In Transport Fever, it's important to never underestimate the positive impact a thriving manufacturing industry can have on your city. Supplying your city with goods is pivotal to creating jobs and places where people can shop. In return, you’ll promote some healthy industrial, commercial and population growth which can ensure that your people have a thriving economy with loads of shining opportunities to go around.
This guide will continue to be updated as we make more progress within the game.
The Manufacturing Industry
In Transport Fever, every city requires 6 end products to sustain and grow. These end products are goods, machines, tools, construction material, food and fuel. These end products come from industries that are found scattered throughout the countryside with 3 types in total: Raw material industries that provide oil, wheat, livestock, wood, stone, iron ore and coal; Refining industries that produce material such as plastic, steel, plank, oil/fuel, and slag; Then factories that make the final products that the cities will use.
How To Start Production
The first step to starting production is pinpointing the products needed and how to make them. Let’s start with an easy end product like food. If you hover over the industry for food, it will reveal the items needed to manufacture the product. This will reveal that food can be made using raw materials such as wheat and/or livestock. Find the factory that produces these items (either item will work, go with whichever is more convenient), and decide on the kind of transportation that you’ll want to use to transport it to the nearest food manufacturer.
Building Transportation
Once you’ve decided on the transportation you’ll use, start by building stations within the catchment area of the place of production. You’ll see this area highlighted when you’re in building mode. Keep in mind that where you decide to build the stations is important since the kind of terrain you’re building on will influence how much the process will cost. Once you’ve built the stations, you’ll need to connect them via road or railroad. If you’re having difficulty connecting them, use the demolition tool and start over. Once this process is done, you’ll need to build a depot (truck depot for the road, train depot for railroad) that connects to the path between the two stations.
Choosing The Right Vehicle
After setting up the depot, click on it to buy a vehicle. The type of vehicle you’ll buy depends on what kind of materials or products you are transporting. To view which items a vehicle transports, click on the options, check out the various cargo types that it supports, and select the vehicle that properly suits your purpose.
Tip: If you keep seeing the ‘Unable to find path to stop’ message, check to see if the train depot is connected correctly to the railroad path and that your train has a proper locomotive attached to it.
Assign Your Vehicle To A Line
Once you’ve built the depot and have purchased vehicles for it, you must now assign the vehicles to an appropriate line. Access the line manager and select ‘New line’. It will automatically highlight ‘Add station’ and all you have to do now is add the corresponding freight stations to that line (in the order you want the vehicles to travel to them). Now you can assign the line to your vehicle or make it the default line for that depot, and watch as it begins delivering the material to the manufacturer.
Transporting Goods To The City
If an industry requires more than one item to manufacture a product, just repeat the steps listed above to have those items transported to that location. The last step to a thriving manufacturing industry is to transport the final products you’ve made into the city. You can do this by building a station near the warehouse of the manufacturing site and by building another in the city.
For more on Transport Fever on Indie Obscura, check out our Developer Talks with Stephan Schweizer to find out more about the game, read up on the Transport Fever release date announcement, and see how Transport Fever evolved from Train Fever.