Since this will likely be your second bot, to start you need to create a file, don't make the mistake I did of overwriting your first CAD that you worked so hard on.

Look for this button on TinkerCAD and click it.

You should now be met with a familiar sight of a blank TinkerCAD slate.

Since you have read the first tutorial you should know the basics of chassis building now so I will skip that part and cut to the next portion of the tutorial, so build the chassis you want and return here when you are ready for wheels.

This is what I designed for the chassis for the visual aspect of the guide.

Time to introduce a new addition to your toolbox, the hole tool.


These are the circled items, and this portion of the guide explains how they work.

To start, you want to put the hole tool in the area you want gone, and select the shape you want parts cut out from.

To merge the shapes and cut the part out hit the button circled in black.

You should be left with something like this, however we don't want the chassis looking like this so lets undo the merge, there are two ways to do this, obviously the undo button, but there is another way.

Remember the blue circle? Well this is the unmerge shapes buttton, and it does exactly what it says on the tin. Click that and then delete the circle hole tool from the artboard. It serves no good in this location.

Before adding wheels, first we are going to want to note our chassis height and make the wheels one smaller than that.

In my case the chassis height is five so I will be making the cylinder 4 tall.

the cylinder should now be smaller, this looks ugly though with the wheels being all low poly, lets fix that.

Click this arrow, when you have the cylinder highlighted to open a dropdown menu.

See the slider that says sides? Drag it alllll the way right til it reaches the max of 64, then collapse the dropdown menu.

The cylinder should look a lot smoother now, but we still aren't ready to start on the internal wheels yet.

Highlight both the cylinder and the red rectangle that is your main chassis

Then click this button, introducing the align tool.

It should bring up this overlay, now each dot aligns one shape to a certain area of the other, the edge ones align to edges, and the center ones center things obviously.

What we want is the one with the blue arrow pointing to it, so click that one, you wont notice much of a difference but believe me this step is critical for any bot, exposed wheels or not.

Now lets introduce a new tool, the workplane tool.

You should notice an orange plane appear on whatever surface your cursor moves to. Click the side of the CAD that the cylinder is on.

You should notice that the build plane has now changed, lets move onto the internal wheels finally.

Lets hold shift and drag on the red dot to resize our wheels so they will touch the ground in game first before we do anything.

These look a bit wide for internal wheels so lets make them thinner you know how to do that already due to the first tutorial so do that then move the wheels within the red chassis block itself.

Now the wheel is moved into place, it wont work without a hole for the internal wheel to slot into, duplicate the wheel using the duplicate tool.

hit this button.

Now turn the copied wheel into a hole tool, its still too small to provide clearance for your wheel yet so time to start fixing that.

One thing I didn't touch upon last tutorial is you can manually scale shapes for fine tuning, shift click and maually set the wheel size to .1 wider on one side (in this case its 2 wide so I will input 2.1) then once its wider, deselect the hole, and reseslect it, and add an additional .1 increment for a total of .2 (I am now at 2.2 width).

You should be left with this, however the other side of the wheel still doesn't have clearance, so add an additional .2 to the other side to remedy that, and change the plane back to normal by going to the plane tool and clicking on the flat white surface around the bot, you no longer need it at this angle. There will be more info on plane tool use in a future tutorial, for now we are done with it.

Obviously one wheel won't cut it so lets use our old friend from tutorial 1 the mirror tool combined with the duplicate tool to get the wheels positioned like this.

Unselect the mirror tool tool and shift click the highlighted cylinder hole to remove it from the selection, and delete the surplus square that is left selected.

Now select the two wheel holes, duplicate them, and mirror them the opposite direction from the other two wheel holes, and you should get something like this.

Now merge the chassis with the wheel holes and you should get this.


Uh oh our wheel is floating and not attached to the chassis if you want to compete in the official tournaments this won't fly, lets fix that by making an axle.

Lets make the axle size 1.00, you know the drill, shift+click+manually set the size to 1, and uh oh, its too thin, lets change the length to 2.

This won't work, before we can lengthen it any further we need to re-align it with the wheel, time to show off the edge align function of the align tool.

Click the dot highlighted red and you should wind up with the following result.

Now like earlier with the wheel holes, lets add .2 length onto each side so both ends of the axle touch the edge of the wheel wells, and center the axle with the wheel using the align tool.

You should now have an axle, so lets repeat the duplication and mirroring process we did for the wheel holes earlier on the wheel and axle.

Congratulations your bot now has internal wheels, but we still aren't done yet.

