All Aboard! The Train Defense Express News

Here we are, finally at version 1.0!

I'd like to thank everyone to played during the Early Access period. You all helped make the game better in every way, and I'm sincerely grateful for your feedback and bug reports. Thank you!
I'd also like to thank my friends, sargx, Exolun, and SilentWizard, for their extensive testing, and Grisknuckle for helping out with some of the art.

In other news: All Aboard! The Train Defense Express is now Steam Deck Verified! Enjoy, Steam Deck players!

Let's discuss the patch stuff already. Wasn't this supposed to be a small patch...?


[h2]New Content[/h2]

• New Carriage Selection/Swapping View: The old way of viewing and swapping carriages was a little unpleasant, especially if there's a lot of junk on the screen, and especially if you're a controller- or keyboard-only player. Now, a new button appears when the game is paused that opens the new carriage view. The new view is functionally the same as before, but much easier to see what's going on, and it supports drag & drop.
  The old way of viewing or moving around carriages still works, but with mouse only.
  
  
• Loot Fairy: A rare loot fairy may now randomly appear and wander around the map for a couple of minutes. The more you hit it, the more valuable gems it will drop. It's pretty hard to kill, though...
  
  
• 5 new boons: The final set of boons have arrived! Two of them cannot be unlocked until you've maxed out every other boon. A special surprise for dedicated players is behind those locked boons.
  Some placeholder art is still being used for this.
  
  
• 10 new relics: This includes more than one relic which requires merging other relics and a new starting relic.
  Some placeholder art is still being used for this.
  
  
• 3 new carriages: However, they don't appear normally. They have something to do with some of the new relics...
  
  
• 8 new achievements: Certain things that many players have already done, such as unlocking all basic upgrades, will need to be re-done to get the achievement, since it wasn't being tracked before.
  
  
• New Elite Upgrade - Shop Level: I never liked that opening treasure chests was mostly pointless after All-In was unlocked. Now, you can upgrade your shop level! When you open a chest to buy more train carriages, the shop will contain carriages at the level equal to your shop level. For example, shop level 4 means that the carriages that you can buy will all start out at level 4, but the treasure chests will be proportionally more expensive (as if you were buying 3, 9, 27, 81, etc. carriages all at once). This affects All-In, too.
  
  
• New Gameplay Option - Mute Ticket Drop Sound Effect: Enable this option in the "Gameplay" tab to disable the little "ding" that plays when a ticket drops.
  
  
• New Collections menus - Unlocks and Achievements: Finally, the two missing screens under the Collections main menu item are available. You can view existing achievement and unlock data through these screens.
  There was a bug with certain items not being internally represented as 'unlocked', so if the unlock time seems wrong, that's why. It will be correct going forward.
  
  
• New Collections menu - Carriages: You can now view all of the carriages that you've seen in this menu, preview carriage stats at each level, and adjust each carriages' effect opacity! Note a carriage will not appear in this menu until you've added the carriage to your train at least once.
  
  
• After 4 hours of playing, an option to automatically open relic chests and select a random non-unique relic that you already have appears when opening a relic chest.
  
  
• ??? secret menu

[h2]Changes[/h2]

• All-In Changes: All-In can no longer be used to buy partial amounts of carriages -- it is exclusively used to upgrade carriages to the next level. The "Estimated Gold Required" is now the exact amount required. If you don't have enough gold, you cannot make an attempt.
  This lets me remove the 'train space required' calculation since train space doesn't matter for this process anymore. Also, a lot of the jankiness behind the calculation came from trying to figure out exactly how many carriages should be added to the player's train if the attempt fails, so that code can be removed too. It also lets me integrate shop level into All-In without much pain, and let's All-In calculations for very high level carriages become instant.
  
  
• The "Satyr" boss's rate limit was adjusted so that it won't spawn so many enemies so frequently. The frenzied state, which activates when you take too long to defeat Satyr, was adjusted to spawn significantly less minions. However, those minions will receive a large bonus to their health and movement speed, and that bonus will gradually increase until Satyr is defeated.
  
  
• The "Engineer" turret is a major cause of lag when it reaches high levels due to the number of missiles that each turret can fire. This is being changed: Engineer now only fires at most 2 missiles, but the damage scaling and area of effect scaling of missiles has increased considerably to compensate.
  
  
• Greatly improved performance of the "Elemental Mage" carriage, especially in the late game. The elementalist's cast duration has been set to a maximum of 4 seconds.
  
