National Transit v0.2.0 — Full Update Notes

Everything since v0.1.14.

v0.2.0 is the largest update National Transit has received: a major economy rebalance and a rebuilt policy and credit system, a redesigned demand panel, intermodal feeder connections and a far more realistic demand assignment, ring railway lines, the all-new City Map — enter any settlement and design its streets, transit, districts and terrain by hand, and zone whole blocks into buildings in a few clicks — the launch of National Transit World on ntgg.me, where you can publish your nation, write its wiki, and follow other creators, Steam Cloud saves that follow you from one computer to the next, plus a new in-game Help system with a rebuilt tutorial, and full localization of the new content into all 11 languages.

Highlights

Economy rebalance — grants and policy fund income cut sharply, max development made rare, new strategic military growth bonuses.
New demand panel — a graphical, three-tab national demand overview whose figures match the simulation exactly.
Feeder connections — passengers can now drive or take a train to the airport or port; air and water routes gained road and rail feeder legs.
More realistic demand assignment and route choice — every mode competes in one price-aware choice, shared capacity is budgeted across the whole network, rail capacity is anchored to real timetables, and free-flowing roads are no longer mislabelled as short of capacity.
Population that adds up — migration is a redistribution rather than a spawner, towns inside a metro’s commuting shed share its jobs, and congestion pushes growth out to the suburbs.
Ring railway lines — loop lines that start and end at the same settlement now work, served in both directions.
The City Map — all-new: enter any settlement and design its streets, railways, metro and bus lines, districts, parks and coastline by hand, with a live link back to your macro nation.
Zoning — pick the blocks your streets enclose and fill them with buildings by mix and density, from loose suburb to Manhattan-tight.
Policy upgrade chains — 21 policies organised into four chains plus a free-port crown, with policy economics repriced and old saves recalibrated on load.
Borrowing that can be paid back — loan limits anchored to your cash flow, plus debt restructuring as a way out of a hole.
Publish your nation — upload your world to National Transit World (ntgg.me): a sovereign nation page, a live-data factbook, a full wiki with embedded game figures, likes, comments, and follows.
Steam Cloud saves — saves and settings follow you between computers, Windows ↔ macOS; when two machines diverge you are shown both and choose, never silently overwritten.
In-game Help & new tutorial — a searchable Help panel covering every system, plus a rebuilt guided tutorial.

Economy & Balance

Income is tighter

Government grants roughly halved across every development tier (e.g. least-developed 0.45% → 0.22% of GDP/month; high-income 0.34% → 0.12%). Grants are now itemised in the finance panel as regular vs. supplemental.
Recurring policy fund income cut sharply — most policies now contribute roughly a third of their old value.
The accelerated-growth reward has been removed — the runaway growth ratchet is gone.

Development & growth

Maximum development is now rare: a settlement only shows 100 for a genuinely complete nine-sector composite; otherwise the score is clamped to 1–99. Development growth decays as headroom shrinks, and all speed bonuses share a single 2.5× ceiling.
New strategic military growth bonus: settlements gain growth from military airports (up to +25%), military ports (+20%), and proximity to a land border within 200 km (+25%), capped at +60% total.
Full port military bonus is now available from terminal level 1.
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 the figure survived a save/reload. A settlement’s GDP is now purely its structural output, the same number the panel and the migration model read. The construction activity itself is still counted, at national level: the finance panel’s GDP chart carries it as an “of which construction” series. Saves carrying the inflated figures are cleaned when you load them.

Population & migration

Migration is a redistribution, not a spawner. Everyone who leaves a settlement now arrives somewhere else — inflow equals outflow every single month. Each settlement used to compute its own rate with nothing on the receiving side, inventing roughly 1.29 million people over 30 years. The −3% decline floor is gone as well: it was binding 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 (asymptotic 3.5% a year), so differences between towns show up 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 an exponential decay, and railways only count where an operating line actually runs. Ferries are timed at the ship’s own speed and drop out of the shed when their water route is suspended.
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 with a one-year lag: a million-person city hit with congestion moves 0.28% in the first month instead of jumping straight to −3.11%, and settles about 40 months later. That is time to answer with infrastructure.
Congestion pushes people to the suburbs. The share of outflow that congestion caused is now offered first to the city’s own commuting shed (60% of it), so a jammed core grows its ring instead of exporting its people across the country.

