Sandcastle Builder Strategy Guide

This guide is broken up roughly by the defining goals and resources of the game at the time. If you have a specific problem, go to the heading that best describes your level of play to hopefully find answers. There are other ways to get through some parts of the game, and this is not the only way to progress though it, but this method will work. 

Start to K castles

Click and get sand. Try to focus on castle tools as sand tools are not super great early. Familiarize yourself with the interface and how processes like the ONG work. Get boosts as you can, especially things that improve clicks. You will want to be focused on getting redundakitties so you can get the important upgrades they provide for having clicked a certain number of them. This part is pretty straightforward.

You want to get Kitnip and the DoRD as soon as possible. The faster you get kitties the better (however, please do not be up all night to get Not Lucky). If you are a new player: do yourself a favor and Molpy Down as soon as you get to NewPix 3 for time travel.

Some interface notes:

• Hovering the mouse pointer on most of the tools, boosts, etc. expands them to give more information. If the "Stats" bar is active, many of these show different information (more details, or different details). This can also activate new features (adding or removing buttons, unlocking new boosts in the shop). So be sure to check each new thing both with and without the Stats bar.
• Redundakitties can appear in front of any tool, shop item, or loot item (including badges earned or badges available), totally at random. If you've hidden a loot section (e.g. badges available) and the redundakitty chooses to appear in front of an available badge, you'll miss it. So don't hide any sections. However, if you hide the entire loot window then kitties can't appear there at all -- they will be forced into the tool or shop windows. (This is also the only workaround for a known Logicat bug you'll run into later.)

K to M castles

Start trying to get 14 of every tool so you can unlock the boosts associated with each one. This will make npb VERY strong and they will produce tons of castles. Make sure you don't ninja them! Do yourself a favor and toggle Chromatic Heresy (on & off 10 times) until you unlock Beachball, and turn it on. Don't click the Newpix when it's red!

Eventually get to 22 npb so you can get blast furnace which is pretty important. You should get to kitties galore here which makes redundakitties pretty frequent. I won't be mentioning kitties anymore, but it's paramount you get to at least 776 of them, so keep clicking them.

If you got time travel, it can be worthwhile to time travel back and forth until you get 30 "temporal invaders". Time traveling farther back makes the travelling less expensive to do all the jumps to get 30 invaders but be mindful of the countdown timer for the next ong, you can not travel farther forward than you have naturally progressed and so it is important to be on your current highest NP when the timer expires. The invaders are special npb, and at this phase they will add a lot to your income. If you did not Molpy Down earlier, do not worry about this part! It helps but is not really that necessary, and you will get time travel later regardless.

M to G castles

If you haven't gotten far enough to get to the judgement dip , you'll probably have to wait. If you're lucky you'll get some blast furnaces in with your factory automation, try to get just enough sand before an ONG that you can max out your profit from it, generally about 3/4 from the next castle. When you get the dip DO NOT BUY BAG BURNING. It is a very temporary fix and will ultimately make this stage take longer.

Just wait it out, and eventually you'll unlock everything (1 upgrade for every castle tool and navigation code). Your goal here is to buy irregular rivers and sandbag, which will make your rivers super jacked. Don't worry about code blowing up npb production with nav code, once you have the other boosts their production is largely irrelevant for a very long time anyways. Get balancing act towards the end.  YOU MUST TURN ON NAVIGATION CODE. FIND THE BOOST, CLOSE THE STATS BAR, AND CLICK INSTALL. This is a step many players miss, and generates a lot of questions.

A note regarding invader NPBs: installing the NAV CODE will cause the invaders to disappear. At this point you may want to buy a bunch of NPBs. You can regain the invaders by waiting for Jamming to expire, then uninstalling the Nav Code (which will restart the Judgement Dip), then time travelling again. You'll have to do the math to decide whether you want to continue playing with or without the Judgement Dip. You can keep the cost under control with Knights Temporal for a while.

You will also have a chance to get a glass furnace in here sometime. Buy it and turn it on ASAP. Progress through glass chip production until you get the blower, and then progress that until you have the extruder and refinery. Initially you'll only be putting a little sand into it but you should ramp it up to 90ish% quickly, as after this phase of the game clicks will be most of your sand income, and glass becomes very important later on. Just getting to these boosts takes a long time, but isn't very resource intensive, so do it now before you need the glass.

