Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sandship-crafting-factory/id1440385758 Sandship: Crafting Factory Rockbite Games From the developers of Deep Town, Sandship is a factory management game set in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi universe. You c… Free Buy Now Watch Media DetailsFrom the developers of Deep Town, Sandship is a factory management game set in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi universe. You control the last remaining sandship: a gigantic, artificially intelligent mega-factory, which roams across the endless deserts of a far-away planet. Noranti One was a highly advanced civilization. After an accident forced your sandship into hibernation, it awoke in a world of ruins. Join us on a journey to rediscover forgotten technologies, forge a better tomorrow through crafting and trade, and fight a vicious cult hellbent on your destruction. Unlock the secrets of this cryptic land onboard your incredible sandship. Design futuristic factories from the ground up in this free to play adventure. Place devices like synthesizers, chemical mixers, and ice guns in your sandship factory. The more devices you have, the greater your automated productivity. Connect those devices with conveyor belts to craft a wide variety of materials, from copper wires and combustion engines to ancient technology utilizing the mythic power of the overwell. Upgrade your sandship and add bigger factories to get the space you’ll need to produce more complex items. Trade the incredible stuff you make to earn credits, XP and get old crates filled with scientific research from the distant past. This ancient knowledge gives your sandship new abilities, becoming stronger, smarter, and more powerful than she’s been in a long, long time. Your engineering mentor is Harvey, a tenacious one-eyed cyborg who needs your help to reconnect with his past. Harvey will show you the ropes of sandship engineering as you build and maintain more complex factories on a desert journey. Are you ready to voyage through a mysterious alien desert with many obstacles in your path? The planet is inhabited by an unusual assortment of robots and aliens. Some are friendly and astounded by your sandship. Others are hostile and want to see your sandship destroyed, but you’re not sure why. Complete quests to meet new characters, uncover ancient civilizations, hear campfire stories and learn how this once industrious world crumbled in the distant past. There’s so much to discover on-board a sandship. Solve factory floor puzzles, then create your own to share with other players. Get creative in the sandbox to try out new setups without using any resources. Build an enigmatic underwell to mine precious resources, but be prepared to defend against hordes of extraterrestrial enemies to collect them. New features and places to explore are added continuously. The universe of Sandship is constantly expanding. FEATURES Engineered for Fun: Free to Play Design a futuristic assembly line for automated crafting Produce everything from simple items to otherworldly technology Place more devices to create increasingly complex materials Trade what you make for credits, XP, and crates containing ancient knowledge Upgrade your sandship’s size to mythic proportions Maximize your credits to buy buildings, devices, and decorations Develop holographic blueprints to get creative with your setups Solve factory floor puzzles and share your own Explore the World: Help Harvey, your cyborg engineering mentor, reconnect with his past Complete quests to earn rewards and assist the colorful inhabitants of Noranti One Adventure through a strange planet inhabited by aliens and robots Uncover lost civilizations and learn their secret histories Defend your sandship against hordes of extraterrestrial enemies Information Seller:Rockbite Games Genre:Simulation, Strategy Release:May 06, 2020 Updated:Apr 06, 2023 Version:2.18.7 Size:345.3 MB TouchArcade Rating:Unrated User Rating:Unrated Your Rating:unrated Compatibility:HD Universal Official Teaser Trailer: Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel Ringerill Well-Known Member Dec 13, 2012 315 170 43 #2 Ringerill, May 7, 2020 Last edited: May 7, 2020 I've preordered the game a while ago since it looked fun and more strategic than most idle games. It reminded me a bit of Factorio and I enjoyed that game But just be warned: right now, the game is bugged as hell and you will alternate between connexion errors, being stuck at certain points in the story and having constant crashes no matter what you do... I would suggest to wait for a few days or a week before really starting. Echoseven Moderator Staff Member Patreon Silver Patreon Gold Patreon Bronze Jul 19, 2011 6,091 270 83 The red Skittle #3 Echoseven, May 7, 2020 I wrote my first review in about 4 years! Copy/pasted from elsewhere below: ——— There’s a certain satisfaction to production chain games. Start with a raw resource, process it a few times and before you know it you’re crafting mechanical assemblers to manufacture ammunition for gun turrets. Which you also created, of course. You wake up aboard Sandship, a gigantic mega-factory that’s cold and silent, chained to the ground in the middle of a ruined town. Who you are and how you got there are a mystery that will have to wait, as the factory starts to come alive around you. A tutorial guides you through the basics of crafting materials for repairs and with a grunt and shudder, you are free. Free to meander the desert, explore the world through quests and craft to your heart’s content. There were lots of factories like yours, once upon a time. And as word spreads that you’re back online, requests come flooding in. One buyer wants steel springs. Another