The words on a spec sheet, in plain English. These are the same explanations that open when you tap an attribute anywhere in the Rig Builder.
The steering wheel bolts straight onto the motor's shaft, with no belts or gears in between. Nothing sits between you and the forces the game is sending, so curbs, grip loss, and the front tires loading up arrive sharply and in the right order.
It is the biggest single step in how a rig feels, and the reason wheel bases are priced the way they are. It also needs somewhere solid to live: a strong direct-drive base on a flexing desk clamp will move the desk instead of your hands.
The motor turns the wheel through a toothed belt. The belt smooths out the sharpest detail, which is why a belt base feels softer than a direct drive of the same strength, and it is also what makes them quieter and cheaper.
A good belt base is a genuinely good wheel. It is the tier most people should buy before they have a cockpit to bolt something stronger to.
The motor drives the wheel through plastic or metal gears. It is the cheapest way to make a wheel push back, and it is what almost every entry-level wheel used before direct drive became affordable.
Gears rattle under curbs and blunt the fine detail, but the important forces are all still there: weight transfer, understeer, the wheel going light.
The wheel pushing back against your hands. The game works out what the front tires are doing and the wheel base turns that into force: the wheel goes heavy as the car loads up in a corner, light when the front washes wide, and kicks over curbs and bumps.
It is how you feel grip you cannot see, which is why a force feedback wheel is the first thing that makes a sim feel like driving. How cleanly a base delivers it depends on how the motor reaches the wheel: through gears, a belt, or directly.
Logitech's name for force feedback that also plays fine, fast detail through the wheel: engine vibration, gear changes, and the texture of the road and tires. It reads the game's physics and audio and sends that detail through the same motor that steers, rather than through a separate rumble motor.
It works only in games that support it. Elsewhere the wheel gives ordinary force feedback. It does not make a wheel any stronger, so a G923 with TRUEFORCE still has the same peak torque as a G29 without it.
Fanatec's name for force feedback that adds high-frequency effects on top of the steering forces: engine vibration, gear shifts, and road texture, played through the wheel base's own motor.
It works only in games that support it, and only on Fanatec direct drive bases with the firmware for it. Like TRUEFORCE, it adds detail, not strength.
Thrustmaster's name for force feedback that adds high-frequency detail on top of the steering forces: curbs, tire squeal, and road texture, played through the wheel base's own motor.
It is built into the T598's direct axial drive base. Like TRUEFORCE and FullForce, it adds detail, not strength.
The hardest the wheel base can push back, measured in newton-meters. It is a ceiling rather than a setting: most people run well below the maximum, and the number matters less than how cleanly the base delivers what it does produce.
What it does decide is what the base needs to be mounted to. Roughly speaking, up to 8 Nm is comfortable on a desk clamp, up to 12 Nm wants a wheel stand, and past that you want a cockpit, which is why the wizard asks where the rig will live before it recommends a base.
How strong a wheel base this frame is built to hold without flexing or walking across the floor. It is the manufacturer's own figure for the mount, not a property of any wheel.
Going over it does not break anything immediately. It just means the frame gives a little where the forces should be reaching your hands, and the rig feels vaguer than the base you paid for.
The coupling that holds the steering wheel onto the base and lets you swap wheels without tools. Each manufacturer has its own, and they do not interchange: a Fanatec wheel does not fit a Moza base because the couplings are different shapes.
This is the single most common compatibility mistake in sim racing, and it is the main thing this builder checks for you. Where an adapter exists to bridge two systems, it is listed as a real part with a real price rather than assumed.
A two-pedal set is throttle and brake, which is everything you need for a modern race car, a GT car or anything with paddles.
The third pedal is a clutch, and it only earns its place if you drive cars with an H-pattern gearbox: older road and race cars, touring cars, rally, trucks. Almost every three-pedal set lets you unbolt or ignore the clutch, so the choice is really "will I ever want one", not "will it be in the way".
A brake pedal that measures how HARD you press rather than how far the pedal moves, the same way a real brake works, since a real brake pedal barely travels at all.
It is the upgrade people notice most after the wheel base itself, because braking consistently is about learning a pressure, and a pressure is something you can learn. Expect a few hours of feeling like you have forgotten how to drive while your leg recalibrates.
A pedal that measures travel: how far you have pushed it, not how hard. It is what entry-level pedal sets use, and it works: plenty of very quick people have driven on them for years.
The limitation is repeatability under braking. Judging a stopping distance by leg position is harder than judging it by pressure, which is what a load cell gives you.
A contactless magnetic sensor. Like a potentiometer it measures travel rather than pressure, but nothing rubs against anything, so it does not wear out or develop the scratchy dead spots older pedals get.
On throttle and clutch this is exactly what you want. On a brake it is still travel-based, so it is a durability upgrade rather than a feel upgrade.
A brake with real hydraulic fluid behind the pedal, giving a stiff, progressive resistance very close to a road car's. It is the top of the pedal market and priced accordingly.
