Construction Simulator | Ep. 47 – Nearly Ready for Tea, Toilets and Questionable Sausage Rolls

Our magnificent service area is getting dangerously close to completion. Soon weary travellers will finally have somewhere to enjoy a cup of tea, visit the facilities, and spend an unreasonable amount of money on a sausage roll that’s been under a heat lamp since Tuesday.

We returned to Construction Simulator after a couple of weeks away from our Monday night simulator duties, and for once everything was ready early. The girls were tucked into bed, I had another hour and a half before the normal start time, and rather than sitting there twiddling my thumbs I thought we might as well fire everything up and get some construction work done.

Starting early turned out to be one of the better decisions of the evening. We did get a substantial amount of building done, but somewhere along the way Construction Simulator also became an excuse to talk about old games, old computers, Yorkshire puddings, modern architecture, Kindertransport history, wartime aerial photographs, medieval monasteries, lighthouses and shipwrecks.

🏗️ About the Game

Construction Simulator puts us in charge of more than 70 construction machines across two large maps, taking on jobs that range from transporting materials and preparing sites to operating cranes, concrete equipment and all the other machinery needed to turn a collection of foundations into an actual building.

A big part of the series for us has always been doing the work rather than immediately taking every shortcut available. If we need concrete, we take the vehicle to the depot, collect the concrete properly and bring it back to the site ourselves instead of simply using auto-fill. It takes longer, but it also gives Construction Simulator more opportunities to create problems, which seems appropriate.

🚧 Where We Are in the Journey

This was episode 47, returning to our service-area project after a couple of weeks away from Construction Simulator. We had already brought both job sections’ worth of prefabricated wall panels to the site, leaving 40 pieces waiting to be unpacked, sorted and craned into position.

The building was already well underway, but there was still a lot above ground to complete. This episode pushed us from roughly 55% through the project into the later stages, with more walls, beams and roof sections installed and the overall build reaching into the 80% range.

Unfortunately, each new level also seemed to reveal another surface that would need concrete poured over it.

Everyone knows how much I love the cursed concrete pump.

🔥 What Happens in This Episode

The evening started rather earlier than planned. With the girls tucked into bed, everything unusually organised and another hour and a half still sitting between me and the normal start time, there did not seem to be much point in sitting around twiddling my thumbs. So we fired up Construction Simulator early and returned to our increasingly elaborate roadside service area after a couple of weeks away from Monday night simulator duties.

We picked up almost exactly where we had left things. Both job sections’ worth of prefabricated wall panels had already been delivered, leaving 40 pieces sitting around the site waiting to be installed. Naturally, the very first section we unpacked and started hauling around with the crane turned out to belong to the second set rather than the floor we were actually working on.

It did not fit anywhere, which left us carefully testing pieces before committing to each lift and trying to work out which container actually held the parts we needed. PapaSoup’s solution was straightforward enough: any unused components should simply be stacked on the motorway.

Somehow we resisted adopting that particular site policy.

Once the correct walls started going into place, the familiar crane routine returned fairly quickly: grab it, rotate it, lose track of which direction the camera is facing, move it back again and eventually wait for the game to decide everything is close enough to snap into position.

There was also the recurring question of why whoever had delivered some of these components had gone to the trouble of craning them into the middle of the structure without simply putting them where they were supposed to go in the first place. Somebody had already done most of the difficult part. Apparently moving them the final few feet was our problem.

Before long, the next stage became painfully obvious. The wall sections were leading us towards another layer of roof panels, and every one of those panels meant another surface waiting to be buried beneath concrete.

The cursed concrete pump was coming back whether we liked it or not.

As always, we do not use the auto-fill option to magically make materials appear at the worksite. If the job needs concrete, we drive all the way to the depot, collect it properly and haul it back ourselves. That meant plenty of journeys backwards and forwards through the evening, bringing load after load up to the site while the next roof sections were craned into place and prepared for pouring.

It may not be the fastest way of doing things, but at least when the concrete becomes a problem we have worked properly for the privilege.

The repeated journeys also gave us plenty of time to chat, which is where the first really substantial rabbit hole of the evening began.

We had already been talking about modern games, the state some of them launch in and why I increasingly find myself looking backwards rather than forwards when deciding what I want to play. That fitted rather nicely with SimCity coming up on the schedule.

