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Which Tidy-Up Games Use AI Art? A List
Librarian discloses AI-assisted assets. Sort Them Ducks is single-player. The whole shelving-sim field compared on art provenance and co-op, in one table.
Steam has published developer statements about AI-generated content on store pages since January 2024, in a freeform box most players never scroll far enough to read. In the small corner of Steam where you pick things up off a floor and put them back on shelves, we opened ten store pages on 4 September 2026: three carry one of those boxes, three state the opposite in their own description, and four say nothing either way. Five of the ten list any kind of multiplayer.
The Techplay team read all ten store pages on 4 September 2026 - the Steam appdetails and appreviews APIs for the structured facts, the live store page for the disclosure text - and this is what they say, quoted rather than characterised. You will also find the second question people ask about this genre answered on the same evidence: which of these games you can actually play with another person, taken from Steam’s own category list rather than from user tags.
Alchemess launches 17 September 2026
What is Alchemess? A cozy first-person sorting game from Techplay, a two-person studio in Phuket. 2,080 hand-named potions, 26 shelves from Alpha to Omega, a gold Sun shelf and a silver Moon shelf, no timer, no fail state and nothing you can lose, playable alone, in co-op, or as a Sun-vs-Moon race, US$5.99 on Steam and the Epic Games Store from 17 September 2026, with a 10% launch discount.
How does Steam’s AI disclosure work?
Before any of the entries below make sense, it helps to know what the system is and what it is not. Valve announced the current rules in January 2024 and revised them on 17 January 2026. Three things follow from that, and all three are visible on any store page you open.
It is a survey answer, not an audit. When a developer submits a build, Steam’s content survey asks them to describe how AI is used in the game. Whatever they type is published on the store page under the heading AI Generated Content Disclosure, introduced by Valve’s own fixed line: “The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:”. Valve does not grade, verify, rewrite or rank that answer. What you are reading is the studio’s own account of its own process.
There are two categories, and they are different things. Valve distinguishes pre-generated content - assets made with AI help during development and shipped in the build - from live-generated content, which the game produces while you are playing. Live-generated content carries extra obligations around guardrails. Every disclosure quoted in this article is the pre-generated kind: static assets that were made once, before release.
The scope narrowed in January 2026. The revision moved the focus onto what ships with the game and is consumed by players, including store and marketing art, and away from the tools a studio used along the way. AI coding assistants, in particular, no longer trigger a disclosure on their own. That matters for reading old and new pages side by side: a page from 2024 and a page from 2026 were answering slightly different questions.
And the rules did not exist before 2024. A game released in 2019 was never asked, so its silence carries no information at all. That single fact accounts for one of the four silent pages below.
Does Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library use AI?
The question usually arrives in a search box in its shortest form - librarian tidy up the arcane library ai - and it usually lands on a forum thread, so here is the answer in full rather than in summary. Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!, by ArtRising, released 30 April 2026, carries an AI Generated Content Disclosure. Read on its store page on 4 September 2026, it says, in its entirety:
“The four assets in this work—one UI component and three landscape paintings used as wall decorations (frames not included)—were produced using additional AI for refinement. None of them were created by AI from the ground up.
AI helped with grammatical corrections for in-game text, which were then carefully reviewed and adjusted by hand.
We only consider AI to be a supportive tool. Every detail is meticulously crafted with human intent, as our creative process is still firmly anchored in manual craftsmanship.”
That is the whole of it, and it is unusually specific. It names a count (four), it names what they are (one UI element, three wall paintings), it says the frames around those paintings are not among them, it separates asset work from a grammar pass on text, and it states the studio’s position on the tool. A player deciding whether that matters to them has everything they need to decide, which is the entire point of the disclosure field working properly.
For context on the game itself: it is a single-player library sim in which you shelve 3,072 books, unlocking abilities as you complete rows, and it is the runaway commercial success of this micro-genre - 24,863 reviews across all languages, Very Positive, as of 4 September 2026, of which 23,488 are positive. If you filter that page to English it shows a smaller number, which is why the all-language total is the one worth quoting. It was priced at US$4.79, discounted from US$5.99, on the same date.