  
• Improved performance of the "Cursed Orb" carriage in the late game.
  
  
• Improved performance of the "Earthbreaker" carriage, especially in the late game.
  
  
• The boons which give more relic rerolls and train carriage free rolls now have a maximum level of 5.
  
  
• Flamethrower's tick rate (how often enemies within the flame are damaged) was increased by 31.7%.
  
  
• Flamethrower's "Flamer" relic now grants a free upgrade of your best Flamethrower on pick-up, or one will be added if you don't already have one.
  
  
• The "Energy Disk" carriage now has a maximum number of disks, a maximum size, and a maximum range from the carriage that each disk can orbit at. Very high levels of Energy Disk would block the entire screen, so this had to change. It's also now subject to low effect mode.
  
  
• New 'backups' folder for meta data: the game now backs up the last 5 instances of your meta data file (meta.sav) being saved. If something happens to your meta data, navigate to this folder right away and restore from a back-up file.
  
  Save folder: %APPDATA%\Godot\app_userdata\All Aboard The Train Defense Express\save\
  
  Back-ups folder: %APPDATA%\Godot\app_userdata\All Aboard The Train Defense Express\save\backups\
  
  meta.sav.bak0 is your most recent back-up file.
  meta.sav.bak5 is your least recent back-up file.
  Back-up files are not subject to Steam cloud storage. If you want to disable back-ups, edit game.cfg and change "create_backup_file" to "false".
  
  
• Increased the amount of tickets dropped from the first super boss killed.
  
  
• Increased the amount of tickets dropped by ordinary bosses.
  
  
• Wise Investment: Buffed mid-late game gold per minute cap scaling.
  
  
• Hand of Midas: Buffed mid-late game gold generation.
  
  
• The max level for the demo has been increased to 10.
  
  
• High amounts of armor can no longer completely nullify an attack from enemy creatures - it will always do a minimum of 1 damage. A bug was also fixed where high amounts of armor can cause enemy attacks to heal the Infinite Power Generator.
  
  
• Another adjustment to EXP calculation to reduce the amount of EXP gained in very, very long games.
  
  
• The damage per second meter now updates once per second independent of game speed (as originally intended). The update rate can be adjusted by editing the config file and changing the "dps_meter_tick_rate" line. Setting it too low may affect performance.
  

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

• A couple of users reported their saved meta data being wiped out. There were some rare circumstances where the game might overwrite your saved data with blank data, for example, if your game was closed before it finished loading your meta data. I've put in some protections against this, but let me know if it happens again in the future. If it does happen again, restore from a back-up file right away.
  
  
• Fixed a bug where saving the game with a relic chest on the ground gives 255 rerolls.
  
  
• Fixed a bug with Machine Gun/Shotgun/Bounty Hunter bullets where the collision box was way too small, causing it to occasionally go through enemies without damaging them.
  
  
• Fixed a bug with the "Shrapnel" relic where the burn was not dealing the correct amount of damage.
  
  
• Fixed a bug with the "Flamer" relic where the incorrect number of burn stacks were being applied.
  
  
• Fixed a bug with the "Sharpened Blades" relic where Saw Blades fired from the carriage were not applying the bleed debuff.
  
  
• Fixed a bug where you were prompted to select a carriage even though you already selected one when getting multiple stacks of the same relic.
  
  
• Fixed a targeting issue with Laser. When set to "Smart" targeting, it's supposed to disengage from weaker targets when a boss is in range - it now behaves correctly.
  
  
• Ticket counter is now properly updated when loading a game.
  
  
• Fixed display bug with the "Treasure Trove" relic.
  
  
• Fixed a bug where boss kills from damage dealt by Area of Effect damage would not immediately trigger the Assassin relic to update its damage bonus.
  
  
• Fixed a bug with Boomerang where the explosion would trigger more than once, causing explosive damage numbers.
  
  
• Fixed a bug with the Explosive Overkill relic where it was reporting way more damage dealt than it should.
  
  
• Fixed a bug with the "Patience" relic where it would stop generating gold if you spent too long banking gold.
  
  
• Fixed a display issue with the gold per minute calculation not updating properly when hovering the mouse over the the number of miners.
  
  
• Fixed the game showing you that you've unlocked the hardest difficulty multiple times.
  
  
• Fixed the secret starting relic not being immediately unlocked upon achieving the condition.
  