I had picked up SimCity 2000 again and played a little of it before bed, while the game we were actually preparing to play on stream was the original SimCity. That brought back memories of playing SimCity at a school friend’s house because I did not own the original myself at the time.

I still have some of my old SimCity CD-ROMs as well, and I remembered the companion software that let you take one of your cities into a 3D environment and fly around it in a helicopter. Mr Smith remembered SimCity 4: Rush Hour letting you drive around your cities, while Gary confirmed the original game’s 1989 release and Metro remembered the rosebud money cheat from The Sims.

That was enough to get me thinking about all the games I have been buying again recently, so Construction Simulator was temporarily abandoned while I started pulling things out.

Over the last six months or so I have been accumulating SNES, Game Boy, Game Boy Colour and Game Boy Advance games from CEX whenever something interesting or sufficiently cheap appears. Some have turned out to be much better than expected. Others have demonstrated quite clearly why they were sitting on a shelf for a pound.

One of the better surprises was B.O.B., a SNES platformer that the Chocolate Thief picked up for me for about two pounds. I had never heard of it before, gave it a try and ended up really enjoying it.

Jurassic Park was another recent pickup, although I had only given that one a very quick test and skipped most of the dialogue, so it still needs a proper attempt rather than the five-minute inspection it received.

Then there was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on the SNES.

The main thing I took away from trying that was the music. It did not sound particularly Star Trek-like, it was extremely loud, and there did not appear to be a convenient way of getting rid of it without muting everything else as well.

While looking up how that game worked, I discovered the old password system for its levels and an invincibility password.

The password was CHEESE.

Naturally.

That whole box of SNES games started looking like it could become a future variety night, spending perhaps 30 or 40 minutes with each game and seeing which ones deserve a longer return.

One game already has priority, though: Stargate. We started that on stream previously and never actually finished it, so that one is absolutely going back onto the list.

The handheld pile was even bigger.

We went through Hook, which I had already tried and did not particularly enjoy, although for a pound it was difficult to complain too much. The Batman and Joker game was extremely difficult to control, while Tomb Raider: Curse of the Sword was sitting amongst the collection waiting for more attention.

I had also picked up both Sabrina the Teenage Witch platformers, Spooked! and Zapped!. I had enjoyed the first one enough that when I found the other for a couple of pounds I bought that too. I have always enjoyed those older platform games, and sometimes the relatively simple licensed games end up being more fun than you expect.

From there we just kept pulling cartridges out.

There was Tiny Toon Adventures, and I already have Tiny Toons and Animaniacs on the SNES as well. We found Donkey Kong, Star Wars, Super Mario Land, Crash Test Dummies, the rather random horse-racing game Winner’s Circle, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Donkey Kong Country 3 and The Mummy Returns.

The Donkey Kong games in particular brought back a lot of memories because I have all three Donkey Kong Country games for the SNES and must have spent hundreds of hours with them over the years. I even remembered my nan taking me into Woolworths after my birthday to get Donkey Kong Country 2, which is the sort of completely ordinary little memory that suddenly comes back when you have the cartridge sitting in front of you again.

We found more film and television games as we worked down through the box: The Mummy, Tweety’s High-Flying Adventure, Tarzan, Casper, two different Buffy the Vampire Slayer handheld games and TOCA World Touring Cars.

Tarzan had not impressed me much when I tried it. Casper still needed testing. The two Buffy games were sitting there waiting to see how much Buffy could realistically be squeezed into a Game Boy cartridge.

Metro mentioning Disney’s Hercules, one of their childhood favourites, nearly added another game to the shopping list because I had already been looking at one of the old Hercules games.

By this point chat was fully invested in the nostalgia session rather than the construction site.

Simply holding up recent CEX purchases was no longer enough, so I opened the old database I used to maintain for my game collection.

This was not the newer pile of second-hand finds. These were games I actually bought new back in the 80s and 90s and have somehow managed to keep all these years, many still with their original boxes, manuals and the various bits that came with them.

For the Game Boy we went through things like Tetris, Super Mario Land 2, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, TaleSpin, Nemesis, Stargate, Star Trek Generations: Beyond the Nexus, Crystal Quest, Wave Race and, of course, Worms.

At one point I managed to confuse myself over whether Nemesis or Crystal Quest was the side-scrolling one and which involved the little tank, so clearly owning something for decades does not guarantee you remember it correctly.

That moved us onto the Master System II.

