Sandustry Planter Box Setup Guide

Direct answer

Feed Wet Seed into a Planter Box to grow a Flower, then harvest the head for 4 Amethelis and 1 Gold with clear collection space below.

The whole Sandustry Planter Box setup comes down to three things: one input, one contact rule, and clear space underneath. Get a Wet Seed to physically touch the box and it grows a Flower; destroy that Flower and you get 4 Amethelis and 1 Gold per head. Everything else in this guide is about feeding that loop reliably.

Residue → Burnt Residue → Kinetic Press → Seed → + Water → Wet Seed → Planter Box → Flower → 4 Amethelis + 1 Gold

What the Planter Box does

The official machine page describes the Planter Box as a building "used to turn Wet Seeds into Flowers." When a Wet Seed comes into contact with the box, it develops into a plant: a stem of Vine with a head made of 4 Amethelis and 1 Gold.

Its permeability is what makes the layout work. The Planter Box blocks the player, but it does not block liquids or gases, and the official page states that Gold and Amethelis are the only solid pixels that can pass through it. In other words, the box is a one-way floor that lets exactly your harvest fall through while holding back Sand, Seeds, and everything else.

That single rule is why a good Planter Box setup is built vertically: input arrives from above, the plant grows on top, and the harvest drops straight down through the machine into a collection area.

How to unlock the Planter Box

The official Research page lists Planterbox in Tier 3 for 2,000 Gold, described as unlocking "the Planter Box to grow various crops." Research runs across six tiers, from 20 Gold at Tier 1 up to 7,500 Gold at Tier 6, so Tier 3 is a mid-game commitment rather than a starter purchase.

The Research page is marked as work in progress on the wiki. Treat the in-game Research tab as the final authority if a patch shifts the tier or the price. These values were rechecked on September 3, 2026.

If you are planning further ahead, note that Tier 5 Void Rift (3,000 Gold) produces void seeds on a separate processing chain. Those are not the Seeds a Planter Box wants.

Inputs and outputs

| | Material | Key properties | | --- | --- | --- | | Input | Wet Seed | Density 100, Slushy, launchable, not burnable, not wettable | | Made from | 1 Seed + 1 Water | Water is absorbed, not duplicated | | Seed source | Burnt Residue in a Kinetic Press | 1 Burnt Residue always outputs 1 Gold and 1 Seed | | Grown output | Flower | A stem of Vine plus a head of 4 Amethelis and 1 Gold | | Harvest drops | 4 Amethelis, 1 Gold | The only solids that pass through the box | | Byproduct | Vine | 1 HP, burns faster than Moss, yields nothing |

Two density numbers matter more than the rest. Seed has a density of 150; Wet Seed and Water are both 100. Because Wet Seed matches Water exactly, wet seeds remain suspended in a tank instead of sinking, while heavier dry Seeds sink past them. That separation is free sorting if you design around it, and a permanent clog if you do not. The Wet Seed guide covers that behaviour in detail.

On the output side, Amethelis has a density of 40 and a "Wisp" matter type that makes it drift side to side while falling. Do not build a one-pixel-wide collection chute under a Planter Box and expect every petal to land in it. Amethelis can later be processed into Dry Amethelis with a Dryer.

Step-by-step Planter Box setup

Research the Planter Box in the Research tab (Tier 3, listed at 2,000 Gold).
Produce Seed. Burn Residue into Burnt Residue, then drop it from at least 25 blocks into a Kinetic Press. Each Burnt Residue outputs 1 Gold and 1 Seed.
Wet the Seed. Bring it into contact with Water: 1 Seed + 1 Water becomes 1 Wet Seed, with the Water pixel absorbed.
Place the box with clearance. Keep the approach above it free of unrelated solids and leave the space below completely empty.
Deliver the Wet Seed so it physically touches the box. Wet Seed is launchable, so an angled feed works as well as a drop.
Grow and harvest. Once the Vine and Flower head have formed, destroy the head. The Flower is burnable, and the wiki lists flamethrowers, guns, rocket launchers, drills, lasers, void guns, shovels, and diggers among the things that destroy the plant.
Collect the drops. The 4 Amethelis and 1 Gold fall through the box into your collection area.

Build and test exactly one box this way before copying the pattern into a row. Almost every Planter Box problem is visible at stage 3 or stage 5.

Automating seeds and water

Both halves of the input chain automate reasonably well, because Seed and Wet Seed are both launchable and Water flows on its own.

A practical pattern is a small wetting chamber rather than a large tank: feed dry Seed in from above, let it meet Water, and take Wet Seed off the top of the water column instead of the bottom. Seeds sink at density 150 while Wet Seeds hold at 100, so a bottom outlet collects unreacted Seed and a surface outlet collects the finished product. Keep the chamber small while you tune it — a big tank hides which stage is failing.

