2. Drop the burnt slag from height onto a Kinetic Slag Press.
3. It breaks into gold and spores on impact.

This raises gold output without raising your mining rate, which is why it is the highest-value addition after the base loop works. Build it with a filter above the press from the start — that prevents the jam rather than fixing it later.

The spores are not waste either: wet spores dropped into a planter box grow moss, and burning the moss yields Amethelis petals and more gold.

Step 5 — Spend gold in an order that compounds

Gold is the research currency, so early research should buy things that produce more gold or remove more hauling. The community-recommended sequence is on the research planner, with the reasoning for each position.

The short version: refining, then logistics, then filters, then pipes, then the flamethrower that unlocks burnt slag.

Checklist

1. Shaker on a diagonal, built next to the dig site.
2. Conveyor from dig site to shaker — remove the walking first.
3. Water piped in, with a pump and a vent.
4. Filter upstream to pace the feed before adding machines.
5. Slag → burn → press, with a filter above the press.
6. Research in an order that buys back gold or time.