Mine originally had Sonic the Hedgehog built into the console, so turning it on without a cartridge immediately loaded Sonic. I remembered my next-door neighbour having a Master System II with a different built-in game, some sort of ninja game that I played quite a bit at the time but could no longer remember the name of.

The database brought up Global Defense, Assault City, Star Wars, Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap, Ghostbusters II and Predator 2, amongst others. Ghostbusters II and Predator 2 also had something in common: I never managed to finish either of them.

Then came the SNES collection: Super Mario All-Stars, Mystic Quest Legend, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, Animaniacs, Tiny Toon Adventures, seaQuest DSV, the three Super Star Wars games, all three Donkey Kong Country games, Killer Instinct and Starwing.

A Link to the Past is another one where I have absolutely no idea how many hundreds of hours disappeared into it when I was younger.

Chat was throwing its own memories into the pile just as quickly.

Mr Smith remembered the Sega Game Gear and playing The Lion King on it, while Shim remembered Wonder Boy and started looking at buying it again. Gary brought up Secret of Evermore and then Terranigma, correcting himself when he initially said NES rather than SNES.

PapaSoup tried to remember one of the old artillery games where you lobbed explosives backwards and forwards. That naturally brought Worms into the conversation again, along with Cannon Fodder, while the discussion moved onto Desert Strike, Urban Strike and Jungle Strike.

Mr Smith still has a PlayStation copy of Soviet Strike, while Shim found a boxed copy of Desert Strike with the manual and was seriously considering buying it.

Then came Tiny Toons, Shinobi, Power Rangers, Captain Planet, Streets of Rage, 2 Crude Dudes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Paperboy and various fighting games.

I never owned the Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter games myself, but I played them at friends’ houses, which was how quite a few games entered your life back then.

Samwise pointed out that while everyone else was talking about their Segas and Nintendo systems, she still had her ColecoVision, which rather won the old-hardware competition.

Somewhere in the middle of this, Mr Smith observed that he had finally worked out the real reason I started the stream early: it gave us enough time to stop halfway through Construction Simulator and talk about old games.

By that point there was really no argument against his theory.

The conversation also moved onto whether it was worth using emulation for all of this. I know perfectly well that I could load most of these games onto a Raspberry Pi and have them running without too much difficulty, but where I can, I like using the original hardware.

Luckily, my old Game Boy still works, the SNES still works and the Master System still works. I was even talking about eventually getting another Master System II and modifying it for a cleaner video output rather than relying on its original RF connection, so that it would be easier to capture properly on modern equipment.

That whole discussion was happening because I want to get more of these original games back onto the stream rather than simply leave them packed away. The newer CEX finds can gradually join them, and judging by the number of games we remembered in chat, we are unlikely to run out of candidates for retro nights anytime soon.

From consoles we drifted naturally into old technology in general.

I talked about the Palm Tungsten T3 that went everywhere with me through college and the HTC Titan I moved onto at university, complete with its proper slide-out keyboard.

I still have the Titan now and it still works. Its magnetic case currently lives attached to the side of my bedside table, which happens to be made from a metal PC case, so it has found itself a surprisingly convenient retirement home.

That same magnetic case had a useful job back when I worked in a hotel. At the beginning of a shift I would stick the phone onto the side of a filing cabinet behind the bar. Whenever somebody called, the vibration resonated through the whole cabinet loudly enough that I could hear the phone ringing from well across the room.

Sometimes the best technology is simply discovering that your filing cabinet makes an excellent speaker.

We also remembered an even older Casio handheld computer I had in high school running Windows CE — or “Crap Edition,” as we called it. Unfortunately, the battery life was so hopeless that keeping useful information on the thing was almost pointless.

There was no particularly convenient way of getting the data off it either, so rather than becoming the futuristic pocket computer it promised to be, it mostly became an unnecessarily elaborate way of playing Solitaire.

Chat had plenty of old-technology memories of its own. Metro remembered working with Palm TX devices and also the era when you needed a completely different charger for every phone, including an old multi-headed cable they called the “USB whip.”

PapaSoup summed up the drawer full of obsolete technology rather nicely: once essential, purchased because you absolutely had to have it, and eventually redundant.

Somewhere amongst all this, Construction Simulator was still technically happening. More concrete was collected, more sections were delivered and more roof components appeared, which somehow led the conversation away from obsolete computers and straight into Yorkshire puddings.