Costs, fares & tolls

Road and rail user costs rebalanced; private car running cost is modelled explicitly, and rail timetable inconvenience is modelled separately from ride time.
Surface taxes are now grounded in actual road use, and population tax is allocated to transport.
Toll economics UI expanded, with one shared toll editor across road detail and the road list; your toll choice survives route edits. Road payback is computed from cash income.
Several passenger-oriented policies no longer penalise cargo demand.
Passenger and cargo accessibility are now separate inputs to the model.
Satellite-city policy now requires an actual nearby city.

Policies rebuilt into chains

21 policies, organised into four upgrade chains — industry/manufacturing, trade/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 shows which chain a card belongs to and which card takes over next. Two new cards close their chains (advanced manufacturing, international resort), and a new migrant new town card seeds population — it accepts any transport connection, not just a road.
Population floors ladder upward along the service chain, so later cards raise the floor the earlier ones set.
Retirement now announces itself twice in the message centre: 12 months ahead, and again when it happens.

Policy economics repriced

Policy GDP multipliers in the same city now stack with decay — each further policy counts 0.6× as much as the one before — instead of multiplying cleanly, and compounding is capped at 6 years rather than 10. Development bonuses still add in full; only GDP compounding decays.
Existing saves are repriced when you load them, typically 40–50% off GDP per capita, with a one-time “economy recalibrated” notice explaining why. Milestones you already earned, and their speed bonuses, are kept. The new pace is roughly 10–14 years from $10k to $20k per capita.

Borrowing & debt

Loan limits are anchored to what you can actually service: total monthly payments may not exceed 80% of the last twelve months’ net operating cash flow. The old limit — 100% of GDP or of new asset value — let a young nation borrow itself into a hole with no way out; a full-limit loan cost about 8.8% of GDP a year against transport income of 5.2%.
Debt restructuring gives that hole an exit: when the fund cannot cover the next payment, you can stretch the term — now up to 50 years — until the monthly payment fits what you earn. Each restructuring also takes 2 points off your rate, floored at 2%.
A one-off act of congress clears legacy debt: saves that borrowed to the old, broken limit are beyond saving by restructuring alone, so they get a single settlement when loaded. It can fire only once, and no current save can reach the condition again.
Missed payments are visible instead of quietly draining the fund, and the loan page explains when restructuring is and isn’t available.

Maintenance & bottom lines

Major overhauls moved to a 10-year cycle with a 24-month window, priced at this year’s replacement cost rather than what you originally paid. (Five years is preventive maintenance in the real world; a genuine overhaul is 20–30.) Airports are now included, and upgrading a road or railway resets its overhaul clock to the upgrade date.
Overhauls are announced in advance: the balance sheet shows the next 12 months of overhaul spending, and every link says when its next overhaul falls due and what it will cost per month.
Two bottom lines on every asset: road, rail, air and water panels all show net profit (revenue − operating − maintenance − depreciation) and net cash flow (revenue − operating − maintenance − overhaul), each with an explanation behind an info button. This also fixed a real bug — cash flow never subtracted overhauls, so payback periods read optimistically.
Toll pricing strategy is now set separately for passengers and freight, each with its own follow field; existing saves migrate.
“Other income” and “other expenses” open up into the actual items, and the monthly briefing gained its expense half.

Milestones & reporting

Capital connectivity milestones now count air routes — island province capitals are no longer impossible to connect. Rail-only and expressway milestones remain ground-only.
New “National Railway Network” achievement; metropolis threshold set at 5,000,000; achievements show progress. Legacy achievement rewards are preserved on load.
Finance report reorganised into three tabs; HUD year-to-date expense accounting fixed; the monthly briefing moved to a settlement toast, and settlement population changes are now explained in the panel.

