Construction Simulator | Ep. 44 – All This Work So Someone Can Stop for a Sandwich
We’re back on the construction site, putting countless hours, tonnes of materials, and enormous pieces of heavy machinery into creating something truly important: somewhere people can stop for a sandwich.
After a couple of weeks away from Construction Simulator, Simulator Monday returned to the Transport Links campaign — and to the cursed service-station excavation that has been swallowing machinery, patience, and entire streams. We started at roughly 71% complete. Several hours later, somehow, concrete was being poured. Progress!
🏗️ About the Game
Construction Simulator puts us behind the controls of more than 70 machines across two enormous maps, taking on everything from straightforward earthmoving to increasingly ambitious construction contracts.
Of course, “straightforward” becomes a flexible concept once Construction Simulator physics, questionable driving and my ability to bury heavy machinery in holes become involved.
🚧 Where We Are in the Journey
Episode 44 continues our Transport Links campaign, with the motorway service station still under construction. For roughly three streams, one particular basement excavation has refused to die.
We returned with the digger already sitting in the hole and the job around 71% complete. The mission was simple: finish digging the thing out and finally move on. The reality was considerably more complicated.
⚠️ What Happens in This Episode
The evening began with us returning to a job that had already consumed an alarming amount of time. The service-station basement excavation was sitting at roughly 71% complete, the excavator was already down in the hole after our previous efforts, and the plan was to carry on digging from inside for as long as we could still reach the dumper truck.
That turned out to be quite a long time.
Scoop after scoop went into the rear dumper while the progress meter crawled from 71% to 72%, then eventually 73%. The good news was that all this unwanted dirt was surprisingly valuable. Each full load could be driven away and sold for somewhere around £10,000 to £11,500, so even if the excavation itself wasn’t moving particularly quickly, at least we were making an absolute fortune from it.
The first delivery didn’t exactly go according to plan. While driving the loaded dumper out of the worksite, Construction Simulator physics took over and we managed to perform a barrel roll with the truck. We lost most of the cargo in the process, but we’d already started leaving the site and weren’t far from the drop-off. Rather than reversing all the way back up to refill it, we decided that a quarter-load of dirt was better than admitting defeat and carried on to sell whatever had survived.
Back at the excavation, another problem was becoming increasingly obvious: the excavator arm was just a little too short to comfortably get the spoil out of the pit and into the dumper. We tried repositioning, reaching from different angles and even dragging the excavator out using the bucket, but it simply wasn’t coming out. Eventually we had to recover it, giving us our first death loop of the night.
Most of the remaining excavation appeared to be concentrated around the edges. Eagle vision showed the suspicious areas we still needed to clear, so we settled into a rhythm of digging out another section, filling the dumper, driving the soil away, getting paid and coming back to move slightly further around the perimeter.
Unfortunately, the percentages were moving at a pace that suggested we might still be there sometime next year.
After about an hour, we’d managed less than ten percent of the remaining work. Material had an annoying habit of falling straight back into places we’d just cleared, the controls weren’t always helping, and every tiny increase seemed to require another small geological era. Chat started keeping track of our imprisonment, with asmith501 declaring it “day 200, doc is still stuck in the hole” before eventually advancing us to day 4,200.
Stryker’s proposed solution was TNT, which I would have been perfectly happy to use if the game had allowed it. That led to memories of the time I wanted to demolish a real wall with explosives and recycle the rubble into a driveway, only for the council to be terribly boring about the entire idea.
Naturally, Gary was also blamed.
“Hashtag blame Gary” became the official explanation whenever a scoop went wrong, soil ended up back in the excavation or a vehicle found itself somewhere particularly unhelpful. With Frodo absent, somebody had to take responsibility, and Gary’s attempts to defend himself did very little to improve his legal position.
Meanwhile, chat was essentially running a second stream alongside the excavation. An early Hunger Games diversion ended with asmith501 defeating Gary, while conversations wandered through Burnout Paradise, Dragon Age, model railways, simulator games and the increasingly important question of whether absolutely everything needs its own simulator. Water Park Simulator attracted enough attention that Gary used the reminder command so I could investigate it later.
Then there was the cheese.
TheCollector31 declared himself a cheese lover, ownership of the cheese became disputed, cheese-and-bacon sandwiches entered the conversation and at some point the question of who had promised to make sandwiches for everyone became almost as important as whether we would ever escape the excavation. Considering all this work is ultimately going towards somewhere people can stop on the motorway for a sandwich, it felt strangely appropriate.
Eventually, however, it became clear that conventional digging wasn’t getting us there quickly enough. By this point we’d already made somewhere around £230,000 from selling soil, which should comfortably cover the concrete and other resources needed for the rest of the build. That meant we could afford to stop worrying quite so much about selling every last scoop and try something different.
Enter Little and Useful.
We brought the smaller bulldozer down into the excavation and started pushing the troublesome soil towards the sides instead. Almost immediately, something miraculous happened: the percentage actually started moving. We hit 86%, then 87%, 88%, 89% and 90%, with the little machine succeeding where the larger equipment had spent so long struggling.
“The little and useful saves the day” was no longer just optimism.
