As of this writing, I've been playing the game for 20 hours, 300 hours and wondering what I'm doing with my life (playing the best game ever, that's what!).
However, I can't claim anymore that I know little about the game, but feel free to disagree :)
Since this is an early access game, expect things to change that make this guide not 100% accurate
I will try to keep this guide up to date, but I'm not made of time (cough 300 hours cough) so no promises.

I will also take this opportunity and apologise in advance for any spelling or gramar mistakes, English is not my first language (but do let me know so I can fix them).

With that out of the way, lets get on with the guide!

Here is as good a place as any to put this. Uncrewed is a physics game, and that means units can roll over and become stuck (a magnet on a different vehicle will help recover them). The game also has a stability controll. If a unit starts losing controll, it will slow down. If your vehicles seem slow, you may need a bigger base or disable the stability controlls (see the advanced section for altering this behaviour).

The first type of propulsion you are going to get in the campaign. Because all wheels can turn 360 degrees, it is quite easy to design a functioning unit thats suprisingly manouverable. However, because the wheels have a quite high top speed and a small footprint, small units whith these wheels tend to roll over easily. To avoid roling over, use wider and longer vehicles.
There is a variant now that attaches sideways to the vehicle, making it less prone to rollover.

With motorised wheels, weight is quite important. A vehicle that is to light will skit arnound the place, and sometimes get some air time and roll over. To heavy vehicles will get problems turning.

Small wheels are for speedy and cheap vehicles, but heavy recoil might be an issue.

note that only the front wheels will steer by default (see the advanced section for altering this behaviour)


Mostly the same as motorised wheels, but for biger vehicles. Because of their round shape, high speed and power, small vehicles will roll over quickly (again, there are newer versions that can attach sideways and come highly reccomended). Large wheels can also handle way more weight.
Note that Large moterised wheels are higher than motorised wheels, tracks and screws. If you want to combine wheels with these other propulsion modules, adapt your design accordingly. (or use the newer wheels).

An interesting behaviour of all wheels is the ability to strafe when a vehicle may be stuck. This behaviour allone adds considerably to the awesome mobility of all wheels.

Together with huge wheels, large wheels are probably the best land propulsion in the game, trudging through most terrain with elegance and speed whilst retaining a high level of mobility.

Do note that you will need to make bigger units to account for recoil on large guns, always test to see if your unit can fire 360 degrees without falling over.


Not much to say other than that these are probably the best all-terrain option. However, the sheer size of these combined with their hight restricts them to the largest vehicles. Note that your vehicle will be quite high when using these, so build accordingly.



Ahh, the good ol' tracks. These will likely form the backbone of many armies. Tracks are not as maneuverable as wheels, but handle rough terain, elevation, recoil and weight way better (at least better than the smaller wheels). And because of their larger footprint and lower speeds, make vehicles less likely to tip over.
The larger footprint also makes it easier to handle the recoil of large weapons.
There may be some problems with tracks and turning vehicles, see the "general tips" section.


Can stabilise units to help deal with recoil from artillery guns or other guns with a lot of recoil (large guns). I use these rarely as I find them cumbersome to use. I'd rather design a slightly heavier vehicle with a bigger base and use the option to not persue enemies if I want a unit to sit still.
It can still be usefull for small vehices with big guns.
On a side note: Vehicles sitting still on top of repair pads are exelent base defenses, especially if you include lasers to counter missiles (as splash damage also damages the repair pad). The telescopic beams can be quite helpfull in constructing such a unit.
Update: above is still a good tactic, but we have better ways to defend now. My advice? Telescopic beams are not worth the effort.


The walker legs are interesting. They seem to be able to carry a huge amount of weight over any type of terrain with exelent stability (if you happen to have 4). They have two big downsides: it is the slowest form of propultion in the game and they use a lot more power. To increase speed, the legs can be retracted so that wheels, tracks or other can hit the ground and take it from there.
The power usage should be taken into acount when designing the vehicle, use a lot of batteries packs or use less legs.
Walkers will be vunerable on large maps and against hit and run tactics, but their carrying capacity will make them good for super heavy units. If only two legs are used, some walkers can fill roles as cheap infantry.
Lasers tend to be good weapons for bigger, slower tanks, while rockets are better for hit and run vehicles. Be carefull though, as lasers have short ranges and high power consumption, both of which can leave a walker unable to counter attack.


These are largely the same as small legs, only... bigger... They cost more and use two vehicle slots, but look amazing.
Be mindfull if you only use two legs though, because you do not want this:


The sollution is to lower the centre of mass of the walker, there is a button to display the centre of mass on the top right of the screen.
If a block like the normal armor plate (not the smooth one) is scaled up, it's weight will increase dramaticly, you can use this as a counter weight in building mechs.

