Creating a vehicle you can actually steer is your first hurdle as a Besiege player, and continues to be a difficulty as you progress into building more complicated machines.
Steering is serious business in a game where you’re meant to build war machines of all types — and unfortunately you are probably never going to build something that steers 100% the way you want it to. Besiege is a physics game, after all. Things are going to be a bit tricky.
There are a few ways you can create a functional vehicle and we’re going to cover a few here using the simple vehicle design the game guides you into building on the first level.
There are a few parts used in these instructions. These being:
- Motor Wheel – These wheels are the mainstay to most land-borne creations in Besiege. You will be using these over Unpowered Wheels more often than not.
- Steering Hinge – Steering Hinges as used here to steer wheels left and right directly.
- Wooden Block and Small Wooden Block – Building blocks, of course.
- Suspension – This is best used on less-than-stable vehicles or for getting over or around rough terrain. Lessens the impact of obstacles — such as going over hills or running knights over — on the body of your creations.
- Steering – This baby opens up a lot of options past simply slapping your Motor Wheels on some Wooden Blocks and calling it a day.
Not everything mentioned here will be using all of these parts, but some do to give you an idea of what options you have and what you can work with.
The very first option we’re going to look at is the most basic from a build perspective, but requires some key mapping.
The basic four-wheeler
This is the first thing people recommend to new builders trying to create a vehicle they can steer because of its basic design and use of the key mapping function (something you need to learn to be friends with).
You can steer fairly well with this design, but you do need to map the front two wheels before you can get rolling with efficiency. It is built exactly how it looks using just Wooden Blocks and Motor Wheels.
Click the wrench icon at the top of the screen, labelled “Key Mapper + Parameter Tuning”.
From here, click on the front left Motor Wheel. Mouse over the button that says “Up” and press the right key on your keyboard. Mouse over the button that says “Down” and press the left key on your keyboard. Press the ‘X’ at the top of that window to apply your changes.
Then click on the front right Motor Wheel and change the keys to the opposite so that ‘Up’ is left and ‘Down’ is right. Apply changes again.
To break it down:
- Right front Motor Wheel – Up is right and down is left.
- Left front Motor Wheel – Up is left and down is right.
Take it for a spin to make sure it works, because you have one more step to do to make this fully workable: Add additional wheels.
Adding wheels to the outside of the Motor Wheels already present keeps your creation moving forward instead of stalling. It also helps you go a little faster without the dangers of changing your wheels’ rotation speeds.
This method can also be used on creations with legs (as opposed to those that are flat), but it’s more janky in action. It also needs double wheels.
If you create something using this method with more than two sets of wheels, you may need to adjust the parameters of the row of wheels behind the front two as well.
Steering Hinges to the side
This is one method a lot of people don’t like, but you just might.
There are two methods of propelling using Steering Hinges, this one being a bit more reliable and traditional, but is slower to turn and hence more difficult to maneuver.
Once more, we’re going to start with the build the game tries to veer you toward at the start of the game.
Before placing Motor Wheels on each side, put Steering Hinges on the left and right of the front of the vehicle like so:
They should be rotated so that they will move back and forth as opposed to up and down. You can press the ‘R’ key to rotate them before putting them down if they are at the wrong rotation by default.
From here, you simply place the Motor Wheels on each Steering Hinge and each side of the back and there you go! Another reliable mode of transportation.
You can double up the wheels, as demonstrated in the first method, to increase speed and driving accuracy.
Building a vehicle using Steering
There are two primary ways to use Steering, one of which being at the bottom of your creation and the other being to its sides.
We’re going to focus here on placing them at the bottom because placing Steering to the sides makes for a very slow turn. That said, here’s a picture of a simple vehicle using Steering on all four sides for reference.
What we’re creating is just a tiny bit more complicated.
The image below is not an option because the Motor Wheels will collide with the body and rip at least one wheel off when you try to turn. Wheels being turned by Steering must not be able to collide with other parts.
So let’s make a functional vehicle using Steering!
First, make the simple four-cornered design we’ve used in the other examples. From there, place a Small Wooden Block on the bottom of each corner like so:
Place a Steering under each Small Wooden Block.
And finally, place the Motor Wheels on the outside of each Steering. (Double Motor Wheels will again increase speed and stability.)
Actually controlling this type of vehicle takes some getting used to.
Suspension
You can take this method a bit further and add Suspension before the Steering for even more stability. This will keep it from breaking when rolling up hills and whatnot.
I don’t recommend putting double Motor Wheels on this because it’s too lightweight and a bit high up, but it’s fine to at least double up on larger, more bulky creations using the this steering method with Suspension.
Hinges to the front
There are a ton of ways to do this, but we are going to focus on the most simple option here. This method also uses the Steering Hinge.
Take the base design and add Wooden Blocks to the front like so:
Add a Steering Hinge to the middle block at the front. Make sure it’s rotated so it turns left to right instead of up and down.
Place a Wooden Block on the Steering Hinge.
Place two Motor Wheels on either side of the Wooden Block at the front, and one on each side at the back of the vehicle.
With this design, you have the Steering Hinge at the front controlling the direction of the front two Motor Wheels and giving fairly precise control over your creation.
Turning with this steering method is precise and easy to do. There are also a lot of ways to customize this method in particular. For instance, here it us using two Steering Hinges instead of one:
And of course, doubling up on the wheels with both designs gives additional speed.
Hopefully these examples and directions will help you on your feet in creating some contraptions in Besiege!
(If interested, I have also done a similar guide on building simple catapults with two .bsg files to play with and one on building a simple, easy to use flying machine.)
Published: Feb 15, 2015 03:13 pm