Machinecraft transcript

Hello and welcome to my Machinecraft general tutorial, this tutorial aims to be a video based guide to the game Machinecraft, there are now official English manuals aswell that will be linked in the description.
Timestamps to the seperate parts of the tutorial are also in the description if you are looking for a single part of information.
And finally this is my first major tutorial so any feedback would be appreciated.

When you start the game for the first time you will be greeted with the main menu looking like this, if some of the buttons greyed out and unusable, this is due to either no machine or an invalid machine being selected.
The first couple of things we will setup is our username, which is in the topmost text box, this is only seen in online games, the box below that is the machine's name, with the box at the bottom being for notes attached to a machine.
It will be worth going into the options menu and configuring the keybinds and performance settings to what you want, and make sure to enable expert mode since many features are disabled without it.
I will use the official key names so that there is no confusion over what key is being pressed.

The end product of this tutorial will be a basic tank like this, which utilises most of the features of build mode such as joints and their configuration, groups, painting and sculpting.

The first thing you will have to do is to create a new machine and name it, then press the build button.
This takes you into build mode where you can edit your machines.
The mouse and movement keys allow you to look around, before we start the walls around the build grid are labeled so show you where it faces ingame, so most bots will be build facing the Front wall. If you build your bot in the wrong orientation simply use the menu key and the Turn buttons.
Now to the actual construction of the machine.
The tools at the top of the window can be selected with the number keys, we're going to start with the form tool which allows us to place blocks and parts.
Press the panel key, the default is Q and make sure the chassis block option is selected.
After this simply build the tank chassis how you want, we're not going for looks here so I'm just building a brick with a gun sellotaped to it.

Holding left or right click speeds up the placing or deletion action.
To save you some effort you can build half or a quarter of the tank body and then use the mirror tool accessed by the menu key to complete it, you can set what direction to mirror from the toggles left of the tool.
If it does not mirror and instead deletes a large chunk of the tank you need to undo then use the flip tool before mirroring.

Now before adding in the tank gun press the panel key and select one of the T joints, T joints are short for turn joints and can rotate in a fully 360 degrees, which is good for things like turrets and wheels.
Joints are classed as either speed configured joints or angle configured joints indicated by what letter is next to them, speed joints can be set to move at a set speed while angle joints are set to go to a specific angle.
For the turret it does not matter what one you use for this setup.
Place the joint in the middle of where you want the turret to be and built the turret around it, connecting the joint between the body and the turret.

After this we add in the gun itself, create a layer of blocks above the turret and clear out a line in the centre, place any type of pitch joint there, this will provide vertical aiming for the gun.
Connect a tracker block to the joint facing forwards and then add in some cannon blocks, followed by barrel blocks, make sure they line up.
A simplified explanation for how cannons work is more guns give more damage output, but are slower and less accurate, accuracy can be improved by adding enough barrels to the end of the cannons.
After this place a tracker block onto the rotating part of the turret aswell.
Tracker blocks make the group they are part of to point at where the mouse by automatically operating joints, it is much easier than manually operated turrets.

Now after this we will set up the wheels. Place a speed configured turn joint at the side of the tank and then place a wheel block on it.
Then press 4 to enter setup mode, this allows you to configure joints and parts.
Left click the wheel and drag the diameter slider a bit so that the wheel can actually touch the ground, a wireframe representation of the wheel ingame will show you it's size.
Right click to exit that menu and then left click on the wheel's turn joint, you can bind a key from the assign menu which will be covered later to a joint operation, for now click a free slot and bind it to the Move F key which by default is W. Next to this you can set the slider to a speed between negative 100 and positive 100, what direction positive and negative is can be found by observing the direction the arrows connect to the rotated block point, as seen positive movement sends the wheel rotating anti clockwise, which is no use for the tank, so set Move F to be negative 100 and Move B to positive 100.
For turning the tank we're just gonna do it the usual tank way of having each side's wheels to spin in seperate directions to cause the entire tank to turn.
Presuming the wheel is on the right side Bind Turn L to negative 100, aka forward, and turn R to positive 100
You can then switch back to form mode by pressing 1 and middle click on the turn joint to copy it, this can be done with just about every type of block, every block you place will be that exact joint settings and all, so cover the same side of the tank with as many joints and wheels as you want.
Now mirror the tank so that the wheels copy over to the other side, if your tank is asymmetrical then manually place the wheels on the other side.
Open up the settings on the other sides wheels and swap Move F with Move B.
You can middle click with the settings tool aswell, which instead of creating a new duplicate block it will copy the settings into the clicked block.
After this our tank can now move, to test this place a core block somewhere on the tank, this block is needed to make it a valid machine and the camera will center on it.
Press the menu key then test to bring the tank ingame.
You can then use the movement keys to test if the wheels work, if they go in the wrong direction look over the joint settings again, the turret will not work yet.

To return hit the menu key and exit.
Now to get the turret working.
If you have gone ahead and configured the turret joint manually you would have found that it does not move, this is due to the turret being connected to the main body meaning it won't move, you can check this by looking inside the turret in form mode and pressing the menu key, if the joint is flashing it means it's connected to the same body twice.
To correct this press 5 to enter group mode, we can set blocks to be parts of seperate groups, grouped blocks connect with each other as normal but do not connect with other groups, so if we make the turret a seperate block group from the tank body the joint will work.
Use group red and left click on any blocks on the turret that connect with the tank body, then you can right click on the turret to convert the entire thing to red group without having to do it all manually.
Then make the vertical aiming gun a seperate group from the turret.
Now that the groups are correctly configured we can setup the joints and trackers.
Set the two trackers and the turn and pitch joint to neutral 0, neutral is a special control that activates when nothing else is triggering the joint, in this case it will be all the time.
What this means that every frame the trackers will move the linked joints to face where the camera is pointing, meaning you can aim with the mouse, of course this can be done manually like wheels but this works better for now.
Then set all the cannons to be the cannon key which is left mouse by default, the slider for cannons is what delay they fire, if they are all set to the same number they all shoot at once, but if you make them all diffrent it will have a machinegun-like effect.
Go into test mode and make sure the turret moves and shoots, if it's still stuck make sure the tracker and joints have the the same settings and that the groups are seperate.
Now we have a fully functioning tank.

You should now know enough of the basics to reverse engineer some of the sample bots, but to finish up this tutorial we will cover some cosmetic features.
Return back to build mode and press 2 to enter sculpt mode, pressing 2 again will shift through the diffrent sculpting modes.
Right click sculpts a block a left click fills and restores it, we want to use the sculpt mode that takes corners off of blocks, if you do something you cant fill back in use the undo tool.
Then sculpt the corners so they don't look as bad, once you have done this you can press 3 to enter paint mode, press the panel key to open up the colours.
Left clicking changes a single blocks colour and right click fills all blocks that are the same colour, middle click copies a blocks colour.
Joints and other parts can be painted too, and some parts like the cannon have their projectiles change colour based on their paint.

If you want to change the buttons you can assign on joints press on the assign option in the menu, this can be done from the main menu too.
From here you can name keyboard keys to allow you to use them in joints, if you run out of keys press f4 or whatever is assigned to the reserve menu, giving you double the amount of keys you can use.

This concludes this basic tutorial, there are many things left of out it but the english manual and ingame tool tips will help you.
The best thing that you could do to learn more information is to reverse engineer the sample bots by using the load button in the main menu, or joining a server by pressing the play button in the main menu and asking around.
The community usually play on the Japanese region so make sure you change the server browser to look there.
Thank you for watching and I hope this tutorial was of use, leave any feedback you have in comments.