Iron Roads News

Oops, 0.2.7 went out with a crash in the new tutorial section. This is a tiny patch to fix that!

The changes are fairly minor this week. Most notably we’ve swapped to a new map generator for the Challenge mode. The shapes are larger and more continuous, which looks better, and gives more variety for gameplay. Also, rather than evenly distributing fields across the whole map, they are grouped in certain areas.

Other than that, some more minor changes:

• We’ve swapped the challenges to be Fortnightly rather than Weekly
  
• The late graph has been removed
  
• We’ve expanded the tutorial to show some example uses of nonstop zones, oneway orders, and waypoints. This is following feedback from quite a few people that the tutorial often explained how to do something, but it rarely explained why you may want to
  

Thanks as always for the feedback, it is a critical part of our process for improving the game!

Despite the innocuous version number increase, in this update we’ve changed the way towns grow. It is a big change to how the game is balanced, and we’d love to hear thoughts on it. The new system sets a clear target for on-time arrivals, and when the target is met, the town grows. We hope this gives clarity on what needs to be done for a town to grow, and adds an incentive to not keep passengers waiting too long. While doing this we also reworked the town information screens to make them easier to read with large numbers of towns. There is more detail about on this on our blog.

Other than the growth system work we have:

• Added images for the scenario chooser
  
• Added buttons to the town screens so you can cycle between them
  
• Added icons to the town screen to show what cargo is accepted by that stop
  
• Split the town screen and route information windows
  
• Sped up the mouse wheel on Windows
  
• Added icons to the contract window to make it clear when there is money to be collected
  
• Fix for mouse with scaled displays under Wayland
  
• Smoothed out the volume changes on background notes
  
• Fixed an issue where houses would spawn on stations far from a town centre
  

We’re currently doing a lot of work on the generated scenarios for Endless Mode and Challenge Mode. We hope to have the new map generator out in an update next week.

We're focusing on the new Endless mode right now, but we’ve made a bunch of fixes in the meantime:

• We’ve removed the length limit for bridges, and the geographical restriction on Horseshoe Isle is enforced differently now
  
• Stations can be extended
  
• We’ve made a number of UI improvements: there is text shown when there are no active contracts rather than ablank box; train warnings are replaced by a text warning when you are paused; toggle buttons have been altered to be more consistent; and there is a background colour change to indicate when a contract is active
  

Thanks as always for the feedback!

We're largely working on the Endless Mode now. While that is not quite ready for playtesting, we have made fixes and tweaks that apply throughout all the modes of play. This is a bundle of those changes.

We've developed Neptunia's characteristic mechanics this week. You can now make more money by setting up routes to Neptunia, and doing so will encourage Neptunia itself to expand. However it will now do so at the cost of any nearby fields, which in turn limits your ability to make money out of fares to and from Appleberry Farm. We want there to be choices with who you serve and how, with payoffs either way.

Another significant change is that passengers no longer give up on journeys. It was difficult to communicate when and why this was happening, and it can be especially annoying when passengers gave up on their journey at a transfer station.

Other minor changes

• Fields don't just disappear, but are replaced by a destroyed field sprite when you build through them
  
• Removed an artefact on the desert map
  
• Clicking anywhere on a train service row expands it
  
• The top bar buttons now jump to the corresponding graphs
  
• Holding shift means you can WASD around the map a lot quicker
  

Ok, back to work! Recently, our work seems to have been amenable to pushing lots of small patches, so I hope we can keep pushing these small upgrades on a regular basis.