A few things that you need to know BEFORE you start the tutorial.
What The Tutorial Doesn’t Tell You
Understand that the tutorial, and, indeed, the whole game, is still a work in progress.
While the tutorial gives you a basic introduction, there are a number of things it doesn’t explain that mean you can make a whole lot of mistakes.
Infinite Voxel World
Well, yes, technically. Practically it’s divided into fairly small regions. You start with one region unlocked and you have to pay to unlock the rest. You can only mine resources in unlocked regions and you can only deliver them to towns in unlocked regions.
Just because there’s a town near your coal mine, it doesn’t mean you can actually deliver there…
Randomised Start
The tutorial is the tutorial, but the world for each game gets randomised when you start it (see the world seed on the game set up menu). You then get to play the same tutorial on your unique world.
Upshot? Your initial view of the game world is probably not going to be in the right place for you to execute the building phase of the tutorial when the game comes up. You need to search around and find the coal mine and a town with an industry that demands coal. Make sure they are both in your region. Don’t try to substitute with alternate resources or the tutorial will get stuck and you’ll waste a lot of money.
Coal by Road
The tutorial is about building a coal mine and transporting its coal to an industry by road. You have to build this to complete the tutorial.
it’s also worth saying that road transport is markedly cheaper and more flexible than rail transport at the start of the game, although it can only transport smaller loads (and, thus, makes smaller profits).
Your starting cash is probably enough to link up all the towns and mines in your initial region by road – or to build one, short, railway. Unfortunately, the business side of the simulation runs into issues if businesses are left unsupplied for to long.
Look Before You Build
Take a good look at the ground before you build anything. There’s a refund when you demolish something, but it’s only about a third of what you paid for it. In addition, once a station is in use, demolishing and rebuilding it requires you to update the routes of every vehicles that stops there.
When building road stations, build the road first (unless you’re planning on building access roads). I’ve had a case where I’ve built a station and it then refused to let me connect the roadway to one side of it. The solution was to demolish the station, build the road and then rebuild the station in a slightly different place. Rail stations probably have the same issues.
Turning Circles
Some of the road vehicles drivers aren’t to bright.
Instead of simply driving past a stop on the other side of the road and making a U turn, they insist on either finding a complete town block to drive around or, as is more often the case with the small road networks at the start of the game, driving to the end of the road – even if it’s in the next town – an then making a U turn!
Pay attention to which side of the road the stop is actually on and build little turning circles so vehicles can easily turn around.
The pa*sengers also aren’t to bright – to go from a stop in Town A to a second Town in stop A, they get on the bus as it’s going to Town B and ride all the way around, taking up a seat, until the bus finally comes back to town A and the stop they wanted to get off at ;-(
I hope you enjoy the Before You Play – Voxel Tycoon guide. This is all for now! If you have something to add to this guide or forget to add some information, please let us know via comment! We check each comment manually!
