Sandustry Filter Setup Finder
Tell it what you are trying to separate and it gives you the filter, the mode, and the reason your last setup jammed.
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Pick the material you want to pull out and the material you want to keep moving. If either is a liquid, a basic Filter cannot do it at all — that is a documented property, not a configuration you have not found yet.
Choose two materials to see the setup.
The two rules that decide every setup
Filters do not stop liquids or gases. The Filter’s own stats read Blocks Liquid: No and
Blocks Gas: No. Anything in those states passes through regardless of your configuration.
The Advanced Filter, at tier 4 and 1,500 Gold, is the building that handles them.
Density decides what reaches the filter. A Filter takes material from the bottom of whatever is sitting on it. In a tall mixed pile the heavy things are already down there and the light things never arrive. So filter the densest material out first, then the next, and you separate a mixed line cleanly. Try it in the other order and the setup looks broken.
Gold is the heaviest material in the game at 300, which is why “Allow Gold” is the most reliable filter in Sandustry and why every gold line starts there.
| Material | Density |
|---|---|
| Gold | 300 |
| Sand | 150 |
| Wet Sand | 150 |
| Water | 100 |
| Residue | 50 |
| Burnt Residue | 50 |
| Voidbloom | 30 |
Allow or Block
- Allow lets a single named material fall through, and carries everything else along.
- Block does the reverse: the named material rides on, everything else drops.
Use Allow when you are pulling one thing out of a mixed line — which is nearly always. Use Block when one material is the product and the rest is waste you want dropped into a pit.
Why your filter jammed
This is the failure that looks like a bug and is not.
If a material that the Filter is allowing through changes into something else while it is passing through, it stops dead. It will not fall the rest of the way, and the conveyor part of the Filter will not push it along either. You have to dig it out by hand, and every stuck pixel narrows the gap until the line stalls completely.
The usual cause is water. Sand meets falling water inside the Filter, becomes wet sand mid-transit, and wedges. The fix is upstream, not in the filter settings — keep the water on its own path until you actually want it to meet the sand. Full explanation in wet sand versus water.
A trick worth knowing
Put a solid block directly underneath a Filter and material enters with nowhere to go. The documented use for this is trapping Cinders and igniting them, giving you a pocket of Lava you can run Residue over — an auto-burner with no moving parts. It is also, if you do it by accident, a very effective way to clog a line.
Related
- Research Planner — what the Advanced Filter costs and what else sits in tier 4
- Sandustry Beginner Guide — where filtering fits in the gold loop