Demand Panel (redesigned)

New graphical national demand overview with a three-tab layout: OD (origin–destination) pair details, a risk map with pair selection, flow-source rows that jump straight to the source pair, and route detail cards.
Unmet demand now shows an unretained total and classifies excess travel time; rail service grades are distinguished, and ride time is separated from waiting time.
The panel now reads the published assignment result rather than re-estimating it — the figures on screen match the simulation exactly.

Demand Assignment, Route Choice & Feeder Connections

Air routes now get road and rail feeder legs; water routes gained rail feeders. Passengers can drive or take a train to the airport or port instead of the trip being counted as impossible.
Feeder validity is judged on time, not distance: both feeder legs together may take at most 1/3 of the flight’s own travel time (airport handling included).
Rail feeders only ride actual operating lines, and capacity is shared correctly — a road or line used as someone else’s feeder is never double-counted.
Unified mode choice: candidate routes from every mode — road, rail, air, water, and their feeder combinations — now compete in one price-aware choice step, instead of each mode being judged by its own rules.
Second-chance routing for stranded trips: demand pairs left with no service after the first assignment pass now get a second search with relaxed limits (longer feeder legs, more road hops), judged separately for passengers and cargo so one side’s service can’t mask the other’s gap. On our test world this cut unconnected pairs from 243 to 86.
Shared capacity is now allocated globally: a road or operating line serving several demand pairs is budgeted once across the whole network, so the same capacity can no longer be promised to multiple pairs at once.
On a mature save, reachable origin–destination pairs rose measurably (≈ 6,000 → 6,600 in our test world) thanks to smarter feeder routing.
Rail capacity now comes from the timetable. Running-line slots were re-anchored to real operating patterns (single track 8 → 24 daily paths; high-speed 96/192), and link capacity is derived from those slots instead of a second, separately hand-tuned table. Before this, a railway whose timetable was completely full still read as “clear” on the saturation map — while the line editor insisted not one more train would fit. A single passenger line no longer eats an entire single-track corridor.
Route search is now per network grade. Where a corridor carried both high-speed and conventional railway, creating an operating line offered high-speed candidates only: the detour cut-off was measured against the fastest option overall, silently deleting the whole conventional network. Detour limits and candidate quotas are now counted separately for each operating network.
Free-flowing road corridors are assigned directly. Pure-road pairs with no congestion no longer ramp up gradually month over month — growing demand on an uncongested corridor used to be booked as “capacity constrained”, so widening the road changed nothing on screen. Corridors with congestion, or any scheduled service, keep the gradual build-up.
Car ferries are visible inside the trip. A road route that crosses on a car ferry is limited by deck space on each sailing (train ferries carry roughly 30 wagons a sailing), and the crossing is now named as a ferry leg in the route breakdown instead of being folded into the road on either side — so you can see where the trip goes aboard. The per-vehicle boarding fee is yours to set.

Railways

Ring (loop) operating lines: you can now create a line that starts and ends at the same settlement — previously this was either rejected outright or silently ran zero trains. A loop must pass through at least a third settlement (figure-eights are still rejected). Both directions around the loop are served, so any two stops on a ring can be reached either way round.
Unified operating-line creation workflow, sortable operating-lines table, directional operations and track-utilisation display, and scheduled-capacity UI.
Segment loads along a line: an operating line now opens a table of carried volume between each consecutive pair of stops, reached from the operating-lines list. Directional load is reported as a distance-weighted average rather than a plain one.
You can create an operating line straight from the railway detail panel’s line list.
Ring roads no longer display their start/end as if they led somewhere else.

