Hello, Railroaders! It's been a busy month for us here on the Railroader Dev Team. We've got three things to share with you today.
First, it's Train Fest here on Steam, which means it's a great time to pick up Railroader for 25% off!
Second, we'll have a booth at the National Train Show in Chattanooga, TN, USA, August 1st and 2nd. If you're in the area, come by and say hello! Also: I'll be presenting Railroader in Meeting Room 6 at 4pm, Saturday. (From what we understand this is included in the train show admission.)
And third, we've made some incredible progress on the forthcoming update in the past few weeks. It's been a very exciting time for the dev team to see all of this work coming together. There's still a lot to share there, but in this post I want to focus on one aspect of it: Map Modding.
Map Modding in the MoW Update
One of the biggest requested features for Railroader has been map modding. Like official modding support in general — which is a focus of this update — we've wanted to add map modding, but we knew that it would be a really big lift for our small team. Railroader's map wasn't built for modding, and part of the reason is that I didn't want to try to design a modding system for something that wasn't fully defined yet. Now that the Maintenance of Way features have matured in development, we feel more confident that we know what a map modding system needs to support.
Still: there's a lot going on in the Railroader map! There's track, industries, signals, scenery, animated scenery, roads, water, trees and vegetation. We could make it possible to mod these things through a file format like JSON, but without an editor we don't see that as an acceptable solution. The most responsible approach seemed to be to not commit to building map modding. Maybe in a few years, we thought.
In the year plus that the MoW Update has been in development, there's been a lot of change in the modding community, and at the same time internally we've been putting a lot of work into the official modding infrastructure. The former created pressure to find a solution, while the latter gave us more confidence to approach the problem. The Railroader community has attracted some very talented modders, and both they and the players who use their mods have told us the same thing: they need stability.
So we knew that we needed to build map modding, but we also knew that we didn't have the resources to build the complete solution right away. It would need to be incremental. Perhaps, if we could release a map editor with the basics and add to it in follow-up updates, that would be of value to the community. The feedback we received was very positive. We took on the challenge and we're glad we did. We think you will be, too.
What have we built?
We're approaching map modding and the map editor by creating the core elements first. Map tile data and map object data have been moved to asset packs (our mod packaging system). The map editor is a part of the game itself. Although a dedicated editor can be nice, in our testing we've found that seeing the game world exactly as it appears in the game itself is extremely helpful, particularly when laying trackwork.
Our plan is for the map editor and modding system to support the following with the MoW Update:
In-editor terrain fetching
Track, industries, and scenery objects (buildings, etc.)
Masks: shapes which are used to change the heightmap or vegetation in an area
The editor runs in single player only, but modded maps can be played multiplayer as long as the other players have the mod installed
The following are not planned for the initial release, but we do plan to add support for them in the future:
Progressions/milestones
Signs
Signals & CTC
Roads & rivers
Crossing signals and crossing pads
One of the parts of this system that I'm most excited about is that it allows you to create map mods of other map mods. For example, you can add industries and track to another map, remove track, or reuse the tiles from another map but nothing else.
We've ported the base game's terrain, track, and industries to this new system, but much of the scenery (signs, crossings, rivers, roads) has not been ported. What this means is that you can create a mod based on the base game terrain, track and industries; it just wouldn't contain those unported scenery objects. We plan to move more of the base map into the new system over time, however.
When can I get it?
We're planning to release 2026.1, including Maintenance of Way, Map Modding, Equipment Modding, and more, on an experimental branch within the next couple of months, once we are confident that it is ready. A lot has changed since 2025.1, and a little more testing now will help us better support all of you once it is publicly available.
As always, we appreciate your support. Railroader has come a long way and — not unlike the game itself — we've still got a boiler full of steam!
- Adam and the Railroader Dev Team