Transport Fever 3 Map Editor: Build & Share Custom Maps

The Map Editor is Transport Fever 3's world-authoring toolset: per the official manual, it imports and exports heightmaps, sculpts the landscape, places towns, industries and assets either by hand or with automated generators, imports town and industry positions, and generates the initial street network. It is a separate mode from free play — a place to build a world first and run a transport company in it afterwards.

Starting an editor project

Both entry points live behind the Map Editor card in the main menu. You can generate a new map — pick a climate, then adjust settings similar to a free game, including Map Size and Map Format — or load a previously created map from the grid below and continue editing it, autosaves included.

One constraint decides your setup before anything else: the manual states plainly that it is not possible to change climate, map size or map format inside the editor. Start with the wrong combination and the only fix is a new project. The map sizes table lists every dimension before you commit.

What the editor adds and removes

The interface matches free play, but the toolsets are deliberately split. Not available in the editor: station and depot construction for every transport type, track construction, vehicle and line management, and warehouses and perks. What you get instead is the authoring layer: terrain tools, the heightmap pipeline, town and industry placement, and the road-network generator. Transport infrastructure is built in-game once your map is being played — the editor ships the world, not the network.

Generating terrain, towns and industries

The heightmap generator produces a complete terrain, trees included. On the Generate tab, the sliders shape the output and the Seed box keys the randomization — with the same seed and the same settings, the map comes out identical every time, the same rule that governs free-game seeds. Four options — Keep Heightmap, Keep Assets, Keep Towns, Keep Industries — let you regenerate one layer while preserving the rest, and terrain generators added through mods appear alongside the vanilla ones.

Towns and industries have their own generator tool with the same DNA: a count slider (its maximum depends on the map size), a Keep existing towns toggle, a preview, and a seed that makes a distribution reproducible. The industry generator works analogously.

Placing towns and industries by hand

The town placement tool sets a town's initial capacity — it correlates to the city's size — plus the initially accepted cargo for its commercial and industrial districts. Later changes go through the inspector: select the town name, open the Editor tab, reconfigure cargo demands; renaming and bulldozing (which reconstructs the terrain) work from the same place. One manual warning is worth planning around: Transport Fever 3 does not limit the size or number of towns, but every extra town, street and vehicle multiplies pathfinding calculations, and closely placed towns raise each inhabitant's reachable destinations — late-game performance depends on the hardware you pair with the map.

Industries place the same way. For industries that both consume and produce cargo, like saw mills, the input requirement can be switched off; raw-material industries expose the impact of delivery boosting and an initial size that corresponds to the number of fields around them.

Both position sets can also be imported and exported as data files from the towns_industries folder in the userdata directory — the documented Lua structure records each town's name, position, size factors and cargo-need categories, which is what makes spreadsheet-style map planning possible.

Connecting the towns

The main street connection generator wires the towns together for car traffic. It offers three one-click modes — auto-detect connections that already exist, propose default connections between all towns, or clear the proposal — plus a Keep Connections toggle for preserved streets. The preview draws the graph as dots and bars; clicking adds or removes a link. Generating turns the graph into actual streets, with terrain occasionally preventing a connection, and existing industries get hooked up too.

The heightmap pipeline

Exports are grayscale .png files at 8-bit or 16-bit depth, with optional biome mask textures for advanced imports; imports accept real-world or externally generated heightmaps plus matching biome data. The resolution rule is fixed: each pixel carries the height for one corner of a 4×4-metre square, so 1025 pixels equal 4096 metres — a Small 1:1 map imports at 2049 × 2049 pixels, Very Large 1:1 at 4097 × 4097.

Playing and sharing your map

Save Map sits in the pause menu, and a saved map is played through Load Game like any other world. To publish it, open the map's card details in the Map Editor and use the Share button: the Save Game Name (32 characters maximum, no line breaks), a description, a summary of at most 100 characters for the Mod Hub tooltip, an optional change log, and the Make Public switch — without it, nobody sees the upload. Uploading accepts the mod.io terms and creates a new Mod Hub item, or replaces the existing one on update; the item's detail page then opens in your browser for images, contributors and the rest.

Sharing a map is not playing it together — see multiplayer for the official status on that.

FAQ

Can I change the climate or map size after starting an editor project?

No. The manual says climate, size and format cannot be changed in the editor, so they are decisions to make at project creation. If a project outgrows its size, the route is a new project at the bigger size — the sizes table on the map seeds page includes the experimental options and their requirements.

Why can't I build stations or tracks in the map editor?

Those tools are excluded by design. The editor authors the world — terrain, towns, industries, roads — and the transport network is laid once the map is being played as a game. That split keeps the editor's data layers focused on geography instead of live traffic.

How do I publish a map for other players?

Save the map, open its card in the Map Editor grid, press Share, fill in the name (32 characters), description and summary (100 characters), switch Make Public on, and upload. The map appears as a mod.io item other players download through the in-game Mod Hub.

Map editor or a random seed — which should I start with?

A random seed hands you a playable world in seconds and is the right default for playing; the editor exists for authored worlds — specific terrain shapes, deliberate town spacing, curated industry chains. Both obey the same seed rule, so even editor projects can be regenerated deterministically.

Related guides

The map seeds page holds the official sizes table and the seed mechanics the editor shares; multiplayer documents what map sharing is and is not; and the mods guide covers the Mod Hub platform your upload lands on.

Version and evidence notes

• Editor behaviour (tools, generators, constraints, sharing flow): official Wiki Game Manual — Map Editor page, checked October 10, 2026.
• Heightmap pixel rule and resolutions: official Wiki Map Sizes page, checked October 10, 2026.
• Checked against Steam stable build 40420 (October 8, 2026).

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