G to T castles

Blast furnace is gonna be the name of the game here. If you're on longpix already and have it, turn off furnace crossfeed so you can get castles. Blast furnace also really picks up when you get fractal sandcastles, so that should be a priority buy. You should upgrade your sand tools so you can get most of the boosts for having 30-50 of them (look at the list if you want to know exactly) and make sure you have enough sand that you furnace the max amount (up to 1/3 your all time castles built). It's also worth saving just before the npb activate and reloading a few times to get furnace runs instead of ASHF. Your goal here is bag puns and VITSSAGEN, JA!, although I liked picking up Blixtnedslag Kattungar, JA! on the way.

Once you have vitssagen, ja (500G with ASHF if you've spend 200M on other things like tools/boosts for silver card, which you should) and have used it 20 times, you will unlock swedish chef. Another long grind will get you to this, one of the most important boosts. You can speed it up if you click a lot, but VITSSAGEN probably won't outpace your furnace. Wait for ASHF to buy it, then immediately look at it in stats and buy family discount for 80% off everything. Use your newfound cheap prices to buy up any outstanding boosts, and make sure you get Swim between the flags around this time. It's half your ticket up.

T to P castles

Hopefully you're at or near longpix, because those boosts are about to be important. Use Rosetta to upgrade factory automation a few times, and get 50 trebuchets and 100 of all sand tools. Unlock all the related boosts and then ride it out on the trebs/furnace/waves (make sure you're not skimping on tools, you want them to be at most 3 orders of magnitude less in cost than your ability to produce. So if you have 100T make sure all your tools cost at least 1T) Save up to get to 20P for free advice to unlock/buy.

P to Inf castles

Once you get free advice, glass ceilings become availible. You need to be furnacing glass instead of castles now (crossfeed and multitasking), and once your production is fine enough that you can unlock a ceiling, get 0. Continue to bump up your glass production until you feel comfortable spending ~40 blocks during an ASHF and get to ceiling 3 ASAP. This is the first big swing and will take you well up into E. Get phonesaw and use it a few times so you can easily get logicats. The next several orders of magnitude revolve around unlocking more ceilings (7 is the next really big bump) and clicking logicats. Keep upgrading glass production, you should be throwing 99.x% sand into it and getting most of your sand from clicking. Sand is consistently 8-10 orders of magnitude higher until about W or KW, and now it's about breaking even. When you get your first crate, smashing it is probably a good idea for a quick glass fix for ceilings/general use, but after that buy keys.

The next phase is fairly fluid and involves getting logicastle from logic rewards (50% cumulative boost for EACH logicat level) and riding that until you have 444 scaffolds to trade for window washing beanies, which gives your scaffolds a huge boost to all your glass ceilings. If you're clever you can sell all your scaffolds when you get a temporal duplication and buy up early. Either way just make sure you build up all of your tools when they're really cheap (you'll be leaping several prefixes at a time on odd NP) and then dump the rest in waves/flags/scaffolds. Keep getting maximum rewards from crates (set your shopping assistant to autobuy Crate Key, remember the caps). The blackprints should be started early, and after you get your first crate opened with keys (or otherwise have enough glass), you should be spamming caged logicat every NP. Make use of castle crusher once your castles outpace your sand if you need the sand.

Unlock Time Lord by getting a rift, saving and loading, taking the rift, and then clicking jump in the log. Upgrade it with the flux crystals you get. Save before you jump, if you didn't jump to an even longpix (going to an even gives you the wave boost) then load and repeat. Make sure you click for stealth since you'll often have factory ninja. You should make it to infinite castles in no time, and once you are there, castle crusher will get you infinite sand, which will replenish your infinite castles. Buy up to max on every tool.

