Cosmetic Materials Coming Soon

Hello Robocrafters!

A couple of days ago we teased cosmetic materials via the following gif:

Eagle-eyed players would have noticed that this machine is comprised of three new cosmetic materials that we’ve never shown before!

• Worn painted Moderonium

• Streaky Hex Illuminum

• Y-Plated Ladium

You can get a better look at the materials on this tank in this screenshot.

Cosmetic materials are a new way to design your robocraft, drastically changing their look and style. They still fall under the exact same properties of light, medium and heavy materials.

These Cosmetic Materials bring with them a new UI system that you to place up to three materials on your machine and also change previously placed materials on the Robocraft into another material without having to repaint the entire Robocraft!

You enter Material Mode as usual by pressing M, but what you may notice immediately is your hotbar now only displays three slots. By default these are Moderonium, Airium, and Ladium

Pressing the number keys will switch to each slot and you’ll be able to paint any blocks in your bay that material. This is pretty similar to how it currently works. However, those familiar with the colour palette system know that they can paint their robocraft up to 6 colours in total.

Materials will behave the same way, this hot bar represents the maximum number of materials you can place on your robocraft. Like the colour palette, changing any of these hot bars will change any previously placed materials that are already in the bay

This is great if you want to make quick changes to the weight of your robocraft and want to switch up all heavy materials into lightweight materials.

The first hotbar slot will be the material that you place while in build mode. This means that if you were to create a machine that is predominately made of Ladium, you can place a Ladium material in this slot and can build in Ladium without needing to repaint it with a different material.

You may be wondering why we have chosen to limit the number of different materials on your vehicle. Well, the reason is that we want to ensure that the maximum amount of memory (ram) that cosmetic textures consume in a battle is capped. We want to be able to release an infinite number of new cosmetic materials over time without it ever increasing the memory used on your PC during a battle. With 10 players in battle and 3 unique materials on each robocraft we can have 30 high quality materials sitting in memory. These materials would be dynamically loaded depending on which are required. Each material has unique texture channels for Albedo, Albedo colour mask, Metallic, Smoothness, Ambient Occlusion and Emissive as well as a Normal texture, so the paintable materials use quite a lot of memory which means we have to have fairly tight limits. We decided that most robocraft use a maximum of three material weights, with many only using two weights which we felt allowed for a fair amount of cosmetic freedom.

These cosmetic materials can be earned in the battle matrix in the next update.

Robocraft on the CRF can also be customised with cosmetic materials that you’ve earned.

If you attempt to download a robocraft that uses cosmetic materials that you don’t currently own, you will receive a message that you don't own those cosmetic materials and it will convert the cosmetic materials selected to default Airium, Moderonium and Ladium

There will be a ton of cosmetic materials in the future and we believe it will offer many players a lot of creative freedom to improve the look of their robocraft.

Note: For builds that use Airum, Moderonium, Ladium and Illuminum. The Illuminum material will be converted into a Moderonium. There are only a small handful that use all four materials.