Construction Simulator | Ep. 48 – Services in half a Mile. Completion Date Slightly Further

The service area project continues, and we’re getting ever closer to finally opening the doors. The signs may promise services in half a mile, but they make absolutely no guarantees about when those services will actually exist. Still, at least the construction equipment is getting plenty of exercise.

Tonight, we’re hoping to finally finish our enormous motorway service station. There’s still a ridiculous amount of concrete to deal with, equipment scattered across the building site, and a few final construction jobs to complete. Surely, after all this time, we must be nearly finished?

🏗️ About the Game

Construction Simulator puts us in charge of our own construction company, operating more than 70 machines across two enormous maps. From transporting materials and preparing building sites to constructing roads, bridges and large buildings, there’s always another project waiting.

We can tackle these jobs alone or with friends, using a huge collection of machinery to complete increasingly ambitious contracts. We’ve been playing for years, and there’s still plenty of work ahead of us, although some of our equipment has developed some rather interesting habits along the way.

🛣️ Where We Are in the Journey

Episode 48 brings us back to the transportation department’s quest line, where we’ve been working on an enormous motorway service station for several streams.

Last week, we managed to build the roof structure, but the enormous concrete slab required so much material that we eventually decided we’d poured quite enough for one day.

With the overall contract sitting at around 91% completion, we’re now approaching the end of this particular project. Once it’s finished, we’ll have just one transportation department task remaining before moving on to the final main quest line, followed by two DLCs still waiting on this map.

⚠️ What Happens in This Episode

Our first objective was straightforward: finish that enormous concrete roof. Last week, we’d reached the point where we’d poured quite enough concrete for one evening, so tonight we were returning to complete the job. With the overall contract already at 91%, surely we couldn’t have too much more to do?

Unfortunately, the roof was an absolutely massive slab that required an equally ridiculous quantity of concrete. As always, we refused to use the automatic filling system. If we need concrete, or any other building materials, we drive to the depot and collect them properly. It might take considerably longer, but that’s how we’ve always done things.

Of course, repeatedly travelling between the depot and the construction site would have been considerably easier if we hadn’t turned the entire area into what looked like a heavy machinery scrapyard.

After weeks of building, we’d accumulated an enormous collection of trucks, trailers, cranes and excavators, most of which had been abandoned wherever we’d last needed them. Getting through the entrance was becoming a challenge in itself, with barely enough room to squeeze between some of the vehicles.

Naturally, I decided that perhaps taking a shortcut through the trees would be a sensible alternative.

It wasn’t.

The mixer truck became rather thoroughly grounded among the trees, leaving us struggling to find enough traction to get moving again. At one point, I thought we might have discovered our first proper deathloop of the evening.

There was one unexpected benefit to our little expedition, however. After getting out of the truck, we discovered a rather lovely lake hidden away nearby. Not particularly useful when you’re supposed to be delivering concrete, admittedly, but at least we’d found somewhere new to explore.

After some determined twisting, reversing and rejiggling, we eventually managed to escape, find the road again and continue towards the depot. Whether we’d learned anything about taking shortcuts was another matter entirely.

Back at the service station, actually pouring the concrete was proving to be another adventure. The concrete pump had its usual difficulties reaching certain areas, particularly towards the middle of the roof, and we spent a fair amount of time repositioning the machinery to try to get the coverage we needed.

We were essentially drawing enormous concrete rainbows across the building, which didn’t inspire a tremendous amount of confidence from chat.

vvoornth questioned why we were spraying the concrete quite so randomly, while Stryker_500 pointed out missed sections and suggested we were wasting an alarming amount of material. megxta also wanted to know what exactly we were spraying onto the roof.

Personally, I preferred to think of it as industrial-grade custard. Concrete is simply what the professionals call it.

Eventually, after several more deliveries and plenty of repositioning, we decided that the concrete bucket would be the better option for reaching the awkward sections in the middle. That meant getting another piece of equipment into position on an already overcrowded site, but at least we were making progress.

The completion percentage gradually crept upwards, passing 80%, then 90%, until we finally reached 99%.

And naturally, that was when we ran out of custard.

Just one percent remained, which brought back memories of a similarly frustrating moment in Phasmophobia where we’d been left needing that final little bit to complete a challenge.

Thankfully, after a little more persuasion, we managed to satisfy the game’s requirements.

We finally had a roof!

Unfortunately, finishing the roof wasn’t quite the same thing as finishing the building.

There were still structural materials to position, including several steel beams that needed lifting into place with the crane. That should have been a relatively simple operation, particularly after spending so much of the evening dealing with concrete.

