Every description of Sandustry is a compound of other games, and unusually, the comparisons on its own store page are accurate. Here is what each one actually captures, so you can tell whether the game — or one of its relatives — is what you want.
The three comparisons critics actually make
Factorio — the automation half. The critic quote featured on Sandustry's store page calls it "the automation of Factorio with the 2D pixel world of Terraria." What carries over from Factorio: conveyor logic, throughput thinking, the compulsion to replace every manual task with a machine. What doesn't: Factorio's world is an abstract top-down grid; Sandustry's materials are physically simulated grains that pile, flow and react. A Factorio bus design does not survive contact with gravity.
Terraria — the world half. Rock Paper Shotgun's headline called Sandustry a "deep and volatile Terraria-style factory sim," and GameRant went with "Terraria meets Factorio." The shared DNA is the sideways-on destructible world and the pull of digging deeper. The difference: Terraria fills its depth with combat and loot; Sandustry fills it with logistics — what you carry up defines the game far more than what you fight.
Noita — the physics half. The store page's critic quotes also reach for "Noita's labyrinths." Noita is the other famous every-pixel-simulated world, and both games share the emergent chaos that follows: fluids find gaps, fires spread, one wrong dig floods a cavern. Noita spends that simulation on a punishing roguelike; Sandustry spends it on industry — the chaos is your feedstock rather than your death.
If those three games form a triangle, Sandustry sits in the middle: build like Factorio, dig like Terraria, and respect the pixels like Noita.
Not the same game: Mindustry
One comparison exists purely because of the name. Mindustry is an older, separate factory-plus-tower-defense game by a different developer (Anuke). People searching for one routinely land on the other — some even search "sandustry -mindustry" to filter the noise. Quick disambiguation: Mindustry is wave-defense first, runs on mobile, and has no falling-sand physics; Sandustry is PC-only, single-player, physics-first, and has no tower-defense mode. Both are good; they are not alike.
Where Sandustry stands apart
The one mechanic none of its comparisons share: the world itself is the factory's input. In Factorio, ore patches are markers; in Sandustry, the sand you process is the same sand that physically sits in the world, grain by grain — mining it changes the terrain, spilling it makes a real pile, and a burst pipe is a flood, not an icon. That is the itch none of the relatives scratch, and the reason the demo pulled 100,000+ players before the game had a price tag.