v0.2.0 Open Beta Is Live — The Simulation Update
Fellow national transportation leaders,
v0.2.0 is the biggest update since launch, and almost all of it goes into the heart of the game: the national simulation. Demand, competition between modes, railways, aviation, shipping, the economy — nearly every system has been deepened, clarified, or rebuilt. You can play it right now on the public beta branch; the stable release is planned for early-September.
One important notice up front: From September 1st, the price will increase from $4.99 to $7.99 (regional prices adjusted proportionally). Details at the bottom.
How to access v0.2.0 beta preview
- Back up your saves first — copy this folder somewhere safe (Suggestion: save it locally on your machine),
- In your Steam client: "Library -> National Transit -> (right click) Properties -> Game version & betas"
- To return to v0.1 later: same menu, select Default public version. If a save written by v0.2 won't open there, restore your backup
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
Modes That Truly Compete
- Aviation gets last-mile legs — air trips now include the land journey to and from the airport, and routes compete on total travel time, not raw distance
- Shipping connects to rail — water routes gain rail feeders, with loads split by direction and separate ferry economics
- Railways: circular lines — ring routes are now fully supported, alongside directional operations and track-utilization views
- Roads — traffic trend overviews, cumulative upgrade history, and a unified toll editor across every surface
- Smarter multimodal routing: the game now picks connection candidates the way a real traveler would
A More Honest Economy
- Government grants rebalanced around what your network actually achieves
- Per-settlement population changes now come with explanations — you can see why a town grows or shrinks
- Passenger and cargo accessibility measured separately
- Expanded national achievements to chase across a long campaign
New: History Snapshots & Map Export
Brand-new ways to look at the nation you've built:
- History snapshots — the game now 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. (Recording starts with nations founded in v0.2, and may not apply to existing saves.)
- Map & screenshot export — export your national map as a shareable image in several styles: atlas, classic web map, territory view, and province boundaries. Perfect for showing off your network — or illustrating your nation's wiki.
Interface & Quality of Life
- A unified interface across all four transport modes — consistent dropdowns, tooltips, dialogs, sortable tables, and back navigation everywhere
- 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, and safer save-as
Localization, Enhanced
The entire in-game help system, policy descriptions, and every panel are now fully localized in all 11 supported languages — 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!
Here is my play:
- The city has its own transport modes — explore your streets by walking, driving, or public transport
- Name any place in your growing city, and navigate to it
- City streets are real infrastructure: their mileage counts toward your national road totals
We're calling it experimental, and we mean it: the core tools work and we think it's already fun, but it's the newest system in the game and it will keep evolving based on what you tell us. Try it, break it, and tell us what a city layer should become. The national simulation remains the heart of the game — the city map is a lens on it, not a replacement.
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 new 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 30+ guide articles there — Quick Start, economy, network design, and city building — written specifically for this game. Links are in the sidebar and in-game.
You can look at the wiki pages I created for my nation, Boressa Republic.
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, the simulation is deeper across every mode, the interface has been rebuilt, the multilingual support has been strengthened, and a community platform and an experimental city layer are growing alongside it. From Early September, the price will rise 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: the next 10 days are the last window at $4.99.
Another principle is, 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.
— NationQ Studio
Quick Guide for v.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