As a side note, when 9 blocks per not lucky is not a lot of blocks for you, turn on panther salve and unlock the boosts you get from it, but turn them off. They suck before you get to the glass part of the game or have all of them to stack, but once you're inf/inf they provide a nice little boost to glass income. Leave it on until it's at speed 1200+ (look in stats view) and then turn it off. When you're infinite/infinite turn it and the next two on, and if you're ok losing some tools now and again you can turn on catamaran and let the cat out of the bag. If you do have all the boosts before infinite phase, you can use them to accelerate your castle generation by a lot, but the cost in glass is not trivial. Still, it can be better than waiting for ONGs/rifts if you don't play over long periods.

Inf sand and castles

The biggest thing to be doing at this phase is getting tool factory (the only way to progress) and making sure you're still getting as many blackprints as possible. Pump your glass chip production up as blitzing is now replaced with glass furnace runs (!!!). You really want to be getting at least 100k chips per firing, and dumping it all back into more chips when blocks permit. Save enough blocks to get upgrades.

First order of business is getting sand to glass and castles to glass. Sand to glass is obtained when you have 7470 buckets and infinite sand per mNP. Lock all glass ceilings except 0 and 3. Load chips into the factory until you have the right number of buckets. Lock 0, and then pump up the factory until you have infinite sand per mNP (remember trebs cumulatively boost buckets, so once you have infinite with no ceilings you'll always have infinite. This is around 3400 trebs). At this point, load the tool factory once and sand to glass unlocks. Buy it for a paltry income of chips in your factory.

If you get MHP, try to get a goat! You'll need goats and you don't need castles now. If you get hall of mirrors, turn it off. Trust me, start this grind early.

Next you want castles to glass: this one is easy. Have infinite castles, and 1515 npb. Load the Tool Factory once and it will unlock. Buy it! This is officially the end of the tyranny of sand/castles. Now your goal is to only be making one kind of sand tool at a time and getting it to 20K (usually, check the boosts list ) so you can buy the upgrades for their chip production. Turn on the ceiling of the tool you want and turn all others off. When you have an excess of chips, put them in, but make sure you keep upgrading capacity/production. You may have to wait around for some boosts to ensure you have enough blocks, but crates should have you covered. Unlock blackprint plans as you earn them, and keep spamming logicats as the logic level gives you some important boosts, it speeds up crates, and effects how many blocks you get per crate. If you want, you can make some monuments now, but I'd recommend waiting for Optimization. Sometime around here you should hit 4k chips/mNP and get glass saw.

Mid to late inf sand and castles

Construct from blackprints as often as you can; your goal is to get to Automata Assembly, and Automata Engineers right after it. Get to 5000 NewPixBots for Production Control and, as often as you can afford to make another set of tools, increase it. With all ceilings off, it takes 78M chips per NP per 12 tools, so do a bit of napkin math if you have to to see if it's worth increasing. Before long it will be pretty often that you want to push it up, and remember the bigger the increment the better. Production Control levels are one of the few things retained when you molpy down, so this is a big priority. Your first big break will come when you get about 2M beanie builders. Immediately trade them in with recycling beanies to get it to inf (assuming you have a few T blocks to buy the boost with) and then rebuild only beanies till you're back up to snuff. This will give you tons of chips. You'll want to do the same with scaffolds and window washing beanies, but you need about 50M of them so it will happen a bit later.

From here on out is kind of a long slog where you balance having enough chips to continue making tools, using glass saw to turn chips into blocks, and using those blocks for boosts/pc versus your furnace/blower. I recommend getting tools evenly, although some people prefer only scaffold/beanie/bag/ladder. Just don't neglect cuegan and lapetite if you do this because they're very important later. You should keep up with your furnace because glass saw is limited by your blower rate. Your goal is to keep going up and up until you can get friendship is molpish, which will make your cuegan/lapetite chips per mNP cover your costs for tools so you can safely saw out all your beanie builder/scaffold chips for blocks. In the meantime, spend your blackprints on construction until you get Mysterious Representations, then spend it all on Automata Control (which unlocks from having 5k npb, you'll get it organically). If you go to sleep and wake up and just have plenty of them, go ahead and pick up zookeeper, but it's not a priority until it looks kinda cheap.

Yes, you will be spending a long time here, and it will not really speed up significantly. Your milestones are pretty far apart and are split in two ways: dragon rewards and blackprint/production rewards.

