Moon Sweepers: How to Move Buildings and Depots

What "Moving" Actually Means Here

The workflow is demolish, repurchase, replace. In order:

1. Pick the new spot first. Walk it. Check the ground is level and the entrance faces open space.
2. Confirm you can afford the full replacement cost, not the difference. You are buying the building twice.
3. Empty anything the structure holds. A garage with dust in its tank, a machine with material queued at its input.
4. Remove the original with the building system.
5. Rebuy and place it, checking orientation before you confirm.
6. Reconnect every conveyor, splitter, and merger that touched it. A disconnected belt looks identical to a working one until a capsule stops.

Moving one machine in a mature base is rarely one action. It is a demolition plus a re-layout of everything downstream of it.

What It Costs

Demolishing reportedly returns 75% of the purchase price, a 25% loss on every removal. A second source confirms that deconstruction is not a full refund without giving a percentage, so treat 75% as reported rather than verified to the decimal.

The fee scales with the building, which is the part that matters. Turning a $1,000 press around costs $250 — a meaningful chunk of an early economy where a wide broom is $75. Doing it to four presses in one afternoon costs more than a vehicle. That is why the advice in this game is "plan before you place" rather than "build and iterate."

The Garage Exception

Garages deserve their own section because they used to be genuinely dangerous to demolish and now are not.

At launch, tearing down a garage could take its stored vehicles with it. Since patch 1.0.3, that no longer happens: vehicles transfer to another garage or stay available when you build a replacement, and ownership is no longer tied to a specific garage.

What has not changed:

• The dust tank. A garage holding dust can lose that dust when demolished. Empty it first.
• The refund. Still partial. The vehicle fix did not make demolition free.
• The entrance problem. A garage against a slope produces an entrance vehicles cannot use comfortably. It is the most common reason people rebuild one, and it is avoidable by walking the approach before you place.

The strategic upside: you no longer need one permanent garage. Build a second near a distant work area and recall your vehicle there instead of driving it across the map. The vehicle guide covers which garages are worth duplicating.

A Placement Checklist Worth Thirty Seconds

That last row is the cheapest fix in the game. If a pressure chamber will not fit inside one tile, span it across adjacent tiles rather than demolishing the floor. The connections still have to line up, but the foundation does not have to be rebuilt.

For where the base should sit in the first place, the base location guide is the page to read before you place anything expensive, and the zone structure guide explains how regions relate to where depots pay off.

When Moving Is Still the Right Call

• A depot placed before you understood the map. If your work has moved two regions over, paying 25% to relocate is cheaper than a hundred walks.
• A machine facing the wrong input side. The stone press takes its materials on specific sides; a press plumbed backward will never run correctly.
• A garage on bad terrain. Vehicles that cannot enter are worse than no garage.
• A cluster that blocks its own belts. When three machines leave no route for a belt, one move unlocks the layout.

Some moves are not worth it: cosmetics, a two-meter shift, or rearranging a working factory because a layout video looked cleaner. The refund penalty turns tidying into a purchase. The auto-sell guide has a better answer — extend the belt instead of moving the machine.

A Cheaper Habit

The real fix for this whole page is one habit: build small, test, then commit.

Place the first packager near your work, not in a permanent factory footprint. Run one belt. Confirm capsules pay. Only then place the machines that cost four figures. A base that grows in the order the progression guide describes rarely needs to move anything, because nothing gets placed before its job is clear.