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. Your world is generated; so was the one in the screenshot you saw.

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 a generated world, 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.

Four 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 not dug at all. No tool works on it. Fire melts it into Water, and that is the only way through. Handy, because it is also a water source.

Two of these you make rather than find. Scoria is frozen Lava, and Vine grows from your own Wet Seeds. Looking for them underground is looking for the wrong thing.

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
• 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.

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 distributed through the Steam Workshop.

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. Sandustry mods covers the Workshop and the loader that community content runs through.

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