needs glass tubes. A third; copper wires. These orders, along with quests, are the reason you craft anything at all. Playing the game is simple - you have a grid and a selection of machines that either synthesise a resource, move an object, or turn X into Y. How you construct and arrange the chain determines what it spits out the other side. Every request is like a puzzle. Past a certain point, making one iron plate per second is not enough and you’ll need to think hard about how to optimise until you can afford to upgrade your floor space. And this, of course, is where the free-to-play model comes in. Throughout the game you need to upgrade your buildings, which increases their capacity. You will also need to collect materials and credits to unlock new tech. Both are pricy and both will make you wait. These timers are annoying, but not critical and won’t stop you from cashing in on orders... The orders will do that just fine on their own. Completed orders are shipped off to their recipients and you must wait up to 12 hours before they get the goods and you get paid. On its own, this still wouldn’t be so bad, since there’s always quicker quests available. Except that you can only complete one quest at a time. Except that the reward for each order (along with credits) is a chest which could contain an artefact, which are required for some story quests and floor upgrades. Except that you can buy a temporary booster that turns 12 hours into 12 minutes... but only affects one of the four order types. In so many ways, Sandship feels at odds with itself: - Like a cat, it wants to play with you... until it doesn’t. Even the largest contracts take me, at most, 15 minutes to complete. After which I can either focus on the main quests, or put down the game down and come back later. - It wants you to buy new factory buildings and expand, but puts hard limits on how much you can craft at a time. Since there’s no penalty for removing machines - they simply go into your inventory and cost nothing to place again - I got through the entire game using only two buildings - even though I had space for many more. - It hyper focuses on production and optimisation, and then throws a tower defence mini-game at you. And a puzzle mode, where you create a production line, delete some parts, and ask other players to recreate it. The puzzle mode is very cool, to be fair, but both feel superfluous to the core experience. Despite wrestling with the free-to-play beast, I had a tremendous amount of fun. The core concept of the game, figuring out efficient chains of production, is put together incredibly well. Even now that I’ve done everything the game has to offer, I’m still thinking about how I can optimise steel production to use a smaller footprint... ——— If you’ve got this far, you should also follow me on Instagram - I play hundreds of mobile games and post about the ones worth playing: https://www.instagram.com/vladimir.knight/ ——— Like @Ringerill says, it’s also quite buggy at the moment. I’ve reported many to the developers, which were kind enough to let me have the beta for about a week now. Long story short - fantastic core concept executed brilliantly, neat ideas, brought down by the free-to-play nature of it all. dukat111, ste86uk and Ringerill like this. ste86uk Well-Known Member May 9, 2012 6,774 1,003 113 #4 ste86uk, May 7, 2020 Zero issues for me so far but I only spent about 20 minutes on it. ste86uk Well-Known Member May 9, 2012 6,774 1,003 113 #5 ste86uk, May 7, 2020 @Echoseven I’m not sure how I feel about the game yet I’m not far in and it’s already getting like a puzzle building the factory. Then with other parts of the game you said that don’t really matter I wonder if I’ll feel like I’m wasting my time. How bad is the free to play? I don’t see it coming into it at all yet. Here’s a picture of my tiny factory. Attached Files: 19DCD94E-EC05-4493-AB66-98D2CBCEB197.png File size: 3.6 MB Views: 8 Echoseven Moderator Staff Member Patreon Silver Patreon Gold Patreon Bronze Jul 19, 2011 6,091 270 83 The red Skittle #6 Echoseven, May 8, 2020 @ste86uk At level 6 you unlock blueprints, which let you save a project and then drag-and-drop the whole lot in one go. This was part of the reason I only ever used two buildings - I had blueprints for just about every item type. They want plates? Sure, I’ll drag 5 of those out and be making 40+ plates a second. Steel? I gotcha. That and the hard limit on Substance production. I rarely built multiple things at a time. When requests come in for 15k of an item, it’s far more time efficient to build one at a time. It’s also the orders that really got to me. Even with a booster that makes a 12 hour trip take 12 minutes, you’re putting together an order for a CHANCE to get an artefact or a data card. Which are then tied to quest progression and building expansion. If they had a single booster that sped up ALL deliveries, that would be more bearable. But no, there’s a separate booster for each delivery type (quick, normal, generous, and the other one I forgot the name of). Those suck. Also, here’s a blueprint I made for wires. It’s not tidy, but high-producing. Attached Files: 479688E7-19DE-4888-8FFD-08EDECA264F7.png File size: 1.4 MB Views: 14 dukat111 likes this. sharfaust Well-Known Member Jul 1, 2013 339 75 28 #7 sharfaust, May 8, 2020 Same. iPhone X, 13.3.1 sharfaust Well-Known Member Jul 1, 2013 339 75 28 #8 sharfaust, May 8, 2020 Looks like it was a server issue. It seems to be fixed. akshaun Member Dec 15, 2011 5 0 1 Male V.P. of Engineering San Francisco, CA http://instoredoes.com/ #9 akshaun, May 8, 2020 I've been doing a 3 hour contract for more than 12 hours now. The timer only seems to tick down when the app is open. Is this a bug or intentional? Edit: