Kinetic Slag Press Guide: How to Set It Up and Use It

What it does

The Kinetic Slag Press turns burnt slag into gold and spores. Drop burnt slag from above the green marker shown when the press is placed, and it breaks apart on impact — that is the entire input/output loop. There is no Shaker or intermediate machine involved.

(The in-game description once referred to a “soaker” — the developer confirmed that is a leftover typo from the machine’s old name, Velocity Soaker, not a separate mechanic.)

It is also a late-game unlock, so it is worth planning for on the research planner rather than discovering you need it mid-build.

How to set it up

1. Unlock it through Research, then decide where the burnt slag on your line is actually going to end up — the press has to sit at the end of that path, not in the middle of it.
2. Feed it from directly above. It only takes input from the top, so build a clear drop straight down onto the green marker — no side-feeding.
3. Filter the feed to burnt slag only, right before the drop. This is the single highest-value addition: it meters the flow so pieces land one at a time instead of stacking, and it keeps gold, spores, sand or anything else that will never process out of the press area.
4. Build the press one tile wide. Anything that misses falls clear off the side instead of resting on top and blocking the next piece.
5. Leave at least five empty blocks below it. The press needs clear room for its output. Players report that once material blocks the output side, the press backs up exactly the same way it does when the input side is blocked.
6. Give the top surface a way to clear itself — a launcher pointed up over the press, or the pusher/staircase layouts below. This is the step that is easiest to skip and the most common reason a press that looked fine on day one starts jamming later.

Placement and layout tips

Two habits players rely on beyond the basic setup above:

• Pushers on a diagonal, either side of the press. Burnt slag that misses the press does not have to become dead weight. Players in the Steam discussions place vertical pushers on a diagonal path to either side of the press, so a miss gets caught and redirected back into the flow instead of sitting there and starting a pile.
• Space multiple presses apart. If you add a second or third press, put gaps or walls between them so overflow from one does not spill onto its neighbour. A staircase-shaped wall above a row of presses spreads the incoming stream across all of them instead of dumping the whole flow onto the first one in line — some players instead run several presses side by side behind a slanted wall that splits the stream between them, with a filter set a few blocks below each.

Feeding it from your gold line

The press is the natural second stage after your first shaker line is running: burn slag into burnt slag with a flamethrower or by running it over lava, then drop the burnt slag onto the press. See building your first gold line for where this fits into the early game, and controlling flow into shakers and filters for why pacing the feed matters for every machine in the chain, not just this one.

Why it can still jam after a setup like this

Players following every step above still hit this:

“I am dropping burnt slag from well above the suggested height but one little particle will just land on it and then it creates a massive pile up and I have to scoop it all out by hand. It’s so frustrating. I’ve tried everything. Dropping from conveyor belts, from launchers, off sloped blocks, even from twice the height.”

More drop height does not fix this on its own. The pattern other players describe is that at high volume, only the outer edge of the falling stream actually lands cleanly on the press — pieces further back in the stream lose velocity and fail to register, and the first miss cascades into the pile described above. The developer has also confirmed a separate bug where the press sometimes just does not process a piece, which produces the same result.

That is why Step 6 above — a launcher or pusher that actively clears the top surface — matters more than raising the drop height further. If a press is already jammed, the full six-fix troubleshooting checklist is in fixing a Kinetic Slag Press that keeps jamming.