  
• Fixed a bug where the ticket drop rate was incorrectly high.
  
  
• Fixed performance issues in the game over screen when counting up extremely high scores and gold amounts.
  

That's all for this patch! But just because the game is released now, it doesn't mean that I'm done with the game yet. I'm not 100% sure if I'll do everything listed, but some of the things I'd like to implement in the future:

• Mobile port (coming next!)
  
• 1 Hour Challenge mode, a game mode where there's no Wise Investment or other economic carriages, where you just have to beat the 1 hour boss, with significantly harder difficulty in general.
  
• Use extra tickets to buy advantages in the next run.
  
• A different map than the green plains, with a differently-shaped train track.
  
• More bosses, enemies, and relics.
  

Now that we're out of early access, I won't be sticking to the "major patch every 3 weeks" schedule we've been on for the last 3 months, so I can take my time making the new content good and stable.
I'll be watching for bugs and issues. You can reply to this thread on Steam or use the in-game "Create Bug Report .zip File" button to report any issues. The absolute best way to report a bug is to send me the saved game file - game.sav - which demonstrates the issue.

Please enjoy!
- Likadev

Hello, gamers! I'm excited to bring lots of interesting changes with this patch!

First of all, thank you everyone who responded to the "beta" branch test request! You've helped make this patch much better. Don't forget to switch back to the regular branch, unless you want to continue receiving unstable test builds.

As we approach v1.0 release, I'm slowing down new features in favor of polishing, stabilizing, improving performance, and bug fixing the game. There are no new boons this patch. The last set of boons are coming in v1.0. However, there is a new feature that is definitely not small or insignificant - this one was in high-demand by many players!


[h2]New Content[/h2]

• Save & Continue: The long-awaited save/load system has arrived! You can now save your game and continue where you left off. The game automatically saves before/after every boss killed, when you open a relic chest, or if you close the game (either by closing the window or selecting "Exit to Desktop". If you get a game over, the save file is deleted.
  You can open the in-game Esc menu and select "Exit to Menu" to cash out your EXP and ticket rewards, if you want to receive EXP and tickets without having to Game Over, or you can select "New Game" instead of "Continue" from the main menu.
  
  
• Elite Upgrades: Upgrading everything in the "Upgrades" menu will now unlock a new window with a couple new things to spend money on. You better bring a LOT of money.
  
  
• 7 new relics! This includes a new starting relic, but how on earth do you unlock it...?
  The maximum level for new unlockable content is 60, where a fun new relic awaits you.
  
  
• New Display Option - Scientific Notation: When certain numbers start getting big (>= 1,000,000), display them in scientific notation.
  

[h2]Changes[/h2]

• Opening the treasure chests to buy new train carriages will gradually increase the price of each chest. This price curve has changed. It's a little more expensive in the early game, but becomes significantly cheaper the longer the game goes on. The drawback is that the chest price is no longer capped at ~9 quintillion, but can continue rising forever. However, it takes a really long time to get to that point, even if you're using All-In obsessively.
  The main benefit of this is that chest price calculation is nearly instant and very accurate for bulk chest buying (such as in All-In) at any number of chests. It can still take several seconds when you get to really high levels, but no more waiting for hours for it to complete.
  
  
• The All-In animation which counts down how many carriages you earned from All-In can now be skipped after it shows the "HERE WE GO!" message.
  Keyboard: ESC, Space Bar
  Mouse: Left-click
  Controller: B/Circle/the right button
  
  
• The "Penetrating Bullets" relic, which makes Machine Gun and Shotgun bullets penetrate enemies, now also applies to Bounty Hunter, which means each bullet will be able to increase the gem value more than once.
  
  
• The projectile for Machine Gun, Shotgun, and Bounty Hunter has been increased in size for easier visibility. The speed of the Machine Gun projectile was slowed a little bit for more reliable hit detection at higher game speeds.
  
  
• Wise Investment no longer has a maximum cap of ~60 quintillion gold per minute (level 14). The cap at level 11-14 has significantly increased, and it continues to increase beyond 14.
  
  
• EXP gained from very, very long sessions has been reduced. This is to prevent players from leveling up hundreds of thousands of times in one long game session.
  
  
• When defeating bosses, the amount of gem value you gain is now properly formatted.
  
  
• Cursed Orb: With All-In making it easier than ever to get super high level carriages, Cursed Orb had to be brought down a bit. 500,000% damage increase against targets by level 30 was way too much. The numbers have been reduced to be much more reasonable.
  
