I have been rather more constructively engaged over the summer than might have been imagined.*

Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, the best and most hardcore city/logistics game ever, has a built-in building editor. In common with most of the rest of the game, it’s a janky, clunky mess of a thing which needs patience and experience with its weird ways to exploit.  But it is, as with most of the base game, built for 1960s Košice, which limits the style, particularly with the game’s new “Early Start” mode from 1930 onwards, and the elements don’t fit perfectly with that.

Years after my initial modding experience back in 2023  I was put onto by the possibilities of the building editor by the modder Antalunet, who used it to put together some astounding pieces inspired by Auguste Perret (and now I need to take an archi-tour of Le Havre at some point.) I ended up messaging him on Discord and offering my fairly minor Blender modding skills, which resulted in my building a clock for Rio Central station in his Metropolis pack.

This clock was followed by a bunch of angled roof pieces. And this was followed by taking a whole pack of Stalinist “Empire style” elements produced by Niss Tagm back in the WRSR modding glory days of 2021, requesting and receiving permission from them to update and expand on it, and making several hundred new elements for making buildings in a neoclassical/socialist-realist/Stalinist style.

I looked at existing elements in the pack, adjusted their lighting and fixing elements which weren’t displaying right. Some I remodelled in Blender to reduce polycount or fix visual errors, or move their coordinates to, eg, make pilasters rather than columns. Then I used them as a starting point to create new assets: diagonal walls and cornices, mostly, and big new roof elements.  Then I ended up cooking up entirely new elements to fit in. This was a whole nest of frustrating learning experiences: the game’s file structures and the relationships between different parts of it, oddities of Blender and UV mapping. These were figured out partly through trial & error and partly through comparing notes with the WRSR modders’ discord (although that has mostly died a strange quiet death since the game hit its 1.0 release. I was really quite proud of the results: for instance, placing a wall element now will pick at random from one of five little models with the texture mapped slightly differently, so avoiding a repetitive pattern when making a large wall. As mentioned these tools are janky and each of these models needed to be separately created in Blender, exported as a .obj, converted into a .nmf, moved into the right folders and coded into the elements.ini. And then tested. There is an intense frustration to how a missing letter can cause an entire day’s work to Not Work, but this frustration is tempered by knowing that ultimately it will work if the error can be found and fixed. There is something about knowing that an objective has a binary, unarguable “success” state that makes it much easier to persevere through technically complex and demanding challenges (in contrast to most of the technically complex and demanding things I do in the rest of life, where success is uncertain or ambiguous.)

And then, of course, I had to actually build things with it. My buildings are all things I actually wanted to see in the game: a mix of infrastructure which didn’t have Early Start and fun uchronic (ie, proposed but never actually built) skyscrapers. Huge albums of these can be found especially on Pinterest (at time of writing there are, every so often, bits of AI slop infiltrating the relevant sources, particularly imitating Hugh Ferriss, but it is mostly real; I don’t know how much longer that will hold.)

My single biggest and best mod is a modular pack of university buildings (taking advantage of the game’s grid system) which realise Charles Holden’s unbuilt designs for Senate House, which in real life is less than half as big as was proposed.

But the most enjoyable part of all this is that game modding is a communal, creative endeavour, and I get to see other people making buildings with my elements (like Bastardo’s elaborate stalinkas or Runom’s delightful civil infrastructure and cities with my buildings. At time of writing nearly 9,000 people have downloaded my elements pack, which I feel is quite a respectable number to have influenced in even the smallest way.

I also got into modding vehicles and cargo tram infrastructure (through research and coding and collaborating with other people with better Blender skills than myself, rather than modelling myself), but that’s for another day, and I really ought to get back into making the comic and writing the travelogues if I’m going to…

Anyway, in common with almost everyone in the world you probably don’t play this game, but if you want to see all my mods, they’re here.

_{* I’m still doing and seeing as much as I ever was. But the ever more adverse “effort to anyone-giving-a-shit ratio” of blogging has really not been helped by the sense that anything now posted publicly online is going to be copied and fed without my consent into slop engines by the worst people imaginable in order to bulk-produce junk data.}