Construction Simulator | Ep. 43 – Building the Nation’s Next Emergency Toilet Stop

Infrastructure matters, people! Back on the construction site, we’re tackling possibly our most important project yet. Somewhere, someday, someone is going to be extremely grateful we built this.

Of course, before we can provide weary travellers with the emergency toilet stop this nation so desperately needs, there is one minor obstacle: the enormous hole beneath it. Tonight’s mission was therefore simple. Dig. Dig some more. Sell the dirt. Try not to fall into the hole. Somehow, we only managed three of those consistently.

---

🚧 About Construction Simulator

Construction Simulator is back bigger and better than ever, putting more than 70 machines at our disposal across two huge maps. Whether working alone or with friends, there are roads to lay, buildings to raise and enough heavy machinery to make questionable decisions on an industrial scale.

Our current project is a service area, which means we’re building some genuinely vital infrastructure. Unfortunately, before anything useful can exist above ground, an astonishing amount of the ground itself needs to disappear.

---

🏗️ Where We Are in the Journey

Last week we levelled the service-area site, moved equipment into position and began excavating the basement. Episode 43 picked up directly from there, with one glorious objective: make the hole bigger.

I’d tried clearing some excess soil between streams, only to discover that anything outside the game’s active excavation area simply vanishes when loaded into a truck. With each legitimate load worth roughly ten to twelve grand, that represented a horrifying amount of imaginary money disappearing into the void.

Instead, I brought our longer, twistier dump truck to the site and bought a skid loader for the gravel stage. There will be gravel. There is always gravel.

---

🔥 What Happens in This Episode

With the service area prepared and a frankly unreasonable amount of earth still sitting where our basement was supposed to be, we climbed back into the excavator and got to work.

The basic operation couldn’t have been simpler: dig up the soil, swing the excavator around, drop it into the dump truck, drive the truck away, sell the contents for somewhere around ten to twelve thousand, return to the site and repeat until either the basement was finished or our collective sanity gave out.

There was just one problem.

I apparently kept forgetting which button emptied the excavator bucket.

Several perfectly good scoops of earth were therefore carefully extracted from the basement, lifted into the air… and immediately deposited straight back into the hole.

I’m blaming the glitch in my arm. Clearly it has spread into the excavator.

At least the dirt that actually reached the truck was worth serious money. Every disposal run was bringing in roughly £10,000–£12,000, which made staring into this enormous pit and watching the completion percentage crawl upwards slightly less painful.

Slightly.

Things became considerably more exciting when we discovered another important principle of professional construction: don’t park the enormous dump truck right beside the enormous hole.

It may fall in.

Only a little bit.

The truck ended up thoroughly wedged in the excavation, leading to various attempts to jiggle it free while chat provided the sort of expert technical support we’ve come to expect. There was a “can’t park there mate”, naturally, while sane_psycho_nl suggested we embrace GTA logic, steal another vehicle and ram the truck until physics reconsidered its position.

Eventually there was only one sensible solution left.

Deathloop.

The truck was reset, the contents could finally be delivered, and another proud chapter in Dr Ravenholm Construction Services was quietly filed away where the insurance company will hopefully never discover it.

Not long afterwards, I remembered something rather important.

We had another dump truck.

I’d brought the longer, twistier truck up to the site during the week, so we lined both vehicles up and started filling them together. That meant I could spend longer excavating before jumping into each truck and making the delivery runs individually.

That was also when we discovered something unexpected. Despite the second truck looking smaller, Construction Simulator apparently gives it essentially the same carrying volume as the enormous one.

Better still, it can unload the entire thing in a matter of seconds.

The larger truck, meanwhile, sits there majestically tipping its load for another thirty or forty seconds while I contemplate every decision that brought us to this moment.

There is a slight downside.

The faster truck has some… interesting physics.

But this is Construction Simulator. At this point, interesting physics are practically part of the vehicle specification.

So the excavation continued. Scoop, truck, delivery, money. Scoop, truck, delivery, money. Somewhere along the way we’d made well over £100,000 just from selling dirt, and the service area still appeared to consist primarily of a hole.

Chat had settled comfortably into the rhythm as well. “Diggy diggy hole” inevitably appeared. The legality of my driving was questioned. We discussed whether my licence had come from a cereal box and, indeed, whether I had ever possessed a licence in the first place.

And then somebody started talking about bears having feathers.

This is where the construction stream took a turn.

The Owlbear Incident

Aida suggested something involving bears and feathers. Spiffy Mango disagreed on the fairly reasonable grounds that bears do not generally come equipped with plumage.

But there is, of course, the owlbear.

