Tips and tricks to make crafting easy (no spoilers)

This guide will help you build your vehicles faster by sharing a few tips and tricks I learned without spoiling too much on how to build a good car, so you can still figure that part out yourself, or come back to other guides.

This guide is mainly to help you overcome some of the UI problems that may prohibit your creativity to flow without requiring external tools.

Introduction

When I was young, I played with Lego Technics a lot. I did not just got lego, use the manual to build the toys, and then play with the final creations, but I also created my own contraptions from scratch.

At first they were modified versions of stuff I already had, but later I would just mess with gears and blocks and build stuff I'd see in real life.

One such example is a ship that would rotate 360 degrees around its axis that I'd seen in a themepark, I recreated it with Lego Technics and it worked.

As I grew up and got into gaming, I've played a lot or race games.

Lets just say, Screw Drivers is a dream coming true. Being able to play with something that feels pretty much like Lego Technics, and driving, which means that not only do you get the fun in building something, you then also get to actually use it in an actual game, so the creation has purpose.

Building problems

I'm going to assume that you have already opened the game, finished the tutorial and probably even started creating your own car and compete a little bit.

One of the things you've probably noticed is that you cannot place new objects in thin air.

You can only attach them to what already exists in your build.

While this works absolutely fine, it is really hard to have an idea of what you want to do, or maybe even experiment with some stuff, but not being able to build it because the way you want to build it, is out of order to what the game allows you to do.

For example, I have an idea for a gear ratio and I don't want to start either at the wheels, nor the motor, and when I place the gears directly in the frame, I won't know if that is going to be the best spot for this car either.

Yet, the game forces me to work from the frame, place my items, and hope everything is placed correctly, and if not, then remove and readd as needed.

How the game moves your creation for you

You will notice, that once you add things like suspension and wheels to the car, the game automatically finds the lowest spot and moves everything so the lowest part always hits the ground.

This effectively also means that you don't have to worry about how high you have to build something, just build it, remove things you don't need, and the game automatically moves everything as low as it needs to go. Adding something below of it, your creation is automatically moved up.

Using this to your advantage to start properly

When you create your first car, you get a default frame to work with.

This was great at the start, but the more parts you get, the more and more this frame will not work for you.

We'll use this frame to jump-start our creation.

Lets say, you want to create your gears first and work from there...

You can hover any piece and press R to remove it, except for the final piece.

There are 2 different sized beam pieces that have a different orientation. Depending on how you want your gears to work, remove everything but one beam that you can use to place the gears into following the orientation you want.

In this guide, we'll make the gears be in-line with the length of the car, assuming we don't yet have the corner gear unlocked.

So we're going to remove everything but one of the long beams:

From here, decide where you ultimately want to place your gears, or if you have a hard time picturing it, just decide where you want one gear to be, and what this gear is going to be.

In order to place the gear, you have to put an axis in first. It doesn't actually matter how long the axis is, so pick one that you have a lot of, and if you already know you are going to use a longer axis, then select a longer one. Do note that you can select the axis at any time, remove it, then place a new one in its place that is longer without removing any of the parts attached to that axis without any problem (you'll learn about that later).

For now, the guide will use 2x 2 length axis, and we'll prepare for a small and medium sized gear.

We'll attach the small and medium sized gears, like so:

Now, at this point we can actually remove the beam and the axis and just have the 2 gears and work from there. We can even replace the beam with a larger one, and we can think of how we want to attach this to a motor or our wheels.

Lets assume we want to attach this to a wheel, as follows:

You can now roughly see where we need to build towards. The axis for the wheel is 4 spaces apart, so 2x medium sized gears will fit perfectly.

If we remove the axis for the small gear, which is now a 2, and we replace it with a larger one, and we also place an axis on the wheel, we can connect both with a gear. If we now imagine that this gear will be the exact center of the car, we can even build the 2nd wheel and almost finish the car.


First, we'll remove the axis for the small gear, which is 2, add 1 length for the other gear, which is 3, and then another 2 to mirror the car for the other side. We get a 5 length axis. We can remove the axis for the larger gear and replace that one too, as well as place it for the suspension.

This is what you'd get:

Lets add the 2 medium sized gears so you can better see what it'll look like. We'll also add the suspension and wheel. This gives a better feel of what we'll ultimately get:

Now, in order to really appreciate what we've build, lets connect a motor to it from the larger gear.
Great, the wheels are spinning, so we've build it correctly.

One thing that you need to look for is the order of gears, from motor to wheel.

Tell yourself that the motor is 10 points. Follow it to the next gear and see if the gear it touches is one of the following:
- Same size
- Bigger
- Smaller

If the gear is the same size, you don't change the points.
If the touched gear is smaller, add points. If the gear is one size smaller, add 1 point, if its two sizes smaller, add 2 points.
If the touched gear is bigger, subtract points like previously, one for 1 step, two for 2 steps.

In our example, we go from a medium sized gear to a small gear, which is 1 step.

So we go from 10 points to 11.

That small gear is attached to a medium gear, so they are spinning at the same speed. The medium gear is touching another medium gear, so same size, so no points change.

The wheels end up with 11 points.

If the starting point is the same as the end point (both motor and wheels have 10 points), it is a linear powertrain. The speed of the motor will also turn the wheels at the same speed, and our accelleration stays the same.

If the starting point is higher than the end point (the motor spins faster than the wheels) then our top speed will be lower, but our accelleration will be quicker.
If the starting point is lower than the end point (the motor spins slower than the wheels) then our top speed will be higher, but our accelleration will be slower.

In our example, we'll have a slower accelleration, but a higher top speed.
In order to explain what I mean, I've changed the build, removed the medium to small gears with only small gears, ran the speed check by pressing X, then rebuild our build and pressing X again.

