Simutrans

About the game

Simutrans is a transport simulation. You start with a company, some money and a map full of towns, farms, mines, factories and shops, and your job is to move things between them: passengers and mail between towns, coal to power stations, grain to bakeries, goods to the shops that sell them. Every load you deliver earns money, and every vehicle and track you own costs money to run.

The map is made of square tiles seen from an angle. You build on it with tools for railways, roads, trams, monorails, harbours and airports, then place stations and stops, buy vehicles in depots and give them a schedule: where to load, where to unload and how long to wait. Lines group vehicles that share a schedule, so a busy route can be served by ten buses as easily as one.

Simutrans pays close attention to where things go. Passengers have real destinations and will not ride a bus that never gets them there, factories need every ingredient of their recipe before they produce anything, and a station only collects from the buildings around it. A network that looks good on the map can still lose money, and part of the fun is finding out why.

The game began in the late 1990s as the project of Hansjörg Malthaner and has been developed since 2004 by the Simutrans Team, a group of volunteers. This page runs version 124.5 with pak64, the original set of graphics, where the timeline starts in 1930 and new trains, buses, ships and planes appear as the years go by.

Playing it here

Press Play and the game downloads (about 9 MB) and opens on the start screen, with a small demo world running behind it. From there:

New Game opens the map settings. The defaults (256 × 256 tiles, 16 towns, the year 1930) are a good first game; press Start Game.
Tutorial loads the built-in tutorial: a ready-made town in 1960 and a series of chapters (roads, rails, ships, industry) that walk you through each step and check your work.
Load Scenario offers four challenges with a goal: carry 500 passengers a month, become a millionaire as fast as you can, or get a book shop or a pharmacy selling by supplying it.
Load Game lists your saved games.

Saved games, screenshots and settings stay in this browser. Clearing the site data erases them. This build has no online play and no music (the game's music is MIDI, which the browser version cannot play); sound effects are on. The first time it opens, the game uses the language of this page; you can change it later in the options.

Controls

Left mouse button: press buttons, pick tools from the toolbar at the top and use them on the map. For a road or a track, click where it starts and then where it ends, and the game builds the way between the two.
Right mouse button: hold and drag to scroll the map.
Mouse wheel or Page Up/Page Down: zoom in and out.
Keys are case-sensitive. p: pause. m: map. f: finances. w: lines. Shift+J: jump to coordinates.
Ctrl+S / Ctrl+O: save / load. F1: help with the full list of keys.

Your first bus line

Pick a large town and open the road tools (the bus-and-road icon on the toolbar).
Choose a bus stop and place a few of them on the town's roads, a short walk apart so that most houses are near one. Each stop shows the area it covers.
Build a road depot next to a road, then click the depot to open it.
Buy a bus, press Schedule and click your stops in order. Start the bus.
Watch the stop windows: the waiting passengers and the money shown when a bus unloads tell you whether the line works. Add buses when people pile up.

Once a town is served, connect two towns with a road and a longer bus line, or build your first railway between a coal mine and a power station.

A few things worth knowing

Coverage matters. A stop only picks up passengers and goods from the tiles around it, so place stops where the houses and factory gates are.
Chains. Factories only produce when they receive what they need, and some need more than one input. Click a factory with the inspection tool (the magnifying glass) to see what it consumes and where it can deliver.
Money. Track, roads and vehicles have running costs every month. Open the finances window (f) to see how the company is doing, and the line list (w) to see which lines pay their way.
Timeline. With the timeline on, only vehicles of the current year are for sale. Better models arrive over the decades; old ones can be replaced.
Pause freely. Building while paused is allowed, and it is the easiest way to plan a big station.

Credits and licence

Simutrans was created by Hansjörg Malthaner and is developed by the Simutrans Team. The game, its texts and the pak64 graphics are free software under the Artistic License 1.0; three items of pak64 are under the GNU GPL version 3. The official site is simutrans.com.

This is a browser build made by FredyGames from the official 124.5 release with a small patch: the game hands control back to the browser while it runs, and network play and the pakset downloader are switched off. It is not an official release of the Simutrans Team. The complete source of this build (the official source, the pak64 source, our patch and the build script) and every licence are listed below.