Your blackprints and other production should be a focus simply because they get you bigger numbers, and you eventually want really big numbers so you can have lots of stuff. The more you ramp up that production, the more you can work on the actual goal: feeding your achronal dragon. If you haven't already, time travel around a bunch (with nav code off!), and then eat your npb duplicates. If you have some temporal duplication dupes around, eat them too since they're not important. The goal is 100 eaten total, which unlocks crystal dragon (lets temporal duplication work with TF, lets you get TD in the infinite phase). You have a side goal now which is to get not lucky while your TD is up, which will require you to try to get it right before npb with caged logicat so you can double factory automation it (turn off key buying as that will eat all your DoRDs for this). You can track your progress in free advice. Once you have lucky twin, you want to do the same double automation trick. Your goal is to get TD to at least 1NP this way so you can have it forever. Once you're at ~1KNP you can forget about this as it will naturally get bigger and bigger.

When you unlock clicking for chips, get your chips clicked to 1M for the next boost, then to 5M so you can get glassed lightning. It's blitzing for chips and will be important to have later. You'll also want to (while semi-idle or via shopping assistant) chain buy bag burning once you have bacon. There's an important boost that unlocks when in stats the threshold reaches infinite. It doubles every time it locks, which is when the mNP ticks over after you buy it (it immediately unlocks again). Buy fireproof when you can afford it (pretty expensive). It will boost your npb chips a lot for a while, and it makes nav code switching fast (20mNP cooldown). Importantly, you will be at 0 castles every mNP unless you click, which is a little inconvenient, but it lets logicats unlock rifts for you which are super good now that most of you chips come from ONG. When you get your first rift, save and then load, and then take the rift. Keep leveling timelord, and make sure you don't rift to shortpix.

Next dragon thing happens at AC 101. Remember all those tedious mould building things you did? They're a bit easier with this, but it's not a huge boost. Remember to unlock all dragon things you have to eat some duplicates after you hit the requisite AC level. After that it's the worst part of the grind: getting to 301 AC. It will take forever and is terrible, but you get dragon forge for it which makes the blackprint cost of AC increases MUCH easier, although it costs some logicat levels to do it. At AC 180 you'll get access to locked vaults from the dord, and you should autobuy the keys for those as much as possible as they give 10 + (# vaults opened) blackprints, so they ramp up pretty quickly. By 300 crates will have disappeared, so zookeeper is gonna be your best friend by 180 if you don't have it already.

Keep ramping up PC/AC until you get to 555 (ugh) and then your dragon will unlock thunderbird (which is ok by itself, I guess). You need to have lightning rod for this to be good, which means you have to get glassed lightning while having factory ninja and ninja stealth ready to go (so you can click for automation), then get GL. Once you have it, buy a crate, then click the picture. If you don't get LR unlocked, load and do it again. Once you have both LR and TB your GL power will go up every time you unlock it. This is important for the next dragon (foundry) at 666 which increases your TD number of duplicates made by 1/10000 of your GL power (starts at 400). In order to have this you need to have max PC, which means you probably need the Crystal Flux Turbine which costs 40k blackprints. It's worth it though, as you can easily ride cuegan/lapetite all the way up to max PC on this and it will skyrocket your economy. Then get the foundry which you use to increase TD, which is how you continue to make your tool production go up after PC is maxed.

Preparing for First Molpy Down

It's worth noting that there is some contention about the usefulness of the prizes, but as it is part of the intended progression (and it is entirely possible that there will be more tiers later), I would suggest you consider doing your first reset now. You probably want to at least get Now Where Was I, or wait until you're on a NP which you have a discovery for so you can continue to progress towards vacuum cleaner.

By now you should be a small powerhouse of blackprints, glass, and tools. There isn't a lot else to do from here to infinite tools really, but you still want to be ready for your first reset. It's worth mentioning that if you can afford to run the vacuum cleaner, you can get to infinite GL (and most importantly to Lightning in a bottle, which will let you keep part of that temporary GL you just powered up) relatively easy by spamming qubes. This is especially appealing if you don't have a lot of time to idly tab over to activate it with a qube or logicat puzzle. It takes about a week with pretty constant reactivating of GL, and with the GL power boosts you can get away with MD before you get to infinite.

