The Water Is Running in ROBLOX

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Pirate ShipWater has arrived in ROBLOX. What many see as an essential, but essentially mundane part of life, we see as a game-changer.

That’s because it’s more than just a texture. ROBLOX’s water comes with comprehensive physics simulation, meaning your ROBLOX character and the physical objects in your ROBLOX world behave as realistically in water as they do on land. You can wade on the surface and dive to the depths, create boats and motorized propellers, design rivers and falls with flowing rapids, and more. We’ve opened the floodgates to new genres of games and given game designers a new dynamic that begs experimentation.

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Getting started with water in ROBLOX

You can start creating your own water-based games and places today using ROBLOX Studio. If you need to spark your creativity, you can download one of our starter places, which we created so you can quickly fill either a lake or river with water and float in a raft. You can also read up on our implementation of water and buoyancy simulation from a technical standpoint in this blog post.

Quick tips

Some materials float, others don’t: The physical material you assign to a part determines whether it’ll float in water. Something made of wood will have more buoyancy, whereas something made of stone will sink.

Making a boat: Making a boat that floats in ROBLOX requires that you follow the same principles you would use to construct a boat in real life. Hint: following Archimedes’ Principle should help you create a successful boat.

Lakes are easy: It’s easy to create a lake using the Material Painter tool. Simply generate some flat terrain and drag the material painter over the area you want to convert to a lake, as seen in the above video.

We can’t wait to see what the ROBLOX community creates. In the meantime, what kinds of new water-based games are you most interested in creating and playing?

420 thoughts on “The Water Is Running in ROBLOX”

  1. We sont need flowing water. All we need is block water. The is a game of blocks what did you think?

  4. dudes chill, if you only knew the work ethics that went into this you wouldent be talking. they worked nonstop for months for something WE told then to do they did this all for us so enjoy it or quit ROBLOX!

  5. lol i visited this one guy’s place called Real Water and i was like???????? so i visited and noticed when you go under you can really swim! like literally i also created a move called dolphin/whale leap just go in the water jump up and keep jumping up and you will be flying (ok maybe not really but something like that like walking on water :)

  8. The water doesn’t run. It just stays still and pushes things. Where’s the running water ROBLOX promised us? Even minecraft has flowing water T.T

  9. No advanced builder uses terrain therefore this is completely useless. Terrain is one of the most pointless things on the website. Now stop trying to be Minecraft and stick with the original bricks, the ones we all prefer.

  10. The “water” brick is poor. Basically it’s blue paint because water would flow to the lowest level not stick to the sides of the original brick. What you’ve created isn’t dynamic in any way.

  12. I became the waterlord! i made some epic stuff!
    Too bad you cant make propellers to drive boats

  13. It’s really cool, but you might think of making lava, and wedges, corner wedges, inverse corner wedges ect..

  14. hey guys, so that your boat wont always topple over, add a BodyGyro to the bottom part of your boat.

  16. also, explosions delete water, unlike the video ( i only tried with stamper and studio mode tools box rockets and bombs, dont know about other explosions, and i heard of explosion resistent terrain, pm me if you find some

  17. Here is a useful comment for the roblox team, there is a glitch, if a bick is in the water and it floats, changing the texture to a non floating object will not change the bouyancy, and vice versa, need to be fixed for sinking ships, people could use a simple texture changing script on bricks to make a ship sink, but with the glitch they cant

  18. Roblox Studio 2.0 is horrible, I don’t have any of my places. 1.0 needs water instead.

  19. I think it is cool you can do a pond or a lake or a seaside and persona severs are the best.

  20. I’ve been making boats and submarines in personal servers. OH YEAAAH!!!

    • I cant use it at all. how do you move in the lake? i cant see my character and i wanted to build an underwater house.I wanted to use it as one of my places on my profile but im now sure how to save it to my profile.
      PLEASE HELP

  24. i like how you made this. I already made a lake from it I put some boats and all that kinda stuff. In my mind, this is the best thing since the terrain itself!

  28. Awful texture. It would be better if we could change the texture of terrain/water.

  30. roblox… getting more 3d and cooler ROBLOX FOR THE WIN!!!

      • How is it unrealistic? Almost the same physics. Chill, guys. This was a hard thing for the Devs, and it took a lot of time. So chill.

      • I like it, it makes ROBLOX compatable with everyone. If you don’t like it you don’t have to use it, so stop fussing.

  32. i have a water place up now! it’s got drift boats (jump into the box and walk in the direction that you want the boat to go in) and paddle boats (like the ones in the video)

  34. This is excellent! I can create a wooden boat where if you push against a wall it will go in that direction! I call it ‘The Whizzer’ PM Sprang if you want to try it out with me!

  35. making a boat is easy and i find water cool thereis some water in freemodels in which u can xpand and script.i like experimenting and i learn new things every day i bought bc yesterday and im reay for my perosnal server to get started again good job one thing:make raffs and gliders as u msdr im previus posts in vehicle section bad grammer i know

  36. If it doesn’t function with non-terrain bricks, I’ll find it completely useless. Also, use IBarrageI’s retexture in the swim event.

