Marbles on Stream Track Building Guide

Overview

This guide includes explanations of all the track builder’s features and includes helpful images of its functional options and pieces. Even if you are an experienced builder this guide might contain some useful tips, tricks and mechanics.

Introduction

Hey my name is Hidri, also known as Hidri02 on Twitch and Marbles On Stream. I have been building tracks since the track builder for marbles came out in Season 9 in March 2019. Track building can be a very complicated and time consuming effort. In hopes of making it easier for people to get into the marbles track builder, I decided to write this guide.

The first couple chapters will teach you some basic information and explain how the tools of the track builder work. I definitely recommend everyone to check out the “Tips & Tricks” section near the end. It contains information about building tricks that can make your life as a builder easier as well as some interesting effects you can create with track pieces.

But let me give you the most important tip about track building right now. Have fun with what you are doing and don’t give up if things don’t work out immediately the way you want them to! It takes time to learn how to use the different tools and controls that are available. The more you build, the easier and more enjoyable it gets.

Should you have any further questions about track building you can comment on this guide or you can head over to the official Marbles on Stream discord [discordapp.com] and ask your questions in the #mos-track-masters section there.

I can also recommend to head over to Tsenshun’s Twitch channel[www.twitch.tv]. He is an awesome streamer / track builder and very good at explaining things. Big shoutout to him for helping me with this guide!

Basic Information

The marbles track builder is an editor tool that can be used to create your own custom marbles race tracks. You can choose from a variety of available track pieces, obstacles, materials and backgrounds that can be freely placed and snapped together. The tracks you create can also be uploaded to the global community maps system in the game for anyone to race.

There are 2 versions of the track builder: A free version, and seasonally paid version.
Anyone can download the game for free and create tracks with the free version of the builder. Of course you won’t get the full experience that way. You will be limited to a lot fewer pieces and have less materials and obstacles to work with. With the free version you are also limited to a maximum of 3 uploaded track to the global system. This version of the builder is intended for people to try out the editor and see if they like it.

If people like the free version they can buy the Track Builder Season Pass in the in-game shop in the track builder tab.

The season pass gives full access to all the features of the builder for the whole season. (Note: That means after the season is over you will lose full access again unless you purchase the pass again)
At the beginning of the season, the pass costs 200 PbP Coins (as of Season 15) but the price gets reduced everyday until it becomes free at the end of the season for people to try out the full version for free.

Track Building: Getting Started

To get started with building your first track head over to the community maps section and click the “create” button to open up the builder.

Once you’ve opened up the builder you should see something like this:

In the top right corner you can find for buttons: “Tracks”, “Obstacles”, “Materials” and “Skybox”.

Clicking those buttons will reveal sub menus.
“Tracks” will reveal 3 different categories for track pieces: “Start”, “Middle” and “End”.

Each track needs to have exactly 1 start piece and 1 end piece for the game to allow races to be conducted on it.

The Obstacles tab contains all the different obstacles that are available in the game. Obstacles have to be parented to a track piece. That means they have to always be placed on a track piece first so they get attached as a child to the piece. If the piece get moved, the obstacles that are attached to it move with it.

In the Materials section you can pick the Material (often also referred to as the coloring) of the track. You can change the Material of 3 different categories: “Base”, “Obstacle” and “Glass”.
The picture on the right shows a spinner (by the community also referred to as “Steve”) where the base material is black, the obstacle material is green and the glass cover is a translucent glass material.

Translucent materials are only available as an option for obstacles and glass because of performance issues with fully translucent tracks.

In the Skybox tab the Skybox (background) of the track can be changed. The skybox also affects the lighting of the track and can make tracks brighter or darker.

In the top left corner is a menu with sliders and buttons to assist in track building:

This menu is always visible and will allow you to adjust:

• Movement speed: You can change the speed of the camera’s movement by moving the slider or by using Shift + mouse wheel.
• Grid snapping: You can move this slider to set a fixed value (5, 10, 45) that you move or rotate a piece, or leave it off for free movement.
• Position: If you select a track piece or obstacle, it’s Position and Rotation values will be displayed here and can be manually adjusted.
• Edit history: All actions taken in the builder are tracked here and can be undone/redone during construction.
  
• Object list: All placed track pieces and obstacles are listed here, enabling you to select them from a list instead of clicking on them in the gamespace.
  
• World setting: The light intensity and light rotation settings allow you to control the skylight direction and rotation of your track’s lighting.
  

