Iron Roads News

0.4.3 fixes a few bugs. Most notably the bug that caused trains to sometimes stop too early at a platform, and erroneously throwing a warning about the platform being too short. We’ve had this bug so long now I’ll almost miss it. However it is now confined to the archives of Iron Roads’ history, as are:

Various formatting problems with town badges that are part of cargo chains
Finished resources that incorrectly counted to the waiting times at a town
The exploit of repeatedly building and selling stations that could lead to infinite funds
The crash that was occasionally caused by the title screen music starting
The formatting of waiting passenger counts where it would sometimes erroneously show 99+ in the detailed display
Quite a few other crashes…

Other changes we've made:

Added a count of waiting passengers to the destinations table on the town screen
Starting Forgotten Valley scenario no longer starts the tutorial
Your progress through the contracts is shown on the mini display

We’ve been a little out of sync between playtest and demo builds recently, but with this update the playtest will be back in line with the demo, getting all the upgrades we made in 0.4.

0.4.2 also has some additional bugfixes

• Better formatting of town badges that are part of cargo chains
  
• It no longer counts cargo units when calculating waiting times at a town
  
• Fix for an exploit that allowed you to get infinite money by repeatedly building and selling statinos
  
• Fixes a crash caused when the title screen music started on some installations
  
• We added a count of waiting passengers to the destinations table on the town screen
  

We’ll also be updating the demo to 0.4.2 as well in the next few days

This is a tiny patch that

• Rebalances the weekly challenge so towns grow faster and you have more passengers
  
• Fixes a bug with Chinese translations
  
• Fixes a bug with the route editing screen
  

Thanks as always for all the feedback, and do please leave a review of the demo!

We'll be streaming a prerecorded developer plays stream for the Planes, Trains and Automobiles fest. As we can't monitor chat at all times, we'll disable it, but we are always active in the forums, so please post there if you have any questions, or feedback on the demo!

This update feels like we have taken the game apart and put it all back together again. One big change is that towns now have badges that show how happy the passengers are with their train service. We hope this acts as another motivator (alongside contracts) for players to design increasingly efficient networks. As always we’d love to hear your thoughts on how this has gone!

The Forgotten Valley scenario in the demo has also been greatly expanded. The map is 4x the size of the original, unlocking in 3 stages as you complete contracts. There are also now some cargo chains in that scenario. For example certain trains now require power, for which you’ll need to haul fuel to the power station on the new eastern landmass.

From this version on, you can play in Chinese, both Traditional and Simplified. Thanks to our Chinese publisher, Hawthorn games, for making that happen!

On top of that there are many smaller changes

🔬 Certain features are now researchable, and you need to unlock them as you play
🪟 New town, train and route windows with far more data available on them
🧑‍🏫 The tutorial has been merged with Forgotten Valley so you play on once the tutorial is over
⚠️ Clearer, and hopefully less annoying, messages when trains are stuck or platforms are too short
🐛 Many bugfixes, including

• Services that carry no trains are now ignored by the routefinder
  
• Unstoppable scrolling on boot should be fixed
  
• We fixed a surprising number of bugs with the continue button
  
• The game window’s title and icon are set
  
• The escape key on the title screen works the same as it does elsewhere in the game
  
• There is a notice when there are unselected contracts and the window is open
  
• A number of crash fixes, and a fix for the layout on the menu screen
  

Thanks to you all for your feedback, but for this update I’d particularly like to thank the playtesters who played early (and really rather rough) versions of these changes and politely nudged us in a (hopefully) better direction!

Also, with this update we've enabled Steam's new demo store page, so if you enjoyed it, please review!