Screw Drivers – Quick Guide to Gear Shifts

Gear Shifts Guide

In the game there are 2 types of gear shifts. The first has 2 steps and allows you to have 2 different gears in your transmission; the second has 3 steps and you can make a 3 speed transmission with it.

But what if you want more gears? In that case you have to combine multiple gear shifts. For example, if in your transmission there is a 3-step gear shift followed by a 2-step gear shift, you will get at most 6 gears. Why? cause there are 6 possible combinations of the two gear shifts:

In the same way, you can obtain an 8 speed transmission with three 2-step gear shifts (2 x 2 x 2 = 8) and so on.

However, by simply using multiple gear shifts you are not guaranteed to achieve as many gears as the combinations of your gear shifts. You need to make sure that there are no combinations with the same ratio. Before getting in depth about this, let’s first see the ratios of the different gears of the game.

We have 4 gears in the game (if we ignore the corner gear):

• Small Gear
• Medium Gear
• Big Gear
• Planetary Gear

The first 3 can be connected together to make different ratios:

The planetary gear instead is used on it’s own to connect 2 axes and it has a ratio of 1 to 2.3. Depending on the direction it is facing, it can either multiply the speed by 2.3 or by around 0.435 (therefore increasing or reducing considerably the speed).

Now let’s see how to optimize your gear shifts. As mentioned earlier, you want all your combinations to have different ratios. Let’s see an example to understand how to do it:

Here we have two 2-step gear shifts coupled together. We should get 4 gears, but let’s check the ratios of every combination:

According to the calculations, 2 of the 4 combinations end up having the same final ratio. For this reason the game will think there are only 3 gears (cause 2 of them are identical). You can also see this thing in the power curve graph:

A good rule of thumb is to avoid using the same ratios on different gear shifts to get as many gears as possible. If you like doing calculations, you can even calculate all the ratios and make yourself a table to check if all the final ratios aren’t overlapping and they are well spread out. Let’s see another example:

Here we have two 3-step gear shifts with different ratios:

Here there are no identical final ratios so the car will have 9 different gears.

Oh, also interesting point: with this transmission, the turbo is only ever used on the first gear, which makes it kinda worthless here. But, then again, you generally don’t need so many gears, especially close together.