Shapez 2 Let's Play: Delivering Shapes Until Retiring as Factory Manager

At the center of the universe is a vortex that swallows everything. The basic flow of the game is to carry the shape displayed in the upper left of the screen to this vortex and deliver it. The first task was delivering a red half-circle. The player first looked for a spot where they could mine something close to that shape and placed a mining platform. Next, they packed extractors into the hole where shapes come out, connected them with conveyors, and carried the shapes to the vortex. According to the player, any set of machines you build once can be copied and pasted, so this is work you only have to do "once in your life."

Mined shapes are then processed. A machine perfectly suited for the job, which extracts only the right side of a shape, is provided from the start, and using it produces the desired half-circle. The player recommends saving general-purpose machine setups like this as blueprints, giving them names like "Right-Side Extractor," and reusing them.

Delivery just requires laying conveyors. You first lay out the rough route with giant conveyors, then switch to small conveyors once you reach the platform with the vortex. The vortex has four input points on each of its four sides, and the player added extra input points in preparation for the future.

With each delivery, the required shapes gradually become more difficult. Once you finish a set of deliveries, new machines are unlocked and you move on to the next era. The next task, a blue shape, required extracting only the bottom-left and top-right parts, and the player built it by using the "Left-Right Splitter" and "Right-Side Extractor" blueprints in that order.

The player emphasizes this as one of the game's great joys. Because of the blueprint system, there's no need to get into the details of implementation; you can get the shape you want just by plopping down blueprints one after another.

There are also additional objectives called "tasks" that you can complete while waiting for deliveries. Completing them earns research points, which can be used to speed up belts and unlock new machines. The final delivery of this era was a red circle stacked on top of a blue square, both of which had previously been delivered separately. The player says they felt "the kindness of the universe" in the way the delivery goals build on one another.

Next to be unlocked was a machine that extracts the three colors of fluid scattered across the universe and lets you paint any shape you like. The task was a shape with a blue star stacked on a square painted in a diagonal pattern. First, they extracted green fluid, piped it over, merged it with the shape conveyor at a painter, and made a green square.

For the diagonal pattern, they brought out the "Diagonal Swapper" from their treasured blueprints. It's a machine that takes two shapes as input and outputs shapes with their diagonal portions swapped. According to the player, internally it performs a left-right swap, a rotation, and another left-right swap, but "as long as the machine works, it's fine." They delivered the green square and the blue star, then delivered the two stacked together, completing this milestone.

For the following era of trains, the player starts by explaining the limitations of giant conveyors. Because laying giant conveyors has a cost, there was a practical limit to how far they could be extended. Rail tracks, on the other hand, cost nothing to lay, which meant every resource in the universe became usable.

In their initial state, trains can only carry shapes, and only one type of route can be set up. The player unlocked several machines so that trains could carry both shapes and fluids. To gather materials from the east, they first laid a long track heading east and placed cars at the end. One train was set to carry four types of shapes, and the green train three types of fluids. The player remarks that while trains in this game can't do much, they are designed to be beginner-friendly: you just connect them and they work.

In addition to this main line, they laid local lines to each promising material in remote areas and brought them into the main line. You only need as many local lines as there are types of materials you want. Since it's advantageous for the factories that use these materials to be close to the delivery point, they decided to build them near the vortex.

What the player calls "the basic unit of our factory" is a station where various materials are brought in. To start, they made the first delivery item: they painted it with fluid, combined cutting and rotation, assembled a shape that looked as if its top-right and bottom-left had been hollowed out, and connected it to the vortex. The plan was to link many of these units together into a massive factory complex.

At this stage, the old machines became unnecessary, so they were removed in favor of a layout consisting only of trains and factories. As a result, the player says, they settled on an easy-to-understand design in which items simply flow from right to left.

