Stage Builder

The Stage Builder (, Stage Maker) is a feature in Super Smash Bros. Brawl,, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate that allows players to create their own custom stages by using the given stage parts, and in for Wii U and Ultimate's case, drawing on the GamePad and the Nintendo Switch, respectively. Players can also choose from a variety of backgrounds and pick any song on the games' soundtracks.

In Super Smash Bros. Brawl


Builders must choose to create a small, medium, or large stage, which will affect the number of places parts can be placed in and the location of blast lines. Next, the builder selects a theme: a mountain, a building in ruins, or a futuristic chamber. Each theme has its own set of special stage elements which allow for slight variations in stage design depending on what theme is used. The final step before building is picking, which can be any track that has been unlocked. Only one track may be chosen per stage, though the player may change it to a different track after the stage has been built. Users must place a minimum of four horizontal areas (for spawning points) for the game to allow their stage to be saved.

There are different structures and building materials the player can use depending on the background chosen earlier. There are three different sizes for most of the structures, with the one exception being the. Parts cannot be freely placed and are restricted to being placed on a grid, with the size of the grid changing with the stage size; 10x8 on small stages, 14x11 for medium, and 18x14 for large (each grid cell is 20x20 units). The player can use parts until they reach the stage's capacity of 8,000 (regardless of stage size). Each piece used will use up a certain amount of capacity for the map, and some pieces take up more capacity than others. Once ready, the player can test the stage through the editor; however, the player is limited to using with the default controls for the controller being used. One can also switch back to the editing screen to make more changes. Custom stages are compatible with SD cards. The limit to the number of custom stages a player can have depends on how much room one has in their internal Wii memory or SD card. The player can also send stages to their friends.

Types of parts the player can use in this mode come in three categories:
 * Floors include objects such as like blocks, platforms, ramps, and stairs.
 * Structures include trees, mushrooms, crates, and rock arches.
 * Features include Drop Blocks, s, ladders, and conveyor belts

Custom stages could be uploaded to a Brawl server, with players also receiving a random stage uploaded by a different player via the Smash Service.

The game comes with three sample stages to demonstrate how the Stage Builder works.

Stage Parts
There are three categories of parts: floors, structures, and features. The following table gives the name (unofficial), size in grid spaces, capacity usage, and description of each part.

Unlockable Parts
There are also certain parts and features that can be unlocked to use in the Stage Builder.


 * Edit Parts A: Play 10 times or more on created stages.
 * Unlocks a new piece for every setting, as well as the spring.
 * Edit Parts B: Create 5 or more stages in Stage Builder (not including the 3 sample stages).
 * Unlocks a new piece for every setting, as well as the conveyor belt.
 * Edit Parts C: Create 15 or more stages in Stage Builder (not including the 3 sample stages).
 * Unlocks a new piece for every setting, as well as the rotating platform.

Use in modding
Because of how Stage Builder loads custom data, a common method to hacking the Wii console involves exploiting this loading mechanism. Referred to as the Smash Stack, forcing Stage Builder to load a file that is too large can allow for a user to load custom data; this method of hacking is common in order to add the Homebrew Channel to the Wii, and it is also one of the main methods of loading gameplay mods.

In
In, the Stage Builder was changed immensely. Players now have much more freedom when creating stages, with the ability to draw platforms of any shape using the Wii U GamePad. The GamePad is the only way to create or modify the stage, with other controllers only being allowed to highlight buttons and perform the actions of said buttons, such as undo or save. An option is given to either make the platform grabbable by players or not. However, there are much fewer stage parts than Brawl, being limited to cannons, springs, moving platforms and magma. Jump-through platforms can be made by making a line and tapping it. All objects' and platforms' locations snap to an invisible fine grid that has a resolution of 1x1 unit. A visible grid with 5x5 unit cells can be displayed by pressing the X button for easier alignment when placing or drawing. The grid also shows where in-game boundaries will be, with a green border showing where the camera boundaries are, and a red border for the blast lines. Walk-off stages can be created because of their placement.

Custom Stages are not available in 8-Player Smash. All Custom Stages have Star KOs and Screen KOs, regardless of layout.

When testing a stage, pausing and pressing ZL or ZR on the GamePad will allow players to select their character, an opponent character (including a second player), and customized controls and names. s can not be selected.

The ability to download and share stages online became available with update 1.0.6, but can no longer be used after the shutdown of.

Five backgrounds share two textures that can be given to drawn platforms, and each background has three unique textures of their own.

There are four types of special features that can be inserted, each with two variations.

In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
While Stage Builder was absent during the initial release of Ultimate, on April 9th, 2019 an advertisement released by Nintendo discreetly revealed the Stage Builder icon on the menu, confirming that a Stage Builder mode was in development at the time of the advertisement's release. A promotional video on April 16th confirmed the inclusion of Stage Builder in the version 3.0.0 update scheduled to release the following day.

