Overview
This guide is basically my personal summary for things you really shouldn’t do in brick rigs for both yours and others’ sake and sanity
Reuploading Creations/Modifying then uploading without permission
Seriously, don’t do this. If you’re going to modify then upload a creation, do it with the original creator’s permission, and credit them in your description (or just credit them if they’re fine with people uploading modded versions of their stuff). If you don’t have the creator’s permission to upload your creation edits, the original creator can easily have your upload taken down by the workshop moderators. And if you’re going to just straight up copy and paste someone else’s creation on the workshop, don’t. You’re only wasting your own, the workshop mods’, and the original creators’ time by reuploading creations.
And if you’re a workshop creator scared of someone reuploading your creation before it’s even published (because that has happened before just so they can say “haha I uploaded first it’s my car”), watermark your creations (example: add 1×1 nameplates in places people aren’t likely to look.), and guard them as much as you can in multiplayer. In case it does happen, you can show the mods your original creation (On discord, preferably, because they’re likely to respond to you quicker that way) with the watermark to prove it’s your car and not someone else’s.
How to spot a reuploaded creation 101:
- Does it seem like a suspiciously high quality creation with no custom thumbnail?
- Does it have a generic name?
- Does it have no additional pictures or description whatsoever?
If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, then it’s probably a reupload.
See this community post for more information on what constitutes a reuploaded creation.
Being “that idiot” in a Multiplayer server (This includes you, server hosts.)
So imagine one day you’re driving around in your 2016 Decker® Peepo™ in a public City RP server one day when you notice that something’s not right, your FPS has gone down from 45 to 17, then you start to hear a projectile narrowly miss your car and a diesel V12 in the distance. At that moment, you come to a realization. Oh no, you say to yourself. Someone’s about to destroy the city and possibly crash the server in the process. You rush to tell the server owner what’s going on but it is to no avail because you then realize he/she, is AFK (probably listening to spotify with their airpods in). You frantically hit the votekick button, hoping everyone will know what’s going on, but everyone else votes no. “Why?” one clueless player asks, in a different location from the chaos about to ensue. Then, you hear more firing, the Diesel V12 getting louder, until you hear it stop. There is a brief moment of peace before something far, far worse happens. You see the tank, with it’s black aluminum and yellow glow all over it. After that, you start to hear the ear deafening sound of an auto-cannon, right before you hear every building in the city collapse at what might as well have been the same time. Finally, everything stops. Then you come back to the main menu wondering why you’re there, then you see the dreaded message, Outgoing Reliable Buffer Overflow.
I’m pretty sure most of you can relate to the scenario above and have had something similar happen to you at least once while playing in a public server. Maybe you’ve even been the one spawning certain black and yellow glow tanks in public roleplay servers because the host doesn’t know how to manage a server and forgot to disable guns.
Things you can do to not be “that idiot” in a multiplayer server
- Listen to the server host. If they tell you to stop doing something, stop doing that thing.
- DO. NOT. SPAWN. ANYTHING. WITH. TRAILERS. Now everything might look fine on your screen, but on anyone else’s screen it’ll probably be doing crazy things like lagging into their cars and destroying them if they’re nearby.
- If someone tells you to stop doing something, stop doing that thing. Whether it’s shooting them nonstop, constantly crashing into them, spawning directly in front of them, etc, stop.
- Keep your troll creations (things with spammed horns, guns, etc) out of public servers. The only thing you’re doing by having troll creations spawned in most cases is getting people to dislike you even further.
- Try not to spawn anything too high brick in a server (Example: literally anything above roughly 500-650 bricks) Now I know this might sound a bit low for some creations like buildings, but you can normally always find a lower brick alternative, or reduce bricks on the creation yourself by removing certain details.
- Keep a sort of “brick limit” for things you spawn in your head, and decrease that by an amount for every player that’s in the server.
- Stay within a server’s theme. Use common sense when spawning things. Say, you wouldn’t cruise around in your nice convertible if you’re in a dogfights server. You’d grab a WW1 fighter and start doing dogfights instead.
- And please, keep your tanks/spy cars/apoc vehicles/anything with guns on it in War servers.
Things hosts can do to prevent idiots:
- Disable guns and explosions
- Name your damn servers properly. Don’t just leave them unnamed, or even worse, having it titled incorrectly (Example: Naming your server “City RP” but the map is Desert: Zombie Mode.)
- Use multiplayer settings properly too. If you’re frustrated with people ruining your servers with guns and bombs, disable guns and explosions.
- If you want only your friends to join your server, there’s a private server button for a reason. Use it so that way only people you have added on steam are able to join your session.
- Have reasonable brick count limits (Say 500 for an RP server)
- Actually supervise what’s going on with freecam.
- Pay attention to chat, if someone asks for someone else to be kicked it’s for a reason.
- If someone’s doing something wrong, tell them. If they refuse to stop, it’s OK to kick them. Also, give the person time to correct the issue before you resort to kicking them.
Joining someone’s server without asking them first.
Self explanatory, but you still shouldn’t join someone’s brick rigs server without asking them first, and if they say no, don’t join them. They might be doing something private that they don’t want anyone other than those already in the server to see.
Adding someone when their description says specifically not to.
Now I know it might be tempting to add the Oberon man just so you can message him to make the glowy-glowy again but resist your urges because it’s not going to happen. He’ll probably ignore your friend request. This goes for anyone, not just famous builders on some obscure lego ripoff game, don’t add anyone on steam if they don’t know you already.
Impersonating YouTubers.
Just. No.
If you want people to hate and/or laugh at you very quickly when they see you trying this, go ahead. Otherwise, you’re not fooling anyone at all. By extension, also don’t host servers titled something like “Camodo/Spycakes/OB/T-Series” pls join because they’re not gonna join. They have better things to do than join some random kid’s brick rigs server just because they asked.
Asking for someone’s help building something, then also refusing as much of it as possible.
If you ask for help on a creation and you don’t like the other person’s suggestion, instead of refusing it entirely, try it on a different save of the car. That way if you end up liking it you can overwrite the original save of that, and if you don’t, you can just delete that save. And if you don’t know how to do something that someone suggested, ask them how.
Posting workshop creations with no custom thumbnail.
Creation quality aside, which one of these would you have subscribed to first? I’m going to bet that a majority of you probably chose the one with the custom thumbnail. If you’re someone that wants your workshop builds to get any attention at all nowadays, you need custom thumbnails. They help highlight your creations more, and more people will subscribe to them that way.
See the following guides on how to make custom thumbnails:
Not keeping backups of your creations.
The last thing you want to happen is to get on the Digital Computer Entertainment Application known as Brick Rigs, a LEGO-Style sandbox game, and see this happen to a creation you’re working on:
>(
Keep backups of your creations, kids. It might save your life one day.
Conclusion / Credits
If you take the advice in this guide the next time you play Brick Rigs, you can save the community’s collective sanity even if it’s just by a little bit.
That’s all folks, thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Credits
- Alex Monamochamuch: Helped with general guide ideas
- CloudPixel: Writing the entire thing.
- WarChallenger: Also helping me with ideas for this guide. Namely helping me with the multiplayer section and the bit on reuploads.