Sand pumps don't need a lot to work at 100% Just stack them and reposition them as needed.

TO STACK;
Place the first one close to the sand, then rise up and place the second. it will be red until you click first when red then set the height and raise it till its blue, then click again, a stacked pump needs to be 3 blocks apart from the one below. All pumps line up with the same pipes, so you can rotate too to help with building upwards.

I always use 3 yellow inserters to input pure and impure diesel on a mixed line, added to 2 x 3 x 3 floors (no power needed) then i take sand out to red storage see below:

Useful pump info - on the later sand levels you only need 6 yellow inserters, into 3 x red storage. You can then remove the sand fast, then take it away with 1 yellow inserter per box. This on 24 pumps in level 14 will clear all the sand in less than an hour. It also uses no power. when the pumps are not pumping (either they reach rock or you need to reposition them to a deeper hole, you can just leave the storage and fuel loop and remove the pumps. The boxes will continue to trickle feed to the conveyor to take the sand away. Generally I deal with all sand processing on lower levels with power. It makes more sense to take it out and deal with it than to try to overpower the levels with no access to water power. This way you can just have a few grinders on the sand levels (4 max) and lots and lots of accumulators to run the odd filter inserter or stack inserter and to start the pumps up in the first place, a long row of mrkII cranks. they run for an hour so you only need to wind them once to empty the level really.

Hover over the pump to see the level fill rate versus the pump speed - having more than 24 will speed it up more, but you will need a lot of diesel. 12 assemblers running diesel infusion packs will supply 6 crushers running pure diesel intermixed with normal diesel kept my pumps running just under 12000 ml/sec. you then feed the waste diesel back to the pure line for the 3rd inserter to pick up as a backup. They get used faster than pure diesel, but they can stack higher and its hard to saturate 26 pump line around the level with just pure diesel, so use the impure too.

The main backlog for a diesel conversion facility is actually carbon blocks. Don't make it from plantfibre etc. its too slow - make it from either sesamite twigs then into plantfibre bricks, to use up the sand, then use the large carbon source just below the surface to the left of the elevator by blast mining (the conventional recipe to start), and then use the sesamite gel excess with the plantfibre bbricks and carbon bricks to make 200 explosives recipe and mine carbon bricks way faster directly and use that for fuel refining instead. this creates an almost infinite loop until the carbon runs out. (if you are playing with non infinite resources on hard).

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Rotating pumps in the stack queue does not help with stacking, but it can help if the sand you build on is slightly off a deeper hole you cannot see - rotated pumps often run longer if one small pipe drops into a deeper hole and the main pipe hits rock - helps to keep you're options open when you can't see on the map where the holes are. A great tip for level 14 is that the entire floor is hollow - so you can clear rock to get the pump to drop into the sand below the main cavern after you clear enough away to see the deeper holes.

Final tip

Once you find everything and mine everything you need from a sand level - you will probably remove all sand from the level to get to the scrap ore. Once you do this, did you know the sand level stays at the bottom? This means you no longer need to pump diesel in to clear the sand out. Despite the level increasing slowly on the overlay info panel, the sand never actually refills, so you can just move your resources to the next level up. I have seen so many people trying to empty sand from levels 12 to 14 only to find 14 so hard that they get annoyed - because they are still trying to empty 12, 13 and 14. When a level is at its lowest point, save your fuel and divert it up to the next! It will no longer rise on the levels providing you have found all fragments, storage and techfobs in the level.

Everyone seems to have way too much sesamite sand than they can remove - particularly a problem on level 14.

I am not sure what causes this but here are a few tips;


Take it elsewhere
Don't deal with the sand on the level you are trying to empty - just send it down to the floors with power.

Use the sand to make these two main ingredients on another floor
- sesamite stems (threshed in a crusher not a thresher!) excellent for quick high volume plantmatter bricks (8 bricks for every 12 stems)
- sesamite gel (made by smelting sesmite powder then using an assembler mrk2 to add coolant gel to make sesamite gel) This will use up that other ingredient everyone moans they have too much of - shiverthorn extract (by the hundred!)

