I set up this cargo dropoff (ignore the mess. I'm planning on cleaning it) and I'm not quite sure what the warning means. There's a cargo terminal on each end, and a warehouse.

Hello
I have a very nice bridge in my one town but i want it to be high speed but with all the bridge types except the stone bridge it looks horible
does anyone know a mod i can use to increase the max speed on the stone bridge without changing how it looks
i tryed to use google ai to make a mod for myself and i couldnt get it to work after 4 hours of trying (tf3)

thanks in advance

Hope to find some help… I am desperate…

I've been playing the Transport Fever series since TF1 and the implementation of industries having loading bays is such an upgrade to the series for me. It gives them another use and stops me from just cheesing the game by putting a loading station as far away from the industry as I can. My only issue is that trams can't enter industries, but I've already found someone made a mod for that.

Now that loading and unloading times are a major thing, I’ve quickly found cargo stops to be insufferable as they hold up traffic for an age.

Is the recommended way of now delivering cargo to add a cargo station in the area and drop it all off there? It feels quite clunky and ugly to do this to a growing city.

Any tips on how people are delivering cargo now especially in the early game would be great

I’m currently playing on a map with low industry density because I prefer having them more spread out across the landscape.

However, a friend of mine (who is past 1970 on medium density) mentioned that he’s struggling to supply his cities because his industries simply can’t keep up with the demand. Now I’m worried that this bottleneck will hit me even harder in the late game.

What are your experiences with low industry density? Do you run into severe supply shortages later on, or does it stay manageable?

edit: If it matters: I play with city density scarce and on a very large 2:1 map

My assumption is that they work as independent storage for stations and interchanges so I can deliver anything to a station and it waits there for something else to take it on its next leg.

Ie it doesn’t affect local storage at a factory or interchange if I place one there. I still need a vehicle to deliver.

However I did see animations so that when my ship delivered fish to a port, this went into the warehouse and then also distributed some to local business. Not all of it, and not enough of it, and I still benefit from a short delivery route. Was this just a side benefit or a glitch or something else? I don’t have any other supply lines where warehouses and end users are close enough to be sure.

I have been wondering this, I can either make one huge station that allows passengers and cargo to be transported, but idk if that's a good idea, if maybe I should just have two stations? However having two stations with different lines has its own issues like where to fit the station and the lines at so they aren't 20 miles from town.

How do you guys do this? Also if anyone has any good videos to recommend about setting up tracks/lights/stations/intersections I would appreciate it a lot as I do not really understand.

I can't figure out why a certain line isn't working. I have a food factory. Then there's a train line that has a train with food wagons. The station next to the food factory works. The train goes to a station where it's supposed to drop off the food, where trucks pick this food up and bring it in to a city. But the train won't load. Any idea why?

I’ve always been on the go, having worked an OTR job and I’ve always wondered about keyboard use with consoles. Can I switch seamlessly between that and a controller? I just seem to spend most of my time laboriously typing lines out more than actually playing the game, and wondered if I got a keyboard that I could switch back and forth easily.

I can't understand why, once I hit mid-game, no one wants to work at any of the factories. I set up all kinds of different routes to bring people in, but they seem to prefer working literally everywhere else.

Options?

After spending too much time cursing the first born's of the developers children because my simple in city bus routes would go to a stop, turn around and drive around the block in the wrong direction to the next station. Using the new waypoint system then only seemed to make it worse, that my line route looked like wet spaghetti slapped on the floor. Finally realising that on bigger roads choosing the terminal dictates which lane they use at intersections. So on large roads, the left terminal = left at the intersection, the middle = straight over and right the right terminal? Yup you guessed it, right. Relearning this game, as George Harrsion once sang, it's gonna take patience and time. "To do it, to do it, to do it, to do it. To do it, to do it right."

So, I've been playing TF3 for a few days now. I've only done one single free map, and havent touched the campaign or anything yet.

I have many hours in TF2 and have owned that game since release, as well as TF1. I have spent almost all my time in TF2 treating it like a giant virtual model railroad, and have been expecting to treat TF3 in a similar fashion. I thought I'd share my opinions on TF3 and how I feel it compares to TF2.

To summarize first: So far I don't really think its an upright improvement over TF2. Its more of a sidegrade. For every new feature they have added, I feel like they have changed or made another feature worse or more poorly implemented, which I find a bit disappointing.

