Sandustry Maps and Exploration

Why there is no Sandustry map

The developers describe the game on its store page as one they are still refining the procedural generation for, with biomes among the things being expanded during Early Access. The pinned FAQ is more exact about how a world is put together today:

• The start area, up to the first portal, is built from randomised tiles joined by a fixed set of connections.
• Biomes have fixed limits.
• Everything outside those tiles is fully procedural.

The developers call the fixed parts temporary, and say widening the procedural generation is a major focus of future updates. So two worlds share a rough shape near the start and the same biome boundaries, but the tiles inside and everything beyond them differ with the seed.

That rules out the page you were probably looking for. “The artifact is in the cavern on the left” is not a fact about Sandustry, it is a fact about one person’s save file. The official wiki has no map, world or biome page at all — and with the details changing from seed to seed, there are no coordinates for one to carry.

What generation does not randomise is the material itself. Redsoil yields Redsand in every world. Stone needs a powered tool in every world. Bedrock is the floor in every world. That is what this page is: the part that transfers.

What the Map unlock actually gives you

Map costs 100 Gold in tier 1 and unlocks the Map and the Minimap. It has no prerequisites, so you can take it as soon as you have the Gold.

That is the whole of what the official research tree says about it, and this page does not guess at the rest — what it draws, and how much of the world it shows before you have been there, is not documented anywhere official.

At 100 Gold with no prerequisites it is among the cheapest things in tier 1, which is reason enough to take it early.

Reading terrain instead of reading a map

This is the table that replaces the map. It is sorted by HP, but HP is durability, not difficulty — the two run independently, and the tool requirement is what actually stops you. Crackstone has the lowest HP of anything you can break, and stops more players than Redsoil, which has the highest recorded finite HP and still yields to a shovel. Read both columns.

Terrain is one half of the wiki’s materials category. The other thirty-four — the ones you make, move and process rather than dig — are on every material and what it turns into.

Six things worth pulling out of it:

Crackstone is not hard, it is immune. Its HP is 1 — the softest terrain in the game — and the Shovel and Gun still do nothing to it. Bring a Rocket Launcher and it is one hit. Full detail on how to break Crackstone.

Stone and Copper Ore need powered tools. Neither the Shovel nor the Gun nor the Rocket Launcher touches them; it is Drill, Laser or Void Gun or nothing. If you are heading down for Copper, take the tool first — the trip is wasted otherwise.

Ice is melted, not dug. Shovels, guns and drills do nothing to it. Fire melts it into Water, and since v0.5.6 the Laser melts it too. Handy, because it is also a water source.

Lava eats Redsoil and Fluxite. Since v0.5.6 Lava destroys both, along with Strataform, which has no wiki page and no row here. A lava cell next to either will not stay put, and a lava cell you place on purpose clears them without anyone digging.

Five of these you make rather than find. Scoria is frozen Lava, Vine grows from your own Wet Seeds, Solidite comes out of the Caulk Blaster, Florinol Soil is what a spent Florinol Battery leaves behind, and Auralite Crystal is condensed from Auralite by the Aura Extractor. Looking for any of them underground is looking for the wrong thing.

Two rows look self-contradictory, and both are faithful to the source. Limestone is listed with 40 HP and yet nothing breaks it — the official page calls it impervious to all known tools, so the number is academic. Auralite Crystal yields Aura but no player tool touches it either; the Aura Extractor mines it with its own nanobots, which is also the only reason it exists. In both cases the HP column is telling you about durability the game never lets you test.

Depth, as far as it is documented

The official pages record roughly where a few things sit, and stay quiet about the rest. What they do say:

• Redsoil — large pockets underground, often at middle to lower depths
• Copper Ore — small veins, deeper underground
• Moss — in caves underground
• Dune — on the desert surface, and it reforms after you dig it
• Lava — deep underground, in the Lava Cave, and it does not travel as lava (how to move it)
• Indestructible — the bedrock, and an absolute boundary; when you reach it you are done going down

Everything else is either not placed at all by the official pages, or placed only as loosely as “underground” — Moss in caves, Fluxite in trace amounts — with no depth attached. Those rows say so rather than being sharpened into a band this page made up.

The kit that replaces a map

Since you cannot look things up, exploring efficiently is a research problem:

Unlock	Tier	Cost	What it does for exploring
Map	1	100 Gold	The Map and Minimap
Hover	1	50 Gold	Float in place and phase through structures
Flare Gun	1	150 Gold	Light up dark areas
Sprint Boost	1	200 Gold	Temporary speed while holding Shift
Recon Drone	4	2,500 Gold	Scouting
Locator	5	3,000 Gold	Fill with Void Juice to scan for hidden alien artifacts
Recall Shard	5	4,000 Gold	Teleport back to a recall portal, powered by Voidbloom

The first four cost 500 Gold together and are all tier 1. That is the cheapest meaningful upgrade to exploration in the game, and it comes before any of the tools that let you dig through Stone.

The research planner shows what each of these costs once you count prerequisites.

What is actually down there

Exploring is not only about resources. The store description promises an ancient civilisation’s secrets, and four things the official sources name are worth going looking for:

• Artifacts. Hidden, and the reason the Locator exists — fill it with Void Juice and it scans for them. The Locator is a tier 5 unlock at 3,000 Gold, so assisted searching only becomes available late; nothing stops you stumbling on one before that.
• Augments. Scattered across the planet, and they upgrade your Utility items — the Gun, the Rocket Launcher, the Shovel — as well as the player: moving faster, and extending the boost’s speed and duration.
• Ruins. The ancients dug and shaped spaces that are still there, and the Beginner’s Guide suggests using them: a pre-cut cavern can be a factory layout you did not have to excavate.
• Puzzles. Left behind by the same civilisation, and some of them need a tool or resource you do not have yet. That is by design rather than by mistake — the intended response is to leave and come back.

Two practical notes for when a puzzle goes wrong. Freezing is the general-purpose trick: building a solid bridge across a teleporter gap works where nothing else will, which is one more reason to carry the Cryoblaster. And if you end up sealed inside something, there is an unstuck command in the pause menu — see controls.

The official wiki still has no page for artifacts, Augments, the ruins or any individual puzzle. What players have worked out since launch — what artifacts add up to, the rules every puzzle room follows, and the solutions for the rooms people get stuck on — is on artifacts and puzzle rooms, labelled as player-sourced.

Custom maps

Sandustry was built for mods, and the developers list custom maps as one of the supported categories alongside visual changes and new buildings and production chains.

They are not on the Steam Workshop, though. The Workshop carries mods and no maps; every custom map is distributed through the community loader instead. Sandustry custom maps covers what you need to install one and what it costs you in trust.

This is the one case where a “Sandustry map” is a real, fixed, shareable thing — because somebody authored it rather than the game generating it.

Related

• Sandustry Beginner Guide — the first hour, above ground
• How to Break Crackstone in Sandustry — the wall that stops everyone
• Sandustry Research Planner — costing the exploration kit
• Sandustry Critters — the creatures you meet down there, and the one worth catching