Planned Release Date: To be announced

About This Game

Late afternoon. The drill is deep in a rich deposit and making a lot of noise. Whatever lives under the sand will have felt it by nightfall. This deposit is why you drove out here. You can pull the drill in and be gone before dark, or keep drilling, set the guns to automatic and get ready for a hard night.



Sand Cruiser is a colony sim where the colony drives and fights. Your settlement is a land cruiser crossing a dead desert under a sun that swelled into a red giant long ago.




A new game starts on a finished cruiser. In the shipyard you rebuild it deck by deck, along with the modules that keep people alive: power, water tanks and water traps, a galley, quarters, weapons and sensors. Get your survivors under a roof, because heatstroke can kill by day, and at night the freezing cold comes for you.




Every crew member has skills, traits and a mood. They all need food and sleep, and they take turns at their posts. You set priorities for each person individually. Under fire, some lose their nerve and run, or freeze on the spot. You hire new survivors in settlements you first have to find. But take care, because every new crew member is one more mouth to feed. And the dead have never woken up again.




People fled underground from the sun and woke the swarm down there. The nights belong to it. It lives under the sand and is blind, so your lights mean nothing to it. It feels the vibration of engines, drills and gunfire, and in the cold nights it senses every bit of heat you give off. The richest ground lies above its nests. Some creatures attack from range with acid that eats into a module for a while, until it is spent or a crew member repairs the module.




Some cruisers are hostile, while nomads mostly stay out of fights. Contacts show up on radar. Through the periscope you measure the range to your targets and walk your artillery in until the salvos hit. Batteries fire on their own or wait for your order. Flak and point defense keep swarm creatures away from the hull. But every shot also shakes the ground, and the swarm feels that. The tactical pause lets you get the full picture.




The map only fills in where you have already been. Seismic surveys find deep deposits, and every deposit runs dry eventually. Drones lift off from their landing pads to strip wrecks. At night you rely on your instruments to navigate, because searchlights light your way but also give you away to every other ship nearby. With a flare you can light up the terrain for a while. If a sandstorm catches you, you can barely see, and not even your searchlights get through.



Sand Cruiser is in Early Access and is being made by 3 Duckz, a small independent studio. The foundation is in place, and it stays: the ship, its crew, the sun and the swarm.

At the moment we are working on combat and weapon balance and on how the crew takes up its battle stations. The sound of combat and the performance of the game still need a fair amount of work. We are replacing placeholder art bit by bit.

There is no fixed roadmap. What players suggest to us on our Discord decides what we work on next.