Low% Trailmakers

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Trailmakers campaign mode is all about collecting salvage, it is essentially the mode's whole gameplay loop. Collect as much salvage as you can to update your vehicle and repeat. However in this video I challenged myself to fly in the face of typical gameplay and beat Trailmakers while collecting the least salvage possible A bit of context. Trailmakers is a sandbox vehicle building game made by Flashbulb Games and released in 2019. In Trailmakers you'll spend most of your time constructing vehicles, taking them for a spin, and eventually blowing them to smithereens. However there is another side to Trailmakers that most players have experienced and still remains unspoken. Campaign mode, no not airborne, the DLC or the spaceship one that I am still yet to play. But the original, stranded in space. This campaign has players collecting salvage to get off a planet they crash landed on. Collecting salvage unlocks a specific block that you can use to build and upgrade your vehicles allowing further progress and the ability to build bigger and better things. After certain salvage is collected, leaving the planet is finally an option. That begs the question, what is the bare minimum amount of salvage.

So, with the goal of finding out I restarted my campaign and waited for the cutscene to load. (Thank god we can skip the cutscene now that used to suck). And with that the run had started. The first thing I did was open the build menu. From here is where I will be making the vehicles to play the game. However here you can also see the salvage required to make the spaceship or in other words the end goal. The part list is a little weird but it seemed doable. You might notice the 24 power core requirement. Power cores restrict the amount of engines you can put on your vehicle. Otherwise I would fill the screen with bulldog engines and watch as my car goes flying around with the power of a concorde jet. Lucky the game gives you one to start and so I put it to good use with a pre-built blueprint. I followed the arrow on the top of the screen along the road. After skipping the second cutscene I collected my first bit of salvage. A power core. And with that I had one down and 36 more salvage to collect.

Straight away I could collect 2 additional power cores with some clever modifications to my vehicle. One from the top of the hill and another from inside this cave. I could also get this 1x2 block without much hassle. With that, I had collected everything absolutely necessary from the island. Well, there was one more power core, super high up without any obvious way to get it. Obviously the devs intended for me to come back later when I could fly or somehow travel vertically. However, since I wasn't able to leave the island yet I decided to focus on this power core. Thankfully there is a feature on our side. When you place a seat down in the build menu, you instantly get teleported to that seat. This allows you to travel up small heights that you couldn't traverse before. Great, perfect, now we can reach the top by placing a seat there and oh there is a limit to how far away you can place blocks. This will have ended our efforts right here, if we can't change build range. Luckily we can, since the build range centres around the player, we have to move the player higher to make the build range reach the top. And if there were only a way to do that. And with that, we have our 5th power core, 19 to go.

From here, there doesn't seem like anything we can do or any place we can go. Usually in this part of the game, you are supposed to collect the underwater propeller and maybe a pontoon and build a boat. From there you can travel to the magnetic island and get one of the most useful blocks in the game. Which is the electromagnet, sadly the rules of the challenge mean that this route is the last resort. After a few unsuccessful tries to get things floating, I tried to build a bridge. And that worked about as well as you guessed. However, not all bad things came from it and I realised something. I could just swim. And so that's what I did. After still trying to make a floating thing. (I didn't learn from my mistakes). I swam my way over to a brand new island with lots of things to explore.

After a rocky start on the new island. (get it, it's a volcanic island). I completely missed the path leading up here and to the wrong route. Thankfully I got stuck trying to cross the lava and had to walk my shameful self back. On the top of the hill there are two massive pieces of salvage. The RAW engine and the Simple Tailfin. Two very important blocks and powerful blocks, both of which are required for the spaceship. To collect them, my humble little vehicle wouldn't do. So I upgraded it. The first thing I did was add more engines then more tires for more traction and finally a beefy bumper. And surprisingly, after a few tries I managed to get both of the salvage. However, without the power cores, I couldn't make anything yet. And so I had to move on. Over to the swampy island, and obviously I need a new car. The mud made everything too slippery. Adding extra tires to the car was a must to maintain traction as well as some engines to power them. This wouldn't be enough as my first interaction with water made clear. Not only was my car too light as it floated pathetically on the surface. It could get no traction with the ground underneath the water. I needed a car that was beefier, heavier and one that would allow me to push salvage though the shallow waters. Sadly, the lack of weight blocks meant I had to build up and out with the 2x4s that were one of the heaviest blocks I had at my disposal. I also put a bulldog engine on the top, as even if the vehicle was under the water, the bulldog engine at the top would be able to provide power to the wheels if it was still out of the water. Remember that for later as it comes in handy more than you can imagine. With that I start ticking things off my list. Rounded 1x2, ect ect ect.