  
• Hand of Midas: Hand of Midas was temporarily changed a couple of patches ago due to some issues it had. I gave it a weak early game but an end game more powerful than Wise Investment. It got so strong that, by level 30, it generates 1.n... x 10^143 gold per hit, and the maximum gold allowed in the game is 9.999999 x 10^72, so it would just instantly restore you to full gold every hit. It scales off of your current gem value, but gem value gets really high as the game goes on, and gets higher and higher thanks to recent carriages and relics, so it's time to change Hand of Midas and bring it in line with Wise Investment.
  
  After the changes, the numbers are much more reasonable, although it's very strong in the early game compared to before. The source of instant infinite gold is gone, but there are more ways to generate gold this patch, so maybe you won't notice a big difference. Hand of Midas is the carriage that scales off of gem value, while Wise Investment scales off of your current gold value. I like it this way, but I'll continue to monitor it to make sure it's not too imbalanced either way.
  
  The base attack speed of Hand of Midas was lowered, but it now scales with levels.
  

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

• For convenience, a "Create Bug Report .zip File" button has been added to the "Advanced" tab of the "Options" screen. If a bug occurs, especially serious bugs such as a game crash, click this button as soon as it happens to generate a .zip file that you can e-mail to us. It includes your game meta data, game session save data, and log files, which will all be very helpful in fixing bugs. In the e-mail, please include as many details as possible about the bug and what you were doing when the bug occurred.
  
  
• For the hardcore players that managed to gain hundreds of thousands of levels in one session: doing this previously caused long loading times and performance issues in the game. When you start up your game, if your save file is detected to be affected by this, you'll be prompted to clean up your save file.
  
  
• Fixed a bug which could allow the player to generate more than the maximum gold limit. The maximum gold limit was increased to 9.999999 x 10^72.
  
  
• Fixed a serious performance issue when reaching multiple extremely large numbers for gold collected, gem value, miners, etc. simultaneously.
  Tech note: A lot of high-frequency number formatting code has been moved from GDScript to C++. There should be a huge performance increase for players who like long games.
  
  
• Fixed an issue that can occur dozens of hours into the game where the number of strong creatures that can spawn at once was uncapped. For example, it had the potential to spawn hundreds of shield-bearing creatures at once. This is now capped at 30.
  
  
• Fixed an issue with Boomerang's explosion not doing damage.
  
  
• Fixed the gold per minute calculation in the tooltip visible when hovering the mouse over the "Miners" label.
  
  
• Fixed the relic tooltip appearing behind the side information panel.
  
  
• Fixed relic icons appearing in front of the carriage information panel.
  
  
• Fixed the "Sharpened Blades" relic not applying Low Effects Mode correctly.
  
  
• Fixed mines laid by "Mine Layer" not applying Low Effects Mode correctly.
  
  
• Fixed a bug where critical strike chance bonuses from relics carried over between games.
  

[h2]Localization[/h2]
As non-English players may know, the localization of All Aboard into other languages isn't perfect. If you want to contribute to making the game better in your native language, please check out our entry on Localizor:

https://www.localizor.com/all-aboard-the-train-defense-express

* NOTE: This website requires a separate account to use.
This website allows users to submit translations for the game's buttons, labels, carriages, relics, tutorials, and everything else in your native language and submit it for review. Other players can vote on these translations. If approved by other players who speak your language, I'll replace the current translation with your suggestion. If you don't know what the label means and can't translate it, you can click the "Request context" button on the left-hand side. You can view all items to be translated by clicking the "Keys" button near the top of the page.

I may not be able to put all translations into the game. For example, some descriptions reference names of other things, such as upgrades, relics, or boons, but if the referenced names and descriptions are not translated consistently, I can't do much with it. There may be other problems too, such as not enough room to display the text.

I think I can see your usernames when you contribute a translation or vote on something. If that's the case, I'll put your name in the credits in patch v1.0. I'll be honest, I haven't used this website, so I don't know if it'll work, but if it can make the game's localization better, it's worth a try!

[hr][/hr]

That's all for this patch! I'll be monitoring this discussion thread for any serious issues, but the best way to report bugs is by e-mailing me your game save file and describing the issue you encountered.

The game will be released as v1.0 on 6/26/2025, just in time for the Steam summer sale. Expect the last set of boons, a few relics, and mostly maintenance/bug fixes.