I would definitely recommend to build up a habit of saving your track from time to time while building.
To save tracks click on “File” in the top left corner and hit “Save”. The name you enter for saving the track is not the same name the track will have when uploaded, it is purely for your local file.

The “Save As” button can be used to save a copy of a track under a different name.

With “Open” you can open up the list of all of your saved track files. It will also show you useful information but the tracks you have uploaded to the global system, like how often they have been raced, what the average elim. rate is, the average finish time as well as the rating.

Track Building: Construction

To place track pieces just click on one of the pieces in the Tracks tab and drag it into the gamespace.

To snap pieces to other pieces simply grab the blue ball and drag it to the pink ball of another piece. It should snap the piece in place.

The blue ball always indicates the snap point of the start of a piece, while the pink piece indicates the snap point of the end piece. You can only snap together blue balls with pink balls. As a result this means you can’t snap together pieces in reverse. You can still manually line them up that way though.

When you select a piece you will also see a few additional buttons.
From left to right we have these have the following functions:

• Copy
• Activate movement tool
• Toggle between global coordinate system and relative/local coordinate system (relative to the orientation of the selected object)
• Activate rotation tool
• Reset button (resets the piece into its default orientation)
• Delete button

Movement tool and rotation tool:

Click on one of the colored arrows and drag to move or rotate the selected piece.

Here you can see the difference between the global coordinate system and the relative/local coordinate system. The piece on the right is rotated at an angle while the left piece is placed in the default orientation. with the global tool the movement tool and rotation tool can move the piece along the default global orientation while with the local tool it changes the movement and rotation tool to reference relative to the orientation of the piece.

Curve pieces have an additional button that allow to switch the direction of the curve without having to replace it.

Obstacles present interesting ways to hold up marbles in your races and can cause a lot of change in the ranking of the marbles. Currently we have access to the following obstacles with the season pass:

• Pins
• Speedboosts
• Destructible Cubes
• Hammers
• Wiggly Sticks (also referred to as “Bamboo Sticks”)
• Rotating Posts (also referred to as “Dojos”)

Note for hammers: Only the head of the hammer actually has collision and can hit/block marbles.

As mentioned before, all obstacles need to be parented to a track piece. That means you can only snap them onto a piece and if the piece gets moved the attached obstacles will move with it.
If you click on a piece with attached obstacles, a list will show up with all its attached obstacles. If you hover over them in the list it will show a little green arrow above their location. If you click on an obstacle through the list you will select it and its properties will show up.

Pins are obstacles that by default move up and down and can occasionally block marbles if they are in the “up” position. But they can also launch marbles or act as a stationary obstacle. To change how they act, pins have 4 different properties:

• TimeBetweenMove: The time the pin will remain still after reaching the “Up” or “Down” position. By default it remains still for 2 seconds.
• MoveDownSpeed: The time it takes for a pin to move back from all the way “Up” to all the way “Down”.
• MoveUpSpeed: The time it takes for a pin to move back from all the way “Down” to all the way “Up”. Reducing this time drastically to 0 or 0.1 will cause marbles to get launched if they happen to go over the pin at the right moment.
• IsStationaryPin: Checkbox to turn the Pin into a stationary none moving obstacle.

Please Note: When you load up a track all the pins will start moving from the same position. This means that all pins will move synchronized if they have the same settings even though it looked different to you during building. If you save and reload your track during building you will be able to see this.

Track Building: Properties and Limitations

A lot of track pieces have extra properties. If you select a piece with changeable properties, a little properties window will pop up in the UI. Some of the properties you can change included:

• Capping a piece with a glass cap
• Changing the rotation speed of spinning elements (spinners, tumblers …)
• Changing the shape of a piece (mogul piece, narrowers ….)
• Changing orientation/angle of piece (ramps and cannons)
• Boost strength (cannons)

Hitting the “Reset to default” button in the properties menu will reset all the properties of a piece to their default.

Not all of the pieces that have properties are mentioned here, just try out every piece and check if they have properties. The properties are usually very self explanatory. 🙂

One of the pieces that has a lot of properties is the bongo pad. The bongo pad has 3 different functionalities:

• light up
• bounce marbles
• play sounds

To customize these functions you get the following properties:

• Soundsetting: Allows you to switch between 12 different sounds (bongos, piano…) Each sound corresponds to a different color of light.
• Soundpitch: Allows you to increase or decrease the pitch of a sound
• Bounceforce: Allows to change how much marbles should get bounced by the pad. This can be set to 0 if you don’t want any marbles to bounce from the pad.
• Volume: Allows to change how loud the sounds of the bounce pad will be when you are close enough to it. The sound gets attenuated until it won’t be audible at all any more after a fixed distance.

