Train Trek — patch notes and updates
Stored observation / content update:
Dated developer announcements recorded from Steam. Open the source for the complete update.
| Update | Date | Excerpt / source |
|---|---|---|
| From the wheels up: our trains get real running gear | 2026-10-28 | Pioneers, most of Train Trek's mechanics are in place now, and a fresh round of optimizations just landed. So it was time to give the stars of the show some love. We rebuilt the trains from the wheels up. The locomotive, in motion Every locomotive now runs on real drive gear, on both of its engines. The pistons push the main rods, the main rods turn the drivers, and the side rods tie the wheels together. The valve gear rocks along with them, just like on a real steam engine. The right side even runs a quarter turn ahead of the left, the way real engines do it. We built it all heavy, too: thick rods, big cylinders, nothing spindly. And some lo |
| Put yourself in the game: mixed reality capture is built in | 2026-10-25 | Pioneers, if you play in VR and stream or make videos, this one's for you. Train Trek can now put you, the real you, inside the game. You, in the game Mixed reality capture is built right into Train Trek. Point a webcam at yourself, and the game cuts you out of the picture and stands you in the world. You show up right where you are in your play area, seen from where the webcam stands. The finished picture shows up in the game's window on your monitor, ready for OBS to record or stream. No extra mixed reality apps, no compositing by hand. And you're not a sticker slapped on top of the game. You stand inside it: whatever is in front of you dra |
| Good news: we added a worm. Bad news: it eats trains. | 2026-10-23 | Pioneers, there's something new on the rails, and it isn't a train. It's a worm. A big one. It eats trains. Meet the track worm The track worm is a long chain of armored links with a grinder where its face should be: three rings of cutters spinning around a glowing throat. It rides the same rails you do, and it hunts the thing you're riding. It comes when you make enough noise. Shoot down 20 or so hostile wanderers and a worm rises out of the fog behind your train. Then the count starts over. You'll hear it before you see it, howling first and then its links clattering down the rails. What it wants Your train, one car at a time. It closes in |
| The Android build is here. Steam Frame, hope you're ready. | 2026-10-21 | Pioneers, Train Trek has an Android build now, made for the Steam Frame. It's built to run right on the headset, no PC needed. The full game and the demo both made the trip. What's in the box The same world, the same trains, the same companions. Their voices came along too: the voice that speaks their lines is packed into the headset build, so nobody has to go quiet. It's a big download, about 9 GB, because the world doesn't get any smaller just because you're wearing it. The hopefully part We haven't had it on a headset yet. The build passes every check we can run without one, but that's not the same as playing it. How fast it runs, how the |
| Your companions learned to make faces | 2026-10-19 | Pioneers, your companions have always talked with their whole face. This update gives them a lot more face to talk with. We also added achievements, and we cut your fleet down to one train. Here's the lot. A brow in two halves A companion's upper hood, the plate that works as its brow, is now split down the middle, and each half moves on its own. That one change unlocked a lot. One brow up is skepticism. Both halves tipped into a V is anger. Tip them the other way and you get sadness, or pleading. They never bump into each other on the way, either. We checked every companion, at every level, in every pose. All told, your companions now have 8 |
| We built an obstacle course for bots. They hate it. | 2026-10-19 | Pioneers, every multiplayer bug you never run into is one a bot ran into first. This is a peek at how we test Train Trek's multiplayer: a small army of bots, an obstacle course, and an unreasonable number of checks. The gauntlet Off in a test level you'll never visit, there's a six-sided arena with a race track looped around it. We call it the gauntlet, and it throws every move a Pioneer has at you. There are low walls to jump, a high wall to double-jump, and a causeway with gaps in it. Then come grapple pillars to swing from, a wall to grapple over, a crouch tunnel and three portal gates. A rocket climb, a steampack climb and a slalom finish |
| Your companions got guns. VR got hands. The train got new decks. | 2026-10-18 | Pioneers, this one's a five-for-one. Virtual reality, the controls, your companions, the insides of your train and the music all got some serious attention. Here's what changed. VR, now with a body We put on a headset, looked down, and our Pioneer wasn't there. That's fixed. Your head and hands are attached to your Pioneer now, and your arms reach wherever your controllers are. The world is scaled to your own height, too, so your hands are the right size instead of toy-sized. The left stick walks the way your body faces. The right stick turns you: flick it for a quick snap turn, or hold it to turn smoothly. Rather play sitting down? There's a |
| We made the world beautiful and with 100% more holes. | 2026-10-12 | Pioneers, two big things this time. The world looks a lot better, and now you can dig holes in it. We suspect those two are related. A new look The hexagon patterns that used to be painted over every rock are gone. Each biome wears its own kind of stone now, with cracks, nooks and crannies up close and calmer shapes in the distance. The far view got its depth back, too. Distant hills used to fade into a bright, milky haze and lose their shadows on the way. Now they keep their colors and cast their shadows as far as you can see. The midday sun has also been asked to calm down a little. Resource deposits got a makeover while we were at it. Fuel |
