This game might sound stupidly simple at first, but it will get complicated, does stay interesting for quite a while, and can become a pain to manage. Just zoom out really far and you'll see how big the map can get.

This guide just contains some very basic stuff that I thought was especially useful but it's missing from the tutorial. There's one bit of advice per section, and no solutions to any difficult problems. It's mostly about how to arrange things to save time and you can just keep adding things as needed with minimal fuss.

This is especially important early on, because you don't start out with copy-and-paste ability right away and you really don't want to have to mass-delete and rebuild anything if you can help it.

To get through the levels of the game, you really do not need the perfect super-dense super-high-speed super-optimal solutions for each level. Just one maxed-out conveyor belt of the necessary shape will complete the level in reasonable time as long as you have also kept up with upgrades.

But even just cobbling together solutions as you go, it can help to have a bit of a starting floorplan to keep things from getting too crammed together.

Unless you really created a huge mess somehow and didn't get past level 3 or so, or if you're trying to do a speed run with the official playtime in the save game as low as possible, it isn't necessary to create a new game.

Remember, equipment in this game is "free". So you can delete absolutely everything and replace it without it costing any credits of any sort (unless you use copy-and-paste after "blueprints" are unlocked, see below). The only real cost is the time to do the manual work of placing all the buildings.

Worst case is that you delete everything on the map but you still have all the stuff you unlocked so far. This is seldom needed though since you can always just delete and redo stuff as you go.

So delete away knowing your only real cost is the real time needed to place new equipment tiles.

Note that it's always impossible to do everything perfectly from the start because you don't start out with the necessary stuff unlocked. So you'll always be deleting and replacing things to some extent anyway.

Select the Conveyor Belt using the 1 key and try Shift-Dragging. What's going on here will be pretty obvious once you let go of the mouse button.

If you want to reverse the direction of the belt relative to the starting point, also hold Alt. You can start holding down Alt later if you want, or let go if it.

Note that if you need to draw one that's very long, like much longer than the screen dimensions, you can use WASD (or equivalent on your keyboard mapping) while holding down shift and dragging without canceling the operation.

Even though this routing will only make one corner angle at a time, and doesn't do any fancy pathfinding, it can save a lot of time, trouble, and error.

When I say "reserve" I mean more like soft-reserve or something, because some of these areas are places that you might need to just use for something else at first, at least temporarily. Others are ones you might want to avoid at first and use differently much later.

It's very easy to underestimate how far you are going to want everything to be built away from the hub when you start trying to deliver lots of things to it. so I suggest trying to avoid building anything close to the hub.

I'd recommend 16 tiles as a guideline. Try not to build anything in this area. 16 tiles looks like this (with 16 tile long conveyor belts shown in each direction):



Obviously you're going to want to get those resources which are pretty much always too close to the hub, but just move them outside the buffer zone to use them and try to keep this area free of anything but resource collectors and delivery conveyor belts.

Part of the reason is: you might eventually want to build some fancy load-balancing stuff here and that will take up a lot of space. Actually it could take up even more space but I don't think it's worth worrying about at this point.

I would recommend dividing up the map like this, and just running four conveyor belts in each direction, up, down, left, and right, from the hub to infinity.



Of course you don't actually need to place the conveyor belts until you need them, much less run them to infinity, as long as you consider those rows and columns reserved for them. You can also just decide to end one at some location later, but in the beginning it will probably help to just imagine these being infinite.

Basically this means that, in the beginning anyway, you should consider -2 <= x <= +2 and -2 <= y <= +2 "off limits" everywhere for building factories along with approximately (-16,-16) < (x,y) < (16,16) around the delivery hub.

Also, if you're not starting from scratch, these main conveyor belts don't actually have to be exactly on the axis lines. They can be offset or route around existing stuff to some extent, but the main idea is to get something like these in place.

"A" Marks areas for building in near the conveyor belts and "B" just shows areas to build in secondly as needed.

With these in place, what matters is how close you build factories to these "axis" conveyor belts and not how close to the hub, because the travel time on the conveyor belts ultimately doesn't matter. Everything is pipelined and everything is output-only so there's no round-trip response delay. So it ultimately only matters that it will be more convenient to build closer to these axis lines to make hooking up the output easier.

Doing this will save trying to route conveyor belts around stuff and through tunnels trying to get them to the hub. Instead, you just need to get to an axis with a straight shot to the hub.

