Maine: Day 2

The whole 'garage is broken/locked' thing in Maine forced me to change my approach. I decided I'd have to go after the Contracts related to the garage first, rather than knocking off the Tasks first. Four of the five were relatively straightforward, but I discovered that the last one, Constructing a Repair Garage, was going to be much harder. It required Fuel x2, and the only supply of Fuel was on the Yellowrock map.

When I checked out Yellowrock I discovered that the only warehouse with supplies of Fuel was in the far Northeast of the map, across a river, and the only bridge across that river was out of action. The location of that warehouse was also right on top of the lone refuelling point and a locked Gateway back to the Lowlands. So the most efficient thing to do was to repair the bridge, get the stuff to reactivate the petrol station, then repair the locked Gateway, and after all that I could easily collect the fuel from the warehouse and drive it through the Gateway to get it back to the Lowlands garage.

I ended up doing a BOAR run to get a lot of the materials up to the NE bridge/gateway. Apart from catching the BOAR's tyres on a guardrail only a few meters from the Gateway (frustrating, but not fatal) the BOAR run was pretty smooth.

I first used the BOAR with the Super Heavy Semi Trailer (hereafter the SHST) in the Don. Twice. The first delivery was not without incident, but I wanted to see if it was something worth doing again. The most frustrating part of those first BOAR runs was not getting stuff to the destination; it was getting the dam SHST back to a garage to sell it back. User error. I kept trying to take shortcuts that that monster of a trailer just wasn't designed to fit through.

I used the BOAR + SHST twice more while finishing up Amur, this time with much better success. My motto is that anything weird/amusing that I do more than twice is now a tradition, so I mentally labelled doing Tasks or Contracts with this combination a 'BOAR run' and vowed to use it where it seemed likely to be low risk.

The BOAR + SHST was the first vehicle to to transit back to Lowlands via the newly opened Gateway and getting it back to the garage there was completely painless. Phew.

By this point I'd decided to just continue with the Contracts-first approach, and in fact to work on finishing Yellowrock before returning to Lowlands.

There were two semi-disasters (pun intended) during all this. First, while retrieving supplies from the North Central warehouse in Lowlands--the one co-located with a timber storage area--I tried to get over to the road to Yellowrock by going over a pass at the far north of the map. Long story short, I had to get a crane up there to rescue the truck, trailer and supplies, and it was while doing this that I discovered that the 'pass' was actually completely impassable at its northernmost point. Joy.

Anyway, I got the whole mess sorted and the supplies over to Yellowrock (by a workable route) without further incident.

The second schemozzle was another case of me going the wrong way. I was trying to repair the bridges in Yellowrock by which you access the Metal Plant and turned down the wrong gully. The Tayga then foundered in the ice. Zikz 650 crane to the rescue again. I was mollified by the fact that I recovered what at first looked like a hopeless situation without too much trouble.

However, the reason I was trying to get to the Metal Plant in the first place was because I thought that was the best option for getting the metal beams I'd need for things like repairing the Gateways. At this point, though, it's starting to look like it's easier to just truck metal beams in from Lowlands. I'll have to count up all the beams needed to be sure.

Starting Maine

I started Maine yesterday. I spent most of the session doing reconnaissance of the Lowlands map. It's huge, but very easy to get around once you figure out how to navigate or avoid the bog just down the hill from the garage. By the end of the session I had all the watchtowers open, all the tasks unlocked, and all but a few corners of the map painted in.

It's also bidding fair to become my favourite map in the game. The contracts are interesting, the scenery is pretty, and there are very few 'death trap' areas. Much of the forested terrain and almost all of the river area is navigable.

Today I started on the contracts, and I've already completed two of the four tasks for restoring the garage: clearing out the spaces for trucks and opening the trailer store. Opening the truck store, giving me the ability to buy trucks here, is low on my list of priorities, but I'm keen to get the repair services done. I'm still not sure if I'll be able to use something on the map for this or if it will require getting to a hard-to-reach warehouse on the second map (Yellowrock).

I have been using the Twinsteer for much of the early work. It must know it's on probation because it's been very well behaved. On the other hand, I'm extremely wary of its lack of stability, so it may be my over careful driving when using it as much as anything else.

I'm going to go get the one Upgrade on the map, which is on an island that may only be reachable by a tall truck, and then I'll have to decide how to proceed.