There's one more dragon to get at AC 888, but you have to have TWW tools before you can unlock it, as well as 100 saved puzzles (use crouching panther a few times). I'd say spend blackprints on increasing your AC to about 1k, 2k at a maximum. You want to be stockpiling tons of logicat levels with all the panther pokes you're getting, and start saving up flux crystals from rifts (I like to have 200 per MD, which doesn't take long with 9 rifts per NP). You can increase flux rate by saving/loading like you did to unlock time lord, waiting for rift to expire, then spamming the jump button. You won't get any ONGs, but you'll get more crystals than just taking rifts.

You also want goats. Lots of goats. At this point factory automation is pretty crappy, so ninja your npbs. You'll unlock ninja ritual, which lets you get a goat for a ninja, which increases for every 5 consecutive ninjas! Use rifts to get it to at least 5, then either wait for the np to end without activating stealth, or rift without clicking to ninja. This should unlock herder, which means even when you idle you get goats! This is the best way to get goats. You want goats, save up some goats.

At some point, you'll be like "I can get the next blackprint reward for 90k". You need 400(!) goats for this, so don't use them all up. This is bag of holding, which you MUST have before your first reset. It lets you keep up to 1W of your sand, castles, glass, blackprints, crystals, goats, qubes, and bonemeal after you MD, and lets you get prizes which is the only reason you want to reset in the first place. Get it, and tuck it away for now.

Once you get shadow dragon, start eating some logicat puzzles. It's better to do it when you're close to the next increment of 100 (196, 494 etc) as you have a higher chance of getting not 1 bonemeal. You need 30 to MD, but I'd say get a few hundred if you can before you do. You'll also want several M blackprings (I had 45, yes it's quite possible with vaults), and as mentioned at least 200 flux crystals. Goats you should be fine on. Your tools get to infinity because of a copious number of GL unlocks. You only have to do this grind once thanks to lightning in a bottle, so you might as well do it now. When you get here, eat your tools with achronal dragon and they'll become "mustard tools". Get your badge, and then for every mustard tool you have you'll get 1 mustard per click. Click up to about 55k (this will hold you over pretty well until you have other ways of getting it) and then use mustard sale and some savescumming to clear them out and get them to infinity again. It should go without saying that by now you have infinite glass block/chips. This is very, very important.

Take a deep breath, time to take the plunge. 

You should savescum your molpy until you get 2 of the following: short saw, doubletap, spare tools. Short saw is great if you really hate clicking (if you haven't already, turn on mousekeys), and coupled with doubletap makes getting glass saw up again a breeze. Spare tools will get you to 7470 buckets and 1515 npb for sand/castles to glass without a lot of ceiling hassle. You also want the tool you retain from No Need to be Neat to be any sand tool, not a castle tool.

First Molpy Down

The first part of the game is gonna be hilariously easy, and mostly predicated on how fast you get your cats back in gear. Immediately go to longpix somewhere (ideally the latest one, as you'll eventually need to get to NP999 to progress), and start buying stuff! Buy tools up to infinity, buy all the boosts, buy buy buy! Some important things to remember:

• Immediately get the glass stuff from chip/block storage, and immediately switch on your furnace/blower. It will take a while for them to come on. 

• Remember to unlock everything you can via chateau and rosetta.
• It might be worth savescumming your first caged logicat reward for panther rush so you can accelerate your logic rewards

• Once you have bought the millions of boosts, remember to click a bunch for bag puns to unlock saw, and then afterwards for swedish chef.

• Turn chromatic heresy on and off a crapload for beach ball to come back.

• If you have spare tools, you can use that to get your buckets/npb high enough for sand/castles to glass.