Narrowers are track pieces that narrow the track. Narrowing the track can make marbles go in a straight line. It can also change the flow of a track. If lots of marbles go into a narrow section it will act as a bottleneck and only slowly let them through.

Narrowers only snap on top of other pieces. They work best on top of a standard straight piece.
There are 4 different versions of the narrower piece that can be switch in between through the variant setting in the properties menu.

One use case would be to place them before a cannon or other jump to ensure marbles jump straight and not at an angle.

At the top of the UI you can see an “obstacle” count and a “tracks” count. This will track how many track pieces and obstacles are part of your track. The free version has a limit of 50 obstacles and 200 track pieces while the season pass bumps up the limit to 100 obstacles and 300 track pieces.

In the bottom left corner it shows how many tracks you can upload to the global system and how many you have already uploaded. With the free version you can only upload a single track to the global system. You can create as many tracks as you want, if you want to upload a different track you will have to first delete your track from the global system to have the upload slot available again.
With the season pass the upload limit is increased to a total of 25 uploaded tracks.

Track Building: Testing and Uploading

To test your tracks, you got 2 options: “Test to Upload” and “Drop Marble”.

If you click on “Drop Marble” it will allow you to drop test marbles on any piece of the track. By default they will despawn automatically after 60 seconds. You can increase or decrease that time by changing the number next to “Drop Marble”. While the “Drop Marble” mode is activated you can’t place or edit anything on the track. By pressing “3” on your keyboard you can quickly toggle between dropping test marbles and building.

Please note that in the drop marble mode not all the physics of pieces get activated. Destructible cubes and Wiggly Sticks will remain solid objects during drop marbles.

If you want to do a full test you can hit the “Test to upload” button. For test to upload to work there needs to be exactly 1 start piece and 1 finish piece on the track. You can stop the test to upload race and go back to editing at any point by hitting the edit button in the bottom left corner.

By default “Test to Upload” will spawn 100 marbles for a full simulation race. You can change the amount of marble for the simulation to any amount between 1 marble up to 1000. It is a good idea to simulate races on your track at a varying number of marbles since streamers out there could be playing your track with very few but also with a lot of marbles. Personally I usually do three tests at 10 marbles, 100 and 500 to see if there are any issues with very view or a lot of marbles on my track.

If you are streaming your track building you can also remove the checkmark next to “Simulation” and let your viewers be the guinea pigs. 😛

So after you are done building and testing your track you are ready to upload it. To upload it you have to conduct another test to upload race.

After the race is finished and at least 1 marble made it you can see all the statistics of the race and an upload button will appear.

Before it gets uploaded the game will ask you to name the track. You have to pick 3 words from a list of words to name your track. This is to prevent people from naming their uploaded tracks anything inappropriate. Once you are done choosing a name you can hit Submit to upload the track

To delete a track, open up the “my maps” menu by clicking on “File” —> “Open” in the top left corner.
In the menu it will list all the tracks. If you hit the “x”-shaped button, in the “delete” column, it will delete the track.

Tracks that are currently uploaded will show a globe in the “uploaded” column of the table. If the track is currently uploaded and you try to delete it will only delete the uploaded track but keep a local version of it.

To make changes to a track that is uploaded you will have to reupload it for those changes to take effect. So if you want to change anything you open up the track file (it can be the same file as the one that is currently uploaded), make your changes to it and then delete the file that is uploaded. As mentioned it will only delete it from the servers if has the “globe” symbol next to it.
After you deleted it you can do a “test to upload” race with the edited file and upload it again.

If you want to upload the track with the same name,it is important to delete the uploaded track first and then reupload it, as the game won’t allow you to upload 2 tracks with the same name.

Should you somehow delete your local track files but still have the tracks uploaded, then there will be a button in the “Get” column to redownload your track.

Track Rating, Favoriting and Searching

If you go to the “Community Maps” section you will be greeted by a list of 25 tracks starting with the top rated ones. To see more tracks you can hit the “more” button in the bottom right to load more tracks. Apart from rating you can also see the name of tracks, their creator, the day they got uploaded/created, the elimination rate and the average time.

You can sort the list of tracks by latest, by rating and by favorites.

