It has been a busy ten days since release; lots of new players, lots of feedback and of course some bugs to fix!

While we work on the Sandbox mode for our first big roadmap update, this is a mini-update to prepare the February Challenge and fix some bugs.

This month’s challenge is a larger map that is more linear in nature. We can’t wait to see the solutions you all come up with!

As for bugs/QoL fixes:

• We updated the research window to explain production chains more clearly
  
• The growth rewards display in the town screen is more compact now
  
• We closed a loophole where you could research technologies in free play
  
• There were some uncompletable contracts in the Desert and Horseshoe scenario. We’ve fixed those now!
  
• We’ve fixed a bug that left remnants of track orders on the board after deleting track
  
• We’ve fixed a bug that could cause bugs if you click deleted track that was part of a non-stop zone
  
• The train screen layout has been fixed for those who were unable to access buttons

Thanks so much to all of you who have played it, bought it, given us feedback or welcomed new players to the community!

Iron Roads has been out in Early Access for a week, and the dust has settled, so we have started planning our first updates. Before that though it has been great to see so many new players, and thank you to all of you who have sent feedback!

Challenge update and bugfixes

The first small update later this week will attend to some bugs, and also the challenge mode. It turns out the January challenge had some loopholes, so we’ll improve those for February!

Sandbox

The first significant update will add the sandbox mode sometime in February. This will be a map generator with parameters you can set to choose the experience you have with the game. The scenarios and challenges in Iron Roads right now are very directed and opinionated from our side, so this will be an opportunity for you to choose how you play!

Beta branch

Up until now, we have always playtested privately, but it wouldn’t be fair to keep any features of Iron Roads gated now that it is released, so we will be starting a beta branch once we have the Sandbox ready for testing!