Moon Sweepers Vehicle Costs and Payback: What Each Tier Buys

The Price Ladder

Every number is from third-party guides rather than the store page, but the five prices agree across three sources, which is the strongest evidence available five days after launch.

Two caveats. The Mega's width is reported as 3.7 m by one source and 4.0 m by another — close enough to plan around, not to quote. And one guide lists the top tier at $15,000; three say $6,000, which is the figure used here.

The Crew Transport Van is not a cleaning vehicle: it seats eight and carries no dust, which makes it a logistics purchase priced like a mid-tier cleaner. See the vehicle role plan.

What Each Price Step Actually Buys

Sticker price tells you what you pay; cost per kilogram tells you what you get.

Three things fall out of that arithmetic:

• The Ride-on is the efficiency knee. Best cost per kilogram, and five times the hopper of the entry machine for 3.3 times the price.
• The Lunar is a width purchase, not a capacity purchase. Its hopper costs about the same per kilogram as the Ride-on's, so the extra $1,500 buys a 41% wider strip. Good in open crater floors, poor in tight hexes.
• The Mega's width is the most expensive in the game. At roughly $16 per centimeter it is not a precision tool. You park it in a dense field and let it eat, which is how the upgrade guide describes its role.

One cheap hopper is 100 kg; the Extra Wide Broom carries 12 kg. A single Push Sweeper load replaces more than eight broom loads.

The Costs That Are Not on the Sticker

So the honest entry price for "I own a vehicle" is about $500, not $300. That is what the progression guide budgets for, and the number to hold when a guide calls a Push Sweeper cheap.

The unload route is the cost people skip. A vehicle that fills in four minutes and then waits at a depot with no conveyor is a $300 storage bin. Walk the route with a full load in mind: where does the hopper empty, and does that path survive a second vehicle?

How to Estimate Payback Without Inventing Hours

The only payback figure that means anything is the one you measure; it bakes in density, price, and base. It takes about forty minutes.

1. Measure your baseline. Work 20 minutes the way you work now and note credits banked. Call it C0.
2. Buy the vehicle and fix the unload route. Do not measure until a full hopper can be emptied and sold.
3. Measure again on comparable ground, same duration and similar density. Call it C1.
4. Take the increment. Increment = C1 − C0. You were already earning C0 on foot.
5. Divide. Hours to payback = price ÷ increment per hour.

If the increment is zero or negative, the vehicle is not your bottleneck, and no amount of driving fixes that. The dust farming guide uses the same incremental logic for tools.

Those are arithmetic, not measurements. The same $1,000 machine is a three-hour or a twenty-hour purchase depending on a number only your save can produce.

Why "It Pays for Itself" Is Usually False

A vehicle does not create dust. It moves labor, which caps the return:

• Your base is a ceiling. If storage or launching limits throughput, a faster collector reaches the ceiling and idles.
• Your session length is a ceiling. A $6,000 machine recovered over sixty hours is a different purchase than one recovered over six.
• Your route is a multiplier. A tuned vehicle on a five-minute round trip loses to a stock vehicle on a two-minute one. Moving the depot is often cheaper — see the depot placement score.

There is no documented resale either. Vehicles recall between garages, so they are not lost, but no refund path exists. Treat the price as sunk when you confirm it.

Skip, Stretch, or Buy