Overall, the legs are quite weak. Their slow speed combined with high units makes them quite hard to use without falling over. Using only two legs makes your walker very easy to intentially topple over via the knockback of a railgun and they will just fall over on some maps when they feel like it.
Note that Uncrewed is a game about having fun, If you like legs, then by all means use them!

I can not think of anything cooler than an amphibious battleship :D

Making a vehicle for water is a bit harder than making one for land, especially making a vehicle that is amphibious, I suggest you test your designs thorougly in the sandbox map. If you are designing a aquatic faction, make sure that you at least have some amphibous units (especially miners on water maps), since most fighting will still revolve around land.
With the new submarines, designing becomes more complicated. Not only will laser weapons not work against subs, but ships with all their weapons on top will have a hard time hitting submerged units.

The screw is the continous track of the water. It performs worse than the track on land, but can hande water quite well. It is even buoyant!

The same turning advice applies to the screw as to the track with regards to turning. My advice would be to combine screws with (large) wheels for better land and turning performance.

Overall, I like the screws the best. Especially in combination with wheels, these can make nasty units fit for almost all situations and types of terain. However, you may still find screws getting stuck on low hills, and screws have a low turning speed when submerged.

If the screws are the tracks of the water, than these are the wheels. These can only work in water and are not buoyant. These can be quite effective for water-only units, and may be the best propultion for submarines.
Water Jets count as flying propultion modules, so they combine with land vehicles quite well.
When using water jets, place them on the rear or the front of the vehicle, otherwise it won't turn in the water (it will still go in all directions, it just won't turn). The rear usually works the best.
Interestingly, the bounding box for water jets is tiny, making them easy to put them into any nook or cranny of your vehicle.

The best amphibious vehicles will most likely have wheels or tracks and these.

Used in conjunction with fans. Hovercraft make exelent, fast units for water and flat land, useless on hills though, any rough terrain will stop these dead in their... ehhh.... pads?. Hover pads also stop working if units are to heavy, so using them for lighter units is advised. If your hovercraft is out of power over water, it will sink. A sunken hovercraft is hard to recover. (So also beware of EMP weapons).

Used in conjunction with hover pads to make hovercraft move somwhere usefull. Fans count as flying propultion modules, but don't provide any benefit to flying units. However, fans will work on any floating unit, hover or otherwise, making them good alternatives for water jets if you only have space on top of the vehicle. Fans can also propell extremly light units over land via tumbeling, resulting in quite some hilarity.
Fans are not screws, and won't work under water. Thus they are useless for submarines.
Just like water jets, place fans on the rear or the front of the vehicle, otherwise it won't turn in the water (it will still go in all directions, it just won't turn).

Add these if units sink, these don't add to the propulsion count.
Always test if your ships are not to heavy and sink before bringing them into combat. The sandbox has a pool specifically for this.
It is higly advisable to test your aquatic designs before going into combat. Land units usually work and are easy to recover. If water units topple or sink, they become almost useless and hard if not imposible(if the vehicle keeps toppeling over) to recover.
If your aquatic unit ever turns slow, you will need to add more pontoons. try to see if there is a part of the unit that is lower in the water and add more pontoons there.
The centre of mass should be below most pontoons, otherwise your unit will list. And yes... you need a lot of them to make a unit float.

The basic idea is that these work the same as pontoons, but they can be used to lower your vehicle into the water like a submarine. Since most units only have weapons on the top, submarines can be really hard to hit. All laser weapons do not work under water, so you can't hit submarines with lasers and submarines can't use lasers. The EMP also won't work against submarines, but subs can still use them against non-submerged enemies. On top of all of this, submerged units recieve up to 50% less kinetic damage (bullet weapons and railguns). Submarines are quite vulnerable to rockets though, as these are the only weapons that work 100% underwater and subs can not counter these with laser weapons.
Ballast tanks need to be placed relative to the centre of mass, but this is more lenient than for air units. Placing one of these ballast tanks on every corner of the vehicle will usually be enough to become a submarine (if you want to surface you might need a few more ballast tanks or pontoons).
If your sub goes belly up, you will either need to get the center of mass lower than the pontoons or make the vehicle wider (with ballast tanks on the sides ofcourse).

Note that vehicles that can only travel on the bottom of the water will get stuck on some maps due to underwater pipes and ramps that don't go to the bottom.

Note: Many thanks to the dev for advice on submarines

Makes units fly and has an awesome name! I've found that flying units can handle more weight than I was expecting, but there will still be limits.
The Idea is that there should be one nozzle pointing in each direction, and at least 3 pointing downwards.
The centre of mass should be located within these 3 points.
When making an air unit, all of the icons in the top left corner should be yellow in order for it to fly.

Add the nozzles sideways to make units fly:


Adding them like this will not work:


Adding sufficient nozzles is important. A flyer that is too heavy will still fly (somewhat slowly). And will have problems getting over high obstacles. But in general flyers can handle a lot of weight.