The Stage Builder was greatly revamped since the iteration. Besides the player-accessible layer, terrain can be placed in up to three additional decorative layers, with one in front of and two behind the playable layer. Various materials are accessible to be used. For the first time, it is possible to have platforms extend beyond the blast lines, which can be accomplished by the use of rails, allowing for walk off stages. Platforms can be drawn freehandedly, or using Square or Circle tools. Their material can be changed at the player's leisure with the Fill tool. Instead of sets of moving platforms, rails can be freely placed by the player in order to make any platform follow it. Rotation effects can also be added to platforms, and both the rotation and traveling of platforms across rails can be toggled on or off mid-battle by placing switches. Many objects can be changed with a properties menu, allowing tweaks such as adjusting rail speed or enabling terrain gravity. However, unlike in for Wii U, custom stages cannot be used in Training Mode or Custom Smash, both of which notably enable the player to modify the gameplay speed.

Unlike previous games, custom stages can support up to eight players by default, although that limit can drop back to four if the stage contains too many surfaces or objects, as shown by a weight gauge at the top of the screen. Going through a 4-Player stage with five or more players in Local Wireless will instead choose one of the game's normal stages.

Stages created using the editor are able to be shared or downloaded on the online Shared Content page.

When testing stages, the default characters for player and CPU are two s. However, as in for Wii U, the player may change the default fighters via the pause menu when testing and are retained for all future uses of Stage Builder until the Stage Builder menu is exited.

When creating a stage, the stage size (small, medium, and large) can be chosen, as well as the background, and the music track. Neither the size nor the background can be changed later, but the music track can be changed at any time. The track can also be chosen among any of the musical tracks in the game, including ones that are normally unable to be played on any of the normal stages, such as Lifelight and Step: Subspace. The only song that can't be used is the song used for Home-Run Contest.

Backgrounds
Unlike the Stage Builder from Super Smash Bros. Brawl and for Wii U, the backgrounds available to choose from are from stages in the game itself, being: Unlike the originals however, these backgrounds are static 2-dimensional backdrops, meaning that they do not have depth and things that normally move in their original stages do not move (clouds, water, etc), and in the Final Destination background's case, it is fixed to the "light" background. However, lightning can occasionally be seen on stages with the Find Mii background.
 * Tomodachi Life
 * Wrecking Crew
 * Kalos Pokémon League
 * Coliseum
 * Find Mii
 * Summit
 * Magicant
 * Luigi's Mansion
 * Rainbow Cruise
 * Mario Galaxy
 * Rainbow Cruise
 * Mario Galaxy

Terrain material
Unlike the Stage Builders in previous installments, the textures - now called terrain materials - are universal regardless of the background. Additionally, the ice block and magma are now treated as terrain material, rather than unique elements.

Each material has various physics attributes affecting how it interacts with other objects with gravity enabled. The attributes only affect the terrain's interaction with objects, not fighters. In the following table, the physics attributes are defined as:
 * Gravity
 * Acceleration downwards. Value is multiplied by 0.065. When multiple materials are part of the same object, the gravity of that object is based on the proportion that each material makes of that object, factoring in density and size.
 * For example, an object made of paper with 16 grid tiles and steel with 4 grid tiles will have a combined density of 560 . Paper (with a gravity of 0.3) contributes 0.0 857142 and steel (with a gravity of 1.0) contributes 0. 714285, resulting in a gravity of 0.8. This can be simplified and generalized to the following  , where a is the area of the material occupies, d is the material's density, and g is the material's gravity.


 * Density
 * Mass per unit volume.


 * Friction coefficient
 * Resistance to being moved across other terrain. Gravity also affects this, however.


 * Restitution
 * Momentum conserved in rebounding objects; bounciness. A restitution of 1.0 will transfer 100% of the momentum back into the object, a value of 0.5 will transfer 50%, and so on. When an object collides with a surface, the highest restitution value is used. For example, sand (0.1), marble (0.3), and steel (0.5) will all rebound the same when colliding with a steel (0.5) or bouncy rubber (1.0) surface as those have equal or higher restitution values; colliding with a sand surface will result in the steel retaining more momentum than marble which retains more than sand.

Most hazards also have some parameters associated with them, such as restitution and friction. Notably, while most share the same friction as either steel or wood, explosive blocks and bomb blocks appear to have 0 friction.

Each type of terrain also determines what kind of materials will get when mining them.