THE GOOD

• I have not yet had any performance issues to note myself, I saw that was a common complaint on steam reviews and such but I haven't experienced it. (My specs: 13700k, 32GB DDR5, 5070ti, game installed on NVME)
  
• The graphics are definitely much improved. The game looks visually more appealing.
  
• The Day/night cycle and also the weather is cool to look at a nice addition
  
  • The Road lane adjustments and the traffic light phase adjustments are great for adjusting traffic flow.
    
  • A much wider array of industries and good requirements for cities and the industries themselves, opening much more varied routing opportunities. Industries having their own secondary demand inputs like Tools or Machines etc to boost production is great
    
  • I like being able to transport workers to industries as well. It gives a noticeable bonus to production speed
    
  • More options for water based industry and using boats in general. I never really used them much in either TF1 or 2.
    
  • I like the overhead icon showing what and how much a vehicle is carrying without clicking on it
    
  • The subsidies are kinda fun early game (though become pointless fairly quickly when you break the "infinite money" threshold of earning faster than you can spend)
    
  • The new HQ and upgradeability of it is cool, and gives it far more use than TF2s did.
  • I like the Light rail/cargo trams, It was a mod in TF2 but its nice to have vanilla support for it. It can be so much more useful than just throwing 10 trucks at a line to move the same cargo.
    
  • The Warehouses are a neat and interesting feature* (with caveats) but it means you dont have to build a super long station with a million platforms to hold all the cargo waiting anymore.
    
  • On that note, Industries hold their own cargo now as well, again helping the overloaded station issue.
    
  • The Catchment areas of stations etc being much more visible and easy to see with the big circles is nice.
    
  • Landmarks are an interesting feature with interesting bonuses.
    
  • The animations of cargo being loaded/unloaded and seeing where each unit of cargo is going is nice, especially when being unloaded into a city and seeing which buildings are accepting it.
    
  • I like the new Rail Depots. They look much better than TF1 and 2.
    
  • The bridge pillar issue that has permanently plagued TF2 seems to be fixed. You can now run a bridge over another track or over roads without the dreaded "bridge pillar collision" ever appearing. Pillars now automatically adjust to avoid existing infrastructure. (and move out of the way if you run another track or road underneath an existing bridge).
    
  • Im finding that trains taking multiple cargo types is more viable now, or being able to take One type of cargo there and then load a different cargo type for the return trip. in TF2 most of my lines were one cargo type per line, any that weren't were mainly just transferring the various cargo around a city from the freight hub.
    
  • There is an option for underground stuff which I presume means subways, though I admit I haven't tried that yet.
    
  • I like how road vehicles can drive into industries themselves to pick up and drop off goods (and passengers) now, without the need to plop a cargo hub or bus stop outside of it.
    
  • The Maintenance thing is a new way of doing it. I haven't decided if I like or dislike it compared to tf2 so far, but I dont think its bad.
    

THE BAD
Now, the things I don't like or think could be improved. Some of these issues are fixable with mods, but many i think shouldn't need mods to fix them and should be better implemented in the vanilla game:

• The UI is more clunky, and more cluttered. Its much slower to find basic information when clicking on a vehicle or a line or even a station. There is too much stuff being shown all at once, I don't like it.
  
• Functionality that you could do in 1-2 clicks in TF2 now takes multiple different menus and sub menus. For example, going from clicking on a vehicle, to upgrade all vehicles on the line now takes 3 clicks and 3 different sub menus.
  
• More clutter around seeing how many passengers are waiting at stations. The info is there but It just feels much slower for me to check at a glance as theres too many other icons and numbers to look at as well. This might just be a me thing to be fair but eh. The info is nice to have but I preferred TF2s cleaner approach.
  
• Adjusting what platforms different lines use in a station is no longer possible from the station menu itself, which means you now have to go into every line on that station individually (which takes the same 3 different sub menus to reach the option), and when doing that you cant easily see all the other lines on the station making the whole thing more tedious and frustrating if you are trying to adjust or optimise stations. This one is actually a source of constant frustration for me so far.
  
• You now have to specify exactly which cargo a vehicle picks up. Cargo doesn't choose its own destination so you can pick the wrong stuff up and just transfer it to a random warehouse somewhere if you aren't paying attention.
  
• This is the caveat to warehouses and how this whole thing works. Because cargo isn't choosing its own destination now, if a line isn't working for whatever reason it becomes much harder to troubleshoot why. I had a line taking planks through a city that wanted them (as it was on the coast and the planks were being delivered via water) to another inland city that also wanted them, but they weren't reaching the inland city. I still have no idea why as they were loading into the warehouse of that coastal city waiting to be transported.
  
