Transport Fever 3 changed the one thing every transport sim player takes for granted: cargo no longer has a destination.
In Transport Fever 2, an industry produced goods "for" a town and your job was connecting the dots. In TF3, cargo just sits at the industry until one of your lines collects it. Nothing moves unless you move it. That single design change turns fleet sizing from arithmetic into guesswork — how many vehicles does a line actually need when there's no demand signal telling you?
I kept getting it wrong in my own games. So I built a small free tool to do the math: the Transport Fever 3 Cargo Line Planner (https://gametinkerer.com/transport-fever-3/cargo-line-planner/).
What it does (three things, nothing more)
1. Size a line. You enter a cargo target per period, what one vehicle carries per trip, and how many round trips it completes. The planner divides target by per-vehicle monthly capacity and rounds up. That's the whole formula — deliberately boring.
2. Compare two setups. Two fleet configurations side by side: capacity per vehicle, vehicles needed, current fleet capacity, cargo still uncovered, extra vehicles needed. This is the one I use most — "should I buy 6 fast trucks or 10 slow ones" stops being a vibe decision.
3. Find the bottleneck. Enter each stage of a chain (production → first leg → transfer → final leg) and it tells you which stage caps the whole chain. In TF3's model this matters more than in TF2, because a warehouse transfer stage silently throttling your line to 90 units while everything else does 110 is exactly the kind of thing you don't notice until you're wondering why the industry is drowning in unsold goods.
What it deliberately doesn't do
No game recipes. No profit estimates. No delivery deadlines, no spoilage modeling, no loading-queue simulation. The official cargo dev blog confirms the systems changed but doesn't publish a universal profit formula, and I'd rather show an honest estimate than a confident fiction.
Every number on the site is labeled: announced systems vs. review-reported details vs. our editorial suggestions. The cargo type table (37 types across liquid/bulk/flatbed/goods — the category decides which vehicle body can carry what) only lists what Urban Games has officially named; the rest gets added when it can be checked in the released game, not scraped from game files that might change with the next patch.
Three things I learned building it
Scope is a feature. The first version tried to be a full logistics simulator. It was unusable. Cutting it to "three questions, one page" made it something I'd actually open mid-game.
Label your uncertainty. Transport sim players are spreadsheet people — they'll trust a tool that says "unverified" over one that fakes precision. Marking every figure's source turned out to be the most-complimented part of the whole site.
Build the tool you'd tab to. If I wouldn't alt-tab to it during a session, nobody else will either. The planner lives or dies on whether it answers in under 30 seconds.
The planner is free, no account, runs in the browser: https://gametinkerer.com/transport-fever-3/cargo-line-planner/. If you play TF3, try breaking it — I'd genuinely like to know where the estimates fall apart against real saves.
— Luke (https://gametinkerer.com)
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