Worth knowing before you buy: hydraulics need a genuinely solid mount, and some designs need occasional bleeding. This is enthusiast territory, not a first upgrade.
A gear lever with a physical gate (first up and left, second down and left, and so on), the way a road car or a classic race car works. You need a clutch pedal to use one properly, which is why the two questions travel together.
It is the right choice for older cars, touring cars, rally and trucking. Modern GT and formula cars use paddles, so an H-pattern will sit unused if that is all you drive.
A single lever you pull back to go up a gear and push forward to come down, like a modern race car. No gate to find, no clutch needed for most cars.
Quicker to use than an H-pattern and much more satisfying than paddles for cars that had one in real life. Some units convert between sequential and H-pattern, and the spec table says which.
A shifter that works both ways: a gated H-pattern for older cars, and a sequential lever for modern ones, usually by moving a plate or swapping a knob.
It costs less than owning two shifters and takes up one desk clamp instead of two. The trade-off is that changing between the two is a job you do between sessions, not between races.
A squared-off open-wheeler rim, usually with a display, a lot of buttons and rotary switches, and no rim at the bottom to get in the way of your legs.
It is correct for single-seaters and modern prototypes and wrong for anything you would want to wind through your hands, because you cannot shuffle-steer a wheel that is not round.
A round or flat-bottomed rim modeled on a GT or touring car: enough diameter to steer smoothly, buttons for the things you change mid-race, and a shape that suits hands staying at nine and three.
If you drive a mix of cars and only want to own one wheel, this is the shape to own.
A fully round rim, usually a little dished, made for the constant hand-over-hand steering rally and drifting need. Fewer buttons than a GT wheel, because you are busy.
The roundness is the point: any flat bottom becomes something to catch your palm on when the wheel is spinning through your hands.
The rim's width across, in millimeters. Bigger wheels ask for more arm movement and make small corrections easier to place, while smaller ones are faster to whip through a hairpin and are what formula cars actually use.
Around 300 mm is the usual GT and road-car size, 280 mm and below is formula territory, and 320 mm and up suits trucks and older cars.
A frame built from extruded aluminum beams with slots down every face, the same industrial system workshops build jigs from, usually called 80/20.
It is stiffer than tube steel for the weight and, more usefully, endlessly adjustable: anything can be bolted anywhere along a slot, so the rig grows with your gear rather than being replaced by it. It costs more and takes longer to assemble.
A bolted aluminum-tube frame: the shape and the assembly of a tube steel cockpit, in a lighter metal. Lighter to move and free of rust, a little less stiff than the same tube in steel, and like tube steel it is largely fixed in shape rather than slotted for anything anywhere.
Not the same thing as aluminum profile, which is extruded beams with T-slots down every face.
A welded or bolted steel-tube frame, the traditional way to build a cockpit. Strong, heavy, cheaper than aluminum profile, and largely fixed in shape.
A fine choice if your rig is going to keep the same parts in the same places for years.
A part that goes onto a wheel base through its quick release and gives a bare wheel rim somewhere to bolt on. A rim with a bolt pattern and nothing else (a Fanatec wheel rim, or a real car steering wheel) needs one to reach the base, and hub plus rim is the complete steering wheel. A hub can carry buttons and paddles of its own, and some take button modules on top.
A hub is a real product with a real price, so this builder lists it as its own line in a build rather than treating it as an accessory that appears from nowhere.
A part whose only purpose is to let two other parts work together: a coupling between two quick-release systems, a cable between a brand of pedals and a brand of base, a bracket that fits one thing to another thing's bolt pattern.
This builder treats adapters as real products with real prices, because they are. Where a combination needs one, it is added to your build as its own line and counted in the total. Nothing here says "compatible with an adapter" without naming the adapter and what it costs.
A coupling that bridges two different quick-release systems, letting one brand's steering wheel mount to another brand's base.
Where the compatibility panel says "with adapter", this is what it means, and it names the exact part and what it costs. An adapter usually adds a little depth and a little weight between the wheel and the motor, which the keenest drivers can feel.
An accessory that plugs into a wheel hub, or into a complete steering wheel that has the connector for it, to add inputs (buttons, rotary encoders, extra paddles) and sometimes a display. The connector on the hub or wheel has to match the one the module uses, which is what the compatibility panel checks. A wheel with the connector takes the module on its own, with no hub.
Seats attach through side brackets or bottom rails, sometimes with a slider. Matching mounting types or bolt spacing alone does not verify fit: check seat width, brackets, hardware and cockpit clearance. Direct fit requires evidence for the combination.
The maker's pedal set line, which a clutch or other add-on names when it says which set it fits. An add-on bolts onto the baseplate of one line and plugs into that set's electronics, so a clutch for the SRP2 set fits the SRP2 set and no other. The compatibility panel checks the add-on's line against the set's.