The factory is your secret weapon to quickly generate chases in a matter of seconds, even on gigantic stages.

The factory is activated by toggling down its menu. It will then neatly and automatically divide all the slices on your stage into a grid, based on the position of their center point. You can then create patterns for this grid very quickly using the controls on the left.

Controls

The first dropdown controls the Direction. By switching between Horizontal and Vertical, the chase will move through the grid in that direction, toggling on a single slice in each consecutive step. If you prefer, you can also select to a whole Row or Column for each step instead. There is a also a Random direction, which picks a random slice per step, making sure to never pick the same slice twice.

Note how the number of steps will automatically adjust itself based on the number of slices and the chosen direction.

By toggling Flip X and Flip Y, you can make the chase start from the opposite side and move backwards through the stage.

Block let’s you change the number of each slices used for each step. The max number of blocks depends on the number of slices, the selected Direction and selected Modulo value.

Modulo controls how quickly the pattern repeats. By default, it’s set to OFF, but for instance by setting it to 2, the pattern will repeat every 2 slices. This is great for making odd/evens. Because of the math involved, the repeat value is identical to the amount of steps your sequence will have. Setting it to 4 or 8 is a great way to make sure your chases hits the beat nicely. The max value of Modulo depends on the number of slices, the selected Direction and selected Block value.

Mirror X and Mirror Y will mirror each step in the sequence over the center of the grid. So by hitting Mirror X, all slices that are active on the left side of the stage, will be mirrored to the right side and vice versa.

Shuffle shuffles the current steps around in a random order. This is great to quickly get some variations on big stages.

Tip! The factory is designed to get you a bunch of variations in a matter of seconds. But if you can’t quite get the exact pattern you want, you can always get it close and then fine tune it by toggling the remaining slices manually. Chaser will remember the factory settings you’ve used for each sequence, but it won’t overwrite anything until you touch the settings again.

The Grid

The grid controls how the factory creates its patterns. As mentioned, by default the factory divides your slices into a grid based on their center point. A lot of the time, this is enough to get you up and running, but sometimes it’s not quite what you want. In the example below, it has divided the slices into a 5 by 5 grid. However, visually it would make more sense to divide this into a 5 x 3 grid, grouping the top 5 slices in the same row.

You can solve this by simply picking up the problematic grid borders and dragging them to their desired location. Or you could delete them entirely by hitting backspace. You can also create new borders by ALT dragging an existing border. The factory will continuously update the sequence in real time based on the new grid layout. It will also use the new layout for new sequences and remember which grid layout you used for each sequence.