Freerailers!

200,000 of you have wishlisted Enginefall, thank you. For an independent studio, that number means everything, and we don't take this kind of support lightly.

This game gets built alongside its community. Your playtest feedback shapes what we make and knowing you're out there waiting at the platform keeps us pushing. To say thank you properly, we're pulling back the curtain on one of the ‘biggest’ visual overhauls in Enginefall's development so far.

If you know someone who hasn't grabbed their ticket yet, now's a great time to bring them along for the ride, we cannot wait to celebrate 300k wishlists and more with you, plus, this is the kind of game that gets better the more people help build it.

The Titan Trains have been rebuilt from the ground up. Here's how.

There's something primal about a train arriving at a station.

The floor starts vibrating before you see it.

You feel it in your feet first, then your chest.

It's a sensation most of us have carried since childhood, a grip tightening on a parent's hand as the platform shakes.

That sensory memory is the foundation the Titan Trains are built on. We all have trains imprinted somewhere in our unconsciousness. Creating a believable one should be easy, right!?

...Except Enginefall isn't a corridor shooter.

The Titan Trains were built from the inside out. Floor by floor, carriage by carriage, the team added whatever the gameplay demanded. Undercarriage traversal. Resource platforms. Rat tunnels threading between floors. For a long time, the exterior was almost an afterthought.

Then someone added a vent with destructible panels.

One playtest later, there was footage of a player raiding another player from the outside, scaling the hull mid-journey, breaching through the vent. "A lot of laughter and emotions," as Art Director Seb puts it.

That single clip cracked the brief wide open. An open cargo carriage followed. A grapple gun for scaling vertical walls. Fights on the roof became a real thing. The exterior wasn't set dressing anymore; it was a full combat layer. Players jumping from the Control Room at the tip of the train. A skyscraper falling onto the Shirley Titan, ripping a hole through the 3rd Class carriage. The exterior now had become a ‘feature’.

The first pass on the exterior was built to match that moment in time, reactive, functional and designed to validate the gameplay loop rather than make a statement. It did the job. But the team always knew it was a placeholder. When the opportunity came to rework it properly, Seb and Concept Artist Lucas sat down together to do it right.

"We wanted players to feel like they are on a real train," Seb explains, "no matter if they walk down the main corridor, crawl through rat tunnels, or run over the ceiling past fortified enemy lines."

The answer wasn't science fiction. A slick bullet train surface would be too clean to make visually interesting, and too far removed from the memory most players carry. Something too generic would read as set dressing. What the Titans needed was a design that already lived in the cultural imagination.

Something with real engineering authority behind it.

They landed on the Amtrak.

"The Amtrak lives in a sweet spot between real-world engineering and cinematic presence." Clean elongated bodies. Strong horizontal branding. A clear visual hierarchy from big uninterrupted surfaces down to fine technical detail. It feels powerful and contemporary without tipping into fantasy. It suggests that an advanced society actually built and ran these things, which, in the world of Enginefall, they once did.

[c]\[New Exterior Concept Art][/c]

The new design drew heavily from classic American trains, sheet aluminium, bold red, white and blue colouring, those long clean flanks. The Titan Trains aren't copies of anything real: the nose is more monumental, the body modules stretched, the running gear enlarged, roof equipment added. But the underlying logic comes from that lineage. Grounded, but mythic.

Once the design direction was locked, the work landed with Bryn, Senior Environment Artist. The scale of the task was immediately apparent.

"We have ten carriages per Titan Train," Bryn explains, "and multiple potential Titan Trains with different carriage variations. That's a lot of different exteriors to create and manage."

Before a single polygon was moved, Bryn built out a full reference collage, trains, ships, oil rigs, large industrial vehicles.
"I especially liked how large ships show the structure of the hull under the thin metal exterior skin. Getting that sense of scale across to the player was essential."

With reference locked, every carriage was mapped against a detailed list of requirements, identifying where window sizes and structural elements could be standardised across modules, and what workable geometry from the old exterior could be carried forward with updated materials.

\[[i][c]Reference collage][/c][/i]

Only then did the blocking begin, large forms roughed out in 3D and dropped into the engine to see how the concept translated into real space. Where proportions needed adjusting. Where the design held up under a first-person camera and where it didn't.

[c]\[3D blockouts][/c]

With the forms approved, Bryn moved into final art production. Trim sheets, decal atlases, and tiling materials were built to be shared across all the carriage modules, a smart investment that dramatically accelerated texturing across the whole train. Window frames, structural fastening points, panel joins: the kind of granular detail that makes a surface read as something built rather than something modelled.

[c]\[Material Sheets][/c]

One of the core design pillars was time. The Titan Trains have been roaming the earth for two hundred years. The metal needed to show it, bent, rusted, worn in a way that felt earned rather than decorative. Material variations were built specifically to carry that history across different damage states.

[c]\[Rooftop details][/c]

[c]\[Completed window detail] [/c]

The final piece was destruction, and this is where Technical Artist Rich came in. With so many carriages to maintain and future updates to consider, a fully manual approach to destruction wasn't viable. Rich built a procedural tool that lets the team mark where damage should occur, automatically ripping chunks from the mesh and swapping in the appropriate worn materials. Future-proofed, and fast.

