New Mission just for noobs is reay - 'Pension Plan' - it's in my collection!

got cha! i'll check it out !

My new mission, "Pirates" is finished and in my collection for anyone interested!

No problem - and yes, it's Marianne (Mum was a fan of Marianne Faithful)

Not exactly the answer i was hoping for ha but thanks...
Is your name really marianne?

if you decide to re-install, you'll need to go have a lie down or a long shower wehile it does it - it takes a bit of time!

I fixed that by uninstalling and reinstalling the game - luckily it remembered my achievements and time spent playing - but it was the only way I could get rid of them from my workshop mission library - at one point I had four versions of the same mission there! I also deleted everything except my challenges folder from my Users/Marianne/AppData/Roaming/Tropico 5 folder and steam reinstalled it all - including about 150 savegames which I didn't really need - and that took a bit of time! Not sure whether it was the re-install, or the deleting folder thing, or both, that did it - but I did manage to get rid of all those copies of the mission I didn't want.

Well the thing is the missions been deleted (on my hard drive and workshop) so i might have to rename my mission so i won't confuse the two

I may have to ask support

No idea what to do about your odd image.... as to your ghost - if it's in your workshop files on steam you should be able to delete it if you click on it. I had one when a mission failed to upload.

if it's in your ingame workshop mission library, it's probably an older version that you subscribed to and deleted from steam without unsubscribing first - that happened to me too.

Good to see you're still hard at work!

it shows up in the workshop but not in tropico
also i have a "ghost" older version of the mission i was working on that wont go away now...

Perhaps it's the wrong size - you could try rescaling it I guess. Other than that, I don't know what to suggest - sorry!

well i do have it as a jpg but it shows as a blank when i test it as a workshop mission. it's just weird

if you mean the picture for the starting conditions tab, it needs to be a jpg file - nothing else will work! There's plenty of jpg's in google images to download - that's where I've got my images from so far... type in a short description of the kind of pic you're after with jpg after that and you should get heaps to choose from. I have no idea what gear clip art is - but it's obviously not compatable.

I never would have thought till that last minute ha! Though i can never get my gear clip art to show up in tropico but oh well

GentlemannOfHats, I wouldn't have thought to check if the files were read-only, but my other half (who's a computer geek) would have. My latest great discovery is that you can rename jpeg picture files to jpg and they still work! Found that out when I was trying to load the heart pic for this mission! Good to hear you're progressing on your mission!

Hi myweoh! I loved your mission too - though it was awfully difficult (I'm a medium difficulty player ususally) I got my behind handed too me twice so far but it was fun! My other half and I like UFO stuff, so that made it even better! I'm still a newb, and my missions are dead boring compared to your creation - but with a bit more time and practise I'll hopefuilly improve!

I also think sandbox games with no custom tasks are dull - I'm a bit sick of the vanilla tasks now that I've played the standard sandbox games so often - so I've been checking out the missions on the workshop - though I've only played yours and had a bit of a go at Sheppards Island.

Thanks muchly for the offer of help - I usually post on the forum if I get stuck - so far only The World Is A Sandbox has given me any help, so it's nice to know there's another cluey mission maker out there who's willing to help out the newbs! Hope you're having a great day!

Oh i know you! I love your mission! i'm still working out my mission i hope you'd take a look when i'm done!

Hey guys, creator of the "Intervention" scenario here. Although I dont look at the forums much (Although perhaps I should do so more often), I am always willing to contribute and answer any questions you may have (If I know how)

As some of you guys are, I much prefer maps with well crafted missions on them.
Im not much of a sandbox player

I almost never thought i'd figure it out but i did..

I see from your other post on the forum that you got it going. Good for you!

It's really unworkable. I may have to contact support again to fix this thing before i faint ugh

Know the feeling! I hope you get it sorted before you give yourself a headache and a nasty lump!

I did mention that the editor was frustrating - now you know what i was talking about!

I'm either bipolar or clinically depressed or maybe both! Just like slamming my head into a hard object figuring out why something wont work. well not really but eh i feel like it

Hat Guy - talking to yourself is a sign of madness! I should know - I do it all the time, and I'm bipolar!

The World Is A Sandbox - glad to be of service in some way! I did actually go and lie down for a break, but thought up a new idea for my mission - so it's back to the grind! Since I didn't get up until about 2pm yesterday, I'm only now starting to get tired - and I've had lots of strong coffee too!
I promise to stop filling up this thread with guff and get some sleep shortly! My computer's always online anyhow, it doesn't sleep unless the power goes out! Cheers!

