What you see here is how builders remember the faces looking in Studio around 2009–2012. Back then you could slap surfaces onto bricks and the engine would try to make sense of it: studs and inlets snapped, weld faces fused, hinges and motors pretended to be joints right on the face. It was clever and also flaky. Today the looks remain, but the real work is done by constraints.
Smooth
Plain gray and deliberately boring. Smooth was the safe option when you didn’t want surprise connections while dragging parts around. New bricks spawned Smooth by default, and most sets left big interior faces Smooth so towers didn’t mysteriously weld themselves during edits.
SmoothNoOutlines
no seams
Same face, different era. Old Roblox drew thick black seams where parts touched; this variant hid those edges so models felt less like outlines-on-boxes. Once outlines were removed globally, SmoothNoOutlines became a historical footnote that loads old places but looks identical to Smooth.
Studs
Raised square bumps. In the late 2000s, dropping a plate with Studs onto a matching Inlet felt magical: a quick MakeJoints and the pieces snapped as if the physics understood LEGO. It didn’t, really—big builds wobbled and broke—but the workflow was fast and that’s why so many classic maps use it.
Inlet
The socket side of the pair. Builders alternated Studs on one plate and Inlets on the other so floors and walls lined up without scripts. In modern Studio they’re just decoration, but the look is part of the era’s identity.
Glue
A face pattern that said, “I’ll try to stick to whatever you give me.” It was a quick-and-dirty auto joint: great for mockups, notorious for letting heavy contraptions slide apart. Think duct tape—handy, not structural.
Weld
The serious version of Glue. Two Weld faces touching told the engine to keep those parts locked together. If your 2010 model somehow still holds up today, it’s probably thanks to a thousand tiny weld faces. These days, builders reach for WeldConstraint instead: explicit, scriptable, and far less moody.
Universal
Universal tried to be everyone’s friend: stick to Studs, Inlets, Welds—you name it. It saved time when you didn’t care how things were bonded, only that they were. The cost was unpredictability when your project grew up. Treat it as a look now, not a system.
Hinge
If you remember the little yellow cylinder stamped into a brick face, that’s Hinge. Two of these meeting at the right angle gave you a simple pivot. Doors, drawbridges, and bad ideas all started here. Today you’ll get better behavior using HingeConstraint with Attachments.
Motor
Looked like Hinge because it was—plus a hint that it should spin on its own. In practice, the auto-motor logic was twitchy and most of us ended up scripting the motion anyway. Still, the yellow cylinder makes it instantly recognizable.
SteppingMotor
Same idea as Motor but it advances in little clicks rather than gliding. The surface icon suggested that with a smaller cylinder and a notched reference line. Authentic to the era, but if you want stepping today, you script it.
Unjoinable
A brick politely saying, “don’t snap me to anything.” Useful while building so your parts didn’t suddenly weld to the table. Modern engines treat it like Smooth, which is fine—the spirit of the setting lives on in better tools.
Blank
A relic of the enum rather than a face you’d set on purpose. It hangs around in old documentation but the live engine doesn’t honor it. If you run into it in an ancient model, assume Smooth and replace the joins with constraints.
These four pop up again and again in screenshots from the late 2000s: a thin Hint bar shouting from the top, a Message dimming your view, the trusty HopperBin hammer in your hotbar, and the mysterious Hole face that shows up in archived kits. None of them survive as working features in modern places, but the look is worth preserving.
Hint
Server says a single sentence and everyone gets it across the top of the screen. That was Hint. It was perfect for short status updates—“Testing, testing!”—or for spooky admin theatrics. These days, rebuild it as a thin ScreenGui docked to the top and you’ll get the same feel without relying on legacy classes.
Message
When you needed the room’s attention, you blacked out the world with Message and typed the announcement. White letters in the middle, gameplay still running behind a gray wash. It’s the ancestor of every “server is shutting down in 30 seconds” overlay you’ve ever seen. Recreate it with a full-screen ScreenGui and a TextLabel.
HopperBin
Before Tool took over, building games handed you bins—little utility containers that listened for clicks and did things like delete, clone, or drag parts. The hammer bin is the one everyone remembers. In contemporary games you’d give players Tools and a simple UI, but the iconography still hits that late‑2000s note.
Hole
A circular opening stamped into a face, tied to experiments with early motors and joints. It shows up in very old kits but doesn’t do anything reliable anymore. Keep it in screenshots for the history; swap it out for proper constraints in anything meant to move.
Snap
An older joint that forced two parts together when faces met. It made quick prototyping fun and sometimes made finished builds wobble. If you’re reviving an old map and it keeps falling apart, replace Snap joints with WeldConstraints and it’ll behave.
Gizmo
Studio’s colored axis handles—the little X/Y/Z triad everyone drags. Some early classes and plugins tried to expose them in-game; eventually that all became editor-only. If you want interactive handles today, you script your own or lean on the built-in tools.
Status
A minimal status tag some games dropped into PlayerGui. Think of it as a tiny “system says…” label. Here it reads “Status: Testing, testing!” to match the Message and Hint examples. In practice you’d build this with a TextLabel and update it from your scripts.