November 2025 Development Update

Can you believe it’s been almost two years since Railroader was released in Early Access? Some of you have been with us since before it was called Railroader! Many of you have joined us along the way, and some of you have only just become familiar with the game. Whether you’re an old head or a greenhorn, we want to sincerely thank you for your support. We’ve been fortunate to hear from many of you over the last couple years how much Railroader has meant to you. Our small dev team feels a lot of responsibility as stewards of the game.

In our last development update we covered some of the features we’ve been working on to support the Maintenance of Way (MoW) update, including enhanced car loads, expanded industry at Hewitt, and the interchange at Almond.

What have we been up to since then, you ask? We’ve been thinking a lot about modding!

Building Toward Official Modding Support

Modding has been a remarkable, unofficial part of Railroader since not long after it was released. We’ve been amazed at what modders have created, and continue to create for the game. While official modding support is on our roadmap, it’s something we have thought of as one of the last big features before Railroader leaves Early Access, simply because we don’t want to break mods, and we don’t want modding support to prevent us from making necessary changes to the base game. In working on the car loads feature, however, it became clear that to build it right we would need to build toward official modding support.

Before we get into details, it’s important to acknowledge that modding is very broad topic. Mods run the gamut: they change parts of cars, introduce new cars and engines, add or change track or industries, scenery, augment the UI. Some even aim to create whole new maps.

As much as we want to provide support and tooling for all of these facets of modding, the reality is that that’s not possible at this point with our limited resources. Map modding in particular is one that we’d love to support but due to the richness of the game and complex features like signals/CTC, map progression, etc., let alone the editing UI, it’s not practical to support map modding without some pretty significant limitations, which we don’t see as a great solution.

Our plan for this update in terms of modding support is that it will focus on two areas of modding, but we plan to continue to consider how we can expand our support for modding in the future.

1. Mod Loading and Dependency Management

Railroader has unofficially supported adding new equipment to the game through asset packs since day one – it’s part of our internal development workflow – but there have been some critical aspects missing, namely dependency management and support for encoding mods in save games and handling them in multiplayer.

To improve this, we have been working on revamping asset packs with the following: (technical details incoming!)

• Asset packs now have strong identifiers in the format: domain/identifier. All built-in asset packs use the domain rr.

• Asset packs now have versions.

• Asset packs can define versioned dependencies and will be loaded in dependency order.

• Definitions (equipment, scenery, etc.) in a pack must have unique identifiers within the domain. If the game defines rr/ls-280-c46 (the C-46 Consolidation), you could define your-name/ls-280-c46. This simplifies creating variants of existing equipment and helps avoid conflicts.

• Asset packs with a matching name no longer