Looks like a bug. A force quit fixed it and the contract was available to collect. This is on iOS. Ringerill Well-Known Member Dec 13, 2012 315 170 43 #10 Ringerill, May 10, 2020 Yeah, this game has quite a lot of bugs all over it. Like for instance if you copy a blueprint and paste it, it won’t produce anything... I would suggest to drop the issues in their Discord server. They also have a google form to fill to keep track of bugs. Echoseven Moderator Staff Member Patreon Silver Patreon Gold Patreon Bronze Jul 19, 2011 6,091 270 83 The red Skittle #11 Echoseven, May 10, 2020 That one in particular has a workaround. It only happens if your production machines are producing something other than the default. So copper/carbon synthesisers, or assemblers, for example. The solution is to go through them and to specify what you want to be made. For example, I have a steel blueprint where one carbon synthesiser is feeding three smelters with three other synthesisers. The blueprint doesn’t work until I tell the carbon synthesiser to produce carbon. As a bonus, trying to save a blueprint with underground conveyor belts will crash the game. GiHubb Well-Known Member Patreon Silver Apr 27, 2010 1,049 39 48 CEO #12 GiHubb, May 13, 2020 I’ve played until exp 8 of the sandship so quite a bit. But the frequent bugs, especially with production, on top of what I see as stupid design decisions, are wearying me down - in order to progress, you need research new abilities with materials you can only obtain from loot boxes. Right now I’m stuck on the Underwell Pit development because I don’t have the Yellow Data Trigon which is an Epic piece. I’ve opened tons of boxes with no luck. What a stupid roadblock. That along with the bugs just make me feel like I’m wasting my time. It’s a shame because the factory aspect, with more meaningful execution, could have been a joy. ShinHadoukin Well-Known Member Feb 20, 2015 972 143 43 #13 ShinHadoukin, May 14, 2020 No matter where I move the machine I cannot get the bolt machine to receive hot rods to actually make a bolt. Echoseven Moderator Staff Member Patreon Silver Patreon Gold Patreon Bronze Jul 19, 2011 6,091 270 83 The red Skittle #14 Echoseven, May 14, 2020 Put a heater directly after the cutting machine. That one is quite finicky, because you need to cool sheets to cut them, then heat up the rods before they are made into bolts. BlueTrin Well-Known Member Jun 21, 2012 376 51 28 #15 BlueTrin, May 18, 2020 This is like a simplified Factorio with timers. would have paid if it didn’t have timers Ringerill likes this. GiHubb Well-Known Member Patreon Silver Apr 27, 2010 1,049 39 48 CEO #16 GiHubb, May 20, 2020 Could have been a mobile Factorio but It‘a full of stupid design decisions: from forcing you to open loot boxes to obtain materials (that you cannot manufacture) which are required to progress research and the story, to having a really low limit of the amount of storage you have for what you do manufacture - as a result of this you will never need to build elaborate factories like you see in the trailer as to open the “rare” loot boxes that have a chance of scoring Epic materials required to progress, they need a ton of specific manufactured parts so due to the small storage space you have to manufacture these 2-3 manufactured goods and discard everything else due to lack of storage space. And thanks to the timers of opening the better loot boxes which range from 5-12 hours, there is no need for more than a simple assembly line. Stupid, like I said, disappointing. Ringerill likes this. Ringerill Well-Known Member Dec 13, 2012 315 170 43 #17 Ringerill, May 25, 2020 I totally agree with you. Factorio is all about automatisation and optimisation, rerouting your conveyor belts, dealing with energy and materials. Here, it's all about produce X elements for this quest or to open a box on timers and all you have to do is just copy-pasting your production blueprints, wait for it then stop. Rince and repeat, just a brainless gameplay. They basically took out the main mechanics of Factorio and put F2P on top of everything: limited amount of materials you can have, limited place for your constructions, loot boxes with timers... The F2P mechanics are not too bothersome but the problem is that in the end, you just don't have any point in advancing. You unlock new machines sure but only because they are required for loot boxes and quests. Also, by spending some time on their Discord, I see a lot of people complaining that they reached the end and just don't have anything else to do... The game is also riddled with strange things such as: you are not warned that you are stuck at lvl 8 if you don't advance enough in the story line so if you do some research giving you a lot of XP, this XP is just lost and not buffered for later (losing 800XP if a lot since chests give you from 2 to 20XP). Also, if you build some rooms in quests like the tower-defence like quest and complete the story, all you have built will be lost and not put back in your inventory. Without mentioning all the different bugs and other bad design choices, I just ended up deleting the game. BlueTrin likes this. (You must log in or sign up to post here.) Show Ignored Content Share This Page Tweet Your name or email address: Password: Forgot your password? Stay logged in
I've preordered the game a while ago since it looked fun and more strategic than most idle games. It reminded me a bit of Factorio and I enjoyed that game But just be warned: right now, the game is bugged as hell and you will alternate between connexion errors, being stuck at certain points in the story and having constant crashes no matter what you do... I would suggest to wait for a few days or a week before really starting.
