Progress Update

Multiplayer Progress: Shared Worlds

A candid look at where hosted worlds stand — what works, what doesn't yet, and how you can push it forward.

Multiplayer is the most requested feature and the hardest thing we're building. The dream is simple: drop several players into one county, show them the same scrap, and let them haul together. Getting there means solving a stack of networking problems, and this update is an honest status check on each one.

What's working

  • Hosted sessions come up. We can spin up a shared world and get players into it, and the site's live status indicator reflects when the shared server is online.
  • Players see each other. Movement sync is functional — you can watch other testers drive and scrap in the same world.
  • The core loop survives contact. Collecting, loading, and selling still work with others present.

What's rough

  • Movement smoothness can stutter under load; we're improving interpolation.
  • Vehicle and cargo sync is the trickiest piece — a bed full of physics objects is a lot to keep consistent across clients.
  • Shared scrap spawning needs to stay identical for everyone; edge cases still slip through.
  • Reconnects after a drop aren't as graceful as we want yet.
  • Voice chat is early and will change.
Why it's hard: single player only has to be right on your machine. Multiplayer has to be right on everyone's machine at the same time, over the network, while trucks full of individual objects bounce down the road. That's the whole challenge in one image.

What's next

Our near-term focus is the sync trio — movement, vehicles, and shared scrap — because those three decide whether a session feels like one world or several overlapping ones. After that: cleaner joins and reconnects, then steady stability work. The Roadmap keeps the bigger picture up to date.

How testers make the biggest difference

Multiplayer bugs are often about context: how many players, who was hosting, what everyone was doing. If you hit a desync, jot those details and grab a clip if you can. Send it via Support. The Multiplayer Guide has a full reporting checklist and some etiquette for shared worlds.