Which shelving sims disclose AI-assisted assets?
Three of the ten. All three are quoted below exactly as their store pages read on 4 September 2026, and all three are pre-generated assets rather than anything the game makes while you play.
TV Archive: Tidy Up Together, by Games Together, released 14 August 2026, discloses: “AI was used only as a supporting tool for the design of fictional images on the videotapes.” In a game about shelving 3,180 videotapes into twenty categories, the fictional cover art on those tapes is a large amount of unique small artwork, and the disclosure tells you which layer it applies to. The game had 542 reviews across all languages, Mostly Positive, and was priced at US$4.99.
Sort The Capybaras, by CapybaraKoala, dated 8 October 2026 on its store page, discloses: “Some of the game model mesh are crafted with AI Support, we have 1 artist creating toy design and 1 model artist to craft model of our own design. AI is used to help edit some of the model.” This one is worth reading twice, because it is doing something the other two do not: it describes the human side of the pipeline as well as the AI side, naming two artists and their roles. For a game built on 4,800 distinct capybara toys, that is a useful thing for a buyer to know.
Librarian’s disclosure is quoted in full in the section above. All three studios are doing what the system asks, in plain language, and each describes a supporting role rather than a wholesale one. Disclosing AI-assisted assets on Steam is legal, permitted and increasingly ordinary, and a page with a disclosure on it is a page whose developer answered the question rather than one that has something wrong with it.
| Game | Disclosure summary, read 4 Sep 2026 | Category |
|---|---|---|
| Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! | Four assets refined with AI, plus a grammar pass on in-game text | Pre-generated |
| TV Archive: Tidy Up Together | AI as a supporting tool for the fictional images on the videotapes | Pre-generated |
| Sort The Capybaras | AI support in editing some model meshes, alongside two named artists | Pre-generated |
Which ones say no AI was used at all?
A second group does something different, and the difference is worth naming precisely: these games have no AI Generated Content Disclosure box, because they told Valve there was nothing to disclose. Instead they put a statement in the first line of their own store description, which is marketing copy rather than a survey answer. Both are honest; they are simply different fields, written for different reasons.
Tidy Up Together, by Malum Games, released 14 August 2026, opens its description with: “NO AI WAS USED IN THE MAKING OF THIS GAME”. It is a co-op organizing sim about restoring a fantasy adventurer’s shop after a wizard’s tornado spell, with online co-op and unlockable abilities. 208 reviews across all languages, Mostly Positive, at US$5.99 on 4 September 2026.
Tidy or Treat, by Luriel, dated 7 September 2026, opens with the same sentence, word for word: “NO AI WAS USED IN THE MAKING OF THIS GAME”. It is a Halloween shop-tidying game with four difficulty modes and unlockable tricks, and its category list includes Multi-player and Co-op.
A fourth game, just outside our ten, phrases it differently and adds a detail. Put Back Stuff, by Shellbunny, dated 13 September 2026, says: “No AI used in the creation of this project. Just one developer and a boat load of caffeine.” It is a single-player supermarket sim with more than 5,000 placeable items across 300 shelves.
Alchemess belongs in this group, on the same terms and with the same caveat. Our store description reads: “The labels are properly printed: aged parchment, a letterpress watermark of the shelf’s own letter, a vermillion drop cap edged in gold, hand-set type. No AI art anywhere.” The concrete version of that: all 260 potion names across the 2,080 bottles were written by hand, and every label was typeset by hand. The naming system is the subject of our post on writing 260 potion names, and the Alchemess store page carries the screenshots at a resolution where you can read the letterforms yourself. It is a production fact about our game, stated the same way everyone else’s is stated, and nothing more than that.
