My Time at Sandrock Beginner’s Guide: 6 Essential Tips for New Players

by Mike Alexander / Articles, Lists, Slider Posts / 28 Jan 2023

300 years after the Day of Calamity, humankind has continued to grow and thrive. They build farms, find a way to live in harsh locations, and make friends the same way they did before the calamity. This is My Time at Sandrock, the sequel to My Time at Portia. Like its predecessor, My Time at Sandrock is a farming/life simulator set in a post-apocalypse where things have become wholesome again. You’ll go about your days collecting resources, talking to people, and crafting awesome equipment and supplies to improve your life in a new home.

If you never played My Time at Portia, there are a few things you should know as you make your way through life in the new location of Sandrock. Thankfully, there are some helpful words of wisdom in this list of My Time at Sandrock: Top 6 Pro Tips & Tricks. If you’re ready to conquer the arid desert town of Sandrock, then pick up your pickaxe, and let’s get started!

Use All of Your Stamina

Like in most games of this genre, you will have a limited pool of stamina points you can use every day. Each strenuous action you make per day will use a single point of this pool. Don’t be shy in whittling down this pool to zero, as there is no penalty for doing so. In fact, it is important that you use every single one of those points in order to get the most out of each day. Make sure you go around and collect every resource and interact with everything you can so that you don’t miss anything or possibly waste your day.

Get the Dew Collector Early

As you complete objectives in My Time at Sandrock, you will collect data disks that can be exchanged for researched equipment. It will be highly beneficial to you to save up 8 of those data disks to research the Dew Collector as early as possible. It will collect water for you, which is an incredibly rare resource in My Time at Sandrock, as it is set in a desert. Having a steady supply of water early on will save you a lot of grief, and it is a fairly cheap construct to research, so make sure you unlock it as soon as you can.

Construct an Extra Recycling Machine

In order to form the resources you collect into usable materials, you will need to drop the scraps into a Recycling Machine. Each time you set the machine to get to work, it will take a considerable amount of time to process whatever you put into it. You can’t really avoid this early on, but you can construct another Recycling Machine to double up your processing power. Building two Recycling Machines will help you get a leg up on workable materials pretty quickly, so put aside the resources you need to construct those as you collect them.

Use Alternate Fuel Sources

Speaking of Recycling Machines, you’ll need a fuel source in order for them to run. The primary fuel source, as it has been throughout time, is wood. However, wood is a valuable resource for crafting and constructing, so you may not want to be using all of your wood in that process. You can use alternative fuel sources like dregs, which are plentiful when you are processing things. Dregs aren’t as efficient as wood in terms of fuel, but their sheer quantity makes them a no-brainer when you’re trying to save up your good materials.

Build Relationships to Earn Perks

As you talk to the people of Sandrock, you will build relationships with them. As those relationships grow, you will unlock various perks depending on the character you are talking to. You can check to see which perks each character will unlock for you in the relationships tab of your guide menu. This will give you the roster of all of the citizens in the town, and each perk they unlock for you at every level of the relationship. Use the relationship menu to optimize your time spent building relationships so that you aren’t wasting time talking to a person that unlocks perks you don’t care for.

Don’t Ignore Sleep

If you don’t sleep in My Time at Sandrock, your character will begin to develop dark rings around their eyes. The more sleep you miss, the darker these circles will get, until she looks a bit like a raccoon! If you want to avoid these dark rings, make sure you get to bed by midnight or earlier so that you get plenty of sleep. A well-rested farmer is an efficient farmer!

Mike Alexander

Mike has been playing video games since he was able to hold a controller, having been fascinated by Sonic 2 on his mom’s Sega Genesis. That fascination and passion for the art form has grown exponentially nearly 30 years later, and he doesn’t see that fading away anytime soon.
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