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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

There’s something about trains and transport that I find irresistible. I loved riding trains to school, and try to use them as much as I can. I absolutely loved SimCity, specifically the parts that let you build rail/subways to connect city blocks. I loved Factorios train mechanisms and hope to play with Satisfactory some day. Recently started Cities Skyline and I’ve been obsessed with it.

What I would really love is for something like a Minecraft but for building trains/managing transport systems. All the games I’ve played treat trains/transport as tools rather than the central focus. But this looks like it’s something along that line; definitely going to check this out along with openttd.

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I get it. There's a few things that just make trains the perfect storm of obsession. I think I can list a few.

1. The clockwork. The time tables and planning are like gears on a civilization scale machine. A gear so big that from the first person perspective you can't even see its a gear.

2. Infrastructure is politics by other means. Concrete and steel are the only things that outlive even the supreme court justices. What gets built dictates so much about where people will live and how they will live, and sometimes these decisions are the result of lengthy deliberations and sometimes they are the result of the selfish wants of an unaccountable planner.

3. The optimization problem of it all. It's so easy to obsess over the map, seeing all those cross town trips that would be so much easier if some existing line just went slightly further. Trying to understand why lines get built where they do.

4. Trains map to (what I suspect is) our genetically-programmed interest in large animals. My 2yo loves anything with wheels (i.e. feet/hooves), and trains are the apex predators. Then we anthropomorphize them (Thomas the Tank Engine, etc.) in order to "tame" them. My 0.02€, YMMV.

So, this is totally pop-evolutionary-psychology, but I think the relevant predisposition is towards hoarding. For 100,000 generations, humans (and our ancestors before then) have had to gather and store food and other supplies to see them through the winter (or other hard times). We are wired to do this because we would have died out if we didn’t.

Building games let you build up your hoard of stuff (whether trains, rails, buildings, tiberium silos, green circuits, …) in a tight feedback loop that repeatedly triggers the “this is my stuff, now I am safe” dopamine response.

This also explains collecting hobbies, and goes some way towards explaining the desire for wealth acquisition in general.

Yeah, trains and trucks seem to tap into some built-in interest in megafauna. Dinosaurs do too.

Check oyt Nimby Rails. It’s a fascinating experiment in two ways:

1. It uses the real world map and tries to figure out population data too

2. There’s no grid. You control the rails with precise Bezier curves, that affect the train speed

Very young and very experimental/ bare-bones, but still something to check out if you’re into the genre

I've put countless hours into OpenTTD over the years but once you learn how to maximise profits (move your cargo over a longer distance than necessary) you can basically print money.

Simutrans appears to work a bit different on that front, I'm going to have to take a closer look.

Getting to the printing money stage is pretty easy in vanilla OpenTTD.

For added challenge, try the FIRS mod, which requires your production chains to be working from raw materials to production to retail. A lot more planning is needed to make things run smoothly and on time.

Perhaps the Cities in Motion series fits the bill? It’s made by the same studio as Cities: Skylines, but focuses specifically on city transit.

The sequel (Cities in Motion 2) is more expansive, but the original has its own charm.

I think what you are getting at and what I really want is a multiplayer model railroad. Something that can have complexity but doesn’t force it like a simulator. I want a mix of transport fever, minecraft, and factorio with a multiplayer component.

Ive been toying around with trying to learn Unity or Godot to build something like this.

You may be interested in Railroads Online: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1696810/RAILROADS_Online/

It leans less to the "model railroad" side of things and more towards the "Railroad Tycoon" economic simulator, but it does seem to have solid multiplayer support.

Minetest has a mod Advanced Trains that allows (but doesn't force) fairly complex builds with automatable scheduling, etc. and works in multiplayer.

https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=ZK1PM8jFRFo&t=18m33s

OpenTTD has multiplayer.

OpenTTD is such an awesome game. I never thought i could sink so much time in that game. I still visit it every few months even though there are way more polished sims available. I thank again the maintainers

Not really what I had in mind.

there is a Czech game Mashinky which have multiplayer in development:

https://mashinky.com/

Played it. Love it. Still too much of a transport sim tho for what I am thinking of.

Surprised no one has said Transport Fever (and it's sequel). Solid game play.

Unfortunately the fixed goods demand and production sites make the gameplay too railroaded (!) for my taste.

I can understand fixed sites for natural resources. The coal mine is where the coal is. But historically, the sites chosen for manufacturing industry are determined by what is logistically feasible. The factory goes where the railroad is, not the other way around (most of the time).

I don't know if OpenTTD allows it but in the original TTD it was possible to plop down factories at will (but not mines, farms or oil wells).

This doesn't match your Minecraft brief but if you love trains have you played Railway Empire? That sucked me in like no other transport game ever did.

You will probably like the game Cities in Motion.

I only have a passing interest in Minecraft but I feel like someone would have made a good Minecraft mod to scratch that itch?

It's called Factorio.

That's not a minecraft mod?

It originated as a minecraft mod. It grew, like a factory must.

There's a lot of other stuff surrounding it, but Satisfactory does have trains much like Factorio, and is 3D like Minecraft. A caveat though is that it's still "less" of a game than Factorio, but fun in its own right, haven't played the latest patches though, so they might've implemented more stuff.

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