Moon Sweepers beginner guide: co-op, robots, building, saves
Moon Sweepers beginner guide: the dust-to-depot loop, first upgrades, building tips, J.O.O.N.A.S. robots, co-op rules and save backups as of patch 1.0.5.
Checked against Patch 1.0.5 on 8 Nov 2026. We re-test every guide after major updates; if something changed, tell us.
Moon Sweepers is a co-op cleaning-and-factory game in which you start with a toothbrush and end up running a lunar operation, and this Moon Sweepers beginner guide covers the loop, the first upgrades, building, robots, multiplayer rules and save safety as of the 1.0.5 patch. It costs $8.99 on Steam, supports solo play or up to 16 players online, and is Windows-only.
What Moon Sweepers is and why it blew up
The setup is a joke played completely straight. The Lunar Surface Department has sent your crew to clean the Moon, and the budget only covered a toothbrush. You collect lunar dust, sell it, and spend the money on better tools, more carrying capacity and eventually cleaning vehicles, turning "an underfunded cleanup mission into a growing operation," as the Steam page puts it. Steam lists the genres as action, adventure, casual, indie, simulation and strategy, and the game has full controller support plus Steam Cloud saves.
It also arrived fast. One week after launch the two-person team at DragDrop Games said it had passed 600,000 players with a peak of 70,000 concurrent, and SteamDB later recorded a peak of 83,138 concurrent players on 1 November 2026, nine days after release. It also placed fourth on the global Steam top-sellers list for the week of 27 October to 3 November. That popularity matters for you in one practical way: the developers are patching quickly, so a guide has to be tied to a version. Everything below reflects the official patch notes through 1.0.5 on the Steam news hub.
Version check: every crewmate must be on the same version to play together, and saves created in 1.0.4 or later cannot be opened in older versions. Update before you invite anyone.
The core loop in plain steps
Whatever you unlock later, the game keeps returning to one cycle. Learn it first and the rest of the menus make sense.
- Brush the dustUse your starting tool on the dusty ground. The dust gauge by your suit fills as you collect, so you can see when you are about to be full.
- Pack and carryDust is packed into capsules. The 1.0.5 notes mention packing with Q, with the Auto-Packer and with machines, so manual packing is the entry point and automation replaces it later.
- Deliver to a depotPer the Steam page you deliver the dust to a depot and launch shipments to get paid. Place depots near the area you are working so the walk stays short.
- Spend on speed or capacityBuy better cleaning tools or more carrying capacity. The Steam page frames upgrades as exactly those two levers.
- Scale upAdd machines, conveyor belts, power and vehicles until your hands barely touch the dust.
What to prioritise in your first hour
The official sources describe the systems but do not publish an optimal order, so treat this section as our recommendation, built from how the systems are described rather than a proven speedrun route.
- Fix your slowest step. If cleaning is slow, buy a better tool. If you keep running back to a depot with a full gauge, buy capacity or move the depot closer. Upgrading the wrong end of the loop wastes money.
- Stay near your base early. The farther you wander, the longer each delivery trip takes. The depot sits at the centre of your income, so clean outward from it.
- Watch the sector readout. The map shows how complete each sector is and what it pays, including the Region Bounty. Finishing a sector is what pays out, so avoid leaving many sectors at 90 percent.
- Learn the stations. Teleporting between discovered stations (South, East and West stations are named in the notes) saves long drives. Version 1.0.4 added a teleport panel listing stations you have found.
- Buy the lamp and goggles when nights hurt. The 1.0.4 patch added Night Vision Goggles as a $350 suit upgrade; press N to cycle helmet lamp, goggles and off. Goggles make nights look like daytime without shadows.
Tools, suit gear and vehicles
Your income rises through three families of items: hand tools, suit gear and vehicles. Hand tools raise how fast you clean. Suit gear covers the helmet lamp, goggles and the jetpack boosts and gravity boots that the 1.0.4 HUD now shows as icons beside the dust gauge. Vehicles clean in bigger sweeps and are kept in garages.
Vehicles got helpful rules in the 1.0.3 patch. Your vehicles work at every garage, so any garage can call them back, store them and upgrade them, and you will not be offered a vehicle you already own. Demolishing a garage no longer deletes the vehicles inside; they move to another garage or wait for the next one you build. A garage whose silo is not sending dust out now tells you why, for example "Connect a conveyor belt to its outfeed", which is the most common beginner snag.
Building and automation
Once you can afford machines, the game becomes a small factory builder. Dust is turned into capsules by machines such as the Stone Press, moved by conveyor belts, split and merged with splitters and mergers, and powered by your base. The 1.0.5 patch made all of this much friendlier.
| Building change | What it does for you |
|---|---|
| Build Anywhere | Every piece can go on dusty ground; the dust is pressed flat, so you no longer clean the spot first. |
| Build on, under, beside | Aim at a foundation's top, underside or side; pieces can extend past an edge into the air. |
| Move Mode | Press R with the building tool to lift a piece plus everything on it, then place it again for free. |
| Full refund | Removing a piece returns its whole price instead of 75 percent. |
| Snap to foundations | Machines line up square, flush or centred, otherwise on a 0.5 m grid; the mouse wheel rotates in 90 degree steps (30 on hexagonal foundations); F places freely. |
| Copy style | Middle-click a piece to copy its rotation and style as well as the piece. |
The full refund is the headline for beginners. Because removal now gives back 100 percent, you can experiment with layouts without being punished. Build a rough line of machines, watch where it jams, and rebuild. Earlier builds also fixed several jam sources: mergers now alternate between inputs, splitters and mergers snap port to port, and the "Could not pack a capsule" pause that stopped machines with power and materials available was fixed in 1.0.4.
