SAND: Raiders of Sophie can be played entirely solo or in a crew. The developers have said the game is designed and balanced so a single player can enjoy it as well as a full team, so grouping up is a choice rather than a requirement. At the Early Access launch a known issue could still place solo players into larger crews; the developers acknowledged it on June 26, 2026 and, in early July 2026, said the fix was proving more complex than anticipated but remained one of their highest priorities.
Crew Size
You can play alone or in teams of two to six players. The maximum crew size is six. If you want to run a larger crew, your Trampler needs enough crew rooms to house everyone, so team size and Trampler design are linked: a six-person crew has to build for the extra occupants.
Roles Aboard a Trampler
A crew shares one Trampler and divides the work. Different players can take specialized roles such as piloting the machine, manning weapon stations, or managing the storage and loot. A coordinated crew makes a Trampler far more effective in both exploration and combat than one person juggling every task at once.
Matchmaking and Server Population
Matchmaking is based on the size of your crew, and the number of players you share a server with scales with that size. The confirmed launch caps are below.
Crew Type | Players per Server (max) |
|---|---|
Solos | 15 |
Small teams (2 to 3 players) | 36 |
Large teams (4 to 6 players) | 45 |
At launch the developers said they did not plan to split matchmaking into separate duo or small-group queues, on the grounds that dividing the population further would leave too few players to fill matches quickly. They tried instead to place teams of the same size together on a server whenever possible, so encounters with larger teams stayed within your queue's size band. That position changed during Early Access, and the queue structure below now supersedes it.
For the technical side of the online experience, including anti-cheat and supported languages, see Servers and Online. For how losing a crew's Trampler and resources works, see Getting Started.
Gear-based matchmaking went live in beta on August 20, 2026. It scores your loadout by combining the Trampler compartments you have installed with the items placed into your outfitting, then tries to match you against players at a similar level. When too few players are queuing at that level the matchmaker widens its search range, and past a certain point it puts everyone into the general queue whatever their gear score, so an expensive build cannot leave you waiting indefinitely. The developers describe it as a beta they expect to adjust from player feedback and their own data, and say it may lengthen the wait for a match slightly. See Early Access for what they have described.
Two smaller matchmaking changes followed in September 2026. On September 1 the developers changed the backend to reduce the chance that players who had teamed up before an expedition would be placed into the same one, their first concrete step against pre-teaming after the moderation statement of August 20. On September 10 they made brand-new players' first couple of matches draw from other new players only. Neither post revisits the solo-into-larger-crews fault, so the status note above still stands.
A crew's conduct on the surface now has a visible consequence of its own. Since September 10, 2026 a crew that destroys two Tramplers in a Solo expedition, or three in any of the crew queues, is marked as a Threat that every other player in the session can see, and capturing a rival machine marks the whole crew. See Gameplay for how the mark is cleared.
Queue Changes During Early Access
On August 3, 2026 the team restructured the queues. A dedicated duo-only queue was added, and the two team brackets were redrawn so that Small Crews now covers teams of three and four players while Large Crews covers teams of five and six. Duos, which previously shared the small-team bracket, now match against other duos.
Queue | Crew Size |
|---|---|
Solo | 1 player |
Duo only | 2 players |
Small Crews | 3 to 4 players |
Large Crews | 5 to 6 players |
The developers did not publish revised server-population caps alongside the new brackets, so the launch figures in the table above remain the last stated numbers. Treat them as a guide rather than a current confirmed value until the team restates them. A follow-up update on August 10, 2026 fixed a fault in the new brackets that had been stopping teams of four players from choosing Small Crews at all.
Gear score sits on top of the crew-size brackets rather than replacing them. A queue still groups you with crews of a comparable size; since August 20, 2026 it also weighs how much machine and equipment each side is bringing to the sand.