Iron Roads News

I've just pushed an update to the beta branch to improve passenger routing on services that call at the same town multiple times in their route. For example in the screenshot shown passengers at Trembley for Neptunia should not board until the train calls at Trembley the second time on the way back from Mercy. Previously the passengers would board immediately, hog seats on the way to Mercy, and sadly this skewed the game quite strongly towards 2 city routes.



This is fixed on the beta branch now - please let me know if you find any issues with it. We'll be working through a number of issues like this, and other UI issues, in the 0.6.x series of updates. Generally we'll push them to the beta branch as we make them, and group/test these into updates from time to time!

There was a crash if you added carriages to a train just after it had flipped direction. This is fixed now, thanks to those who let us know about it!

[h2]Sandbox[/h2]

The headline feature for this update is sandbox mode. Rather than play on a map we have hand drawn, you get a page of options, and Iron Roads will generate a map with whatever parameters you choose. The scenarios in Iron Roads are quite directed by us, so this is an opportunity for you to remix the game in whatever way you prefer.



We’ll be updating and extending Sandbox mode in future updates, so we’d love to hear how it works out for you!

[h2]Hotkeys[/h2]

One of the greatest usability issues in the initial Early Access release was the lack of hotkeys. We’ve added them now. The list of all hotkeys can be found in the game's pause menu. If you feel that any are missing from this list, please let us know!



[h2]Minor changes[/h2]

We have made a number of more minor changes to fix bugs, clarify the UI, and adjust the balance

• After a lot of feedback that the Horseshoe Isle scenario was surprisingly hard, we’ve worked through it, and rebalanced many aspects
  
• One-way arrows have moved slightly to make two way tracks more readable on diagonals
  
• The space around Daters Rest in the Desert Dew scenario has been increased to allow more growth
  
• The Tithonus was a game breakingly good train, so it is now slower, more expensive and carries fewer passengers
  
• Futura was a little hard to unlock, so we’ve reduced the star unlock requirement of Futura from 5 to 2
  
• The new train screen shows a power icon next to any train that requires power to run
  
• The wording of carriage contracts has changed to describe exactly what needs to be carried
  
• The town status display (map version) shows what the town requires in the case production is stalled
  
• The formula showing what factory towns do is laid out better on the town screen
  
• Journey time tasks now show a jump-to button to connect them to the statistics on the town screen
  
• We’ve fixed a bug where the transport tasks only counted passengers who travelled solely between the listed towns, not passengers where part the journey was via those towns
  
• We fixed an issue with the cargo info screen where it would not close in some circumstances
  
• We fixed an issue where towns would be erroneously considered connected when a tunnel ran under a platform. This caused passengers to be generated when they shouldn’t have been
  
• We removed the errant "Show tutorial contracts for this chain" button that could show up in the research window
  
• Many tooltips and other UI elements have been updated for clarity
  

Thanks so much to all of you who have played the beta branch, and given feedback!

This is a tiny patch. There are no gameplay changes, it is just some updates to the March challenge!

Iron Roads is taking part in the Women's day 2025 Steam Sale. Due to release cooldown, we can't put Iron Roads on sale right away, but we'll do our best to do so by the end of the event!

We will be streaming during the event. We won't be able to monitor chat so that is disabled, but if you have any questions we monitor the forums regularly, or you can drop by our Discord.



Thanks to Wings for including us in this event!