There are a lot of things you can do in build mode in Blankos. I will try to introduce beginners in building to the features they can use and how they can reach the things they want to create and later give more experienced builders some tricks i picked up on my building journey in blankos so we can together continue to create creative and fun maps for the game.
First a small FAQ
What is building in Blankos?
Building means that you can create your own levels. These levels can be published and then be played by other players when they click on the level in the party bus.
Who are the people allowed to build?
Every player in Blankos also has the option to build their own map. So all you need is your blankos account and being able to play the game and you can directly start.
Are there any restrictions?
Yes, there are some restrictions on what you are allowed to have in published maps. You will get a window telling you which things are not wanted in published maps and can lead to possible consequences. So it is recommended to make sure you dont have these things in your map.
Are there rewards for building?
Yes, for every of your maps that is good enough that it gets featured in brawl (which is different from party bus) you get a reward.
At this point these rewards are:
– 1,000 Blanko Bucks
– 40,000 XP
– 4 random Gumballs
– 10 Foreman Fun Funds
– one time reward for the first map of a builder – the NFT accessory community chrome and getting the „Hit Maker“ role on the Blankos discord
What are Foreman Fun Funds?
That is currently a way to reward people for continued building of maps. It is a currency you can collect outside the game and choose to use them for exclusive build props once you got the hit maker role.
Are there any basic rules if i want to build a map for brawl?
Yes, there are a few rules. In general your map should have a theme and you should try follow it mainly.
– player count 2-12
– time: best 3:00, 2:30 for combat heavy levels, maximum 3:30. in races it is good if slow players can finish too
– if you use flight, make sure all players get a jetpack at the start or no one gets it. If you equip jetpacks somewhere in your level make sure every player gets one guaranteed. Even when 5 people run through the same spot directly after each other
– play through your level and test it with friends and other community members to improve it as much as possible before submitting it to be reviewed for brawl
– make sure textures are not flickering
– pick one win condition. Avoid having multiple win conditions
If i have a level i am happy with, how can i suggest it for brawl?
Currently the choosing process is done manually by the foreman. (an NPC in blakos and coincidentally also the name of the one who takes care of the brawl levels). If you think your level deserves to be looked at and you want a professional feedback you can post the level name, your ingame name and the win condition (optional and preferred including a picture) into the „please-feature-my-level“ channel in the blankos block party discord. In that channel is a discord-pin how the process goes. Usually the foreman has a stream at tuesdays where he goes through the levels and gives some live feedback. After that he will give you written feedback in a thread and following changes to that level will be discussed in the thread.
How To Start Building In Blankos Block Party
you just started the game for the very first time and barely completed the tutorial but already are curious about building. Don’t worry, i will try to introduce you to the basics so you dont feel overwhelmed.
A while ago there was a small building tutorial. I am not sure if it is still in game, but i will describe how you reach it if it is still there:
– you are at the desk, at the right you see „select mode“
– click „select mode“ and then go to the „Junction“after you loaded in go under the bridge, follow the vibes (the tiny pink lightning bolts) to the two big holes in the ground
– on the right side you will see first a old bearded guy listening to music and dancing to it. After that further to the right is a gigantic glass with an enormous brain inside it. That is the so called „Think tank“ and in front of it you see „the Foreman“. If you can still do the tutorial he should tell you details when you interact with him (stay close and press E or whatever the shove button is for you.)
he will then send you into the portal behind him into the think tank. Follow his instructions.
In case you dont want the tutorial, he doesnt have a tutorial for you or you already completed the tutorial: if you press „select mode“ on the desk you can directly go to the build mode. It shows the same picture as you see when going into the portal at the think tank.
Here you can choose which map you want to work at. Since you are new to building you will see only „new map“. Click on it (or later any map you want to edit) and press „edit map“. You will now load into the map. The new map has usually a spawn point (the circle with a hand above it), a hex and the lobby (the big area with the disco floor and the party bus)
Lobby:
the Lobby is the area where people will spawn. You can move it around if it is ever in the way or you want to place it somewhere else. Usually i prefer to have it somewhere where it is not in the way and when i am done with my map i try to find a nice place for it so people can either have a nice view on my map or already explore a tiny bit. It is just important that you make sure to not block the disco floor, since that is the area where people will load in and gather before they continue to play the map
Spawn Point:
This is the area where people will start in your map. You can rotate the hand at the top to adjust in what direction the people look when they start. You can also adjust the area of the spawn circle. That is useful if you have a smaller area than the spawn circle is large or want to place people more precise.