Capsule limits: capsules lying on the ground used to cap at 10,000. The 1.0.5 patch lifts that, and a world can now hold up to 90,000 capsules in total. Still, a belt into a depot is cheaper for your frame rate than a pile of capsules.
J.O.O.N.A.S., the cleaning robot
J.O.O.N.A.S. is the robot that cleans for you, and the developers have reworked it twice in a week. Under 1.0.4 it no longer makes dock trips: it cleans a sector and launches capsules to the nearest catcher from anywhere while moving on. It cleans one hex at a time from the outside in, which the notes call twice as fast, finds its way around buildings, skips hexes it cannot reach, and keeps working even when no players are nearby. Its bin gauge flashes red when full, and looking at it opens an information panel.
The 1.0.5 patch changed where those capsules land. J.O.O.N.A.S. now fires each capsule at the emptiest capsule catcher in the nearest group, meaning catchers within 100 m of each other, and moves to the next group once every catcher in a group is over 80 percent full. Capsule catchers hold 100 kg each since 1.0.4, and their glass shows the dust inside. The practical advice: cluster several catchers together near the robot's work area rather than scattering single ones, and make sure the dust they collect has a belt or collection route.
Co-op and multiplayer rules
Moon Sweepers supports online co-op for up to 16 players, and everyone needs their own copy of the game on the same version. You can spread out to cover ground or work the same area; the developers admit that whether everyone actually works is another matter. These are the rules that matter once you play with others, all from official patch notes.
- Shared upgrades. Since 1.0.3 the whole crew uses the host's upgrade matrix, and anyone's purchase upgrades everyone. In older saves the highest level anyone had bought was kept.
- Host controls. Open the ESC menu and choose Your Crew to see everyone. The host can kick or ban a player; a banned player cannot join that save again unless unbanned there.
- Public game warning. Starting a public game, or switching your crew to public, now asks you first and explains what other players can do to your Moon and how to remove them. Keep builds you care about in private lobbies.
- Synchronised ground. Version 1.0.4 reworked ground sync so everyone sees the same cleaned ground, including robot trails, which ended the problem of dust reappearing.
- Shared belt building. Any crewmate can place splitters and mergers on belts built by other players.
There is also a chat voice slider under Settings, Audio for the text-to-speech chat, and a vehicle camera option under Settings, Controls that stops the camera re-centring behind the vehicle.
Saves, backups and performance fixes
Early reviews complained about crashes and unloadable worlds, and the developers apologised publicly. Large bases that failed to load now load, and a damaged save is repaired automatically from its backup or a recent snapshot, with a message if anything had to be fixed. Version 1.0.4 added up to five full backups per save slot, taken a minute into every session and then every 30 minutes, stored outside Steam Cloud under C:\Users\[user-name]\AppData\LocalLow\DragDropGames\MoonSweepers\Backups. Saving big bases now takes a fraction of a second instead of up to half a minute.
On performance, the 1.0.3 notes cite up to about 20 percent higher frame rates in the developers' tests, and 1.0.5 fixed a freeze that hit some worlds about half a minute after loading on both DirectX 11 and 12. AMD users should note that DirectX 11 is now the default to avoid GPU crashes; to use DirectX 12 add -force-d3d12 to the Steam launch options. Steam lists the minimum spec as Windows 10, an Intel Core i5-8400 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600, 8 GB RAM, a GTX 1650 or RX 570, DirectX 11 and 2 GB of storage.
What is coming next
The studio has said update 1.1 is planned for December 2026 and will be its biggest yet, with new production machines and chains, new materials and products, more tools and upgrades, better automation and buildings, expanded progression and more optimisation. It also teased that cleaning the whole Moon is not the end of the job. The developers stress that everything is in development and may change, so do not plan around any single item. For new releases and patch coverage, keep an eye on our guides hub and the Moon Sweepers hub.
FAQ
Is Moon Sweepers free?
No. It costs $8.99 on Steam at the time of writing. It is Windows-only, with Steam Deck and Linux startup fixes noted in the 1.0.4 patch.
Can I play Moon Sweepers solo?
Yes. Steam lists single-player alongside online co-op, so you can sweep alone or host a crew of up to 16.
Does Moon Sweepers have crossplay?
The Steam page lists the game for Windows only, so every player needs the Steam PC version on the same patch.
How do I stop griefers in a public game?
Open the ESC menu, choose Your Crew and, as host, kick or ban the player. Better still, keep the lobby private.
Where are my save backups?
In your AppData LocalLow folder under DragDropGames, MoonSweepers, Backups. Each slot keeps up to five backups.
Has finished every FromSoftware game at level 1. Writes the boss guides and checks them on every patch.