Getting a world into VRChat and visible to other users can be a bit difficult. Most of the methods we’ve used so far require quite a bit of manual intervention. This means slow iteration, slow updates, and confusing pathways to getting your creation published.

Today, we’d like to introduce the first step towards reducing this friction and helping users find Worlds you’ve created.

Introducing VRChat Community Labs: Stage 1

Community Labs is the new way for you to get your world published and out into the metaverse. When you upload a world, you will be asked if you want to publish the world to Community Labs. If you choose to do so, your world is placed into Community Labs. This is a place where anyone can upload their content, and allow users to browse and find content to explore.

During Stage 1 of Community Labs, the only additional step that World Authors must take to participate is check the “Publish to Community Labs” box when uploading a world. If you want your world to be considered for Public status, we ask that you still submit your World using the process we describe in our documentation.

Additionally, we’re changing the way that you update worlds. When you choose to update your world, your world no longer drops out of its current status back to Private. That means that if you currently have a Public world, you can update it whenever you like.

Exploring Community Labs

You can find Community Labs right in your Worlds tab. There’s a row dedicated to Community Labs, which will start collapsed. You can expand it to see the entire Labs row. Before the row expands, you’ll get a pop-up notifying you that the worlds in Labs aren’t reviewed yet, and thus could be a bit spooky.

You’ll know when you’re entering a Community Labs world. Portals to Community Labs worlds will have a special icon and a ring around them. In addition, you’ll receive a warning while loading a Labs world. This warning lets you know that the world you’re entering has not been curated. If you accept this warning, you’ll continue on with loading the world.

Quick report action, with a snazzy icon

If you find a Community Labs world that violates our Terms of Service or Community Guidelines, the Quick Menu will have a fast shortcut to the Report World menu. This allows you to quickly submit a Report on a world you find unsuitable for public access. Just like Public worlds, you can report Community Labs worlds for various reasons including malicious content, bad performance, or other issues. Additionally, if a world is so disruptive that it requires that you leave immediately, then you can find the world in your Recent Worlds row and report it that way.

Publishing to Community Labs

Authors are permitted to Publish one world to the Labs per week, and you must have a Trust Rank of at least User to submit a world to Labs. You can update your world whenever you like, no matter what state your world is in. As stated before, this also applies to all worlds that are currently Public!

During Community Labs Stage 1, we may adjust the Publish time limit, as well as the Trust Rank requirement.

As an author publishing a world during Community Labs Stage 1, you’ll have to submit worlds to Community Labs as well as the previous form submission available in our documentation. If you don’t mind users having to click past a warning when joining your world, then feel free to stick around in Community Labs.

Once we’re done with Stage 1 and have taken a look at how Labs has fared, things will change. In future stages, if your world does well in Labs and generally has a lot of good signs that your world is being enjoyed, your world will be made Public automatically! To reiterate, this isn’t how Community Labs will work in Stage 1, but this is the process we’re targeting in the final version. As we move on to further stages, we’ll document the new process for you.

If your world doesn’t get a lot of attention, your world may sit in Community Labs for quite some time. Worlds that are reported for legitimate reasons will be removed from Community Labs, and moderation action may be taken against the author in severe cases. As an aside, just like our current report system, we have safeguards in place to prevent “review bombing” and other forms of abuse.

We hope that you found this information about Community Labs helpful. Community Labs is entering Open Beta as a part of VRChat 2019.1.3 right now, and you can check it out by joining our Discord and looking in the #open-beta-info channel. We also have a new Canny board just for Community Labs for feedback and bug reports. Please try it out and let us know what you think!

In addition to this post, we’ve also got a FAQ up in our documentation. Check it out at the bottom of the VRChat Community Labs doc page.

This is an entirely new process for submission of worlds into VRChat, so please bear with us as we work through the nuances. We appreciate your patience, and are excited to see what you create and share with the metaverse.