Pioneers,

Most of your time in Train Trek is spent up above it all. High over the train, looking down on the rails, the rock and everything trying to stop you. It's a fine view for a fight. It's the wrong one for a story.

And there's a story out here. A world that was old long before the first Pioneer laid a rail, full of things that were never meant to be looked at from the sky. You can't take in a place like that from up there. You have to stand in it.

So we came down. You can step off the locomotive now. Not to watch it from a new angle. To walk.

Bigger on the inside

Your train is bigger on the inside. Every car has a room, every room wears its own car's colors, and the whole train joins up into one long walk from the locomotive to the last car. Doors open as you reach them. The two ends stay shut.

Only Pioneers get in. Your guildmates can follow you through. Nobody else can, however hard they try.

The room at the front

At the front of the locomotive there's a chamber with seven pedestals in it, one for each Virtue. Each pedestal has three places to set something down, and each of those places fits exactly one thing.

We're not going to tell you what goes where. You'll know them when you find them.

Doors in the rock

Out in the wilds there are openings you'd never notice from the rails. Blue on the way in. Amber on the way out.

The machines inside are old. They weren't built by Pioneers and they weren't built for you, and something has gotten into their cores that makes them glow a color nobody likes. Down there, they're the only light.

They don't open fire the moment they see you. They watch first, and some of them make up their minds faster than others. Stay out of their sight and you can walk straight past. Stay in it too long and you'll find yourself back home, wondering what happened.

Two hands and one back

One hand throws a grappling hook, and the hook will follow you straight through a portal. The other opens the portals. You can jump twice, which you'll need more often than you'd think.

Your back carries one thing. Only one. Pick it well, because you're taking it home on foot.

And the train doesn't forget you're out there

Look at something and one of your guns will look at it too. For a few seconds, if you ask, all of them will.

Dress for it

The Depot fits Pioneers now as well as trains. A frame to wear, piece by piece, in your own colors. Until you design one, you'll wear your locomotive's paint, which is only fair.

Meanwhile, the rock breaks

Alongside all of that, we spent a long stretch making Train Trek run properly. We chased down a Steam Deck report of one frame per second and fixed it. We pinned the view distances so every quality setting sees the same world, instead of quietly shrinking it on you. We cut what the shadows were drawing.

It worked. So we opened the profiler to admire our own handiwork, and found the graphics card sitting there doing nothing.

Not struggling. Idle. It had finished its share of the frame and was waiting for the rest of us to catch up.

That felt like waste. So we went looking for something to spend it on.

You still cannot dig

We want to be clear about this, because we know exactly what some of you were about to try.

The damage is cosmetic. The rock looks hurt. It is not out of your way. Nothing you shoot changes where a train can go, where a wanderer can fly, or what a shell can hit.

If you were planning to tunnel under a fortress and come up inside it, we admire the ambition.

It grows back

Leave a broken column alone and the land knits it together again, slowly, in the same warm orange the cleanse wears everywhere else. Come back later and your handiwork is gone.

Whether that's the world healing or the world tidying up after you is between you and the world.

Less static, especially on the Deck

While we were in there, we fixed something that had been bothering us for a while. Far-off rock used to sparkle. Every tiny crack and hex line on a distant column tried to squeeze itself into a pixel or two, lost, and flickered like a badly tuned TV.

On a big monitor it was annoying. On a Steam Deck, where every distant column gets even fewer pixels to live in, it was worse.

So detail now fades with distance, the way your eyes already do it. Up close the rock keeps every crack. Farther out, the fine work gives way to bigger, calmer shapes. The tops of the columns and the track ballast do it, and so do the mossy, snowy and sandy tops, which trade their fibers for broader patterns. Grass blades settle into tufts.

Nothing goes flat or washed out. It just stops fizzing. It reads cleaner at any resolution and a good deal calmer on a small screen, and your Deck will thank you quietly, which is the whole point.

If your Deck has finally started behaving, it should carry on behaving. If it doesn't, tell us, and we'll take some rock back out.

Thank you for your patience while we figure all of this out.

Step off the train, Pioneers. Somebody left a door open. And if you break something on the way, it'll forgive you in a minute.