How to Automate Your Sandustry Factory

Once a Shaker is ticking out gold by hand, the next leap is logistics: conveyors, filters, pipes, pumps, launchers, and drones. This guide covers what each does and, more importantly, how to lay them out so your factory keeps growing instead of choking on itself.

The Logistics Toolkit

• Conveyor — moves items along a belt; the backbone of any automated line.
• Filter — splits one stream into outputs by material; essential for separating gold from residue.
• Pipe & Pump — move fluids (water, steam, lava) where you need them.
• Launcher — throws items with momentum; with the Shift-skip trick it's a precise routing tool.
• Drone — late-game automated hauler; unlocked last in the research order.

Unlock Order

Community consensus COMMUNITY: Refinement 1 → Logistics 1 → Filter → Pipes → Tools → Refinement 2 (Slag Press) → Drones. Logistics 1 opens conveyors; Filters and Pipes follow; Drones come last. Full costs on the Tech Tree page.

Modular Layout: Leave Room to Expand

The most common way a new factory dies isn't a lack of resources — it's boxing itself in: machines pressed against machines, nowhere to add a Shaker when you need one. The community layout principle COMMUNITY:

• Modular production unit. Treat "mixing pool + diagonal shaker chain + 3-layer filter + Collector" as one standard unit. Expanding means copying the whole unit, not cramming into the original.
• Plan the gaps. Leave empty lanes between units so conveyors and pipes have somewhere to run.
• Separate by function. Keep the water side, the sifting side, and the residue side as distinct zones so one backup doesn't cascade.

Getting the Most from Filters

A single filter rarely does the whole job. Stacking filters (the "3-layer filter" in the standard unit) lets you grade output cleanly: gold to the Collector, residue away, water back to the loop. Because the Slag Press needs Burnt Slag dropped from ≥25 blocks to work VERIFIED, a well-graded filter chain is also what keeps your second gold line fed — see the Lava & Slag Press guide.

Save Your Layouts

Once a unit is dialed in, save it as a blueprint and reuse it — the official blueprint system lets you export and share builds with others VERIFIED. Details on saving, exporting, and importing are on the Blueprint guide.

Performance Floor

Big automated factories are the usual trigger for lag. The game expects at least a 4 GB memory floor COMMUNITY; if framerate drops as your base grows, see the performance guide before adding more machines.