Sandustry Energy Unlocks

Energy is late and expensive. This page is the list of what exists, what each costs, and what the game says it is for — so you can decide whether tier 5 is where your Gold should go.

The five unlocks

Four of them are buildings; the Energy Siphon is a tool, which the research tree says outright. All five are tier 5, and their own prices add up to 8,500 Gold. That is not what it costs to own them: the Copper Mold requires the Smelter, which is not one of the five, so the real total for the set is 11,500 Gold.

Two notes the table’s own wording earns:

The Copper Mold is the only one with stated prerequisites. It needs the Smelter and the Florinol Battery first, which the research tree records directly, putting its own real cost at 6,500 Gold rather than 2,000 — and dragging the Smelter’s 3,000 into the set total above. It casts the Power Brick from Liquid Copper, and the game says the Power Brick Officialstores large amounts of Energy and can be recharged automatically with input from a Generator.

The Battery and the Turbine do different jobs. The Florinol Battery stores Florinol as energy; the Steam Turbine is described as automated power generation. One holds, one makes.

What actually needs Energy

Three unlocks in the entire research tree state that they require it:

Needs Energy	Tier	Own price	With prerequisites	What the tree says
Drill	5	2,500 Gold	6,000 Gold	To break through hard materials. Requires Energy to run.
Snowmaker	5	2,500 Gold	2,500 Gold	Converts Water into Snow using Energy.
Synthesizer	6	7,500 Gold	7,500 Gold	Uses energy to convert one material into another.

That is the whole demand side. The Drill is the one with a concrete consequence you can check: it is one of only three tools that breaks Stone and Copper Ore, so terrain you cannot get through is terrain that needs power. The maps page has which tool breaks what.

Should you unlock it

Compare against what the same Gold buys elsewhere. Every priced unlock in tier 1 and tier 2 comes to 6,350 Gold — the Shaker, Logistics, the Filter, the Kinetic Press, the Thermal Buffer, the Cryoblaster, the Flamethrower and the rest. Energy’s five list at 8,500, and 11,500 with the Smelter you need for the Copper Mold.

So the case for Energy is specific rather than general. It is worth it if you want the Drill for hard terrain, the Snowmaker for snow without the Cryoblaster, or you are heading for the Synthesizer in tier 6 — which you can research without any of this, but cannot run without it. If none of those three is where you are going, this branch unblocks nothing.

The research planner shows what each of these costs once prerequisites are counted, and how much Gold you still need.

How the pieces connect

Until September this page said the official wiki had no page for any of the five. That changed on 3 September 2026, when all five were written up, and the section this page promised for that day is below.

Two kinds of storage, holding very different amounts.

Storage	What fills it	What it holds
Florinol Battery	Florinol, up to 16 pixels per block	16 Energy per block, 1 per Florinol pixel
Power Brick (a filled Copper Mold)	16 pixels of Liquid Copper	Up to 1,000 Energy

A drained Florinol Battery leaves Florinol Soil behind. Dig or burn the soil and it turns back into Florinol, and doing that while the soil is still inside the battery recharges it, so the Florinol is never used up. Break a Power Brick and you get its 16 pixels back as solid Copper.

The Steam Turbine makes the power. Every pixel of Steam that passes through it generates 10 Energy and leaves as Depleted Steam. A full Power Brick is therefore 100 pixels of Steam. The wiki’s own tip closes the loop: a Condenser turns the Depleted Steam back into Water, and Water meeting Lava is Steam again.

The Energy Connector carries it. It stores nothing. Any Energy it receives goes to the nearest battery that is not full, moving one block per tick. A Turbine’s output only reaches storage through a Connector, and batteries can be linked to other batteries the same way.

The Energy Siphon moves what you have already stored. Hold it on a power line or a brick and each tick it pulls 1 Energy from the nearest storage outside that network. The Copper Mold page suggests the obvious use: moving charge from Florinol Batteries into Power Bricks.

A Voltblub parked on a filled Copper Mold charges that brick as well; the critters page has its rate.

On the demand side, only the Snowmaker has a published draw: 1 Energy per operation, turning four pixels of Water into four of Snow. The Drill and the Synthesizer have no figure yet, and nothing official says how far a Connector will look for a battery.

Related

• How to Get and Use Copper in Sandustry — the other half of the Copper Mold line, from ore to Power Brick
• Sandustry Heat and the Thermal Buffer — the other supply system, and better documented
• Sandustry Maps and Exploration — which terrain needs the Drill
• Sandustry Research Planner — tier 5 against everything else
• How to Grow Flowers in Sandustry — where the Florinol in that battery starts