Your First Hour on the Moon

Quick answer

Take the free toothbrush from the supply wall, walk outside, and clean the hex directly next to the station. Press Q to pack your dust into a capsule, carry it back, and deposit it at the depot. Then buy the $25 Household Broom before anything else. Do not buy the Nail Brush or Handbrush unless you are still short of $25 and getting impatient.

Your first ten minutes

Your astronaut starts inside a station. There is a supply wall with the free toothbrush, a depot intake, a tool shop, and an upgrade terminal. Before you leave, look at all four. You will be back at each of them within twenty minutes.

1. Take the toothbrush. It costs nothing. There is no reason to walk outside empty-handed, and no reason to buy a better brush before you have earned a single dollar.
2. Walk out the main door and stop. The ground immediately outside is dusty. That is your first work area.
3. Sweep in straight passes. The toothbrush is narrow, so overlapping passes are faster than trying to be precise. Watch the dust gauge fill as you go.
4. Pack with Q when full. Packing turns loose dust into a capsule you can carry. If you do not pack, you stop collecting.
5. Deposit at the depot. The intake is inside the station. Dust only becomes money once it reaches that machine.

Finishing the first hex

A hex is the small hexagonal tile your brush works across. Completing one is satisfying for a mechanical reason: it pays out separately from the dust you collect. In observed play, an early hex completion awarded $10 — which is the price of the Handbrush, or a third of the Household Broom.

That changes the opening maths. Sweeping four hexes to 80% looks like more progress than finishing two, but the finished ones paid a bonus and the unfinished ones paid nothing extra.

How to find the last specks

The last 5% of a hex is always the slowest because the remaining dust is in corners and thin strips. Two habits help: work the perimeter first and spiral inward, and use the map or the field manual scan to confirm whether a hex is actually complete rather than nearly complete.

Packing and depositing without wasting trips

Your container is small at the start, so you will pack often. The temptation is to run back to the depot after every capsule. Resist it for the first few minutes, then do the opposite once you can afford it.

• Early: deposit often, because the depot is close and your time is cheap.
• Mid-run: pack several capsules, stack them near your work area, and make one trip instead of five.
• Later: stop carrying things entirely — a Packager and a conveyor do this job better than you do.

What to buy first

There are six hand tools and they form a fairly obvious ladder. The question is not which one is best — the Extra Wide Broom clearly is — but which purchase removes your current bottleneck.

The practical route: use the toothbrush until you can afford the Household Broom at $25, then buy it. Skip the Nail Brush and Handbrush if you are close — they are real upgrades, but the Household Broom is the first tool that clears a hex in a reasonable number of passes.

Once you own the Household Broom, look at its container upgrade before the next brush. A bigger container means fewer interruptions, and interruptions are what make the early game feel slow.

The first hour budget

• $0 — toothbrush from the supply wall.
• $25 — Household Broom. First real quality-of-life jump.
• $30 or so — container upgrade, doubling capacity to roughly 6 kg.
• $40 — Wide Head from the Upgrade Matrix, if you plan to keep hand-sweeping.
• $50 — Building Tool, only when you are ready to place structures.

Reading the map before you wander

The Moon Map is on the station console. It colours hexes by state: orange for untouched, blue for partly cleaned, green for complete. Early on, the useful information is not the colour but the shape — a blue cluster next to green means you left work half done.

The number at the bottom of the map is honest and slightly brutal. A player who had cleaned a substantial area around their station was still looking at a fraction of a percent of the whole Moon. That is not a bug. The map is roughly 163,830 sectors.

Surviving the night

Moon Sweepers has a day-night cycle, and the dark is genuinely dark. Your helmet lamp switches on automatically when needed, and it can be upgraded. Patch 1.0.4 added Night Vision Goggles for $350, toggled with N, which turn night into something closer to daylight without shadows.

You do not need goggles in your first hour. You do need to know that darkness is not a bug and that solar-powered machinery will eventually stop producing at night once you build it.

Watch the trailer before you commit

If you are still deciding whether the loop is for you, the trailer is the fastest way to see the tone. It is accurate about the vibe and quiet about the grind.

Video · MoonSweepersMoon Sweepers official trailer

Video loads from youtube-nocookie.com only after you press play. Rights belong to the original creator.

Five opening mistakes

1. Buying every cheap brush. Nail Brush and Handbrush are transitional. Going straight to the Household Broom is usually better.
2. Leaving hexes at 95%. You forfeit the completion bonus and you will have to come back to a harder-to-see mess later.
3. Hoarding capsules instead of depositing. Packed dust in the world is not money and it is not safe.
4. Buying the Building Tool too early. It costs $50 and does nothing until you can also afford a machine and the conveyor to connect it.
5. Judging the game by its first twenty minutes. The toothbrush stage is deliberately ridiculous. The loop opens up at the Household Broom and again at your first vehicle.

Where to go next

Once you own a Household Broom with a capacity upgrade and roughly $100 in the bank, you are out of the tutorial in everything but name. The next decision is whether to keep improving hand tools or start saving for the Garage.

Read the brush guide if you want the full price ladder, or the money guide if your problem is that the balance is not growing fast enough.