| Game | Statement, read 4 Sep 2026 | Where it appears |
|---|---|---|
| Alchemess: Tidy Up Your Potion Shop! | “No AI art anywhere” | Store description |
| Put Back Stuff | “No AI used in the creation of this project” | Store description |
| Tidy or Treat | “NO AI WAS USED IN THE MAKING OF THIS GAME” | Store description |
| Tidy Up Together | “NO AI WAS USED IN THE MAKING OF THIS GAME” | Store description |
Put it on your list before launch
What is Alchemess? A cozy first-person sorting game from Techplay, a two-person studio in Phuket. 2,080 hand-named potions, 26 shelves from Alpha to Omega, a gold Sun shelf and a silver Moon shelf, no timer, no fail state and nothing you can lose, playable alone, in co-op, or as a Sun-vs-Moon race, US$5.99 on Steam and the Epic Games Store from 17 September 2026, with a 10% launch discount.
Which store pages say nothing either way?
Four of the ten, and this is where readers most often draw a conclusion the evidence does not support. No disclosure box and no statement in the description means exactly one thing: no disclosure found on that page as of 4 September 2026.
Sort Them Ducks, by Mr.Duck, released 13 August 2026 - 4,000-plus unique rubber ducks, a money-and-upgrade loop, 1,370 reviews across all languages, Very Positive, at US$5.99. Shelve the Potions!, by Knight Owl Games, released 24 August 2026 - over 2,000 potions arranged by puzzle rules you deduce from clues around a cellar, 317 reviews across all languages, Very Positive, at US$5.39 down from US$5.99. Wand & Order: Tidy up the magic shop!, by OnSkull Games, dated 18 September 2026 - three zones of tarot decks, wands and potions, roughly four thousand items in total by its own description. And Wilmot’s Warehouse, by Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg, published by Finji, released 29 August 2019 - 500 products, no labels, no categories, only the system you invent and then have to remember. 560 reviews across all languages, Overwhelmingly Positive, at US$14.99.
Wilmot’s Warehouse is the clean illustration of why silence is not evidence. It shipped more than four years before Steam’s disclosure survey existed. Nobody ever asked its developers the question, so its store page could not answer it. The other three shipped or were listed under the current rules and their pages carry no AI disclosure, which is what a developer answering “none” produces - but a reader who wants certainty about a specific asset should ask the developer in the store forum rather than infer it from a blank space.
What a disclosure does not tell you
Reading these ten pages back to back makes the limits of the system obvious, and knowing them is what lets you read any store page for yourself.
- It is unverified. Valve publishes the developer’s text. It does not check it, and it does not rate it.
- It does not report scale. “AI was used” covers four wall paintings and it covers an entire art set. Only the specific ones - Librarian’s four assets, Sort The Capybaras’s model meshes - tell you which.
- Absence has three possible causes. The developer answered “none”; the game predates January 2024; or the use falls outside the current scope, which since 17 January 2026 excludes development tools such as coding assistants.
- A description line is not the disclosure field. “NO AI WAS USED IN THE MAKING OF THIS GAME” is a claim a studio chose to make in its marketing. It is a strong signal of intent, and it is not the same artefact as a survey answer.
- It says nothing about whether the art is good. Provenance and quality are separate questions. Several games in this survey with disclosures are better reviewed than several without.
If you want hand drawn games specifically, the honest method is the same one used here: read the disclosure box if there is one, read the description, and then look at the screenshots at full size. Letterforms, brush edges and the small inconsistencies of a human hand are visible at 1080p if you look for them.
Which tidy-up games have co-op?
The second question, and the one with the shorter answer. Take this from Steam’s categories list, never from user tags. Tags are voted on by players and are frequently wrong - Sort Them Ducks carries a “Multiplayer” user tag while its category list reads Single-player and nothing else. The category list is Valve’s structured data, filled in by the developer in Steamworks, and it is what the store filters actually use.
Read on 4 September 2026, five of the ten list any multiplayer at all:
- TV Archive: Tidy Up Together lists Online Co-op and Online PvP. No local option.
- Tidy Up Together lists Online Co-op. No PvP.
- Wand & Order: Tidy up the magic shop! lists Online Co-op. No PvP.
