👷‍♂️ This bridge was beautiful... and dangerously slippery

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Hello Fellow Engineers!

Welcome to Real Civil Newsletter - the only newsletter where bridges are judged on load paths, games are optimised like spreadsheets, and architects keep accidentally designing slip hazards.

This week we’re engineering our way through Pass The Fear (because strategy > chaos), growing bridges out of actual trees just to prove nature understands structural efficiency, and reviewing a bridge that looks impressive right up until you try walking on it in the rain.

Read on for synergy builds, living infrastructure, and a bridge review that might upset a few architects 👇

🧊 Preserve – Ice Age Giveaway!

Preserve is a relaxing nature-building game where you do something engineers rarely get to do: make ecosystems work instead of breaking them with traffic models.

You place habitats.
You balance biomes.
You try to keep everything alive instead of value-engineering it into a car park.

It’s calm, clever, and surprisingly satisfying — like optimisation, but with woolly mammoths.

And yes, we’re doing it again 🥁
This week we’re giving away FIVE copies:
🎁 5 × Preserve – Full Game
🎁 5 × Preserve – Ice Age DLC

Because nothing says engineering community like carefully managing environmental systems while pretending we totally planned it all along.

🎉 This week’s winners (check your emails shortly):
jac122583
fraseriain.mcintosh
mikey.whitaker
pauvaliente
fergmacdavis

As always: submit a bridge in this email’s poll to enter future giveaways.

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Pass The Fear - a strategic roguelike bullet-hell that replaces “stack everything and hope” with actual engineering.

Items are limited. Choices matter.

🧠 Design Your Build (Properly)

• Limited item combinations = real decision-making

• Card-style strategic thinking (combos > chaos)

• 100+ relics with keyword interactions that trigger chain effects

• 5 characters, 30+ weapons, 30+ accessories

If you enjoy optimising systems until they hum… this is your kind of game.

🔥 Deep Scaling for People Who Like Numbers Getting Silly

Higher difficulties introduce Ember and Growth attributes, so you’re balancing survival and long-term stat scaling.

There’s also a 22-card Tarot system (upright and reversed) that can push builds into borderline irresponsible territory.

Casual-friendly early on.
Properly brutal if you want it to be.

And yes, there’s co-op.

The demo is live during Next Fest.

If strategic builds, synergy optimisation, and “what happens if I break this system?” energy sound like your thing:

🎯 Go wishlist Pass The Fear
🎯 Download the demo during Next Fest
🎯 Try breaking it (responsibly)

👷‍♂️ Truss Me, I’m an Engineer…

This week’s project proves engineers don’t always need steel or concrete, sometimes they just borrow nature and let it do the work.

Say hello to the Living Root Bridges of Meghalaya, India, bridges literally grown from tree roots, because normal bridges kept getting destroyed by extreme rainfall and flooding.

Architects probably suggested a sleek glass crossing “in harmony with nature.”
Engineers said: “Cool. We’ll just grow one instead.”

🌳 What is it?

Local communities guide the aerial roots of rubber fig trees across rivers using simple scaffolding. Over time, the roots thicken, fuse together, and become fully load-bearing pedestrian bridges.

Yes, the structure gets stronger with age.

🧠 Why this is elite engineering

🌧️ Built for one of the wettest places on Earth
🌱 Strength increases over time instead of degrading
🪢 Flexible structure that moves with floods instead of fighting them
⏳ Some bridges are over 100 years old and still in use

Most bridges have a design life.

These ones just keep upgrading.

⚡ Cool Links

✈️ What it takes to land a plane on a runway made entirely of ice

🤑 “I realized that getting 10,000 people to buy my game is statistically unlikely. So I’ve decided to price the game at $200,000.”

🚃 I fixed traffic for 2 hours straight!

🐕‍🦺 Paddy’s Corner

Where in the world is Paddy now?!

One commenter put their Geoguesser pin somewhere in Southeast China…

👾 Indie Game of the Week:

This week I’m playing Pass The Fear like an actual engineer: limited weapons, hard choices, and building synergies instead of blindly stacking buffs like an architect stacking glass.

I start sensible (fire + lightning)… then immediately pivot into legendary acid weapons and melt the game into a puddle of corrosion and regret.

There’s even a classic engineering vs architecture showdown (spoiler: the “architects” get absolutely demolished).

👉 Watch the video here: Using LEGENDARY ACID WEAPONS to completely break the game!

It’s time for a Bridge Review!

Designed by an architect (Calatrava), the Zubizuri is a 75 m tied-arch footbridge with hangers off a big white steel arch, structurally it’s fine, visually it’s doing the absolute most.

But then the deck was made from glass bricks… in Bilbao… where it rains… so it became locally infamous for being slippery, and the city ended up adding non-slip matting because humans prefer not to die commuting.

Also, it didn’t even connect properly where people actually wanted to go, leading to add-on walkways and drama, classic “looks-first, works-later” energy.

Engineering feats: clean arch + cable load path, lightweight deck, decent span for a pedestrian crossing.

Needless architectural flair: a floor that turns into a skatepark when damp.

Final Score: 3.4 / 10