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
Requires: shapez 2 >= 1.0.0
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
After finishing the setup wizard, your project will end up looking something like this:
<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
<PropertyGroup>
<TargetFramework>netstandard2.1</TargetFramework>
</PropertyGroup>
</Project>
To open the project file, right click your project (not the solution) and click Edit Project File (for Visual Studio) or Edit » Edit 'MyMod.csproj' (for Rider). Other sections of this documentation will refer to this file