Chaos! “Who is responsible for this!?”, you shout at the unfortunate messenger who brought you this rail schedule sheet. On the sheet are trains and their numbers misaligned, their names misspelled, and their destinations! Horror upon horror, they’re a mess! The wood train to Stuttgart is heading to Warsaw.
The vacationing passengers on the Corncob Liner III were supposed to go to Paris, but are on their way to Mons right this minute. The fertilizer train is heading for the BMW factory, and the train full of car parts is on its way to a farm near Amsterdam!
You cry and weep, the only solution to you is an expensive one. You must take your engineers, rush to the rail tracks, and force the trains to their proper destinations by making temporary rail tracks to the correct main lines. The trains are about to cross each other in a crucial junction and potential multi-train pileup in Berlin, so that is your destination.
You arrive in Berlin faster than the trains, the one good thing about that scheduling disaster. As the trains come, your engineers do their magic: They lay track like men possessed, hammering as if the fate of the universe depended on it. Within seconds, a track is completed, a train passes it, and the track is dismantled with the parts ready for reuse.
This repeats for the duration of the schedule. Many near-misses are had, but thankfully the ones manning the trains can hear your orders through the radio. They stop when told to stop and continue when told to continue. It is an utterly nail-biting day, but by the end, disaster is averted and the trains report their arrivals on time. You return to your home while the engineers celebrate with beer and pretzels.
The next day, in the office, you get the day’s schedule. The envelope is signed by the person who signed it yesterday. You shake your fist at the sky and yell that name out in anger, because you know the schedule will need a fixup job, again!
Welcome to our Train Conductor World beginner’s guide! Train Conductor World is a very fast-paced puzzle action game from The Voxel Agents where you redirect trains on the fly to help them reach their destinations.
The maps are small and very tense, often with multiple trains being on screen at once with a high risk of collisions. You can redirect trains and stop them from moving. Keeping the trains moving as much as possible without getting them to the wrong destinations or crashing is the key to a perfect all-Star run.
While the actual game is incredibly tense, it is also very forgiving: You still get paid if you lose, and you will eventually make progress through the map even if you do it by bludgeoning your head repeatedly against the missions on Easy, though of course winning and playing on harder difficulties is much faster for progression provided you play like you have magic fingers.
This is very much a game highly reliant on your quick thinking and awareness, though we hope these tips make that process easier for you.
THE BASICS OF TRAIN CONDUCTOR WORLD
Don’t mistake Train Conductor World for a tycoon economy management game: This one’s a high-speed action puzzler through and through, with a need for absolute twitch skill, a very cool head amid chaos, and a precise sense of timing. You’ll scramble to place tracks and avoid railroad disasters by the skin of your teeth. Or during Crash Test missions, trying to cause as huge a train pileup as inhumanly possible! Here are the basics of gameplay.
Track Placement and Stopping Trains
Your most commonly used tool is the ability to place temporary tracks ahead of trains to move them to other main tracks. You simply drag your finger from the track in front of the train to another track on the field. Once the train passes through the temporary track, it disappears.
You can point the trains to any track in the field, not just the ones matching their colors, so you can use this to maneuver trains away from each other and avoid collisions. Tapping a train stops the train from moving. You usually only want to do this for about a second per train, as stopping a train for too long destroys a train’s Star, making it worth fewer points.
Color Coding
Each train and track exit comes in different colors, BLUE, RED, YELLOW, and GREEN. Your goal in normal missions is to get each train through its appropriately colored exit without smashing them into each other. In the beginning, most maps tend to have the same color for both ends of a single main track, making things a bit more predictable. But later on, tracks will start having individual colors for each end.
When mixed with things like tunnels, roundabouts, dead ends, and crisscrossing, things can get pretty hectic very fast. Thankfully the game will make a noise if you put a train on a track that doesn’t lead to its destination, and trains will shake and let out an exclamation point [!] symbol when they’re nearing the wrong exit.
Keep an eye on the track end colors and the colors of the trains, and listen for the noise the game makes when you put a train on the wrong track, which you may occasionally have to do to evade other trains.
Stars
Each train starts with a Star mounted on it. Collecting all the Stars in a map unlocks higher difficulties for the map you played on and gives you a reward, usually a random piece of Track for the Overworld.
This means keeping train stops to a minimum: Stopping a train for too long, roughly 2 or 3 seconds, will cause the star to dissipate. While you can still get the money from delivering that train to its destination, you won’t be able to unlock the next difficulty unless you try the map again.
GENERAL TIPS
Train Conductor World is a relatively simple-to-understand but tough-to-master game, so most of the tips can pretty much be split between stuff for missions and for stuff outside of missions. That being said, some tips may not really fit too well into either category, so this section exists for those tips.
