Sandustry Aura Extractor
A late-game tier 6 building, and the one that breaks your logistics. Auralite is pulled to it globally, so belts often cannot move it at all.
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The Aura Extractor is a tier 6 device — the last section of the research tree — and it does two jobs. Auralite drifts into it and becomes Auralite Crystal; then you click the extractor, aim its nanobot swarm at a forming crystal, and the swarm breaks it down into Aura. The catch is that Auralite is pulled toward the extractor from anywhere on the map, which can make belts and launchers useless for moving it.
Every other production line in Sandustry is something you route. This one routes itself, and that is the problem.
The line that feeds it
| Step | How |
|---|---|
| Florinol → Aurixite | Synthesizer, tier 6 |
| Aurixite → Auralite | Shaker |
| Auralite → Auralite Crystal | Aura Extractor, on its own |
| Auralite Crystal → Aura | Aura Extractor, nanobot swarm |
The whole thing sits downstream of flower farming: Florinol is what that chain produces, and the Synthesizer turns it into Aurixite. That earlier chain is in the production chains tool with its yields; this one is not, because the official pages give no quantity for a single step of it — the sequence above is everything that is recorded.
Aurixite is worth one note of its own. At density 200 it is heavier than almost everything, but unlike most solids it does not flow and settle into heaps — so a pile of it will not level itself the way sand does.
Global attraction is the whole design problem
Once the extractor has room, Auralite is attracted to it globally, every few seconds. Not to the building exactly — to an occasionally moving glowing spot inside its radius. Auralite that collides with that spot is consumed and becomes an Auralite Crystal.
The official page is blunt about the consequence: because Auralite is pulled in from anywhere, moving it with launchers and conveyors can be inconvenient or outright impossible depending on where your factory sits. Your belts are competing with the building.
The recommendation that follows is to put the Shakers next to the extractor rather than somewhere sensible and belting the output across. Build the last stage of the line as one compact block and let the attraction do the transport it was going to do anyway.
It cannot be moved once it is working
The Aura Extractor can only be moved while it holds no Auralite Crystals. Since crystals form on their own as soon as Auralite arrives, in practice that means: pick the spot before you switch the line on, or plan to drain it first.
Combined with the attraction radius, this is a building you site once.
Turning crystals into Aura
The crystals do not process themselves. Click the extractor, which lets you pick a target for the nanobot swarm, and drag that target onto one of the forming crystals. The swarm breaks it down into Aura.
That is also the answer to something the Auralite Crystal page states and does not explain: no player tool touches an Auralite Crystal. Not the Drill, not the Laser, nothing. The nanobots are the only thing that mines them, which is why the crystal is listed as being damaged by nanobots and by nothing else.
Aiming the swarm by hand every time is exactly as tedious as it sounds, and the game knows it — with enough Aura you can research Swarm Zoning, which makes the swarm target crystals automatically.
What Aura is for
Aura is a non-physical currency: it is spent rather than stacked in a container, and nothing comes out the other side. It shares that with Fluxite — both are things you spend on upgrades — but not its form, since Fluxite is a material you dig and produce. This is the end of the byproduct chain that started with a pile of sand.
| Unlock | Tier | Cost | What the research tree says |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shaker | 1 | 20 Gold | The Shaker, which can separate Gold and Residue from Wet Sand. |
| Synthesizer | 6 | 7,500 Gold | The Synthesizer, which uses energy to convert one material into another. |
The last column reports the research tree's own description of each unlock. Cost is the unlock's own price, before prerequisites.
Two of the three buildings on this line are priced in the research tree, and they sit at opposite ends of the game: the Shaker is a tier 1 unlock at 20 Gold, and the Synthesizer sits in tier 6. The Aura Extractor itself has no price here because its page describes it as unlocking at tier 6 rather than as a research node — there is no entry for it in the tree at all.
Related
- How to Grow Flowers in Sandustry — where the Florinol comes from
- Sandustry Production Chains — the flower chain that feeds this one, with its yields
- Sandustry Energy Unlocks — the Synthesizer is one of three things that need Energy to run
- How to Get Fluxite in Sandustry — the other currency that works this way
