How to Move Lava and Steam Without Pipes

Why this is a separate problem

Pipes in Sandustry carry water. Lava cannot be pumped, and in the demo build steam could not be either — the developer described steam piping as in development. So anything involving heat needs a different approach, and the community has settled on two.

Moving lava: turn it into a solid

The trick is that lava does not have to stay a liquid.

1. Cryo the lava. Cooling lava turns it into cinder, a transportable powder.
2. Move the cinder. As a powder it behaves like every other solid in the game — conveyors, launchers and filters all handle it.
3. Re-melt at the destination. A flamethrower turns cinder back into lava where you actually want it.

Players are candid that this is still awkward to fully automate. It is a workaround, not a designed pipeline — but it is the one that works.

The autoburner pattern

If your goal is burning slag rather than relocating lava, you can avoid transport entirely. The pattern players describe:

• Fill a filter with cinder.
• Burn the cinder to lava in place.
• Run your slag over that lava in the slag pit.

The heat source stays put and the material comes to it. This feeds burnt slag into a Kinetic Slag Press without you ever piping lava anywhere.

Steering steam: build walls, not pipes

Steam has no directional control of its own, and it collects in grotto ceilings where it is hard to reach.

The working answer is solid blocks. Players report that with enough care in the build you can control both where the steam goes and where the water lands when it condenses. Treat it as architecture: build the channel you want the steam to follow, roof the places you want it to avoid, and give it a deliberate exit.

This matters beyond tidiness, because steam that rises to the sky comes back as rain on whatever is underneath. Steering steam is deciding where your future rain lands — see stopping rain flooding your factory.

If steam ends up somewhere genuinely unreachable — including inside a pipe, where it blocks drainage — the grabber tool removes it directly.

Checklist

1. Lava → cryo → cinder → conveyor → flamethrower → lava.
2. For slag burning, keep the lava still and move the slag instead.
3. Build block channels to steer steam; there is no steam pipe in the demo.
4. Grabber tool for steam that is stuck where nothing else reaches.