Subway Builder news & patch notes

Version 1.5.0 is now live for all players.

Features

- Experimental: this build plays fully offline. Your license is checked once the first time you launch online, each city's map downloads and stays on your machine, and after that you can build with no connection. - You can now view the speed of each route on the tracks it runs on with the new route speeds panel. The panel also includes stats like route length, speed, station stop time, etc.

- The measure tool now shows walking time in addition to distance.

- Added border crossing demand data in San Diego (it seems there are no pedestrian border crossings in Detroit though).

- The map in every city will now subtly color neighborhoods with high commercial or college worker density.

- Routes can now have a “full name” in addition to their route bullet.

Improvements

- Huge rewrite of the pathfinding algorithm. Lots of pathfinding bugs have been solved and pops know how to transfer trains better. This new pathfinding algorithm is also much more performant. More information on this system is available in-game and at subwaybuilder.com/simulation.

- Increased performance on large maps by ~35% on Windows and ~15% on Mac.

- You can now make your heavy metro lines use any amount of train cars between 5 and 15 cars, unlike before where you were pinned to using either 5, 10, or 15 car sets.

- Pops will now consider journeys requiring up to 4 transfers (previously it was limited to 3).

- Home and workplaces will be paired together to form pops differently from before. Previously, commuting distance distributions were hardcoded into the pairing script to fit NYC and Philadelphia commuting distance patterns but now commuting distance distributions will follow the real life distributions of that cities LODES data.

- Station group marker dots can be moved to make more aesthetically pleasing station markers.

- Increased the distance pops are willing to walk to or from a station from 30 to 45 minutes.

- The warnings panel sits flush against the edge of the screen again.

- Slightly expanded San Diego

- The tutorial's step chime is tuned to a pentatonic scale so it's easier on the ears.

- Made daily challenge only use transit share game mode

- Made city select globe stop auto-spinning

- Toggle button in the annotations layer for toggling the annotations map layer.

- When panels are pinned now the panel it is split from doesn't remain anymore, similar how it functioned before the UI update

- Achievement descriptions now show in the achievements menu.

- Removed some transit-associated LA buildings from the building database.

- Made track drawing faster on large maps.

- Added a ridership per station chart to the route stats panel.

- Increased commuter rail grade crossing TPH limits by ~50%.

- Cities now have a difficulty level in the city select screen.

- Increased commuter rail grade crossing TPH limits by ~50%.

- Fixed light metro acceleration being too low

- Slight modifications to light metro and heavy metro track costs

- Reduced heavy and light metro TPH limits slightly to 42 TPH for realism

- Made game start paused by default - Increased heavy and light metro max slope percentages to 5.5%.

- You can make your heavy metro lines use any amount of train cars between 5 and 15 cars, unlike before where you were pinned to 5, 10, 15 car set.

Bug Fixes

- Trying to open a city you haven't downloaded yet while you're offline now tells you to reconnect, instead of leaving you stuck on the loading screen.

- Fixed a batch of broken newspaper story templates that could show raw placeholder text or garbled headlines.

- Loading or importing a save from inside a game reloads the map and data cleanly now.

- Fixed rockefeller exploit in daily challenges and limited wire size.

- Fixed 'can't create crossover because the split point is at the start or end of a track.'

- Fixed a bug that broke the ability to pause the game, usually on large maps while commutes were being calculated.

- Fixed lag on opening station ridership panel on large maps.

- Fixed route bullets on station ridership panel overflowing on bar charts.

- Fixed bug causing some massive saves to refuse to load.

Modding Changes

- The modding API now lets mods pick their own titles for notifications.

- Updated the modding API docs and corrected some issues with the instructions

- ~100 game variables are now mod-able. These variables control train physics, commuter pathfinding, track geometry, train signaling, and other parts of the game.

- You can now open the dev console by pressing f12.

We thank you for your continued interest and will continue striving toward peak network performance.

-SBAT

• Fixed "cannot read undefined stops" error

• Added a "please verify files" check on the back-end that gets rid of a license issue several players were encountering

More fixes are incoming and are currently in testing on beta.

We thank you for your continued enthusiasm and will continue striving toward peak network performance.

-SBAT

Following final system preparations, Subway Builder is now available on Steam.

Launching today for $39.99 USD, Subway Builder is available at a 25% introductory discount for the first two weeks, bringing the launch price to $29.99 USD.

Cities included for launch are:

United States: Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Honolulu, Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, and Washington. (new additions special for launch: Los Angeles, New Orleans, Nashville, Raleigh, Kansas City)

United Kingdom: Birmingham, Liverpool, London, Manchester, and Newcastle.

Transit planners, optimization enthusiasts, simulation fans, and foamers are advised to begin reviewing corridor plans accordingly. Service is expected to commence on schedule.

We thank you for your continued interest and will continue striving toward peak network performance.

-SBAT