Transport Fever 3 Best Starting City: How to Pick a Winning Start

“Which city should I start in?” is the most natural question to ask a transport sim — and in Transport Fever 3 it has an unusual answer: your map probably does not have that city on it. Free-game worlds are generated from a seed, so towns, industries and coastlines are different for every player. What transfers between maps is the method: reading what a generated map offers and committing to the start with the best economics. This guide is that method.

Why there is no fixed best starting city

The official wiki’s free-game documentation describes map generation as seed-driven randomization — same seed and settings produce the same map, everything else differs. Launch-week community threads on map generation show players comparing wildly different starting options (“three viable starts with meat, fish and one with bricks” on one map), not trading city names.

The only fixed-geography content is elsewhere:

• The 8 campaign missions — New Orleans, Domodossola (Simplon), Wadi Rum, Bethel, Ekofisk, Manila, Adelaide, Tanegashima
• The 3 Deluxe handcrafted maps — Redrock Bends, Northern Gates, Emerald Shores

So a strong start is a scan, not a lookup. Here is the checklist we run before placing a first station.

What makes a strong starting position?

Two towns close enough to connect cheaply. The official tips and tricks page recommends starting with a direct bus connection between two neighboring towns. Close towns mean short track, short roads, fast turnaround — and bus links can upgrade to trams and rail later without wasted geometry.

A short, valuable industry chain. Distance between raw material and buyer is the whole game early on. Launch-week community favorites:

• Oil / fuel — repeatedly recommended for the opening: high value per delivery and a compact chain (well or platform → refinery → town demand)
• Fish or vegetables → town commercial district — the official tips page’s own beginner suggestion
• Meat or brick clusters — whatever your map puts next to a town works if the route is short

Our cargo and warehouse guide maps the full chain logic, including which industries pay only on final delivery.

Terrain you can afford. Follow contours and flat ground; reshaping terrain is expensive and dents town reputation, and the official tips warn that winding detour lines pay maintenance on their real length. A start across a gentle valley beats a “better” start behind a mountain wall.

Water access if you want it. Shoreline starts unlock fishing lines and cheap bulk shipping — a strong second act once road income is flowing.

Should you start on passengers or cargo?

Passengers (two towns, one bus line) is the lowest-risk opening: simple infrastructure, immediate demand, forgiving of early mistakes. Cargo pays better per vehicle once the chain works — the launch-week community leans oil, or fish and vegetables to a commercial zone per the official tips. On harder difficulties, players who started with cargo chains using the industries’ own pickup behavior report surviving where sprawling passenger networks starved.

Whichever you choose, the arithmetic that decides profitability — headways, fleet counts, deliveries per month — is exactly what the Transport Fever 3 calculator computes before you spend a single credit.

What size of map should a strong start live on?

A common launch-week mistake is starting on the biggest available map: with everything far apart, fixed costs outrun revenue. Medium or Large gives a dense enough cluster to bootstrap your company; the experimental giant sizes are a late-game canvas. The full dimension table lives in our map sizes guide.

The 10-minute opening routine

1. Generate the map, then pause and scout — pan along coasts, valleys and town clusters before building anything
2. Find your two towns or your industry pair; check the corridor between them for gradients and water
3. Place stations with generous catchment overlap of the demand buildings
4. Build the simplest possible link — one road or rail line, no loops
5. Size the fleet for the headway you want (the calculator’s fleet tool does this in one keystroke)
6. Watch the first month, then reinvest into a second line before upgrading the first

Regenerate the map freely at step 1 — a mediocre start punishes you for hours; a good one compounds for the whole campaign.