How To Use The Maker Pen In Rec Room | A Beginner’s Guide

Hey everybody, it’s UnderMyCap and welcome back to another post! Today I’m going to be showing you how to use the Maker Pen in Rec Room. Now I know what you’re thinking — I usually make Minecraft content, and yes, that’s true! But I thought Rec Room is a really cool game as it has a lot of the same creative elements that I love. If you’d prefer to watch the video version of this guide, you can check it out here: How To Use The Maker Pen In Rec Room Tutorial | Create Menu

Opening The Maker Pen Menu

When you open up your Maker Pen, you are presented with a menu that includes the Create button, Undo and Editing buttons at the top, Snapping options, and a whole bunch of other settings. The very first thing you want to do is click on the Create button. When you click it, a whole bunch of useful create tools will pop up. You will also notice options for Snapping, World Space, and Show Circuits — we won’t be covering circuits today, but that will be a video for another day once I get into them!

The Create Tool & Shapes

The Create tool is the only tool in the Maker Pen that allows you to create shapes. You can generate a whole bunch of different shapes by clicking the Palette button. Inside the palette, you will find a variety of shapes including cubes, which are one of the more commonly used shapes, as well as many other shapes that surprisingly not a lot of people use — though I still use them! If you scroll all the way down, you will also find tubes, which are one of the most important shapes in the entire game, and I’ll be covering those in a separate video. For now, let’s go with the Cube since it is a great starting shape to work with.

Uniform Shapes

When you start drawing shapes, you might notice that your shape looks a little different from mine. This is because I have Uniform Shapes turned on. Uniform Shapes ensures that the X, Y, and Z coordinates of the shape you spawn in are all identical, meaning your shape will always be perfectly proportioned. If you disable it by going to Tools and turning off Uniform Shapes in the Create menu, you will see that the shape you draw will no longer be uniform. This is a really useful tool if you want to make sure all dimensions of your shape stay exactly the same while you are creating.

Snapping

Snapping is essentially an alignment tool that makes sure everything you build stays neat and even in your world. With snapping turned off, shapes don’t have much structure when spawned in — they can rotate freely and won’t align properly on top of one another. There are two types of snapping available: Surface Snapping and Grid Snapping.

Grid Snapping

Let’s start with Grid Snapping since Surface Snapping works a little differently. To turn it on, simply slide across to Grid using your finger, or your mouse if you’re on PC. Once Grid Snapping is enabled, you will notice that shapes automatically snap into position and even rotate in set increments. This is really useful when you are building something that requires very neat and precise lines.

Grid Snapping Settings

To customise your snapping further, head back into the Create tool and scroll all the way down to Snapping Grid Settings. Make sure Grid is selected at the top. Inside, you will find two options: Position Snap and Rotation Snap. Position Snap determines where in the world your object will snap to and the distance between each snap point. By default it is set to 0.5, meaning your shape snaps every 0.5 metres. If you are working on a really large build, you can increase this to 1 metre or more. If you need very sensitive and precise placement, you can bring it all the way down to 0.005. Rotation Snap works in a very similar way — you can set your shape to rotate every 30 degrees rather than every 90 degrees, giving you more control over how your shapes are positioned. Of course, if you don’t want any snapping at all, you can simply turn it off.

Swatches — Colours & Textures

Now that we have covered the basics of creating shapes, let’s make them look a little nicer! Instead of keeping everything orange, we can apply colours and textures using Swatches. Head back into the Palette menu and click on Swatches at the very top. Swatches are basically the colour and texture settings you apply to objects in the game.

Colours

When you open the Swatch menu, if you are brand new to the game you will just have one default swatch to start with. Click on it and you will see options for colour, texture, and size. Colours in Rec Room are entered in hexadecimal format, so if you are comfortable with hex codes it is really simple to copy your desired colour directly into the game. Otherwise, you can simply click on one of the pre-made colours available. If none of those suit what you are building, you can click Custom and use your finger to select any colour you want, with the option to also adjust the brightness. Once you are happy with your colour selection, hit Done.

Textures

The texture options in Rec Room are really cool and give you a great variety to work with. You can choose from textures like Cardboard, Wood Grain, Painted Wall, Painted Brick, Metal Floor, and many more. The Size option for textures does not change how big your shape is — instead, it controls how zoomed in the texture appears on your shape. The higher the size value, the more zoomed in the texture looks, and the lower the value, the more detail you can see. Setting the size very high, such as 5,000, will make the texture virtually invisible, so it is worth experimenting to find the right balance for your build.

Saving & Managing Swatches

Once you have set up your colour and texture, you have a couple of options for saving your work. If you want to save the Swatch for use in another project, click Save As New Swatch and it will be added to your Swatches menu. If you simply want to overwrite and replace the currently selected Swatch with your new settings, click Save Swatch. You can also use Restore Swatch to revert back, and if your Swatches menu is getting full, you can delete any swatches you no longer need.

Wrapping Up

That was a really full-on introduction to the Create tool in the Maker Pen, but I hope it was helpful! I will be going into much more depth on topics like Tubes and other advanced features in upcoming videos and posts. If you found this helpful, make sure to leave a like and subscribe — Part 2 will be out very soon! I also appreciate any in-game subscribes as well, it means a lot. Thank you so much for reading and I can’t wait to see you in the next one!