We've been working on Railgrade now for 6 years! Oh how time has moved on. I wish it was at least half as fast :)
Now, we made Railgrade to be played, and thanks to you all: it got played! So thank you for giving our little train game purpose.
As thank you we've put together a little surprise!
Update 7 brings with it a bunch of new buildings, industries, and even trains! Yet one thing players have been asking for has been new missions! I do not think you'd believe me, and I almost do not, how many players DM'd me asking for DLC. In past updates we added a bunch of optional side missions, but we felt limited in just expanding the main campaign. We needed more: we needed a new campaign!
So please get excited for a new Railgrade Campaign: Rapid Repo Rescue!
In Rapid Repo Rescue you take on a new planet. This one's got a problem: a court ordered repossession ! You see, years ago when the colony ship first landed: they landed on the wrong planet! This planet has a different owner! An evil corporation at that! So now you need to rush to rebuild a resourceful planet to recharge the space launcher and rescue everyone before that corporation takes possession!
Did I mention the corporation has an evil scheme to trap any workers you leave behind to a life of low wages and high company-store-inflation? You better rescue everyone! And quick!
If you've been following the Workshop map making community you've likely played his maps already: Mortiz! He's one of our community's elite map makers. He took time out of his busy university schedule to craft this brand new campaign. Of course we paid him, cash, but I want to thank him for putting in his time & care beyond the paycheck.
We also received a bunch of help from players on our Discord! A hardcore group of players helped Mortiz by play testing early versions of his maps. They spent a bunch of time testing and giving feedback. Plus, and I am quite thankful: no one leaked the surprise!
They proved skilled at both Railgrade and at keeping secrets!
You'll find the Rapid Repo Rescue campaign on the main menu under the "Bonus Campaign" choice. There you'll find a full menu allow you to play each map as you unlock it. Including an overview of each mission's score, and a total campaign rank.
The full campaign rank takes the sum total of your best play times, and the sum total of every map's par time, and treats the entire campaign like a combined mission time. This means you can catch up by playing faster on some maps to compensate for slower times on others.
And like all missions: you can enable modifiers to tune the difficulty to your choice.
The 11 missions should take about 9 hours to complete. We gave Mortiz access to every yet-unused asset in the game. This meant new trains, new industry, and new resources.
My personal favourite is the new Natural Gas & Hydrogen set of energy production chains. Complete with a new Gas Powerplant as you see below, plus Offshore Gas Wells! If you scroll to the top of this page you can even spy the on-shore Gas Well Industry.
When we started working on Railgrade I wanted to keep supporting it far beyond release. In prior jobs I felt we had stop working on games too soon. I am thankful for Whiskerwood we've found a publisher in Hooded Horse which values long term support for games and writes their contracts to make that happen.
That is why we made this bonus campaign and are releasing it for free. I think Railgrade is special, and I am thankful to everyone who supported us over the years when our rent depended on it. I hope this campaign can give new and old players more of the unique fun Railgrade can give :)
Thank you again for playing Railgrade!
Daniel Dressler
Lead Programmer on Railgrade
We've released 2 hot patches these past 3 days. The first fixed an ordering issue in the DLC campaign. The second patch adds the new industry and trains to the research tree in sandbox. You can also now use the new industry chains to power research itself. :)