Transport Fever 3 Map Size: The Real Max Size and How to Unlock Bigger Maps

Quick answer: the largest map you can pick in an ordinary new game is Very Large, the top of the shipped dropdown, confirmed by a launch-day player who tried and failed to go past it. Larger sizes sit behind an undocumented experimentalMapFeatures flag in settings.lua, which makes them community-observed rather than official, and how many there are depends on which guide you trust. Urban Games has published no size table, no km² figure, no town-capacity number and no frame-rate cost per size.

• Official max size out of the box: Very Large. The tiers below it are not yet confirmed, so do not assume the Transport Fever 2 ladder carried over.
• Bigger sizes: Huge 20x20, Megalomaniac 24x24 and a disputed third tier reported at 28x28. Community-observed; it may change with patches.
• Town count is not set by size. Town density is its own slider, and at launch the industry-density labels do not match behaviour.

What Transport Fever 3 Actually Ships

The Steam store page, the official game page and every developer blog describe the map generator in detail, and none state a size, a tier name or an area.

Official source: Dev Blog Episode 5: Highlights — "We are experimenting with map sizes ahead of the release of the game, but it is worth keeping in mind that the scales used in the game are not intended to be realistic. Instead it aims to create a similar feel to reality even if distances and scales are shortened over what you'd expect in reality."

So a "24 km" map is not a quarter of a real county.

The 576 km² figure is a player's own arithmetic, quoted in a launch-day Steam discussion: "even the megalomaniac map with 24 x 24 km = 576 km² in size". The 400 and 784 figures are multiplication on the same community-reported spans at 1:1, not measurements. The guides print bare numbers like "20x20" with no unit; reading them as kilometres is an inference from posters' own wording, not something either guide states.

The third tier is a live disagreement. Two guides went up on launch day about forty minutes apart: one, "Enable Experimental Map Sizes", lists three tiers including "Gigantomaniac 28x28"; the other, "Unlock Larger Maps", stops at "You should see 'Huge' and 'Megalomaniac' map size options in your map editors now". The flag line is identical in both, so if 28x28 is missing from your dropdown you have not misconfigured anything.

One control sits next to size. The map editor exposes a map format ratio separately, and a launch-day seed post shares a 1:2 world, so the same size name at a wide format is a different world. Exact per-format dimensions are not yet confirmed; treat an elongated map as a shape choice, not an area guarantee.

Unlocking Bigger Maps: The Experimental Flag

Getting past Very Large takes a text editor and a restart. Two independent community guides posted on launch day give the same procedure, and a third player confirmed it in the Steam discussion.

1. Open Settings, go to Advanced, press Open User Data Folder.
2. Open settings.lua.
3. Find experimentalMapFeatures = false (the guides place it around line 55).
4. Set it to true, save, restart the game.
5. Start a new game. The extra sizes appear in the map dropdown for new maps; the guides stop short of confirming whether a save already running can pick them up.

The same file carries a sibling flag, experimentalTunnelAndBridgeMinHeight, lifting the height constraint on bridges and tunnels. Both are community-observed; it may change with patches. For a bigger world without editing files, the map editor and mod route is documented, and the editor embeds the Terrain Generator Editor.

Map Size and CPU Load

Urban Games does address this, and unusually directly. Map size is not itself the cost. The cost is everything sitting on it.

Official source: Transport Fever 3 Known Issues — "Transport Fever 3 continuously simulates a large number of vehicles, cities, industries, transport connections and other systems. As the map and transport network grow, the amount of simulation work increases. Performance can therefore decrease on large or highly developed maps, particularly with: many cities; dense transport networks; large numbers of vehicles; complex road traffic; many industries and cargo connections; large or demanding mods."

The same page warns that meeting minimum requirements "does not guarantee high frame rates in every situation. Performance can also be affected by the size and complexity of the current game." No per-size frame rates are published. What exists instead is this two-minute diagnostic.

Simulation cost scales with entities, not area, so a Megalomaniac map left mostly empty is cheaper than a Very Large map filled completely. See the performance and lag guide and system requirements.

Map Size vs. Expansion Pace

A launch-day thread titled "Size of the Maps" holds the best pacing evidence, because the replies describe play rather than preference. A player nine game-years into a 1900 start on Very Large reports it still "feels really big". Another explains why the top shipped size already feels oversized early: "alone my first connections industry to town felt like the traveling takes an eternity for my carts." A horse cart is the slowest thing in the roster, so a 1900 map feels enormous by construction.

The complaint runs the other direction later, asked about high-speed trains and jets: "Wait until you are using high speed trains or jet airplanes and you will see the problem." Distance stops being a feature and becomes dead time.

The one official scale figure is the achievement "Around the World", which asks for 40,075 km of streets and tracks. Read the wording: it ends "(combined)", which across this achievement set means summed over all your Free Game saves, not one map. It describes a career's worth of network, not one map's capacity.

That last column is editorial judgement, not measured data, and rests on one structural fact: a bigger map does not hand you more cities, it hands you more distance between them. Town count is answered by the town-density slider, independent of size. On an official Urban Games forum thread a player reports the industry-density slider misbehaving at launch, because maxing it out strands future demand. Read the industry panel before trusting the label. How growth consumes capacity is in the city growth guide.

The Three Deluxe Handcrafted Maps

The Deluxe Edition adds three fixed maps, described verbatim by the publisher.

Official source: Transport Fever 3 Editions — "Three New Handcrafted Maps For All Kind of Challenges"

No area, town count, climate zone or difficulty rating has been published for any of the three. If you are deciding editions on these maps, the comparison is in the edition guide.

Can You Enlarge a Map After Saving?

Not yet confirmed, and do not plan around it. No official statement addresses it. The Known Issues page does not mention it, the store page advertises an in-game map editor without saying a running save can be resized, and no developer blog covers it.

The substitute is what the game documents: the map editor is a full authoring tool with an embedded Terrain Generator Editor, heightmap import and terrain sculpting, so you design a world at the size you want before starting. That is authoring a new map, not enlarging one. For freedom without restarting, sandbox mode, where all costs can be switched off, is the documented escape hatch.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the biggest map in Transport Fever 3?

Very Large, as shipped. Larger tiers exist behind the experimentalMapFeatures flag in settings.lua; two guides agree on Huge and Megalomaniac and disagree about a third reported at 28x28.

How do I get the Megalomaniac map size?

Open Settings, go to Advanced, click Open User Data Folder, open settings.lua, change experimentalMapFeatures = false to true, save and restart. Community-observed; it may change with patches.

Is 24 x 24 km really 576 km²?

That conversion comes from a player, not Urban Games, and assumes a 1:1 format. The game treats the ratio as a separate control, so an elongated Very Large and a square one are different worlds.

Does a bigger map give me more cities?

No. Town count is set by the town-density slider, independently of size. A bigger map gives you more distance between the towns you generate, making air freight and express rail more viable rather than giving you more settlements.

Is the Transport Fever 3 map bigger than Transport Fever 2's?

Launch-day players disagree in the same thread. One post reads "I even feel that the Maps in Tf3 are even smaller... i hoped for them to be bigger"; the reply below says "the map size are the same". Both are first-day impressions, so treat the comparison as unsettled. What did change is the generator: TF3 moved from a layer stack to a node-based system with four climate zones, so terrain reads differently even where dimensions match.

Related Guides

• Performance and lag fix — the CPU-bound walkthrough a big map creates.
• System requirements — what Urban Games asks for, before committing to Megalomaniac.
• City growth explained — how towns consume capacity, the driver of simulation cost.
• Which edition to buy — where the three Deluxe maps fit the value comparison.