I honestly thought this day would never come. For years, the “multiplayer when?” crowd has been shouting into the void of the Steam forums, and for years, the answer was always some variation of “physics are too hard to sync.”
Well, they finally did it. Sort of.
If you check your Steam library right now, Teardown has an update sitting on the experimental branch. It’s raw, it’s clearly barely holding itself together, but it is official multiplayer support. I spent about three hours last night trying to coordinate a heist with a friend, and while we spent half that time looking at connection error screens, the other half was the most fun I’ve had in this game since launch.
The Physics Synchronization Nightmare
Let’s be real for a second. The reason Teardown didn’t launch with multiplayer isn’t because the devs were lazy. It’s because syncing a fully destructible voxel world across a network is a technical nightmare. In most shooters, the server just needs to know where you are and where you shot. Simple coordinates. Vectors.
In Teardown, if I smash a support beam with a sledgehammer, the building doesn’t just play a “crumble” animation. The engine calculates stress, structural integrity, and generates hundreds of individual debris voxels that all have their own physics properties. Now imagine trying to tell another computer exactly where every single one of those voxels is landing, in real-time, with 50ms of latency.
It shouldn’t work. The bandwidth requirements alone should be impossible.
Yet, playing on the experimental branch, it actually holds up. Mostly. I noticed they seem to be using some aggressive culling on the debris for the client side—my friend saw a wall collapse slightly differently than I did—but the major structural changes synced perfectly. If I blew a hole in the floor, he fell through it. That’s the important part.
Mods vs. The Real Deal
I know what you’re gonna say. “But the modding community added multiplayer ages ago.”
I played those mods. They were impressive feats of engineering, absolutely. But they were also held together with duct tape and prayers. You’d desync if you looked at a propane tank the wrong way. The difference with this official implementation—even in this early, buggy state—is engine-level optimization. They aren’t hooking into the game from the outside; they’re rewriting how the engine handles state.
This matters because of the input lag. The experimental branch feels responsive in a way the mods never did. When I swing the hammer, the hit registers instantly on my screen, and the server seems to reconcile the destruction afterward. It’s a subtle difference, but it makes the game actually playable rather than just a tech demo.
How to Access the Branch (Don’t Blame Me If It Crashes)
If you want to try this, don’t just launch the game. You won’t see it. You have to opt-in manually, and Steam hides this stuff in menus that haven’t changed since 2010.
Here’s the workflow I used:
Right-click Teardown in your library. Go to Properties. Click the Betas tab on the left. In the dropdown menu, look for the experimental branch. It might be labeled something cryptic depending on the build version, but it’s usually the one that isn’t “None.”
Once you select it, Steam will force a download. It’s not huge, maybe a few hundred megabytes.
Warning: Backup your save files. Seriously. I didn’t lose anything, but I’ve seen threads where people corrupted their campaign progress because the experimental build tried to write data to a save format the main branch didn’t understand yet. Just copy your save folder to your desktop. It takes five seconds.
The “Experimental” Reality
I need to manage your expectations here. This is not a polished release. It is janky.
We had sessions where the join button just didn’t work. We had moments where my character model was invisible to my partner, leading to a very confused ghost-heist scenario. And the frame rate? Goodbye.
Teardown is already CPU-heavy. Throwing networking overhead on top of that crushed my framerate during heavy destruction scenes. When we decided to level a warehouse simultaneously with explosives, my rig—which usually handles this game fine—chugged down to single digits for a solid ten seconds while it tried to figure out who blew up what.
But then the dust settled, the frames came back, and we were standing in the rubble together. It was glorious.
Why This Matters Now
It’s 2026. Teardown isn’t a new game. Usually, single-player titles like this fade away after the DLC dries up. But adding official multiplayer support this late in the lifecycle? That’s a power move. It completely changes the value proposition of the game.
Sandbox games live or die by their community creativity. By unlocking multiplayer at the engine level, they aren’t just letting us play the campaign together. They’re handing the keys to the map makers and mode creators who can now build dedicated multiplayer experiences—Capture the Flag in a destructible city? Racing where you can destroy the track? The potential is ridiculous.
I’m going back in tonight. We still haven’t managed to complete the Lee Chemicals mission without accidentally killing each other, but hey, that’s half the fun.