And owlbears have feathers.

That was enough to unlock several years’ worth of tabletop RPG memories.

I used to play in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign where the Dungeon Master would spend time carefully preparing encounters, characters and elaborate situations for us.

I would then arrive.

One particular adventure was supposed to involve an owlbear attacking the party. The DM had prepared this creature as a serious threat. Presumably there would be combat, danger, possibly somebody getting mauled and whatever carefully balanced consequences were supposed to follow.

Unfortunately for the DM, I had an ability that allowed me to try appeasing the owlbear.

So naturally I tried it.

What followed was one of those ridiculous strings of dice rolls where everything inexplicably goes your way. Twenties appeared on the d20 and the terrifying monster that was supposed to attack us essentially decided:

“Actually, these people seem lovely.”

And that was that.

The DM’s carefully planned encounter evaporated and our party acquired an owlbear companion.

That became something of a recurring theme in our campaigns.

The Town Crier Business Model

Possibly the finest example began when our little guild travelled from a smaller settlement into a large city.

We were working for — or at least associated with — a rather suspicious deity, and our guild had headquarters in different places connected by magical portals. Once we’d established ourselves in the city, the DM explained that we needed to advertise our services so people would actually hire us for quests.

There were three town criers available.

One was cheap and wouldn’t bring much work. One occupied the sensible middle ground. And the expensive town crier would apparently attract the best contracts.

Then the DM told me his prices.

They were outrageous.

This man, I decided, was ripping people off.

Now, a normal D&D player might respond to that situation by hiring the medium-priced town crier.

I asked the Dungeon Master a question.

“Does the town crier have a family?”

There was a pause.

Yes, apparently. He had a daughter. His wife had died.

Excellent.

I followed him home after he’d finished his town crying for the day and discovered where he lived. Then we enlisted our companion Wolf of the Unknown Fire to create a distraction.

Wolf had a hobby.

He liked punching trees.

There was a sacred area in the city filled with trees, so Wolf wandered over there and began doing what Wolf did best: punching them down.

Understandably, this caused something of an uproar.

While everyone was occupied with the unfolding tree-related emergency, I went to the town crier’s house.

And through another astonishing run of successful dice rolls, I abducted his daughter.

We brought her back to the guild headquarters and handed her over to the associate managing our operation. He subsequently transported her through the portal to the previous village we’d worked in and, for reasons that presumably seemed reasonable at the time, left her on the roof of the tavern.

Apparently nobody knew what to do with the mysterious child who had appeared from nowhere, and she eventually became somewhat feral.

Understandably.

But before I’d left the town crier’s house, I’d done something important.

I’d left behind one of our business cards.

The following day, the distraught town crier arrived at our guild looking for help.

He wanted somebody to investigate the disappearance of his daughter.

And somehow, through persuasion rolls that seemed permanently blessed by the gods, I convinced him to hire me.

Not only had I kidnapped his daughter because I didn’t like his advertising rates; the man was now paying me ten gold per day to investigate the crime I had committed.

From that point onwards, every new D&D session began with the same important administrative question:

“How many days has it been since the last adventure?”

I’d calculate how much gold he owed me, collect the money and provide another convincing update on the progress of an investigation that absolutely was not happening.

Occasionally I’d even negotiate additional funding.

And this continued.

Week after week.

Adventure after adventure.

The poor man essentially financed us throughout the campaign while we very carefully avoided finding the daughter we’d abducted in the first place.

The Dungeon We Didn’t Actually Enter

The town crier wasn’t the only carefully prepared part of the campaign that encountered problems.

Back in the previous village, we’d been hired to explore a dungeon beneath a ruined structure on top of a hill.

The Dungeon Master had built the whole thing.

There were multiple chambers, enemies, puzzles and whatever important objective we were supposed to locate inside. There were two entrances: one concealed in the hillside amongst the trees and bushes, and another hidden amongst the ruins above.

The DM was apparently expecting this dungeon to occupy us for three or four sessions.

I had another idea.

Wolf, as we’ve established, liked fire.

So rather than wander obediently through the dungeon solving puzzles and fighting everything room by room, I barricaded the hidden entrance in the ruins and surrounded it with burning oil.

Then we added explosive barrels.

Lots of explosive barrels.

The theory was wonderfully simple: if we could blow the side of the hill off, we wouldn’t need to navigate the dungeon.

So that’s what we did.

The explosion ripped open the hillside and exposed the chambers inside. Most of the enemies were wiped out immediately, while the survivors trying to escape encountered the smoke, fumes and fiery welcome we’d prepared on the surface.

