s&box 26.05.13 Patch Notes (13th May 2026)

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

https://sbox.game/news/update-26-05-13

AI Thumbnails

I've been making a lot of changes to our Workshop so we can identify and discourage the AI Slop.

Our moderators can now mark packages as having AI thumbnails, which will reduce their prevalence in lists and searches. I can understand why people would want to use AI to generate these thumbs, since it makes generating them easy and fast, it does have the massive downside of making everything look like the same shit. So we're actively discouraging it.

I've added a warning to the thumbnail page about this.

Review Filtering

Last week I added a new review system which contains positive and negative tags. This week we started using those reviews and their tags to help out with discovery.

First of all, you can now filter by the rating. The star rating is generated from a combination of thumbs up and down and the actual review ratings. My hope here is that it's intuitive for people to find games that other people have enjoyed, instead of having to fight their way through games that no-one loves.

You can also filter by the prominent review tags. For example, you might want to play a game where everyone agreed universally that the story was standout, or where everyone liked the graphics. Hopefully that's a lot easier now.

I think this gives some good community-led discovery options that we didn't have on launch, but obviously we'll keep improving this stuff over time.

Steam Reviews

Our steam reviews obviously aren't great. They're painful for us. They are showing us where we have made missteps in the release.

Around 35% of the reviews compare the game to Garry's Mod. They point out the differences between s&box and Garry's Mod, they wish it was more like Garry's Mod. I understand this, they wanted an iteration of Garry's Mod onto the Source Engine. They didn't want an engine and a platform. They wanted a Source 2 SDK, they didn't want a modern c# engine built on top of Source 2. I don't think we can win in that argument, it's going to be an expectation and preference thing. My only real hope is that eventually everyone will realise that this is a much better way to work for developers, and we'll end up with much better content because of it.

Around 27% of reviews think we're missing Workshop integration. They liked the way you used to subscribe to stuff out of game and then join the game and have all those mods. There is probably something in that, for certain types of mods, and we'll look into it. We have a system in our Sandbox Mode where you don't need to subscribe to anything. If you want a weapon or an NPC you click on it, and it downloads and spawns it. I guess this appears like we're shipping all this stuff with the game.. but we're not. Anyone can make these entities and publish them for anyone else to use.

Around 24% of reviews complained about AI Slop. I think I addressed this before. It's not our intention to encourage games created using AI. It's not our intention to encourage people making shit no effort games. But it's a UGC platform, there is always going to be dog shit. What we need to do is remove obvious trolls, discourage it and make sure it doesn't keep floating to the top. We are developers and this is our platform. Of course we don't want it filled with shit.

Around 20% of reviews complained about performance. This is a legit greivence, we have the data to back it. We're working on it constantly, and have made some big strides this week.

Around 12% of reviews complained about NFT's. I have no idea what this shit is about. Of course we don't have NFTs or blockchain stuff, and never will.

About half the people that reviewed negatively went on to play more. 6% of them played for over 10 hours. One French guy played for 280 hours after posting their negative review.

What I'm getting at is that we're listening and it's appreciated, so please keep the feedback coming, it's extremely useful to us.

Upscaling

I've added three upscalers this week based on the ones that ship with Valve's Deadlock. Upscalers let you render the game at a lower resolution to your display. They're useful if you're trying to play on a high resolution display, or simply have lower end GPUs. Onlythe 3D rendering is upscaled, UI elements are still rendered at native resolution.

They're not going to improve performance in every game or on all hardware, and they're not a replacement for real optimization work that needs to be done. But they are a good option for some people.

Stretch

The most straight forward, no tricks, just renders the image lower and stretches it bilinear to your native resolution. This is the fastest, for older GPUs, but makes zero effort to add to the image quality.

FSR

This is the FSR1 and it's a solid option still, it uses spatial upscaling instead of temporal upscaling. This means it's great for fast camera movements and games with heavy particles/effects where temporal usually shits the bed.

FSR3

This is the big one. FSR3 is a temporal upscaler, it accumulates detail across multiple frames, this produces a great looking image quickly, but comes with a big caveat - ghosting.

Fast moving cameras, translucents, particles and 3D world UI are all going to look a bit shitty, this is the nature of temporal and why we don't want to use it in our core rendering tech. However it's the expectation of many to be able to use this, so it's here as an opt-in but clearly labelled for what it is.

