Guide · Economy

Turning Lunar Dust Into Money

Moon Sweepers has three saleable materials and one bottleneck at a time. Understanding which multiplier your factory can actually feed is worth more than any upgrade.

Patch: 1.0.4
Updated: 26 October 2026
Read: 9 min
Sources: Steam + patch notes

Quick answer

Early game: clean near the depot, deposit constantly, and buy the Household Broom. Mid game: add a Pressure Chamber ($500) for 3x dust value. Late game: add a Stone Press ($1,000) for 7x, but only after your power and dust supply can support it. Never buy processing before transport works.

Where money actually comes from

New players often assume dust is money the moment it enters their container. It is not. Dust becomes money at exactly one point: the depot intake, when a shipment is paid out. Everything between your brush and that intake is a logistics problem.

That gives you three independent ways to increase income, and it helps to know which one you are short of:

Collect more. Wider brushes, vehicles, Robot Vacuums. Increases the volume entering the system.
Collect faster per trip. Capacity upgrades, bigger hoppers, shorter distances. Reduces the time cost of the same volume.
Sell higher. Processing machines. Multiplies the value of the same volume.

TipFix the earliest broken stage first

If capsules stop moving at a machine input, adding another collector makes the pile bigger, not the income. Always find the first stage where movement stops.

Dust, sand and stone

Raw lunar dust is the base unit. Two machines convert it upward, and each step costs power rather than money — which is why power infrastructure is an income upgrade.

Sale value per kilogram, relative to raw dust. Sand and stone do not replace raw dust as a product; they replace it as a price.

Processing machines: cost, power draw and conversion
Machine	Price	Power	Conversion
Packager	$100	—	Carried dust becomes capsules for a conveyor. No value change.
Pressure Chamber	$500	10 kW	Dust to Moon Sand. Up to 5 kg per 12 s. 3x value.
Stone Press	$1,000	18 kW	1 kg dust + 1 kg sand to 2 kg Moonstone per 6 s. 7x value.

The stone press needs two inputs

The detail that breaks most first factories: the Stone Press consumes both dust and sand. If you route all your dust through the Pressure Chamber, there is nothing left for the press and it idles. You need to split the incoming dust stream before the chamber.

Watch outDo not send everything through the chamber

Split incoming dust. One branch feeds the Stone Press directly, the other feeds a Pressure Chamber whose sand output goes to the press. Then merge the Moonstone outputs to the depot.

Early money: under $500

For the first hour, your income is entirely manual and the only optimisations that matter are distance and completion bonuses.

Work outward from the depot. The first ten minutes should never involve a walk longer than a few seconds.
Finish hexes. Completion pays a bonus on top of the dust. Half-finished hexes pay nothing extra.
Buy the Household Broom, then its container upgrade. $25 then roughly $30. That is the cheapest meaningful improvement in the game.
Do not buy the Building Tool yet. $50 for nothing until you can also afford a machine and belts.

Aerial view of a Moon Sweepers base with multiple conveyor lines running from processing buildings — A mature base. The money is not in the buildings — it is in the belts that keep material moving between them.Official Steam screenshot, copyright DragDrop Games. Used for identification and commentary.

Mid game: the first machines

The first real income step is not a processing machine. It is a transport machine: something that removes the walk. The Packager at $100 does that for manual collection, and a Robot Vacuum at $250 does it for a fixed area.

Budget roughly $315 for a working first automatic line: Building Tool $50, Robot Vacuum Mk I $250, and about 30 metres of conveyor at $0.50 per metre.

Only after that line actually pays out should you consider the Pressure Chamber. A chamber with no reliable dust supply is a $500 ornament.

Order of operations

Building Tool — $50.
Packager — $100, placed where you clean.
Conveyor to the depot intake.
Verify the balance moves.
Robot Vacuum Mk I — $250, on fresh ground.
Pressure Chamber — $500, plus power.
Stone Press — $1,000, only if sand supply keeps up.

Late game: unattended income

Two things change the scale of your income: multiple parallel processing lines, and J.O.O.N.A.S. at $20,000. Before spending that, your factory should already be able to process and deliver more than you can collect by hand.

Patch 1.0.4 made J.O.O.N.A.S. worth the price: it cleans hex by hex to 100%, fires capsules to the nearest Capsule Catcher ($1,500, now 100 kg capacity), and keeps working when no players are nearby.

ConfirmedBudget the catcher too

J.O.O.N.A.S. without a Capsule Catcher returns home full and waits. The working budget is $21,500 before conveyors — and the catcher only helps if its output feeds a line that reaches a depot.

Why your balance stopped growing

Nearly every "my factory is broken" report is one of five things. Check them in this order.

The belt direction is wrong somewhere. A continuous-looking belt with one reversed section behaves like a wall.
The belt does not reach the depot. Capsules accumulate at the end and are never sold.
A machine has no power. Pressure Chamber needs 10 kW, Stone Press 18 kW. A basic Solar Post provides 3 kW.
A machine input is facing the wrong way. The Pressure Chamber's inlet is on the side without the handle.
It is night and your battery is empty. Solar output drops to zero; stored charge decides whether production continues.

Patch 1.0.4 also fixed a bug where machines paused with "Could not pack a capsule" despite having power and materials. If you are on an older build, that message may not be your fault.

The numbers in one table

Power sources and consumers in Moon Sweepers
Item	Type	Value
Solar Post	Generation	3 kW
Solar Twin (M)	Generation	7.5 kW
Pressure Chamber	Consumption	10 kW
Stone Press	Consumption	18 kW

That means a single Pressure Chamber needs more than three basic Solar Posts to run at full rate in daylight, and the Stone Press alone needs six. If you run both plus a second chamber, plan the power before the machines.

NoteMultiplier is not profit

Seven-times sale value does not mean seven-times income. A Stone Press that waits for ingredients produces less than two Pressure Chambers that never stop. Compare the output of the whole working system per hour, not the label on one machine.

Use the profit calculator to see how the multipliers interact at your current dust rate, or read the automation guide for the physical layout.