You can also get multiple spawn points in the settings.
First steps in Build mode
After you loaded into the map, you will notice a lot of buttons and descriptions on the left side. That left side will be your best friend when building to remind you what you can do with which button in what mode. So always keep an eye on the left side and soon you will remember the button combination to achieve certain things and achieve your goals intuitively.
3 different movement modes:
There are 3 different modes to move around.
The normal runmode where you walk around like you are used to it. But you cant use skills or sprint. It is mainly so you can get an impression about the size of your map. I would always recommend to use it from time to time to keep a feeling for the size of the map. Especially when you start building it will happen often that you build way too big with too long ways which can be for example a boring straight walk in a race or an open field without cover in a shooter. Both are not the best experiences for beginners. You load into building in run mode and can return to it from the other modes by pressing 1/X(controller) one time (from float mode) or two times (from interactive mode).
The interactive mode is similar to the normal run mode just that items that move or can interact with a blanko work now. Here you can jump at trampolines, use bounce pads, get hit by lava, see movers move and get shot out of a cannon. Also your jetpack settings and start weapon apply here. You reach interactive mode by going to run mode and then press 2/D-pad up.
The most used mode when building is the floating mode. This is the mode you will use to place props and adjust settings for individual props (like color or how strong a bounce pad shoots you). You recognize it easily by your blanko holding a spray can in one hand and you keep hovering because your blanko is holding a balloon in the other hand. You reach it from both other modes by pressing 1/X(controller) one time.
Moving in float mode:
There is the forward, backwards and side movement you are already used to. Of course you can also move the camera around. Additionally there is a key to move up and down. Spacebar/RT for up and shift/LT for down.
If you ever feel like you want to move faster you can hold Ctrl/RB while moving. To move slower you can hold Alt/LB.
If you made a very huge map and want to move quickly from one place to another aim with your camera to the item you want to move to and then press T/Left stick. It will teleport you right in front of that item. Of course that doesnt work through walls because you look at the wall prop first.
How to find props (build items) and how to place them
There are two menus to look through the different build items. To reach them you cant have any item selected and cant be in the progress of moving items (usually that should be the case when you just loaded into the map, so dont worry about that for now).
The menu you can reach over keyboard and controller you open by pressing Q/B(controller) while being in float mode. Now a menu with the different categories should pop up at the bottom of the screen. The other way to find the build props is pressing F on the keyboard. That menu goes over the entire screen. It is up to you to decide which one you prefer. When you enter a category you can choose one of the items in that category. Take your time and look a bit around which item you want to place. Choose an item and confirm your choice and the item will appear at your screen. If you move around or move the camera around the item will always stay in the same distance to you. You can also push it away or pull it close by pressing/holding F/D-Pad up or C/D-Pad down.
Once you find the spot where you want to place your prop just press the left mouse button/A(controller) and it will be placed. If you find you didnt want this prop just press the right mouse button/B(controller) before placing it to abort your prop choice.
Editing props
there are a lot of different ways to edit a prop.
– moving: to move a prop around, left click/A(controller) on it, press E/D-Pad up, move it like you learned when placing a prop and then place it.
– resizing basic bits: most props can be resized. (including vibes to change the amount) for props like the basic bits you go into the editing mode (as you did for moving) and then you press 2/X(controller). after that you scroll up or down/LB or RB to move through the different possible sizes until you have the one you like. Then you either press 2/X(controller) again to continue with moving the prop or you can directly place it with left click/A(controler). The right mouse button/B(controller) aborts the entire progress and the prop stays where it was before. (some props like decorations can’t be resized)
– resizing interactive items like KO plane, lava plane, spawn point: press on the item you want to resize and press Q/Select or Back. That opens for every item the menu with the possible setting it has. Some items have no settings. It can be worth a look to test it out on different items when you are a bit more experienced. For the previous named items there should be some settings that say width, height or something in that direction. You will see the new sizes while you change the numbers. Then you confirm your changes and have your new resized plane or spawn point to work with. (some props like most decorations can’t be resized at all)
– rotating: you can rotate items by selecting it, pressing E/D-Pad up and then 2/X(controller) like you did for resizing basic bits. that is the rotation and resize mode. You get a circle which shows you around what axis the rotation will happen. You can change the axis by pressing B/D-Pad up. (due to a visual bug i often change the axis 3 times to be sure i see the correct rotation axis before i start rotating an item). To rotate you press E or R/move right stick left or right as often as you want to. You can also change the amount of rotation each input does by pressing 3/D-Pad down. You will see the circle divided into 8, 4, 2 or 1 piece. When it is in 1 piece that is the free rotation mode and i think that is very useful if you want to adjust more precisely but it is also very hard to handle exactly the way you want. So for the beginning i would recommend to stay in the other 3 rotation modes.
