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I've been struggling with the first step of the beginner Rubik's cube solving algorithm with one simple problem. I am able to get the top face as all white, with blue and orange center pieces adjacent to each other. However, in the guide, in order from top, left side, and right side, the colors are white, orange, blue.

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However, in my cube, I have, in same order, white, blue, orange.

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As someone even slightly more experienced than me can confirm, this is still a valid cube and I haven't somehow swapped its edges. I have tried to "swap" these centers in relation to each other for a while, and this doesn't seem to be possible. Even most sources say that centers cannot change in relation to each other:

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There are algorithms for "swapping centers", but these involve "swapping" the top as well and cannot simply interchange the order of these. However, even in the very guide I'm following, one of the very steps involves a cube that has its center "swapped", as follows:

enter image description here

(as, if the cube were flipped, the order here would be white, blue, orange). Is there something really obvious I'm missing?

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One of my old and tattered cubes doesn't even have a white-orange-blue corner – white is opposite blue:

This is also not the scheme on official Rubik's cubes.

Never fix your mind to make a white cross, or any specific colour cross. Speedsolvers pay little attention to the explicit colours when solving, only the patterns formed by stickers of the same colour and the orientations and permutations of whole pieces per se. Be colour-agnostic, in short.

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  • $\begingroup$ this does kinda make sense, but I suppose I was most confused why on the original guide, with their shown illustration, they had a timeline of each step and somehow showed that they could go from the white, blue, orange cube to the yellow, blue, orange cube in the same one $\endgroup$
    – Daneolog
    Commented Jan 26, 2022 at 1:39
  • $\begingroup$ @Daneolog The explanation's the same: the colours themselves don't matter. $\endgroup$
    – Parcly Taxel
    Commented Jan 26, 2022 at 3:45
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The images in the guide are bad. Well, one of them is at least. One shows white up with Orange on the left and blue on the right. The other shows yellow on top and orange is still on the left with blue on the right. While it's true that both would be valid cubes (custom color schemes are prevalent), you could never get both results on the same cube without disassembling it. My cube (indeed most cubes) are like yours, where if white is up, blue would be on the left and orange on the right.

Whoever was generating the images for the instructions just took a shortcut and didn't worry about the order of colors. It's possible they had the yellow-on-top image first, then copied it, changed yellow to white, and then greyed out some more stickers to get the white cross picture. After all, the diagram is only to show the general idea of what's going on (that the cross is done and the center upper side colors match the centers they're adjacent to). So the creators of the diagram weren't too worried about which color scheme was being used, only that the right colors matched.

I've generated some of my own pictures for visual tutorials, and it's always tempting to reuse diagrams from other steps like that.

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