Failure? Doesn’t Matter, I Still Get Paid
“What about the passengers-“
“What about them?”
So you’re just not having a good run. Constant train crashes, constant resets, the game’s just so fast it drives you nuts. Don’t worry, you still get paid for losing since not only do you get paid for every train car delivered, you also get money idly via the Train Station cities.
This means you are always making progress just by playing. Never ever give up, and keep at it until you unlock the next level. And don’t restart until after a train actually crashes, that way you get paid for the trains that DID make it.
Log In Once In A While
Once you unlock your first Train Hub, you now have a way to progress the game passively. That being said, you still have to collect the cash by logging in and tapping your Train Hubs, and the game will tell you if the Hubs are full if you allow it to send notifications. Come in once in a while to take the money and fill that bar to get your random train track.
Random Tracks
Speaking of random rewards, the train tracks you get from filling the bar are more or less random, perhaps only affected by the type of box shown. Even if the box is of a higher tier (Which you can view via the Track Shop which sells them for real money), you might get a shape you’re not exactly gunning for. Even the Track Trader gives its tracks a random shape!
This means there really is little point in rushing like crazy since it is entirely possible you grind for a while and still get shapes that don’t help you at all, even after you feed the spares to the Tile Trader!
Be Aware, Keep The Tablet Some Distance From Your Eyes
Listen and keep a wide eye for new trains entering the field and when. It is very easy to get caught off guard, especially in missions that have tunnels or mixed-up paths that have differing exit colors on each end.
Above fast fingers and perfect timing, you must first learn to see the whole railroad, usually by keeping the tablet at a distance where you can see the whole screen rather than hyper-focusing on single tracks or trains. A very common cause for rail crashes, at least in the writer’s experience, is the player trying to focus on one set of trains only to realize a head-on smash-up is about to occur elsewhere.
THE OVERWORLD
The overworld map helps you make a small measure of idle money, slow yet guaranteed progress and is the place where you unlock new game maps. You unlock game maps by connecting Cities and Train Hubs to the town of Mons. To connect Cities and Train Hubs, you need Tracks, and you unlock Tracks by filling the money bar on top of the screen via gameplay or idle rewards. Here are some tips about connecting cities in the Overworld.
Tile Trader
The Tile Trader allows you to trade 5 lower tier Track tiles for one random tile of a higher tier. The randomness of this tile means you have to be careful using the Tile Trader: You’re usually better off saving tiles of the shape you need to unlock more cities to play, which is the main point of progression.
It’s usually best only to trade if you have either a large surplus of low-tier tracks or keep getting shapes that you can’t use. If the shapes you get are the ones you want, you’re better off placing them down immediately rather than waiting until you can make a pure Iron or Alloy track for the extra Hub profits.
Track Tiers
There are 3 tiers of track tiles to correspond with the 3 types of terrain on the Overworld: Wood for Plains, Iron for Plains and Forests, and Alloy for Plains, Forests, and Water. Finally, nothing can be placed on Mountains.
As explained in the previous tip about the Track Trader, 5 of a track can be spent to get 1 random track of a higher tier. Track Tiers don’t just affect the terrain they can be placed on: Every line coming from a Rail Hub like Hamburg and leading to playable levels such as Mons or Paris generates profit, and a line made of Iron tiles will generate more profit than one made of pure Wood and mixed Iron and Wood and will make the same amount as one made of mixed Iron and Alloy.
Place Now, Adjust Later (Unless it’s a Bridge!)
If you have enough tracks to reach a new City inefficiently, place them down and worry about cutting down the number of used track tiles later. This is because you can place used tiles back into your inventory and place them elsewhere as you wish, unless it’s Alloy tacks going over water, as bridges are permanent.
Sure you’re using more tracks than you need since you’re using some weird shapes to get it done, but you’ll be getting more profit the faster you set it up. Once you’re making money or completing missions, go fix the train tracks later to make it more efficient once you get the parts for it. Don’t sit on tracks!
Keep An Eye On Mission Icons
NPC faces and the Crash Test symbol denote missions you can play for extra cash. Usually, they take the form of a special objective you can achieve during a normal mission, such as getting all the trains in perfectly or grabbing a certain number of balloons.
Of special note are the Crash Test missions: Rather than take trains to their destinations, you have to destroy as many of them as possible via collisions. Not only do you get paid a base amount for wrecking the required number of trains, but you also get paid for every train car on every train you wrecked, much like how a normal map pays you for every car that goes to its destination.
TRAIN REDIRECTION
The main part of the gameplay is directing trains to their destinations in small, tightly chaotic maps. We’re warning you now, no amount of knowledge is a replacement for sharp awareness and fast fingers. The sheer chaos that ensues when 3 trains are on the field at once can quickly derail any planning you might have had.
