Construction Simulator | Ep. 49 – We’re Building a Bypass. Nobody Tell the Concrete Pump

Another ambitious construction project begins as we get to work building a bypass! There are roads to lay, machinery to operate, and enough building materials to make the local wildlife reconsider its travel arrangements. Everything should run smoothly, provided nobody tells the concrete pump. It has opinions.

After last week’s Halloween-themed streams, we’re returning to Construction Simulator for episode 49. This time, we’re tackling a road that I really wish we’d built much earlier in the series. Unfortunately, getting it finished is going to involve an enormous amount of earthmoving and some particularly uncooperative gravel.

🏗️ About the Game

Construction Simulator puts us in charge of our own construction company, operating over 70 machines and completing building projects across two enormous maps. With plenty of equipment to choose from and the option to play alone or with friends, there’s always another job waiting.

I particularly enjoy doing the work ourselves, from collecting machinery to purchasing and transporting materials. We don’t use automatic material delivery to skip the work. After all, what’s the point of cheating yourself out of the gameplay?

🛣️ Where We Are in the Journey

We’re now starting “Village in Turmoil”, the final mission in the Transport Links storyline. Last time, we completed the motorway service station, and tonight we’re beginning construction of a bypass intended to reduce traffic through a nearby village.

It’s a road we could have used many hundreds of hours ago. We’ve repeatedly had to make long detours around this missing connection, when having the bypass would have allowed us to complete the road loop properly.

Typically, we’re only getting around to building it now! Still, with the castle, stadium and airport remaining, hopefully we’ll make good use of our new road in future episodes.

🚜 What Happens in This Episode

We began beside our completed motorway service station, with almost all our equipment safely returned to storage after the previous episode. The one exception was a truck that still had the concrete bucket on its back because I couldn’t remember how to send it back to the warehouse. Since it was already out, we decided we might as well use it to travel to our next construction site.

Before leaving, I took another look at the motorway service station we’d spent so much time building. Unfortunately, in typical Construction Simulator fashion, the completed building had become another rectangular blob that barely resembled what we had actually constructed. Gary suggested it looked more like a dealership, although I wasn’t entirely convinced about that either.

It’s something I find particularly disappointing about the game. You spend hours working on these projects, only for the completed structures to look nothing like what they’re supposed to be. I suspect the developers assumed we’d finish a building, drive away and never really look at it again. I really wish they’d improve that aspect of the game. Unfortunately, given that they’ve moved on to developing another title while Construction Simulator still has some significant bugs, I’m not particularly optimistic.

Our new assignment was “Village in Turmoil”, the final mission in the Transport Links storyline, offering potential earnings of around two million on our high-difficulty setting. The idea is to construct a bypass that will divert traffic away from a village near a busy river crossing.

This is the road I really wish we’d been able to build right at the beginning of the playthrough. We’ve spent hundreds of hours taking the long route around this missing connection, and having it available earlier would have saved an enormous amount of driving. Typically, it’s the very last mission in this particular series of road construction jobs!

Getting everything organised was an adventure in itself. We needed to retrieve our earthmoving machinery from storage, arrange transport and get everything over to the site. I had a few problems trying to fit the machines onto the trailers, including one that wouldn’t secure properly because it was slightly over the edge. There were also a few wrong buttons pressed and an inconvenient turn during the journey, but eventually we got ourselves organised.

Once we arrived, we discovered that the first stage involved removing an enormous stretch of topsoil along the proposed road.

Ideally, I would have liked to excavate all that material properly, load it into trucks and take it away to sell. As we’ve discovered during previous projects, topsoil is worth an absolute fortune, and there was certainly enough of it here to make a considerable amount of money. Unfortunately, the game mechanics make doing that rather impractical on this scale, so we decided to bring out the bulldozer instead.

That meant spending most of the evening driving backwards and forwards along the route, pushing the ground around and trying to level everything out. It felt almost more like we were compacting the soil than actually removing it, but the game seemed perfectly happy to count our efforts towards the objective.

Progress was rather slow. We reached twelve percent, then twenty-four, and eventually thirty-five and forty-five percent, despite having already driven over much of the area. The trouble was that the blade kept leaving little ridges and uneven patches along the edges, meaning we had to go back over sections several times.

We also experimented with our two bulldozers, which I’d rather helpfully named “big and useless” and “little and useful”. The smaller machine had a blade that could be angled, which made it easier to push some of the stubborn piles towards the edge. There was a fair amount of experimenting with the controls, along with the occasional realisation that I hadn’t lowered the blade properly in the first place.

