Simutrans

Do you remember OpenTTD? Simutrans is a similar game. It’s a tycoon game and we need to make a lot of money. We have a transport company and we must build lines for buses, trains, planes, trucks and boats. Unlike OpenTTD, Simutrans isn’t a clone, it’s a game that evolves as users request. It was developed by Hajo, but now a team does the dev work.

The game is managed using the mouse as usual in many tycoon games. I’m going to tell you how to build your first line. Click on the Road button (the truck). Build a road. There are different types of roads, each one with a price and a maximum speed. The higher you pay, the fastest it is. Basic roads are already built between towns. However, we must build a little road to build the garage.

Build the garage by clicking on an end of the road. Build also two passenger stations. Passenger stations can be built anywhere in the road.

Click on the garage to buy a bus. Then, select the bus you want.

Click on Enroute (Enrutar in the picture). Add stations to the route by clicking on the stations. Now you can start the bus.

Congrats! Your first bus is doing its first job.

The game supports a great varity of vehicles, from trams to helicopters (there are even trolleybus). Excellent tools for working with lines, industries, high-density traffic. One thing to remind is that in Simutrans everything has a destination. If your lines doesn’t connect the original place with the destination, nobody will be on your vehicles, they will be empty.

Paksets

I have lied to you. Simutrans is only an engine (technically is more like a game because game logic is still in Simutrans). The game content is in paksets. There are different paksets with different artistic styles, rules and difficulties. For example, pak128. Its grids are 128 pixels wide, there are a lot of roads and it can be one of the most difficult paksets based on what money they give you for a successful job. The most common pakset is pak64, because it was the original and it’s the default pakset. However, you can install a lot of paksets, but be careful, savegames doesn’t work between paksets.

Simutrans has multiplayer servers, join the server with the correct engine and pakset version and be ready to compete with people from all around the globe. The Simutrans community can be found in their forums.

Install Simutrans on Haiku

Simutrans is available on the HaikuPorts ports tree (newer version) or in Simutrans official page. HaikuPorts also has packages por pak64 and pak128.

haikuporter simutrans_x86

If you have downloaded the ZIP file from the official page you can install new paksets by running the bash script _getpak.sh.