- Tidy or Treat lists Multi-player and Co-op, without the Online Co-op or Shared/Split Screen entries that would tell you which kind it is.
- Wilmot’s Warehouse lists Shared/Split Screen Co-op and Shared/Split Screen PvP, plus Remote Play Together. Couch only, and it has had it since 2019.
The other five - Librarian, Sort Them Ducks, Shelve the Potions!, Put Back Stuff and Sort The Capybaras - list Single-player and nothing else. That is the direct answer to the Librarian co-op and Librarian multiplayer searches: there is no co-op mode, no versus mode and no listed multiplayer of any kind on that store page. It is a single-player game by design, and the same is true of Sort Them Ducks.
Alchemess sits in the multiplayer group. Its Steam category list reads Online Co-op, LAN Co-op, Shared/Split Screen Co-op, Online PvP, LAN PvP, Shared/Split Screen PvP, Cross-Platform Multiplayer and Remote Play Together. It is the only game in this survey whose Steam page lists online co-op, couch co-op and a versus mode together - Wilmot’s Warehouse has couch co-op and local versus but no online, TV Archive has online co-op and online versus but nothing local. Online co-op joins by reading out a six-digit room code, with no account and no port forwarding; the versus mode splits the shop into 13 shelves and 1,040 slots per side, which we wrote about here.
| Game | Online co-op | Local co-op | Versus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alchemess: Tidy Up Your Potion Shop! | Yes | Yes | Yes, online and local |
| TV Archive: Tidy Up Together | Yes | No | Yes, online |
| Tidy Up Together | Yes | No | No |
| Tidy or Treat | Listed as Co-op, kind unspecified | Listed as Co-op, kind unspecified | No |
| Wand & Order: Tidy up the magic shop! | Yes | No | No |
| Wilmot’s Warehouse | No | Yes | Yes, local |
Ten shelving sims, two questions, one table
Ordered by the release date shown on each store page, so the sort favours nobody. Every fact below appears in a section above and was read from Steam on 4 September 2026.
| Game | Released | AI on the store page | Multiplayer | Reviews, all languages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wilmot’s Warehouse | 29 Aug 2019 | No disclosure found; predates the rules | Local co-op, local versus | 560, Overwhelmingly Positive |
| Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! | 30 Apr 2026 | Discloses four AI-refined assets, plus a text grammar pass | Single-player only | 24,863, Very Positive |
| Sort Them Ducks | 13 Aug 2026 | No disclosure found | Single-player only | 1,370, Very Positive |
| Tidy Up Together | 14 Aug 2026 | Description: “NO AI WAS USED IN THE MAKING OF THIS GAME” | Online co-op | 208, Mostly Positive |
| TV Archive: Tidy Up Together | 14 Aug 2026 | Discloses AI support on the fictional videotape images | Online co-op, online versus | 542, Mostly Positive |
| Shelve the Potions! | 24 Aug 2026 | No disclosure found | Single-player only | 317, Very Positive |
| Tidy or Treat | 7 Sep 2026 | Description: “NO AI WAS USED IN THE MAKING OF THIS GAME” | Co-op, kind unspecified | Not yet released |
| Alchemess: Tidy Up Your Potion Shop! | 17 Sep 2026 | Description: “No AI art anywhere” | Online co-op, local co-op, versus | Not yet released |
| Wand & Order: Tidy up the magic shop! | 18 Sep 2026 | No disclosure found | Online co-op | Not yet released |
| Sort The Capybaras | 8 Oct 2026 | Discloses AI support in editing some model meshes | Single-player only | Not yet released |
Four rows read “not yet released” because those four games have not shipped, ours among them. Alchemess has no reviews, no score and no player numbers, and will not have any until the shop opens on 17 September.
How to check any game yourself in a minute
The useful outcome of this article is not our table. It is that you never need our table again. Open any store page, scroll to just above the System Requirements block, and if there is an AI Generated Content Disclosure heading there, read the developer’s own words. If there is no heading, scroll back up and read the first two lines of the description, where studios that want to say “none” tend to say it. Then check the category list in the right-hand column for Online Co-op or Shared/Split Screen Co-op rather than trusting the tag cloud, which is voted on by players and often wrong.
