Dev Updates: Sculpting Worlds & Building Networks
Two new fundamental features: a new Terrain Editor, and our first draft of Interconnected Tracks. This unlocks deeper world-building, more realistic railway behaviour, and fully automated networks.
Hello everyone,
We are delighted by the positive response to our December development update (devlog), which was released last week. The update introduced several exciting new ways to play, and we’re thrilled by the variety of new features. For those who couldn’t catch the live stream, here is a concise overview of the most important highlights.
We’re excited to announce the release of two highly anticipated features in this update: an all-new Terrain Editor and a revised Interconnected Tracks system.
Unlocking Unprecedented World-Building with the new Terrain Editor
We are introducing one of the most asked for features in the game - the Terrain Editor! This powerful new tool represents a major step forward in giving you, the world-builders, greater creative control over your environments. Forget rigid landscapes; the Terrain Editor empowers you to sculpt, refine, and detail your world with an unprecedented level of precision and artistic freedom.
Core Sculpting Capabilities
The Terrain Editor’s core functionality is centered around intuitive, easy-to-use tools for landscaping every aspect of your world:
Elevation Manipulation (Raise/Lower): At the heart of the editor is the ability to sculpt the foundational shape of your landscape. With simple brush strokes, you can instantly raise or lower the terrain to create everything from gentle inclines and rolling hills to sheer cliffs, deep canyons, and dramatic mountainous peaks. This direct control allows for the rapid iteration and creation of diverse topographies.
Contour Smoothing: Achieving natural, believable landscapes often means softening harsh transitions. The dedicated smoothing tool allows you to seamlessly blend sharp edges, jagged peaks, and abrupt changes in elevation. This results in more organic, natural-looking contours, adding a crucial layer of immersion and realism to your world that makes exploration more rewarding.
Advanced Texturing and Detailing
Beyond shaping the land, the Terrain Editor gives you complete mastery over the visual appearance of your surfaces:
Adjustable Brush Painting: Our texture painting system allows you to apply in-game textures directly onto your sculpted terrain. More importantly, the system features fully adjustable brushes for size, falloff, and opacity.
Detailed Texture Application: Whether your vision calls for laying down expansive stretches of grassy plains, painting detailed paths of worn earth, or creating the stark contrast between smooth rock faces and patches of snow, the varied brush sizes enable you to achieve detailed, high-quality texture application. This means you can effortlessly transition from building a serene, moss-covered mountainous ravine to rendering expansive, scorched sand dunes, ensuring every inch of your world reflects your artistic intent.
Empowering Your Creative Vision
The Terrain Editor is more than just a set of tools; it’s a foundation for creative expression. From shaping quiet valleys and defining the flow of rolling hills to carving intricate, winding ravines or laying out vast, desolate sandy stretches, this new feature provides you with significantly more control over building the world you want to play in.
Dive in, experiment, and start crafting the immersive landscapes you’ve always envisioned!
Forging a Living Railway Network with Interconnected Tracks
This development is a monumental leap forward, transitioning our railway system from a collection of simple, isolated lines into complex, dynamic networks. It represents the foundational first major step toward realizing truly ambitious and intricate track layouts.
The introduction of the Interconnected Tracks system fundamentally redefines how you can design, build, and operate your rail infrastructure. It is driven by two core, highly impactful behaviours:
Dynamic Path Splitting
Previously, tracks were simple point-to-point connections. Now, using new presets integrated directly into the track-laying tool, builders can define sophisticated track junctions and switches.
This allows a single incoming track to branch off into multiple predetermined paths (e.g., a straight-through line, a siding, or a junction leading to a different sector). These presets are key to building shunting yards, station approaches, and main line interchanges, giving you granular control over the potential routes a train can take.
On-the-Fly Route Management
The most significant operational change is the ability to change a train’s route on the fly without stopping the network. Using the new control interface, operators can dynamically signal a train to switch its trajectory as it approaches a junction.
This control is instant and responsive, moving beyond static, pre-set routes to allow for real-time traffic management, emergency rerouting, or simply directing a train to its appropriate loading bay. This functionality is crucial for avoiding collisions and optimizing flow.
The Network Comes to Life
These two additions synergize to achieve the ultimate goal: allowing you to run multiple trains on pre-defined routes simultaneously and autonomously.
By defining clear paths, implementing control points at every switch, and managing the dynamic routing, you can transform what was a simple, closed loop into a sprawling, living network that mimics real-world railway complexity.
This foundation feature enables us to build the future of our automated train networks, where trains will wait for clearances, dynamically choose the shortest route, or be diverted to a maintenance siding, creating a dense, complex, and immensely satisfying railway environment.
What’s Next? The Road Ahead
We are currently dedicating a significant portion of our development cycle to both refining our existing toolset and aggressively expanding the game’s core feature list. While new content is always exciting, our immediate and most critical goal is to dramatically enhance the authenticity of the simulation.
To achieve this, we are laser-focused on developing and implementing features that significantly bolster realism. This isn’t just about graphics; it involves deep systemic work on elements like:
Advanced Physics Model: Overhauling the current physics engine to account for finer interactions, material properties, and environmental forces, ensuring that every action has a believable and realistic consequence within the game world.
Dynamic AI Behavior: Expanding the complexity of network routines, building the foundation for implementing automated logic networks and interactions between the track layouts, the world built around it and its environment, within the physics sandbox this world exists in.
Environmental Complexity: Introducing more granular environmental simulation, including realistic weather effects, detailed resource degradation, and complex ecosystem interactions that influence gameplay.
These realism-focused features are foundational to the immersive experience we aim to deliver. We are focused on building deeper roots on these three tracks and establish a robust, authentic simulation layer and maintain the depth our community expects.
Watch the full Devlog below:
We are incredibly excited about the progress we’re making in this area. We encourage all of you to keep an eye out for our next devlog announcement to stay fully up-to-date with our progress, detailed feature breakdowns, and some more early gameplay footage!
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