Wiki / The world
Cities & stars
The world is 3,982 cities and every one of them is a separate problem. The cities panel is where you decide which one to solve next.
The cities panel
The dock's Cities tab lists every city your network touches, one row each, and it is sortable on every column:
| Column | What it means |
|---|---|
| Name | The metro area |
| Transit | The share of trips in that city that use your network |
| Trips | Transit trips per day — the volume you carry, not the demand |
| Profit | Profit per day in that city |
| Points | Points earned there in the past 24 hours |
Sorting by Transit ascending is the most useful view in the game: it puts the cities you are failing at the top. Sorting by Profit answers a different question — which city pays for the rest.
Click a city to open its details: boardings, the split by purpose, its lines and stations, and its top lines and top stations. That panel is the fastest way to find the line that is dragging a city down.
Two views, two jobs
Transit share ascending finds opportunity. Profit descending finds dependency. A healthy network has both: some cities that are nearly solved, and no single city that the whole network depends on.
Transit share is the score
Transit share is the fraction of trips in a city that go by transit. It is what the mode bar shows, what the stars measure, and what every other system feeds. Two things about it are worth internalising:
- It is a share, not a count. A city with huge demand can have a low share because its trips are spread over a huge area. A small dense city can score higher with a fraction of the track.
- It is measured per city. Serving a suburb of one metro area does not raise the share of the city next door, even if the stations look close together.
Stars
Each city has star goals set at transit-share thresholds. Reach the threshold and the star is earned, with the date recorded — the city panel shows it later as "star earned on …". The goals scale with the city: the game sets them where they are meaningful for that city's demand, not at one flat number.
Stars are the game's own definition of "solved enough". A network that chases the last few percent in one city is usually better off taking the first stars in three others.
Real-world starts have their own goal
If you began with the real world network option, the city's goal is expressed against the share its real lines actually achieve. You are not building from zero; you are being measured against a network that already exists.
Metro areas and boundaries
Cities are modelled as metro areas with boundaries, and a station belongs to the smallest area that contains it. Where two metro areas overlap — and in dense regions they do — this rule decides which city gets the credit for a station and its riders.
The practical consequence: a station placed in the overlap between two cities counts for one of them, not both. If you are chasing a star in a specific city, check where the boundary falls before you build on it.
The world
Above the cities there is a world total: trips per day across everything modelled, the population behind them, and your share. It is a scale check more than a target — no realistic network moves the world number — but it is a good reminder of how the game is built: the demand exists whether or not you serve it, and your network is a small, deliberate intervention in it.
The all cities view in the cities panel compares the cities in this game against the wider world, which is how you see whether a city you are proud of is actually unusual or just large.
Choosing the next city
A method that works:
- Sort by transit share ascending, and look at the top five.
- Open the best of them and read the purpose split. A city with unserved work trips wants a radial line; a city with unserved airport trips wants one link, not a network.
- Check the distance to your nearest station. A city adjacent to your network is cheap to connect; a distant one needs an intercity corridor with a business case.
- Build one thing, run a day, and see whether the share moved. If it did not, the problem was not where you thought.
The one mistake to avoid is opening a new city before the last one is stable. Every city you touch adds upkeep; every city you finish adds points and stars. The game rewards depth before breadth.