Thank you for your support!
- Likadev

Hello everyone!

I've had my head down working hard on a couple of very important features coming in v0.9. I want to make sure these features are perfect when v0.9 launches in a couple of weeks, so I'm opening up the beta branch for anyone who wants to try it out early.

[h2]New Features[/h2]

• Save/Continue Game - If you close the game or exit through the menu, your game will automatically save. You can also save and exit to the main menu. It automatically saves before and after every boss fight, as well as when opening relic chests. There are some limitations:
  
  1) Certain map objects such as gems are not saved.
  2) Due to complex boss behavior, it will not save during a boss fight.
  
  The last thing I want to fix next patch is corrupted save issues, so please test this thoroughly and try to break it.
  
  
• Chest Price Change - The algorithm that drives the chest price up has been simplified. Chests are slightly more expensive early on, but curves much, much more gently as the game goes on. The main beneficiary of this change is the All-In system:
  
  1) All-In is now almost instant at any train carriage level. I can open quadrillions of chests in a second.
  2) All-In is generally cheaper. Keep in mind that v0.8.2 was using a temporary fix to always assume the minimum chest price when opening massive amounts of chests.
  3) All-In's chest price is no longer limited to ~9 quintillion - instead, it can grow forever.
  4) All-In's "Minimum Gold Cost" label is now "Estimated Gold Cost" and gives a reliable estimate on how much gold it will cost to All-In.
  

[h2]Extra Stuff in the "beta" Build[/h2]

• The "Penetrating Rounds" relic, which makes Machine Gun and Shotgun bullets penetrate enemies, now also applies to Bounty Hunter, which means each bullet will be able to increase the gem value more than once. (Tooltip not yet updated.)
  
  
• The projectile for Machine Gun, Shotgun, and Bounty Hunter has been increased in size for easier visibility. The speed of the Machine Gun projectile was slowed a little bit for more reliable hit detection at higher game speeds.
  
  
• Wise Investment no longer has a maximum cap of ~60 quintillion gold per minute (level 14). The cap at level 11-14 has significantly increased, and it continues to increase beyond 14.
  
  
• Fixed a performance issue that can occur dozens of hours into the game where the number of strong creatures that can spawn at once was uncapped. For example, it had the potential to spawn hundreds or thousands of shield-bearing creatures at once. This is now capped at 30.
  
  
• Fixed an issue with Boomerang's explosion not doing damage.
  
  
• Fixed the gold per minute calculation in the tooltip visible when hovering the mouse over the "Miners" label.
  

I'm sure there will be some bugs with these systems, so if anyone is willing to help test it, that'd be very helpful.

If you aren't sure how to get to the "beta" branch:

1) In Steam, right-click the game and select Properties.
2) Select the "Betas" tab.
3) Select "beta" from the drop-down.
4) Click OK. You should see an update to the game.

If you have any bug reports or feedback, feel free to reply to this post. It's always helpful if you copy everything in your config folder, zip it up, and e-mail it to [email protected], especially if serious bugs or crashes occur. (You can click the "Open Config Folder" in the "Advanced" tab of the options to get there.)

Thank you!

• To reduce lag, the Engineer train carriage now has a maximum duration of 30 seconds per turret.
  
• The pop-up damage numbers were causing excess lag spikes and have been throttled to not display too many per frame.
  
• The following train carriages had a bug that caused them to do WAY more damage than they should have, and was also a major source of performance issues (especially Hyper Beam):
  
  Hyper Beam, Sonic, Flamethrower, Boomerang, Energy Disk.
  
  They had an Area of Effect component coded into them, which means each enemy hit also did damage in an area, causing their damage to inflate, and also is probably the biggest source of lag in the game.
  Every carriage listed except for Hyper Beam was given a small buff to base damage to compensate for this fix (Hyper Beam is still amazing). Energy Disk's size scaling was also slightly increased.
  
• Due to the changes listed above, the "level 2" enemies have had their base health and movement speed reduced.
  
• The "Flamer" relic (for the Flamethrower carriage) now applies 3 stacks of Burning instead of 1 per tick of damage. (Tooltip has not yet been updated to reflect this.)
  
• Bounty Hunter now gives a bonus 3 gems per hit per level.
  

Performance-wise, the game runs MUCH better now, but the changes may have some balance implications, so please let me know if you're struggling too much. (Except on the new difficulty, that should be very hard.)