We are excited that today the Train Fever USA DLC was officially released! The DLC is available for free and features a complete American game mode.

Here is the launch trailer:

Equivalent to the original European game mode, the player starts in 1850 and experiences more than 150 years of railroad history. More than 50 realistic American vehicles including trains, buses, streetcars and trucks are included.

To make the American experience complete, landscape and towns are modified as well. Wild West stylized American towns spread in a desert landscape and wait for a transport tycoon to be connected to the world. Also, environment elements like trees, streets and the sky have been adapted.

All vehicles are realistic. Models and textures have been developed by using blueprints and photographs of the original vehicles. As a result, the USA DLC depicts quite a piece of American railroad and transportation history.

The USA DLC has been developed in close collaboration with the modding community. We are excited that modders have contributed more than 15 vehicles. It’s great to see such an active modding community. To further support modding activities, together with the release of the USA DLC modding support was significantly extended. Most important, mods can now be enabled and disabled in-game. Also, there are more modding possibilities now.

Because the modding system has been completely reworked, we highly recommend that all players who have installed mods should clean their game installation. To do so, please first delete the “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Train Fever\res” folder and second run the “Verify” option in the Steam client (Steam Client -> Train Fever -> Properties -> Local Files -> Verify Integrity of Game Cache”).

Today we officially announce that the Train Fever USA DLC will be released this Friday, February 27. The DLC will be available for free and features a complete American game mode.

Equivalent to the original European game mode, the player starts in 1850 and experiences more than 150 years of railroad history. More than 50 realistic American vehicles including trains, buses, streetcars and trucks are included.

To make the American experience complete, landscape and towns are modified as well. Wild West stylized American towns spread in a desert landscape and wait for a transport tycoon to be connected to the world. Also, environment elements like trees, streets and the sky have been adapted.

All vehicles are realistic. Models and textures have been developed by using blueprints and photographs of the original vehicles. As a result, the USA DLC depicts quite a piece of American railroad and transportation history.

An American wild west style town.

4-4-0 General locomotive crossing a river.

Metroliner electric multiple unit.

The USA DLC has been developed in close collaboration with the modding community. We are excited that modders have contributed more than 15 vehicles. It’s great to see such an active modding community. To further support these activities, together with the release of the USA DLC modding support is significantly extended.

Today we have released build 5112. The build fixes a number of serious issues which came up with the last updates (build 5068 / 5080).

Most important, players reported freezes at the end of each game month. We have identified the problem and it is fixed now. Because since the last update, the game runs faster during the months, on certain systems (parallel) simulation calculations which need to be finished at the end of each month were still in progress and caused these freezes.

In addition, several small fixes and improvements are included in this update. Please find the release notes here.

Finally, let us mention that due to a lot of feedback and criticism related to the street main connection feature, we have decided that it will be possible to disable the feature in a future version. However, when doing so, the game will switch to “sandbox” mode (i.e. achievements cannot be earned in such games). Most likely this will be released together with the USA DLC. Also, we are thinking about other ways to “force” the player to maintain the main connections.

After a short break over the holiday season our team is back at work, and development runs at full steam! We are happy that today another game update has been released.

The update brings a significant performance boost. Many CPU calculations have been optimized, and the most expensive CPU task (pathfinding for people and goods) has been moved to a separate thread. In other words, Train Fever now exploits today’s multi-core processors. As a result, the game runs more fluently and the number of frames per second is higher, especially when playing with 2x or 4x game speed.

After the last update, many players complained about the newly introduced main connection street feature. The most important problem was that players were not able to remove or change streets even when a reasonable bypass was present. Unfortunately there was a major bug which we now have fixed. Let us apologize for this.

In addition there are various improvements like e.g. correct vehicle door animations (now doors open at the platform side only). Another widely requested feature is the ability to reduce the auto save frequency. We have added that and it’s even possible to disable auto save at all. Also the game has been translated to Spanish and Korean.

Please find the complete release notes here.

Finally let us mention that the development of the USA DLC goes according to our plans. You can expect the DLC to be released in the second part of February. We are excited that many modders are contributing to the DLC, and if you still like to take part please check this page.

Thanks for your continuing interest in Train Fever and best wishes!

Today we officially announce a first Train Fever DLC. The DLC will be available for free in February 2015 and will include more than 50 typical American locomotives, train cars, buses, streetcars and trucks.

But it’s not only vehicles: When starting a new game, players can choose whether to play in a European or American environment then. Terrain, vegetation and towns will look different dependent on the player’s choice as well.

At the same time, modding capabilities will be extended. We will not only reduce the number of currently hard-coded implementation parts, but also improve the handling of mods in general: Mods can then be activated or deactivated in-game and save games will remember which mods are active.

We have observed the modding scene (especially on http://www.train-fever.net/) during the last months and we are absolutely excited by the huge amount of great content created there. Because we are not able to model all vehicle by ourselves and because many modders like to contribute, we have decided to involve the modding scene in the development of the USA DLC. Therefore we officially invite all modders to take part here.

This said, we would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. 2014 was an amazing year for us and you can be sure that we won’t stop listening to the community, developing new features and improving the game also in 2015.