I wrote my first review in about 4 years! Copy/pasted from elsewhere below: ——— There’s a certain satisfaction to production chain games. Start with a raw resource, process it a few times and before you know it you’re crafting mechanical assemblers to manufacture ammunition for gun turrets. Which you also created, of course. You wake up aboard Sandship, a gigantic mega-factory that’s cold and silent, chained to the ground in the middle of a ruined town. Who you are and how you got there are a mystery that will have to wait, as the factory starts to come alive around you. A tutorial guides you through the basics of crafting materials for repairs and with a grunt and shudder, you are free. Free to meander the desert, explore the world through quests and craft to your heart’s content. There were lots of factories like yours, once upon a time. And as word spreads that you’re back online, requests come flooding in. One buyer wants steel springs. Another needs glass tubes. A third; copper wires. These orders, along with quests, are the reason you craft anything at all. Playing the game is simple - you have a grid and a selection of machines that either synthesise a resource, move an object, or turn X into Y. How you construct and arrange the chain determines what it spits out the other side. Every request is like a puzzle. Past a certain point, making one iron plate per second is not enough and you’ll need to think hard about how to optimise until you can afford to upgrade your floor space. And this, of course, is where the free-to-play model comes in. Throughout the game you need to upgrade your buildings, which increases their capacity. You will also need to collect materials and credits to unlock new tech. Both are pricy and both will make you wait. These timers are annoying, but not critical and won’t stop you from cashing in on orders... The orders will do that just fine on their own. Completed orders are shipped off to their recipients and you must wait up to 12 hours before they get the goods and you get paid. On its own, this still wouldn’t be so bad, since there’s always quicker quests available. Except that you can only complete one quest at a time. Except that the reward for each order (along with credits) is a chest which could contain an artefact, which are required for some story quests and floor upgrades. Except that you can buy a temporary booster that turns 12 hours into 12 minutes... but only affects one of the four order types. In so many ways, Sandship feels at odds with itself: - Like a cat, it wants to play with you... until it doesn’t. Even the largest contracts take me, at most, 15 minutes to complete. After which I can either focus on the main quests, or put down the game down and come back later. - It wants you to buy new factory buildings and expand, but puts hard limits on how much you can craft at a time. Since there’s no penalty for removing machines - they simply go into your inventory and cost nothing to place again - I got through the entire game using only two buildings - even though I had space for many more. - It hyper focuses on production and optimisation, and then throws a tower defence mini-game at you. And a puzzle mode, where you create a production line, delete some parts, and ask other players to recreate it. The puzzle mode is very cool, to be fair, but both feel superfluous to the core experience. Despite wrestling with the free-to-play beast, I had a tremendous amount of fun. The core concept of the game, figuring out efficient chains of production, is put together incredibly well. Even now that I’ve done everything the game has to offer, I’m still thinking about how I can optimise steel production to use a smaller footprint... ——— If you’ve got this far, you should also follow me on Instagram - I play hundreds of mobile games and post about the ones worth playing: https://www.instagram.com/vladimir.knight/ ——— Like @Ringerill says, it’s also quite buggy at the moment. I’ve reported many to the developers, which were kind enough to let me have the beta for about a week now. Long story short - fantastic core concept executed brilliantly, neat ideas, brought down by the free-to-play nature of it all.