| Say Hello to your Trek Companions! | 2026-10-08 | Pioneers, you've been hearing a voice since your first ride. It talks you through the hard parts, cheers the good ones and has opinions about your driving. Now you can see who's been talking. Meet your companion Take your train and a companion comes with it. It's a little steampunk core, a ball of hexagon plates with one big glowing eye, hanging from its own set of rotors. It rides on top of your locomotive. Step off, and it comes with you, hovering at your shoulder. Stop for a moment and it turns around to look at you. Look somewhere and its eye follows. Every so often it glances toward where you ought to be going, with a little nod, in case |
| Wanderer AI fixes.. | 2026-10-02 | Hi everyone, Pax here, your Train Trek dev. I've been playing the game a lot more lately and losing myself in it - especially in VR mode which will soon be launched and available for everyone to enjoy. As I was grappling from wanderer to wanderer in the sky and having a blast trying not to lose my footing IRL - I noticed that some wanderers were getting stuck in the terrain because they didn't know to climb above it. Don't worry, there will be a way to play this in VR while sitting down as well. This is a small update to fix a few things (mostly after 1AM decisions I made that made sense at the time I made them). |
| Hello and Welcome to the Big Infinite World! | 2026-10-01 | Pioneers, remember the rocket? The one that came screaming out of the sky at the start of every run with your locomotive strapped to it? It's retired. It had a good career. Mostly downhill. Your train comes from somewhere now. So do the wanderers. So do the couriers. And the world they all come out into just keeps going. The factory Your train is built in a factory you can't drive to. It isn't anywhere on the map. It's a pocket of its own, folded away behind a door, with room inside for whatever needs building. Cranes ride gantries over the lanes, a press pumps up and down and a flywheel spins. Your locomotive and tender are built in there, o |
| Get off the train. Something's out there.. | 2026-09-19 | Pioneers, Most of your time in Train Trek is spent up above it all. High over the train, looking down on the rails, the rock and everything trying to stop you. It's a fine view for a fight. It's the wrong one for a story. And there's a story out here. A world that was old long before the first Pioneer laid a rail, full of things that were never meant to be looked at from the sky. You can't take in a place like that from up there. You have to stand in it. So we came down. You can step off the locomotive now. Not to watch it from a new angle. To walk. Bigger on the inside Your train is bigger on the inside. Every car has a room, every room wear |
| Turrets, Turrets, Turrets! | 2026-09-12 | Pioneers, Every turret on your train has been rebuilt. Forty-seven turrets you can build, eleven families, up to three levels each, and not one of them looks like its neighbor any more. While we were in there we wrote down where they all came from. Some of it doesn't reflect well on anybody. Cannons: the first idea, and then five more Something came down the line. Somebody pointed a tube at it. That worked, so the tube stayed. Then something turned up further away, and we got the mortar. Then something turned up bigger, and we got the howitzer. Then something had the nerve to turn up in the air, and we got the flak cannon. The field gun is fo |
| Portals, multi-language, and the road to 128 Pioneers and the Deck | 2026-09-08 | Hey Pioneers. This one is big. We put holes in the world, we built a button that digs a train out of trouble, and we spent a week finding out whether a hundred and twenty-eight of you can share one sky. Also, reality kept doing what reality does, so there's a pile of fixes at the bottom. Portals A portal has two mouths and whatever goes into one comes out of the other. That part you can guess. Here's the part we're pleased about. The far side can open over nothing at all. Not a tunnel, not a doorway onto more track. A hole in the air, three kilometres away, with no ground under it. Drive into it and your locomotive comes out into open sky. Yo |
| Train Trek — Reality 1, design document 0 | 2026-08-23 | Every update leaves here in perfect condition. We test it, we're pleased with it, we write confident words like "tuned" and "balanced" in the notes. Then it meets actual Pioneers, and inside a day we find out that the enemy turrets had never once fired at anybody, the wanderers were flying tight little circles admiring their own spawn point, and one shell to the hitch could fold a tender inside a locomotive and leave it there. None of that was in the design document. All of it was in your reports. So: thank you. Genuinely. Including for "they seem to be spiraling towards high up into the sky", which is a bug report and, we'd argue, a poem. He |
| The Depot opens, the sky fills up, and fireworks means "Hello!" | 2026-08-22 | Hey Pioneers. Time for the first big update! The Depot is open and it has opinions about your train. There are 189 wanderers in the sky and they're finally the right size. And you can now form a guild with someone by pulling up alongside them and asking. The world out there is still corrupted. It isn't lost, it's waiting for someone to go and clean it up. Here's what you've got to work with now. The Depot The Depot is where you build your train. Parts hang off named mount points, and mounts nest inside other mounts, so a lamp sits on a bracket, the bracket sits on a hood, and the hood sits on the engine. You're assembling a machine, not decor |