We had discovered that Cathedral City cheese-stuffed Yorkshire puddings were beginning to appear in Iceland stores, although they had not worked their way this far up into Scotland yet.

This may now require regular investigative visits because they obviously need to be tested.

Pre-made Yorkshire puddings are normally a bit stale and disappointing, so the question is whether filling one with cheese is enough to overcome the fundamental limitations of the supermarket Yorkshire pudding.

I also showed off the Yorkshire pudding breakfast I had picked up from Iceland. That was actually really nice, although the Yorkshire pudding itself remained exactly as questionable as expected.

You cannot have everything.

Eventually we returned properly to the building, and that was when another innocent conversation turned into what occupied most of the rest of the night.

Looking at the architecture in Construction Simulator started me complaining about modern buildings and how everything increasingly seems to be an antiseptic grey rectangle. Older buildings often had decorative details, strange shapes and a sense that somebody had actually cared about what they were designing.

Modern construction, by comparison, seems rather fond of giving us another cube.

The building in the game had corrugated roof sections waiting to go on, which reminded me of that period in the late 1990s and early 2000s when curved and wave-shaped roofs seemed to appear on everything. I remembered watching buildings with that style going up around Newcastle and North Tyneside, so naturally we opened the maps to see whether some of them were still there.

That quickly turned into a much wider wander through Newcastle.

We went along streets comparing older buildings with newer ones, looking at the amount of work that used to go into windows, stonework, rooflines, lamps and façades. Even where older terraces were fairly uniform, there was still far more going on visually than another flat wall of glass and grey panels.

From there we headed towards Tynemouth because I was trying to find a particular building along the seafront, and this is where the evening moved from complaining about architecture into a rather substantial history discussion.

I initially became confused about which street I was looking at and referred to Percy Street while searching. The house we were discussing is actually 55 Percy Park, and its history is rather more significant than I managed to explain while flying around Street View.

During the Second World War the house provided a home for more than 20 Jewish girls who had escaped Nazi persecution through the Kindertransport. The girls had been brought to Britain as part of the rescue effort that allowed thousands of predominantly Jewish children to escape Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and other territories threatened by the Nazis. At Tynemouth, the local Jewish community helped provide the children with a safe home overlooking the sea.

The £50 figure I remembered on stream related to the financial guarantee needed to support each child. The community had to raise the money not only for those guarantees but also for the practical business of keeping the house running and providing food, clothing and everything else the children required.

The girls lived there together for around a year. After war was declared and the danger of bombing increased, the group was moved away from Tynemouth to Windermere, where they remained through the war. Most of the girls would never see their parents again. There is now a blue plaque on the house recording this almost-forgotten part of Tynemouth’s history.

It is one of those pieces of local history that can hide in plain sight. You can look at the terrace and see a perfectly ordinary house, yet for a group of children fleeing one of the darkest periods in European history it represented safety.

The other building I had been trying to find was over on Percy Gardens.

Once I finally realised I was looking in the wrong place and moved across, the architectural difference became obvious. You have this sweep of older seafront houses and then a much more modern building interrupting the pattern.

I remembered the reason for that difference being wartime bomb damage, which was why I was trying to find it in the first place. Tynemouth was certainly hit during the war. On 15 April 1941, parachute mines fell around the Priory moat and King Edward’s Bay, and contemporary local information records substantial damage to properties in both Front Street and Percy Gardens.

That was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to show on the map: even when the crater has gone, the rubble has been cleared and the street has been rebuilt, the history can remain visible in the architecture. An older terrace suddenly changes style because one section had to be replaced in a completely different period.

The history discussion naturally moved on to Tynemouth Priory, where my explanation on stream was essentially that people kept attacking the place and the monks kept coming back.

That turns out to be a fairly reasonable summary of several centuries.

The monastery was already established by the early eighth century. It was attacked repeatedly in the ninth century, with recorded raids in 800, 832, 865 and 870 before an attack in 875 finally destroyed the early monastery. More than 200 years later, a monastic community was re-established on the headland.

Even that was not the end of the trouble.

The rebuilt priory became wealthy, important and increasingly fortified because of its position overlooking the mouth of the Tyne. After the Scottish victory at Bannockburn in 1314, Robert the Bruce attacked Tynemouth, but the priory was successfully defended by a garrison of just 80 men.

The monastery itself eventually came to an end under Henry VIII, surrendering to the Crown during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539. The location was far too strategically useful to be abandoned, though, and the old priory headland continued as a coastal fortress for centuries afterwards.

