Groundwork Simulator beginner guide
The first site decides how the rest of the run feels. Dig a test hole before you commit a machine, keep the haul short, and get water to the plant early.
Start with one test hole on ground that drills as gold-bearing, run a short haul to flat ground, and set up water and the wash plant before you scale up digging.
The first two hours decide whether the next twenty are fun. Most of the frustration players reported on launch day came from doing jobs in the wrong order — digging before testing, hauling before the route existed, setting up the plant after stockpiling a mountain of dirt. This is the order that avoids all three.
Before the first bucket
Five minutes of setup that saves an hour:
- Check the options that exist. The store listing confirms custom volume controls, adjustable difficulty, save-anytime and playable-without-timed-input. Turn the difficulty where you want it before you start learning the machines, not after.
- Find the music toggle. If the main-menu music is already annoying you, the speaker icon is in the bottom-left corner of the main menu — that is the answer players were given on launch day, and it is the single most-asked question of the first evening.
- Open the Field Journal once and read the left column. General Notes, Rumour Trails, Gold Map, Gold Report, Gold Prices, Machine Dealer, Company Ledger, Machine Manual, Controls, Settings. That list is the whole interface of the game's business side, and knowing it exists stops you hunting menus later.
- Note the map key. The gold map is a separate full-screen view opened from the Field Journal, and players point to
Pas the fast way in and out of it.
Hour one: one hole, one route, one sale
The mistake is opening five cuts. Do this instead.
- Drill a single spot. Let the test decide. If it comes back gold-bearing, that is your first cut.
- Plan a short haul before you dig. Flat ground, straight line, no switchback. Your first route is the one you will drive fifty times.
- Cut with the excavator, not the loader. The excavator breaks ground; the loader moves it. A bucket that scrapes instead of cuts is an angle problem, and the how to play page explains what the machine is telling you.
- Stockpile where the pile will not become a wall. Material goes beside the route, never across it.
- Get water to the plant before the pile gets big. Pumps and hoses first, then feed. A plant with no water is a trailer with extra steps.
- Wash, then sell in the Field Journal. Check the price panel before selling — the demand figure refreshes on a daily timer, so the same gold is worth different money on different days.
What to buy first, and what not to
The current build does not publish a price list for machines or upgrades, so this page will not pretend to have one. What the store and the roadmap do tell you is the shape of the economy: Update 2 is explicitly about new vehicles and matching vehicle capacity to the scale of your operation, which means capacity — not speed — is the axis the game grows along.
The practical read: spend on the bottleneck you can measure. If trucks are queuing at the plant, the plant is the bottleneck. If the plant is idle waiting for material, the haul is the bottleneck. If the excavator cannot keep the trucks fed, the cut is the bottleneck. Buying a fourth machine into a queue does not fix a queue.
| Symptom | What is actually wrong | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| Plant sits idle | Haul too long, or cut too small | Route and cut size |
| Trucks queue at the plant | Feed rate beats processing rate | Plant setup and water |
| Bucket scrapes instead of filling | Bucket angle and hydraulic load | Machine handling |
| Loaded truck will not climb | Route grade, traction, load | Ground work first |
| Gold in, little gold out | Washing chain, not the digging | Wash plant end to end |
Hour two: make the loop repeatable
Once one cut, one route and one sale work, the job is to shorten the lap. That means grading the route so loaded trucks keep speed, putting the stockpile on the side you will dig next, and keeping water routing tidy enough that you can extend it without rebuilding it.
Players who got frustrated fastest were the ones who kept opening new cuts while the first one was still half-finished. The site does not reward that: every bucket changes the ground, and ground you abandoned is ground you have to re-plan later.
The three launch-day traps
- The gold map can stick. If the map will not close, players report pressing
Por closing it with the X in the top-right instead of Escape fixes it. Threads and dates are on the launch week page. - Dirt can pass through a dump truck. Reported on day one, with one player tying it to swapping truck models. If a load vanishes, check the thread before you rebuild the route.
- Controllers are inconsistent. Some pads honk the horn or eject the driver at speed, and at least one player saw "0 joysticks connected" while inputs still worked. Keyboard and mouse is the safe path while that settles.
Where to go next
The machines overview next if the three machine types still blur together, gold washing if the plant is the part that feels random, and money and progression once you have gold to sell and want to understand what the panels are telling you.