At one point, our construction vehicle appeared almost transparent while we were working, making it look like a ghost. I commented that perhaps this particular job should have been part of our Halloween streams instead!

Fortunately, we had plenty of company while all this earthmoving was happening.

A big thank you to EntertainJD for 68 months of support and Mr. Smith for 49 months! We also welcomed plenty of familiar faces, including Cheesecollector31, Gary, Stryker, Jim, Vvoornth and others who kept the conversation going throughout the evening.

Gary was telling us about looking after children during the school holidays and how he was finally going to get some peace when school started again. We also discussed the upcoming Iceland and coach additions for Euro Truck Simulator, including our continuing predictions about the possibility of future content arriving around St. Potato’s Day.

Stryker joined the conversation about 7 Days to Die, which led to me remembering my own brief experience with the game. I’d set up a base inside a restaurant, barricaded the entrances and used the roof as my way in and out. Stryker mentioned taking over a KFC, which sounded rather familiar. I enjoyed certain aspects of the game, but never really managed to get into it.

We also had a conversation about my latest Game Boy purchases. I’d picked up six games, including 102 Dalmatians, Rugrats and Batman: Chaos in Gotham for the Game Boy Color, along with Populous, DuckTales and Speedy Gonzales for the original Game Boy. A slightly muddled explanation about the shop where we’d bought them gave everyone another opportunity for jokes, and the conversation eventually wandered into films and Nintendo.

Meanwhile, AIDA was having a rather unusual evening of her own.

For reasons I couldn’t immediately work out, she’d become stuck repeatedly delivering the same affectionate message to Stryker_500, telling him how he made her heart do an upside-down flip. Every time Stryker spoke, or whenever certain commands were triggered, there she was again with exactly the same declaration.

Naturally, chat found this entertaining, at least initially. Mr. Smith wondered who was flirting with his AIDA, Jim suggested she was becoming Skynet, and Stryker seemed perfectly happy to let the situation continue. Other viewers were beginning to wonder whether we’d ever hear anything else from her.

I tried investigating the problem while continuing with the construction work. It appeared that a variable or part of the response processing had become stuck in memory, so I attempted to reset the relevant processes and pass fresh information through in the hope of clearing it.

Unfortunately, AIDA continued repeating herself while I was trying to explain what I was doing. It became rather difficult to have a conversation without another declaration of affection interrupting us.

Eventually, though, she seemed to sort herself out. We tested her with a different request, and she responded normally again, which was certainly an improvement.

Jim also attempted one of AIDA’s Pokémon hunting contracts involving a Staryu at the stadium. Unfortunately, the Pokémon managed to escape every attempt, and Jim failed the contract. This prompted another round of jokes, including a conversation about Gary having potatoes in his ears.

There was also some discussion about the astronomy cameras Jim and I have been working with. I’d been hoping for a clear night so we could try recording a longer time-lapse of the stars moving across the sky. Unfortunately, the weather forecast wasn’t particularly promising, with plenty of cloud and possible fog. We talked about different camera arrangements, Jim’s telescope and the possibility of viewing images in 3D using a VR headset.

Alongside that, we discussed the remaining development work on our software project, particularly getting the GitHub update system working properly, connecting it to the notification system and sorting out a few outstanding bugs.

Movie nights came up as well. We’d recently selected our films through to January, including a run through the ten original Star Trek films, with a couple of Christmas films along the way. I was also looking forward to watching Paul around the time of our Comic-Con trip.

Speaking of Comic-Con, I was still trying to find a suitable Star Trek outfit. Unfortunately, the uniforms I’d been considering were either far too expensive, unavailable in my size or couldn’t be made in time. I particularly liked the maroon uniform, but it was looking increasingly likely that I’d have to settle for something else.

Back on the construction site, we were finally making some proper progress. After what felt like an enormous amount of pushing, reversing and working over the same patches, the topsoil objective reached ninety-three percent, then ninety-eight and ninety-nine percent.

A little more work on the remaining sections finally completed the entire stage!

That was a satisfying result, although the overall contract was only around 28% complete, so there was still plenty of construction ahead of us.

And then we discovered what is probably going to be the worst part of this entire project.

Gravel.

The game now wanted us to fill that enormous cleared area with gravel, which is one of the materials I find most frustrating to work with in Construction Simulator.

