Scrap Mechanic FAQ

The case for buying it is the building. You bolt parts together, wire them with logic and controllers, and drive the result around a world that fights back. If that idea does not appeal on its own, no amount of story content will carry the game for you.

The case against is that it is a physics sandbox, so creations break, flip and behave in ways no tutorial predicts. Players who want a tightly directed experience usually bounce off it.

What has genuinely changed since the Early Access reviews: a finished main quest line, voiced characters, a reworked world with new locations, and the Drilling Thunder content. If a review or video predates the release date above, treat its verdict on content volume as out of date.

The main quest line is what carries the story. It sends you across the farming planet, explains why the bots turned hostile, and ends with getting off the planet.

Finishing the story does not end the save. The world, your creations and the crafting systems are all still there afterwards, and most players keep building.

We do not publish a walkthrough of the final scenes here. The quest pages list the main quest line and what each step asks for, without spoiling how it resolves.

The fastest way to check this yourself is the announcement feed linked at the bottom of this page. It lists every patch and post in date order, so you can see the real gap between updates rather than relying on a forum thread.

Long quiet stretches during Early Access were real, and that history is why the question keeps being asked. Judge the current pace from the dates on the feed rather than from posts written during those stretches.

The developer's own site links to Steam for this game and to console stores for the games that have console releases, so the absence of a console link is informative rather than an oversight.

Anything on a phone app store using the name is not from the developer. If you want the game on a handheld, the honest answer is that you are relying on Windows compatibility, not on an official port.

We have found no official statement either promising or ruling out a console release, so this page does not claim one is coming.

Raids scale with the number of players in the session, so a shared farm draws heavier waves than the same farm would solo. The raid calculator shows how the player count changes the budget.

The host owns the save. If the host is offline, nobody else can continue that world, which is worth agreeing on before a long co-op run.

Steam publishes no maximum player count for this game and we have found no official figure, so we do not repeat the numbers that circulate in community posts.

This is not a small detail for this game. Building relies on precise aiming, a scroll wheel for part rotation and a lot of modifier keys, so even third-party controller mapping tends to be slower than the keyboard.

Driving your own creations is the part that suits a controller best, and that is also the part a mapping tool handles most easily.

With no demo available, the usual safety net is Steam's own refund policy rather than a trial build.

The game is a single purchase. The 1.0 release and the Drilling Thunder content came to existing owners at no extra cost, and no paid add-ons are listed.

Physics load is what actually strains a machine here, and it comes from what players build rather than from the world itself. A large creation with many joints and separate bodies can push a machine that runs the game fine while walking around.

The same applies in multiplayer: everyone in the session simulates the same creations, so one player's ambitious build affects everybody's frame rate.

Workshop parts mostly extend building. Subscribing to a part pack adds it to your inventory in the modes that accept it.

Mods change what a world depends on. A world built with modded parts needs those mods to stay subscribed, which matters if you plan to share a save or come back to it much later.

Buy Scrap Mechanic if you want the building to feed into gathering, crafting, defending a base and following a story.

Buy Trailmakers if the vehicle itself is the point, if you want to fly, or if you want to play on a controller from the couch.

The table below is drawn from the two store listings, field for field, so neither game is described in terms the other's listing does not publish.