– changing colors: you might have noticed that some block parties are very colorful. To change the colors of a prop, select that item and press T/Y(controller. That opens the texture menu if the item can have different textures. Here you can click at different previews of textures/colors and accept the one you like.
– copying props: if you have no item selected, point at an item and press C/hold D-Pad up or if you have an item selected and press C/hold D-Pad up you copy the item including its current size, settings and textures. You can now place that new item wherever you want with the left mouse click/(controller) or abort the action with the right mouse button/B(controller). If that copied item can be resized without menu you can also do that now before placing it.
– deleting a prop: sometimes you place a prop and see later you really dont want to have it. You can now select it and press X/D-Pad down (or just point at it and press X/D-Pad down, but i prefer selecting it first to be 100% sure i delete exactly the one i want to delete.)
– undo and redo of an action: you accidentally deleted the wrong prop and want to get it back, press Z/D-Pad left to undo the action. If you pressed one or two times too often undo you can also press Y/D-Pad right before you do anything else to redo the last undo action. But take care, if you did anything else after the undo you cant redo the other step. So if you use undo and redo always make sure you want to continue working with the current step.
!Caution! There is a bug that can cause the undo/redo options to not work properly. Based on my observations make sure to not have anything selected when using undo or redo.
Advanced editing/Groups
before i talked mainly about editing single items. But there exists also the option to group objects and to move them around as if they are a single prop.
One suggestion for working with groups: keep a copy of the group. Especially when it is a complex group consisting of many elements or elements with difficult rotations or placements. It is also a safety copy against an undo bug where items/textures will switch places and therefore mess up your group.
– how to group: select at least 2 props you want to group and press G/press left stick, from now on these items will always get selected together as long as they are grouped
– disband group: very useful if you want to disband a group of 3 or more items into individual items. Select the group, press Q/select or Back and press disband group or Y/controller). From now on all the items of that group will be individual items again. Problem with controller: reverting the settings of props and disbanding a group use the same button.
– moving/deleting/copying a group or multiple items: same as editing a single object that way. The game will always handle all selected objects.
– unselecting an item in a group/selection of multiple items in a group: have the group/items selected and then press the item again that you want to unselect. You are left with all the other selected items
– invert selection inside a group: you have only parts of a group selected and want to select all other parts, just press H/hold B(controller) and the selection will be inverted
– resizing/textures of groups/multiple items: that is a bit more difficult. For textures all items of that selection have to be able to get a texture of the same type or any texture (the basic bits have a different texture type than balls or lava planes). Only then you can change the texture of the selected items. If you want to resize you need to make sure the items have the same resizing type (as you know some items resize in a menu and some with buttons) and need to be aware that the individual items will not change their distance to the group/selection middle point. So it will very likely look different than you would expect.
– dividing a group into smaller groups: select the group, unselect part of the items and press G/press left stick. Now you have two smaller groups that were once the big group. i use that often if i want to ungroup just one or two items. i select the group, unselect the items, group the rest and have now my other items free.
– delete/move/edit a single item of a group: select the group, unselect the item, press H/hold B(controller) to invert the selection and then interact with that item for deleting,moving or edit (including things like textures and resizing). After you placed it or had the group fully unselected the group will act as before with that one item at its new position or in a different color/size.
– rotating groups: rotating a group works similar as rotating single props. There is just one detail to consider. After a group got rotated and placed the rotation axis will adjust to the normal axis’ of the map. That means, when you rotated the group in the strangest angles it can happen that you have difficulty to get it back into the original angle. Therefore i would always recommend to keep a copy of complex groups until you either need space or are done with placing that group.
Different placement modes
maybe you noticed by now that all the items are placed on a grid, but did you know you can change the grid and that there are even other placing modes that can ease the building progress?
