There were eight worlds and they were all generated. There are sixteen now, still on eight servers: each slot alternates between the world it has always run and a new one built on the real map. And the work you do in them has a shape to it, because contracts arrive five at a time every quarter, the same five for every company, and the ones nobody finishes fail.
Every slot now has two identities. It runs the generated world it always ran, then at its next reset it runs a real map, then back again. So eight worlds are live at any moment, sixteen exist, and each one opens a four hour session every eight hours. Records are kept per world, so there are sixteen books now rather than eight.
| Map | Climate | Starts | Size |
| United Kingdom | Temperate | 1950 | 1024 x 1024 |
| Europe | Temperate | 1960 | 1024 x 1024 |
| Scandinavia and Russia | Arctic | 1970 | 1024 x 1024 |
| Japan | Arctic | 1990 | 1024 x 512 |
| East Asia | Temperate | 1980 | 1024 x 512 |
| Africa | Tropic | 2000 | 1024 x 1024 |
| The World | Temperate | 2020 | 1024 x 512 |
| North America | Temperate | 1940 | 1024 x 512 |
The maps are real elevation data, so the coasts, the mountains and the gaps between them are where they belong. The climate is a choice, not a latitude: the engine decides where desert and snow sit from height, water and flat ground, which is why Africa is the tropical one and East Asia is temperate. Every map is used whole unless a crop is the region itself. The four square maps run at 1024 x 1024 and the rest at 1024 x 512.
The two kinds are staggered, so at any hour some servers are running a real map and others a generated one. You are never made to choose between a familiar map and a fresh one; four or five of the eight are real maps at any moment, and the servers page says which world each slot is running now and which one it takes next.
The heightmaps are other people's work and they are credited on the servers page, one line under each world.
Session contracts used to be three objectives rolled once at the start of a map. Now a session is four quarters of about an hour, and every quarter rolls five contracts. Finish one and it stays finished. Leave one and it fails when the quarter ends, and five new ones arrive. A full session therefore offers twenty.
Every company gets the same five. That is the point of them: a contract that names a mine, a power station or a pair of cities sends everybody to the same place. You can all finish it, but you are competing for the same coal while you do.
A haul target is 40 per cent of what that mine actually produces over the quarter, and a collection is 60 per cent. Four companies cannot all take 40 per cent of one mine, and the target rises on its own as the mine develops, so a haul is never ramped on top of that.
Every other target is rolled rather than fixed. It moves up to 20 per cent either way, and then each quarter asks more than the last, compounding: a cargo or money target rises 100 per cent on the quarter before it, so it doubles every quarter and the fourth asks 8 times the first. That is the shape a network grows in. A target counting places, towns or vehicles rises 25 per cent a quarter instead, because a network does not double in size the way its traffic does.
Updated later on 11 September: this note first said every target rose a flat quarter each time. The ramp was split in two that afternoon and the figures above are the ones that shipped.
A haul or city pair contract also opens a real subsidy on exactly that route. The first company to serve it takes the engine's subsidy payment for its full term, and nobody else does. The offer is kept open for as long as the contract stands, so it is a race that lasts the whole quarter rather than the twelve months an ordinary offer lives.
Your contracts page shows how many companies have finished each one and whether its subsidy is still open or already taken.
Each contract pays 120 XP times your charter as before, and the finish multiplier now pays 15 per cent per contract instead of 30, because there are up to twenty of them rather than three. Finishing all five of one quarter still earns Full House.
A market nobody had touched used to climb to the x2.5 ceiling within a few months, and the first load of anything dropped it to plain vanilla in one step. Both are gone. Every market now carries a silent baseline of 300 units a month for each 10 per cent of its target share, so every cargo opens exactly on target at x1.25, nothing starts at the ceiling, and one route no longer swings a market by itself.
The same applies to vehicle types. Each of road, rail, sea and air carries 25 phantom vehicles, so the four open level and your first bus does not throw the other three to the ceiling. Both baselines fade as real traffic grows, which is what they are for: they shape the opening of a session, not the middle of it.
A town used to want nothing until it was big enough, then want it all at once. Now every cargo the map has is wanted from the start, at 10 per cent of the full rate, rising to the full rate as the town reaches the size that used to unlock it. Demand also grows per head: a town of 10,000 wants twice as much per person as a village, so a city is hard to keep fed.
The window lists every cargo, met or not, in green, orange and red, with what is stored and how long it lasts. Towns bank 24 months of what they need and lose 4 per cent of the store a month, so a stockpile is a buffer and not a bank.
Every row is a multiplier on growth above an absolute floor of 30 per cent. A cargo you ignore costs a share of the growth rather than a flat penalty, so growth boosts scale the penalty with them and cannot buy past it, and one ignored cargo cannot crush a town on its own. A cargo the town cannot accept yet is listed and never counted against you.
And a town's needs now pay. Town needs multiplies the holdings income of everything in that town, industries included: -20 per cent for each cargo at or under half supplied, down to a floor of 30 per cent, and +50 per cent when every row is over four fifths. Feeding a town is worth money on top of the growth it buys.