Do note that the nozzles continue to use energy if the unit is in the air. If there is no more energy, the aircraft will fall out of the sky. I would advice you to keep your aircraft landed if not needed, and have units with maintainance tools and loads of batteries to recharge downed aircraft on standby.

If you add weapons on the top, the vehicle will lower itself to try and bring all its weapons to bear.

Do not forget to add a magnetic pad under the aircraft so it can carry your units across the battlefield (ships to the water or tanks over obstacles). As of this writing, there seems to be no weight limit on this. My smallest aircraft can carry my heaviest tanks. This can also be a usefull strategy: Have a cheap healer aircraft carry a bigger vehicle. This makes a dangerous combo.


Overall the Rocket Jet is the best propulsion system by far. Flyers are the fastest, and don't care about terrain. They are the easiest to micro, have no problems with any recoil or knockback and can more easilly handle weapons with short ranges due to their speed and knockback resistance.
If you micro them, you can avoid damage from most weapons. All large weapons, plasma guns, grenade launchers, rocket launchers and even EMP's can be mostly avoided with a bit of micro.

EMP's will knock out aircraft, making them fall down. This will only disable your unit for a short while, and will only be significant if you have energy weapons or the aircraft falls in a way in which it can't use its weapons anymore.
EMP's are a good against raiders, but may only slow down a full air assault.

Weight is an importaint factor; too light and units will roll over, to heavy and units will not be able to turn any more. I suspect that to light will not be a problem for most designs.
Motorised wheels and hovercraft need the most attention in the weight department.

If you notice tracked vehicles or vehicles with screws not turning properly, it may have more to do with the shape of your unit than with it's size.

Tracks can cause problems with turning in heavier vehicles. In the figure to the left, there are 4 vehicles weighted down. Vehicle 1 has problems with turning, because it is too long and thin. To make it turn better, you can make the vehicle wider (nr. 2), use wheels (nr. 3), or a combination of wheels and tracks (4). Note that this is more visible with screws, since they perform worse on land.

Tracked vehicles have a lot of downsides IRL, all that power is wasted on roads for example, but tracks are way better off road than wheels. In the second world war, half tracks were used to cobine the best of both worlds with quite a lot of success*. The same can be achieved in Uncrewed.

Amphibious vehicles have most to gain from combining propulsion types. Tracks can make hovercraft better at climbing things and wheels combine well with screws for turning and speed over land. The water jets will have to be combined if you don't want to fly your units to the water.

If you are making a unit that just about fits in the bounding box (long and thin), I'd also recomend you combine wheels and tracks (or screws if you want to make a battleship). However, small wheels can still stop turning if to much weight rests on them and large wheels are higher than other propulsion types, so adapt your design accordingly. Wheels also tend to work best on the front or back of the vehicle.

In uncrewed, vehicles tend to get the best from both world when combining types of propulsion, so go wild and see what you can come up with!


*= Of course half tracks have been replaced by 6x6 and 8x8 vehicles with better tech, but we will skip over that little detail here ^^

There are advanced configuration options for a bunch of propultion modules. Not all modules have these options. to access the options click here:

Clicking this button will overlay icons over modules that can be adapted. If you click on the module you want to adapt you get the following menu:

There are a number of options here that may be quite interesting for your creations, Here I will go over them.

The drive options on the left are handy for power consumption, and the "mostly off" button supposedly turns the system off unless required. It may help you in creations that hog power but I have found that wheels, tracks e.c.t. only consume noticable amounts of power when moving.
It may be helpfull in flying or hover contraptions though.

The steering options are quite handy. "Automatic" means that what the game precieves as the front wheels will turn the vehicle. This can be undesirable in some cases (if steering makes vehicles topple for example) so you could switch to "none". The "direct" option makes wheels act as front wheels. The "reverse" option is the most usefull, because the game does not use this by default. If you want to get a half-track with wheels in the rear and tracks up front to steer fast, use this option. It could also be handy if you want to reduce the turning radius of long vehicles:


This section has two sliders. The "Stability control" tries to make the unit accelerate and decelerate slower and ajust speeds as to not topple over. The unit will be faster if you turn this down, but more prone to toppeling over.
The "Power" slider controls the amount of energy that goes into a module. If your vehicle makes a backflip when starting, you could cut power to the rear wheels.

These options also work on other modules. If you click on the computer you will see the option for the unit ai to avoid water or land.
Flying units can also be customised a lot with these options. Who know, maybe I'll update this guide with those some day.

I really hope this helps beginning players in designing their vehicles, but tis guide may be to simplistic for that. And as you can see, some parts need quit a bit of fleshing out.
Feel free to tell me what to change or add, or ask me if you want to help and contribute :)
I won't promise I will keep this updated, but I'll try.