← All Guides

Builder Basics

This guide walks you through the core loop of building in Buildopia: choosing a tool, picking a shape, selecting a material, and placing blocks in the 3D viewport. If you're brand new to the app, start here. You'll be placing your first structure within a few minutes.

The Four Tools

Everything you do in Buildopia flows through one of four tools, selectable from the top of the sidebar or via keyboard shortcuts:

Only one tool is active at a time. You can swap tools at any point — even mid-drag — and the active tool is always highlighted in the sidebar so you know where you are.

Shapes

Once you've selected Build or Paint, the next choice is the shape you want to place. The Shape section of the sidebar holds the full catalogue: Block, Steps, Roofing (Slope), Door, Window, Pathing, Pillar/Post, Nature, Liquid, and Furniture, among others.

Selecting a shape does two things: it sets the physical geometry of what you're about to place, and it filters the material palette below to show only compatible materials. A Roof shape will only show roofing materials; a Door shape will only show door materials. This keeps the palette manageable regardless of how many materials are in the game.

Some shapes have additional controls that appear in their own sidebar section once selected. Roof reveals style options (Sloped, Hipped, Valley, and so on). Door and Window reveal Combine and Position controls. Liquid and Nature each have their own rich toolsets. These are covered in detail in their respective guides.

Materials

The Material section sits below the Shape section and is the largest part of the sidebar. Materials are organised into tabs — Walls, Flooring, Roofing, Misc Building, and so on — and you can also search by name using the search bar at the top of the section.

Each material has its own recipe (the in-game crafting ingredients) which you can view by hovering or long-pressing its swatch. The swatch itself shows a small preview of the material's texture and colour.

Some materials support colour tinting. Double-clicking (or double-tapping on mobile) an eligible swatch opens the Colour picker, where you can choose from 18 preset tints to recolour that material. Not every material offers this — if double-clicking does nothing, that material has no tint variants. Tinted materials show a small colour dot on their swatch so you can tell them apart at a glance.

Camera Controls

The 3D viewport starts in Orbit mode. In Orbit, dragging with one finger (or clicking and dragging with a mouse) rotates the camera around your build. You can also:

The mode buttons (Orbit, Pan, Draw) live in the viewport itself and in the top bar. Switching to Draw mode is how you actually interact with the grid to place, paint, or erase — tapping the viewport while in Orbit or Pan mode won't accidentally modify anything you've built.

Camera preset buttons in the top bar let you snap to useful angles instantly: Reset returns you to the default perspective view, while Top, Side, and Front give orthographic views for precise alignment work. These are especially useful when you need to check that walls are flush or floors are level.

Undo and Redo

Every action in Buildopia — placing a block, painting a material, erasing, moving, rotating — is tracked in a history you can step through freely. The Undo and Redo buttons are in the top bar, and the keyboard shortcuts work from anywhere in the app:

Undo and Redo have no limit on how many steps you can step back through in a session. The history resets when you load a new build (via Import or Community Builds), but not when you simply navigate away and return — autosave preserves your work in the meantime.

Placing Blocks

With your tool, shape, and material selected, switch the viewport to Draw mode and click or tap a cell on the grid to interact with it. The exact behaviour depends on the active tool:

You can also click and drag to affect multiple cells in one stroke. Build will fill a run of cells as you drag; Paint will repaint them; Erase will clear them. The cells affected depend on your current layer and the placement size settings — by default, each tap or drag affects a single cell at the current layer height.

Rotation

Before placing a block, you can rotate your selection using the Rotate button in the sidebar (or press R). Each press rotates the preview 90° around the vertical axis. This matters for directional shapes like Steps, Roof slopes, and Doors, where orientation is part of the design.

You can also rotate placed blocks after the fact using the Cursor tool's Rotate action — see the Cursor Tool guide for details.

What's Next

Once you're comfortable with the basics, a few guides will significantly expand what you can do:

• Placement Size — Place entire floors or walls in a single tap instead of block by block.
• Mirror Symmetry — Build symmetric structures automatically by mirroring across one or both axes.
• Templates — Stamp 2D or 3D shapes (circles, spheres, hearts, and your own images) across the grid at once.
• Importing & Exporting — Save your build to a file and load it back in any time, on any device.