Sweet Transit: Early Access check of the indie railroad builder

There have been many economic sims that use the railroad as the backbone of the industrial simulation. In 1990, Sid Meier packed the fascination for the steel monsters on rails into a game with the legendary Railroad Tycoon and celebrated great success. Since then there have been many successful and less successful imitators and variations of the game concept. With Sweet Transit, the former Factorio developer Ernestas Norvaišas is now trying his hand at an economic simulation with a focus on railways. The game, distributed by Team 17, has now entered Early Access and we’ve had a look.

The game is not just a transport simulation in which we’ll connect cities and industries with rails to circulate goods. It’s also half a small city builder, because we start on a completely empty map. Except for trees, rocks, raw materials and water, nothing exists at the beginning. The first thing we are doing is building a warehouse that will serve as our central hub in the future. Then we can found the first settlement with the village community center. In addition, we are providing a few workers’ dwellings for our population to move into. Manpower is one of the central resources in Sweet Transit, without which nothing works. Almost all buildings require a certain number of workers to function.

Sweet Transit: Indie Train Builder Early Access Check (2)

Source: PC Games




This also applies to the water towers that we will put up next so that our population does not die of thirst. We are also building a fishing port for food supply. It is therefore advisable to always found a village near bodies of water. However, since each settlement only has a fixed radius of influence, depending on the map, you are quite limited in your choice of location. The best example of this is the in-game map showing a floor plan of Europe. The idea of ​​building on a real landmass is cool, but it has its limitations. Since there are no rivers on the map, settlements can only be founded on the coasts. The central core of Europe thus remains free of villages.

While the fish supply can still be guaranteed within our settlement without transport routes, other important resources such as wood, stones and coal have to be brought in from outside. We start with a coal industry because the black gold is essential to fuel our trains. So we set up a corresponding mine on a coal deposit. We can upgrade these with deposits in order to have enough intermediate storage on site. The trains then come into play for the onward transport of the mined coal. When planning our first routes we have to consider the following. On the one hand, workers from our settlement have to be transported to the mine and, on the other hand, the coal from the mine to the central warehouse.