The green curve is just motor to wheels, and the blue curve is with our improved gear ratio:
As you can see, the top speed with just the motor to wheels cuts off around 44 km/h, but we have a higher torque value at the start, which results in more accelleration.

One small note here: You can create the best accelleration curve here, but if you drive more torque to your wheels than your wheels can grip, you are losing power that you could've used for top speed. In addition, the car will become harder to control at speed as the wheels are constantly slipping.

In later stages of the game, you can add weight and down force to counteract this, but this is not always the way to go. Just massively dumping into more torque just doesn't always mean more accelleration. But on the other hand, too little torque will definitely not mean more accelleration.

Using this to your advantage to start properly [part 2]

As we've placed the engine, it is now clear that the beam we've used is just too short. We can't connect the engine to the beam and also put a suspension there.

So lets increase the length of our beam. While we do that, lets consider what we want to do with our rear wheels. Do we want to put in some gears there too? Do we not want to power them at all? Or maybe power them, but without any gears?

For the sake of this build, lets go with a 1:1 ratio.

Here's how to do this. First we replace the beam with a larger one, and add suspension and a wheel:

Now, we'll add power to the rear wheels by placing a motor.

As you can see, Because both engines hit different wheels, we get different curves mixed together, resulting in having the top speed from our front wheel curve, but the accelleration from our rear wheel curve. This will result in a car being able to shoot off the line, and once the top speed of the rear wheels have been reached, the car will slowly keep accellerating to the top speed.

This is essentially like a gearbox, except that a gearbox is more optimal. This works great in the beginning of the game, but at later stages, a gearbox will win it in terms of accelleration vs top speed, when bulld properly.

Anyway... now that we've placed the 2nd engine, lets connect this to the frame. Yes, it already works, but neither engines are actually connected to the frame, so lets fix that first.

We'll use 2x 3 sized pin (you'll understand at the end of this section why) and place them as follows:

And then use Ortogonal connectors to connect them to the frame as follows:

We'll now finish the car by adding another beam, suspension and wheel, like so:

While this is great, we got ourselves a car, we can actually do more with this.
In this game, you can connect multiple motors to the same axis, which increases the power. I've left room for adding more motors, and by following the steps we did so far, here's what adding more motors to the build will look like (I've added 2x 2 sized pin for the left beam side to attach the last 2 motors to:

As you can see, adding a few motors really does improve the performance of the car.

More ways to build

So, you've now learned a great way to build towards an idea you're having, which will already help you getting your next car built.

But there's another way, that will help you especially at later stages in the game when you already have your frame built and want to alter an existing design or change parts.

You can change the orientation of the camera, and by doing so, you can ensure that only one part is completely visible at a time.

If you now drag a selection into this part, you can make a selection that contains only this part.

(this is with keyboard and mouse, not sure how this works with a controller)

Once a part is selected, a menu pops up with a few options:

Rotate is interesting, although it only rotates around the Y axis, and copy is especially interesting.

While you have an item selected, not only do you have the option to delete, rotate, paint and copy it, you also can move the selection around. The arrow keys move the object around, and the scroll wheel will move the object higher or lower.

You can now essentially add a gear from the start, select it, move it away and build whatever you want outside of the vehicle, then select everything once its finished, and move it back to where you want it, and connect everything.

The only thing you need to worry about is that there's no Z axis rotation. If you want anything in the Z axis, for example because you have the Gear Corner, here is a way to do just that:

First, lets build an axis somewhere, select it, then move it away, then place a corner gear on top, and place the second corner gear in the rotated orientation. Move it until it snaps as you desire (use the right mouse button to rotate if needed), then, if not perfect, move it to where it should go. Don't worry about gears overlap. As soon as you attach a motor to something, the entire drivechain will align properly.

Here's a short cartoon displaying all the steps:

Final note

That concludes this guide.

You can basically use the last technique from the start too. Just add an axis to your existing frame, move it out, select the frame, delete, and go from there.

You can build your gearbox in the sky, build your frame at the bottom, select one and move it towards the other, and then connect the last pieces.

You no longer are limited by the game UI. You've been set free from the limitations and can create anything you want.

Do note, the game will not allow you to test a car if not everything is linked together. If you get a message that the car is in a broken state (you will get this when pressing X already) ensure that all beams have been connected properly. In one of my builds I had the beams in the right spot, but had accidentally removed a pin, so 2 beams were next to each other, but not connected by pins.

The game will allow you to keep things working if they are just connected by something. For example, a turbo has both inputs for an axel and 2 pins. You can connect the turbo by just the axel, but if you then drive the car, you'll notice the turbo will spin. While the car will still drive normally, I don't know how much (if any) it will impact performance. In any case, it will most likely cause the car to damage more quickly if you take a hit somewhere, and its not like the costs are extremely high that you have to cut corners.

But it is great the game does allow this, because it helps you build to an idea quicker.

[GUVNA!!]

How do you change the material of the car?

[BoneYard]

why the extra 2 large gears? you could of just had the motor close and used two gears. The wheels still turn the correct way once youre driving :)

[SadPuddle_12]

an you make a tutorial on how to make a car steer better?

[LPChip]

You can download cars from the workshop. I've uploaded a few. After that, you have them in your game. If you really want to learn the building, this tutorial has pictures to follow to make a simple (but not really good) car.

Once you have a few cars downloaded, you can edit them and see how they were build.

[bluefly]

and how fast did it go at the end?

[bluefly]

i wish you could give me a picture or somthing so i could copy

[LPChip]

You're welcome, bluefly. :)

[bluefly]

super thanks