You can get fancy trying to load distribute stuff on the belts, but if you can fill up an entire belt you can just break one of the "lanes" and dedicate it to a particular output. You then don't have to run the belt any further in that "lane", but you might want to keep it's lane open just in case you want to reconnect it to something further down later.

And also leave a 2 block gap next to long runs of 4 parallel conveyor belts or anything else similarly large or thick.

This is because early on you get a tunnel that has a maximum stretch of 4 tiles. So you will easily be able to tunnel under 4 conveyor belts, but not so easily for any bundles thicker than that. (If you have more than 4 parallel conveyor belts, you can run all 5+ of them through a tunnel to create a 4 block wide "bridge" over them, but it's easier to just tunnel under 4 belts with one conveyor belt than put 5 or more into tunnels just so one can cross it.

Also, it takes one tile to come out of a tunnel and one tile to go back in, so the two block gap allows you to tunnel under something else, come back out of the tunnel, then go back into another 4 block tunnel.

Anything else involving tunnels is going to be more of a situation-specific puzzle, but just keep in mind that you need 2 tiles to exit a tunnel and go back in.

Generally speaking, try to max out the capacity of all of the belts, but especially the delivery belt for a particular shape.

You can see the current speed/capacity of your belts by looking at the tooltip with the belt tool selected:



You can also see the speed of various machines in the same place with the machine's tool button selected.

So if a machine, with your current upgrades, outputs 1 item/sec and your belts have a capacity of 4 items/sec then you need four of that machine operating in parallel to completely fill up an output belt.

The math is pretty simple, but keep bottlenecks in mind since the whole pipeline is going to be limited by whatever is slowest.

Also, as long as you keep the speed upgrades at the same level, the number of parallel machines of a particular type needed to fill the capacity of an output belt should remain the same. So it shouldn't usually be necessary to scale up or down the number of machines in a parallel array.

For the most part, these work the way you'd expect.

They are the main way of joining and splitting belts:



They can be combined to join and split:



In fact, merging lots of sparsely used belts onto one fully utilized belt as quickly as possible is highly recommended since it will save a tremendous amount of trouble over trying to run several belts in parallel next to each other.

One last thing, balancers can try to balance the load of two belts coming in to two belts going out, but it gets more complicated with more than two-in-two-out. Balancers can't shove more than 50% from one belt to another so something more clever than the crude example below is needed for perfect balancing with 4 belts, for example.



(Sometimes that might be good enough though.)

Originally I avoided this kind of "exit ramp" arrangement with balancers:



You might be thinking "this is no good because each balancer divides in half, so the belts will get 1/2, 1/4th, 1/8th, 1/16th, 1/32nd, 1/64th, etc, like some sort of conveyor belt Xeno's Paradox".

And this would be correct if the belts were going into trash cans, the delivery hub, or something very fast somewhere.

But if they're going into something slow then they're going to get blocked immediately and a balancer will bypass any blocked belt. So if these off-ramps go to equipment then everything will make it to the equipment with the last one being "just in time". That is, unless you have more equipment that is in total faster than the capacity of a single belt. (This can happen temporarily if your equipment speed upgrades are ahead of the belt upgrades.)



So this is fine if it's for immediate input to machines. Otherwise you do get conveyor belt Xeno's Paradox, and you would get very uneven distribution if you were trying to divide up a belt for several things requiring the same high input rate.

This of course has it's limits since, at some point, it will be pointless to deliver any more unpainted circles. But in general you want to just leave everything in place until either:

• it's needed for something else, in which case you can leave it there and feed the output into the input of a new assembly line, or
  
• It's "obsolete" because you have a better design using newer equipment that you've unlocked, or
  
• It doesn't have much use anymore and is just in the way.

This is because the speed upgrades (the little star button in the upper right) "cost" n number of shapes per upgrade, and until you get above a level V upgrade the cost for the next one will include all previous shape types plus a new one. After every 5 levels the list of shapes will "reset", but until then you'll need the previous shapes.

So don't stop delivering the shapes until you're sure you don't need any more for another upgrade.

After that, you're likely to need the previously manufactured shape as part of a more complex shape. So once there's no point in delivering white circles anymore, you will probably have something else that needs white circles stacked on top. That would be a good time to reuse the previously built white circle factory for the new shape.

You might still want to build yet another white circle factory for even more white circles, but by reusing the existing white circle factory you at least won't need to rebuild one you deleted.

Eventually, some of the first stuff that you created will look very obsolete because it was built without the benefit of the new equipment you have since unlocked. It may also be cranking out stuff you have no use for anymore.

