A newbie guide to #openttdcoop
First off, let me welcome you to the #openttdcoop community. You might’ve stumbled upon this site for the first time, or we’ve met you on IRC, maybe you even played a game, but you still consider yourself a new player. I noticed new players don’t really know what to expect, or what to do for that matter. That is why I decided to write a small introductory guide. Just so you’re warned, our games are quite advanced, and even though there’s plenty of easier things to do, we do expect you know your way around the basics of Transport Tycoon. If you don’t know these, I recommend you try some singleplayer games first.
About us
#openttdcoop is a community that promotes the coop style of playing games. Instead of competing with each other, we group together and work towards one goal with our combined efforts. Because of this, our games tend to become large, complex and sometimes incomprehensible. This either puts you off of it or makes you go “WOW!”. If you are in the second group, you should try playing along, you might like it.
What to do
I often hear that new people don’t know what to do in our games. They see us build gigantic structures, which they feel they can never match. Now, no worries about that, you’ll get there sometime. However, there’s always some things to do. I think from easy to hard, it could be like this:
- Just watching. An important step, understand before you build.
- Eyecandy. Makes the game look better and easy to do.
- Connecting industries to the sidelines.
- General management, such as grouping and adding trains.
- Building your first Sideline Hub
- Submitting your own plan.
- Building your first major station
- Building your first Backbone Hub
Ofcourse you can always help other people with signalling or tracks. But if you help others, it is generally appreciated if you ask before you do so. Also on the topic of building: what you have built, might be re-built. You shouldn’t take this personal though, we do a lot of rebuilds in our games, when capacity calls for it, or when the original construction had some flaws in it. This is also why it’s good practice to let somebody else check what you have built, or ask for suggestions, especially when you are new here. If you sign your work with your name (as you should), people can check back with you, if they don’t understand it or think that it needs improvement. It’s good practice to check back with a builder before you change what was built.
Behaviour
#openttdcoop is an open community where everyone is welcome to join in and play. This does mean that we expect decent behaviour from the players to keep it fun for everyone and to stop things from getting out of hand. As a start, I’d like to point out the cooperation, building guidelines and naming conventions pages to you. Of course, rules are always an arbitrary line, but we have to draw it somewhere, so please try to follow that “code of conduct”. With these pages in mind, I’d like to stress some key points.
- Be friendly. This seems like an obvious one, but in practice turns out not to be. If you are in a grumpy mood, don’t make us grumpy by sharing it. Not only does the “being nice” cause a better atmosphere, it also gets you more help from others.
- The coop in our name is there for a reason. Please discuss with other people before making big changes. This also means you shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help or advice, more people working together generally leads to better results.
- Sign your work. This is often forgotten and then we don’t know who did what anymore. This way people can discuss or give advice with/to the right person. Things to sign are stations, hubs, construction sites and changes in someone else’s work.
Getting involved
As all of our content is generated by the community, helping hands are also appreciated. If you’d like to help out, possible things to do include:
- Updating the wiki by adding new or correcting old content.
- Submitting new scenarios to be played on the Publicserver.
- Writing posts for the blog. Especially Publicserver game reviewers would be appreciated.
If you’d like to help out with any of those, but aren’t sure how, you can always ask a member on IRC.
Handy links
If you’d like some more information about the game and this community, i can recommend the following links.
I hope this guide gets you starters started a bit. If you have any more questions, feel free to chat up on us on IRC. On a final note I’d like to stress that you can always ask for a helping hand, so don’t be shy. See you around and in-game!
