Tower Lab Updates Hub

Tower Lab is still approaching Steam Early Access. The scheduled date is September 7, 2026. Devon Powell and Xueer Zhu (Play Tug Studio) are shipping a single-player physics roguelite tower defense on Windows and macOS, with Steam Deck listed as Playable. This hub is the wiki’s patch desk: what Early Access is supposed to contain, how long the window is planned to last, and where campaign modes sit relative to that plan. It does not treat the game as already unlocked on your account.

Open Early Access for the store FAQ list, demo dates, and Discord loop. Open the roadmap for the full-version promises: more towers, traps, units, machines, cores, cards, campaign regions, Endless depth, Workshop, and polish. Open the campaign walkthrough when you need the five modes translated into play order instead of patch language.

Upcoming Early Access, not a finished 1.0

The Steam FAQ is explicit. Early Access exists because the game’s depth is emergent physics, and a two-person team wants a larger community breaking combinations. The planned window is roughly six to twelve months. The price is planned to rise about 25% when the game leaves Early Access. No dollar amount belongs on this wiki, because the store can change a number overnight and a percentage is what the developers actually wrote.

That framing matters for every other page on the site. Starter decks are hypotheses you will test in an unfinished economy. The tower roster will grow. The tower tier list will rot if you treat a pre-launch ranking as law. Use this hub as the reminder that balance, late-game content, and Workshop tooling are still listed as in progress.

What the store currently lists

The “current state of the Early Access version” block on Steam is the checklist this wiki copies, then dates. As of the pre-launch FAQ it includes:

• Twenty playable towers, each with a tech tree, interacting through real physics rather than scripted damage.
• Twenty-six run-modifying player cores plus fourteen Hazard Cores (forty cores total), seven physics-effect cards, eight utility cards, and seven traps.
• Five playable machines with distinct starting tools, active abilities, and run styles.
• Five modes: a roguelite deckbuilding campaign across three regions with Hazard modifiers; arcade Standard TD; Endless on a procedurally expanding map; physics Puzzle challenges; and a sandbox level builder with Steam Workshop.
• Meta-progression, a collection screen, and leaderboards for multiple modes.

Photo Mode, achievements, Steam Cloud, Family Sharing, and a level editor flag also appear on the store. Community posts have used slightly different card counts during development. When a news post and the FAQ disagree, this hub prefers the FAQ and then links the Early Access page for the long form.

Demo, playtests, and the two-person loop

A public demo ran from January 23, 2026 through June 29, 2026 and then came down ahead of the Early Access date. Steam listed that demo at 95% positive from 44 reviews. Community playtests existed before the demo, including the session captured on the Early Access page’s video. Deckbuilding overhauls during that period added shop rerolls, card removal, and randomized starts. Tesla, Salvage, and Hot Swap later left the Region 1 starting deck; that is a patch fact, not a rumor, and it is why starter decks refuse to assume Tesla in the first shop.

Discord is the developers’ stated daily loop: bugs, contraptions, and balance talk. Steam discussions and reviews are the public record. This wiki is unofficial. If a number on these pages disagrees with a patch note posted tomorrow, the patch note wins. Keep community links next to this hub so you can jump to Steam, Discord, YouTube, and X without hunting URLs in a loading screen.

Pages in this hub

• Early Access — why EA, the store content list, demo history, playtests, Discord, and the planned price bump.
• Roadmap — full-version plans copied from the Steam FAQ, the six-to-twelve-month window, and what “more” means for towers and regions.
• Demo patch notes — v0.0.4 through the June 20, 2026 rebalance, Tesla leaving Region 1, and the demo shutdown.
• Campaign walkthrough — how Campaign, Standard TD, Endless, Puzzle, and Workshop actually play, including weekly Endless tags such as Overmass.
• System requirements — Windows and macOS minimums, DirectX 11, Metal, 2 GB storage, Deck Playable. Not a Linux support claim.
• Physics basics — the design that makes patches weird: no HP, knockoff payouts, Grow versus Shrink.

Use the guides hub for how to play, and the towers hub when a patch adds a card this updates desk has not rewritten yet.

How to track patches without rumor

A practical watch list after September 7, 2026:

1. Steam news hub for numbered patches and FAQ edits.
2. Discord for the same-day “this Tesla node is broken” reports.
3. This wiki’s Early Access page for the frozen store list, then the roadmap for whether a patch was a promised roster expand or just polish.
4. Matter farming if shop prices move; example M200 / M400 values will not last forever.
5. Tower tier list only after you have played the patch. Ranking a FAQ is not ranking a game.

Do not mark the Steam build as unlocked on your own notes until the store date is real. This page will keep using scheduled language until that happens. Tower Lab’s update story is a two-person physics lab inviting more testers. Treat every list here as a living contract with the store FAQ, and refresh it when Play Tug Studio does.