From our collecting spree, we only have a few blocks left to collect. The tube pieces, on the cockpit island, seemingly inaccessible due to its steep cliffside walls. Spaceship cockpit, high in the sky on the floating islands. And the two hardest of them all. The dragon jet from inside the volcano and the gimbal thrusters that sit dormant at the bottom of a lake, laying there until underwater propellers pull it out from the depths. While all hope may seem lost, in fact the opposite is true. By now, we have enough pieces to make a fully controllable plane. What!? I hear you saying, there is no way. For engines you can only have a bulldog engine and a raw engine. One does not work in the air, and the other can really only boost. And what about lift, are the simple tailfins going to provide enough lift while the engine cools down? With only 9 power cores, is it even possible? Yes, in fact it's quite a simple design. It's not going to win any prizes for its speed or aesthetics but it's all we need to fly over to the cockpit island and collect the tubes. You can even gain height, and so I do, all the way up to the spaceship cockpit. I don't even need to carry the spaceship cockpit down. I can simply nudge it, and watch it fall. Ooh, nice, hole in one. With that, most of the blocks are collected. Leaving only the dragon jet and gimbal jet remaining, and also 12 power cores. Well, if we want to get those two, we might want to start collecting.

Well, this is quite the challenge. My straightforward approach of just pushing the salvage over the edge no longer works. I had to think creatively. The idea that struck me was to somehow airlift the salvage, or just build a mechanism that will lift it in the air. My initial solution involved creating a lever mechanism. The plan was to lift the salvage on one side of the lever with the hinges on the other, allowing me to place a plane underneath and glide down. I constructed the lever and duplicated it on the opposite side, hoping that the two would help stabilise it somehow. However, there was a small hurdle for this to work, the flaps needed to be positioned above the ground. I ended up building a frame around it and attaching wheels, resulting in a rather unconventional machine.

Initially, it didn't work as expected. But after some adjustments to the angle and speed, pasus the machine started functioning. Now, the final piece of the puzzle is to design an aeroplane capable of carrying the salvage down to the ground. My existing plane was too small, so I expanded it and added a small basket for the salvage. After two unsuccessful attempts, the third one proved successful, and I managed to obtain another power core. Only 11 more to go. The new technology played a crucial role in collecting the next power cores, and things began to fall into place. The countdown for the power core requirement commenced, steadily ticking down. The last few required their own unique tech but I quickly figured it out. However, one of the power cores that I aimed to get lay surrounded by water. In this challenge water is the antagonist (change), so you may be wondering, how did you do it? Well in this situation, I could use what we learned in the swamp to its extreme. Instead of just putting the bulldog engine at the top of my vehicle, I have to put it on top of a tower so that it stays above the water. Remember how I had to beef up my machine to prevent it from floating. Well now I have had to make this massive brick. With this chuck of a vehicle, the salvage was easy work. Finally all 24 power cores have been collected and it is time to finish the game if not for the dragon jet and gimbal.

However, we will have to get them in part 2. Those particular salvages do not want to be collected under any circumstances. And it will be a real waste to go to all that effort when I'm not even sure if this format is going to work. As my subscribers would know this is the first time I'm trying doing something like this, so if you enjoyed it please tell me. Anyhow, see you in part 2

~~If you thought that the previous salvage was hard to collect, these ones are literally the bane of the challenge, with both requiring blocks that we don't have and being challenging even if we had all the blocks. To start us off, the gimbal jet. The gimbal jet is located in a cave, at the bottom of a lake. This may not seem bad until you discover that we 1. Don't have any propulsion under the water. 2. Cant even use our seat under the water. 3. This salvage is covered in water And 4. The gimbal jet salvage is so heavy that even with proper underwater propellers you would still struggle to get this thing to land. The dragon jet isn't much better. After getting to the rim of the volcano with our fancy plane, you will see that the salvage is all the way down here. Giving us almost no room to manoeuvre, usually, you would use a drone to carefully fly your way out. But we can be afforded no luxury as our engine is neither graceful nor delicate~~