Depots and shipments: placement beats every upgrade

The payout side is where the money actually is

Most guide material about Moon Sweepers focuses on sweeping, because sweeping is what you look at. The economy does not run there. It runs at the depot, where a load stops being cargo and becomes a shipment, and where a percentage multiplier can be worth more than several brush upgrades combined.

The store copy describes it plainly: fill your storage with lunar dust, deliver it to a depot, and launch shipments to get paid. Depots are placed by the player, and the game recommends putting them near your work.

What a shipment is

A shipment is a whole load, launched as one unit. Because it is priced as a unit rather than per kilogram carried, percentage bonuses on the launch apply to the entire payout rather than to a marginal increment.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A six-percent bonus on a small shipment is pocket change. The same six percent on a maximum load, multiplied across every shipment of a session, is a permanent raise — and it compounds with the width and capacity upgrades that make each load bigger.

Width makes a load arrive faster. Capacity makes it bigger. The launch bonus multiplies both.

Placement beats every early purchase

Nothing in the early game returns as much per unit of effort as putting the depot where the dust is. The maths is unforgiving: a two-minute walk per trip, repeated across an hour of sweeping, consumes a substantial fraction of the session in transit with zero dust collected.

Because depots are movable, this is not a permanent mistake — but it is a mistake you keep paying for until you fix it. Fix it before you buy the second brush upgrade.

The economy upgrade lines

Two upgrade categories sit on the economy side rather than the tool side. The first is the launch payout percentage: a straight multiplier on every shipment you send. In the recorded session this was read as six percent per step, which is worth taking as soon as your shipments are regular enough to benefit.

The second is raw material value, a separate line that raises the unit price of the dust itself before any launch bonus applies. Because it acts on the base value rather than the launch, it multiplies with the payout percentage instead of duplicating it.

Buying both is the point. A player who takes only the launch bonus gets a smaller multiple than one who raises the base and then the multiplier on top.

Reading the numbers you are shown

Shipment discipline

1. Never launch a partial load once capacity upgrades are in play — you are paying the same trip cost for less cargo.
2. Batch before you launch. Stage capsules along the strip, then run one trip.
3. Re-place the depot whenever your working face moves more than a short walk away.
4. Buy the multiplier early, when shipments are frequent, so every later shipment is worth more.

Depot economics in one paragraph

A depot converts cargo into money. The distance between your working face and the depot is therefore a tax on every unit of dust you collect, paid in seconds of walking rather than in currency. Moving the depot reduces the tax; nothing else in the early game reduces it at all.

That is why placement should be revisited whenever the working face moves significantly, and why a player who never moves their depot ends up paying a tax that grows all session while their tools get better and better at producing cargo they cannot bank efficiently.

Shipments versus continuous selling

Shipments are priced as units, which rewards batching and punishes impatience. Every time you launch a partly-filled shipment you pay a full launch's worth of overhead in attention and depot interaction for a fraction of the cargo.

That is not a hard rule — if you are at the end of a session and holding a partial load, launching it is better than losing it. But across normal play, batching to a full load is strictly better than launching whenever a load happens to exist.

Reading a payout line

The payout lines in this game are multiplicative, which means order of purchase does not matter for the final total but does matter for how quickly the total grows. Buying the percentage multiplier early means every subsequent shipment — including all the small ones in the early hours — carries it.

Buying it late means the early shipments went out at the base rate. Since the base rate is small, that loss is small. Since it recurs for the rest of the contract, it is worth taking earlier than feels necessary.

A depot checklist

1. Is my trip under a minute? If not, move the depot before buying anything else.
2. Does the depot sit at the end of a lane? A depot at the end of a strip turns the walk home into the natural end of the lane.
3. Am I launching full loads? Partial launches are the quiet drain on early income.
4. Have I bought the multiplier? It applies to every shipment for the rest of the contract.

Next: cleaning vehicles, or the worked first shift.