Power is scarce
6 yellow inserters will empty a pump recieving 6 diesel per minute. I see everyone using green stack and filter inserters and wonder why they have power issues. You only need filter inserters when taking out separate ingredients of more than 1 type. So do the filtering on the floor you send it to for processing - where you have power.

Put the sesamite sand into 3 red storage boxes using 2 yellow inserters per box at the side of each pump and then take it out with one inserter per box. This saves on power needs, meets demand and holds way more storage than a pump will drain at most full depths. You also then have less on your conveyors for processing. By the time you combine all pumps needed to empty a level - you will have collected what sesamite you need to move on to the next.

Stop making sand when you don't need it
Found everything on the level and emptied the sand to the base? Why are you still running your pumps on diesel then?. Shut it down and walk away! you only need scrap and carbon from the higher levels and they require hardly anything to get to.

I stopped all production on 12 apart from carbon and scrap, once it was empty, because it never refilled (oddly after collecting(scanning) all items). Then on 13 I collected my only source of sand and sent it to 10 for processing. once I moved to 14, I used that level to produce pure diesel using the sesamite recipe to make mass biobricks, and mined carbon bricks to run the refinery area. Technically you only need to keep the carbon source free from sand once everything is explored. Hardly any power needed other than a few mark2 cranks and accumulators. Even though the sand meter says its refilling - if you have found everything and scanned all items on the level, the sand doesn't really seem to come back once you reach rock bottom. (where the scrap is)

A little charge
After you have cranked a start up power to get going, run a few crushers to keep power topped up to run your refinery area on 14 and shut floor 13 down to just scrap and carbon. 4 crushers will keep a lot of accumulators going to run the main refinery and recycling processes and even then that's only needed on 14, if you supply 12 and 13 from elsewhere (a level with a good source of limestone is the best place to make low level biodiesel) move to the high yield recipe when you have opened up level 14. You'll need sesamite gel.

scrap = gold
Scrap has many uses especially if you're prior factory isn't optimised well, but really to finish the game, scrap has just one main purpose - making gold. You'll need around 3500 gold bars to complete the levels so a crusher making gold, that feeds the spare scrap to another crusher - to use up the waste, needs just feeding to a smelter and storage loop. You can run around with the gold bars to complete the level upgrades and then you are effectively done with scrap. Yeah sure you can make a few items that are handy with other recipes but on my second run through, I literally made just gold with it from level 12. I didn't need to mine it from anywhere else.

The biggest problem with crushers is you have to find them first.
Do what you need on level 12 to get to level 13. Don't over think level 12 yet as you won't be able to make crushers other than those you find at the very deepest rectabgluar cave on 12. The crushers on 13 are easier to scan and if you pay attention to the tech tree - it tells you this on the crusher recipe, you need to go to 13 to find it.

Where are they?
They are just behind the elevator, initially go left and add about 4 pumps to get to the crushers. Go left again till you are behind the elevator(lift) use the scanner to locate them just below the surface. You'll find a few accumulators too, but you should already be making those en mass to get the drill bits to be on the sand biome.

There are some I believe on 12 at the rock bottom, but these are harder to get to than the ones on 13. Don't waste your effort trying to empty 12 until you need the tech keyfobs for the recipes needed on level 14. You need to scan the ones on 12 to make the recipe available so till then you only have what you scan on 12.

What do they do?

They are essentially a thresher - but some recipes can generate static, so you can store this power in accumulators. This is handy as power is scarce without water. Separating sesamite sand is the easiest way to generate vast amounts of power with crushers. Store it all in accumulators on 12-14. Add a long row of mk2 cranks near the elevator entrance so you can top up if you need to for running filter inserters and stack inserters if you need them.

There are many recipes, but the main important ones are:

Sesamite stems - great for mass producing plantmatter bricks which can be made into carbon or for turning into mining charges, this is key to refining diesel for level 14.

Separating sesamite sand - into sesamite powder and sand (use the sand to mass produce glass and send it elsewhere to make sensors needed for the final mining drillbits).

Gold - A by product of scrap processing, use the gold and scrap recipe to put scrap back into gold production. You need this to initially and predominantly to clear the tech upgrades at Sierra level 12