Earn the adoration of the community with these advanced tips to creating mods, karts and tracks in ModNation Racers on PS3.
Celebrity skin
When you access the Creation Station via the in-game menu, a blank white mod is the starting point to creating any character you like. You can edit any of the mods included with the game or download new ones from the community, but starting from scratch is the best way to really get to grips with the flexible creation tool.
Your choice of skin is a good place to start and while the standard patterns and colours offer a huge range of possibilities, there's a second layer of customisation options beneath the surface that will really help you get exactly what you're aiming for.
While you're choosing the colour of your skin, you can press the Square button to bring up the Material Properties sliders. These can be incredibly useful depending on what kind of mod you're trying to create. If you're trying to make a robot then move the metal slider all the way up to a hundred for that shiny, metallic look. There are also rubber and cloth sliders; experiment with combinations of all three until you get the result you're looking for.
Pimp your ride
When building a kart from scratch you can select the body, engine, seat, wheel, accessories and even raise or lower the suspension. However, if you want something utterly unique to take onto the racecourse, try creating your own custom badge using stickers.
There are dozens of stickers to choose from, ranging from basic shapes to elaborate patterns, and there are many ways to play around with them in order to achieve exactly what you're going for.
Once you've selected your sticker, you can press the Triangle button to adjust the colours and material properties, just like you did with your mod's skin. Hitting the L1 button brings up the Advance Edit options, allowing you to scale, stretch, skew and rotate your stickers. On a basic level, this is how you can turn a square into a rectangle and a triangle into an even pointier triangle, but play around with it and you'll be surprised by what you can achieve. You can even adjust the transparency and add relief to each sticker, giving a 3D effect - this is particularly effective on kart bodywork.
If you're using multiple stickers on a particularly grand design, grouping them together makes it easy to move and scale them as one. On the Stickers menu for each area on your kart, where there's a list of the ones you've used so far, highlight the stickers you want to group and press the L1 button. Now, anything you do to one of them will apply to the whole group. This is completely reversible, should you want to tinker with individual stickers, and you can have multiple groups at the same time.
King of the road
It's easy to get up and running on your own, unique track in minutes, but if you want to impress the community then you're going to have to come up with something that's fun to play.
Every good track should have a good amount of twists and turns, changes in elevation, varied surfaces and some shortcuts to add an element of strategy. And remember: shortcuts don't always have to be a quicker route; you can introduce an element of risk and reward, where a player can choose to take a slightly longer way round in order to access a speed boost or an item pod.
Of course, make sure your track is actually playable by testing it thoroughly beforehand and making sure that you and the AI opponents can finish a full lap without getting stuck or stranded. And help out your fellow racers with a few well-placed signposts, particularly ahead of tricky turns or hazards.
Above all, experiment and have fun. This guide only scratches the surface of what's possible in ModNation Racers so explore the tools and, before you know it, you'll be a Mod Square celebrity.
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