For moving material between the press, the wetting chamber, and a row of boxes, see Hauler management. Note that the official Hauler page is largely unpopulated, so route capacity and filter behaviour are things to measure in your own save rather than numbers to copy.

The harvest side is the part nobody has fully documented. The box passes Gold and Amethelis, so gravity does the collection for you, but the official pages do not describe a hands-off way to trigger the destruction of each Flower head on a timer. Fire is the most-cited approach in the community, and Vine "burns considerably faster than Moss," which is worth knowing before you run a flame source next to a densely packed row.

Throughput and how many planters you need

There is no verified growth timer, so you cannot compute flowers per minute from the wiki alone. What you can compute is yield per pixel, because every ratio in the chain is fixed:

1 Burnt Residue → 1 Gold + 1 Seed
1 Seed + 1 Water → 1 Wet Seed
1 Wet Seed → 1 Flower → 4 Amethelis + 1 Gold

So one successfully burned Residue pixel eventually returns 2 Gold and 4 Amethelis, one from the press and one from the flower head. The bottleneck sits further upstream: burning Residue has a listed 25% success rate, with the rest burning away entirely. Averaged out, that means roughly four Residue pixels feed one Planter Box cycle, which is why a flower farm usually stalls on burner throughput long before it stalls on planter count.

Size your burner and press stages first, then add Planter Boxes until wet seeds start queuing at the input. Because maturation time is unverified, that observation — seeds waiting at the box — is the only reliable signal that you need another box.

Common mistakes

Feeding dry Seed. The box does nothing with a Seed that has not touched Water.
Missing the box. The Wet Seed must physically contact the machine, not land beside it.
A blocked underside. If anything solid sits below the box, your Amethelis and Gold have nowhere to go.
A narrow collection chute. Amethelis drifts sideways as it falls; give it a wide catch area.
A giant wetting tank. Wet Seed shares Water's density and stays suspended, so oversized tanks clog rather than sort.
Expecting Vine to be worth something. Vine yields nothing when destroyed; only the head pays out.
Skipping the drop height at the press. Burnt Residue needs at least a 25-block fall to pass through the Kinetic Press, so no press output means no Seeds at all.

What changed in recent updates

Neither Early Access patch so far touched the Planter Box. Update #1 (0.5.4) delivered in-place filter editing, a Tier 5 softlock fix, demolition of red blocks at 256 tiles or fewer, a puzzle reset, and rebindable zoom. Update #2 (0.5.5) was a stability pass: expanded crash logging, tutorial videos replaced with animated images to stop GPU crashes, an Alt+Enter fullscreen toggle, a macOS right-click fix, and better Aura Extractor tutorial hints.

The practical takeaway is that the recipes and densities on this page have been stable since launch. The in-place filter editing from Update #1 is the change most likely to affect a planter build indirectly, since lava-in-filter burners are one documented way to make Burnt Residue.

Sources

Recipes, densities, permeability, research tier, and harvest yields were rechecked on September 3, 2026. Flower maturation time, per-box output rate, and a fully automatic harvesting cycle remain undocumented in official sources.

FAQ

How do you set up a planter box in Sandustry?

Research the Planter Box, place it with clear space above and below, then deliver a Wet Seed so it physically touches the box. The Wet Seed grows a Vine stem topped by a Flower head, which you destroy to drop 4 Amethelis and 1 Gold into the space below.

What do planters need in Sandustry?

Only one input: Wet Seed. A Wet Seed is made by bringing a Seed into contact with Water at a rate of 1 Seed plus 1 Water. Seeds themselves come from running Burnt Residue through a Kinetic Press.

Why isn't my planter box growing anything?

The usual cause is a dry Seed rather than a Wet Seed, or a Wet Seed that falls past the box instead of touching it. Wet Seed shares Water's density of 100, so it stays suspended in a tank instead of sinking to an outlet.

How do you unlock the Planter Box in Sandustry?

The official Research page lists the Planter Box in Tier 3 for 2,000 Gold, described as unlocking the Planter Box to grow various crops. That page is marked work in progress, so treat the in-game Research tab as the final authority.

What does a Sandustry Planter Box produce?

Each Flower is a stem of Vine with a head of 4 Amethelis and 1 Gold. The Vine itself yields nothing when destroyed. Amethelis can then be dried into Dry Amethelis with a Dryer.

Can you automate a Planter Box setup?

You can automate the input, because Seed and Wet Seed are both launchable, and the output drop, because Gold and Amethelis are the only solid pixels that pass through the box. The official pages do not document a complete hands-off harvesting cycle, so the harvest step still needs testing in your own build.

Sandustry Planter Box Setup: Wet Seed, Flowers, and Automation