Happy Friday, assemblers. Short week? Long factory? Doesn’t matter — the belt keeps moving. Here’s your weekly roundup.

Shapez 2 — the shape-routing puzzle factory that’s been in Early Access — officially launches version 1.0 on April 23rd. That’s next Wednesday. The 1.0 release brings Steam Workshop support (everything from quality-of-life mods to full gameplay overhauls), 86 new achievements, and a revamped codex with actual search functionality. If you bounced off Shapez 2 during Early Access because it felt incomplete, now’s the time to look again. And if you’re already deep in it, brace yourself for the mod floodgates to open.

📌 Full announcement on Steam.

Game: Factorio

Use the Upgrade Planner (default key: U) to mass-upgrade your belts without manually replacing them one by one. Drag a selection over any section of your base, set it to upgrade yellow belts to red (or red to blue), and Factorio will queue up all the replacements automatically as you bring in the new belt materials. Most players discover this 20 hours too late — after they’ve hand-replaced hundreds of belts individually. Don’t be that engineer.

With Shapez 2 hitting 1.0 next week, we’re in a celebratory mood — which got us thinking about first impressions.

👉 This week’s question: What factory game deserves a fresh playthrough right now — and why?

Maybe it’s Satisfactory now that Update 1.2 is on its way. Maybe it’s a classic Factorio run with Space Age. Maybe it’s Shapez 2 at 1.0. Hit reply and let us know — we read every response.

We’re diving back into Shapez 2 this week, tidying up our shape-routing spaghetti before the 1.0 mod wave hits and makes everything we built look embarrassingly primitive.

That’s all for this week’s Conveyor Belt. If you found something useful, forward this to a fellow factory brain — or come argue about belt balancers with us on Discord: https://discord.gg/w3Q3JxWPeJ

Keep optimizing. 🏭