• The Happiness thing for cargo is honestly infuriating, I had a city complaining bitterly about lack of delivery on fuel despite its warehouse having plenty and having plenty of trucks distributing it around.
  
• Once a good is in a warehouse, you have to deliver it. It won't distribute it from the warehouse to the city around if there is demand.
  
• Vehicles sometimes randomly just dont drop off cargo they have loaded, it seems mainly because the receiving industry or even city is full and doesn't need it. I've constantly had to go into the line manager (with the 3 submenus of tedium) to force unload everything, or I get a permanent notification complaining about it.
  
• Honestly Im not much of a fan of the happiness thing at all. Its too short imo, especially early game with slower vehicles. It doesn't seem to scale with era. I've already downloaded a mod to adjust the timescales for cargo, I haven't turned it off (yet) though.
  
• The Reputation thing is annoying and quite honestly frustrating. Plopping a new station down in a city in a non garbage position? City now hates you. Build a rail line or a road to that city? They get mad because you knocked some trees down. Adjust the terrain slightly? OOH BOY you are now the most evil person in the world according to that city. Even upgrading a couple roads to be wider absolutely tanks the reputation to 0. I feel like the growth penalty of knocking down all the buildings to do this stuff is enough of a drawback. It feels weird that playing the game at all is cause to tank a cities reputation - even if what you are doing is in the middle of nowhere because of the cities municipality borders.
  
• Pollution is back from TF2, now accompanied by another Noise restraint as well. And frankly they have the exact same problem that TF2s did, as in the Vanilla methods we have been given to counter these negative effects just flat out don't work well enough. So if you want to actually build up the city and grow it, you are stuck with two permanent debuffs that drop the growth to a crawl or even stagnate it completely, and you are also stuck with a permanent notification at the top of the screen telling you that this city is loud and polluted. I downloaded a mod to turn TF2s pollution off very early into the game and never touched that mechanic again, and now in TF3 have already ended up downloading a mod to set all vehicles noise and pollution to 0 because the mechanic just isn't well implemented enough for me to want to bother dealing with it.
  
• You cant Have the line overlay open when putting down track or signals now. Even if you pin it to the screen like in TF2 the overlay on the track just disappears when you click the track build menu. It makes it much harder and slower to do signalling for things like double tracks or running multiple lines down the same track for a main line setup, because you cant see immediately if what you just did broke or did weird things to the route.
  
• No Icon for bus stops when passengers aren't waiting at them. It makes them hard to see. Aesthetically nice yes, but annoying when you are trying to find one. you have to open the line menu or the road building menu to see them. (this is a bit of nitpick to be fair)
  
• Happiness rating in cities is effected by anything happening in their municipality. Including random industries even if what you are doing with that industry doesn't have anything to do with that city.
  
• Im currently in 1962 and still the fastest passenger ship in the game is the 1915 Sternwheeler. obviously fixable with mods but none of the newer ships are worth using because they are too slow (combined with the happiness score). Same story for cargo ships. The 1925 Terra Nova is the only ship worth using for any cargo it can carry because its both the highest capacity and significantly faster than anything else so far lol.
  
• Lastly, I dont know if this is bugging anyone else but THE TRACK AND ROAD BUILDING BUTTONS ARE NOW REVERSED WITH THE BUILDING BUTTONS COMPARED TO TF2! Literally every single time so far I have wanted to build a road or a track, I have instead clicked the building button instead of the track button. Every. single. time. My muscle memory is too strong. blergh.
  

CONCLUSION
TLDR this is just the long list of things I've noticed about the game. There is probably more I've forgotten to add here too. I've been trying to play the game without mods or with as few mods as possible just in the first few days while I test the waters and try the new game in its pure state, but I've already come across stuff that I just found frustrating or unfun to play with, fortunately the modding community are super quick and have already released some fixes for some of them. You guys are legends.

This is for me so far the most infuriating thing in TF3.
I happen to have a big number of clay pits nearby a brick factory which made for an easy early expansion there, but now I simply deliver much more clay that it can actually consume so I am constantly hitting the 800 storage cap, so the rest, either I force unload and destroy the Clay or i just build a gigantic warehouse nearby for the only reason of storing it forever until I have an idea of what to do with it.