Brickadia LLC just released the first major update for their ambitious brick-building sandbox, and it’s a game-changer. After eight years of development that included completely rewriting Unreal Engine 5 to support their hyper-optimized brick system, the team has delivered customizable bots and a completely overhauled prefab system in their Early Access 2 update. For anyone who’s ever dreamed of building massive cities with friends online or creating physics-based contraptions that actually work, this update makes those dreams significantly easier to realize.
The game launched into Steam Early Access on July 11, 2025, after years of alpha testing and refinement. But this wasn’t your typical Early Access release where developers throw an unfinished mess at players and promise to fix it later. Brickadia arrived feeling like a complete game, completely polished and content-rich thanks to nearly a decade of development. The December update builds on that foundation by addressing two of the community’s most requested features: better ways to save and share complex creations, and AI characters to populate the worlds players build.
Building With Millions of Bricks Actually Works
The technical achievement behind Brickadia deserves recognition before diving into the new features. Most building games struggle when you place thousands of objects. Brickadia handles millions without breaking a sweat. The development team spent years optimizing their brick system to the point where you can construct sprawling cityscapes with intricate detail, and the game runs smoothly on hardware ranging from Android phones using basic graphics to high-end PCs pushing 4K resolution with global ray tracing.
This optimization didn’t happen by accident. The team actually modified Unreal Engine 5 itself, reintegrating PhysX 5.1 after Epic Games removed it in favor of their Chaos physics system. Why? Because PhysX runs several times faster in large simulations and works better with their custom brick collision code. They’re possibly the only developers running a custom branch of Unreal Engine 5.1 that switches between physics engines with a single build setting.
The dynamic level of detail system they implemented means Castle MoorDread’s 4.5 million vertices and Brickadia City’s 54 million vertices render efficiently at any distance. When you’re close, you see every brick in perfect detail. Step back, and the system automatically simplifies the geometry without visual degradation. This allows the game to scale from small vehicles to massive cities without performance collapse.
What the Bots and Prefabs Update Changes
The new bot system transforms empty worlds into living spaces. You can spawn customizable AI characters, give them any weapon from swords to guns, adjust their aggression levels, enable 360-degree vision, and watch them interact with your creations. Want peaceful NPCs wandering through your medieval village? Set them unarmed with low aggression. Prefer chaotic team deathmatch? Arm everyone with rifles and let the chaos unfold. The bots look identical to players and can be given custom avatar skins, making them indistinguishable from real people at a glance.
These bots aren’t decorative. They navigate obstacles, jump over barriers, reload weapons appropriately, damage players in minigames, join teams based on spawn colors, and count toward win conditions like last man standing. You can create zombie horde defense scenarios, populate racing events with AI drivers, or stage elaborate battles between bot armies while you direct the action from above.
The prefab system overhaul addresses a fundamental challenge in building games: how do you save complex, interconnected creations and share them easily? The old system had limitations. The new one integrates prefabs directly into your catalog. Build an entire car with working physics, suspension, and steering. Save it as a prefab. Place it anywhere you have permissions with a single click. You can even copy from live worlds to your clipboard and paste into different instances, making collaborative building dramatically more efficient.
Build Together in Real Time
Everything in Brickadia happens in-game without external editors. Multiple players can modify the world simultaneously in real-time multiplayer, enabling seamless creative collaboration. This design philosophy extends to every system. Want to create interactive experiences with buttons, switches, and logic gates? Build them live while playing. Need to add physics to transform your static structure into a moving vehicle? Select it and apply physics instantly using the Selector tool.
The wire logic system lets you create circuits without programming knowledge. Connect buttons to doors, link sensors to lights, chain logic gates to create complex behaviors. Players have built functional calculators, automated defense systems, intricate puzzles, and elaborate traps using nothing but the in-game logic tools. The physics engine supports bearings, motors, servos, sliders, and other mechanical components that bring creations to life.