Its military use lasted all the way into the twentieth century. During both World Wars, guns and searchlights around Tynemouth formed part of the defences protecting the Tyne and its industries, and the army did not finally leave the site until 1956.

So the recurring theme really was persistence. Different buildings, different occupants and different wars, but people kept returning to the headland because controlling that position meant controlling one of the most important entrances on the north-east coast.

We also looked towards Knott’s Flats, where I repeated the local story that German bombers had supposedly been ordered not to destroy the buildings because they were intended for use as a headquarters if Britain had ever been successfully invaded.

That is one of those stories I have always heard locally, but it is better treated as a local wartime story rather than something we can state as established fact. The buildings themselves were certainly designed at a time when the threat of war was becoming very real, and their large cellars could be used as air-raid shelters.

By now the history discussion had given me another idea.

I opened Google Earth Pro.

One of the things I enjoy doing in Google Earth is using the historical imagery and winding the clock backwards to see how an area has changed. Instead of just looking at today’s streets, you can suddenly find yourself staring at an aerial image from decades earlier.

We started around Newcastle and rolled the imagery back to 1945.

The differences were enormous in places. We jumped between the old photographs and modern imagery, looking at areas that had since been completely redeveloped and comparing how the city had expanded.

Some of the historical coverage only exists in relatively small patches, and there can be enormous gaps between one date and the next. You might have an image from the immediate post-war period and then suddenly jump decades forward before another useful image appears.

While we were looking at the Newcastle photographs, I wondered whether some of the oldest images could have been German aerial reconnaissance. The individual photographs appeared in strips and patches in a way that looked as though an aircraft might have been flying a grid.

I do not actually know where those particular Newcastle photographs originated, so that remained speculation on stream rather than something we could confirm.

From Newcastle we moved down to London, where Google Earth has a major historical imagery set from 1945. Google introduced that material specifically to let people compare wartime and immediate post-war London with the modern city, and the imagery includes bombed buildings and cleared sites among all the ordinary streets and infrastructure of the time.

That immediately raised another question in chat.

Could we actually find visible bomb damage?

vvoornth suggested the centre of London because of the bombing and the later V-weapons, so we began moving around the 1940 and 1945 photographs looking for anything that appeared to have been destroyed.

That is much harder than it sounds.

At that resolution, a dark shape might be the shell of a building, an ordinary roof, a cleared piece of ground or something else entirely. We kept moving between historical and modern images trying to match streets and work out what we were actually seeing.

There were a few areas where the shapes really did appear to resemble the exposed shells or frameworks of buildings. In one case I switched forward to the modern view and found buildings and greenery occupying an area that looked much more broken up in 1945.

My feeling at the time was that it could have been a site that had been bombed and already at least partly cleared before the aerial photograph was taken. We had no way of proving that simply from Google Earth, though, so it remained an interesting possibility rather than a definite identification.

The date itself made that interesting because a 1945 photograph could preserve the effects of several different stages of the war.

The main Blitz on London began in September 1940 and continued into May 1941. Then London came under attack again in 1944 from V-1 flying bombs and V-2 ballistic missiles. The first V-1 attacks on Britain began in June 1944, while the first V-2 to strike London landed at Chiswick on 8 September 1944. V-2 attacks continued into March 1945.

So the damage visible in an aerial photograph from 1945 was not necessarily just a remnant of the original Blitz. Depending on the exact location, it could also have been connected to attacks much later in the war.

We briefly took the historical imagery elsewhere as well.

Around where we live now, we could move through old images of Falkirk, Grangemouth and the surrounding area and see how entire stretches of development simply did not exist yet.

Gary wanted us to try Ireland, but the historical coverage was far less cooperative. We kept winding the date backwards only to find insufficient data and large gaps.

The complete lack of useful imagery in some years became a running joke by itself.

By this stage we had started with Construction Simulator, moved into retro games, passed through obsolete handheld computers and Yorkshire puddings, complained about modern architecture and ended up studying aerial photographs of wartime Britain.

Starting an hour and a half early had turned out to be extremely useful.

Eventually we moved back towards Tynemouth and North Shields, which gave me the chance to show Samwise something because of her love of lighthouses: the High Lights and Low Lights.

The basic idea is beautifully simple.

