Sands of Time

[Yehi'Or]

How are you guys gathering sand? I only play in solo and I find that gathering sand is really boring and time consuming. It doesn't even give exp, and if my base is far, grabbing something above wood shovel is basically counter productive as I can't repair them anywhere.
I usually just grab a wood shovel and a cement furnace to smelt the sand into glass at the place I'm gathering, but are there more efficient and fun ways of doing it? Thanks fellow prospectors.

[Trik]

silica, silica, and miasmic pickaxe

[КрендельФигов]

Personally, I always first put
https://icarus.fandom.com/wiki/Electric_Deep-Mining_Drill
on
https://icarus.fandom.com/wiki/Deep_Mining_Ore_Deposit
for silicon (and not only). And manually it is secondary, you can't collect much.

[Yehi'Or]

What's collecting silicon got anything to do with sand? Can I convert it?

Edit: Scratch that. Holy crap! Silica can be used to make glass???? *facepalm*

[КрендельФигов]

Sand glass is actually an additional option that was introduced not so long ago. Initially, glass was made only from silicon.
https://icarus.fandom.com/wiki/Glass