Now for spinning weapons, for this tutorial I will be building a toothed saw.

Put the axle where it is depending on how large you want the weapon, this will be a decent size spinner so its up high.

Next make the base of the disc, this is too far forward for a weapon of this size, so time to set it back some.

Lets also set the chassis to transparent so we can see what we are working on a bit better, I will show you how.

Choose the shape you want to make transparent, go to where you would go to change color and click "Transparent".

To make you more able to make custom bots I will be doing an asymmetrical weapon inspired by the one on Cobalt and Wayside 23 so time to start.

For this disc I have made an 8x8 triangle, set it to the width of the disc and arranged it so its at the top center, this is the start of your tooth.

But you can make your disc however you want for this portion (Again I'm not teaching you how to build a specific bot, merely the basics to get you to understand how to build for this game.), you can even make it a spinning bar if you want that instead of a disc.

Now lets turn off grid snapping, you will need it for this part, there's a drop-down menu at the bottom right titled snap grid, set that to off, you can change it back later, in fact learning to switch between different snap grid increments is key to improving your building later on.

Raise the triangle up as close to the end of the disc as you dare, for me I raised it up by 7.34 but your needs may differ, and will differ bot to bot.

If a tooth is so large it will impact the ground, you need to shorten it. In my case I decided to add some angles in the process so I rotated a cube hole to -14 degrees, raised it up 48.00, and merged it with the triangle.

This is what I came out with.

To duplicate any tooth on the other side, first you need to turn it to a hole, the mirror tool won't work here.

Then you need to merge it with the axle, duplicate the merged shapes, rotate the duplicated shape 180 degrees, and unmerge.

Like with mirroring the wheels, deselect the tooth by shift+clicking it and delete the excess axle that's left highlighted, you might have to zoom inside your chassis to deselect the tooth.

Unmerge the original tooth from the axle, turn both teeth solid again, and merge both teeth together, this will help with rotating., if you want a two toothed disc this is all you have to do.

To get it to four teeth, you have to duplicate your shape, and rotate that 90 degrees.

However getting a saw requires a bit of fine tuning depending on the size of the saw teeth so just keep duplicating and rotating til you are satisfied with your saws shape. This is what I came up with.

Unfortunately it is too big to add the asymmetric tooth so I had to shrink it. but if I just wanted a saw I would have left it as is.

The asymmetric tooth has to be bigger than the other teeth to get bite, so in this case first I set it to 5 height.
Then I shift clicked the tooth, and set it to 6 height before making it the same width as the disc and aligning it to come up with the following image.

I wonder what you have come up with by this point in the guide?


First things first you don't want your teeth's mesh clipping through the disc mesh in game, make the teeth thinner by .02 and center them in the disc. The teeth's shape outlines should look like they are barely popping out the disc like this.

Time to make room for your disc to spin without clipping through the chassis, first duplicate the core of your disc, turn the duplicate to a hole, and set it to be as wide as it is tall. (In my case 36.96)

Next, with snap to grid off, and the plane tool set to the side of the disc shift+click the hole from the opposite side you lengthened it by and lengthen it til the hole covers the whole disc plus a bit extra for that sweet sweet clearance (Again this will depend on the size, and symmetry of your disc or bar).

Turn your bot's chassis solid again, then change the width of your disc hole to at least 2x the width of your disc, and center it on the axle (My bots disc is 1.00 thick, again this is case dependent, and if you don't like how thin the hole is you can always make it wider like I did by making my hole 3.00 thick).

If you have a wedge and chassis the disc needs to go through, you will need to create a separate hole for each shape, duplicate tool and apply the holes to the chassis and wedge (I also lengthened my wedge before doing this).

Your bot is probably (like mine) a bit to high to get under things at the moment, you will learn how to fix that in the next chapter.

Like in real life, forks are important for the ground game. put some evenly distributed holes in your wedge, 5 forks should do for the average vert leave all but the first hole unmerged for now.

Time to work on the curved end of the fork. Start by aligning it at the rear edge (for now) of the fork making it the height of the fork, minus the height of your cutout wedge, and half the length of the axles height (here the fork is 3.10 high, and the cutout is 0.10 so the curve here starts at 3 high making it 1.5 long to start).

at the rear scaling point extend the axle part out so the cylinder is a cylinder again with the curve sticking out of what once was the rear of the fork, and merge your cutout wedge with the fork.

Its axle time again, you know the drill by now, make it smaller than the main cylinder, center it in the said main cylinder.