Applied to this genre, that method produces a genuinely varied field. Librarian is the most polished and by a distance the most played, with a real progression loop and a scoring system if you like being measured. Wilmot’s Warehouse is still the smartest game about categorisation anyone has made, and it is nine years old. Shelve the Potions! is the one to buy if you want deduction rather than sorting. Sort Them Ducks is the most generous with sheer quantity. Tidy Up Together and Wand & Order are where to go for a shop you can tidy with a friend over the internet.
And Alchemess is a shop with 2,080 bottles on the floor, no timer and nothing you can lose, where the second player can be next to you on the sofa or on the other side of the world, or racing you across a line down the middle of the room. Every potion name, shelf title and bottle word is a plain text file you can open in Notepad, rename and translate, which is how the whole shop gets modded and how it gets translated. It arrives on 17 September 2026 at US$5.99 with a 10% launch discount, and the store page has the full mode list, the nine interface languages and the system requirements.
Wishlist Alchemess on Steam.
2,080 bottles are waiting for a shelf
What is Alchemess? A cozy first-person sorting game from Techplay, a two-person studio in Phuket. 2,080 hand-named potions, 26 shelves from Alpha to Omega, a gold Sun shelf and a silver Moon shelf, no timer, no fail state and nothing you can lose, playable alone, in co-op, or as a Sun-vs-Moon race, US$5.99 on Steam and the Epic Games Store from 17 September 2026, with a 10% launch discount.
FAQ: AI disclosures and co-op in tidy-up games
Does Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library use AI? Yes, in a stated and limited way. Its Steam page carries an AI Generated Content Disclosure describing four assets - one UI component and three landscape paintings used as wall decorations - that were “produced using additional AI for refinement”, none created by AI from the ground up, plus AI-assisted grammatical corrections to in-game text that were then reviewed by hand. The developer, ArtRising, states that its creative process “is still firmly anchored in manual craftsmanship”. That text was read off the store page on 4 September 2026.
Does Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library have multiplayer or co-op? No. Its Steam category list on 4 September 2026 reads Single-player, with no Co-op, Online Co-op or PvP entries. There is no official co-op mode.
Are there Librarian Tidy Up the Arcane Library mods, or a multiplayer mod? Its store page lists no Steam Workshop support as of 4 September 2026, so anything you find is community-made and unofficial, and a multiplayer mod would have to build networking the game does not ship with. Modding support differs a lot between games in this genre: in Alchemess every potion name, shelf title and bottle word is a plain text file, which is the whole modding and translation story.
If a game has no AI disclosure, does that mean it is hand-made? Not on its own. A blank means one of three things: the developer answered “none” on Steam’s content survey, the game shipped before the survey existed in January 2024, or the use falls outside the current scope, which since 17 January 2026 excludes development tools such as coding assistants. If you want certainty about a particular game, the store forum is the place to ask its developer.
Which tidy-up games can I play with a friend? Five of the ten surveyed here list some form of multiplayer: Tidy Up Together, TV Archive: Tidy Up Together and Wand & Order for online co-op, Wilmot’s Warehouse for couch co-op and local versus, and Tidy or Treat for co-op of an unspecified kind. Alchemess is the only one in this survey listing online co-op, couch co-op and a versus mode together, and all three are on its category list. Librarian, Sort Them Ducks, Shelve the Potions!, Put Back Stuff and Sort The Capybaras are single-player only.
Are there hand drawn games in this genre? Several studios say so in their own words - three of the ten state plainly that no AI was used in making their game, and Alchemess’s labels are typeset by hand on aged parchment, with 260 potion names written by hand. Because no store page certifies this, treat every such line as the studio’s own statement and check the screenshots at full size before you buy. That is true of ours as much as anyone’s, and the Alchemess screenshots are there to be looked at closely.
