Goal of the Game

Playing

You choose the goals you want to achieve:

make as much virtual money as possible
build a great transportation network, and watch it as it operates by itself (actually, you will always find something that can be improved)
connect all cities, industries, tourist attractions in the game, directly or by creating transport hubs
- make every building and point of interest accessible by public transport, such as busses, trains, trams, monorail, maglev, airplanes and even ships (ferries etc.).
- connect complete industry chains
most importantly, enjoy yourself while playing Simutrans

You can improve Simutrans by:

creating new city buildings, monuments and tourist attractions
creating new types of tracks, roads, stations, loading bays, airports and docks
creating new industry chains and dependant factories
creating new types of trees
creating new engines, trains, road vehicles, ships, airplanes, trams, monorail trains, maglev trains
composing some new music (encoded in the .mid format)
extend the documentation, manuals and wiki
help out with the translations
create new maps if you are able to
test newest versions, to find and report bugs in order to help fixing them
if you know some language spoken in the international forum, you can also help out there

Simutrans is open source as of version 99.12 (observe the license!). It's possible to contribute to the program itself in several ways:

Note: You will have to understand the existing codebase, of course, and changes (patches) will have to be approved by the main developers.