Ribbleton Valley Map v1.0
After a year I’ve finished my second map (the first being Raybury Countryside). Again, it’s a relatively easy map with tricky stretches here and there and a couple of tough spots for distraction. However, this time the map is an open late summer/early autumn countryside with plenty of roads, both tarmac and dirt, providing tonnes of options for hauling routes… once everything’s fixed.
There’s an insane number of features in need of repair. The goal was to provide a map that offers very different options depending on what is fixed and what not. Once fixed, the map offers a whole lot of contracts to be still done on a completed map. I might have gone crazy a bit in this part but, as with the first map, this one is also meant to provide a relaxing driving experience when vanilla/DLC or other mod maps start to get frustrating. This map is frustrating only away from main routes and in limited areas.
Main features:
- Size: 2×2 km
- Region: not specifically set but the Canadian flag is flown at townhall (region lock off anyway, any vehicle can be used)
- Tasks: 6, providing enough XP to reach level 30
- Contracts: awful lot (100+), consisting of two main groups (Minor/Major) and repairs (Progress)
- Amount of cargo: seemingly endless, almost all cargo types
- Structures to be fixed: 19 bridges, 2 fords, 1 dock, 10 barriers, 1 rockslide and part of a refinery.
- Structures get fixed through a single zone only. Relevant mainly for bridges.
- Cargo manufacturing: large pipes (4x metal rolls), boilers (5x metal rolls + 1x small pipes), gold (4x consumables), no electricity generator needed
- Difficulty: vanilla vehicles in stock setup (as found on the map) might struggle in some places. Upgraded and modded trucks usually don’t.
- No: watchtowers, manual loading zones, farming, earth vibrating, contests, custom assets, tree stumps
- A couple of new cargo supply zones and fuel stands to be activated through contracts
Possible walkthrough
Play the game to whatever style or strategy you want but, since the tasks/contract structure is quite extensive, some suggestions may come in handy. The idea behind the map was to provide enough XP to reach the maximum level early in the game and to earn decent money to start building a proper fleet. Thus, I would recommend doing the tasks first. They are easy to find. Since the map comes in its pristine state, for some tasks it’s quite tricky to find a route around all those to-be-fixed bridges. To complete this part, you would probably need to fix one or two bridges and open a couple of barriers. Then a mix of bridge fixing and Minor contracts is recommended, leaving the Major contracts to the point when everything is fixed. Once achieved, the map provides plenty of alternative routes to choose from. Also up to your preferences, use modded trucks as you like. For map testing, only short Tayga was used in tests from the vanilla trucks pool, otherwise, I used modded trucks only.
Known bugs and oddities:
- Main railway bridge is not driveable – it was selected because it doesn’t cause ‘camera-snap’ bug when driving under. Obviously, it’s because it has no hitbox. If you attempt to drive on it, you will simply fall down as if nothing was there. However, the bridge was never meant to be driveable. On the other hand, it interferes with extra big cargo when driving underneath.
- Slab factory and concrete factory is the same zone. Railway station and railway yard are not!
- Always make sure you are unloading for the contract you want. Since there is a lot of cargo getting moved around the map, a situation when you bring something to a destination and it can cover more than one contract is not uncommon. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t prioritize the active contract, the priority is based on its position in the XML config file. However unpleasant this can be, you can be sure the cargo is not lost, it’s only used to fill a different contract than you would like to. This situation happens especially with 1st stages when a few pieces of cargo are needed to open the rest of the contract. You can select the contract in the unloading screen to avoid this pitfall.
- The lake is not a sea, that’s why the water flows from it downwards. Using farplane with hills helped to create such an impression, however, placing a harbour, lighthouse and seafaring container ship didn’t.
- The map areas vs. cargo balance is a slot-based calculation, tested both on the map itself by two walkthroughs and a complex spreadsheet. It should mean that, if you don’t run empty trucks across the whole map, there should be something to load around the place you unloaded. Minor and Major contracts are balanced separately. However, especially with Major contracts, this is not possible to completely test due to the number of possible combinations but I rely on the fact that the map segments are somehow balanced against each other. Nonetheless, the opening stages of contracts and structural fixes couldn’t be taken into account since they can happen at any time. In any case, all Major contracts are made repeatable.
- The map can get boring because of its relative easiness. During the tests, this happened to me especially when I pushed myself to finish something ‘by force’. Then the map may get truly boring. At that moment I switched to career maps or another mod map, returning an hour later, wanting to have a relaxed and easy drive. That’s exactly the reason this map was created – to provide relaxing driving after getting mentally & emotionally drained somewhere else.
- I couldn’t get the water delivery working, despite several attempts. I will try to solve this issue in future. Now, you can find zones for loading (it unlocks with one of the contracts), storing and unloading water but with no task or contract linked to them since it doesn’t work (the water delivered to the target zone doesn’t count towards the contract, making it impossible to complete). However, the loading and storing zones work so you can haul water for no reason around the map as you wish. And that counts.
