Did you enjoy building vehicles out of Lego blocks as a kid? Ever build any really wild-looking, improbable designs? Trailmakers is your chance to have Newtonian Physics respond to your build with, "No, that's stupid!" and smash it, just like your irritating kid brother did!

Trailmakers has a built-in campaign mode that doubles as a great introduction to the game, "Stranded in Space." I've noticed there aren't any good general-purpose guides to this campaign, so I figured writing one would be helpful. I'll point out two other guides I found very helpful, some general advice, a few parts I think are key to be priorities to retrieve, a discussion of the stock template vehicles, and two designs of my own, with commentary.

https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1884443224 - A link to a website with a searchable map.

https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2675367781 - A wonderful list of Parts alongside a discussion of their use.

General Advice:

- Don't be afraid to try out the stock templates provided; there's no need to re-invent the wheel. By the same token, use those templates as starting points to build your own versions. The provided vehicles are often adequate but rarely optimal. Experiment!

- In my initial playthrough, after collecting everything I could on the starting island, I headed west to grab the diving bell and electromagnet/tractor beam. I then went roughly clockwise around the map. If I were to play again, I'd probably start the same way, but instead of proceeding clockwise from there I might make a detour to hit the muddy islands in the southeast next, and then travel north from there.

- Don't be locked into one way of doing things, or one vehicle! For example, the tractor beam is exceptionally useful in many contexts, but, in particular for the larger pieces of scrap, it can be more effective to turn it off and simply nudge the piece with your vehicle. Likewise, for both the RAW Engine and the RAW jet, which both are on high spires of rock, my approach was to use a smaller, lighter vehicle to jump the gap and knock the piece to the ground, and then use a beefier vehicle to roll the piece up the ramp to the nearby
retrieval point. This was a fairly painstaking way to do this, but it worked. Most submerged pieces are also going to need a multi-vehicle approach.

- Resist the temptation to overbuild. You *can* throw 8 dragon engines on your off-road vehicle, but adding more power than you need just makes it harder to control and easier to wreck.


2 Fast 2 Furious

2 Prone 2 Rollovers 2 Many Burny Pieces

- Use the built-in template vehicles as a shopping list for what parts you should be thinking about next. Not all the vehicles are necessarily useful, but moving through the list from right to left gives you a good progression in terms of increasing difficulty.

- Remember that you can click on contacted recovery drones on the map to teleport to that location. Can save you some time and annoyance.

- In the build menu, under advanced, you can get a good look at the forces acting on your vehicle, like center of mass, which can be very useful to help balance things.

Medium Pontoon/Underwater Propeller: On the starting island, and your keys to getting off of it. Don't even think about trying to leave without them.

Electromagnet AKA Tractor Beam: On the largest island to the west of the start; incredibly useful. As soon as you have Amphibious, make a bee-line for this.

Diving Bell & Buoyancy Control Device: To the north and south of the Tractor Beam island; necessary for building The Sub and hence, underwater adventures.

Monster Truck Wheel: Useful in many different builds, to the point of becoming my go-to tire. Honorable mention goes to the nearby Large Pontoon, which is also needed for the Monster Truck.

Dragon Engine: Not strictly necessary, but fun! Retreival involved using The Sub (ugh) to haul it to shore, and then a vehicle with Monster Truck tires to haul it to the check-in point.

Gimbal Jet: I retreived this fairly early, and slept on it for much longer than I should have. This right here, optionally combined with the Monster Truck (modified) is your key to getting to all those places you've wanted to get to since the early game. A pain to retreive, of course (because The Sub is needed) but worth it.

Go-Kart Seat: Key for several builds, and a good introduction to dealing with lava. The piece itself is not terribly exciting.

Thruster/Mini Thruster: Up on a ledge in Pine Heights, and possibly the final piece you need for the Gimbal Car and hence, the last few pieces and winning the campaign. Useful on Gimbal Jet equipped vehicles so you don't have to rely solely on forward momentum when you take off.

- Bumper car: What can I say? The starting vehicle, and a good platform to start experimenting with.

- Amphibious: Do you like rolling over? Awkward and ungainly; it can be improved with additional propellers underneath and an electromagnet on the front. With additional propellers, it can travel at a good clip, making it a good vehicle to reach another island or get to a dive site. Still awkward and ungainly, no matter what you do though.

