1.0 added a whole new tier of items related to the sand levels, and all of them revolve around Crushers. And Crushers themselves have weird production chains, with quite poorly explained logic and recipes. To see what a Crusher can do, you need to open it’s interface and hover over materials in your inventory, which will populate the recipe on the right side of the screen.

Note: If you put in at least 3 Sand Pumps on floor 12, you will remove enough sand to find 10 Crushers. Do not craft Crushers, until after you’ve placed these 10.

The defining feature of the Crusher is that it operates in high quantities – either in or out. The side effect is that the Crusher never works 100% of the time, as it needs to queue materials, even with stacked inserters. It’s also the largest structure you will build, both in x/y footprint, but also 2 voxels more in height. This means that it cannot be integrated into an existing multi-floor factory.

There are a few uses for the Crusher, almost all of which are locked behind research.

• Scrap Ore crushing. It takes 250 Scrap Ore, and combined with some other ingredient (in very small quantities) will generate a slew of other items.
  • Scrap Ore should only be collected as slabs through Blast Miners, the belts in the game are incapable of supporting anything else as the compression ratio is wild. Bring the slabs back, crush them, make 250 ore + a minor amount of limestone (which you can compress to a brick).
  • If the Scrap Ore has multiple outputs, you need stack filter inserters and storage. Most items will come out at slow enough rates you can supplement other lines. The exception is Shiverthorn Gel Extract, which will eventually log up your production lines.
• Sand crushing. There are variants in here, and some of them generate power.
  • Generating power is how you’ll get to be self-sufficient on floors 12+. You’ll need accumulators given that the Crushers don’t run 100% of the time, and it takes a LOT of sand to keep them running. You will likely want that sand for other things before you want it for power.
• Ore/Slab/Material crushing.
  • Think of this as accelerated Threshers with better ratios. On paper it seems great, but be aware that you will need a ton of power and space to run this setup. This is so incredibly effective in speed/ratio that you’ll likely rebuild your factory around it.
  • If, for some insane reason, you are using ore powder, this method will completely saturate all your belts with a single machine.
• Biodiesel Refinement
  • It’s a very large ratio of Assemblers to Crushers for the refinement process, and you’ll need 2 Crushers as it’s a 2 step process, with byproduct. This should be the #1 priority, as it’s the only way to operate Sand Pumps at scale.
• Material compression.
  • Similar to Blast Smelters, Crushers can create some types of bricks. This is effectively a ratio tool for storage purposes… but also the likely source of Plantmatter Bricks in late game.

The largest challenge I’ve found with Crushers relates to the relatively poor tools you have to deal with them. They should operate at 250 items per minute, which can easily be accommodated by a Mk3 belt + stack inserter, but they clearly don’t. There are often multiple outputs, up to 3, that require a lot of belt magic and space to sort out. The lack of prioritization on belts means you’re going to saturate some belts and exhaust others if you don’t plan ahead.

I like the concepts of Crushers, just like I did with the Blast model when it first came out. The practical application of Crushers naturally create significant logistical issues that the game currently doesn’t explain well enough, or provide the tools to effectively manage. More specifically, the lack of a practical sink mechanic really shows up here. Blast incineration is the only method, but you need to build a dedicated machine per item type, which basically means a few dozens machines where a single one should suffice. This isn’t a math problem, it’s a mechanical one, meaning there’s no readily available solution.

Related, the Sand Pump mechanic is conceptually sound, but has practical limitations. First, the ratio is 100% if you are positioned over a sand well, and 50% if you are anywhere else. At the start of a sand floor, you are always 100%, but you will need to move the pumps as the floor drops, which means insane spaghetti belts to get fuel to and sand out of the pumps. The lack of power transfer to these floors means that you will only ever run Sand Pumps on the last 5 floors and nothing else. Floor 12 requires 3 pumps at 100%, floor 13 needs 5. Floor 14 needs 24, floor 15 + 16 need over a dozen each. There’s no sugar coating – this is timegating and poorly implemented at that. Thankfully you don’t need to do anything except access floors 14 and 15 in order to progress the story, and floor 16 requires zero sand pumping. Get to the bottom of floor 13 and you’re set.

I do feel that with a few tweaks these things could be rather ‘easily’ addressed.

• Sand Pumps should have research options to increase their speed/effectiveness.
• There should be a research item (or unlockable) to transfer power to the sand floors, so that you can build factories there. You can technically do the entire floor without power with basic inserters (20/min) but will need a dozen per pump.
• Floors 14+15+16 sand pump rates need to be changed.
• Crushers should have the option to destroy (or make Carbon Powder) any item

As it stands, the sand mechanics are interesting to manage on floor 12, and very uninteresting past that. Fingers crossed this gets tackled soon.