How to Get and Use Copper in Sandustry

The chain is short and every step is documented:

Copper Ore → Copper → (Smelter) → Liquid Copper → (Copper Mold) → Power Brick

The Power Brick matters because it is not the battery you already have. The official Beginner’s Guide puts the two side by side: “Florinol batteries and power bricks are distinct sources of energy, with the former using dried Amethelis petals broken down into florin to fill the batteries, and the latter being made of copper molds filled with liquid copper.” Copper is a second power line, not a supplement to the flower one.

Digging the ore

Copper Ore has 12 HP and is “harder to dig than Dirt and will require more advanced digging tools to destroy.”

Three tools break it, per the wiki’s own Damaged By field:

Tool	Notes
Drill	Listed. Research says it “Requires Energy to run”
Laser	Listed
Void Gun	Listed, but “The Void Gun has only a minimal effect on Copper Ore”

If you have read elsewhere that only the drill works on copper, that is wrong — the laser is on the same list.

Where to find it: “Copper Ore can be found in pockets underground” and “tends to be in relatively small veins, found deeper underground.” Those two sentences are the whole of what the official wiki says about copper’s location. There is no named biome, no depth figure, and no per-location yield table. Anywhere you see one of those, someone made it up.

Separating it from sand

Copper Ore is terrain — a block you break. What travels is what falls out of it: “The resulting Copper can be carried or transported like any other material.” The wiki’s own tip is to not bother separating it underground:

Because Sand and Copper Ore are often found together, you can use the same logistics to bring both materials to your factory, and then divide them with Filters for processing.

The plain Filter is enough here, because Filters sort solids and both Copper and Sand are solids. That is a Tier 1 unlock at 250 Gold — you do not need the Advanced Filter for this.

Smelting

The Smelter melts Copper into Liquid Copper, one for one:

The primary use for Copper is to melt it into Liquid Copper, through the use of the Smelter. This yields 1 Liquid Copper for each Copper.

The Smelter is fuelled by heat from a Thermal Buffer or Lava. Note the direction of that sentence: those are heat sources for the Smelter. Copper’s Processed By field names the Smelter and nothing else, and the wiki is explicit that heat on its own will not do it — “You cannot melt Copper with flames.”

How much Liquid Copper a Copper Mold takes, and how fast it casts, are not published.

Moving copper

This is where most guides stop, and it is two separate problems, because solid and liquid copper behave differently:

	Copper	Liquid Copper
Matter type	Solid	Liquid
Density	200	150
Launchable	Yes	No

So a Launcher will throw solid Copper across your factory, and will not touch it once it is molten. Plan the smelter’s position before you melt anything.

For the liquid, the wiki gives two routes:

It can then be moved via Pump, Pipe and Liquid Vent, or with the Grabber in common with other liquids.

The pipeline is one system, not three options: a Pump sits in the liquid and feeds attached Pipes, and a Liquid Vent puts it back out. All three come together in the Tier 3 Fluids research at 1,250 Gold — worth knowing before you plan a run of pipe you cannot build yet.

The Grabber is the manual route. It “is the only way to manually move material” and is available immediately, with one catch that bites on a mixed pile: it “can only hold one type of material at a time. Once you have grabbed a material, it will only pick up more of that material, and leave anything else.”

One practical warning about the pipeline, from the official guide: a Liquid Vent cannot filter what comes out of it and “will always prioritize whichever Liquid is closest.” If water and liquid copper share a pipeline, you do not get to choose which one arrives. Run the copper line separately.

Liquid Copper is otherwise inert — it “cannot be frozen or combined with other materials” — so there is nothing to insulate and nothing to react with.

What it costs to unlock

Copper Mold sits at Tier 5 and lists 2,000 Gold, but it will not unlock on its own: the research entry says it “Requires Smelter & Florinal Battery to unlock.” Those two are 3,000 and 1,500.

Node	Tier	Own cost
Florinol Battery	5	1,500 Gold
Smelter	5	3,000 Gold
Copper Mold	5	2,000 Gold
Everything above		6,500 Gold

That 6,500 is our addition, not a number the game prints — the three own-costs are above so you can check the arithmetic. Neither prerequisite has prerequisites of its own, so nothing is double-counted here.

Then a digging tool, if you do not already have one: Drill is 6,000 Gold once its own prerequisites are counted, Laser is 5,000 with none. Automating the liquid adds the Fluids 1,250; sorting ore from sand adds the Filter 250. The Grabber costs nothing.

Gold is not the only gate. Research “is unlocked with Gold, with more advanced Research locked behind your Factory Level” — so a node you can afford may still be closed. No milestone figures have been published, so there is no table to give you.

What is not recorded

Copper turns up on exactly six pages of the official wiki, and in no recipe, no building cost and no upgrade outside its own line. Some things readers reasonably want are simply not published:

• how much Energy a Power Brick stores — the wiki says “large amounts”, and the only comparable published figure is the Florinol Battery’s 16 energy per tile
• how much Liquid Copper fills a mold, and how fast
• which biome or depth the ore sits at, beyond “pockets underground”

We would rather leave those blank than fill them.

Related

• Sandustry Energy Unlocks — the rest of the Tier 5 energy set, and what each device costs
• Sandustry Heat and the Thermal Buffer — where the Smelter’s heat comes from
• Sandustry Filters Explained — sorting the ore out of a mixed pile
• Sandustry Research Planner — work out the cheapest route to Copper Mold from where you are