How to Move Lava in Sandustry
You can't pipe lava like water or belt it like slag - it melts through your plans, sometimes literally. The correct method, per the official wiki, is to stop treating it as a liquid for the journey:
- Use the Cryoblaster (or snow) to freeze lava into Scoria.
- Break the Scoria apart to get Cinder.
- Move the Cinder with a grabber, conveyor belt or launcher - it's just a solid now.
- Reignite the Cinder (a flamethrower does it) wherever you actually want lava.
There's a middle step a lot of summaries skip: lava becomes Scoria first, and only then Cinder. Miss that and the chain looks broken when you try it in-game. Once it clicks, "moving lava" is just "moving a rock and relighting it" - which is why late-game bases ship cinder up launcher towers instead of ever trying to pour lava anywhere.
Natural lava lives underground in lava caves, so this loop is also your mining technique: freeze the cave's lava, crush it, haul the cinder out, and burn it back into lava at your base wherever a heat source is needed.
Automating Sandustry Lava: Freeze, Crush, Refuel
The manual loop becomes tedious, and the official wiki documents the automation pattern: use a Filter as a lava holder. Seal the space beneath a filter, store cinder inside it, and ignite the cinder - the filter keeps the re-formed lava fixed in place while other materials pass over the top. Route slag across the top of that holder and you've built an auto-burning line: the lava stays put, the slag gets roasted as it passes, and burnt slag falls out the other end ready for the Kinetic Press.
That's the deeper point of lava in Sandustry - it's not a hazard to avoid, it's the game's free heat source. Anything that needs burning (slag into burnt slag, drying, smelting) can run off a controlled lava holder instead of your flamethrower's fuel.
Sandustry Water Sources
Water is the resource you'll move most, and it comes from more places than new players expect:
- Rain - steam that rises to the sky condenses and falls back as water. A working steam cycle rains on your base.
- Melting ice - ice from cold biomes melts into water; bring heat to the ice rather than hauling ice home.
- Groundwater - underground pools, pumpable once you have pumps and pipes.
- Water duplication - a documented behavior where water multiplies under the right conditions; the basis of every "endless water" build.
Before pipes are unlocked, you can still move water as steam: heat groundwater so it vaporizes, then build channels and blocks so the rising steam condenses into surface pools where you want it. Clunky, but it works in the first hour when a base needs water and the nearest lake doesn't.
How to Make Infinite Water in Sandustry
The documented loop: use the Cryoblaster to make snow, then run the snow through a heat-steam-rain cycle. Snow melts to water, water boils to steam, steam rises and rains back down - and because water duplication is part of the official behavior, each pass through the cycle can leave you with more than you started with. The official wiki documents this loop and the community wiki cross-checks it.
Practical placement matters more than the loop itself. Put the cryoblaster's snow output where the resulting water can be collected (a dug basin works), and give the steam somewhere to condense - a ceiling - or your rain falls back into open sky and the loop leaks. An infinite water rig is one of the first "solved forever" problems in a run; build it once, cleanly, and water stops being a constraint for the rest of the game.
Moving Water Around in Sandustry
Every fluid except lava moves through the same trio: a Pump at the source, Pipes in between, a Liquid Vent at the destination. Two mechanics to know before you design a network:
- One pipeline can carry multiple fluids, but the vent always pushes out the fluid closest to it first - you can't choose which. Separate lines per fluid is the safe default.
- Water flows by physics too. Dig a channel and water will run downhill into it; blocks and conveyors can dam or redirect it. Piping is for precision, not for everything.
Sandustry Community Water Tips (Unofficial)
Two player reports worth passing along with the appropriate caveat - these are community observations, not wiki-documented rules: water-producing critters (Lumlings) only produce when kept above the waterline and stop when submerged; and melting the snow or ice mountain near your starting area is a popular early water source. The Lumling behavior in particular still isn't officially documented - if you build around critters, keep a backup pump. For what is officially documented on fluids and materials, the materials guide and official wiki cover the rest.