Sand

Sand has no shop, no recipe you can reach early and no quest that hands you a stack. It comes out of pits in the ground, four at a time, and the first ones are at home: cross to the left of your house, by the broken bridge.

Finding them is half the problem. The other half is Building mastery three, which is one rung above what a clay pit asks, so the two sit side by side on the same bank with clay letting you dig and sand refusing.

Everything glass in the game runs on it, Polished Bronze runs on it, and the Sluice Box turns it into Tin. The zombie bench that digs it for you arrives far too late to be the answer.

Where the sand pits are

Start at the base. Walk left from your house toward the broken bridge and there are pits there, which is a considerable relief the first time a recipe asks for two and you were expecting an expedition.

Sand pits are low mounds sitting on bare sand, and the game puts no label on them, so you are looking for a shape rather than reading a name. Clay pits sit nearby as cracked reddish discs, which is the quickest way to tell you are in the right sort of ground.

The bigger field is out west. Head away from the Forest until you reach the river running north to south down the left of the map, where the banks widen into sand and the zone name in the corner reads Riverside.

A porter station can be built on this bank once you reach the zombie stage, and it ships exactly two things back to the yard, Clay and Sand. That is the game telling you which two materials live here.

What a pit costs and what it gives

Each pit has four hit points and takes 1 a swing, so four swings and four energy empties one for four Sand. It pays 1 on the way, and it refills itself in the same spot afterwards.

That puts sand in the same family as copper veins and clay pits rather than with iron. The bank is a supply you return to, not a resource you can strip, which matters once glass and polishing start eating it in pairs.

Sand is cheaper per swing than clay, oddly enough. A clay pit has three hit points at 2 each for its four Clay, so it costs six energy against sand’s four for the same count.

Why clay works and sand refuses

A sand pit asks for three in Building, the orange track. A clay pit asks for two, which is why players standing on the same bank can dig one and not the other and come away thinking the sand is broken.

The shovel is what the pit asks you to hold, and it is not what opens it. A Bronze Shovel carries a Farming rating and so does an Iron Shovel, so neither one adds anything to the Building number the pit is reading.

That number comes from the axes and pickaxes on your belt. A Bronze Pickaxe is worth two in Building, so one bought level alongside it clears the pit, and an Iron Pickaxe is worth four and clears it alone. A Bronze Axe does the same job, because an axe and a pickaxe feed the same track.

What sand turns into

Glass is the headline. Three Sand and ten Fuel return three Glass at either furnace, four of them with the Glassworker perk, and Lens takes eight Sand and thirty Fuel for two.

Polishing is the other half. Polished Bronze takes two Sand a batch, and Polished Stone and Polished Marble each take two Sand and a Melted Fat to turn four rough plates into four finished ones.

Then there is the Sluice Box, which washes three Sand into two or three Tin in five seconds. Tin is what turns three Copper Nugget into four Bronze Ingot, so sand sits upstream of the copper route into bronze. Melting Bronze Scrap is the other route and wants none.

The box has a second output worth knowing about. With the Gold Digger perk on whoever is working it, a wash can also turn up a Golden nugget, which is what the perk means when it promises gold from sifting sand.

One Sand is also worth studying once. A single grain plus a Faith and a Science pays back 5 and 5, which is a good trade for the first one out of the first pit.

The Sand Digger Stand cannot be your first answer

There is a bench that digs sand for you. The Sand Digger Stand costs two Wooden Plank and four Iron Nails, takes no inputs at all, and returns one Sand every eight seconds without spending energy or asking about mastery.

It comes from Zombie Digging at 50 and 10, which sits behind Iron Smithing. Reading the price alone makes it look like a mid game convenience, and the real cost is in the four Iron Nails. The node is hidden until two blockages are cleared, the one in the basement under your house leading into the mine and the one blocking the quarry cave, and clearing the second of them reveals the whole zombie gathering branch at once.