Once you have better designs using newer equipment, or otherwise don't need the old stuff, the old obsolete factory area should probably go to the scrap yard immediately to free up space for new stuff. This will make it easier to later identify space that can be reused.

This is because completing levels is just going to take longer than needed otherwise, and completing levels isn't usually going to help speed anything up.

Pretty much always, if you have all the possible to complete upgrades completed, or close to it, a single delivery belt of the required level goal shape will be enough to complete a level in whatever time it takes you to take a break from the game, for example.

Of course you can also do most upgrades, work on the level goal, and then while that is cranking out the shapes work on another upgrade instead.

But don't fall behind on the upgrade more than one upgrade level or so or you're going to be turning the game into a typical idle game where you're just waiting forever.

There's a little pin button in the upgrade popup. You might initially overlook it in your haste to build funky shapes.



Click that and the shape you want to focus on will the added to the left side of the screen:



This is pretty useful.

Since the map is so big, using markers to mark everything you might need to pan the map to is a big time saver.

Zoom out and you will see the UI hints for creating markers. You can hit M any time to create one though and you don't need to be zoomed out to do it.

Sometimes you can just use a human language name like "stars" or "white paint factory" for a marker, but when you start getting into complex shapes it becomes very unwieldy to try to name everything stuff like "circles with a little square in the right corner with stars on top".

This is where shape codes come in. They will also save you a lot of trouble.

To get a shape code automatically, look at one of the goal indicators at the left edge of the screen.



Click the little 'i' info button and click the 'copy key' button in the box that pops up.

This will copy something like CuCuCuCu to the clipboard.

Now create a new marker in a relevant place and paste that as the name.



Click OK. You will notice the new marker is now labeled with a picture of the shape and you no longer need to resort to awkward descriptions for 3+ layer multi-color complicated shapes.

Luckily the format is pretty easy to remember and it's not some base64 encoded gibberish.

To get the full documentation on the short keys and a decoder/viewer, click that "here" link. Here is the link[viewer.shapez.io], and here's a screen clip of the docs part:



The format is pretty simple, but you usually don't need to create one manually. Most of the time you can just copy and paste from the 'copy key' button you get from the little info button on a goal shape.

Unfortunately it's not possible to combine text with a graphic shape symbol using the short keys, so make sure your name contains only a short key and no other text. Otherwise the label for the marker will look like the text for the short key plus whatever you added.

Eventually you will unlock a feature called "Blueprints" which is actually just copy/cut and paste for your tiles. (If you try to use these features before you unlock blueprints, you'll get an error about Blueprints not being unlocked yet.)

Once you do unlock Blueprints, you'll notice that you only get copy, cut, and paste (plus the ability to rotate before pasting) but (at least in Shapez 1) there's no "blueprint database" where you can save frequently reused designs for pasting.

This is pretty easy to work around though. Just do this:

1. Zoom out and pan the map to an area far away from the hub in a corner somewhere, so far away that you're unlikely to want to build anything functional there.
   
   
2. Hit M to create a marker for this area. Name it something obvious like "Blueprints".
   
   
3. Copy and paste any good designs you will frequently reuse, like arrays of parallel stackers, cutters, mixers, etc, to this area.
   
   
4. You can now just jump back to this location any time you need a clean unmodified version of one of these designs to copy and paste.

Using this kind of design storage area can save a lot of time and trouble.

Looking at the map it will become apparent that the further away you get from the hub, the less regular and the more mixed up the shapes in the shape "deposits" are.

Two of the shape types are either rare or nonexistent in "pure" symmetric form:

• Pure Stars are rare in "nature" and there may only be one or two deposits of them, so it can be easier to just find irregular shapes with half of a star and cut/fuse full stars from those. But it's up to you how far you want to haul them.
  
  
• Pure Windmills (sometimes called Fans) absolutely don't exist naturally, and always must be "refined" from irregular shapes by cutting and fusing.

Below are images of the two shapes mentioned above. Notice that while they're both a bit stellar-looking and and can get confused at small size, they are not the same.


Star


Windmill (or Fan, Pinwheel)

I think that's pretty much it. If anyone can think of anything else please leave comments below.

This work © 2025 by NimrodX on Steam Community is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0[creativecommons.org]

Anyone who wants to translate this guide to any language is free to do so based on the license mentioned above, but please let everyone know about your translation in comments below and link to the original English guide somewhere in your translation.