This Moon Sweepers beginner guide covers your first dust shipments, the upgrades that matter and how to grow beyond the starting toothbrush. DragDrop Games launched the game on Steam on 23 October 2026, sending players to clean the lunar surface with a laughably small budget.
You don’t get paid simply for brushing a patch clean. Dust needs collecting, transporting to a depot and shipping away. That income funds better tools, greater carrying capacity, new depot locations and eventually cleaning vehicles. Getting the delivery cycle right makes the rest much easier.
Moon Sweepers beginner guide: the first dust shipment
Start by cleaning a nearby patch using the toothbrush, then collect the dust in your available storage. Return to a depot and launch a shipment to earn money. Repeat until you’ve made enough to invest in an upgrade. Staying relatively close to a depot at the start saves you from spending more time travelling than cleaning.
The basic Moon Sweepers beginner guide loop is clean, collect, deliver, ship and upgrade. Try finishing a small area and cashing in the dust before expanding into more distant terrain. The first shipment pays for your next tool, so finish that job before wandering off into another area.
How to earn money from dust
DragDrop Games confirms that launching dust shipments pays for new equipment. Dust left in storage is not the same as money you’ve earned. That is why a dependable route back to your depot is as important as clearing the terrain itself.
An efficient early routine is to clean until your storage is approaching capacity, deliver what you’ve gathered and return to the next nearby patch. This Moon Sweepers beginner guide treats depot trips as part of the job, rather than an interruption to it. There are no officially published universal shipment-size targets or tool costs to recommend.
Which Moon Sweepers upgrades come first?
There are several types of improvement, and each solves a different problem. Better cleaning tools help if you’re spending most of your time brushing. More carrying space is useful when repeated journeys to unload dust are slowing you down. Place depots closer to active working areas as your operation expands.
Vehicles help you cover larger areas once your cleaning business grows. Before spending on one, consider whether your existing tools, storage and depot routes can keep up with the extra dust you’ll collect.
How to position depots
Pick depot locations based on the terrain you’re working on, not the area that looks most interesting. If every load of dust requires a long return journey across already-cleaned ground, you will waste time. A depot near a busy cleaning area makes shipments easier to organise.
For this Moon Sweepers beginner guide, you can think of each new depot as a base for the next area you want to clear. When you unlock cleaning vehicles, shorter routes between clearing and shipping become even more useful.
Can you play Moon Sweepers alone?
Yes. The Steam listing confirms single-player and online co-op with up to 16 players. If you’re on your own, you handle every part of the cleaning business. With friends, the group can spread out or tackle one dusty area together.
A useful way to divide the workload is to keep some people cleaning and others moving collected dust to depots. That’s a suggested approach rather than a compulsory class system. Read our Moon Sweepers multiplayer guide for the player limit and co-op details.
Mistakes that make the first jobs harder
The obvious mistake is brushing across a huge section of the Moon without arranging a way to ship what you’ve collected. Focus on turning dust into money regularly. Another is buying a faster tool when your real problem is carrying very little, or paying for extra carrying capacity when cleaning itself is taking most of your time.
In this Moon Sweepers beginner guide, the simplest rule is to improve whichever part slows you down: brushing, carrying or delivering. Complete shipments, shorten the return journey and expand once your current patch is running smoothly.
After your first upgrades
Keep reinvesting as you clean. Larger carrying capacity, convenient depots and cleaning vehicles let a small operation tackle larger jobs. If you’re playing with friends, you can coordinate the extra work instead of sending everybody to the same depot at once.
Moon Sweepers is available on Steam for Windows, with full controller support, achievements and Steam Cloud. Its Steam Deck compatibility rating is Unknown, although the developer’s 1.0.4 update did address startup issues involving older Proton versions. For other co-op ideas, try our RV There Yet multiplayer guide, or browse our best indie games.
Official developer source: Moon Sweepers by DragDrop Games on Steam.
