Best upgrade order and how to make money in Moon Sweepers

The sale prices per kilogram are $1 for dust, $3 for sand and $7 for moonstone, so one 2 kg block of stone sells for $14 (MoonSweepersDB profit calculator, version 1.0.4, confirmed by MoonSweepers.me). Making sand from dust earns $2 per kilogram, and making stone earns $6 per kilogram. The best use of a kilogram of dust is therefore to turn it into stone, which is what the chamber and press chain does.

Other income is smaller and one-off: $10 for completing a section, $100 for a flag and $250 for a historic site, over regions 25 m across (MoonSweepers.me economy page, build f87fd7e5).

The margin is revenue minus the dust that went in. The payback figures look short because they assume the dust is already arriving at that rate. Your real bottleneck is almost always the supply of dust, and its rate from robots and J.O.O.N.A.S. is unpublished. Read the table as a ceiling for the machines, not a promise for your base.

MoonSweepers.me publishes the payout formula as 1 + 6% x Market Contracts level + 10% x Lunar Exchange. The bonuses are additive, not compounded. With Market Contracts at level 3 and Lunar Exchange owned, the multiplier is 1.28. Market Contracts has 3 levels costing $120 / $400 / $1,100. Lunar Exchange costs $2,500.

For any upgrade with a numeric payout effect, the payback in minutes is its cost divided by the extra income per minute it creates. At the 100 kg/min line above, which earns $700 per minute, the first Market Contracts level ($120) adds about 42 per minute and pays back in about 2.9 minutes. Lunar Exchange ($2,500) adds about 70 per minute and pays back in about 35.7 minutes. Both figures scale with your income: at a tenth of that income, they take ten times longer. The calculator below does the sum with your own number and ranks every level.

• Rank economy upgrades by payback once you know your income per minute. Cheap levels with a large effect go first.
• Buy a production chain before economy upgrades: the multiplier scales income, and with no income it scales nothing.
• Supplier Network ($250 / $700) lowers tool and container prices by 5% and 10%, and Region Bounty ($200 / $600) adds 15 and 30 per region. Both depend on how much you buy or how many regions you clear.

Deep Heads, Long Reach, Lunar Leap, Rapid Transfer, Capsule Tether and Throw Assist have published costs but no numeric effect. Auto Packer has a cost and no effect text in our data. Width, speed and capacity upgrades do have percentages, but turning them into income needs your hand-cleaning rate, which differs per player. Rather than guess an order, the data page lists every upgrade with its levels so you can read the costs yourself, and Foundry will add effects when sources publish them.