Shapez 2's Early Access will run smoothly with factories 12 times larger than the first game

Shapez 2 will be available in Early Access on August 15th, bringing the relaxing, shape-cutting factory-building gameplay to 3D.

In a new post , its lead developer explained what to expect from Early Access. The general idea: a polished, 40-ish hour experience with no major known issues, and a post-release roadmap waiting to be defined by player feedback.


“We spent a lot of time polishing the game and are really happy with how it turned out. We believe it is in great shape and meant to be played,” the post reads. “With 4 game modes, there is a lot of content to explore. There should be at least 40 hours of content, but as our players have proven, it's easy to get over a hundred hours of content.”

Tobspr Games has grown from the mostly one-man project of the original to eight people, and has been working with its backers and the series’ Discord community since development began. They’ve run regular playtests since then, asking players what features are most important to them, what suggested art style they prefer, and more. That relationship will continue into Early Access.

“I don't like to launch with a roadmap right away, especially for early access. What impact does it really have on players if the roadmap is already set?”

There's also no set amount of time for how long Shapez 2 will spend in Early Access, as “in theory it could take years” and it depends on how well it sells.

“Our dream goal would be to continue updating the game for many years while funding its development. However, the gaming industry is unpredictable so we don't want to promise something we can't deliver.”

The post states that one of the main goals of Shapez 2 is to improve performance compared to the original.

“Performance was a common complaint [in Shapez 1]”but there was nothing left to optimize. Shapez 1 is written in JavaScript, so it's literally just a website. There's no support for efficient rendering, memory management, or proper multi-threading, and the language itself is at least an order of magnitude slower than C++ or C#.”

Shapez 1 would start to lag for players “starting at around 5,000 – 10,000 buildings.” By comparison, in Shapez 2 “everything should now run very smooth up to 100,000 buildings, pretty smooth up to 250,000 buildings, and somewhat smooth up to 500,000 buildings (30fps on a higher-end setup) depending on your setup.”

There is no hard limit on the number of buildings players can build, and during testing some players built factories that built “1.25 million buildings and above”, but experienced “significant delays”.

I played Shapez 1 for the first time last week for a fun few hours. It's a factory-building game where resources are unlimited, buildings are free, and there's no threat or time pressure. That makes it pretty much perfect for pairing with the stone-cold silly sections of Criminal Minds on a second screen. My few hours with it were enough to make me sure I wanted to try Shapez 2 when it's released next week.

Leave a Comment