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Vehicles are used to transport goods. Transporting goods is your basic task, it will earn you money in Simutrans. Vehicles are bought and sold in depots. There are busses, trucks, trains and ships available in Simutrans.
Factories consume and produce goods. Factories have contracts. You need to take care of the contracts if you transport goods. You can only transport goods between factories that have a contract.
City inhabitants want to travel. They visit friends, go to work or make a holiday trip to visit tourist attractions. Besides transporting goods, creating passenger service is the second big task for the player in Simutrans. Maybe even more important and intersting than goods transport, because passengers go to much more different destinations. Building a efficient and widespread passenger service network is a nice and challenging task.
Some city buildings also consume goods, i.e. a cars shop needs cars to sell and the gas station need gas.
Goods in Simutrans are categorized. There are four categories:
Vehicles can transport any good of a category. This means that i.e. you can use the same train to get coal and iron ore to the iron foundry, because both are in category 'bulk goods'. Some goods, i.e. passengers, mail, steel, paper and some more, need specialized vehicles that can only transport this one good.
There are more categories planned: cooled freight, food.
There are some famous buildings distriobuted over the maps. Tourists want to visit them.
At the top of the Simutrans window, there is a tool bar with icons for the most frequently used functions. The tool bar contains the following tools:
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The rail tools window contains tools for building:
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The road tools window contains tools for building:
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The ship tools window contains tools for building:
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The bridge tools window contains tools for building:
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A detailed description of each tool can be found in the subsequent sections of the documentation. But at first another thing has to be explained:
Simutrans uses two mouse cursors:
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The inspection tool is used to gather informations about all the different objects in Simutrans. Just click a object with the inspection tool and Simutrans will open an information window showing all available information about this object. |
see: Description of the station
info window
see: Description of the factory info
window
see: Description of the city info
window
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The raise land tool is used to raise single squares of land. this way small hills can be produced or little valleys may be closed. |
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This works just like the raise land tool, but lowers land instead to raise. |
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The remover tool will remove things from the landscape. Everything which has no owner may be removed. It may cost some money to remove things. |
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The map is used mainly for easy navigation in the Simutrans world. Just click into the map window and the display will be centered there. All cities and industries are shown on the map window as well as all roads and railroads. |
The map can be zoomed by right-clicking into the map window.
Buildings are displayed in grey, roads are black and railroads are displayed in white color. Station are displayed in red, vehicles in yellow color.
There are distinct colors for the various types of industries but they are not yet fixed. In Simutrans 0.80.0, coal mines are displayed in black, iron ore mines in brown, lumber plantations in light green and sawmills light brown. Iron foundries are displayed in blue. Vehicles are yellow dots. But the colors may change in future versions.
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To build a railroad just click on the desired start square. A small bulldozer will appear there. Then click on the designated end square of the railroad. Simutrans will automatically build the shortest possible railroad connection from start to end. |
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Signals let you place more than one train on a track and thus enhance the transport capacity of the your railroad networks. |
see: how to use signals
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Two track sections are used to let more than one train run on a track. You need at least one two track section to use a track with two trains, and per two track section you can use at most three trains.
There's no extra tool to build two track sections. Simply assemble them from single tracks and one way signals.
see: how to build a two track
section
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Electric engines can only run on railroad track with overhead lines. This tool adds overehead lines to a whole rail block. A rail block is a section of rail between signals or track ends. |
see: how to build overhead
lines
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This works just like building railroads, but instead of railroad tracks ordinary roads will be build. Simply click the start and end squares and watch the program build the road. |
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Channels can only be built by using "raise" and "lower" land tools. Water always is on the lowest level of the map. |
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Bridges must start and end on flat ground or a straight slope. Their length is not limited. Bridges can be build over other bridges, buildings, stations actually just anything. |
see: how to build a bridge
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The next picture displays a road bridge over a road. A rail bridge crosses the road bridge on a higher level.
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Tunnel building is easy in Simutrans. Just build two roads on opposing hillsides. The click the end of one of the roads with the tunnel building tool. A tunnel becomes automatically build. A tunnel has to be straight, and both road ends have to be on the same level. |
see: how to build a tunnel
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At the time Simutrans knows about building rail stations, bus stops, truck loading bays and ship stops.
Simutrans passengers prefer the shortest route to their destination. Direct routes (without tranferring from one transport to another) will be best. Passengers travel from city to city as well as from their home city to the factory where they work and back from work to their home. Some passengers surely like to travel to the tourist atractions of the land. Some other passengers do only short trips within one city. Place your stops carefully to serve the passengers need, else no one will travel with your company.
Passengers will walk up to 4 sqaures to reach a station.
Goods will be distributed among all possible connections to their consumers. Once a station reaches 1000 units of a good, factories will not deliver to that station anymore and distribute their product among the other, less crowded stations.
Passengers and goods transfer from one transport type to another to reach their destinations. They change transportation up to 30 times to reach their destinatioon.
Mail can only transfer from one transport to another at stations equipped with a mail office.
see: Description of the station
info window
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Station buildings are used to build railroad stations. At first the railroad tracks must be layed. In a second step the station building can be built upon the railroad tracks. Simutrans will automatically determine the dirction of the tracks and build the station buildings in the appropriate direction. No stations in curves though. |
If you attach a mail office to the station, this allows to deliver mail from and to this station, too.
see: how to build a station
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Bus stops may be build on every straight road. If a mail office is build near the bus stop, mail can be transported from there also. |
see: how to build a bus stop
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Harbors can be built at every straight coast. |
see: How to build a harbor
offsite tutorial:
How to use ships for oil transport
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Truck loading bays can only be built on roads ends. Just click the end of one of your roads with the loading bay building tool, and a new loading bay will be build there. You can't build truck loading bays on your competitors roads. |
see: how to build a truck
loading bay
offsite tutorial:
How to use trucks
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Mail offices will accept and store mail and packages. Every station, including bus stops and truck loading bays, which is equipped with an mail offices may accept mail from elsewere. I also stores mail from the area which will have to be delivered to its destination. A similar rating as for passengers will be applied for transporting mail. |
Transport routes are initially set up in depots, but can be changed for running vehicles at any time.
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A rail depot is used as a control center for buying locomotives and waggons and for assembling them to trains. The initial schedules of the trains will also be done in train depots. |
see: how to build a train depot
see: how to build a train/how to use a
train depot
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Road vehicle depots work just like train depots. Just buy a bus or truck, assign a schedule to it and let them go by clicking the "start" button. |
see: how to build a road depot
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Ship depots work just like the train depots. New ships can be bought and given their initial schedule. |
see: How to build a ship depot
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Simutrans schedules are platform precise. A train always arrives at the platform of a station that you clicked while defining the schedule of the vehicle. This applies to other vehicles types, too, i.e. if you build multi-bay loading bays.
If a train stops in a station only the wagons which are in the station will be served. Waggons outside the station will not be loaded or unloaded. Using the full-load option in a train's schedule with trains that are longer than the station will result in endlessly waiting trains.
see: how to set up schedule
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