Move the fork parts into your cutout for the fork using the original wedge to center it, delete the original wedge.

duplicate the cylinder and turn it to a hole, in no snapping mode shift+click scale til the edge of the cylinder is juuuuust poking above the edge of the initial hole. (depending on the width and size of your forks it will vary bot to bot)

Make the cylinder hole the width of the initial hole, and unmerge the initial hole, align the two. (again depending on the width and size of your forks this will vary bot to bot)

merge the two shapes together and turn the other holes solid, use these former holes to align your holes this is a common step I use for positioning fork holes.

Duplicate the hole, and align the duplicate or duplicates with your solid alignment blocks using the align tool and merge the first hole with the wedge once done, you will want easy access to work on the axle and finalize the fork.

Time to work on the axle, you know the drill, make it as wide as the hole is one half at a time. (In my case the fork is 2 wide with a 3 wide hole so I increased the width of the axle 0.50 on one side and 0.50 on the other).

merge the main cylinder with the main fork, if part of the main cylinder is sticking out, use a square hole to level it.

Duplicate and align the fork and axle with the other holes (The amount of holes depends on the amount of forks and varies bot to bot, my bot has 5.). Merge the remaining holes with the wedge (or plow if your bot has a plow instead).

We still aren't done though, some things have drastically changed when it comes to importing bots into the game since my last guide, I will go over this in the next and final part of this guide.

Before going further, have you noticed there are only 36 individual stock colors in Tinker?
Note how my bot has 40 shapes, what if you are in this situation in the future or even now?

You can individually tweak the color, this is the most tedious part of getting a bot ready for export, but it's a necessary evil, I will teach you how.

This is how I used to tweak my colors, I no longer do it this way but for someone starting off with the advanced color tool its the best way. Start by highlighting EVERY part of your bot.

Then go to the color tool and select custom, and change all RGB values to 255, now shift+click on one part to deselect it.

Bring the red value down by 1 and shift+click another part, keep doing this bringing the red value down by 1 every time you deselect a part while being careful not to reselect a part you have already colored (I told you this was the most tedious part of prepping a bot for export).

Eventually you will be down to the last part left, bring the Red value down one last time, sit down, breathe a sigh of relief, and hit export.

Depending on the complexity of your bot and temperament of Tinker at the moment your bot may take a while to export, don't panic if it doesn't work, start work on another bot, you know a lot of tools now to feel comfy experimenting on your own, and come back to the problem bot after 30 minutes or so. It should export then.


So you imported your bot, and its not centered, its backwards, or worse in a bad spot like upside-down or sideways. In the past you would have to fix that in Tinker and re-export.
However as of the latest update which overhauled the bot lab, that can be remedied in game now.


The red 90 button

rotates your bot this way.


the blue 90 button

rotates your bot this way.


the green 90 button

rotates your bot this way.


And the center button?

Well it obviously centers your bot.


With your bot all centered and facing the right way, you are ready to work on your bot.


As Hinges are considered "weapons" by the game, depending on the amount you have you will need to add that many weapon slots plus any actual weapons you have. This bot has 5 hinges and a vertical disc so 6 weapon slots are needed.


I already went over how to make sure a weapon is centered in the first tutorial, the same goes for hinges and spinners. So I will cut to what to do if you have a multi-part wheel.


As you can see you group the wheel parts to their respective wheels and they will rotate as a whole.


For the spinner, it automatically defaults to horizontal. If you want a vertical, you will have to set it to that via the drop-down menu where it says "spin type"


Not pictured here, but you will also want to set weapon force to 1 for the first weapon test to make sure its going in the right direction.


To add a hinge, go to the weapon type dropdown menu and select "hinge".


Remember when I said to set your spinner to 1 force? Here's why, notice it is now set to CCW when in the botlab it was set to CW? This is because it was spinning downward. With a weapon moving at 1 it is easy to catch that and fix it.


Hinges work in strange ways, positive is up, and negative is down. For best ground game, you will want to set your hinges to 1 positive under max and 0 under min...

And that's the guide, hope you learned a lot cause there's not much more I can teach, the third guide (when I get around to it )will be the final one, and will be on decorating your bot so it doesn't look so boxy... But maybe you've even got that down by now... I welcome people posting links to their workshop creations in the comments using the stuff they have learned.

-Okamifan1

By the way, the bot you have been watching me build this whole tutorial? Here it is for download.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3423193404

The thumbnail bot, Blackhole Warrior is also available on the steam workshop.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3360923481