Aviation & Waterways

Aviation panels rebuilt: unified route creation flow and route editors, airport selection for new routes, route operation states, a dedicated route management panel, sortable route lists, grouped traffic metrics, and airport rankings showing observed data. Air cargo has been recalibrated.
Fixed: new subsidised air routes were inert — they could launch with no service due to a chain of scheduling and subsidy-cap bugs. They now actually fly.
Air runtime state is preserved on load, and air market events replay correctly after migration.
A new air route’s preview now judges steady state instead of the first month of ramp-up, so viable routes are no longer reported as loss-making before they have had a chance to fill.
Water: port traffic cards and sorting, aligned port rankings/trends, a ferry filter and ferry add-ons in the route list, and route loads split by direction.
Car ferries now wait for a sailing and travel at the water route’s own speed — previously a once-a-day ferry took exactly as long as a fifteen-a-day one, with zero boarding wait.
Ferries rebuilt around deck space: capacity now comes from the sailings you actually run, utilisation is capped at 100%, and ships hold a constant speed. A train-ferry sailing carries roughly 30 wagons; mixed cargo was recalibrated from 8,000 to 2,400 per sailing.
You set the per-vehicle boarding fee. Prediction cards show it beside tolls and net profit, and label how much of a sailing’s deck the vehicles take.
Ferry business is itemised in the route list — five columns, always visible, instead of one merged total buried in the editor. Loading and unloading time is its own line in link details.
Suggested water fares now carry a cost floor, matching rail. The old water suggestion system has been removed.
Duplicate water routes can no longer be built.

The City Map (all-new)

Every settlement in your nation can now be entered and designed by hand. Open a city from its settlement panel (nearby settlements merge into one metro) and you get a full city-scale editor — connected live to your macro nation.

Roads

Draw roads in a single stroke, with five types — footpath, branch, secondary, main, expressway — each carrying a complete default cross-section, built at ground level, elevated, or in tunnel.
Edit the cross-section freely: direction, 1–20 lanes, lane width, sidewalks, central median. Copy a road’s style with an eyedropper, save favourite presets, and batch-apply them to a multi-selection.
Go further with corridors: group several carriageways into one named boulevard, add frontage roads, place median openings, build exit ramps with proper merge/diverge geometry, and set turn restrictions per junction.
Reshape everything after the fact — drag to bend, branch, move, duplicate, or extend, with names and sections inherited automatically. Continuing from an endpoint inherits the road’s name only when the new stroke is roughly in line with it, and a branch can be drawn as a one-way (derived from its host), as “same design”, or as a dual carriageway.
Rail, transit and bus strokes get the same finish-segment button roads have, and in-progress strokes name their type and length.

Public transport

Lay railways (regular or high-speed) and rail transit — metro, light rail, monorail, tram — at ground level, elevated, or underground, with named, colour-coded lines, stations, extensions and branches.
Bus routes run over your street network and re-route automatically when you edit roads; demolition is only refused when it would genuinely break a route.

Districts & terrain

Zone the city: residential, commercial, office, industry, mixed use, public services, education, medical, parking, parks, plazas, culture and more — drawn in editable shapes with building heights, then hollowed, grouped, curved or duplicated at will.
Reshape the land itself: pull the coastline out to reclaim land, carve bays, reroute rivers, place water bodies and artificial islands (capped at 20% of buildable land).
Name everything — roads, lines, stations, districts, seas and mountains. Geographic place names are shared with the macro map.

Zoning — fill whole blocks at once

Click a block your own streets enclose and the tool cuts it into plots and fills them with buildings. A dial sets the mix — residential against commercial, office, industry and civic — and a density slider runs from loose suburb to Manhattan-tight, where plots are cut like a real cadastre and buildings sit right on the kerb.
Buildings come from a shape library — rectangles and their variants, courtyards, L-shapes, balconies — placed and sized procedurally and inheriting the street’s angle. Wedge-shaped plots get square buildings, not triangles, and existing buildings are built around.
Some decisions are made city-wide, not per block: schools and clinics appear against city-wide population thresholds and service radii, so painting five blocks cannot conjure five schools; parking is derived from population and lane-kilometres, with surface car parks appearing only where in-building parking cannot absorb the demand.
The selection can grow beyond the smallest enclosing loop, and a multi-loop selection fills every face in one go. The card reports what it paved by area — and tells you why when a block cannot be filled.
Zoning never draws transport. Roads, railways, transit and lines remain yours to draw by hand.
Drawing a road through built-up ground now demolishes the buildings standing in its way.

