Huge thanks to everyone who jumped in and tested out Maker AI so far. Every prompt, success, and failure is helping us better understand how people want to interact with Maker AI. With an experimental feature like this, it’s helpful to understand where it’s hitting the mark (or missing it).
One of the clearest takeaways so far? Engagement is very high, even with its current limited functionality and confinement to the dorm. We expected interest—but have been surprised by the overall level of use.
Here’s what the average player is doing right now:
Spending over 35 minutes with Maker AI
Issuing over 300 prompts
Generating more than 20 textures or canvases
These numbers are pretty surprising for a feature that’s still so early.
Cost & Sustainability
With great usage comes... great costs. The level of engagement is helping us get a handle on the resource demands of supporting AI-driven tools for creators. No one else has a feature quite like this, so there’s no template to follow. We’re learning by doing.
We launched Maker AI as an experimental feature for RR+ users to try out in their dorm. We wanted to get some real data on how people would use Maker AI. Right now, it looks like the money we’d spend to support a month of Maker AI for an individual is way higher than the RR+ net revenue we get from that subscription. RR+ players will continue to be able to use Maker AI in their dorm for the next month or so as we add new features, but we don’t plan to link Maker AI to RR+ when it’s fully released outside the Dorm. Doing so would leave us financially upside down on each player using Maker AI.
We want Maker AI to be accessible to everyone - whether you’re a new player who just wants to check it out or a pro who is looking for a consistent speed boost, and we need to find a business model that lets us offer that.
Additionally, over the coming months, we have a lot of optimization to do to bring down the costs of popular AI requests. As an example, texture generation is one of the most popular features but also one of the most expensive. If we can bring down the cost of that feature and others, we can bring down the overall cost of Maker AI for players when it releases as a standalone feature.
What’s Coming Next
Keep using Maker AI and keep giving us feedback. That usage is really valuable in helping us improve Maker AI. And we expect usage to ramp up even further as we roll out Maker AI’s new capability - circuit graph generation.
While it won’t be able to generate every circuit under the sun, it’s already surprising us with the quality and complexity of what it can build. As with all generative tools, there will be some trial and error—debugging, re-prompting, refinement.
Out of the gate, we think this capability will be most useful if you’re already a circuits pro. We believe it’s going to significantly accelerate your ability to write large circuit graphs. And you probably will have the best intuition about how to prompt the AI to generate useful circuits and debug any errors.
Still, if you’ve never touched circuits before, this feature could be your on-ramp. The AI doesn’t just generate the circuit—it lays it out on a tidy grid for readability. It’s actually a great learning tool.
We feel it’s important to note that this feature was not trained on any in-game circuit graphs. Instead, we’re able to leverage the fact that LLMs are already very good at writing code without any training data from us. We’re asking Maker AI to write code (which it knows) then we translate that code into circuits (which it doesn’t). No code is ever pushed to the client, just circuits. And no circuits data is used for training Maker AI.
Let Us Know What You Think
If you haven’t checked out Maker AI yet, give it a shot. It will stay Dorm room only for RR+ players for the next few weeks (just be warned, RR+ can trial this feature out before everyone else, but Maker AI will not be a RR+ feature upon full release), until we build a plan for Maker AI to be available everywhere.
So whether you're an experienced builder or just starting out, it's already proving to be a surprisingly fun and interesting tool for creativity. We especially enjoyed BearDaBear’s “Change something in the room and I’ll guess what you changed” game. Not what we were expecting…
Jump in, experiment, and let us know what you think. Your feedback is shaping the future of this feature, and we’re just getting started. If you’ve got any thoughts, please go here to let us know.