And I hope that's just your computer that's still online. It must be 7 in the morning where you are. Get some sleep.

@mehopkins1971 - you know what, this has been a really helpful exchange: I'm making a last minute change to the Buccaneer Bay map because of it. There was a feature in another map of mine, Marquis Island, that was universally loathed. It was essentially a puzzle: in order to win you had to thread a road through the needle, so to say. It required it to get it JUST right. I designed it as a challenge puzzle, but I think people just hated it. I had another one like that in Buc Bay. I conceded just now. I took it out. I think you made Buc Bay a whole lot better for a whole lot of the players who'll play it..

I ask myself that all the time

No chance of that seeing as how I'm female anyhow! Just saying, he's been very helpful in solving my problems on the forum - and mission makers that actually answer questions seem to be rare at the moment! What are you doing reading this thread when you should be working on your own mission? Tut tut!

Hey you ain't my dad!

Sorry, but I'm giving up - even though the map was gorgeous, I've no patience for fiddliness I hate to admit! I confess I like flat land - unrealistic though that may be! I'll still rate you up however, in appreciation of your lovely looking map that must have taken a lot of time to make!

Be very nice to him - he seems to be the only experienced mission maker posting in the forum at the moment and he's awfully helpful!

Sandbox Dude, I hate to say it but I've spent the last hour just trying to connect a road to the dock with no success. I tried winding it around the side of the teamsters office, but the terrain was unbuildable. Then i tried deleting the teamster's office - forgot you can't delete the only one on the map. No problem, i thought, I'll build another one and delete the first one after it's built. Found a level spot to the east of the palace to put one, but the builders couldn't reach it with the gap in the road! So I looked for a spot to the west with no luck. My chance of placing the pineapple farm the crown wanted was looking bad!

The world is a sandbox, I've seen you quite a bit now!

OK, you've convinced me - I'm running out of ideas for my new mission so I'll take a break from it and try Sheppards Island out now. However, it's 4am here where I am at the moment - so I probably won't finish it today as I'll head off to bed about 10am. (My other half and I are night owls!) I'll let you know how i went with it when I finish the game!

I'm an untidy wretch - and my islands turn out untidy too - although I have a thing about straight roads! I don't see any point in playing with unlimited money either, and I'd hate to play a game through with no chance of winning it.

I suspect that setting the victory conditon when you first create a workshop mission ( ie - not writing one into the sequence editor) doesn't work anyhow - as you know, I couldn't get a victory by points mission to work, and I've seen a comment that the advertised victory condition of getting $500 000 didn't work in one of the workshop missions someone else posted - so I suspect they didn't write one in either.

Good point! Never thought of that: I should've advertised the Win condition for the maps I posted. I'll fix that after I post Buc Bay. But just so you know: on all my maps it's the "Become a Millionaire" condition, i.e. get to $1,000,000. Which is not that easy, because the maps are tricky and the economic condition is set to hard.
FYI, people who are drawn to Sandbox games often don't even want a Win condition, because their goal (their "win" condition) is to create an island that is aesthetically pleasing (and achieving that under the standard economic/political constraints the base game gives you - playing a Sandbox map with unlimited money is sort of pointless). You and I are very different type of gamers.. :)

I haven't played any purely sandbox maps because I'm put off by the thought of spending hours and hours playing a game, only to possibly lose at the end of the modern era! Also, I've played so many standard kalypso sandbox maps, that I'm getting sick of the vanilla tasks! (Over 900 hours now!) That's one of the reasons I'm making my own missions now, and checking out missions in the workshop. I tried the 'Intervention one', but got my ass handed to me quite early on! That one sure was difficult!


I promise I'll give the sandbox Sheppards Island a go, if you tell me it's winnable at the end of the modern era! Warn me about the difficulty too, please! I'll likely need lots of coffee if it's hard!

I appreciate you taking the time to post in here - you must be pretty busy with your own missions, so it's good of you!

Hello again! Nice to see you active in the workshop! I'm still a newb and learning how to use the editor, so there's been a few mistakes in the two missions I've made so far... but I managed to fix them (I think!) Hopefully I'll improve as I go! Working on my third one now! I'm a writer, not a map-maker - I've just been slightly modifying random gen maps for my missions so far...

So what's the go with purely Sandbox maps with no custom tasks - are they even winnable? Like, if I get to the end of the modern era (is it 2012? 2020? I can't remember now) do I win or lose the game? If you can't win the game, there doesn't seem to be much point playing! Even the standard Kalypso Sandbox games have victory conditions that you can choose from...

