How to Find Every Artifact Chamber in Sandustry

Sandustry artifacts sit in sealed puzzle chambers deep underground, and in the Early Access world there are no fixed coordinates to copy: parts of the map are procedurally generated, so every seed places the chambers differently. You find them by exploring cave systems, checking the map for unexplored blank space, and eventually loading the Locator tool with Void Juice and following its direction marker. What stands between you and a relic is never a hidden map pin — it is a capability check: ice that needs the flamethrower, crackstone that needs explosives, sealed doors that need puzzle logic, and weapon tiers that gate the deepest barriers. Fund your gold loop first, carry the right tools, and treat any chamber you cannot open yet as an entry on a to-do list, not a dead end.

How artifacts are actually discovered

The reliable discovery loop in Early Access combines eyes, map, and the Locator. The Locator is a research tool you fill with Void Juice; clicking and holding it consumes some juice and emits a dot from a ring that points in the direction of the nearest artifact. A Fluxite upgrade called the triangulation lens improves this guidance, so a funded upgrade line makes hunts shorter. The upgrade panel also tracks your progress — one recorded Early Access playthrough showed a counter reading "five out of a potential 10 artifacts," which tells you both the scale of the hunt and how many chambers are still waiting.

Terrain gives you hints as you tunnel. Miners in recorded footage repeatedly ran into indestructible walls and immediately treated that as a signal that an artifact chamber was nearby, because the relic rooms are large box structures wrapped in unbreakable material. In the 2025 demo the chambers were even numbered, and players found them out of order — one spent a whole session hunting the "first" site after already clearing the second. Expect backtracking; that is the intended texture of the hunt, not a bug.

Let the map do the scouting

Look for blank spaces behind breakable terrain on the map; many chambers are gated by ice, Crackstone, or later tools.

The in-game map (press M) is your cheapest scouting tool. Unexplored regions show as blank space, and a large blank gap between your tunnels and a distant area is exactly where an unopened chamber is likely to sit. Recorded hunts use the map to pick a straight excavation line toward the blank zone, then cut that line with the laser or rockets so nearby sand can drain toward the existing belt network instead of being hauled by hand. Planning the route on the map first saves the most tedious part of artifact hunting: flying back and forth through the same shafts.

Do not rely on the map alone, though. A chamber only becomes obvious when you physically reach its box structure and find the door, and some freshly opened areas contain nothing at all — recorded runs at both low and high tool tiers ran into dud rooms that paid out no artifact. Treat the map as a filter for where to dig, and the Locator as the confirmation once you are in the neighborhood.

Terrain that blocks the path

Four barriers do most of the gating, and each one names its own tool:

• Ice and snow wall off cold approaches and melt to the flamethrower. Community guides consistently rank the flamethrower as mandatory kit, and it is cheap for how much it unlocks.
• Crackstone ignores normal digging entirely and demands explosives — in the demo era the answer was the Rocket Launcher bought through research, and the same explosive logic carries the gate in Early Access. Our crackstone breaking guide covers the full approach.
• Hard stone and shatterstone need gun tiers, and some barriers explicitly send you back for the next tier before you can pass — a recorded speedrun hit exactly this wall and had to return later with weapons maxed.
• Indestructible walls cannot be mined at all. They are the shell of the artifact chamber itself, so when you hit them, stop digging and start looking for the door.

The practical order this creates matches the research tree: Logistics for belts and launchers, then Guns 1, then the flamethrower, then Guns 2 and the Rocket Launcher for the deepest barriers. If a barrier refuses your best tool, that is the game telling you which research node is next — bank gold and come back.

Puzzles and rooms that demand later tools

Artifact chambers are puzzle prefabs, and several mechanics inside them are non-obvious. The official FAQ calls out the single most common confusion: foundations can be placed on the yellow blocks in puzzle rooms. Many water-routing puzzles are solved by building foundations on those yellow tiles and guiding a fluid onto them until they turn green, which opens the chamber door. The same rooms can contain portals that delete any material entering them, so containment walls matter more than throughput.

Other puzzle types seen in Early Access footage include flame-button rooms where you ignite a burn and race the fire, reset buttons that restart a failed attempt, and distant flammable material that must be ignited with a rocket so falling snow becomes a crossable bridge. Some chambers are restricted zones that disable flying, building, and even the flamethrower once you cross their plane — demo footage shows the flame refusing to fire and interior ice refusing to melt. The developer has also shown circuits being used inside artifact puzzle prefabs, with artifacts set to feature prominently in unlocking upgrades, so expect the puzzle vocabulary to keep growing during Early Access.

What to do with rooms you cannot open yet

When a chamber is beyond your current tools, the correct play is to mark it and leave. Note what blocked you — no gun tier, no explosives, a puzzle element you do not have the tool for — and keep the gold line running so the return trip is affordable. Nothing inside an artifact hunt fixes a factory that is behind, and arriving funded is what separates a quick collection from a respawn cycle.

If you are physically wedged inside a chamber, do not reload a save. The developer's own reply in the stuck-player thread points to the Unstuck/Respawn button at the top of the menu, which frees you in seconds. Restricted rooms have trapped players behind something as small as a pebble or an ice ledge, so this button is worth remembering before you enter any no-fly zone.

Prepare a kit that matches the gates

A practical hunting kit, assembled from community guides and recorded runs, is short: lights for unlit chambers, mobility upgrades so vertical shafts stop costing minutes, the flamethrower for ice, a gun tier high enough for the local stone, rockets for volume excavation, and spare building material for puzzle test structures you will delete afterward. Community reports consistently name jetpack speed as the single most valuable upgrade for hunting — the default movement is described as painfully slow, and the caves are deep. If you are still building your income, start with the getting started guide and the beginner guide before spelunking; a stable Wet Sand, Shaker, Gold line funds every tool this page mentions.

Sources and version notes

This page reflects Sandustry Early Access (v0.5.x, August 2026; EA began 2026-08-13). Because the EA map is partly procedurally generated, no coordinate-based directions from demo-era guides are reproduced here — those describe the fixed 2025 demo map, which is labeled demo history and had a bounded artifact set with an end-of-content message. Key sources: the official Steam store page, official Steam FAQ and developer replies in community threads, the developer's shared artifact-puzzle preview, community wiki and guide pages, and recorded playthroughs (Early Access footage plus demo-era runs used only as labeled history). Details that are player reports, not independently verified: the ten-artifact counter and Locator behavior (single recorded EA playthrough), the triangulation lens upgrade effect, unique artifact names such as "Zorix 22," and reports of specific puzzle instances failing to trigger — one such report was resolved by upgrading the gun and shooting the mechanism longer. The official Hooded Horse wiki pages for artifacts were not accessible at collection time, so interface-level details lean on community documentation, and puzzle solutions have changed between game versions.