Nacon’s railway simulator Train Life received the first major update. The game is developed by Simteract and is currently available in the Early Access stage. For the first time in railroad simulation, play as both the driver and company director! Take the controls of your locomotives and grow your railway empire by negotiating deals and developing your network.
The first update added a variety of new features, new regions and events as well as introduced a number of changes and fixes.
“Shortly after launch we had to make the difficult decision to temporarily disable AI Train and broken-down locomotive events, as they were causing too many issues with driving progression and signals. We’re very excited to flick the switch and let them run wild in our game again, but with many improvements to their spawning and logic. We do expect some edge cases to occur, but we’re confident in the overall improvement to these two crucial events. Thank you for being patient!
As our content updates continue to be worked on and roll out, expect more communication from our side. When we leave work, we’re gamers just as much as anyone else reading this. We know how important it is to keep our community close to us and confident in our team’s abilities. We’re deeply appreciative of all the support and criticism we receive, and while we may not have the manpower to work through it all as fast as we wish, we’re dedicated to addressing the concerns you all have!” – Joey Bougneit, Lead Game Designer
Features
- Added Scenarios Mode with ICE3 and ICE4 locomotives – Willkommen, Eisenbahnfans!
- Added 3 new optional cabin button features, which can be enabled via the options menu in-game
- Air Conditioning
- Dead Man’s Switch
- Incline Button
Regions
- Western Europe – This includes France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom. Slowly conquering all of Europe, just as Crusader Kings taught me.
- Locomotives.
- Added the Deutsche Bahn ICE 3.
- Added the Deutsche Bahn ICE 4.
Events
- AI Trains and Broken-down locomotives are back, with 16x the fish AI
Sounds
- Appropriate sounds have been added to the new region, as opposed to inappropriate sounds OwO
Settings
- Added ‘Locomotive Part Cost Multiplier’ functionality to difficulty settings (in the future difficulty settings will be customizable)
Miscellaneous
- Headlights are now required for riding at night, but feel free to scare your passengers for a little bit by turning them off – “Look, I can drive with no hands or lights!”
- The GPS will prefer right-hand tracks and station bypass tracks, if possible. This should alleviate many issues with our GPS wasting your time. Wasting time is now your responsibility!
Changes & Fixes
- Tracks & Railways
- Added a railway bypass at Hamburg Main Station
- Fixed instances of crossings that would get blocked by AI trains
- Fixed many instances of blocked rails
- Fixed a billion instances of signal and corridors absence & misplacement. Okay, it’s probably not a billion, but LD told me it was too many to count. And since I can only count to about 14, a ‘billion’ seems like the most logical next step.
- Redesigned railway layouts at some problematic junctions. Look, they were poorly behaved and had to be taught a valuable life lesson.
Tablet
Additional navigational fixes for using the tablet with a gamepad
Gameplay
- Improvement of AI Trains, Events and blocking signals
- Fixed dysfunctional blocking signals that were at the edges of junctions or inside them
- Fixed multiple problems with track markers during passenger/postage delivery
- Fixed wrong amount of damage dealt to player after colliding with blockade at low speed
- Fixed incorrect compatible bogies for the Lechner-Koch FZ18
- Fixed incorrect compatible bogies for the Lechner-Koch FZ21
- Adjusted spawning weights of all events
- Lowered max speed on all engines to help normalize values around actual in-game speed limits
- ‘Refueling’ and ‘Fuel Leak’ employee events can now no longer occur if the employee is driving an electric locomotive – maybe I’ll add a ‘battery leak’ event, just for that feeling of being on 1% battery and trying to quickly get that text off before the battery dies
- Animals on and near the tracks will now automatically run away when 45m away instead of 30m, because animals don’t always have a death wish
- Animals on the tracks can now be honked at to make them run away at a distance fewer than 150m rather than 60m, because animals have great hearing unlike our game suggested
- Restored block occupancy violation fine with a fine value of 1000 and a minimum jail time of 5 years IN REAL LIFE – How’s that for consequences, eh?
- Fixed improper damage values on events that can be collided with
Level Art & Design
- Added life to Western Europe: People
- Added life to Western Europe: Traffic
- Added life to Western Europe: Birds
- Visual upgrades in Western Europe
- Various level art and design fixes have been performed in Germany and Western Europe
Sound
- Fixed not stopping voiceover and missing cabin sounds when skipping tutorial cutscenes. I get it, you don’t want to hear my voiceover any more than necessary. I empathize strongly.
Language
- Update various translations
- Stability & Performance
- Increased FPS in the tablet
- Improved performance of long GPS routes
- Fixed very rare crash after starting a new game in Berlin area
- Miscellaneous
- The game will now remember chosen camera after changing locomotives…and I will continue to not remember anything from over a week ago
- Adjusted probability of all weather episodes
- Lowered general fog level in all weather episodes
- Fixed a litany of bugs in the tutorials