Fellow national transportation leaders, v0.2.0 is now the default version. No beta opt-in needed — launch the game and it's there. If you've been playing on the beta branch, you can switch back to Default public version in the same menu; both branches run the same build, so your saves open either way. Two notices before the tour: 1. If you are carrying a save over from v0.1, read the next section first. The economy has been repriced, and your numbers will move the moment you load. 2. The 10-day window at $4.99 closes on Monday, August 31, when the price rises to $7.99 (regional prices adjusted proportionally). Details at the bottom.
Before You Load an Old Save
Four things you already know change on purpose in v0.2.0. Everything else in this update is additive.
Policy economics repriced — expect GDP per capita to fall by roughly 40–50%. Policies in the same city used to multiply cleanly and compound for a decade. They now stack with decay — each further policy counts 0.6× as much as the one before — and compounding is capped at 6 years instead of 10. The old maths turned the mid-game into a runaway ratchet. The game shows a one-time "economy recalibrated" notice when it happens, milestones you already earned (and their bonuses) are kept, and the new pace is roughly 10–14 years from $10k to $20k per capita.
Railway capacity now comes from the timetable — saturation readings will change. Running-line slots were re-anchored to real operating patterns (a single track carries 24 daily paths, not 8), and link capacity is derived from those slots instead of a second, separately tuned table. A railway whose timetable was completely full used to read "clear" on the saturation map while the line editor insisted not one more train would fit. Both now tell the same story — and a single passenger line no longer eats an entire single-track corridor.
Your credit line is recalculated — and only a genuinely stuck save is bailed out. Existing loans keep their principal, rate and monthly payment; what changes is how much more you may borrow — 80% of your last twelve months of net operating cash flow, minus what you already pay, which for many v0.1 nations is a much smaller number, or zero. A one-time congressional appropriation is granted only to a save that is genuinely stuck, and only when all three gates are met: the fund is already negative, you cannot cover the next payment, and even restructuring at the longest term cannot reach the coverage line. When it fires, it retires principal from the most expensive loan down — stopping exactly at the coverage line — and restores a negative fund to zero. It is recorded as contributed capital, never as revenue, and it happens once. A save whose fund is positive never qualifies — that gate is what closes the "borrow to the limit, wreck your own cash flow, collect the appropriation" loop.
Construction investment no longer inflates a town's GDP per capita. Connecting a few small towns by rail used to push them past $80,000 per capita — above the capital — while their growth still read −3%, and reloading never cleared it. A settlement's GDP is now purely its structural output: the same number the panel and the migration model read. The construction activity is still counted, nationally, and appears in the finance panel's GDP chart as an "of which construction" series. Inflated figures are cleaned when you load the save.
New: Railway Operating Lines
Track is no longer the whole story. You now build the infrastructure, then run services on top of it: define each line's stops, direction and service grade, then watch how it actually performs.
Load per segment — see how full each train is between one stop and the next, not just as a line average
Directional operations — morning and evening imbalance is visible, and load is reported as a distance-weighted average
Track utilization views — find out how much of the railway you built is actually being used
Ring routes are fully supported — a line whose first and last stop are the same settlement, served in both directions
Express and local services compete for the same passengers, and candidate routing is calculated per service grade — a high-speed line on the corridor no longer hides the conventional network from the planner
Create an operating line straight from the railway detail panel — or drag between two settlements, where the new-railway panel now offers it as an action card beside "upgrade the railway" instead of a tab that read like a filter
Transport Demand, More Transparent
The demand panel has been redesigned from the ground up. It now reads like an answer, not a spreadsheet:
A national overview, then three focused tabs that drill from country level down to a single origin–destination pair
Graphical flow details for every pair — who travels, which modes they chose, and how your services competed
Every lost trip now has a stated reason: too slow, too expensive, no connection, not enough capacity
Rail service grades are distinguished in demand, so express and local services compete the way they should
The panel reads the published assignment result instead of re-estimating it — what you see is what the simulation did
Modes That Truly Compete
Underneath the panel, the way trips are assigned was rebuilt — and the results are measurable. On our test world, origin–destination pairs left with no service at all fell from 243 to 86, and reachable pairs rose from roughly 6,000 to 6,600.