From Alpha to Early Access Over Eight Years
Brickadia’s development journey demonstrates remarkable patience and commitment. The project started as something the team believed in, spending years optimizing core systems before considering public release. They participated in Steam Greenlight before Valve shut that service down. They ran multiple open alpha testing periods, gathering feedback and refining mechanics based on what actually worked versus what sounded good on paper.
The decision to delay Early Access until July 2025 meant the game arrived far more polished than typical early access titles. Players expecting bugs and missing features instead found a complete experience with intuitive building tools, a growing library of bricks, functional multiplayer, dynamic weather systems, comprehensive avatar customization, an online gallery for sharing creations, and enough depth to support everything from architectural showcases to engineering challenges to combat arenas.
Community Creativity and Steam Workshop Integration
The in-game gallery showcases what happens when you give creative players powerful tools. Browse through community creations ranging from faithful recreations of real-world landmarks to fantastical structures that defy physics. Detailed islands. Functional spaceships with interiors. Massive cityscapes with distinct districts. Intricate mechanical contraptions that accomplish specific tasks. The variety demonstrates the tool’s flexibility and the community’s imagination.
Sharing your own designs takes seconds. Build something cool, save it, upload it to the gallery. Other players can download and place it in their worlds, modify it, learn from your techniques, or use it as a starting point for their own creations. This ecosystem of shared creativity accelerates everyone’s ability to build impressive projects by learning from each other’s solutions to common challenges.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Brickadia enter Early Access?
Brickadia launched on Steam Early Access on July 11, 2025, after approximately eight years of development and multiple alpha testing phases. The first major update arrived in December 2025.
Who developed Brickadia?
Brickadia LLC developed and published the game. The team spent years building custom optimization systems and even modified Unreal Engine 5 itself to support their vision for large-scale brick building.
What makes Brickadia different from other building games?
Brickadia handles millions of bricks simultaneously without performance issues through hyper-optimized systems. Everything happens in-game with real-time multiplayer collaboration, dynamic physics, wire logic circuits, and no external editors required.
What’s included in the bots and prefabs update?
The Early Access 2 update added customizable AI bots with weapon support, navigation, and team functionality, plus a completely reworked prefab system that saves entire contraptions with all interconnected objects to your catalog for easy placement and sharing.
Can you play with friends?
Yes, Brickadia is built around multiplayer. Multiple players can build together in the same world simultaneously, host custom servers with specific rules, create game modes, and share creations through the online gallery.
What kind of things can you build?
Players build everything from towering skyscrapers and detailed cities to functional vehicles with physics, intricate mechanical contraptions with wire logic, islands, spaceships, interactive puzzles, combat arenas, and custom game modes.
Does Brickadia support NVIDIA DLSS?
Yes, Brickadia supports NVIDIA DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation for RTX 50 Series GPUs, and DLSS Frame Generation for RTX 40 Series users, enabling high performance even at 4K resolution with ray tracing enabled.
Can you run it on lower-end hardware?
Yes, Brickadia scales from Android phones using basic graphics through Gamehub Lite to high-end PCs with 4K resolution and global ray tracing. The dynamic level of detail system ensures it runs on a wide range of hardware.
Conclusion
Brickadia represents what happens when developers refuse to compromise their vision. Eight years of development produced a brick-building sandbox that genuinely handles millions of objects, supports real-time multiplayer collaboration without limitations, and provides tools powerful enough for engineering challenges while remaining intuitive for casual builders. The December 2025 update proves the Early Access roadmap isn’t just promises. Customizable bots bring life to empty worlds, while the reworked prefab system makes sharing complex creations effortless. For players frustrated by building games that can’t handle their ambitions, Brickadia delivers the performance and features needed to create truly massive projects. Whether you’re recreating real-world architecture, designing physics contraptions, building functional vehicles, creating custom game modes, or just experimenting with friends, the tools exist to make it happen without fighting against technical limitations. The community creativity on display in the online gallery proves these tools work. After eight years of patient development, Brickadia LLC built something special that respects both player creativity and technical excellence.