UI Tips and Tricks

Keyboard shortcuts and other small tips and tricks to make editing your mechanisms a little easier

UI Tips and Tricks

Dragging an arm directly from the 'new components tray' and dropping it on top of an existing arm will change the type of the existing arm without changing its instructions.

You can copy components or instructions by holding ctrl while dragging. (I kept pressing ctrl+c,ctrl+v without knowing how close I was)

Right mouse will let you pan around your solution in both the component view and the instruction view.

You can select multiple instructions or components at the same time. Click and drag to draw a box around multiple items or hold shift to add/remove from the current selection. You can even rotate or copy everything you've selected at the same time.

Ctrl+z is undo and ctrl+y is redo.

Let me know if you find any other good tips I should add!

How instructions repeat (as I understand it)

Each arm repeats the same instructions over and over again, but you can delay when some arms start. The empty slots before an arm's first instruction are that delay. This delay isn't part of what's repeated and can be longer than the full period of repetion. It's common for some arms to be already repeating instructions before others have even started.

[Troff]

Goddammit! I also made it 3 chapters into the game thinking I only had one page of instructions to work with!!! Never knew you could scroll right. DOH!

[drpavelko]

This is great. I made it pretty far into the chapters thinking that I was only able to use the first page of the instructions. I never scrolled right, so I was thinking I'd have to get pretty clever for the more advanced levels.

[godamnsteemsux]

Ctrl-Shift-A selects all instructions. God damn, I wish I'd known that a long time ago. There must have been at least a dozen times when I needed to move all instructions a little bit to the right, and there were over 20 pages of instructions to move.

[Haxton]

Became widely known semi-recently in the Zachtronics discord: P toggles the area display.

[Will Madrid Go]

Is there a way to hide the instructions panel?

I know you can hide the component panel by pressing 4, is there a way to hide the instruction panel to make your machine full screen?

Thank you

[calyptratuss]

You can hold ALT and press on an instruction to fast forward to that place for then given cycle, though I imagine this was already said by someone here. Also, all of these shortcuts can be found in the controls/instructions (don't remember how they were called) in the main menu

[Mystic Argus]

Another handy thing that I didn't realize for awhile is that while ctrl+a selects all components, ctrl+shift+a selects all instructions.

[(In)VisibleReality]

Just press escape twice or move your mouse to the top right and click the x

[kalinda.pride]

How can I exit the level? I'm working on a puzzle, but I want to save my work and go back to the main screen so I can work on a different puzzle instead.

[1978 FIFA World Cup knockout sta]

How did I not see that earlier...