Still, they wanted to get rid of the delivery conveyors. So they unlocked the ability to send entire trains into the vortex and added dedicated routes for delivery trains. Along the way, they also unlocked the roller coaster feature. All the delivery conveyors were removed, and delivery trains were set up at each factory. This freed them from the annoying cluster of small rooms, and everything from bringing in materials to delivery came to be handled entirely by trains.

Here the player explains the resource system, which they hadn't mentioned until now. Placing things in the universe requires resources, which are earned through deliveries. At this point, everything placed so far had used about 3,000 resources in total, and the display in the upper left showed about 3,000 remaining. Judging that they could expand to twice the current size, they copied and pasted the same facilities as on the east side onto the west side, doubling production capacity. As a result, the deliveries for this era were finished in an instant.

The next unlock, the pin pusher, is a machine that adds a small pin beneath the bottom of any shape passed through it. This era's tasks were shapes with pins inserted in various places. Reasoning that it's ultimately just a simple one-input, one-output machine, the player connected the factory loosely and finished the deliveries in an instant.

With the color mixer that followed, you can work with a total of seven colors in addition to the three primary colors. Before introducing it, the player tidied up the factory and used the resources they had earned to lay tracks to the north as well. Separate from tasks and milestones, there's a system for delivering items requested in the past, and the rewards are reportedly good. The player divided the work so that the northern factory handled this, the west handled tasks, and the east handled milestones.

The first delivery item of this era could be made simply by painting a square with yellow fluid mixed from red and green. Since two delivery items can be made from a single square, deliveries can be made at double speed, which the player calls a real "perk." The other delivery item had a similar structure, so they handled it by copying and pasting the factory. In the final stage of combining the two, the upper part required white, so they mixed red, green, and blue to make white. While waiting, they copied and pasted factories to increase the delivery speed and completed the milestone in a few minutes.

The last thing unlocked was the crystal generator. It's a machine that injects fluid as crystal, turning all the empty parts of a shape into crystal. This era's delivery items serve as the final exam, and once you finish them you can call yourself a full-fledged factory manager.

For the first part, they processed a square down to only its diagonal portions and set up a crystal generator. Since it's best to have twice as much fluid as shapes for producing crystals, they also borrowed fluid from the neighboring station. The other part was a white circle with a pin pushed onto it, which the player positioned as a comprehensive review of the previous era. They mixed the three colors to make white, placed a pin pusher and a painter, and connected them to a delivery train.

There's a constraint in the stage of combining the two parts. Crystals are extremely fragile and shatter if dropped, so they can only serve as the base. This final delivery item required stacking two crystals. So they built a process that temporarily places a pin where the upper crystal would go, stacks the parts, and injects the crystal at the very end. Since the groundwork was already laid, all that remained was to add a crystal generator at the end, pour in two streams of fluid, and secure a delivery route. They copied and pasted the factory, waited about 10 minutes, and passed the final exam.

Finishing the final exam unlocks two slots for random delivery goals. Delivering these endlessly lets you gain levels infinitely, but rebuilding the factory for every goal is a hassle. So the player unlocked logic circuits and other features and decided to build a machine that would make anything automatically.

With the unlocked machines, you can receive the shape information of a delivery item with an antenna, connect it to a display with wires, and show it. Automation also becomes possible, such as extracting only part of the received information and sending only matching shapes onto a conveyor. After wrestling with this, the player completed the "Make-Anything Machine." A train coming from below brings in shapes and fluids, and the materials flow from right to left through each machine. After going through processes such as cutting, painting, and crystallization, the finished product is output and delivered directly.

With every task automated, the player retired as factory manager and ended the playthrough. Before playing, they had thought it was a mysterious game where they didn't know what to aim for, but in the end they became so absorbed that they lost track of time. Although the video couldn't cover the detailed blueprint creation, the player says that getting absorbed in work meant to make work easier was also tremendously fun. They closed by comparing that enjoyment to the pure joy of making things, like when you write a program or do DIY to make your own life easier.