Sandustry Factory Layout

Processing Plant, and what the game calls it

Search traffic looks for a processing plant. The game has no building by that name: the official building index lists sixteen buildings and none of them is it.

What you are building is a line: Shakers, Conveyor Belts, Filters, a fire, and a Kinetic Press. Production chains covers what turns into what and at what ratio. This page covers where each piece physically goes, which is the part that decides whether the line runs or stalls.

A jam is never local

Start with the belt mechanic, because it is why one bad placement stops a whole factory.

Only the pixels actually touching a Conveyor Belt are driven by it. Anything piled on top is carried along by the pixels underneath. So when the bottom pixel is blocked, the whole pile stops where it is rather than spilling over the obstruction.

Nothing routes around a stuck pixel. Every rule below exists to stop one specific thing from becoming that pixel.

Residue arrives at the same rate as the sand

Every Wet Sand pixel that lands on a Shaker turns into one Residue, and one time in four it also drops a Gold. The Gold passes through and falls out of the bottom; the Residue stays on top and is pushed off very slowly, like a conveyor.

The wiki documents that conversion. The rate is our arithmetic on top of it: the Residue is guaranteed on every pixel, with no dice roll to thin it out, so it appears at exactly the speed you feed Wet Sand in. Given how slowly the Shaker itself pushes it off, the exit for that Residue is not something you add once the line is running — it is the first thing you place.

Two placements follow from that:

• Run Shakers in a downward diagonal from the Wet Sand supply rather than a flat row. Wet Sand is denser than Residue, so on a staircase the Wet Sand settles into a thin layer on each Shaker while the Residue is lifted to the top and flows onward.
• Treat the Shaker as your first Filter. Gold is the only solid pixel that can pass through it, and it leaves from the bottom while Residue leaves across the top. The two products are already on different levels before any Filter is involved. Anything else dragged into the Shaker’s body is trapped there until you dig it out by hand.

Filter the heaviest thing first

A Filter draws from the bottom of whatever is sitting on it. In a tall mixed pile the heavy material has already sunk and the light material rides on top — and the light material riding on top never reaches the Filter at all. The configuration is irrelevant to a pixel that never touches the thing.

So Filters go along the line in descending order of density, heaviest first. Gold at density 300 is the heaviest pixel in the game and always sits on the bottom, which is why “Allow Gold” is the most reliable setup there is and why it belongs at the head of the line. Residue at 50 is near the other end of the scale, so it is what you leave riding the belt rather than what you try to pull down through a pile.

Water is the other half of this rule, and it is a layout constraint rather than a settings one. A Filter does not stop liquid — water passes straight through it and keeps going. And if a pixel changes into something else while it is passing through a Filter, it stops dead: it will not fall the rest of the way and the conveyor part will not push it along either. Sand meeting falling water inside a Filter, becoming Wet Sand and wedging there, is the common case. Your wet section and your filtering section need separate paths. Filters explained has the full density table and both failure modes.

The press is the bottom of a shaft, not a station in a line

Burnt Residue has to fall onto a Kinetic Press from 25 blocks or more. Below that height it does not transform — it rests on the press surface and blocks everything behind it. Anything that is not Burnt Residue does the same thing.

That is what makes the press different from every other building here. You do not slot it into a horizontal run; you dig a shaft, keep the column above it clear, and put the press at the bottom. If you have not got 25 blocks of headroom, you have not got a press line.

Two more clearances come with it:

• Below the press. The Gold and the Seed fall out of the bottom, so that space stays open.
• Water out of the shaft. The press’s own stats read OfficialBlocks Liquid: Yes and OfficialBlocks Gas: Yes. It is one of only four things in the game that stop water — the others are Block, Conveyor Belt and Flux Emanator — so water that gets into the shaft has nowhere to drain.

Size everything below the fire for about a quarter of what the Shakers make. Each Residue pixel that meets fire has a 25% chance of becoming Burnt Residue and is otherwise destroyed with no output — but that is an average over volume, not a ceiling. A run of lucky pixels arrives as a burst, and on a page about not jamming that matters: give the shaft and the press some headroom over the average rather than sizing them to it exactly.

The press does not clear itself

The Shaker has a Conveyor Belt built into it. The Kinetic Press does not, so nothing sweeps its surface on its own.

The documented answer is a row of angled Launchers along the top of the presses, aimed at an opening in the side. They clear stagnant pixels without disturbing anything mid-fall, which is exactly the combination this spot needs: the surface gets swept while the column above it stays untouched.

Build the side opening at the same time as the shaft. It is part of the press, not an afterthought.

Make the fire a fixture instead of a machine

Put a solid Block directly underneath a Filter and whatever enters has no way out.

Set that Filter to allow Cinder only, fill it with Cinders and ignite them. They melt into Lava, and the Lava is now held exactly where you put it. Run Residue along a Conveyor Belt over the top and it ignites on contact.

Nothing to power, nothing to refuel, no moving parts, and it lives under a belt run you had to build anyway — which is why the burn belongs on the horizontal stretch between the Shakers and the shaft rather than in a room of its own. Slag processing has the full build, including where Cinders come from.

The shape these rules force

Each rule pins one piece to one place. Stacked together they point at a vertical arrangement — this is one that satisfies all of them:

Level	What goes there	Why it has to
Top	Wet Sand supply feeding a downward diagonal of Shakers	Wet Sand must settle onto each Shaker in a thin layer while Residue is lifted clear
Under the Shakers	The Gold line, ending in Collectors	Gold is the only solid that passes through a Shaker, and it exits the bottom
Across	A belt carrying Residue away	The Shaker pushes Residue too slowly to be the transport
Under that belt	Trapped Lava in a blocked Filter	It ignites the Residue passing above it, with no fuel and no power
Then down	25+ blocks of clear fall	Burnt Residue does not transform below that height
Bottom of the shaft	The Kinetic Press, Launchers along its top, an opening in the side wall	The press does not clear its own surface
Under the press	Clear space, then Collectors	Gold and Seed drop out of the bottom, and Gold only counts once a Collector holds it

Design around the 25-block drop before anything else. Every other rule is something you can fix by moving a building; that one decides how much you have to dig before you can start.

Related

• Sandustry Slag Processing — the burn rate and the auto-burner in full
• Sandustry Production Chains — what turns into what, and the ratios
• Sandustry Filters Explained — Allow vs Block, density, and why Filters jam