However, I noticed that our excavator was parked directly above the spot where the beams were supposed to go.

Now, the sensible approach would probably have been to move the excavator out of the way before placing anything underneath it. Instead, I wondered whether we could get the beams to snap into position regardless.

It turns out that we could.

Unfortunately, that worked rather too well.

Once the beams were in place, we discovered that the excavator was now sitting directly on top of them, with its tracks suspended above the ground. We were completely grounded, and attempting to drive away achieved absolutely nothing.

I spent several minutes trying to rescue the situation using the excavator’s own arm and bucket. The theory was that we might be able to push against the ground, lift ourselves slightly and somehow get enough traction to drive off the beams.

There was plenty of twisting, pushing and experimenting with different angles, but very little actual movement.

vvoornth quite reasonably pointed out that using the arm wasn’t going to help much if the tracks couldn’t reach the ground. I was still determined to see whether we could somehow jiggle ourselves free.

Eventually, however, we had to concede defeat.

The dreaded deathloop had claimed another victim, and our only realistic option was to reset the excavator back onto the road.

With that little engineering disaster resolved, the remaining construction work was thankfully more cooperative. We craned the entrance arches into position, dealt with the materials on the roof and worked through the last requirements of the contract.

There was also the small matter of clearing the construction site. The game wanted twelve pieces of equipment moved out of the work area, which was slightly awkward considering how much machinery we’d accumulated there.

We spent some time shuffling vehicles around, finding suitable gaps and trying to get everything outside the marked construction zone. The concrete pump, which had caused us so much entertainment over the past few streams, was among the last pieces of equipment to be dealt with.

Even the surrounding traffic had become part of the entertainment. At one point, vvoornth observed that we’d managed to create a traffic jam, although Mister Smith insisted it was entirely intentional.

Eventually, though, the final requirements were satisfied.

Mission accomplished! We had finally completed the motorway service station!

After spending so long working on it, we naturally had to take a little look around our finished masterpiece.

Unfortunately, the completed building was rather underwhelming.

Despite all the effort involved in constructing it, the service station had become a surprisingly bland and featureless structure. There were a few ice cream cone stands, almost like plastic display decorations, but very little that resembled an actual motorway service station.

There wasn’t anywhere particularly convincing to buy anything, no obvious interior to explore, and very limited signage or interesting details. Even the parking arrangements seemed rather restricted for somewhere intended to serve motorway traffic.

It’s something that continues to frustrate me about Construction Simulator. We spend hours, sometimes entire streams, constructing these enormous buildings, only for them to become fairly lifeless structures once the mission is complete.

A little more detail would make such a difference, particularly when these locations are supposed to become part of the world we’ve spent years helping to build.

It’s also one of the reasons I’m cautious about the newer Construction Simulator. Support for this version ended with some fairly serious problems still remaining, particularly with multiplayer. The final update introduced bugs that have made playing together considerably less enjoyable, and I know there are other issues that were never properly addressed.

Knowing that development moved on to another game doesn’t fill me with confidence about how long the newer one will receive support. It’s disappointing, because there’s a lot to enjoy here, but the world really could benefit from more attention to detail.

Still, whatever we thought of the finished building, the important thing was that we’d actually completed it.

Throughout all of this, chat had been keeping us entertained with plenty of conversations beyond the construction site.

Mister Smith was having problems with his PC randomly freezing whenever he tried using Discord or OBS, while several viewers were discussing their ever-growing collections of simulation games and RPGs. We also wandered into conversations about retro gaming, original GameCube and SNES hardware, capture cards and the various games we’ve played over the years.

There was even some discussion about my Raspberry Pi projects, including a stargazing interface I’d been working on for Jim, and the camera rig I’m hoping to use for more chicken streams.

AIDA was also having an interesting evening with her recently upgraded AI brain. She seemed particularly fascinated by the idea of Stryker living upside down in Australia, managing to work the same joke into an impressive number of conversations.

Eventually, even Stryker wanted to know how many more times she was going to mention it.

We also discovered that our backup moderation system was interfering when it shouldn’t have been, resulting in some rather unexpected chat moderation. There were jokes about everyone getting into trouble with AIDA, a failed Pokémon hunting adventure involving a balloon sword, and the usual assortment of tea, biscuits and general mischief.

Newcomer marathagamerPritesh was interested in the game and asked about our progress, which prompted a look at just how long we’d been playing. By this episode, we’d accumulated roughly 96 hours and 54 minutes of Construction Simulator streaming across 48 sessions.

