First, the naming: searches are full of "sifter", "sand shaker", "sand washer" and "sand vacuum", but the game has exactly one sifting machine, and its official name is the Shaker (20 Gold, the first research you buy). The Vacuum is a handheld collection tool, the Drill is a late tool for hard rock, and "washing" isn't a machine at all — it is just wetting. Everything below is Shaker engineering.
What a Shaker actually does
Feed it Wet Sand from above (1 Sand + 1 Water = 2 Wet Sand) and each grain resolves as:
- Always: 1 Residue, slowly pushed off the machine's top like a conveyor.
- 25% of the time: 1 Gold, which falls through the Shaker's underside — only Gold can pass through the machine's body.
So at the Shaker stage, expect about 4 sand per gold. That is not the whole story: the Residue you keep is worth more gold downstream (burn → press, see the slag guide), which is how the full chain reaches the community-measured totals of roughly 2 sand = 3 gold, and — with redsand feeding the parallel chain — 2 sand : 3 water : 4 redsand → 3 gold : 8 fluxite.
The staircase layout
The wiki's recommended geometry is a downward diagonal staircase of Shakers, and the reason is pure density: Wet Sand (150) is denser than Residue (50), so on a slope the unprocessed sand sinks below the residue and keeps flowing down to the next Shaker, while residue rides off the tops. Gravity does your recirculation. Build the staircase over a shaft with a Collector at the bottom — the gold from every step rains straight into the bank.
The red sand answer
Half the "red sand to sand ratio" searches assume Redsand is a richer sand you sift. It is not: Redsand never goes into a Shaker. It is dug from Redsoil pockets (HP 20, mid-to-lower depths) and exists for one purpose — merging with Amethelis into Voidbloom for the fluxite chain. The only real "ratio" linking them is the whole-economy one above: for every 2 sand your sifting line eats, the fluxite line wants about 4 redsand. If you are stockpiling redsand next to your shakers waiting to sift it, stop — dig it toward the emanator instead.
Densities: the numbers every filter needs
Filters and gravity-sorting both run on density, and the wiki publishes the values. The ones that matter early:
| Material | Density |
|---|---|
| Gold | 300 |
| Redsand | 160 |
| Sand / Wet Sand / Seed | 150 |
| Water / Wet Seed | 100 |
| Residue / Burnt Residue | 50 |
| Amethelis | 40 |
| Voidbloom | 30 |
Gold is the densest pixel in the game — it sinks to the bottom of any pile on its own, which is why "filter densest first" is the standing rule and why lost gold is rarely lost, just buried at the bottom of something.
Scaling up
The Shaker line stays your primary income until the Kinetic Press (500 Gold) comes online and starts converting the residue backlog. From there the two lines run in parallel forever: same input stream, split at the Shaker top. The blueprints guide has the compact combined layout.