
Subway Builder is a hyperrealistic transit simulation game. Build a new subway system from the ground up while dealing with real-world constraints and costs. Craft the subway system your city deserves.
Modeled estimate, not a reported figure. How we estimate →
About

Subway Builder is a hyperrealistic transit simulation game built using live data from US, UK, Irish, French, and Japanese cities.
Real-World Passenger Simulation
Millions of commuters are generated from Census and Redistricter data and simulated using the same pathfinding algorithms you use on your phone. Your job is to design a route network that gets the most people to their destination as fast as possible. Juggle station placement, transfer dynamics, and train frequency to maximize ridership.
In-Depth Analysis
Explore how individual commuters weigh tradeoffs between wait times, transfers, income distribution, delays, and more, to pick their commute. Understand which routes, stations, and trains your commuters take and use that information to optimize your network.
You must also find the right balance between cost and time using this analysis. Too many trains on a line or an overcrowded station may cause delays or disruptions.
Authentic Data
The US, UK, Ireland, France, and Japanese census records home and workplace locations. The game generates millions of commuters with homes from that and then uses a distance-based gravity model to assign them all workplaces. They're also assigned times to leave to/from work in a distribution similar to real life. Please note that a broadband connection is required to maintain the real data used by the game.
This decision is then made based on how long each commute method takes, how much it costs, and the value of their time (different commuters can have different incomes).
If they decide to take the subway you can follow their commute (and thousands of others simultaneously) as they get to work. If a train is delayed or cancelled, it will affect their commute and future commuters will take that into account.
College and airport commuters are also simulated and they behave differently since they have different income distributions and commuting times. Federal data is used for college student counts and FAA data for airports.
Current cities in Subway Builder include: Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Honolulu, Houston, Indianapolis, Miami, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St Louis, and Washington in the US. Birmingham, Liverpool, London, Manchester, and Newcastle in the UK. Paris, Marseille, Lyon, in France. Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo, Sendai, Hiroshima, and Nagoya in Japan, and Dublin in Ireland.
Genres
Stats
All-time low is the lowest price we've recorded for this game since we started tracking it.
Languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish - Spain, Arabic, Czech, Dutch, Hungarian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean +11 more
Engagement
Reviews
Themes across 314 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
Reviews
It's closest equivalent is NIMBY Rails but they are quite different still. This is focused on city maps that are still quite large allowing for tight city networks as well as suburbian traffic. (The Paris map for instance extends about 150km outside the city limits in all directions). SB also isn't as deep when it comes to the infrastructure. Tracks are simple and your only worry is handling grades and depth to get around buildings and water however terrain is not in consideration. If you are more interested in the minute detail of track building with signaling, depots and the challenges that come with that NIMBY is more detailed and allows for building anywhere in the world but is also a little more esoteric. SB is a good simulator, looks nice, customisable color scheme, your traffic and route data is well presented, building is easy to learn and you can get started quite quickly. Things don't really break and the game tells you where bottlenecks are, and won't let you do things that won't work. I like the idea of the daily challenges but they need to be more fleshed out and i believe the scoring system is broken but it could be a fun way to play the game in different ways but it needs more specific tasks and a way to track your success more accurately. When i tried, your bank balance was the score and the top score within the time frame was simply your starting funds. This mode should instead track something like a day profits at the deadline, total earnings, or something specific like passengers carried on that day, maybe between two specified areas of the map or whatever.
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Price dynamics, follower growth, revenue and sales trajectories with interactive tooltips
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Hours played at review time, across 314 reviews with recorded playtime.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
Positives: Fun, easy to build, realistic enough, makes you think but has good balance where slight inefficiencies don't ruin your game but by being more efficient you can transport more people/make more money, good variety of maps/locations Criticisms: very hard to edit existing track (if at start/end of line is fine but if in the middle you'd pretty much have to remove the line change the tracks then remake the line which on larger lines is a lot of effort), quad tracks being >><< not <><> makes it hard to use stations where two lines meet then depart again (end up using two parrallel tracks and single tracks to get into the station which works but makes me question the usefulness of quad tracks), not enough colours/options for custom colours, all trains of a certain type are the same (heavy/light metro and commuter) while you can customise cars per train (2-4 (in 2's) for light, 5-15 (in 5's) for heavy, and 1-14 (in 1's) for commuter) in future options to swap train car types (eg faster/more capacity and differing costs) would be nice (also make it so you can change car length per train by 1 for all as there's no reason to have to have either 2/4 for light why not 1/3 or only 5/10/15 for heavy) Edits: removed "Requires online (hopefully option to download all data for certain maps to run offline in future)" as the dev has now made the option to download maps to run them offline
This game is really fun at the start, but after a while it starts to get a bit repetitive. Maybe the devs could add things like random events like trespasser to cause delays to give players more things to do and manage. One bit downside is the performance. I would say I have a good PC but it somehow only runs at around 15 fps at 4 times speed. Overall, this game REALLY good.
Game is fun just confusing on at least the hard ones on how to make the routes
自宅と職場が乗り換えなし16分で繋がり、感動の涙が止まりません
As someone who owned the game before the Steam release, and someone who has been at the forefront of the modding scene for most of the game's life, I am a little biased. However, I do think that the game has made significant progress towards community concerns since the Steam launch. There genuinely is a good game here, albeit one that could benefit from more performance improvements and a review of open bugs before moving onto new features. But overall, the game has improved significantly since both the initial launch and launch on Steam and I feel confident in recommending it to people.
Pros (over NiMBY): - Trips make more sense. Home to work and back instead of random residential to random residential. - You have to consider building - Track types are more meaningful - Smaller learning curve Cons: - Most of my play time is background building my bank. Needs faster fast-forward. Should be easy since simulation is very consistent day to day - Early Access levels of buggy - Less freedom to build what you want The only reason this is positive is because the dev seems to want to fix it. It is a good idea, but the vibe-coded execution was poor. I am hopeful that the Steam support is the kick the dev needs to start cleaning the mess. Their first post-release update suggests that may be the case.
petit jeu très sympa mais avec beaucoup de beug le jeu s'arrête et redémarre a zéro les sauvegardes ne se font pas toujours je epnse qu'il faut attendre d'autres mise a jour
还不错,就是赚钱慢了点
Very good. One quick help for beginners (me : ) )- Start with Honolulu hawaii ;its the only small dense city in the us and the mountains limit the city in one nice long corridor. The others feel too intimidating to start off with. The game is essentially a google maps extension with realistic passenger modeling visualized in good ui with a cities skylines like ( but better ) metro builder. I love how intense the detail is with the modelng and the ways you can intimidatly look into the route of your passengers it makes it feel like a realistic model based on Us census data ;). To be fair this game was made specifically for me and playing in the long run will be dependent on how big the modder community is. good and stable on mac
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