And we’ve still got plenty left to do.

Completing the service station leaves us with just one remaining task in the transportation department’s quest line before we move on to the final main storyline. After that, we’ve still got two DLCs to work through on this map, before we even consider moving on to the others.

At this rate, Construction Simulator could quite happily remain part of our Monday evenings for several more years.

I didn’t particularly want to begin another enormous construction project so close to the end of the stream, especially when the next mission deserved an evening of its own.

Instead, we saved our progress and decided to finish with a few rounds of Marbles on Stream.

Unfortunately, participation was a little slow to begin with, so we selected a couple of courses ourselves while encouraging everyone to join in.

As usual, the racing produced its own assortment of unpredictable moments. Between portals, launchers, obstacles and marbles flying off in entirely unhelpful directions, predicting the eventual winner was almost impossible.

Dr Ravenholm managed to win an early race, AIDA claimed another, and snoofa_ celebrated a victory in the final round. I even managed to forget to enter that last race myself.

However, the real mystery arrived when the Grand Prix standings appeared.

Mr V finished in third place, while second place, or the first of the losers as we affectionately call it, finished with 34 points.

And somehow, against absolutely all expectations, Mister Smith won the entire Grand Prix with 54 points.

That would have been impressive enough under normal circumstances, except for one rather important detail.

He hadn’t won a single race.

Not one.

Yet somehow he’d accumulated twenty more points than second place and walked away with the overall victory. Exactly how Marbles on Stream calculated those standings remains something of a mystery.

Completely legitimate, I’m sure. Definitely not rigged.

With the racing finished and the evening drawing to a close, we wrapped things up by raiding profshikari, who was playing ARC Raiders, sending everyone across for a little more entertainment.

And that brought another wonderfully chaotic evening of Construction Simulator to an end.

Next time, we’ll be returning to the transportation department for its final mission, Village in Turmoil.

Rather ironically, the mission involves completing a stretch of road that I’ve wanted to have available for an incredibly long time. Throughout this playthrough, there have been countless occasions when that particular route would have made transporting machinery and delivering materials considerably easier.

Had I known about it when we first started the transportation contracts, I probably would have prioritised building it much earlier.

Instead, in typical fashion, we’re going to be opening that road when we’re practically finished with this part of the map.

Still, the service station is finally complete, the excavator has hopefully recovered from its unfortunate encounter with the steel beams, and we’ve got another major construction project waiting for us next Monday.

What could possibly go wrong?

🎬 Watch the Episode

If you want to see how we finally completed the service station, including our adventures with the concrete mixer, the grounded excavator and Mister Smith’s highly suspicious Marbles victory, you can watch Construction Simulator Episode 48 here.

If you enjoy the video, please leave a like, let me know your favourite moment in the comments and subscribe to my YouTube channel.

You can also follow our progress from the beginning through the Construction Simulator series playlist.

🔴 Join the Adventure Live

There’s still plenty of construction work waiting for us, and judging by our recent experiences, there’s a reasonable chance that some of our machinery will end up somewhere it really shouldn’t.

Come and join us live on Twitch and YouTube, where you can chat with everyone, offer advice, join in our community games and see what happens as we continue building.

Hopefully, next week’s road construction will involve slightly fewer deathloops.

💬 Community & Links

Our adventures don’t end when the construction machinery gets parked. There’s always something happening across the community, whether we’re chatting about games, sharing projects or discovering what AIDA has decided to do next.

Live — Join us for the next stream and see what we’re building:
Twitch | YouTube

Community — Keep the conversations going between streams:
Discord

Socials — Follow the latest videos, projects and occasional construction disasters:
TikTok | Bluesky | Instagram | Facebook | Threads | X

Music — Listen to my music, including the occasional song inspired by our gaming adventures:
Spotify | Apple Music

Support — If you’d like to help support the channel and its ongoing projects:
Fourthwall | Teespring | Streamlabs

More — Explore my other projects, services and things I’ve been working on:
Business Centre | Download the Brochure | About Me | Blog

🚜 One Service Station Finished, One Road Still to Build

After weeks of concrete pouring, moving machinery and getting ourselves stuck in increasingly awkward places, the motorway service station is finally complete.

We’ve still got that last transportation department mission to tackle, followed by plenty more construction work and DLCs. Given how long we’ve already spent playing, I suspect our Monday night Construction Simulator streams will be keeping us entertained for years to come.

Thanks for joining me, everyone, and I’ll see you for the next one.

What could possibly go wrong?

— Dr Ravenholm