The elaborate multi-session dungeon was effectively completed in a single evening.

I had once again ruined the Dungeon Master’s plans.

Although, to be fair, some of those catastrophes apparently became his favourite sessions.

How I Acquired the Persephone

At another point in the campaign, we needed to travel further inland and hired a rather nice fishing boat to transport us.

It was a paddle steamer operated by a fisherman and his son.

There was subsequently an unfortunate incident.

An attack may have occurred.

A cannon may have been fired.

The cannonball may, possibly, have travelled through the fisherman’s son’s chest.

He may have been slightly disintegrated.

These things happen.

The father understandably didn’t take this particularly well. He was shocked, traumatised and generally having quite a bad day, so we brought him along with us for a while.

Later, however, we needed a distraction to deal with some enemies.

And we did have one extremely traumatised fisherman available.

One thing led to another and he was rigged as a bomber and sent into the enemy lines.

He’ll be fine.

This did, however, leave an important logistical question.

Who owned the boat now?

Naturally, I claimed it.

The paddle steamer had taken some damage during the fighting and needed repairs, but fortunately I had an excellent source of recurring income thanks to the town crier continuing to fund the investigation into the disappearance of his daughter.

So some of that money went towards restoring my newly acquired vessel.

I renamed her Persephone, after the Persephone from my Commander Levesque science-fiction stories.

The DM now had another slight complication to deal with.

We owned a ship.

Christmas Inside Santa’s Sack

There were plenty of other tabletop catastrophes.

One Christmas adventure took us inside Santa’s sack, which turned out to contain an entire city populated by elves manufacturing presents.

Except this wasn’t exactly the cheerful North Pole workshop from the Christmas cards.

It was more like a gigantic smoky industrial city where the elves appeared to be functioning as a captive workforce.

Getting into the sack meant descending an enormous distance from the opening at the top.

We could have used a rope.

But we’d seen R.I.P.D.

There’s a scene where Jeff Bridges jumps from a building and uses Ryan Reynolds to break his fall.

This seemed inspirational.

Unfortunately for one of our companions, Wolf broke his neck and we threw him down first so we’d have something to land on.

There was one small flaw in this plan.

He was playing a tiny leprechaun.

So our intended landing platform was not particularly large.

What could possibly go wrong?

The Portable Hole Problem

Another adventure had given me something resembling a portable hole, and I had transformed mine into basically the fantasy equivalent of a luxury camper van.

While everybody else was setting up camp in the wilderness, I could slap this thing onto a wall, walk inside and find myself in a proper dining room and kitchen with all the comforts required by the discerning adventurer.

It was brilliant.

Until we needed to escape somewhere quickly.

One of our companions had acquired some slaves during the journey, and rather than abandon them, we decided everybody could simply jump into the portable hole. I’d fold it away, carry them safely with us, and open it again once we’d escaped.

Perfect.

Except for one minor technical detail.

Portable holes contain a limited amount of oxygen when closed.

We had forgotten that.

Wolf got a meal out of it.

Wolf would eat basically anything.

Or anyone.

Meanwhile, Back in the Actual Construction Game…

All of these stories were unfolding while we were supposedly building a service area.

Every so often, we’d remember that there was still an excavator on screen and continue digging our diggy diggy hole.

The percentage slowly climbed. The money continued rolling in. Trucks went backwards and forwards while our construction livestream somehow became an oral history of every Dungeon Master’s worst nightmare.

Eventually the excavation itself became awkward enough that the excavator fell into the hole.

At this point, that almost felt inevitable.

On the positive side, having the excavator physically sitting inside the basement gave us much better access to the edges, which seemed to be where much of the remaining excavation was hiding. So we carried on scooping those awkward sections out and loading them into the waiting truck.

And because the tabletop floodgates were now completely open, the stories moved from Dungeons & Dragons to another campaign some of the community might remember.

The Labyrinth Campaign Returns

A couple of years ago, I Dungeon Mastered a tabletop RPG based on Labyrinth on stream.

We’d intended to continue it, but I became very ill afterwards and lost my voice for several months, so the campaign never properly resumed.

It had already generated its own collection of ridiculous moments.

One involved a chamber containing a magical sleeping effect. Anyone passing through a particular area would immediately fall asleep. If somebody dragged them back out, they’d wake up.

This should have been solvable.

The players instead kept making everything progressively worse.

Eventually they developed a plan involving Gary’s character, Little Worm, and Happy Cat with a baseball bat.

The idea was that Happy Cat would use the bat to launch Gary across the sleeping field while he carried a rope. He’d pass out during the flight, wake up safely on the far side, and then use the rope to help everybody else across.