Stars For Movement
The tutorial says you can stop trains by tapping them, then you can get them moving by tapping them again or giving them a side path. Sometime later, the game also tells you that you get stars by disallowing trains from stopping for too long.
Note that they don’t actually say the train has to get to its destination quickly, just that it shouldn’t stop too long! You don’t have to worry if you slow down the train too much by weaving it in and out or giving it a deliberately slowing path, just make sure it arrives at the destination safely.
Parallel Trains? Stop One For A Bit
It may not look like it immediately, but having two trains travel parallel to each other is one of the worst things that can happen, especially if they’re of the same color and on tracks close to each other. This is because it will almost always result in a crash if you move one train to the same track as the other.
You can stop this by tapping one of the trains to stop for a moment then tap them again to keep going. This causes the train to go out of alignment compared to the other, making it easier to redirect should they have the same destination.
Weave In And Out of Tracks If Needed
You don’t need to send a train to its own color exit immediately. In fact, doing that too often typically results in crashes from temporary rails crossing over main rails along with their trains. You should treat the main rails as a potential dodging tool too: If you see two trains about to collide head-on even though they’re both headed to their correct exits, send one train to another track, then back onto the correct track to prevent a crash.
Or have a train slow down by sending it to another track and then to the correct track if it’s riding in parallel with another train headed for the same destination and you don’t want to stop that train for a second for whatever reason. Use the main tracks to evade trains, treat them as one more of your tools rather than merely treating them as an objective to fulfill.
Listen For The Train Whistles
When you hear a train whistle, that’s usually a warning telling you a new train is coming to the board and you should get ready ASAP. What the game doesn’t tell you is that the kind of whistle it gives out tells you the color of the train, since those colors also correspond with the train’s appropriate railroad exit number.
Blue trains let out 1 SHORT whistle, Red trains let out 2 SHORT whistles, Yellow trains let out 3 SHORT whistles, and Green trains let out 1 LONG whistle. That’s because the exits are labeled Blue 1, Red 2, Yellow 3, and Green 4. This way, you immediately know what train color is coming next even if you’re keeping your eyes on every other train trying to kill each other on the screen.
And one more thing: If you hear 2 LONG whistles and there is a huge set of blinking warning arrows on one of the lanes, that means a huge, high-speed bullet train is coming down that lane! And no, the noise of that one has nothing to do with its color.
Save Undos for Late Disasters
If a train crashes, you can watch an ad to Undo the crash and cause nearby trains to move unharmed to their destinations. You can only do this once per mission, and most Ads can be annoyingly long.
Knowing the tip above about getting paid even after a failed mission, you’re usually better off restarting if you crash early. A restart often takes less time than an ad and your prospects are more improved by saving the Undo for much later in a mission when you don’t want to go through 20 train near-crashes again.
Sometimes, You Get Lucky!
Train spawning during games is done more or less randomly. This means you can get lucky and have several trains in a row or across the match spawn in such a way that they are already on their way to their destination, sometimes even at no risk of crashing!
If this happens, you might as well keep playing and use the Undo if you somehow mess this up. This also opens the option to simply restart runs until you get a lucky beginning, though that might be more tedious than simply gritting your teeth and playing the mission through all the madness.
Train Crashes Linger
This is a tip specific to Test Crash mode: If you’ve crashed a long enough train through enough tracks, you’ll have noticed that it can hit multiple trains without needing to do it at the same time. Train hitboxes linger for as long as their visuals stay on screen, and can even hit other trains as physics sends train cars flying across tracks.
This means you can redirect trains to existing wrecks if you’re quick and long trains can be used to barricade several tracks at once, causing grievous, comedic amounts of destruction!
Missions Don’t Care For Difficulty
Missions that appear on the map have a fixed payout of so-and-so coins depending on the mission, with harder missions typically having better payouts.
The easiest way to get those coins is to play on easier difficulties, except for the ones which come with a fixed difficulty level anyway. While the run will pay less because fewer trains are running rampant through the tracks, the mission itself will be achieved regardless and pay the same.
This means the mission pays the same for less effort! On the other hand, completing missions on Chaos tends to be quite difficult, so you’re usually better off clearing missions on easier difficulties and then moving on to harder ones while you wait for new missions to appear.
Balloon Busting
If you spot balloons while playing, try to pop them with your trains if possible: Popping balloons nets you some coins, though not really enough of them to be worth sacrificing the run for.
Sometimes, you can get several balloons positioned next to each other, in which case it may be worth taking a few risks to pop them with a single train. Getting them isn’t critical, but can be helpful for progression. Note that you can’t pop balloons in Crash Test mode.
This ends our Train Conductor World beginner’s guide. We hope this helps you keep the trains running on time. If you have your own tips, leave them in the comments below for others to read!