It’s quite the month for sand-related games! Sandcastle, a literal sandbox game, received a demo earlier this month, and now here we are today with the release of Sandustry, another, entirely different literal sandbox game. Where Sandcastle is about building, uh, castles out of sand, Sandustry is about building entire factories, and also, apparently, discovering an ancient civilization’s secrets. Sure!

Developer Lantto Games describe Sandustry as a survival/factory automation game “where every pixel is a resource waiting to be mined, mixed, processed, or destroyed.” What that means in practice is that some of these pixels can be used to construct large, intricate factories that produce various kinds of technologies, each of them reacting to one another in physically realistic ways. Think sand absorbing water and becoming easier to sift for gold, and ice melting when heated, with some unique chemical reactions between other kinds of pixels.

It is also a game where it is more or less up to you what you do in it. Each world is procedurally generated and completely destructible, meaning you could go on a horrendous rampage and eradicate every pixel on screen if you like. Seems a bit much though, I prefer the sound of just constructing some cool production lines to make my life easier. There’s also some mysterious artifacts to find from the aforementioned ancient civilization, and on top of that, Sandustry is built with modding in mind, so I’m sure over time there’ll be plenty of silly extraneous options for building contraptions.

One thing to note is that this is an early access release, so don’t expect everything to be in place just yet. According to the game’s Steam page, it is completely playable at least, and everything described on the page can be found in-game. It’ll be in early access for around a year, depending on how progress grows, and the price may increase after that point, so potentially worth getting on the grainy ground floor. And if you’re not entirely certain of it yet, there’s a demo you can try out too. You can pick up Sandustry on Steam now.