Analysis

A traffic overlay colours streets by congestion from simulated commuting and business trips.
A Navigate tool shows the fastest door-to-door route in four modes — walking, driving, public transport, or mixed — broken down leg by leg with times and total distance. Driving routes steer around congested streets and offer alternatives to choose between, and are drawn on the side of the road you’d actually drive on.
Public-transport legs carry line badges in the line’s own colour with a mode icon, and open into a Google-style list of the stops along the way, highlighted on the map.

Tied to your nation

Macro roads and railways passing through the city are automatically adopted as real, editable city streets.
Development capacity is metered per category from the city’s population and your macro development levels — to build more, develop the nation. The city map reads the macro simulation and never writes back.
City designs save with your game (Cmd/Ctrl+S works inside the city) and travel with save import/export.

Presentation

A five-level zoom presentation takes you from whole-city structure down to individual buildings and kerbs, with natural vegetation generated from moisture and terrain, curved road-name labels, and full undo/redo.
A dark colour scheme for the City Map, switchable in Settings → Display and remembered between sessions.
The City Map UI ships in all 11 languages, and has its own searchable Help panel — hold ? for a complete gesture and shortcut sheet.

National Transit World (ntgg.me)

Publish from inside the game

“Publish to National Transit World” now lives in the map tools menu, with a clear three-step flow: Introduction → Preview & consent → Result. The intro states plainly: your first upload goes only to your private My Nations; website data is read-only and never writes back to your save or Steam Cloud; your full save and credentials are never uploaded; and the game will never ask for your Steam password.
Publish failures now tell you why (nine distinct error causes) instead of failing silently.
Your national flag/emblem uploads with your nation.
Published data now includes built-up area, city street mileage, and expanded city figures.
In-game bug/feedback reporting from the Settings panel: on success you get a copyable report number, and the processing history shows status changes.

On the website

Sovereign nation pages: archive-paper styling with your flag, name, motto, a creator tagline, and an owner-chosen accent colour.
Factbook: a full nation factbook with contents outline, snapshot picker, finance section, and sortable tables.
Wiki: write articles about your nation with drafts and server-side autosave, pretty URLs, aliases, footnotes, tables with merged cells, and — the headline — live embedded game figures: a searchable Data picker inserts real published values into your prose, and a Card button drops in a ready-made infobox. Works on phones.
Social: like public nations, comment (owner-moderated), and follow creators. Creator profiles show identity, nations, and earned badges.
Owner control: withdraw a snapshot or delete your nation entirely. Private means private — moderators included. Self-serve account deletion is available.
Feedback boards: reports sent from the game now live on the site — community-submitted reports appear on public boards with Q&A, images in the discussion, voting and visible status changes, and your own reports stay on your Mine board even after they are merged into a bigger item.
Comments gained basic formatting and a 5,000-character limit.
Wiki: entity pages get an alias panel, aliases can be edited inline under the editor title, an entity’s custom title now resolves in [[links]], an entity that has an article wins over an identically named red link, and pasting an image no longer uploads it twice.
The nation data card gained an Area row and your uploaded map image, and My Nations is reachable from the user menu as well as from the /world call to action.
Guide library: a 7-part Quick Start (your first hour, roads, railway, airport & routes, port & water routes, keeping the fund alive, what to aim at next), plus city, map-creation, network, and economy collections — all cross-checked against in-game help.

Help System & Tutorial

New unified Help panel with a searchable table of contents and formatted articles, plus contextual ”?” links wired into panels throughout the game.
Help chapters cover: My Country, Provinces, Settlements, Place Names, Map Tools, Analysis, Roads, Railways, Aviation, Waterways, Economy, Finance (balance / revenue / expenses), Demand (flow / quality / accessibility / pricing), and all four policy stages.
Guided tutorial rebuilt from scratch — a new road-and-settlement walkthrough with a new step model and new visuals.
The City Map has its own Help panel, and remembers your reading position separately from the macro game’s Help.
All help content is available in all 11 supported languages.

