Pioneers, remember the rocket? The one that came screaming out of the sky at the start of every run with your locomotive strapped to it? It's retired. It had a good career. Mostly downhill.

Your train comes from somewhere now. So do the wanderers. So do the couriers. And the world they all come out into just keeps going.

The factory

Your train is built in a factory you can't drive to. It isn't anywhere on the map. It's a pocket of its own, folded away behind a door, with room inside for whatever needs building. Cranes ride gantries over the lanes, a press pumps up and down and a flywheel spins. Your locomotive and tender are built in there, on their own lane, facing a blue door in the wall.

When it's time to go, a yellow bolt drops out of the sky and hits the rails. Where it lands, a door opens. Your train rolls out of the factory, through the door and onto the line, and a few seconds later the door shuts behind the last car.

Look through it while it's open. That's where you were built.

New cars, same door

Build a car and the factory makes that too. A car has no engine of its own, so a stubby little shunting tug does the honors. It shoves the new car through the portal and out onto the track behind your train.

It arrives loose. Back up and couple it yourself, the way a Pioneer should.

And if you want it facing the other way, there's a second button on the confirm now that builds it backward.

Towns build their own

Every town that makes wanderers builds them in a hangar of its own, a pocket far bigger than anything the town could hold. One tall bay, a pad in the middle, and a roof full of nested hexagon frames, one for every size of wanderer.

The town's Constructor doesn't fire rockets anymore either. It lobs a glowing orb into the air, and where the orb bursts a door opens in the sky, facing up. A moment later a fresh wanderer climbs out of it. The door is always its size, and it never opens the same way twice.

So keep an eye on the sky over a town. If a door opens up there, something is coming out of it.

The courier bay

Your tender has a new room. Walk to the far end, take the short corridor off the side wall, and you're in a little hangar with a courier waiting on the pad. It hovers there, props turning, and it won't let you walk through it.

Walk in and it says hello. Stick around and it'll tell you a joke, laugh at its own joke, and start trading banter with your train. The couriers are a good bit bigger now, too, so there's more to like.

You can grapple it. It'll complain. It'll complain more the second time, and after that it gets really fed up with you.

When your tender sends a delivery, its dock gun fires a yellow bolt high over the roof. A door opens in the sky above your train, the bay's roof opens under the courier, and up it goes, straight through one and out of the other. Then it's off on its errand.

Out there it's fair game for the other side. An enemy harpoon can pull a courier out of the sky and keep what it was carrying, and yours can do the same to theirs.

An infinite world, the easy way

The world used to come in regions: "unlimited regions", one after another, each with its own edge, and you crossed from one into the next, forever. It sounded great on paper. In practice, it was a lot of edges.

So we threw that out and built an infinite world instead, because that's easier. Obviously. Nothing says "done by Friday" like a world that doesn't end.

The land and the track are built from your world's seed as you travel, all around you and farther out ahead. After the opening load, there are no more loading screens.

The track never runs out. Even the mountains on the horizon travel with your train. However far you ride, you never get any closer to them.

Your first hour

An Expedition begins on the Expedition screen, where you type in a world seed, a latitude and a longitude, and pick a difficulty. If there's no town where you pick, you'll start at the closest one. Press Survey for a map of your start, with an X on your town. Come back to the same seed and spot and you'll find the same tracks, towns and hills.

You start on foot, at a neutral town that's yours to take. It's the only one that isn't hostile. A Soul relic waits on its pedestal a short walk away. Take it, and down comes that yellow bolt. Your train's on its way.

Two railways wind across the whole world, so you're never far from track. The main line runs right past your town. It keeps mostly to the ground, carries every town and winds through every part of the land. It bends every 200 meters or so, each bend in its own random spot, so no two stretches are laid out quite alike.

The second line weaves through the gaps between the main line's bends, 12.5 meters up. Your train runs the main line, so the second is the one you'll see passing overhead. The two never share a stretch of track. Where they cross, one always passes well over the other.

And both of them climb. At random bends, either line winds up into a helix of one to nine loops, and every climb has a matching descent farther along. A one-loop helix lifts you 12.5 meters, and a nine-loop helix lifts you 62.5. Small helices are common and big ones are rare. Only a few in every thousand have nine loops, so if you spot one, take a picture.

Your map scrolls with your train, north up, and towns show on it as you come close enough to see them. The main line is yellow, the second is blue, and your latitude and longitude sit along the bottom.

The neighbors

There's a town in every other row and every other column, wherever your latitude and longitude are both even numbers. The next one is only a few hundred meters away, and you always know where to look. It isn't friendly. Every town but yours is hostile.

Enemy towns build wanderers, and you've seen the doors they come out of. Each town keeps up to ten in the air, and they come looking for your train. Every one you shoot down makes room for another. Getting out of sight doesn't help, either. Once you've been close, a town keeps sending wanderers even after it's back in the fog.

Towns have water, fuel and metal at their feet, with more deposits scattered in between. Where the main line runs high, its town sits up on a flat-topped plateau, level with the track. There are no ramps. That's what your grapple and your new Steampack are for, and the Steampack is exactly what it sounds like.

Fortresses stand between the towns, never in them, and they're as big and as well armed as your difficulty allows.

Under old management

Say you take the town next door. Nice work. Now drive off and leave it the better part of a kilometer behind, and it resets, unless one of your cars is still parked beside it.

Come back and it's rebuilt as you get close. It's the same town in the same place, as hostile as it was before you ever showed up. You'll have to take it again. Your start town is no exception. Wander far enough and it falls to the enemy like any other.

So keep taking towns as you go. If you lose your train, the town you took most recently is where the next one comes from, and a town that's reset can't send you one. Lose your train with no town left to send another, and your run is over.

Nine of almost everything

While the factory was going up, the armory filled in. Most turret families have nine guns now, a full three by three on the build grid. That's eighty-four turrets to choose from, before you've picked a single level.

A lot of the new ones are exactly what they sound like. The Piledriver drives piles. The Hail Cannon hails. The Rivet Gun is a very serious weapon, and we'd thank you not to laugh at it.

The Healers picked up a Cleanse Projector, a Shield Projector and a Supply Mortar. The Mine Layers got webs and magnets. And yes, there's a Searchlight. It mounts on your train like any other gun, and it's very proud of itself.

Here's every one of them, family by family, from Level 1 to Level 3.

Rooms that grow with the car

One fix while we were in there. Upgrading a car never rebuilt the room inside it, so a Level 3 car could still have a Level 1 room. Now the room upgrades with the car.

Hello, Linux and Mac

Train Trek runs natively on Linux now. It's experimental, which is the polite word for it. The less polite word is that it might crash, and a few brave Pioneers are about to find out exactly where before we do.

The same goes for Mac. It's here, it's experimental, and it may fall over in ways the Windows version doesn't.

If it does, hang in there. These are exactly the problems we're working through right now, and they will get solved. Tell us what happened in the Steam discussions, and thank you for your patience while we get there.

One tip for the Steam Deck: with a Linux version out, the Deck picks it on its own. If it gives you trouble, you can go back to the Windows version under Proton. Open Train Trek's Properties, go to Compatibility, and turn on "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool." Same game, just the version that's had more miles on it.

Go pick a world and build something in it, Pioneers. Watch your train come through the door, go meet the neighbors and see where the line goes. And somewhere along the way, stand in the courier bay for a minute, because it's been waiting all day to tell you that joke.