Help and guides

Getting started

BLOX is a free building game that runs in your browser. You place blocks on a grid, paint them, and shape the world around them. There is no download, no launcher and no setup step — open the game and the scene loads in a few seconds.

You can start building as a guest. An account is optional, but it keeps your creations attached to you across devices and lets you post in the community.

Your first build

Small projects teach the controls faster than big ones. A tower is a good first build because it needs placement, stacking, painting and camera movement.

1. Open BLOX and wait for the ground to appear.
2. Pick a shape from the strip on the left of the screen.
3. Click the ground to place your first block. It snaps to the grid.
4. Keep clicking to stack a few more blocks into a small tower.
5. Hold the left mouse button on a block and drag to move it if it lands in the wrong spot.
6. Select the paint tool and click a block to change its colour.
7. Scroll to zoom out and check the shape from a distance.
8. Open Save and store the build so you can come back to it.

Habits that keep a build clean

• Build on level ground first, then add the interesting parts.
• Turn on snapping when you want straight walls and even floors.
• Rotate pieces with R instead of deleting and replacing them.
• Pick two or three colours before you start detailing, then add accents last.
• Zoom out after every few changes. Balance problems are invisible up close.

Controls

The same controls are listed inside the game under Controls, so you can check them without leaving your build.

Camera

Building

General

On touch screens

Tap to place a block, drag with one finger to move the camera and pinch to zoom. Two fingers pan the view. The shape strip and toolbar stay on screen, and the labels shrink to icons on narrow displays.

Blocks and shapes

Everything in BLOX is built from a small set of shapes. A build reads well when the big forms are simple and the detail is saved for a few spots that matter.

• Full blocks are the base unit. Use them for walls, floors and mass.
• Slabs and half pieces break up a flat surface and add steps or ledges.
• Slopes and ramps soften edges that would otherwise look blocky.
• Small details like cylinders and trim are for fences, chimneys and decoration.

Snapping keeps blocks aligned to the grid so surfaces stay flush. Studs, where available, show the connection points and make it easier to line pieces up by eye. If a block lands next to the one you wanted, undo with Ctrl + Z rather than rebuilding around the mistake.

Painting and terrain

Paint changes the colour of a block without changing its shape. Terrain paint changes the ground you are standing on, which is useful for deserts, snow, grass and stone settings.

The paint panel gives you a preset palette plus a custom colour option for members. Like the other tools, it stays open while you work, so you can test a few colours on the same surface and compare them before settling on one.

• Paint the large surfaces first, then add accents.
• Very saturated colours work best in small amounts. Use them for doors, signs and roofs.
• Terrain colour sets the mood of a scene more than most people expect. Try the build against two or three grounds.
• Lighting changes how a colour reads, so check your work with the final lighting before calling it done.

Block skins

A skin is the surface texture a block uses. Wood, stone, brick, metal, water and sand all place exactly like a normal block, but they change what the build reads as — the same tower can look like a sandcastle or a lighthouse.

Open the skin picker to browse categories, and use the recent row at the top to jump back to textures you used earlier in the session. Skins you own stay available in your collection.

Saving builds

Saving stores the current state of your scene so you can return to it later. Open Save from the menu, choose a slot and give the build a name you will recognise in a list.

1. Clean up stray blocks around the main structure.
2. Open Save and pick an empty slot.
3. Name the build. "Desert watchtower" is easier to find later than "build 4".
4. Wait for the confirmation before closing the tab.

Guests save to the local slot list in that browser. Signed-in accounts can keep builds in the cloud, which means a build saved on one machine opens on another when you sign in there.

Saving and sharing are separate actions. Save first, then use the share option when you actually want to send the build to someone or post it in the community.

Accounts, Bits and membership

An account stores your name, progress and cloud saves. You pick a username when you sign up — 3 to 20 characters, letters and numbers, and it cannot be the same as another account.

Bits

Bits are the in-game currency. You earn them by building, completing challenges and levelling up, and you spend them on block skins. They drip in over time on the server side, so the counter stays honest between sessions.

Levels

Building, painting and finishing challenges all give experience. Each level unlocks something, and the level panel shows what is next and what you have already claimed.

Membership

Membership is optional and adds in-game perks. It does not give Bits real-world value, it does not change who owns your builds, and the game is fully playable without it.

Password and account safety

If you forget your password, use the reset link on the sign-in screen and we email you a fresh one. Nobody at BLOX will ever ask you for your password. If you think someone else has been in your account, change the password and email us.

Daily and weekly challenges

Challenges give you a prompt when you feel like building but have no idea what to make. There are daily and weekly slots, so there is always something active.

• Read the prompt twice. The builds that score well are the ones that answer the theme clearly.
• Pick one subject. A crowded scene is harder to read than a single strong object.
• Check the silhouette. Zoom out often; the shape should still look like the theme when it is small.
• Finish it. A completed simple build beats an ambitious half-built one.

Challenges also award Bits and experience, which makes them the quickest way to build up enough for a new skin. The progress panel shows how much of the current set you have finished.

Community builds

The community page is where players post their builds and see what everyone else is making. You can share a saved build as a post, add a short description, and like or comment on other people's work.

Posting needs an account. Everything you share is public, so avoid putting personal information into a build name or description. The community terms explain what belongs there.

Performance

BLOX renders in 3D, so a build with tens of thousands of blocks is heavier than a small one. Most of the time a slow frame rate comes from the browser rather than the game.

• Close other tabs, especially anything playing video.
• Check that hardware acceleration is enabled in your browser settings.
• Lower brightness and shadow settings if the scene feels choppy.
• Build in passes: keep large areas simple and only detail what the camera will see.
• On a laptop, plug in. Battery saver modes throttle the graphics.

Troubleshooting

Frequently asked questions

Contact

Still stuck, or found a bug? Tell us what you were doing, which browser and device you were on, and what happened. A screenshot helps a lot.