The Crust Conveyors and Logistics Guide: Crossings, Directions and Storage

Direction

VisibleToggle with V

Blockage signal

Built inDistributors and inputs

Clear in place

M keyEmpty a full belt

Crossings

Auto distributorNot a special piece

Overflow

Bypass buttonSkips storage

Planning

Ghost layerCancelling is free

What 1.0 actually changed about conveyors

The 1.0 announcement’s conveyor section is long, and reading it as a list is instructive because it contains almost no new belts. Nearly everything is about making a network you already built explain itself:

Two entries in that table deserve to be pulled out, because they change how you work rather than what you build.

The first is resource-type switching. The developers explain the motivation themselves: “Many players asked us to add the ability to switch resource types so you do not have to rebuild a module or its conveyors when changing a recipe. We did it.” This is a large quality-of-life change in a game whose production chains are long, because it decouples what you built from what it currently produces. A production block whose recipes change with the tech tree no longer has to be physically rebuilt when the recipe changes.

The second is that cancelling a plan is free. Combined with Planning Mode — where you lay ghosts rather than real belts — this means the correct time to make conveyor mistakes is before you pay for them.

Why a conveyor is “not working”: the real causes, in order

When a line stops delivering, the causes in The Crust are finite and mostly diagnosable from the screen. In rough order of how often they are the answer:

1. The destination is full. This is the most common cause and the least dramatic. Several official fixes address resources backing up at module inputs, and the game now shows an indicator for exactly this state. A saturated belt is doing its job — it is waiting. The fix is downstream: consume the output, add storage, or add a bypass.

2. The belt runs the wrong way. Check this with the V key before anything else. Direction only became visible in 1.0, which means anyone carrying habits from earlier builds still underestimates how often this is the answer.

3. There is a ghost segment in the chain. See the community panel above. Planning Mode makes this more likely, not less, because it deliberately lets you draw things that do not exist yet.

4. The belt and the destination disagree about the resource. Resource filters exist in several places — officials notes mention “Resource filters in Cargo Docks” and “Contract filters”, and record removing gases from distributor filters. A filter is silent when it excludes something; the item simply never appears.

5. The module itself is stopped. A module without power, without staff, or without input ingredients will not draw from its belt. In this situation the conveyor is a symptom, and the power warning or staffing panel is the diagnosis.

6. Adjacency geometry. Hotfix 1.0.11 fixed conveyors behaving incorrectly when modules were placed directly adjacent to each other. If you are on a current build this should no longer occur — but if you are seeing geometry that makes no sense at a module boundary, confirm your build before redesigning the block.

Crossing conveyors, and what the intersection is

Crossings are the single most-asked conveyor question, and the answer is a small piece of good news: you do not build a crossing. The game handles intersections through the distributor, which the community wiki describes as being placed automatically when conveyors merge or split.

That same page gives the distributor’s default behaviour in a satisfying level of detail. With no filters applied it works in what the wiki calls a soft round-robin: it sends one item to each output in turn, and skips any output that is blocked — blocked meaning by a setting, by having no conveyor attached, or by the attached belt being full. Priority outputs, if set, are checked first, and only if an item cannot go to any priority output does the distributor fall back to its normal logic for everything else.

The wiki also lists the five per-output controls in left-to-right order — Priority output, Reset settings, Manual control, Block output, Resources — and notes two behaviours worth internalising:

• A resource filter is absolute. Items not on an output’s filter “will never be output here.”
• If an item cannot be output to any side, it blocks the distributor entirely. There is no overflow to nowhere.

And one limitation: that page records no input-side settings for the distributor.

Two official notes corroborate the model without describing it — “Fixed an issue where splitters could ignore conveyor priorities” and a fix stating that “priorities are now displayed” on distributors. The mechanic is real and the interface exposes it.

Storage is four different answers, not one building

“Storage” queries in The Crust are really four separate questions, and the game answers them with distinct buildings whose names you should know before you plan a block:

The multi-resource family is the one that changed most after release. Update 3 introduced Multi-Storage 2.0, in which “you can now select specific resources to store and distribute the total capacity of the multi-resource storage between them in any ratio” — which is the answer to a question older guides get wrong, because it means a multi-storage is no longer an all-or-nothing box. You can commit 70% of it to one material and split the rest.

Update 3 also added the automation layer on top: a research “for Multi-Storage that enables automatic resource supply for contracts and expeditions. Once connected to certain modules, it will automatically open outputs and provide the exact amount of resources required.” That converts a storage building into a fulfilment system for contracts, which is a different role from just holding things.

And in Update 1.0.12 the developers reduced the research cost of both Large Storage and Large Bulk Storage, plus the Cargo Dock and the Programmable Conveyor Distributor — a strong hint that these are the intended mid-game expansion path rather than luxury items.

The Conveyor Elevator, and the surprise about speed

The Conveyor Elevator is the belt-based bridge between surface and underground, and it is where assumptions break. The community wiki is unusually explicit that “Drones do not take from or deliver to the Conveyor Elevator” — so it is a pure belt interface, and you cannot use it as a place for drones to pick up from. The same page confirms “There is no speed modifier for the Conveyor Elevator. It will match the highest speed of any attached conveyor,” which is why upgrading the belts on either side is the way to increase throughput through it.

Officially, the elevator has been a recurring source of small fixes: an output interface displaying incorrectly, the stuck-resource notification being removed from it, and the interface when building it. For placement, the community page offers the pattern most players settle on — put one near a Cargo Dock on the surface so arriving regolith and rare minerals get underground quickly, and stage bulk storage on the underground side so the dock can be emptied without delay.