UI & UX

Whole-game UI kit: a unified control family with design tokens — shared dropdowns replace native selects, in-game dialogs replace native alerts, custom tooltips replace browser tooltips, plus unified back controls, confirm bars, sortable tables (keyboard-accessible), consistent positive/negative colouring, and one shared type scale.
Road panels: traffic trend overview, cumulative upgrade history, expanded status metrics with responsive trends, and clearer route-smoothing tradeoffs.
Settlements list is searchable; air routes appear in the drag-connect chooser; optional metropolitan overlay; settings panel unified; Continue button hierarchy restructured.
Saturation map: severe-load colour restored, pressure bands clarified, peak pressure separated from monthly throughput, low vs. normal load distinguished.
Map key shows full terrain ramps with larger swatches; province-boundary drag feedback is visible even with the toolbar collapsed; foreign world edges look natural.
Music now mutes while the game window isn’t focused.
Message centre: everything the game tells you is now kept in one place that travels with the save — milestone entries in a compact two-column form, single-item delete, and its own icon. Toasts pause when you hover them, with a bar showing the time left, so a burst of month-end messages can actually be read. City Map notices stay out of the macro message centre.
UI scale setting (100–200%) for 4K and high-DPI screens, applied when you release the slider, in both the menu and in game.
Road and railway lists gained year-to-date passenger and freight volume columns, a build-time span on group rows, the missing overhaul column on group summaries, and a toll button that is always visible — greyed out when a group cannot be tolled.
Upgrade entries in the road and railway detail panels, opening in front of the panel, with airport selection when upgrading an airport.
Creating an operating line is now a visible action. In the new-railway panel it used to be the second tab of a strip that looked like a filter; it is now an action card beside “upgrade the railway”, it tells you when the two ends are already connected by rail, and the operating-lines list gained a ”+ Create operating line” button in both its toolbar and its empty state.
Help icons show their tooltip immediately, and a help window opened from a detail popup now sits in front of it. Importing a save shows a busy state and a success message instead of seconds of silence.
Fixes: list panels no longer slide under the HUD; resizing the window no longer overwrites the panel widths you set; the saturation overlay survives the settlement popup and keeps its line width as you zoom out, and shows road colour where there is no traffic data at all; road name labels sit at the middle of the arc; Esc on a confirm dialog no longer falls through to the game menu; a city promoted to a province no longer leaves its host province’s label stranded; map-creation density presets stay selected; the province list’s header and data rows share one set of column widths; zooming all the way out no longer shows a black edge.
Map export: four styles — street/classic, atlas, territory, and province-boundary (with province name labels and collision-avoiding layout). Your style preference is remembered.

Save System

Steam Cloud saves

Your saves now travel with your Steam account. Saved games, your uploaded images and your settings — language, units, music volume and mute, tutorial progress — sync between computers, including across Windows and macOS. Machine-specific preferences (window size, panel widths, map-creation drafts) stay on the machine they belong to.
Two computers can no longer overwrite each other. Each device writes its own save head: a straightforward continuation fast-forwards silently, but when two machines have genuinely diverged the load menu lists both branches and asks you to pick one. Nothing is overwritten on a timestamp, and choosing one branch does not delete the other. (Picking a branch decides what you load this time; it does not merge the two.)
Turning Steam Cloud off leaves the game and your local saves working exactly as before.

Saves & slots

Save names now belong to the save itself; Save As on a duplicate name auto-numbers; new slots are always numbered, and autosave claims its slot name properly.
Exported saves are importable again.
The game also saves on the way back to the main menu, and load failures are shown in-app with a localized message instead of vanishing silently.
Old saves can be deleted again. Deletion used to be refused by asset cleanup and, worse, left a copy in the fallback store that reappeared on the next start; both stores are now cleared and a genuine failure is reported instead of swallowed.
Exported save files keep non-Latin nation names in their filename instead of being stripped to underscores.
History snapshots fixed in the shipping build — they were completely unreadable in packaged builds. Checkpoint verification was also overhauled: it now self-checks in four segments and pinpoints the exact entity and field when something diverges, ending the spurious “invalid checkpoint” reports.

