Assembly Mode

Mistakes happen. But you can learn from them. Sometimes you can even embrace them. If you don't want to, however, there's always undo.

Press on over the button and your last action will be undone. Press it again for the action before that. You can undo everything to the start of your session if needs be.

There's also a shortcut for this - just tilt or twist to the left and press to undo.

Decided you'd like to embrace that mistake after all? Press on over the button and the action you undid will be redone, as it were. You can redo everything you undo.

There's also a shortcut for this - just tilt or twist to the right and press to redo.

The move tool, as you'd expect, is for moving things around in your scene. You can also use it to change the size and position of whatever you grab with it.

Hover it over the object to move. Press and hold on to grab it. Move where you want it to go and release to put it down.

Scale it by holding on while twisting as if twisting a dial. To flip it, hold on , move in the direction you want to flip it, and let go of

You can shortcut move by pressing on to get the move icon and grabbing with on as before.

Changes the proportions of puppets, or any other item which is connected using ball joints or bolts. Note that there need to be at least 3 connected items for stretch to work.

To see it in action, stamp a blank puppet and scope in using on + on . Select stretch, grab a part of the puppet with on , and drag in any direction.

As you'll see, you can quickly give that vanilla-looking puppet a giraffe neck, a gorilla chest and orangutan arms. Or, you know, just make the legs longer.

To help you understand the rules, take 3 sculptures (cubes are fine, let's call them A, B and C) and connect them (A to B, and B to C) using 2 ball joints or bolts.

Select the stretch tool and grab C using on and move the imp to drag it. B will be stretched, as it's between a child (C) and the parent (A).

Makes copies of stuff, saving you from creating something you want lots of from scratch a load of times. It also makes your creations more efficient in memory terms.

Select clone, hover over what you want to clone and grab it with on . Or press and hold on to change the imp tip to the clone icon and then grab with on

If you press or on while holding the clone, you can increase and decrease the number of clones. Extra clones are added differently depending on the button.

Press on for clone-to-clone, where the clones appear between the original and the clone. Move to space and position the original and the clone.

Clone-to-clone is great for bridges and stairs, with the original and the clone defining the start and end points, and the extra clones filling in the space nicely.

Press on for clone-from-clone, where the extras appear beyond the first clone. Good for, say, a floor, to save you spacing your clone miles away from your original.

If you start with clone-to-clone () and decide you actually want clone-from-clone () or vice-versa, just press the opposite button repeatedly till it goes the other way.

There is also a fiendishly clever thing we call live cloning. Select the clone tool and the live clone button will appear in the context menu. Press on over it to enable it.

Now when you clone, the copy is a live clone. Any edits you make to it will be replicated on the original. Note that live clone only works with sculptures and paintings.

Just about everything in Dreams has a tweak menu. These are used to set and edit all sorts of object properties. What those are depends on what it is you're tweaking.

Select tweak, hover over something and press on . A tweak menu will appear. For a shortcut, just hover over the thing you want to tweak and press on + on

All of the properties on a tweak menu also have input & output ports, which you can see slide out of the sides of the tweak menu when you hover over them.

By wiring these ports up to other tweak menus or gadgets, you can pass signals in and out of the object and make things happen in your creations.

Signals can trigger an event, turn the power on in a gadget, send information from one gadget to another, change the properties of an object and so on.

To wire a port, hover over it, press on and then move your imp. A wire will be attached to the imp tip. Move to the port you want to wire it to and press again.

Sometimes you just need to get rid of something. Maybe you stamped it by mistake. Maybe it's in the wrong place. Or maybe you just don't like it anymore.

Select the delete tool and hover over the thing you want to trash. Notice something rather radical has happened to your imp.

Don't panic. Your imp is just letting you know you're about to delete something. We don't want you doing it accidentally, do we? Press on to delete the object.

You can also delete any time using on . If you delete accidentally don't worry - you can undo it. Just tilt to the left and press to undo and your object will reappear.

When you're working on a scene full of stuff, you don't want to be moving things out of the way all the time to see what you're doing. So use this instead.

Select hide, hover your imp tip over what you want to hide and press on . To hide multiple things, hold instead and move to the next thing to hide.

While you're using the hide tool, hidden things turn yellow to let you know they're hidden. Once you leave the hide tool, those things will disappear from view.

To unhide everything, select hide and use unhide all on the context menu. Or use on + on to hide or unhide everything except the thing you're hovering over.

Stops you accidentally interacting with things in a complex scene. Choose stuff to freeze so that you don't move, delete, or otherwise bother things you didn't mean to.

Select freeze, hover your imp tip over anything you want to freeze, and press on . To freeze multiple things, hold instead and move to the next thing to freeze.

Frozen things turn blue to let you know they're frozen, and you won't be able to do anything to them. If you try, they'll flash to remind you.

To unfreeze specific things, select freeze and press on over them again. To unfreeze everything, use unfreeze all on the context menu.

Finally, you can also use on + on to freeze or unfreeze everything except the thing you're hovering over.

Emitted objects are impermanent, only existing when time is running... right? Not if you bake them! This tool takes emitted objects and makes them permanent.

Imagine you've got an emitter spitting out sticks. Your pile of sticks is beautiful in its randomness, and you think "that would make a great bonfire". No problemo!

Select bake emitted from the tools menu and any emitted objects in your scene will show up as nice solid purple things. Hover over one and press on to bake it.

Or, to bake all the emitted objects in your scene, use bake all emitted in the context menu. Hey presto, your emitted objects are now actual permanent objects in your scene.

If you are a bit of an artist, sometimes your work can be so detailed it fills up the thermometer. Use this to reduce detail in sculptures and paintings.

For sculptures, the colour scheme gives you an idea of the cost of each in your scene, blue being the least costly and red the most, with pinks and purples in between.

Cost can be based on actual detail if you enable consider scale in the context menu (on by default); or on memory usage if you disable consider scale.

Hover over the sculpture you want to simplify. Press on and keep pressing it until you don't want it any simpler.

Tap the top of to the bottom of to switch between increase and reduce detail.

You can also use a shortcut to simplify whatever is the most detailed sculpture in your scene. With the tool set to reduce, press on + on

It's important to note that this will also affect any clones of the sculpture that you have in your scene. Sculptures to be simplified will highlight when you hover.

For paintings, meanwhile, this is a simpler operation. You cannot increase detail, only reduce detail, and reduce most detailed does not apply to paintings.

Operation is the same - just hover over the painting you want to simplify, make sure the tool is set to reduce, and press on . You'll notice that flecks start to disappear.

Once they're gone, they're gone, and you can only get them back by using undo. It's this that sets it apart from simply using fleck density in the tweak menu, however.

Fleck density can be used to reduce the number of flecks, but only visually. They're still there, taking up valuable thermo. This tool actually removes them completely.

So it's a fantastic way to save some memory! Try using stretch in the tweak menu to fill the gaps. It won't work with everything but it's worth experimenting.