  37. I certainly approve of this.
    Now,stop focusing so much on adding these properties to terrain and add them to bricks,too. CFraming,regular building,both would benefit from this.
    But still,needed add-ons aside,I still approve.

  38. There should be water spouts, so you can make a reverse waterfall (lol), you should be aloud to control where it goes, in a PBS, and curves, and you should drown if you are under to long.

  39. finally realised that u need the arrows keys to swim. i always use the wasd keys, because its easier to use tools. shouldnt u add those keys to the swimming scipt? plze?

  41. Seems like a nice add to the game…Very realistic although…it should be like when the boat gets destroyed enough, it should start sinking…just to get it a little more realistic.

  42. About the boat, how can you make urself steer? if its because of the motor, where do u get one of those?

  43. About the boat, how do you get a steering wheel that works and the motor?

    • i think roblox needs to make boats and put it in the tool box so u can use it on a personal sever. ~telagrate~

  44. Water is cool, but it has some problems. First of all, when I had a pool of water, I was unable to keep my character afloat. It would drag my character down just below the surface, but if I went down and left it I was pulled back up. Characters need to be able to float on the surface with the head above the water.

    Second, make a brick form of water. If someone has a brick baseplate the water won’t place because it is a terrain piece.

    Valar morghulis.

  45. Super cool! I made a mini raft in my building game and it was pretty fun. But we can’t drown underwater. That would make it more realistic. Like an air meter to show how much air until you resurface. Also, can you keep us up to date on the ROBLOX for iOS. And will we have to buy it or is it free?

  47. If you get rid of bricks and just keep terrain, I’m quitting ROBLOX.

      • Yes im sure they will. Terrrain is cool but Id rather just sick with brick. Im not planning to use the water though. It looks like cartoon water instead of the crystal water that we know.

  48. It’s okay. I have always hated terrain from the second you introduced it. Please make a water function in bricks too.

  50. The water is ok, but please make it a property of normal bricks instead of just terrain bricks, it would make it more accessible in places which don’t want to use terrain. Plus, with terrain, resizing is an absolute pain because you have to get the blocks to fit exactly. If you could make it a property of normal blocks then you could resize it much quicker and easier. Please consider this.

  51. I do think this is a step in the right direction, though it can obviously stand for much improvement, like all things in life. As an overall improvement for terrain I would suggest making the voxels smaller, say 2 or 3 studs instead of 4. It wouldn’t cause much more lag, and it would look so much better. And if possible, water could have smaller voxels than land, say half the size of land voxels.

    Improvements for water specificly should include heavily improved swimming, because the current version makes the character flop like a dying fish when on the surface. And of course, the automatic water flow suggested by many comments above would be very nice.

  52. Looks very good, despite I never play games on ROBLOX anynore this looks pretty decent.

  54. I tried it,it was very cool!!!!!!!!!!! U can swim in it :O that was really awesome!!!!

  58. ummm…. yea. I place any block from the stamper tool where there is nothing and it says can’t place it here, even though there is nothing there. Could you try and fix that and make world boundrys be seen in build mode and stuido mode? also be able to set boundrys of the world in stuido mode (you’d of course have a limit of how far you can make the boundrys). Thanks…

    —carapar3334

  59. Why bother adding this laggy thing in a tiny part of a place when you can do it the old fashioned way? When you had mesh based water, and boats that floated independantly.

  60. Well, this water is okay… I guess. See, way back in February, I looked through the game’s textures on my computer simply out of boredom. I found water textures, so I placed them into another person’s buoyancy brick model and it looked fantastic. I then saw the plans for the official release of water several weeks ago, and it looked similar to mine (but not the same, different textures.)I then saw this water just on Monday in the Beta Studio, tested it out, and quickly made some resolutions about it.
    1. Glitchy Swimming. My avatar was flopping around the whole time. It may be because my river was 1 brick deep, but you probably get what I mean.
    2. Behaves like a brick. the Beta Studio, I decided to relearn all of the terrain features. You know that tool that turns the selected terrain into a large ball? I used that on the water, and swam over the top of it, and it constantly pushed my legs up. That was annoying. I blame the block-like behaviors it had been given like the rest of the terrain. Oh, and by the way, I simply fell right to the bottom when I wasn’t swimming. At least put some drag into the block’s properties.
    Well, I guess that’s all I have to say today. Bye!

  62. The terrain toolbar keeps crashing(stops working) when I press ‘play’ then ‘first’. It is really anoying and Ithe only way to fix it is to restart the game.

  63. I have not gotten the chance to check this out… Is the painter a edit only mode like plugins because water is also in stamper or is it a new tool able to use in both build and edit? Also… the guy who explained this is not much of a talker are you…

  64. I think this is probably one of the best updates i have ever seen, You are doing great, ROBLOX!

    p.s. Can you add Dynamic ropes next?

  67. I say the last water was better then this cause the alst water you were able to swim better and the boats were able to sail better

  68. This is great and all, but really. What you guys need to focus on is all of the exploiters recently and you need to focus on fixing the coding of the game.
    Then i and other people will be satisfied and will stay on roblox for a bit longer.

  69. Gonna try it out. I read all the comments and see theh problems! I don’t want to remake the Titanic, should I…..

  70. I can’t place the water terrain in my ROBLOX Studio, I am using a MAC.