There was still plenty of manoeuvring, resetting and wrestling with machinery to get through those final percentages, but eventually the moment we’d been waiting roughly three streams for finally arrived. The cursed excavation was complete. After hours of digging, hauling, selling, repositioning and staring at percentages that refused to move, the service-station basement was finally ready for the next stage.
The victory also coincided with an extra-special surprise when our old friend RememberMolly appeared in chat for the first time in years. Molly has only recently returned to streaming, although being over in Oregon means her usual stream time is around four o’clock in the morning for me. It was genuinely lovely to see her again, have a catch-up and find out what trouble she’d been getting herself into.
Naturally, Molly’s arrival also became part of the surrounding chaos. After emerging from a silent lurk, she asked AIDA for a song about me digging a hole, which eventually turned into a request for something more suitably Ravenholm: industrial metal. The result was a short AI-generated number called Steel Scars.
Around the same time, Stryker observed that nothing says a happy Tuesday quite like being passive-aggressively threatened by an AI. Gary and Molly pointed out that it was still Monday where they were, leading Stryker to declare himself a visitor from “the upside down future.” Somewhere among all of this we also found time for dysentery, the Harmonica of Doom and demands that various people receive the loops. The construction site was operating normally, in other words.
With the excavation finally conquered, the contract moved forward and, briefly, we looked like we were actually running a construction company. We brought the crane onto the site and started unloading the building materials we’d previously transported down on the trailer, lifting everything directly into position and unpacking what we needed for the foundation.
Then an old enemy returned.
The cursed concrete pump.
I’d already opened the stream with a song effectively cursing the thing, so seeing it again wasn’t exactly reassuring. This time, though, we went back to HQ and collected the concrete pot — because, as it turns out, there is a much easier way of doing this that I really wish we’d known years ago.
The pot can be suspended from the bottom of the crane.
That meant we could fill it, lift it across the site with the larger crane and pour the concrete directly where it was needed rather than spending the entire evening wrestling the concrete-pump arm into increasingly impossible positions. We brought the pot up to the site along with the concrete mixer and its cursed pump arm, positioned everything so the crane could bring the pot underneath, and started experimenting with our new system.
Surprisingly, it worked.
The concrete was rapidly renamed custard, making “Are we pumping the custard yet?” the important technical question of the evening. Compared with the excavation, the foundation moved astonishingly quickly. The percentage climbed through 17%, 28%, 43% and 54%, and it became painfully obvious how much time this method might have saved us on jobs like the museum.
There were still wrong controls, awkward positioning and the usual amount of machinery being jiggled around until everything lined up, but the basic idea was sound. The pump arm could remain largely in one position while we kept bringing the pot back underneath, refilling it and using the crane to carry another load across the foundation.
Eventually the mixer ran out of cement with the concrete stage sitting at around 63% complete. We seemed to be getting roughly three or four bucket loads before needing another refill, but even with that limitation it was dramatically easier than fighting the pump arm around the entire site.
Rather than start another supply run, that seemed like a good place to call the evening. We’d finally defeated an excavation that had consumed around three streams, made roughly £230,000 selling dirt, installed the crane, unloaded our materials and poured nearly two-thirds of the foundation.
Next time, we should be able to bring more concrete up and continue using the crane-and-pot method to finish the slab without quite so much wrestling with the cursed pump. Whether Construction Simulator allows anything after that to remain straightforward is another matter entirely.
We finished the night by sending the Ravenholm crew across to OurChickenLife with the end-of-stream raid, bringing Simulator Monday to a close with the hole finally behind us and actual construction happening again.
🎬 Watch the Episode
Want to witness the barrel roll, the eternal excavation, Little and Useful’s finest hour and the surprisingly effective custard-delivery system? Watch the full episode here:
Watch Construction Simulator Episode 44
You can also visit the Dr Ravenholm YouTube channel and continue through the Construction Simulator playlist. If you enjoy the chaos, remember to like, leave a comment and subscribe.
🔴 Join the Adventure Live
The videos show you what happened. The livestreams are where the plans disintegrate in real time.
Come join us live on Twitch or YouTube, where chat can offer questionable engineering advice, blame Gary, demand explosives and occasionally reunite us with old friends like Molly.
🌐 Community & Links
The construction site might close for the night, but the Ravenholm network stays very much alive. If you fancy joining the crew beyond the streams, there are plenty of places to pull up a chair.
For live operations, you’ll find me on Twitch and YouTube.
For the community, join us over on Discord.
Across the wider network, you can find me on TikTok, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and X.
If you want more Ravenholm in your headphones, my music is on Spotify and Apple Music.
If you’d like to support the madness, visit the Dr Ravenholm shop, Teespring, or Streamlabs.
For everything beyond the gaming chair, explore the Business Centre, download the service brochure, learn more about me, or wander through the blog.
🌙 Until Next Time
The hole is finally dead, the foundation is more than halfway poured, and somewhere in the future a weary motorway traveller will stop at this service station and order a sandwich without ever knowing what it cost us.
Next Simulator Monday, we finish pumping the custard.
Until then, stay safe out there — and remember: #BlameGary.
— Dr Ravenholm
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