Surprise!! With the holiday season now upon us and the ten year anniversary of SimplePlanes 1’s release on Steam coming up on December 17th, we’ve released another SimplePlanes 2 demo (or playtest, whichever you’d rather call it) for you to try that you can play RIGHT NOW, featuring an all-new area, new stock crafts, and more! This second demo will be available all month long, ending on January 5th, 2026, giving you a whole three weeks to play a limited version of SimplePlanes 2 by yourself, with friends, or with random people.
The very keen-eyed among you may have noticed a peculiar image in our most recent dev blog on our website, with hidden text saying “I AM CHAD”. Clicking that image took you to a secret teaser video (sorry, the hidden link didn't work on Steam), and the file name of that image, 12.15.png, actually revealed the release date of this demo. If you noticed that, congratulations! I have no specific prize for you, just know that your observational skills make me happy.
HOW TO JOIN
To join the demo, go to the SimplePlanes 2 Steam page and click the “Join the Playtest” button in the playtest box. The game will automatically be added to your Steam library so you can just download it and start playing!
What To Expect
The demo is a limited slice of the SimplePlanes 2 experience, limiting you to a specific portion of the map, and a read-only designer where you can only load crafts, paint them, and edit their decals (if applicable). In other words, you cannot build crafts yet, but you can edit their paint scheme to use all of the new textures and stuff in SP2. Multiplayer is here and fully functional, as are a host of activities to play, so go wild!
Bug Reports
If (and let’s be honest, when) you encounter a bug, please use the in-game bug report button to tell us what happened. It’s the little bug icon in the pause menu. Bug reports submitted this way give us various files such as your log file that help us a lot with deducing what went wrong.
What’s New in Demo 2
Compared to Demo 1, a number of things are different and we’re gonna lay out some of the more important changes here.
An all-new playable area
Rather than Driftwood Island, Demo 2 places you on the south of New Yoke island, allowing you to play in the location we showed off in our latest blog post, including a power plant, port, a military base, a train, and more. This location has more playable airspace, in particular there is significantly more playable area out towards the sea, hopefully giving you more room to breathe with faster and less maneuverable crafts like the Stormvark.
The USS Beast II has come to visit
The USS Beast II, our state-of-the-art aircraft carrier, is now inside the playable area and can be landed on, sunken, or whatever else you feel like.
A quick note: there was supposed to be a spawn location so you can easily spawn on one of its catapults, but we accidentally broke that so it’s not there. For now, if you want to spawn on the Beast, you’ll have to land on it and create a custom spawn location.
Many new stock crafts
Loads of new stock crafts have been added by our internal playtesters, ranging from supermaneuverable thrust vectoring fighter jets to civilian propeller planes to racecars. The name of each craft’s creator is included in the craft instructions.
New propeller engines
The propeller-powered stock crafts from Demo 1 have been updated to utilize our new procedural propeller engines, featuring better sounds and more realistic flight performance, among other things. All of the new propeller crafts use these as well, with the exception of the Vogel and Peanut.
Performance has been greatly improved
Performance (framerate), especially in multiplayer, was a major complaint in Demo 1 and we’ve spent a lot of the time between then and now working on making it better. Although there is still a lot of work to be done on that front, we’ve made a lot of progress that we hope you’ll notice.
On top of framerate we’ve spent a lot of time optimizing the networking, to hopefully offer you a smoother experience in multiplayer. That being said, we haven't managed to fully contain the chaos of random trolls, so we’ve decided to limit public lobbies to 10 people in order to reduce the chances of people unexpectedly running into a slideshow, while still allowing for private lobbies to have 16 players.
We really hope you all have fun with this demo! When you’ve played for a while, you’ll be asked to fill out a survey providing your thoughts. If you have the time, please consider filling this out, it’d help us a lot <3
If you’d like to discuss the demo with other players, or find people to play with, please consider joining our Discord Server! There are a lot of friendly people there who’d love to play.
The team will be entering a holiday break pretty soon, but before then we're planning to do a livestream on our YouTube channel where some of the team will be playing the game, and perhaps doing some other things. The scheduling isn't fully locked in right now, but it'll probably be on December 19th, starting sometime between 2-4 PM Central Time. We hope to see you then!