s&box 26.05.06 Patch Notes (6th May 2026)

A new update has been released, you can view the full changes on our blog post.

https://sbox.game/news/update-26-05-06

Reviews

The review system has been updated with tags. This will allow users to select specific elements of a game that they like, or don't like.

These tags are aggregated so you can see exactly what everyone thinks at a glance.

The intention is to use these reviews to punish and reward games in terms of discovery. We'll also be able to create new discovery categories, like most original, most polish and biggest ai slop.

Reports

You can now file reports in game. The reports system has a similar tag system, which allows us to categorize and group the reports on the backend. This should help us tweak discovery too.

Performance Metrics

We've updated the performance metrics page to be even more transparent, not only showing medians but also first (P25) and third quartiles (P75) showing the worst and better experiences.

There's now a breakdown of the best and worst performing popular games on the platform.

As well as a breakdown of the best and worst performing popular hardware - as you can see we have a lot of work to do with the Steam Deck still.

Ditching Cloudflare

We've moved away from Cloudflare for both our API and CDN, replacing them with Azure Front Door and Bunny.net. There's advantages and disadvantages of course, but they've left a bad taste with obscure pricing that we'd rather not support over all.

This isn't really a drastic change for us, our tech stack is flexible enough that we can try out different places easily.

Most people shouldn't even notice a difference, downloads should be just as fast.

For Russians it should be great since Cloudflare is mostly blocked there, so now you should be able to play the game without a VPN.

Faster Load Times

We've optimized the loading process, especially when joining servers and lobbies. Joining should be up to two times faster now.

Turns out, that for years, we were loading and compiling packages twice on connect, that's fixed now.

Main Menu Stuttering

When we released we got a shit load of lobbies - querying 1000 of them on the main menu was causing big stutters for some people.

Whilst querying lobbies is async it wasn't always being done on the thread pool, and if it ran on the main thread it would stall the game for 2.5 seconds each time it queried lobbies every 10 seconds.

We've fixed this by both: optimizing the actual query removing heap allocations and locks, and enforcing the work to be done on the thread pool.

Steam Trading Cards

Steam trading cards are now avaliable along with emoticons, badges and profile backgrounds.

These won't drop if you got the game for free unless you've purchased cosmetics, that's just how Steam works.

You can also get these items in the Steam Points Shop.

Polish Pricing

The price in Poland was bullshit, it was set from Steam's pricing tool but didn't properly reflect the current economy. So last week we changed it from 91,99zl to 69,99zl.

If you got it whilst it was more expensive feel free to refund and rebuy.

Summary

Our first weekly patch after release! 🎉

While there has been a lot of negativity, both deserved and undeserved, it has been really great to see people enjoying everyone's game. I love seeing developers see their games get played. It's exactly what we have been missing during the developer preview, where people only really played their own games. Now we're seeing real world usage and we're reacting directly to it.

We always release as early as possible and iterate. We did it with Garry's Mod, we did it with Rust, and we're going to do it with s&box. We know what our challenges are right now. We know what sucks, and we're iterating to fix it all.

Cya next week for another one 😘

garry

🎁 Added

• Project templates including Player Controller, Sandbox Map, and Sandbox Game Addon
• Mapping components: door & button with Doo support
• Content reporting system
• Reviews now let you select various positive and negative tags
• Prop explosion damage now includes an "explosion" tag so games can react to it
• `Connection.OwnerSteamId` shows the owner of a family sharing account
• `Sound.Play(SoundEvent, Mixer)` overload for playing sounds with a specific mixer
• Separate mesh components added to object selection mode (Alt+N)
• Drag models, maps, sounds directly into the Hierarchy panel instead of just Scene View
• Tools context menu showing per-tool keyboard shortcuts
• `version` console command to display engine version info
• Allow multiple `\[Doo.ArgumentHint]` attributes on a single property
• Physics simulation on proxy rigidbodies when transform sync is disabled

🧼 Improved

• Loading screens now show meaningful progress with the main thread unblocked during load
• Scene objects now render off the main thread by default, improving rendering parallelism
• PreJIT moved off main thread, eliminating 4+ second stalls when joining servers
• Clients no longer download redundant code archives when joining servers, cutting load time by ~33%
• Lobby queries are significantly faster with async processing and reduced allocations
• UI panels with backdrop blurs can now be batched, reducing draw calls
• Matchmaking silently retries the next best lobby on connection failure
• Particle system performance improved with object pooling
• PolygonMesh.Rebuild optimized — menu scene mesh build time reduced from 1s to 300ms
• Eliminated per-field boxing allocations in network message serialization
• Reduced sound cache memory usage from 512MB to 256MB
• Sprite batch rendering uses zero-copy approach for better performance
• Deep-copy of embedded resources only performed in editor, not at runtime
• "Waited 500 ms for jobs to complete" no longer gets stuck on main thread jobs

🪛 Fixed

• Collision contact point calculation using best separation from manifolds
• Potential crash with material overrides when copy source handle is invalid
• Managed callbacks firing before BuildDependencyData completes
• Vulkan swapchain destruction handling
• Material load reentrancy crash in terrain tool
• Animated textures (GIFs, animated Steam avatars) not playing through the lazy load path
• `GameObject.GetBounds` incorrectly including origin when components have bounds
• Box/lasso selection picking hidden objects in the editor
• Unfinished mapping primitives lingering when entering Play mode
• Death ragdolls spawning in T-pose on explosion
• Vertex paint tool undo/redo sync, selection tracking, and vertex count display
• Duplicating GameObjects sharing ResourceGenerators between original and copy
• Lobby privacy settings not being applied immediately on creation
• Other players appearing with no clothing due to inventory verification on clients
• Unowned avatar items not being removed when first loading
• Esc Key now closes modals, dropdowns, and cancels text entry
• Footer friends list debounce
• Missing Steam auth ticket validation
• 3D text bounds not recalculating when text properties change - Thanks @Infiland
• All-white material thumbnail lighting on blend and reflective materials - Thanks @frotstar