We're looking to add DLSS next, but it'll more or less be the same as FSR3. And absolutely no frame generation.

Open Mic Setting

We added an Open Microphone option to the sound settings. If active it will automatically transmit your voice if you are in agame that supports voice chat.

For anyone paranoid, we also added an option to completley disable microphone input.

Physics: Box3D Update

Box3D has been updated to the latest version. In this version is misc changes and bug fixes but the biggest feature added was something called contact recycling. This enables much more stable stacking of objects ontop of each other.

Explosive impact

Explosive barrels didn't blow up when you'd throw them at shit. Now they do. What a blunder.

🎁 Added

• Upscalers: Stretch, FSR, FSR3 - rendering the game at a lower resolution and upscaling it
• Mapping: boolean tool
• Mapping: vertex extrude via Shift+Drag
• Mapping: vertex select loop
• Mapping: UV vertex mode for moving UVs directly in the texture view.
• Clutter props now support instanced rendering with physics collision, no longer need a prefab for collision
• New Citizen/human animation parameters
• Open microphone voice setting with an explicit disable option for users who never want voice transmitted
• Gizmo handle preferences: worldspace, depth test, scale, and render distance
• Cone shape traces via `Scene.Trace.Cone`
• `Rigidbody.SleepThreshold` advanced property for controlling when rigidbodies go to sleep, useful for games with lots of stacking objects
• Mouse wheel up/down support for keyboard shortcuts, including with modifier keys
• Added `Color32.Lerp` and `Color32.LerpTo`

🧼 Improved

• Updated Box3D physics engine with contact recycling for more stable object stacking, mesh contact rework, and solver optimizations
• Platform overlay now renders independently even when no active cameras are present, preventing apparent freezes during loading
• Texture tool merged back into the face tool with collapsible groups
• Vertex mode layout improved, properties now saved to cookies
• Texture tool correctly saves and loads last state including bounds, mapping mode, and grid size
• Impact sounds now use more of the available sound variants
• Sound files created from data now correctly preserve loop points
• Addon editor assemblies now properly load ConVars, Mounts, and EditorEvents
• Explosive props detonate instantly from impact damage
• Prop break pieces now inherit MaterialGroup
• Achievements list no longer limited to 10
• Publishing now excludes all dot-files and dot-folders
• Layered modals get proper stacked z-indexing
• `GameTask.WhenAny` methods now return `Task`
• Eliminated SceneTrace boxing allocations in filter callbacks
• JSON reflection warmup is now cancelled before hotload to avoid race conditions
• Launching a map in another game ignores ParentPackage dependency
• Editor mouse position now updates while game widget is unfocused. Thank you @aidencurtis!

🪛 Fixed

• Fixed terrain crash in editor from null material during heightfield shape casting
• Fixed shape cast traces returning incorrect hit points on overlaps
• Fixed CCD bullet bodies incorrectly triggering sensors based on AABB instead of actual shape
• Fixed bone scaling not preserved through animation add pose operations
• Fixed invalid scale in animation subtract pose operations
• Fixed null and dangling resource crashes in animatable objects and scene objects
• Fixed vertex colors lost during mesh topology operations
• Fixed multi-edge merge in mesh editor
• Fixed vertex paint on non-manifold meshes
• Fixed BoolControlWidget not calling SignalValuesChanged
• Fixed NRE in console autocomplete for convars
• Fixed various issues reported in PVS static analysis
• Fixed URL validation hanging on DNS lookup
• Fixed DefaultMap stomping map selection for games that don't use the create game modal
• Fixed `TaskSource.WhenAny` not returning the completed task
• Fixed ModelPhysics created components not being available immediately after creation
• Fixed isolate selection when isolating children
• Fixed resize mode in mesh editor
• Fixed extrude nudge direction
• Fixed pivot mode snapping
• Fixed crash web page opening on benchmark runner
• Fixed Steam networking stutter on joining clients from stats collection on connections that haven't finished handshaking
• Fixed runtime configs not matching sbox.runtimeconfig.json
• Fixed incorrect tintMask in material output. Thank you @Beldaa!
• Fixed `GetComponentsInParent` in TriggerHurt causing double damage with player controllers. Thank you @Deotexh!