There was a low light close to the river and another light higher up the bank. Ships approaching the Tyne could line the two lights up vertically. If they stayed aligned, the ship was following the safe approach into the river.

The pair of High and Low Lights we were looking at date from the early nineteenth century and were first lit in 1810, although the use of leading lights around North Shields goes back much further.

They mattered because the entrance to the Tyne could be extremely dangerous.

The Black Middens rocks near the river mouth are normally hidden at high tide and have been responsible for numerous wrecks. In November 1864, five ships were wrecked there during just three days of storms and blizzards, with 34 people losing their lives.

The disaster led directly to a meeting in North Shields on 5 December 1864 where local men volunteered to form an organisation trained to help the Coastguard rescue people from shipwrecks.

That became the Tynemouth Volunteer Life Brigade. More than 140 men volunteered immediately.

That gave some extra context to something I remembered myself from growing up around there. At very low tide you can see hazards and wreckage that normally disappear beneath the water, and I distinctly remember seeing the top of a wreck sticking up near the entrance to the Tyne.

So what started as “Sam likes lighthouses, let’s show her these” became another little history lesson about why the lights were necessary and why lining up two buildings on the hillside could genuinely help keep a ship away from rocks and wreckage.

From a conversation about bland modern architecture, we had somehow reached Kindertransport history, wartime bombing, post-war rebuilding, Google Earth imagery, the Blitz, V-1s and V-2s, medieval monasteries, coastal defences and nineteenth-century shipwrecks.

And somewhere, underneath several open windows, Construction Simulator was still running.

Eventually — and I do mean eventually — we remembered there was still an unfinished service area waiting behind all these distractions.

We returned to Construction Simulator, moved several more roof sections into position and took another look at what remained.

There was a lot of concrete.

An unreasonable amount of concrete.

Despite all the distractions, we had actually made substantial progress. More beams and roof plates had gone into place, and the overall project had pushed well into its later stages.

There were also plenty of smaller moments along the way.

At one point I took a vehicle around a corner with rather more enthusiasm than Construction Simulator usually calls for. The result was immediately clipped, Cheesecollector praised the “nice drift,” and Mr Smith decided I apparently thought we were in Tokyo Drift rather than on a building site.

Someone inevitably followed up with “can’t park there mate.”

The channel’s Hunger Games appeared twice during the evening as well. Metrolija won the first one and announced that the training had clearly paid off.

I somehow won the second.

That result was treated with complete confidence by chat.

Frodo declared betrayal, vvoornth called it #rigged, and I pointed out that Frodo was dead and I had taken his precious. Entirely legitimate competition.

There was at least one occasion when chat genuinely made the construction work more efficient. vvoornth pointed out that I did not actually need to physically run between all the machinery on site because pressing 3 brought up the machine list and allowed me to transfer directly.

That would probably have been useful information several episodes ago.

The jukebox contributed to the evening as well. Mr Smith selected “Pour Some Cheese on Me,” which led to discussion of hairspray, leather and the appropriate appearance for an eighties rock video. Later we had “The Heresy of Mr. Smith.”

Food remained almost as persistent a theme as concrete, with tea, biscuits, cheese and bacon sandwiches appearing repeatedly throughout the evening.

By the later stages I was openly asking for a bacon sandwich, while the construction itself had apparently become something two sufficiently motivated people could build if supplied with enough bacon.

The building also developed a steadily less respectable fictional purpose.

What started as our roadside service area gained hot tubs, an executive lounge and various increasingly questionable suggestions about exactly what sort of services weary truck drivers might be receiving when the place finally opened.

We probably should not put all of that on the planning application.

Eventually, though, there was no avoiding the next job.

I looked at the next enormous stretch of roof, all of which still wanted more concrete, and reached the only sensible conclusion available:

Future Ravenholm can deal with it next week.

We finished positioning the roof sections for the current stage and checked the concrete equipment.

There was almost nothing left.

Not even enough for one percent of the next pour.

That was enough for me.

Before finishing, I also went wandering back through the structure looking for the basement we had spent so much time digging earlier in the series. For a moment it looked as though the game might have simply blocked it off, which would have been a wonderful reward for all the work we did down there.

Eventually I found the entrance again.

The murder hole survived.

That was where we left the actual construction work. The building was substantially further along than it had been at the beginning of the evening, but there was still far too much roof waiting for the cursed concrete pump.

Even wrapping up the stream produced one final unexpected turn.