Grid mode
in grid mode you have a grid that helps you place items in a certain distance to each other. It can often help if you want to place even and clean things (for example a wall or a shelf) or want to give your square a colorful border exactly at the outside
– changing grid size: if you have an item in the editing mode, you can keep pressing 4/D-Pad right to change the size of your grid. Sometimes it can make things easier to have a bigger or smaller distance between the grid spots. Note that the grid will always take the middle of your entire selection. That detail can be useful to know if you want to place your items exactly.
– advanced – half grid: you might have had the situation that you wanted to place an item on the grid but placing it left was not the right grid and placing it right also was the wrong one. You wanted to have it in the middle. The solution is as simple as it is amazing. Copy your item. Place it 1 grid next to the other item in the direction you want to move it (also works diagonal). Now select both items and edit. The game will choose the new middle point of your entire selection and place that on the grid and since you had 1 (or any other uneven number) distance the middle point of the individual items is now technically on a half-grid spot. Now you can delete the item that is not on the correct position. I use this little trick often for detailed work but it can also be useful in bigger grid sizes if you dont know for sure the smaller grid size would put it exactly at the half.
And for the even more advanced builders: Yes, you can also go for quarter or even smaller parts of a grid. It just gets more complicated to move things at the exact position. I am still trying to figure out the movement logic for that and get it only with testing around.
Magnet mode
In magnet mode you will see different blue dots. These are the magnet snap points. If the item you edit did snap onto the correct magnet point of the other prop you can use the rotation option, but it only rotates around the snapping point, not in all directions.
If your item is at the correct point of the other object but your item connected with the wrong snapping point you can switch through its snapping points by pressing 4/press right stick over and over until it is the correct point. The only downside is that you can only go forward though the points. If you missed it you have to keep pressing 4 until you are there.
Of course you can rotate the item once you found the correct snapping point.
These things regarding magnet mode also work with groups but especially going through the snapping points can take some time with a group since every item has multiple snapping points.
Surface mode
the surface mode is very handy if you want to place an item adjusted to a surface which is especially on round surfaces very challenging otherwise. Most simple objects lay with their middle surface point on the other items surface but groups tend to have the group middle on the surface. So you might need to adjust it. But at least you already have the item oriented to the surface.
None snapping mode
this mode is very useful when you want to move objects into each other and create your very own objects. For example you have a ball and want to move a bone into it so that only the top looks a tiny bit out of the ball, then i would recommend to use the none snapping mode.
Or you have a broken window and want a glass shard laying on the ground. Then i would recommend to adjust the angle of the glass and put it in none snapping mode in the correct place on the ground.
It is also useful to lean objects against other objects since having the things on a grid can sometimes make it look like the thing floats.
Advanced rotating
You might have noticed that it is sometimes difficult to place a prop in the correct angle if you have a sphere you want to give some dots or if you want to create a prop with 3 or 6 sides.
It is comparibly easy to create a sphere with different colored spots on them. Just take the sphere, go to surface mode, place the item with surface snapping on the spot where you want to have it later and then move it mostly into the sphere in none snapping mode. That is an easy way to make a moon or some spots on mushrooms or cheese after these items are already built.
If you noticed the 4th and 8th for the rotation are not good enough and free rotation also doesnt give you a result that is exact enough: there is a way to adjust items by a 6th. to do so take a hexagon from the basic bits and place it. (You can adjust it roughly in the correct size, but it is possible you will need to place the elements in none snapping mode in the end.) Now take your item you want to rotate by 1/6th. Go to magnet mode, let the item snap to the correct side. Now it can be the item is oriented the wrong way. Use 4 or pressing the right stick to cycle through the snapping points of your item until you find the correct one. You can now also rotate it around the connected snapping point until it shows in the direction you want to have it. After you are done with that you can place it, go to none snapping or grid mode and place the item where you wanted it originally. It also does’nt matter if you didnt rotate it before placing it connected to the hex. if you go for the normal rotation amounts you can do that now.
Interesting is, that if you rotate an item by 1/6th and then rotate it on the same rotation axis with the 8th of a rotation you end up with 1/24th or 7/24th so that is already a pretty precise rotation. I used this method in the past to create my own equilateral triangle and i saw it used to attach 6 landing gear legs evenly to a U.F.O.
One thing to consider: If you want to rotate a group the rotation axis usually adjusts to the map axis’ so if you want to keep the original rotation axis of a group keep a copy of it somewhere while you build and i highly recommend to use the method with cycling through the snapping points even when it can take some time. for simple props that is usually not needed since their snapping points tend to be on an imaginary cuboid and therefore the prop can easily get oriented in the correct direction.