• Blackprint construction is your bottlneck here, so start it up as soon as you have 17 in automation (need doublepost to upgrade it). Remember: if you rift after npb go off you get extra building! If you have 9 in time lord you can do 340 runs per NP, and that will blast you through pretty fast.
• Qubes are your best friend! Once you have dord, spam qubes to unlock all your boosts super duper fast! The sooner you get them all unlocked and bought the sooner you'll be able to start blackprints, get doublepost for factory upgrades etc

Once you have infinite chips/mNP, go ahead and upgrade your extruder/purifier to a little over 500 each to get seaish if you intend to build up your blower/furnace again. You should probably at least put some into it so you don't start to bleed out chips/blocks. Start sawing those blocks out! You'll have to do a lot of clicking, but you do eventually need infinite blocks again. Kind of tedious, yes, but oh well. Follow the mid/late info again if you forget something, but it should go pretty damn fast once you get back to AA/AC. PC unlocks at 5k npb and will immediately blast you into GW tools, so it's usually worthwhile to lock everything but ceiling 1 until you have it.

From here, your goals are mostly advancing in NP for discoveries and getting back to bag of holding and your previous stuff amounts. Flux crystals are likely to keep you from MD immediately after you get the bag, as a reset with few crystals is gonna make you cry when you're still making the glass mould maker 3 days in. Be patient, and after about 4 molpies you'll have all the t1 prizes. The 4 I listed are the only ones really worth a damn, and don't use the single use ones at all (you shouldn't need them if you're carrying that infinite tool through your resets or getting back to infinite with lightning in a bottle). Once you unlock the Bag of Molding when you MD you know you're at t2 next reset! Exciting!

Note: Using the single use ones locks them and unlocks another reward of Tier 1. You can use them and get useful ones instead.

T2-T4 prizes

There isn't much to say here. Bag of Moulding makes your MD much shorter since you need many fewer blackprints to get to AA, and the t2 boosts are pretty decent. Soul Drain is one of the better ones, although it goes off very, very infrequently and you won't be just rolling in bonemeal or anything. Between the cracks is pretty convenient as well, and in combination with factory expansion will help to speed things up a bunch if you want to savescum your prizes. Rush Job is good, just not while you're going through prizes.

T3 is probably the most important bag. It lets you keep glass saw, AA, and a lot of the other kind of nice but not necessary boosts like no sell and beachball. Archimedes lever makes doing mould work trivially easy, and if you're opening vaults you'll more or less automatically get discoveries without trying. The real prize here is Eww, which will let you get bonemeal at a much faster rate than the shadow dragon. Mustard your tools so you only have 1 sand tool left and perhaps your npb (for ritual goats), then click away. It's pretty easy to rack up enough mustard to get many thousands of bonemeal, which you'll need since the bag bonemeal costs are getting pretty hefty now. If you get GoatONG make sure you wait for swedish chef and ashf and it won't cost any vacuums!

T4 is mostly a matter of having the right expensive materials. Heavy bonemeal cost, flux crystal cost for many of the boosts and the bag. MD when you can, there are only 5 prizes, and all of them are pretty good. Crystal memories can help you spam up some crystals if you need them. Lubrication makes switching your blower/furnace nearly instantaneous. Riser is way less clicking for seaish upgrades, and the crown jewel is mould press, which has possibly the worst description. With lever, it will take ALL of your AA runs and chain apply them to making monuments. You get a new discovery? Next mNP the glass monument for it is already done, with no input from you. Sitting on about 100 you were too lazy to do? Watch them blast through in quick succession. Very fancy.

Vacuums and late-late

At some point during all this, hopefully you got to around NP 560 and have been good about keeping your discoveries. When you get to 50 minus discoveries, you get vacuum cleaner. This has two purposes: 1) it makes vacuums, which are good and 2) you can use it to easily unlock LR. Turn it on while you have GL, open some cubes with no key autobuy, get LR. It's pretty expensive crystalwise to start, so either up your time lord levels. Once it's not too expensive, leave the cleaner running and save up 8000 vacuums so you can get This Sucks and start improving the cleaner, and when you are getting 2-3 per run, turn on void starer so you can boost your blackprint production. Now it's all a delicate dance of using your logicat levels/blackprints on more dragon forge/panther rush (which gets you more logicat levels and blackprints), deciding between saving vacuums for a better starer bonus or spending them to get more vacuums, and spamming the crap out of crystals. There are a number of relevant boosts you can look up for this and how to unlock them etc, but they're changing pretty fast as this is the bleeding edge. Get more stuff!