Sand publisher celebrates 300,000 copies sold: ‘We getting a half hour of air conditioning tonight!’

XA couple weeks after its early access launch, things are going mostly pretty well for the steampunk-mechs-in-the-desert game Sand: Raiders of Sophie. An update that rolled out on July 2 caused some surprise headaches and had to be rolled back, which isn’t great, but on the brighter side the game looks to be a legitimate hit, too.

“300K copies for Sand sold,” Alex Nichiporchik, CEO of publisher TinyBuild, wrote today on X. “We getting [a] half hour of air conditioning tonight!”

The second update for Sand: Raiders of Sophie went live on June 2, but caused connection problems that forced the developers to pull the plug. The plan was to figure out what was happening and redeploy the update later in the week, but fortunately developers were able to get it squared away fairly quickly.

The re-rollout of the new update, and no doubt the coming of the weekend—a long one for gamers in the US—has helped push Sand to its highest concurrent player count yet on Steam at just over 40,000. That’s good enough to put it in the middle of Steam’s 100 most played games chart, between Farming Simulator 25 and Helldivers 2 (PC gaming is so wonderfully diverse) and while it’s nowhere near the six-figure counts of the real big boys, bear in mind that Sand is not free to play—at $20 a pop with its launch discount, that adds up to not a bad little chunk of change.

The full patch notes for Sand: Raiders of Sophie update 2 are below.

• Update #2 changelist:
  • Fixed an issue that caused servers to become unavailable, and players were stuck on the “Connecting” screen
    • Because of thіs issue, we reverted yesterday’s update
  • Improved BattlEye behavior to decrease false-positive bans
  • Occlusion changes that will have a minor positive effect on game performance
  • Additional improvements to the character movement
  • Improvements to the trampler collisions
  • Decreased the number of shakes and glitches during the collision between tramplers
  • Possibly fixes issue when character would fly in the air after the collision between tramplers
  • Possibly fixed the issue that trampler parts would be invisible but you would still be able to interact with them
    • Let us know if you will still encounter this issue after the patch
  • Fixed oversaturated boxes and props in the lobby
  • Fixed that trampler stability didn’t affect speed
  • Fixed energy rod selling price on the contract platforms from 450 to 50Fixed the issue where a character’s body may remain in the air after death
  • Fixed the issue that you could make additional shots from autocannon by pressing the right mouse button
  • Another round of improvements to the character controller. Including but not limited to:
    • Fixed issue with getting stuck on difficult terrain
    • Fixed several issues with parkour
    • Fixed different issues with movement
    • Fixed issue with flickering names on the landing cutscene
    • Improvements to the hit registration
  • Improved occlusion for the compartments on the trampler
    • There are still some cases where compartments might occlude, and we’ll fix them in the upcoming updates
  • Grenade pin no longer gets pulled automatically in Outlaw controls
  • Improved upiors’ behavior
    • Now has collision with player
    • Their movement is now less twitchy
    • The overall behavior is more responsive and more natural
    • Upiors can now use cannons (except shotguns)
    • They will leave the cannon when the player gets close to them
  • Added a gas giant next to the Sophie
  • Improved design for some of the pop-ups
  • Fixed issue for some of the crew compartments where character would respawn outside of the compartment
  • Fixed exploits where items could be duplicated
  • Fixed the issue when some doors may be restored improperly after fixing the Compartment with a Repair kit
  • Fixed the issue where, visually, the door is displayed as broken after being fixed with a repair kit
  • Fixed the issue where the expedition will end for the player even though their teammates are still alive. This would also cause issues with receiving the loot after the expedition
  • Fixed the issue where players could get into the compartments by sliding on the entrance group ladder
  • Fixed the issues where Toggle and Combine Sprint settings didn’t work as intended
  • Fixed the issue where matchmaking preferences were not saved between Expeditions
  • Fixed the issue where incorrect crew sizes were shown during loading
• Balance changes:
  • Increased Recoil for 80mm Cannons
  • Increased T3 80mm cannon reload time from 2.5 to 3 sec
  • Base and low recoil 40mm ammo now have slightly better range (150m/s -> 200m/s and 100m/s -> 150m/s)
  • Added 20% more projectiles for regular 70mm Ammo (42 -> 52)
  • Decreased siege damage of regular 70mm Ammo by 20% (30 per pellet -> 25 per pellet)
  • Added 5 more meters before the damage starts decaying for regular 70mm Ammo (35m -> 40m)
  • Decreased fire rate of Triple Barrel shotgun by 30%
  • Projectile amplifier radius decreased from 15m to 5m
  • Manually loading turret from the container now transfers shells from the container into the turret’s inventory instead of actually loading it (thank you for the tip Peanut)
    • This is now called “Transfer Content” instead of “Load Turret” to avoid confusion
  • Loot containers will spawn slightly less pneumatic parts
  • Increased Canned Sea Deer XL sell price from 100 to 500
  • Decreased MedKit sell price from 50 to 20
  • Increased Sell price of Small Valuables and Valuables by 1 crown (3 -> 4, 6 -> 7)
  • Ironclad Crate slot changes (12M -> 1L and 11M)
  • High-tier resources orbital stack size increase (50 -> 75)
• Known issues:
  • Character can get stuck at the top of the ladder
  • Character may become transparent in Spectator mode in some cases
  • Character cannot crouch while carrying the Repair Kit
  • The Character cannot enter the Expedition if the Invite has been accepted at the Tutorial pop-up background
  • Character may become invulnerable to melee damage while interacting with turrets or the steering wheel