Quirks and glitches
Ultimate's Stage Builder has a fairly large number of quirks, glitches and other issues, especially when compared to the Stage Builders in earlier games. These include:


 * While testing stages, fighters idle poses will not occur until the fighter moves from their spawn position or uses an attack.
 * While building stages, the game will sometimes prevent the player from extending or moving terrain and hazards in a way which causes no scenarios which would normally be disallowed by the game. The issue can be overcome by moving the terrain to a different position, and then moving or extending it into the desired position.
 * All flat surfaces have very small 45˚ slopes at the edges, regardless of what angle the edge is at.
 * Sometimes, Robin's Tomes and Levin Sword durabilities will not be correctly displayed on the U.I next to the fighter icon while testing custom stages. Instead, the Levin Sword durability will always show as 0 and the Tomes will always appear to have maximum durability, however the durabilities function the same way they do in Versus Mode.
 * Mii Fighters cannot be selected while testing stages.
 * Single Joy-Con controllers cannot be used when testing stages.
 * Sometimes, one or more of the fighters' damage meters will not be displayed when first loading a stage to test, although their artwork, name and series symbol will still appear as usual.
 * Ordinarily, if the "change fighters" feature is used, and a second controller is used, the second fighter can be controlled by a second player, and will be displayed as P2, with a blue battle UI as usual, while testing the stage. However, if "return to edit" is selected, and then test is selected again, the second controller will still control the second fighter as before, but they will now be displayed as a CPU, and will have a gray battle UI. The same can be done with P1 being controlled by the CPU while having a red "P1" tag.
 * Although objects bouncing straight up off bouncy rubber return to the same height on average, their actual bounce height tends to fluctuate, with some terrains deviating slightly upwards every other bounce, and others deviating slightly downwards, returning to their original height on the next bounce. Oddly, when dropped from specific heights however, some materials actually end up gaining height over time, eventually despawning off the top of the stage. This is likely due to rounding errors not being corrected for.

Trivia

 * Springs are able to send low gravity characters higher than higher gravity characters. This is because while high gravity characters have higher speed, they lose it faster while low gravity have low speed but retain it for longer. This applies to all springs, but stronger springs exaggerate it&mdash;the strong springs can launch Jigglypuff (the lowest gravity character) noticeably higher than Fox (the highest gravity). This is less-so in Ultimate as the weak bounce's force results in a linear correlation between gravity and height, while the strong bounce is weak compared to prior games and causes characters with less than 0.0925 gravity (over half of the roster) being within 5 units of each other.
 * In Brawl, the game does not load the custom stages at the same time that it loads the stage select screen, and thus the game does not let the player select custom stages from the stage select screen until they are done loading.
 * The futuristic chamber background image of Super Smash Bros. Brawl is similar to the background in the Subspace Emissary's Research Facility II where players fight the two False Samuses or when Samus first encounters Ridley. Similarly, the ruins background image can be seen in the distance behind part of The Ruins.
 * Unusually, the futuristic chamber in Stage Builder uses wooden crates and barrels instead of their futuristic counterparts.
 * In Brawl, if the player tests a stage, self-destructs, return to the Stage Builder menu before respawns and quickly tests it again, Mario will spawn on-stage briefly and then disappear with the camera scrolling to where he self-destructed then reappear on a revival platform.
 * There are two glitches associated with the Drop Block in Brawl: The Flop Block and the Teleport glitch.
 * Prior to version 1.1.3 of, a regular Final Destination-like stage without any platforms filled with magma below (in a way that the magma seemingly covers the whole stage but doesn't hurt characters walking along the main ground) will cause all CPUs to indefinitely stand on place doing absolutely nothing, even at level 9, without even defending against attacks or recovering. This also works against amiibo.
 * In for Wii U's Stage Builder, if the original or  songs from the  series are selected, the music will not change regardless of the match's present situation.
 * Also in for Wii Us Stage Builder, the volcano backdrop bears some sort of resemblance to the Volcanic Rim stage from Capcom's Street Fighter IV'' series.
 * In for Wii U's Stage Builder, if start and select are pressed during testing (which will pause the game then go back to the Stage Builder menu if done correctly), nothing but the background music will be heard until the game is paused again.
 * In Ultimate, Wing Blitz allows to fly through thin walls drawn with the line tool. Additionally, any character can jump through a thin wall as long as they are holding down on the control stick as they hit the side of it, likely due to them retaining soft-platform properties.
 * In Ultimate, fighters with a run speed higher than 2 (, everyone faster than him, and anyone with Speed Art) can gain distance running against horizontal wind at maximum speed.
 * Most special moves will not gain distance against maximum speed horizontal wind over time, but certain moves like Wario Bike and Spinning Kong completely ignores wind.
 * In Ultimate, terrain with gravity enabled will ignore players in its path. They will be unable to push or redirect terrain without the assistance of switches to toggle rails or gears.
 * Due to the way meteor smashes function in Ultimate, it is possible to K.O. fighters with a meteor smash despite terrain beneath them as long as the terrain is off-screen, as powerful meteor smashes K.O. as soon as the fighter crosses the bottom of the screen rather than across the blast line.
 * In Ultimate, regardless of the music used, will always use the Persona 5 victory fanfare on custom stages.
 * In Ultimate, custom stages using the music tracks ' and ' cannot be downloaded from Shared Content if the DLC entailing those tracks have not been purchased. Stages using music tracks from the Fighters' Passes will change the song to .