Transport Fever 3 Map Seeds: Best Seeds and How They Work

Prefer video? Hushey shows the large-map generation options in action:

How Transport Fever 3 builds a map

Every new game starts with the generator: you pick your settings — climate and map footprint first among them — and the game rolls a world to match. The campaign footage this site draws on used the temperate climate on the largest map size, which produced a 16×6 km playing field carrying 21 towns and 22 industries.

Those numbers are worth knowing, but the placement matters more than the totals. On that map, some of the 22 industries ended up in genuinely awkward spots — including facilities sitting out in the middle of lakes. A water-locked industry can only be served by ship, so before you commit your first loan, pan across the entire map and take stock of what the generator handed you.

The industrial map is also not static. New industries appear on their own as the years pass — one campaign watched a sand pit, a glass works and a distillery show up in sequence through the early decades. The reverse happens too: an industry nobody serves can disappear outright (one playthrough's canning factory simply vanished), though lost industries can return later. Treat your day-one map as a snapshot, not a promise — a region that looks resource-poor in 1900 may look very different by 1930.

What a map seed actually is

A seed is the starting number a map generator builds its world from. The same settings combined with the same seed should reproduce the same world — identical coastline, identical town sites, identical industry layout — while a different seed reshuffles all of it. That is all anyone means by a "good map seed": one roll of the generator that happens to produce a layout you like.

Beyond that general principle, we owe you honesty about scope. The launch footage this site is sourced from never walks through a seed entry screen, and we will not publish a list of seed numbers we have not loaded ourselves — an untested seed is a guess, and a wrong one wastes your evening.

What we can do is the useful half of the topic: explain the terrain behavior you can actually plan around. On a game whose industrial map churns for a century, reading your rolled map well beats hunting a mythical perfect one.

The Deluxe Edition's premade map

You can skip the generator entirely. The Deluxe Edition ships with Emerald Shores, a premade map that arrives as a finished world rather than something rolled from a seed. If you want a curated starting point — or just want to compare a handcrafted layout against your own rolls — it is one of the edition's concrete extras; our Deluxe vs standard comparison covers what else the upgrade includes.

How terrain shapes your network

Terrain is where a rolled map starts charging you, and the bill arrives in three currencies: grades, structures and reputation.

Rail grades punish lazy routing. In the campaign, track that simply followed an existing road up a hillside produced grades around 9%; deleting the road and rerouting for a gentler line brought that down to roughly 1%. The build tools let you lock a grade between 2% and 6%, but mountains do not negotiate: when an 8% climb proved unworkable for a mainline, the fix was a tunnel with a 3% ceiling — which then allowed the faster 160 km/h track standard on top.

Bridges and tunnels are the price of straight lines. Early small bridges ran about $40,000 against $700,000 for a large one, and tunnels scaled from roughly $600,000 in 1900 to millions for long bores — mainline tunnels cost between about $2.2M and $5M at different points in the campaign. Roads, notably, do not simulate grades at all (a 15% road is purely cosmetic, unlike Transport Fever 2 — the full change list is in our TF2 vs 3 comparison), so a road-first network sidesteps mountain surcharges that rail cannot.

Terrain costs and grades recorded in the campaign

• Small bridge: ~$40,000 · large bridge: ~$700,000
• Early tunnels (1900): ~$600,000
• Long mainline tunnels: ~$2.2M–$5M depending on length and era
• Track following a road: ~9% grade; rerouted: ~1%
• Build-time grade lock: 2–6%
• Mountain tunnel: 3% grade ceiling, which permits 160 km/h track

Water rewrites your route map. Lake and coastal industries need ports, and some terrain is outright hostile to direct connections: an offshore oil platform could not link to a dock at all, and the campaign's workaround was a small harbor nearby plus a road link and a tunnel to get past the headland. On a water-heavy roll, ports stop being optional infrastructure.

Prospecting finds what the generator left out. If your map rolled no source of a resource you need, you can prospect for one: order a survey for a specific resource from a town, and roughly five in-game months later a deposit appears — where the game decides, not where you asked. Prospecting unlocks through your company rank progression, so it is a mid-game tool, not a day-one one.

Landmarks double as mining permits. Building a landmark spawns a quarry, and landmarks are paid mostly in reputation rather than cash. The campaign's amphitheater cost 800 stone to raise but cut road-vehicle noise in its area by 25% — on a map with no natural stone industry, that is both a civic upgrade and your only path to bricks.

Choosing a map for your goals

You rarely get to pick every trait of your world, so match your plan to the roll:

• Water-heavy maps favor shipping. Boats move bulk cargo well, lake and coastal industries become natural ports of call, and water-locked industries are unreachable any other way. If a third of your industry map touches water, plan your first rail budget around ports instead.
• Mountain-heavy maps tax rail. Every straight line through a ridge is a tunnel bill, and grades force slow climbs or long detours. That is not a dealbreaker — the campaign crossed its ranges anyway — but budget for it, or lean on roads where cargo volumes allow.
• The default temperate roll is the teaching map. With 21 towns and 22 industries spread over 16×6 km, there is almost always a short, profitable first chain within truck distance of your headquarters. If this is your first campaign, the beginner guide walks you through the opening hours.

Whatever you roll, plan for churn. Industries appear and disappear across a hundred years, so the durable skill is building corridors with room to grow rather than optimizing for day one. Our industries and cargo guide explains how to read an industry map and its chains, and sandbox mode lets you test a layout without your balance sheet watching.