We had nobody obvious available to raid, so in a relatively rare move we picked somebody random from the COGG stream team and landed with HARRYxCAELUM, a creator from Colombia who was doing graphic design work.

There was one small communication problem.

She did not speak English, and I do not speak Spanish.

Google Translate became the unofficial interpreter, and what was supposed to be a quick raid turned into another hour and a half of chatting backwards and forwards.

During that conversation I introduced her to one of my favourite artists, Nerina Pallot. She found videos of “Mr. King” and “Sophia” with Spanish lyrics alongside the English songs and immediately connected with them, becoming emotional enough to cry while listening.

It was an unexpectedly lovely way for the evening to finish.

It also gave me an idea.

The following morning I sat down and added a translation system to AIDA so language does not have to be such a barrier when somebody new arrives in the community.

The new command lets somebody specify the language they want followed by their message. AIDA translates it, posts the result into chat and speaks it aloud using a clear text-to-speech voice.

For example, entering:

!tr Spanish Pink, Orange, Red, Brown. Leaves gently dancing to the Ground. Crunch, Crackle, lovely sound, Fall into a giant mound

allows AIDA to translate the message:

Rosa, naranja, rojo, marrón. Hojas que bailan suavemente hacia el suelo; crujido y chasquido, un sonido encantador, al caer formando un enorme montón.

She then posts the translation into chat and reads it aloud using a clear text-to-speech voice rather than the normal stream voice.

All of my tests worked, and I think it is going to be a genuinely useful accessibility feature. We already have several people around the community whose first language is not English, so JD can give the Swedish a proper test and Saint Psycho can put the German through its paces.

And, of course, there is Striker in Australia.

I am not entirely certain what translation system is required for the upside-down world, but I assume all the blood rushing to their heads has something to do with it.

By the time everything finally wrapped up, we had somehow gone from 40 prefabricated wall sections and the dreaded return of the concrete pump to B.O.B., Stargate, Game Boys, Master Systems, Donkey Kong, Palm computers, cheese-filled Yorkshire puddings, Kindertransport history, bomb-damaged Tynemouth, 1940s aerial photography, wartime London, medieval monasteries, lighthouse navigation, shipwrecks, an international raid and a brand-new AIDA accessibility feature.

The service area still needs that concrete poured, but after an evening like this, I think it can wait until next Monday.

🎬 Watch the Episode

If you want to see how an evening that was supposed to be about finishing a service area managed to involve retro game collections, Google Earth Pro, wartime London, Tynemouth history and quite a lot of concrete avoidance, you can watch the full episode on YouTube.

You can continue through the full Construction Simulator playlist and visit Dr Ravenholm on YouTube for the rest of the videos and livestreams.

If you enjoy the episode, leave a like, let me know in the comments which particular rabbit hole you enjoyed most, and subscribe so you do not miss the next part — especially when Future Ravenholm is inevitably forced to deal with all that concrete.

🔴 Join the Adventure Live

This stream is a fairly good example of why watching live is never quite the same as just knowing which game is on the schedule. We can start with 40 wall panels and a crane, spend half an hour discussing cartridges from the 1990s, disappear into Google Earth looking for wartime bomb damage and still somehow make meaningful construction progress before the end.

Chat is a large part of where those detours come from, whether somebody is remembering an old game, providing genuinely useful machinery advice, suggesting somewhere to investigate on a map or accusing me of rigging the Hunger Games.

Come and join us live on Twitch or YouTube and see where the next stream ends up.

🌐 Community & Links

The machinery may be switched off for the evening, but the conversations, games and various side projects continue between streams. If you want to keep up with what is happening, everything is gathered below.

Live — Come along when the next stream begins and see how long we stay on the original subject:
Twitch | YouTube

Community — Keep the conversation going, check the schedule and share your own gaming memories with us:
Discord

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🧱 Future Ravenholm Can Pour the Concrete

For all the distractions, we finished the evening with the service area considerably closer to completion than when we started. More walls went up, the roof advanced, the building pushed well into its later stages and the next major obstacle is now very obvious: a large amount of concrete that I had absolutely no intention of pouring before bed.

Construction Simulator should return next week, although the current schedule is always best checked on Discord or in the weekly blog schedule. Before then, we have Permafrost, a new survival game that the developers kindly gave me access to ahead of its release.

For now, though, the concrete pump can stay exactly where it is.

— Dr Ravenholm