Guide · Vehicles

From Push Sweeper to Mega Vacuum Rover

Five machines, one Garage, and a Moon big enough to make the choice matter. Width and hopper size beat top speed, and the real limit is usually your unloading route.

Patch: 1.0.4
Updated: 26 October 2026
Read: 8 min
Sources: Steam + patch notes

Quick answer

Buy the Garage at $200 and a Push Sweeper at $300 as your first vehicle step — $500 total. Save for the Lunar Sweeper at $2,500 next; it is the best value in the list with a 2.8 m cleaning strip and a 1,200 kg hopper. Skip the Mega Vacuum Rover until your unloading route can handle 3,000 kg loads.

The Garage comes first

Vehicles live in a Garage. The Garage costs $200, stores your vehicles, and brings the selected one into its central bay. You cannot buy a vehicle before you have somewhere to keep it, so the real entry price for any vehicle is its price plus $200.

Since patch 1.0.3, vehicles work at every garage. Any garage can call a vehicle back, store it, and upgrade it, and you are not offered a vehicle you already own. Demolishing a garage no longer deletes the vehicles kept there — they move to another garage or wait for you to build one.

TipOne garage is enough now

Before 1.0.3 you needed a garage near each work area. That is no longer true. Build one, keep it, and use the recall system.

All five vehicles

Moon Sweepers vehicles with price, cleaning width and hopper capacity
Vehicle	Price	Width	Hopper	Role
Push Sweeper	$300	Walk-behind	—	Cheapest vehicle step. Needs the Garage first.
Ride-on Sweeper	$1,000	Drivable	—	Turns cleaning into long driving passes.
Crew Transport Van	$2,000	Transport	—	Moves people, not dust. Buy for logistics, not cleaning.
Lunar Sweeper	$2,500	2.8 m	1,200 kg	Three brushes, enclosed cab, the value sweet spot.
Mega Vacuum Rover	$6,000	4.0 m	3,000 kg	Suction control trades speed for width.

Push Sweeper — $300

Walk-behind. The cheapest way to stop using a broom, and the honest first step. It is not dramatically better than an Extra Wide Broom in raw width, but it changes the rhythm of cleaning: you push a machine along a line instead of swinging a tool.

Buy it if: you have $500, you have finished the nearby hexes, and you want to start covering distance. Skip it if: you are within a session of affording the Ride-on Sweeper.

Ride-on Sweeper — $1,000

Drivable. Turns cleaning into long passes and lets you cover ground that would take minutes on foot. The handling takes a few passes to get used to, and precise cleanup of the last dusty corner inside a hex is harder than with a hand tool.

Crew Transport Van — $2,000

This is a transport vehicle, not a cleaning upgrade. It moves players, which matters in a large co-op crew where half the group is working far from the station. Solo players should skip it entirely.

Watch outThe van is not a sweeper

Do not buy the Crew Transport Van expecting it to clean. It has no cleaning function. If your goal is income, the Lunar Sweeper at $2,500 is the better spend.

Why the Lunar Sweeper is the sweet spot

At $2,500 the Lunar Sweeper has three brushes, a 2.8 metre cleaning strip, and a 1,200 kg hopper. It also has an enclosed cab, which makes long sessions considerably more comfortable.

The width matters more than the hopper for one reason: cleaning width determines how long it takes to finish a region, and finishing regions pays bonuses. The hopper determines how often you drive back, which is a smaller cost once you have a proper unloading route.

Moon Sweepers Lunar Sweeper with three orange rotary brushes cleaning a wide strip of lunar dust — The Lunar Sweeper's three brushes produce a visibly wider clean strip than any hand tool. This is the point where manual sweeping stops being competitive.Official Steam screenshot, copyright DragDrop Games. Used for identification and commentary.

The Mega Vacuum Rover trade-off

The Mega Vacuum Rover at $6,000 has a 4 metre intake and a 3,000 kg tank before additional capacity upgrades. One late-game configuration reached 5,700 kg with further investment.

Its distinctive mechanic is Suction Control: increasing suction widens the cleaning strip but reduces travel speed. That is a genuine trade-off you will use — high suction on dense untouched ground, low suction when crossing already-clean terrain to reach a new area.

Do not buy it before your unloading route can handle it. A 3,000 kg load with nowhere to dump it simply moves the bottleneck from collection to delivery.

Moon Sweepers astronaut pushing a walk-behind sweeper across the lunar surface, dust clearing in front of the brush — The Push Sweeper: the cheapest vehicle step, and a genuine change in how cleaning feels even though its width is modest.Official Steam screenshot, copyright DragDrop Games. Used for identification and commentary.

The unloading problem

Vehicles create their own logistics. A loaded hopper has to go somewhere, and the somewhere has to be connected to the rest of your system.

Set up the garage and the vehicle's unloading area.
Find the collector pad that receives the vehicle's dust.
Connect the silo's capsule output to a conveyor.
Run that conveyor toward a depot or a processing machine.
Return with a load and use the unloading interaction.
Confirm the silo starts releasing capsules.

A silo provides temporary storage. It does not remove the need for an outgoing route. A vehicle can unload successfully while your balance stays flat because the contents are still sitting inside the logistics network.

TipBuild the receiving end first

Before your first long drive, confirm that unloading actually results in money. It is much easier to debug a route with an empty hopper than with three tonnes of dust waiting.

Vehicles in co-op

Each player buys their own vehicles. That is a personal purchase, not a crew-wide unlock — the opposite of how the Upgrade Matrix now works since 1.0.3.

In practice this means a 16-player crew should not all save for a Lunar Sweeper. One or two drivers with good vehicles, plus a builder keeping the belts running, produces more income than sixteen people each buying a Push Sweeper.

Suggested vehicle priorities by crew size
Crew size	Vehicles to prioritise	Why
1 player	Push Sweeper, then Lunar Sweeper	You need one good all-rounder.
2–4 players	One Lunar Sweeper, one Crew Van	One driver, one builder who can travel.
5–10 players	Two Lunar Sweepers, one Van	Split the map into two cleaning zones.
11–16 players	Two or three vehicles total	More drivers stop helping; belts matter more.

Which to buy

The short version, by budget:

$500: Garage + Push Sweeper. Accept that this is an entry ticket.
$1,200: Garage + Ride-on Sweeper. Better if you will drive a lot this session.
$2,700: Garage + Lunar Sweeper. The best value in the game.
$6,200+: Garage + Mega Vacuum Rover. Only with a working unloading line and spare power.

Read Lunar Sweepers vs Moon Sweepers if you arrived here looking for a game with that name, or the automation guide for what comes after vehicles.