Next to the Favorites button you can find a search box. With the search box you can find tracks of any creator you like. Type the name of the creator and hit the enter button next to the box. Please note that the search function only works to search for track creator names and the name has to be fully typed accurately. Only the capitalization doesn’t matter. So for example searching for my tracks with “hidri” wouldn’t work since my full twitch name is “hidri02”.

If you have raced a track before a little flag gets put next to the track. The little blue number tells you how often you have raced the track.

If you want to reset the list of raced tracks you can hit the reset button next to the enter button.

The last 5 tracks you have raced will also get marked red in the menu. If you race them again while they are marked, they will award fewer points.

After a streamer races a community track, their chat can upvote or downvote the track by typing “!vote yes” or “!vote no” into the chat, they can also use the global twitch emotes VoteYea or VoteNay. The rating will affect how far up your track will be listed on this screen. The top 5 tracks also get featured on the front page of the game.

Hotkeys, Copy & Multiselect

• “1” switch to movement tool
• “2” switch to rotation tool
• “3” toggle drop marble
• “delete” to delete the selected object(s)
• “ctrl + z” undo
• “alt” hold alt and drag a piece along one axis of the movement tool to create a copy of it and all of its attached obstacles. This also works for multiselections.
• “shift” hold shift and click on pieces to multiselect them. You can also deselect pieces from a multiselection while holding shift.
• “T” to toggle slow motion during a test to upload race

There are 2 ways to copy pieces. You can hit the copy button or you can hold the “alt” key and drag along one of the axes to to copy a piece along its axis.
For example in this picture I selected the “bottom” piece, held alt and dragged the green arrow to the side to create a copy of it.

You can also select multiple pieces at once and copy them all at the same time. There are also 2 ways to multiselect. You can hold shift and click each piece you want to select. (you can also deselect pieces again by clicking on them) Or you can hold shift and left click to drag a window over your track to window select. You can copy the selection the same way either by hitting the copy button or using alt drag.

