The purpose of this page is documenting the foundation of shapez 2 mod development for future reference and serve as a quick guide to help modders jump straight into creating, without getting bogged down in setup details
⚠️ The components described in this guide are only available **when using shapez 2 v1.0.0 or later.
If you are reading this before the 1.0 release, be sure to switch to the appropriate beta branch before!** (Name & password are in the #modding-beta-instructions discord channel once you’ve been invited)
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In order to access the steam workshop before the official 1.0 release, please join this steam group: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/shapez2-mod-testing
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We recommend grabbing the mod samples https://github.com/tobspr-games/shapez2-mod-samples and starting there. They are Plug'n’Play projects that should get you up to speed in no time
We strongly recommend grabbing one of the mod examples and making a a copy for developing new mods. This section should be useful for creating a custom one or troubleshooting issues when running one of the sample ones.
⚠ This section assumes that the modder is working in Windows. Transferring the ideas to other platforms should still be possible
Start by creating a new C# Class Library project in your IDE of choice. Since the mod is not going to be a standalone executable and instead will be loaded by Shapez 2 Mod Loader, it does not make sense to generate executables from it
Selecting a new project type inside Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2022
Selecting the correct framework in Visual Studio 2022
Configuring the project’s folder structure in Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2022
Configuring a new project inside JetBrains Rider 2025.2
ℹ️ Important: Make sure to select the .NET Standard 2.1 as the Target Framework since this is the specification Unity is compliant with