And yes, I advise against trying out the newest mission (Buccaneer Bay) that I'll now finally post tonight. It is NOT easy. I've spent the last days toning it down and making sure it doesn't break. There is nothing more enraging (I know from experience) than to take on a very difficult mission by a fellow modder, invest a huge amount of time in trying to master it, and then have that thing break on you because the modder made a mistake. I spent a great deal of time trying to make sure there are no mistakes left in mine.
But, it'll be a nail-biter, cliff hanger, head scratcher, so certainly not something I could recommend for easy fun. However, it does also have a Sandbox option, with an easy $100,000 starting capital set-up. Feel free to check that out once I posted it. I think the map turned out truly gorgeous.

I saw you comment on another Sandbox map; you said that you were missing tasks... That's the idea of a Sandbox map: that you only have to work off the very basis vanilla story lines so that you are free to focus on building up a beautiful island.
The map you played there might've not been particularly interesting. I've tried to post maps where the map itself becomes the task. Go ahead, give it a try: subscribe to Sheppards Island, select the Sandbox option, and start building your town on that island. You might find that itself is quite a good challenge, even without many explicit tasks.

G'day The World Is A Sandbox! How's your bad back? Hope it's healing up well! Nice to hear from you again! I've played a bit of Civ4, it was better than Civ5 in my opinion. (Though Civ5 looked prettier) How's your latest mission going? I noticed your screenshot in the community hub - map looks very nice! Too scared to try any of your missions as you've warned that they're difficult - and I like an easy game!


Hat Guy, If you're looking for your hpk file, it's in Users/Your Name/AppData/Roaming/Tropico 5...

It really does pay to make a copy and paste it somewhere handy - even if you don't mess it up, as The World Is A Sandbox said, a crash or power outage might! Hope you're making progress with your mission!

I second mehopkins1971's suggestion: ALWAYS, ALWAYS make a copy of the .hpk mission file. Tropico 5 is admiringly stable, really amazingly so (says someone who was driven nutty by the constant crashes of CIV4, for example). But it gives you a false sense of security. At some point, usually when you've worked weeks or months on something, something will happen to your .hpk file and then you are toast. I lost 2 months (!) of work this January on a power outage during a save. Fortunately was ultimately able to recover most of it, because Kalypso can help you retrieve the .hpk file from uploads you made to Steam (you can't do that yourself, so it's a poor form of a safety measure).

But now, just yesterday, had a freeze happen to me on a save operation, the first time Tropico 5 has done that to me, so it's not completely bug free. A freeze will corrupt your .hpk file. I was able to laugh it off because I had just made my desktop .hpk safety copy, so I just replaced the corrupted file. You won't be laughing if it happens to you and you didn't make a safety save. Happy customizing!

There's lots of complaints about just that in one of the forum's pinned threads - i don't much like it myself, but uploading and testing outside the editor prevents you from accidently saving after testing and ruining the mission... so it does have one advantage I guess!

As I suggested, it's also a good idea to find the mission file in your User Game files and save it to the desktop, that way if you mess up (and it's awfully easy to) you can go back to a previous save and not have to start from scratch again!

The editor is annoying at times, but once you've played with it a bit, it's addictive! I'm working on a new mission myself at the moment too... and going bald with tearing out my hair in frustration!

Good luck with your mission!

I hate my habit of clicking the wrong thing. Having to upload it to the workshop just seems a bit counter-intuitive but if thats how it works I guess i can't fight against it

It's best not to test your mission in the editor itself, but to upload it to steam and subscribe to it, then test it in the new game/workshop mission section. Otherwise you may accidently save after testing and stuff up the mission! I did that once and learned my lesson - now I always test it after I've uploaded it!

If you want, you can find the mission file in your User Data game files (it's stored in the Challenges folder) and copy/paste it to the desktop or somewhere handy - that way if you stuff up you can paste your last saved mission file back into challenges, to at least get back to where you were before you made a mistake!

I've lost a lot of work accidently clicking save&test button and steam workshop doesn't hold the editable version for me :/

What a bummer! I see you've posted on the forums - hopefully the members will be able to help you if I can't!

I started to work on my mission and i cannot test it... stuck in a infinite loop of loading

huh didn't think there would be a guide...

There's a bit of a guide for it in the steam guides section - that's where I learnt the basics. Plus you can always post any questions you have while you're working on a mission to the forum - I got some good help that way. It's quite fun once you start!