One choice, all modes — road, rail, air, water and their feeder combinations now compete in a single price-aware step instead of each mode being judged by its own rules, and shared capacity is budgeted once across the whole network
Aviation gets last-mile legs — air trips now include the land journey to and from the airport, judged on travel time rather than raw distance
Stranded trips get a second chance — pairs with no service after the first pass are searched again with relaxed limits, judged separately for passengers and freight
Free-flowing roads are no longer mislabelled — an uncongested corridor whose demand was growing used to be booked as "capacity constrained", so widening it changed nothing on screen. Widen a green road now and the number moves
Shipping, rebuilt — water routes gain rail feeders, with loads split by direction. Car and train ferries derive deck capacity from the sailings you actually run (a train-ferry sailing carries roughly 30 wagons), charge a per-vehicle boarding fee you control, and report the ferry business as its own columns in the route list
Roads — traffic trend overviews, cumulative upgrade history, and a unified toll editor across every surface, with separate pricing strategies for passengers and freight
A More Honest Economy
The money side went from bookkeeping to something you have to manage.
Policies are now upgrade chains
21 policies organised into four chains — industry and manufacturing, trade and logistics, services and liveability (with a tourism branch), and a short agriculture line feeding into trade — topped by a free-port crown
Forced retirement is now a generational change inside a chain: the panel tells you which chain a card belongs to and which card takes over next, and retirement is announced 12 months ahead and again when it happens
New cards close their chains (advanced manufacturing, international resort), and a new migrant new town card seeds population wherever any transport connection reaches
Credit with consequences
Borrowing is anchored to what you can service — total monthly payments may not exceed 80% of your last twelve months of net operating cash flow, instead of a share of your balance sheet. The old limit let a young nation borrow itself into a hole it could never climb out of
Debt restructuring — when you can't make the next payment, you can stretch the term (now up to 50 years) until the payment fits what you earn, and each restructuring takes 2 points off your rate
Insolvency is visible before it becomes fatal, and a one-time congressional appropriation settles debt left over from the old credit rules
Assets that age, and books you can read
Overhauls — infrastructure needs a major overhaul on a 10-year cycle (airports on their own schedule), priced at current replacement cost, announced up to 12 months in advance, with the clock reset when you upgrade a road or railway
Two bottom lines — all four transport modes report net profit and net cash flow on the same terms (and cash flow now actually deducts overhauls, so payback periods stopped reading optimistically)
Other income and other expenses can be opened up to see exactly what's in them, and the monthly briefing gained its expense half
Government grants roughly halved across every development tier, and itemised as regular vs. supplemental
Per-settlement population changes now come with explanations — you can see why a town grows or shrinks
Passenger and cargo accessibility are measured separately, and expanded national achievements give you something to chase across a long campaign
Population That Adds Up
Where people move is the other half of this update, and the model behind it was rebuilt.
Migration is a redistribution, not a spawner — everyone who leaves a settlement now arrives somewhere else, with inflow equal to outflow every month. Each town used to compute its own rate with nothing on the receiving side, inventing roughly 1.29 million people over thirty years. The −3% decline floor is gone too: it bound in every single month for every struggling town, which is why a dozen very different towns all shrank at exactly −59.4%. Outflow now follows a saturating curve, so the differences between towns show instead of being clipped away
Towns inside a metro's commuting shed share its jobs — a settlement within reach of a core now shares that core's employment and GDP per capita, because its residents can work there. Cores are the capital, provincial capitals, and metro areas of 200,000 or more; the shed is 60 minutes of ground travel with a decay over distance, and railways only count where an operating line actually runs
Migration has inertia — attractiveness used to be recomputed from scratch every month, so repairing a road (or letting a corridor jam) flipped a town's flow that same month; nobody had signed a lease. Flows now chase their target over about a year: a million-person city hit with congestion moves 0.28% in the first month instead of jumping straight to −3.11%. That is time to answer with infrastructure
Congestion pushes people to the suburbs — the outflow that congestion caused is offered first to the city's own commuting shed, so a jammed core grows its ring instead of exporting its people across the country
New: Cloud Saves
Your nation no longer lives on one machine. Saved games, your uploaded images and your settings — language, units, music, tutorial progress — now sync through Steam between computers, including across Windows and macOS. Window sizes and panel widths stay on the machine they belong to. If two computers have genuinely diverged, nothing is overwritten on a timestamp: the load menu lists both branches and asks you to pick one, and picking one doesn't delete the other. Turning Steam Cloud off leaves the game and your local saves working exactly as before.