Tips & Tricks

• Get inspired: Looking at tracks other people build is a good idea to get inspired. Don’t copy exactly what they do, but get ideas and try to use them in creative ways in your own tracks. If you took an idea from someone else and you get complimented on it, it is always nice to throw the credit at the creator you got the idea from. 🙂
• Watch streamers run your track: Watching streamers run your track can help a lot to see on what you can improve. They might view the track very differently or miss certain parts of the race. The way a streamer uses the camera on your track can have a huge influence on how the track is perceived. Sometimes there is nothing you can do if a streamer does a bad job at using the camera. If that happens try to not get upset and maybe point out the good spots of your map to the streamer. That way they can show it off better. 🙂
• Simple tracks: A simple track that is straightforward in terms of layout is usually a lot easier to follow than a track with multiple paths and overlapping sections. Now that definitely doesn’t mean that you should never do those things. Just keep in mind that it makes the track a lot harder to follow for the streamer.
• Be creative: Don’t just snap together some pieces and call it a day. Be creative with it, try to move around elements. Twist and turn things to create something new and unique. An interesting race in my opinion should allow for unexpected things to happen. I like to make very unique finishes that allow for some last second switchups in the rankings.
• Rating: Don’t bother too much with the rating of your tracks. People have very different tastes and love and hate tracks for the same reason. For example, some people love it when tracks are deadly while some hate it. You won’t be able to satisfy everyone so you might as well not bother too much with it. Rather than focusing on what everyone wants, you should do what YOU want. Build the track that YOU want to build and enjoy building. 🙂
• Bongo pad lights: Since bongo pads light up, it can lead to amazing effects if you place them below parts of your track so it lights up when marbles roll over it. This works especially well on tracks that use a dark background and can look something like this[clips.twitch.tv]. Just remember to turn off the volume on those pads if you don’t want them to make terrible noises because of all the mixed sounds.
• Center your track: Put your start piece at y = 0 that way if you have to center an obstacle or a piece along the track it will be very easy to put it into the middle. You can also copy the coordinates of the piece you want to attach to and use those to center an obstacle but it is usually easier to just have everything at y=0.
• Cube explosions: One trick I am fairly known for is to stack cubes on top of each other. If you stack them it will cause a big explosion. It can make for a very colorful effect but also for a great jumpscare. Here[clips.twitch.tv] is a clip of it jumpscaring a streamer. The easiest way to stack them is to place one cube, then hold alt and and tap on one of the arrows from the movement tool. That way it will create copies of the cube at the same spot.
• Stairs: If you look at the stair pieces, you might have noticed that there are 3 different versions of a straight stair piece. If you take a closer look at them you will notice that 2 of them are slightly rounded at the start or the end of them. They are intended as transition pieces between a stairway and a track while the last one is intended to be used as a middle section between 2 other stair pieces. If you don’t use the stair transition pieces, it is likely that marbles can get stuck at the transitions.
• Placing Hammers: The easiest way to place a hammer is to attach it to some piece that is close to where you want the hammer to be, then hit the reset button to reset its orientation and then manually move and rotate it into the position where you want them to be. To make sure that they are lined up correctly and will actually hit marbles, turn down the speed to the slowest speed possible and start a test to upload race. During the test to upload race you can hit “T” for slow motion to see the position of the hammer better.
• Hammers & Cubes: If you put a cube in the way of the head of a hammer, it will be blocked and held in place by the cube. In the builder you won’t notice it until you start a test to upload race since only then the physics of the cube activate and actually stop the hammer. If you do this please note that it is not an intended use case and can be a bit buggy.
• Stacking Hammers: If you want to stack hammers in place so you for example have 1 hammer every 90° you have to change the rotation of the hammers. Hammers just like pins and other moving objects will reset at track load up and start from the same position. So even if you have 4 hammers stacked, they will appear as one if you don’t change their rotation.
• Speed boosts and hills / loops: If you want to make marbles move uphill or through a loop you might want to use speed boosts. A mistake a lot of people make is not spacing and configuring their boosts properly. Putting one boost pad with a maxed out boost magnitude into a loop is not really a good solution since the physics engine of the game won’t be able to keep up properly with such speeds and cause marbles to glitch through the track. Multiple boost pads with a lower boost magnitude present a much better solution. In your testing you might have all of your marbles make it up the hill, but if you have multiple marbles then collisions between marbles can lead to marbles getting slowed down and stuck in between 2 boostpads, on a boostpad or before a boostpad. To prevent that, always make sure that marbles can reach the next boostpad. To test that you can place single test marbles at different points of your hill / loop like at the beginning, near the end or in between boostpads.
• Hidden boost pads: If you place a boost pad on a track piece and then lift it up sleightly into the air, the yellow arrows will become invisible while the pad still affects the marbles. This can lead to some very surprising effects especially if you rotate the boost pads to launch marbles upwards out of nowhere.
• Avoid open edges: The surfaces between pieces that usually aren’t visible when they are snapped to other pieces are referred to as “open edges”. If you have marbles roll or fly against those, it is very likely that they will get stuck inside of them.
• Avoid dead stops: Having cubes in your track is fine and I personally like to use them a lot in unique ways. But using them to hold up a race usually makes the race feel bad. You don’t want all the marbles to just sit there and wait for cube debris to despawn.

Tips for free piece tracks

Free piece tracks only have very limited pieces available. You can still create awesome tracks with just the free pieces, but you need to be a lot more creative. Here are some tricks that can help you make your races more exciting:

• Rotated Boostpads: Boostpads can be rotated upwards to point up into the air. This will cause marbles get launched upwards by boostpad similar to how bongo pads can launch marbles that roll onto them. In my experience rotated boostpads make for more accurate jumps than any sort of ramp piece. They can also be used easily in free piece tracks to make interesting jumps.
• Free piece Narrowers: Before the narrower existed as a unique piece, we had to come up with our own design to line up marbles for jumps. One of these designs looks something like this:
  
  It consists of four straight piece and two 45° turns. (you can also use 90° turns) Two of the straight pieces are spaced exactly 620 units apart from each other. So if the middle is at y=0 the other 2 will be at y=310 and y=-310.

  By doing that it will create a tiny gap in between the pieces that allows exactly for 1 marble at a time to roll through straight.
  
  In a way this design is actually even better for accurately lining up marbles than the piece provided by the game. The prebuild piece is just a lot quicker to use and takes fewer pieces to build. There is also a fairly high chance for marbles to get stuck with this design if too many marbles go at it at once.

• Free piece Splits: One way to spice up your free piece tracks is to create splits. Since there aren’t any split pieces in the free version, you will have to come up with your own design for one. Here is an example of what a split completely made of free pieces could look like:
  

All the Pieces

Starting pieces:

Finish pieces:

Turns:

Downhills:

Splits:

Transitions:

Elevators:

Jumps and landings:

Funnel types:

Mogul types:

Narrower types:

Loops types:

Other pieces:

Large pieces:

Misc caps and bongo: