My Time at Sandrock

You arrive in Sandrock, a desert town scraping by on recycled scrap and dwindling water, as its new Builder. The previous one left. The town needs a bridge, a water system, a defence against the things in the desert, and someone to fix the machine that keeps breaking.

This is the part people get wrong: it looks like a farming game and it is not one. Farming exists and is optional. The actual loop is commissions. Townspeople post jobs, you gather and process materials, you assemble the thing at your workshop, you get paid and the town visibly improves. It is closer to a crafting RPG with a village attached.

• Your workshop is the centre of the game: furnaces, worktables, recyclers, and eventually a whole yard of machines.
• Resources come from salvaging ruins, mining, and scavenging, more than from growing things.
• There is real combat, real dungeons and a real main story with stakes.
• The town changes as you build. Sandrock at the end does not look like Sandrock at the start.

1. 1

   Take every commission you can finish

   The board is your income and your reputation. Early commissions are small and teach you the machine chain.

2. 2

   Build a second furnace, then a third

   Processing is the bottleneck of the whole game. Machines run while you sleep, so more machines is more time.

3. 3

   Salvage everything

   The recycler turns junk into parts you cannot buy. Ruins and scrap piles are your hardware shop.

4. 4

   Meet the town

   Everyone is a quest source, a shop, or both. Talk to all of them in the first few days.

5. 5

   Manage stamina and water

   It is a desert. Heat, stamina and hydration all cost you, and food is the answer to all three.

6. 6

   Upgrade your tools before your house

   A better pickaxe and axe pay for themselves in a day. Decorating can wait.

Sandrock has a large cast with schedules, opinions and long personal storylines, and the writing is a genuine step above what the genre usually manages. Romance is available across the cast and the relationships are written as relationships rather than as unlockables.

• Friendship rises from talking, gifts, and doing commissions for people.
• Many characters change their mind about you, and about the town, as the story goes on.
• Festivals and mini games break up the calendar and pay well.
• The town itself is a character: its water crisis, its economy and its politics drive the main plot.

Sandrock sits in the aftermath of the Day of Calamity, an apocalypse that ended the Old World and left its technology buried in the sand. Civilisation has rebuilt into something agrarian and careful, and Builders are the people who know how to make the old machines work again.

• The ruins you salvage are Old World infrastructure. Every plastic part you recycle came from a dead civilisation.
• The Church of the Light and the Research Centre disagree, fundamentally, about whether reviving that technology is wise.
• Duvos, the militaristic neighbour, is a running political threat rather than a monster of the week.
• The desert is not empty. What lives out there is a consequence of the Calamity, not natural wildlife.

Co-op is a separate mode from the story campaign rather than a way to play the campaign together. You share a workshop and build with friends, with its own progression.

• Play the single player story first if you care about the plot, because that is where it lives.
• Co-op is the better place to just build and mess about.
• Progress does not transfer between the two, so treat them as two games in one box.

• Never leave a machine empty overnight.
• Accept commissions in batches that share materials.
• Keep scrap. All of it. The recycler is hungry and the parts are not purchasable early.
• Water your crops only if you actually want crops. Nothing forces you to farm.
• Do the museum-style donations and the town projects, they unlock permanent conveniences.
• Read gift preferences before spending money on presents. The wrong gift is worse than none.

• The official site and the developer's update posts for DLC and patch content.
• The community wiki for commission chains, machine recipes and gift tables.
• Ask in our Discord if you are deciding between this and Stardew. They are not the same game and the right answer depends on whether you like machines.