New: History Snapshots & Map Export
Brand-new ways to look at the nation you've built:
History snapshots — the game keeps a monthly record of your nation. Step back through time and revisit any past month in a read-only view: your network, your cities, your numbers, exactly as they were. (History is recorded from the version that introduced it onward — a nation carried over from an older save keeps playing normally, but has no past months to visit.)
Map & screenshot export — export your national map as a shareable image in four styles: atlas, classic web map, territory view, and province boundaries. Perfect for showing off your network — or illustrating your nation's wiki.
New: The Message Center
Notifications no longer vanish before you've read them. The game keeps a message log that travels with your save — milestones, policy expirations, congressional appropriations, published nations — and a toast pauses while your cursor is on it, with a bar showing the time left.
Interface & Quality of Life
A unified interface across all four transport modes — consistent dropdowns, tooltips, dialogs, sortable tables, and back navigation everywhere
Road and railway lists gained year-to-date passenger and freight volume columns, build-time spans on group rows, and upgrade entries straight from the detail panels
The finance report reorganized into three readable tabs
A rebuilt guided tutorial and a full in-game help system with contextual links
Numbered save slots, named autosaves, safer save-as — and old saves can be deleted again (deletion used to leave a copy behind that reappeared on the next start). Exported saves keep non-Latin nation names in their filename
UI scaling for high-DPI displays, and startup failures that explain themselves instead of showing a white window
Terrain rendering moved off the main thread — panning and zooming the national map is noticeably smoother
Worlds That Look Right
Settlement generation was reworked several times during this cycle. Towns are now balanced across provinces instead of stringing along the coast, weighted toward regional centres rather than piling into corners and borders, coastal quotas are measured by whether a port could actually be built there, and island settlements are no longer assigned to the wrong province. Two new ways to control how your world is named:
Bring your own vocabulary — supply your own word lists for settlements and provinces, and the generator builds names from them using its own grammar. Your nation can sound the way you want it to, without naming every town by hand
Set the naming language explicitly — independent of your interface language, so an English UI can generate a French-speaking nation
Note: these apply to newly generated worlds.
Localization, Enhanced
Policy descriptions, the in-game help system — including the City Map's own help articles — and every panel are now fully localized in all 11 supported languages, numbers follow your game language rather than your OS locale, and your world generates locale-aware place names.
Experimental: The City Map
v0.2 also ships our first version of the city map: you can now step inside a settlement and plan its interior — streets, corridors, zones, and development that fills in block by block.
And most excitingly, you can explore (using map navigation) locations within a city created by you!
The city has its own transport modes — explore your streets by walking, driving, or public transport, with driving routes that steer around congestion and offer alternatives
Name any place in your growing city, and navigate to it
City street mileage counts toward your national road total
A dark theme for the city map, with a light/dark setting that persists
And the Zoning tool. The loudest piece of feedback during the beta was that cities should grow on their own, rather than being placed building by building. Fair point. So: you draw the road network, and Zoning fills the blocks it encloses — with a density slider that runs from loose suburb to Manhattan-tight, an adjustable mix of housing, retail, office and industry, derived parking, and public-service coverage gaps flagged for you.
We're still calling the city map experimental. The national simulation remains the heart of the game — the city map is a lens on it, not a replacement.