World Generation & Naming

Deterministic multilingual naming system: settlement, province, road and city-entity names are generated with far greater variety from an eleven-language corpus, and your world’s naming language persists with the save.
Settlement placement rewritten over four generations. Balanced worlds now spread settlements across provinces by habitable area instead of stringing them along a contour parallel to the coast; a rank-weighted pull toward the interior stops cities from piling into map corners and along borders (capital strongest, provincial capitals next); the coastal quota is measured by whether a port could actually be built there rather than by distance to the sea — starting cities are back on buildable water; and island settlements form their own provinces or join the nearest province across the water, instead of being filed under “province 0”. Existing worlds keep the layout they were generated with.
Bring your own names: the new-world panel takes comma-separated lists of settlement and province names. The vocabulary is yours, the grammar stays the game’s — generic terms, joining and numbering still follow the naming language, which is now an explicit dropdown rather than silently following the interface language. Your lists travel with the save, so towns founded later use them too.
English settlement names no longer come out hyphenated.

Notable Fixes

Packaged-build breakage: under the tightened security policy, several panels, map overlays and the connect chooser broke in the shipping build only — all fixed. Startup overlays no longer flash.
Two ways out of a failed start, both from player reports: a blank window (the web view never rendered) is now caught by a native watchdog that offers a one-click clear of the graphics cache, and a loading screen that hangs or throws now turns into a failure state showing the actual error instead of animating forever.
Wine/Proton: a dismissible warning instead of a hard refusal — players reported it renders fine on real hardware — and never a blank window pretending to be a corrupt build.
Renaming a settlement no longer crashes the macOS web view.
Railways and routes entering a settlement no longer kink into a sharp V.
Steam: initialisation failures now report a reason and can be retried; fixed a macOS signing issue that prevented Steam’s runtime from loading.
After returning to the main menu, the window close button no longer stops working.
Panels refresh properly after month advance and after edits; country identity drafts are no longer wiped by the monthly refresh.
Sorting a table no longer resets its horizontal scroll; dropdowns inside labels no longer re-open after selecting.
Same-name but disconnected road groups no longer merge incorrectly; group endpoints and upgrade costs in the list are correct.
Province boundary drags are no longer rejected on certain provinces.
Full-line automatic fares are protected again; assignment results stay continuous across republication.
The game now tells you when the month gate has closed instead of ignoring input.

Performance

Road route search aligned with demand income, cutting pointless candidate generation.
Dominated feeder candidates are pruned before evaluation.
Terrain no longer redraws on the main thread: the roughly half-second freeze after a zoom or pan is gone — viewport and overview rasterisation both moved into a worker pool sharing one copy of the pixel code.
Ten rounds of City Map optimisation: link indexes built on entry, bounding-box pruning for block clustering and building overlap, fast frames while dragging (roads cached per gesture), viewport culling in the draw loop, snapshot bleed margins, caches reused across gestures and pre-warmed while idle, asynchronous snapshot swaps on zoom, and derived geometry cached per road version. A stall watchdog with breadcrumbs now makes in-city hitches diagnosable when they do happen.

Localization

All new content in this update is fully localized into English, 简体中文, 繁體中文, 日本語, 한국어, Deutsch, Français, Español, Italiano, Português, Русский. Beyond that:

Numbers now follow the game language, not your OS locale — thousands separators and decimal marks match the language you picked.
The units setting is now respected everywhere: road and lane widths, speeds, areas, the city scale bar, airport checklists, the demand matrix, HUD areas, road previews, ramps and bays, and more.
The City Map ships in all 11 languages, including its in-game help articles — the whole help body is translated, with control names quoted exactly as each language’s city interface prints them.
Error messages for save/load/import/exit and month-advance failures are now localized instead of showing internal text.
Full localization sweeps across aviation, ports and water routes, railways, roads, settlements, trends and dates, save-menu dates, panel titles, and the feedback form.
Water-operations labels that were still falling back to English are filled in across the remaining languages.
Assorted corrections, including the English “Update”→“Upgrade” button label and consistency fixes in several languages.

Thanks for playing National Transit — and see you on ntgg.me.