// Sector /tools · guide
Cleaning tools: width beats storage every time
The tool terminal offers two upgrade lines that look equally useful. One raises your cleaning rate, the other only delays the walk.
Two lines that look alike and are not
The upgrade terminal offers a widening brush head and a larger dust container side by side, at similar prices, described in similar language. They do completely different jobs.
The head changes your cleaning rate. The container changes your shift length. Buying the container first is the most common early mistake, because it feels like progress: the number goes up, the canister empties more slowly, and the actual bottleneck — surface area stripped per minute — has not moved.
What the widening step actually buys
In the recorded session behind this manual, the widening upgrade was read as roughly eight percent more cleaning width per step, and the player running it immediately called it the priority. That judgement holds up arithmetically. Width compounds with itself across every strip you will ever sweep, while a container only ever saves you trips you were going to take anyway.
Eight percent sounds small. Applied across a five-hour session it is the difference between finishing a lane in one pass and finishing it in one pass plus a return trip, repeated over hundreds of lanes.
When the container is the right purchase
Capacity becomes correct the moment a full container no longer lasts a full strip. If you fill up halfway down a lane, you walk back with a half-finished job — the worst of both outcomes, because the walk costs time and the strip still is not done.
A player who has just widened the brush hits that wall sooner rather than later: a wider head collects faster, so the container fills faster. Capacity upgrades are a consequence of buying width, never a substitute for it.
Widen first. Then buy exactly enough container to finish the lane you just made shorter.
The tool belt is a comfort tier, not a rate tier
In the same session the tool belt exists to swap between tools without walking back to storage, priced in small steps of about five units across three levels. It does not make you clean faster. It removes a specific irritation: switching between brush and percussion hammer every time the surface changes character.
That makes it correct for a player working mixed terrain and a waste for a player grinding one clean seam. Buy it when you catch yourself making the same walk twice for the same reason.
The hammer answers a different question
The percussion hammer breaks compacted crust that the brush skates over. It is not a faster brush; it is the answer to a terrain type. If your strip has patches where the brush produces no visible cleaning, the hammer is not an upgrade, it is the only tool that works there.
Because it is a second tool, it also creates the strongest argument for the belt: without one, mixed terrain forces a storage round trip in the middle of every pass.
Observed price anchors
| Upgrade | Observed cost | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| Brush widening | $5 first step | Cleaning width, about +8% |
| Dust container | $60 | Container size, roughly doubles |
| Tool belt | $5 per level, 3 levels | Tool swapping, no rate change |
| Percussion hammer | not observed | Access to compacted crust |
Purchase order for a fresh contract
- One widening step. The cheapest change to your actual rate.
- Depot placement. Free to move early, and it multiplies everything above.
- More width until a lane no longer fits in one container.
- One container step to restore the lane-length match.
- Tool belt only once you own two tools and actually swap them.
What the terminal does not tell you
The upgrade screen shows a price and a name. It does not show a rate. That omission is the reason so many early purchases go wrong: a player looking at two adjacent buttons with similar numbers has no on-screen reason to prefer one, so the choice defaults to whichever sounds bigger.
Building your own comparison is therefore part of playing well. The three figures worth tracking are how long a fill takes, how long a depot trip takes, and how much one shipment pays. Everything else is derived. If a purchase does not move one of those three numbers, it did not improve your income, no matter how satisfying the click was.
This is also why the observed percentages in the table above matter more than their size suggests. Eight percent width is a small number attached to the single input that everything else multiplies against, and that position in the chain is what makes it valuable.
Three ways to spend the same money
The same early budget can go three ways, and they do not produce the same hour of play. The comparison below is arithmetic on the observed figures, not a measured experiment, and it is labelled that way.
| Opening | What your first hour feels like | Where it stalls |
|---|---|---|
| Width first | Every lane ends sooner; the canister fills mid-lane | You walk back with a half-finished strip |
| Container first | Fewer interruptions, but each lane takes just as long | You never notice the improvement, because the brush is the limit |
| Depot move first | Same brush, but every trip is short | Nothing stalls; it is strictly better and costs only the walk |
The third row is the one players skip, because moving a depot does not look like an upgrade. It is not an upgrade. It is a change to the multiplier sitting underneath every other upgrade you will buy.
A habit that beats any single purchase
Upgrade discipline in this game is mostly about not buying. The run behind this manual declines the container twice before taking it, declines further capacity after that, and stops brush upgrades entirely once a vehicle is in reach.
Each of those refusals is the same judgement applied at a different scale: does this purchase change the number of square metres I clean per hour, or does it only rearrange when I stop? Only the first kind is worth money.
Next: carrying capacity in detail, or depots and shipments.