What the Beta Changed
Thank you to everyone who ran the beta branch this past week and filed reports. It changed the build that shipped today.
Crashes, startup and platforms
Proton / Wine — the launcher no longer refuses to start. A player reported that it renders fine on real hardware, so the hard block is now a dismissible warning
Fixed a crash when renaming a settlement on macOS
Startup failures now explain themselves instead of showing a white window, with a recovery path if the loading shell stalls — plus a grace period for slow disks and a retry on a missed heartbeat
Windows, panels and layout
The world map no longer overshoots and springs back at minimum zoom
Resizing the window no longer leaves a black edge, and no longer overwrites the panel widths you set
List panels no longer slide underneath the HUD
Help windows opened from a detail popup now appear in front of it, not behind
The saturation overlay stays alive across the settlement detail popup
Operating-line lists no longer reserve an empty scrollbar column
Economy and reporting
Editing a toll in the route dialog no longer resets net figures to the pre-edit basis
Road and waterway detail panels now read overhaul costs from the same basis as the summary
Highway group rows show the overhaul column, and the cash bottom line deducts it
The restructuring button is now visibly disabled when it isn't available, with the reason stated
Policy stacking and quarterly-effect wording corrected to match what the simulation actually does
Modes
Aviation — new route previews no longer judge a route unprofitable from its first ramp-up step; the preview now settles before reporting
Railways — operating-line candidate search now calculates detour limits and quotas per service grade, so express and local lines don't crowd each other out
Shipping — car ferry capacity is no longer overwritten on load, upgrades no longer pull the ferry into the wrong flow, and toll congestion is measured on the correct basis
World generation
Island settlements are no longer assigned to province 0
Mountain thresholds in provincial quotas are now normalised against sea level, and landlocked detection was tightened
City map
Confirming a road no longer flashes an enormous road for one frame
Sidewalks now fit properly at T-junctions on curved roads
In-progress rail and metro strokes follow the built spline instead of a straight guide
Stop-mode managers no longer slide under the info window
Zooming past the limits no longer stalls the frame
Coming Soon: A Free Demo
A free demo is coming in the next couple of weeks, so anyone still deciding can try the game before buying. Export your demo save and import it into the full version to carry your nation over.
Your Nation, Published — ntgg.me
Your country no longer has to live only in your save file. From the game, you can publish your nation to our community site: a public nation page with an auto-generated factbook, a full wiki editor with live figures from your own snapshot, and creator profiles for following other builders. Publishing is entirely opt-in and private-first — nothing leaves your machine unless you choose to share it. You'll also find 50+ guide articles there — Quick Start, economy, network design, and city building — written specifically for this game.
Reporting Bugs & Suggestions
So we can properly track every report, please use one of the two official channels:
In-game (easiest): Settings → Support → Submit a bug/suggestion
On the web: ntgg.me/feedbacks
Every report lands in the same queue and gets a tracked status — you can see what happened to yours.
About the Price Change
When we launched into Early Access in June, National Transit was a promising macro transit sim. Two months later, railways have an operating layer, the economy has credit and consequences, shipping has been rebuilt, the interface has been unified, and a community platform and an experimental city layer are growing alongside it. On Monday, August 31, the price rises from $4.99 to $7.99 to reflect what the game has become. Our principle is simple: the earlier you support the game, the less you pay — and that holds until 1.0. If you already own the game, nothing changes for you, and thank you. If you've been waiting: this weekend is the last window at $4.99. Another principle: one purchase is all it takes. We have no plans to sell new features as paid DLC. Every update and every new system we build will be included in the base game, for everyone who owns it.
Two Small Asks
Hit Follow on the store page — that's how Steam tells you when an update lands. It's the only way we can reach you directly.
If you've been enjoying it, consider leaving a review. We read every one, and for a game this size they genuinely matter.
— NationQ Studio Quick Guide for v0.2.0: Smooth switch from v0.1 to v0.2 Feedback, wiki (for nations) & guides: ntgg.me Full patch notes: National Transit v0.2.0 — Full Update Notes