Revision 6

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.

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.

The developers have also announced a planned gear-based matchmaking system, not yet live, intended mainly to give new players a gentler introduction while keeping most of the community in the same queue. See Early Access for what they have described.

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.

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.