- Off-Roadster: A solid vehicle for tooling around on the larger landmasses and small scrap pickups; I relied on this heavily before getting the Monster Truck. Can benefit from adding some engines, but be careful not to overdo it - otherwise you'll just crash while going very fast.

- The Sub: A necessary evil. Frightfully easy to unbalance (you'll forever be fighting being pitched up or down, like some demonic see-saw) and barely adequate to haul heavy pieces, this is nonetheless a key vehicle for the campaign. Consider sticking an additional electromagnet (or moving the one on the front) to underneath and behind the diving bell, so larger pieces of scrap don't quite so fatally unbalance the silly thing. Of course, having large scrap underneath tends to complicate hauling pieces to shore... but being a pain in the butt is just the nature of this beast.

- Monster Truck: Once I had this, it became my absolute favorite. Able to handle most larger pieces of scrap, able to navigate water with enough speed for island hopping, able to handle uneven terrain - there's not much this beast can't do. It's also an excellent platform for modification. The obvious thing to do is to modify it to make an even beefier monster truck, with additional engines and underwater propellers, and maybe some additional weight on the back to counterbalance heavy scrap, and this is indeed a good idea and worth doing - but thinking in the other direction is what opened up the late game for me!



Above is what I call the "Floaty Monster Truck." I've stripped the pontoons, propellers, and weights off the back, and the already well-balanced vehicle is almost perfectly balanced. With the addition of 6 Gimbal Jets, placed as shown, you can neatly control it's orientation just with the WASD keys - it's otherwise extremely stable. Using this, you can make (slow) leaps that you never could have managed without some kind of crazy thrust otherwise - and you can also float right up cliffs to get at the scrap above, assuming you build up some forward momentum first. Note that picking up scrap throws the balance off, but using the Gimbal Jets you can usually still have a semi-soft landing and rebuilt your vehicle into another version that can haul your now-landed scrap wherever you need.

- Heavy Duty: I want to like this more than I do. I didn't get it until well after the monster truck, and I found it was too little, too late. That said, if this was rebuilt to have a larger storage area in the back, this might be a good vehicle for retrieving those really large chunks of scrap.

- Prop Plane: I used this exactly once. Or more precisely, I crashed it a dozen times and found it useful once - I activated the recovery drone up in the sky to the west of the starting island where the Helicopter engine V.2 piece is. I found it too prone to over-steering to enjoy using it. Probably becomes better if you tweak it; whether it's worth the effort is up to you.

- Gimbal Car: This became my workhorse at the end of the game - including the last piece I needed from the volcano. All the floatiness of my improved Monster Truck, plus actual steering via thrusters. It's a little unsteady, but it works fairly well, though climbing 1000 meters up with it can be a bit tedious.

- Hovercraft: In principle, really cool! In practice, I found the "ice skating over every surface" to be more annoying than useful. Not bad if you have to traverse a lot of lava, though - though a Gimbal Jet equipped vehicle can do so as well, albeit slower.

- Pickup Drone: I couldn't manage to take off without having this flip forward. I quickly got disgusted with it and went back to Gimbal Jet vehicles. I'm assuming it would be better if you fixed the balance.

- Cloudcopter: Balance seems (mostly) fixed in this. The problem is that by the time you get it, you'll already have your vehicles of choice tweaked to your liking. It's also rather bulky, which makes it less than ideal in tight spaces, like the volcano. Might be a better (or at least, quicker) choice for getting the pieces that are 1000 meters up than the Gimbal Car.

- 6 Wheel Rover: Used this a fair bit before I'd fully unlocked the Monster Truck. It's not terrible. Long, with a lot of weight in the back, helps to counterbalance the weight of scrap. 6 Monster Truck wheels on straight springs allow it to get a fairly good grip.


- The Cage: Essentially, designed to try to trap larger pieces of scrap. This design could be improved by making it larger and perhaps putting the electromagnet on a piston. Still, for early large scrap, this ungainly beast works, and occasionally even partially lifting scrap is better than pushing or dragging it. I've also seen designs where people put something like this on Hover engines for lava recovery, which strikes me as putting lipstick on a pig, but whatever works, I guess.