@Echoseven I’m not sure how I feel about the game yet I’m not far in and it’s already getting like a puzzle building the factory. Then with other parts of the game you said that don’t really matter I wonder if I’ll feel like I’m wasting my time. How bad is the free to play? I don’t see it coming into it at all yet. Here’s a picture of my tiny factory.
@ste86uk At level 6 you unlock blueprints, which let you save a project and then drag-and-drop the whole lot in one go. This was part of the reason I only ever used two buildings - I had blueprints for just about every item type. They want plates? Sure, I’ll drag 5 of those out and be making 40+ plates a second. Steel? I gotcha. That and the hard limit on Substance production. I rarely built multiple things at a time. When requests come in for 15k of an item, it’s far more time efficient to build one at a time. It’s also the orders that really got to me. Even with a booster that makes a 12 hour trip take 12 minutes, you’re putting together an order for a CHANCE to get an artefact or a data card. Which are then tied to quest progression and building expansion. If they had a single booster that sped up ALL deliveries, that would be more bearable. But no, there’s a separate booster for each delivery type (quick, normal, generous, and the other one I forgot the name of). Those suck. Also, here’s a blueprint I made for wires. It’s not tidy, but high-producing.
I've been doing a 3 hour contract for more than 12 hours now. The timer only seems to tick down when the app is open. Is this a bug or intentional? Edit: Looks like a bug. A force quit fixed it and the contract was available to collect. This is on iOS.
Yeah, this game has quite a lot of bugs all over it. Like for instance if you copy a blueprint and paste it, it won’t produce anything... I would suggest to drop the issues in their Discord server. They also have a google form to fill to keep track of bugs.
That one in particular has a workaround. It only happens if your production machines are producing something other than the default. So copper/carbon synthesisers, or assemblers, for example. The solution is to go through them and to specify what you want to be made. For example, I have a steel blueprint where one carbon synthesiser is feeding three smelters with three other synthesisers. The blueprint doesn’t work until I tell the carbon synthesiser to produce carbon. As a bonus, trying to save a blueprint with underground conveyor belts will crash the game.
I’ve played until exp 8 of the sandship so quite a bit. But the frequent bugs, especially with production, on top of what I see as stupid design decisions, are wearying me down - in order to progress, you need research new abilities with materials you can only obtain from loot boxes. Right now I’m stuck on the Underwell Pit development because I don’t have the Yellow Data Trigon which is an Epic piece. I’ve opened tons of boxes with no luck. What a stupid roadblock. That along with the bugs just make me feel like I’m wasting my time. It’s a shame because the factory aspect, with more meaningful execution, could have been a joy.
No matter where I move the machine I cannot get the bolt machine to receive hot rods to actually make a bolt.
Put a heater directly after the cutting machine. That one is quite finicky, because you need to cool sheets to cut them, then heat up the rods before they are made into bolts.
Could have been a mobile Factorio but It‘a full of stupid design decisions: from forcing you to open loot boxes to obtain materials (that you cannot manufacture) which are required to progress research and the story, to having a really low limit of the amount of storage you have for what you do manufacture - as a result of this you will never need to build elaborate factories like you see in the trailer as to open the “rare” loot boxes that have a chance of scoring Epic materials required to progress, they need a ton of specific manufactured parts so due to the small storage space you have to manufacture these 2-3 manufactured goods and discard everything else due to lack of storage space. And thanks to the timers of opening the better loot boxes which range from 5-12 hours, there is no need for more than a simple assembly line. Stupid, like I said, disappointing.
I totally agree with you. Factorio is all about automatisation and optimisation, rerouting your conveyor belts, dealing with energy and materials. Here, it's all about produce X elements for this quest or to open a box on timers and all you have to do is just copy-pasting your production blueprints, wait for it then stop. Rince and repeat, just a brainless gameplay. They basically took out the main mechanics of Factorio and put F2P on top of everything: limited amount of materials you can have, limited place for your constructions, loot boxes with timers... The F2P mechanics are not too bothersome but the problem is that in the end, you just don't have any point in advancing. You unlock new machines sure but only because they are required for loot boxes and quests. Also, by spending some time on their Discord, I see a lot of people complaining that they reached the end and just don't have anything else to do... The game is also riddled with strange things such as: you are not warned that you are stuck at lvl 8 if you don't advance enough in the story line so if you do some research giving you a lot of XP, this XP is just lost and not buffered for later (losing 800XP if a lot since chests give you from 2 to 20XP). Also, if you build some rooms in quests like the tower-defence like quest and complete the story, all you have built will be lost and not put back in your inventory. Without mentioning all the different bugs and other bad design choices, I just ended up deleting the game.
