The Line & The World

Every line rides through generated country — never the same country twice, but always drawn from the same fourteen biomes. Climbing the Track Ladder doesn't just make a line longer, it opens up new kinds of country to ride through.

The opening country

Available on every line, from Shortline onward:

Further out

Longer lines add drier, harsher country:

Higher country

Further up the ladder, the line starts climbing:

The far end of the ladder

The longest lines reach the harshest country there is:

Riding underground

A delve isn't just a dark screen. The bore is lit from the one thing that's actually down there with you — the train's own lamps — so the rock walls read as rock, not as a black void, and a special camera angle eases in the moment you cross into the tunnel mouth to show it off before easing back out the far side. Zombies down here give themselves away early: their eyes glow in the dark, and the colour tells you what you're about to fight before it's close enough to hit you.

Tunnels are real holes now: the track drops steeply into a cutting that ends at a rock face, goes in through a stone portal in that face, runs under a whole hill, and climbs back out the far side.

Every tunnel runs under a real hill or mountain. Inside, zombies come out of dark side tunnels in the walls ahead of you - and the tunnels belong to the crawlers: they swarm along the walls and the roof and drop onto the train from above.

Some rungs are underground levels. Roughly one track in eight dives into a tunnel just after the platform and stays down there until just before the end - the whole ride is a bore through rock. A rung never changes its mind: an underground rung is underground every time you ride it. The named opening rungs never are.

Other rungs cut straight through. Where the line meets ground too steep for a train to climb - a cliff or a small ridge - it bores a short tunnel through it rather than grinding up and over - and the hill it bores through stands as tall as the climb it saved. Big mountains are still climbed, switchbacks and all; little bumps are still taken in stride. Inside a cut-through it's underground, with everything that means for what's waiting in there.

Now and then a wonder stands right over the line. The line tunnels straight through the Great Pyramids, the Fallen Colossus, the Frozen Leviathan or the Great Tunnel, and runs down the main street of the Ruined City. Most of the time they still stand beside the track for the view.

Route events

The line isn't always clear. Sometimes it breaks under you, and sometimes something happens beside it that never stops you at all.

A broken rail or a collapsed bridge stops the train dead — and you'll see it coming. The hazard appears on the track ahead as soon as it's within sight, the same distance the fog itself reveals the world at, dressed to match the country it's in: boulders and rockfall on a mountain pass, a fallen log across a forest or jungle line, buckled rail and debris everywhere else. It never marks itself on the route bar, though — seeing it come up the line ahead is the point, not a warning read off a progress meter. Once you arrive, a prominent banner names what's wrong and a radial ring drains as the repair runs. While the train is stopped, the engine is idle — it takes no damage from the throttle, however high the lever is sitting, because a stationary train isn't driving.

Track stability. Every run has a Track stability meter, next to the Quit button. It starts at 10 and shows the breaks on your line right now: each open break costs 2, and a finished repair gives the 2 back. A route event that stops the train is a break, and so is a portal or a boss's hole. A hazard your build passes costs nothing. At 0 the line collapses and you lose the run. The Bulkhead (boss 5) smashes this same line.

Other events pass without stopping you — a lucky find, a hazard your build shrugs off, a pack of raiders sighted off to one side, or one suddenly moving faster than the rest — and each one gets its own moment: a coloured pulse at the edge of the screen, a burst where it happened, a sound of its own, and a banner that holds long enough to actually read.

What stays fixed, what doesn't

Every line on the ladder is guaranteed to cross its own signature country at least once — Dust Flats always finds salt flats, The Long Dark always delves underground. Everything else about a line's country — the order the biomes come in, how long each stretch runs for, and the exact terrain within it — is drawn fresh, so the same line is a different ride every time you attempt it.

Longer lines also cross landmarks: rare, striking set-pieces the terrain builds itself around. Whether one appears at all, and which one, is never guaranteed on any given run.