No matter what you try, gravel simply doesn’t spread properly. If you tip it from a dump truck, it comes out in awkward piles rather than spreading evenly across the ground. Trying to move it around with a bulldozer or scoop it up using a skid loader isn’t much better, because so much of it seems to get compacted into the ground instead of moving where you actually want it.

As a result, you end up using considerably more material than you should need, which makes a project of this size potentially very expensive.

To make matters worse, both gravel suppliers are located on the opposite side of the map. We had to work out which one would be the more convenient journey, taking into account the road layout and how much driving we’d have to do for every load.

Of course, we don’t use the automatic material delivery options. We travel to the suppliers, purchase the materials and collect them ourselves. That’s part of the gameplay, and I don’t see much point in skipping it just to get a construction project finished more quickly.

Rather than dropping a little gravel, spreading it, collecting another load and repeating that process over one small section at a time, I decided to try something different.

The plan was to make several trips with the dump truck, placing piles of gravel at intervals along the bypass. Once we’d built up a reasonable amount of material, we’d see how effectively we could spread it across the road.

The initial deliveries made it clear just how much gravel we were going to need. One load barely moved the progress counter, and even after getting several loads onto the site, we were still only around three percent through the gravel stage.

Chat was suitably encouraging about our prospects. Gary suggested we might be looking at something like a hundred journeys, while Vvoornth reckoned it could take me a year to finish the job. Mr. Smith was also wondering when his trucks would finally be able to use the road.

I suggested that, until the bypass was complete, he’d simply have to recreate the bus jump from Speed to get across the gap.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get much further.

I believe we were on our third gravel pour when I started to feel rather ill. I’d already been struggling with coughing throughout the evening, but this particular coughing fit was much worse.

I have a condition where severe coughing fits can cause me to pass out, and this one left me extremely dizzy. It was getting close to the point where I could lose consciousness, so I decided that continuing the stream simply wasn’t sensible.

As much as I wanted to carry on with the construction, my own safety had to come first, and we made the decision to finish a little earlier than usual.

Everyone in chat was very understanding, encouraging me to get some rest and not worry about ending early. We thanked everyone for joining us, shared the upcoming stream schedule and said our goodbyes before heading over to Rooville for our end-of-stream raid.

So, while we didn’t get quite as much of the bypass built as I’d hoped, we did manage to clear and level the entire road section and make a start on delivering the gravel.

Construction Simulator will return next week, when we’ll continue filling this enormous stretch of road. Hopefully we’ll find a reasonably efficient way to spread the gravel without wasting a fortune on materials.

There’s still plenty of work ahead of us before that missing road connection is finally complete.

📺 Watch the Episode

If you’d like to see our bulldozing adventures, the troublesome gravel and AIDA’s unexpected romantic fixation, you can watch Construction Simulator Episode 49 here.

You can also visit my YouTube channel or catch up with the complete Construction Simulator playlist.

If you enjoy the episode, please consider leaving a like, sharing your thoughts in the comments and subscribing for more.

🔴 Join the Adventure Live

There’s still plenty of construction work ahead, and the bypass certainly isn’t going to finish itself!

Come and join us live on Twitch or YouTube for more gameplay, conversations and occasional technical problems. You can also join our Discord community to keep in touch between streams.

🔗 Community & Links

The machinery might be parked for the evening, but there’s plenty happening beyond the construction site. Here’s where you can find me and my other projects.

Live — Join us for the next shift on the construction site:
Twitch | YouTube

Community — Keep the conversations going between streams:
Discord

Socials — Follow the latest streams, projects and updates:
TikTok | Bluesky | Instagram | Facebook | Threads | X

Music — Something to listen to while the work continues:
Spotify | Apple Music

Support — Help support the streams and future content:
Fourthwall | Teespring | Streamlabs

More — Explore my other projects and services:
Business Centre | Download the Brochure | About Me | Blog

🚧 The Gravel Will Have to Wait

We managed to clear the entire bypass route of topsoil, but there’s still an enormous amount of gravel to deliver and spread. I would have liked to make more progress, but ending the stream early was definitely the sensible decision.

Construction Simulator returns next week, when we’ll continue building the road I wish we’d had from the beginning. Hopefully the gravel will cooperate a little better, and perhaps AIDA will have recovered from her fascination with Stryker!

Thanks again to everyone who joined us, supported the stream and kept the conversation going.

— Dr Ravenholm