How it works
What gets onto the site, and why.
The short version
Scrap Mechanic's Workshop has thousands of items. Most of them are abandoned first-attempts, duplicates, or very low effort. The goal here is to surface the genuinely worth-your-time creations without drowning them in noise.
Three things together decide whether a creation ends up here: an automated quality filter, human review, and community submissions.
1. Auto-ingest
Every day a cron job queries the Steam Workshop API for each kind (blueprints, mods, worlds, …), sorted by trending, and pulls the most engaging items. Two gates apply before a creation is even considered:
- Subscriber count is above a kind-specific minimum — this is the single best proxy for "people found this useful enough to save."
- At least a few days old, so Steam's initial thumbs-up/down spike has time to settle into a real signal.
| Kind | Min. subscribers | Min. age |
|---|---|---|
| Blueprints | 500 | 7 days |
| Mods | 100 | 3 days |
| Worlds | 150 | 5 days |
| Challenge Packs | 100 | 3 days |
| Tiles | 75 | 3 days |
| Custom Games | 100 | 3 days |
| Terrain Assets | 50 | 3 days |
| Other | 500 | 7 days |
These thresholds are tuned against what actually shows up on Steam. Mods have a lower bar than blueprints because mods are rarer and harder to find on the Workshop's native browser.
2. Human review
Passing the auto-filter gets an item into a pending queue — it does not make it public. A moderator reviews every pending item and either approves it (it goes live) or rejects it (it never appears). The filter is a first pass, not the final word; a blueprint with 5 000 subscribers that turns out to be a re-upload or meme doesn't get through.
This is why the site is smaller than Steam's Workshop browser, and deliberately so.
3. Community submissions
The auto-ingest only looks at what's trending. Hidden gems that never went viral get missed. If you have one — yours or someone else's — drop its Workshop URL at /submit. It lands in the same review queue as the auto-pulled items. No subscriber threshold applies — a moderator just eyeballs whether it's worth including.
Submitters get a credit badge on the creation page once it's approved, and a notification when the review is complete.
What if a creation shouldn't be here?
Every creation has a Report button next to its Steam link. Reasons include wrong tags, poor quality, spam, and "not Scrap Mechanic." Reports go to the moderator queue and get handled case-by-case — either a public mod note is added, the creation is archived, or the report is dismissed.
Comments can also be reported individually if something's off.
Costs & sustainability
The site runs entirely on free tiers — Vercel Hobby, Neon Postgres, Steam's Web API. No paid AI APIs, no per-request billing, no revenue goals. That's a deliberate constraint: the project is designed to keep running indefinitely without anyone needing to pay for it.