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Smart Walking
Smart Walking lays one connected run — belts, pipes, or hyper tubes on stackable poles and supports — that turns corners, climbs slopes, and routes exactly where you want it. Instead of a straight, uniform grid, you steer the run forward one segment at a time and build it all in a single click.
Screenshot placeholder: a belt run walking around a corner and up a slope, with the Smart Walking panel open.
Use it when a straight run will not do:
- Route a belt bus around a corner or a cliff.
- Climb a slope with a continuous pipe run.
- Lay a long conveyor line that bends to follow your factory's layout.
- Reach a far-off destination while you stay put and watch through the Smart! Camera.
- Run a hyper tube up a steep climb to a distant platform or outpost.
- Hold a stackable conveyor pole (for belts), a stackable pipeline support (for pipes), or a stackable hyper tube support (for hyper tubes) in the build gun.
- Press
Kto open the Smart! Panel. - Click Smart Walking. (The button only appears for buildables that can be walked.)
The first segment starts at the pole you are aiming, and the run grows forward from there.
Smart Walking reuses the controls you already know from grid scaling — they just apply to the active segment (the leading edge) instead of a whole grid. Everything behind the active segment stays locked.
| To do this | Use the control |
|---|---|
| Advance a segment / back up | Mouse wheel (up advances, down undoes the last segment), Num 8 / Num 5, or your Scale-X keybind |
| Turn a corner | Rotation |
| Set the gap to the next pole | Spacing |
| Climb or descend a slope | Steps (rise) |
| Shift sideways | Stagger |
See Controls for the exact keys. You stay free to move the whole time — walk alongside the run, or stand still and steer it from a distance using the Smart Camera picture-in-picture, which follows the head of the run.
Press K while walking to open the Smart Walking panel — an editable list of every segment:
- Each row shows a segment's advance, turn, rise, and shift, plus its exit heading as a compass bearing.
- Edit any segment and the run rebuilds from there forward.
- Choose the run's tier, routing, belt flow direction, or pipe style for the whole path.
- Belts carry a tier, a routing mode, and a flow direction (forward or backward).
- Pipes carry a tier and a routing mode, and flow either way once connected, so they have no direction.
- Hyper tubes carry a routing mode and, like pipes, have no direction. Because a hyper tube doesn't sag, its run can climb far more steeply than a belt, and there is a single hyper tube buildable, so there is no tier to choose.
The whole run uses one tier and one routing — mixing belt tiers on a single line would just bottleneck it at the slowest belt. Add splitters, mergers, or valves to the finished run the normal way.
- Commit: fire the build gun (left mouse) to build the entire run at once. You pay the normal material cost for every pole and belt or pipe.
- Can't afford it? The preview turns red and the run will not commit until you can.
- Too long or too steep? A segment that overshoots the maximum span, or (for belts) climbs too steeply, is flagged and blocks the commit — shorten it or split the climb.
-
Cancel: press
Escapeor put the build gun away to discard the run.
Smart Walking works in single-player and as a client on a dedicated server (Windows and Linux). The whole run previews on your machine and builds in one server-checked action, charging the normal cost. See Compatibility and Multiplayer.
- Lay the straight sections first, then turn — each turn pivots the heading, and the next advance follows the new direction.
- Back up removes segments from the end. There is no partial undo of a turn mid-run, so back up to the point you want and re-steer.
- Use the Smart Camera to route long runs without walking the whole way.
Last updated: 2026-06-26 · Smart! v33.1.0