If a placed Cleaner does nothing, first enable its production method and check whether the target is polluted or already toxic. If the footprint will not place, check the current tutorial goal, road access and any unfinished move order separately. These are different symptoms: the Pollution System thread reports idle Cleaners, while Cleaning/soot lockup describes toxic industry that can no longer produce cleaning inputs. Neither establishes that every placement failure has the same cause.

Kewa and destination markers on the galaxy map, Steam store screenshot. © Balancing Monkey Games / Hooded Horse.

Resource overlay on Kewa showing ore and sand, Steam store screenshot. © Balancing Monkey Games / Hooded Horse.

The method is off by default

Hooded Horse’s FAQ says the Burner Generator and the Cleaner do not start with a production method enabled. You select the building, open the Work tab, and turn it on. Players on the Pollution System thread put it more bluntly: “use soot and water” begins unchecked. I would do that before demolishing a row of idle Cleaners.

Soot, toxic tiles, and riverbeds

Early Cleaners consume soot (and water in the player wording). Soot comes from the Burner Generator and the Ore Smelter. The official FAQ says continuous power stocks soot, at the cost of more waste.
A tile that stays at high or very high pollution for 15 minutes becomes a Toxic Area. Peeps refuse to work buildings on toxic ground. Cleaners handle pollution that has not tipped over; the Toxic Tile Scraper handles ground that has. Rules are on the soot page.
In Polluted Riverbed, Solutions?, players report that Cleaners miss underwater tiles. A developer marked the player reply suggesting a nearby tree as the answer. This is a reported workaround, not a universal recovery guarantee. The official 4-tile absorption distance belongs to forests, not Cleaners.
A player estimate of a 2-tile Cleaner radius is not in the official guide. I am leaving the number off this page.

When the building really will not sit down

Tutorial locks hide some buildings until the step allows them.
Hotfix #1 (17 Oct 2026) fixed a move cancelled by a Peep that left the building stuck. Hotfix #4 (19 Oct 2026) adds an explicit cancel-move.
Free placement (Left Ctrl) lets you set a footprint before the road exists. Hotfix #4 also fixes a case where the road you added afterwards still did not count.
Check the road and fill every worker slot within housing range. Check power only where the building panel requires it; green indicates a valid connection. See the power page.

For the wider production chain, check the soot producer’s by-product bin: the official guide says a full by-product store stops that producer even when its main output has space. This does not establish an undocumented Cleaner waste output or storage capacity.