[c]\[Destruction States][/c]

The result is a train that feels like it belongs to its world, something an advanced civilisation built at the peak of their engineering, now carrying two centuries of wear, conflict, and survival across the rails.

[c]\[Hero Shot of the Finished Exterior][/c]

🚂 Grounded, but mythic!

Thanks for reading, we'll be back soon with more deep dives! Let us know if you enjoyed this content in the comments.

Hey Freerailers,

Welcome back to the train. This week's closed playtest brings a sizeable batch of changes across almost every system, economy, extraction, combat, progression, and more.

Open: 9 Apr 2026 11:00 UTC

Close: 13 Apr 2026 07:00 UTC

• Dagger items wiped (apart from the player vaults)

• Dagger buildings wiped

• dagger tech tree progression wiped

• skyhook inventory wiped

• character data wiped

• dagger energy wiped

Why the reset? As we are in pre-launch and active playtesting, we occasionally need to reset progress to implement new systems, balance gameplay, and ensure the smooth development of the game.

We have done visual pass on multiple carriages. We've started iterating on the lighting, set dressing, and architecture to establish the visual identities of each carriage and variant. You might not notice all of the work done yet but more passes are coming, which will iterate on this and show visual progression.

• New Look for Junktown (Carriage C07)

Terminology update:

• Blueprints → Schematics

• Blueprint scraps → Data

We've made a lot of adjustments here, and the tl;dr version is ‘getting started should feel less punishing’.

T1 weapons, SMGs, shotguns, drills, and armor, now cost fewer credits to buy, and you'll find them dropping more frequently in Third Class. Yes, they're more available now, especially early. We want you to be able to get into/survive fights without spending your whole run just trying to gear up.

Energy costs for printing schematics have been rebalanced too. Tier 1 schematics are cheaper to print: Tier 3 and above cost more. Higher-tier gear should feel like a meaningful investment rather than just a grind tax.

A few other economy changes worth knowing about:

• Blue trash bags now have a 10% chance to spawn throughout the train, and they're guaranteed to drop data . They're meant to be a more readable and reliable way to gather data as you move through carriages, keep an eye out for them!

• Gambling schematics now costs fewer scraps (the non category specific ‘random’ blueprint option).

• Meganodes now always drop 50 Uranium (up from 10). Yes, really.

• Toilets now drop ceramics in Class 2 and above (more in keeping than plastic).

• Converting Parts into data at a Research Station now only requires 3 Parts, down from 5.

We have added an early experimental version of a tutorial train which aims to introduce new players to Enginefall before jumping in to a Titan Train. This can be found on your Dagger Train when you 'select your destination'.
If you do check it out, be sure to leave your feedback on the Discord server so we can incorporate feedback as we develop it.

A massively requested feature has made its way onto the trains! This is an early and experimental version of the map and can be accessed by pressing 'M' in game.

This will show:

• Your location

• The levels of a carriage (mouse wheel to scroll through them)

• Locations of:

  • Skyhooks

  • Party Members

  • Base Cores

  • Extraction Points

  • Airlocks

  • Bedrolls

• The two nearest extraction points now always show on your compass.

• Bedrolls and airlocks also appear as world markers on the HUD

So finding your way around the train should now be less guesswork especially for newer players.

Two big changes to how extraction and inventory work.

First: items are now kept on extraction. When you return from the Titan Train, everything you're carrying comes with you back to the Dagger. No more vaulting screen, which means you can choose where you store/use items.

Second: Overflow Inventory. If you travel with a loadout and leave items behind (as they are not compatible with the class you are boarding in etc), those items are stored in a new overflow inventory. You'll need to clear it before you can ready up again. This replaces the old vaulting flow; we think it's cleaner, more intentional and gives more control when partied up.

• A new grenade indicator is in; the incoming grenade warning has been improved so you can actually react to it.

• Searchable containers have had a significant overhaul:

  • Items now reveal one-by-one as you search, rather than all at once. You can open a container immediately and items populate as your character searches.

  • Empty containers now restock their loot over time, so revisiting areas can pay off.

  • Discovering rare items now plays a unique audio stinger based on rarity and type, so you'll hear when something good turns up.

We've also fixed a handful of container bugs.

Two ATM bugs have been fixed:

• The deposit prompt was showing 0 credits

• The interaction prompt was missing when you had no credits available.

Both should behave correctly now.

We are happy to now have ‘Trace’ audio announcements play when you enter a carriage, which aims to add a lot to the atmosphere.

ASCII also has a new voice throughout the game.

Fixed a number of issues surrounding tech trees.

We've also fixed a chain of issues with tech tree unlocks, schematics researched in the tech tree now correctly unlock at the Research Station, and Dagger tech tree research properly grants mission unlocks.

• EasyAntiCheat is now integrated and enabled.

• We've also updated NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR for smoother running and sharper looks

• Foliage density on the Low settings has been improved

• The first-person camera body has had a fidelity pass

• General stability improvements

That's everything for this week's playtest. As always, your feedback shapes what we work on next, make sure to leave us your thoughts on Discord.

See you on the train.