The single most useful thing to know about Sandustry's world: in Early Access, there is effectively one map. As the community documented and developer participation confirmed, every generated world has the same layout — "top layer mountain to the left, pyramid to the right," with every story structure, point of interest and artifact site in identical places. World seeds currently change nothing meaningful. Procedural generation is on the official roadmap, but today, map knowledge is permanent knowledge — everything below applies to your world too.
Region by region
- The snow mountain (surface, left). Frozen terrain: Snow, Ice, and Frostbed ground too hard to melt — dig Frostbed to harvest Snow. Holds one confirmed artifact.
- The desert (surface, right). Dune terrain with pyramid-like structures of Limestone, a material "impervious to all known tools" — the pyramids are scenery and vault shells, not quarry. Digging Dune yields Sunsand, which quickly re-forms into Dune: the desert heals itself, so it is a place to explore, not to mine. An artifact comes "from the dunes" per the official achievement.
- The cave layer (underground). Moss-grown caverns, Copper Ore seams alongside sand, and standing water pockets worth pumping (see the water guide).
- Redsoil pockets (middle-to-lower depths). The large red deposits that feed the fluxite chain. Their positions are fixed — once you have found a pocket, it is found forever.
- The deep layer. Mooncrystal outcrops (source of ridiculously bouncy Moonhop, fuel for the artifact Locator) and the Lava Cave, the natural lava reservoir the lava cycle is built around.
- The Sky. Build space, all the way up: steam condenses to rain at the top of it; Depleted Steam vanishes there.
- Bedrock. The world's absolute boundary — the wiki's name for it is Indestructible, and it means it: no tool, no explosion, no exception.
What "abyss map" actually is
If you searched "sandustry abyss map": The Abyss is not an official region. The name comes from a demo-era custom map that circulated in late 2025 — the demo's maps were plain image files anyone could edit, and a 50-mod scene grew around swapping them, including a custom-map loader. Those demo-era custom maps do not load in Early Access; today, custom maps arrive through the Steam Workshop instead (see the mods guide).
What's coming
Two named expansions of the world are on record from the developer: Deepmire, "a hostile and expansive material you need to destroy in order to access deeper parts of the caves," and the refined procedural generation that will eventually make seeds matter. Late-game world events already exist — the Strataform events around the anomaly questline — and when procedural generation lands, the fixed-map register this page relies on becomes a demo-era artifact itself. Until then, it is the most reliable map data the game has.