There were two slight problems.

Firstly, Gary was playing a tiny worm and was never going to pull full-sized adventurers across with a rope.

Secondly…

They forgot to give him the rope.

Happy Cat, apparently rather enthusiastic about this particular solution, simply scooped Gary up with the baseball bat and punted him across the chamber.

Gary still remembers this.

Possibly not fondly.

The discussion brought back memories of the unfinished campaign, and I still have the old inventories and notes. So perhaps we don’t necessarily need to start over if Labyrinth eventually returns.

And that wasn’t the only tabletop possibility resurfacing during the evening.

There’s still the Dark Crystal RPG we never got around to starting, plus the Fallout tabletop campaign I’ve wanted to Dungeon Master. I had actually begun preparing that one before everything was interrupted.

We might have to break those back out at some point.

Construction Simulator apparently wasn’t content with digging up soil tonight.

We also excavated several abandoned tabletop campaigns.

Back to the Hole

Eventually, though, there was no avoiding the enormous unfinished basement still occupying the middle of the screen.

Despite the distractions, lost scoops, buried machinery, physics incidents and lengthy discussion of tabletop atrocities, we’d actually made serious progress. More than £100,000 worth of soil had left the site, and the excavation had climbed to roughly 65% complete by the time we prepared to finish.

We squeezed in one final delivery run, but the basement wasn’t surrendering tonight.

So that’s where the nation’s next emergency toilet stop remains: currently an enormous hole containing considerably less dirt than it did when we started.

Construction Simulator will return in two weeks, when we’ll climb back into the machinery and continue excavating until this service area finally starts looking like somewhere people might actually want to stop.

Before then, next Monday we’re trying the new game Deliverage, which is currently in extremely early access.

There’s also been a change to Thursday’s planned Bayonetta Origins stream. Instead, we’re breaking out something I picked up in the sale and have been really enjoying: Iron Nest Heavy Turret Simulator.

We use maths.

We blow things up.

Seems reasonable.

With the construction shift finally over — and the room getting hot enough that turning the fans on was becoming considerably more important than digging another truckload of soil — we wrapped things up and sent the community onwards with a raid into CatsyB33.

The basement may still be unfinished, but we’d made a small fortune selling dirt, rediscovered enough tabletop stories to traumatise several Dungeon Masters, and possibly resurrected Labyrinth, Dark Crystal and Fallout campaigns in the process.

All things considered?

Productive night.

---

🎬 Watch the Episode

Want to see the dump-truck disaster, the never-ending excavation and the moment a construction stream somehow transforms into a catalogue of crimes against Dungeon Masters? Watch Episode 43 below:

Watch Construction Simulator Episode 43

You can catch the entire adventure through the Construction Simulator playlist, and if you’re enjoying the chaos, head over to the Dr Ravenholm YouTube channel. Give the video a like, tell me your favourite moment in the comments, and subscribe so you don’t miss whatever machinery we accidentally bury next.

---

🔴 Join the Adventure Live

The videos capture the adventure, but the livestream is where these stories actually happen — where sensible construction plans become physics experiments and an innocent discussion about feathers somehow resurrects years of tabletop crimes.

Come join us live on Twitch or over on YouTube. Chat is very much part of the expedition, whether you’re offering genuinely useful advice or simply arriving in time to point out that I’ve parked another vehicle in a hole.

And when the shift ends, we often carry the adventure onwards with a raid — this time joining CatsyB33 after finally putting the excavator down for the night.

---

🌐 Community & Links

The construction site might close for the evening, but the crew doesn’t disappear. There are plenty of places to stay connected between streams, continue the conversations and prepare for whatever questionable project comes next.

When the machinery starts moving again, you’ll find me live here:
Twitch | YouTube

For the crew between adventures, join us over on:
Discord

Follow the signal across the wider network and you’ll also find me on:
TikTok | Bluesky | Instagram | Facebook | Threads | X

If you’d like to help keep the operation running, you can visit the:
Merch Store | Streamlabs Tip Page

And beyond the gaming bunker, there’s plenty more happening through Transparent Aluminium:
Business Centre | Download the Brochure | Learn More About Me | Blog

---

🌙 Until the Next Shift

The nation’s future emergency toilet stop remains a very large hole, we’ve made over a hundred grand selling dirt, at least two pieces of heavy machinery have questioned their life choices, and several dormant tabletop campaigns may have accidentally been awakened.

I’d call that a productive evening.

Until next time, keep the engines running, keep an eye on the physics — and whatever you do, don’t park too close to the hole.

— Dr Ravenholm