Welcome to the Metruvia Content Creator Series Balancing Metadata Guide. The temptation to create a “super vehicle” is a rite of passage for every new modder. It is incredibly easy to open a .mdl file, set the top speed of a 19th-century steam engine to 300 km/h, set the running costs to zero, and give it a cargo capacity of ten thousand.

However, Transport Fever 2 is not a sandbox driving simulator; it is a rigid, mathematically driven economic management game. If you release a hyper-powered, zero-cost vehicle on Mod.io, it effectively acts as a cheat code. While a small subset of players might download it for novelty, the core community—and the automated curation algorithms—will aggressively bury it. More importantly, severely unbalanced mods disrupt the carefully tuned logistical loops required for console scenarios and campaigns.

This masterclass will deconstruct the metadata matrix. We will explore the physics-to-economics pipeline, the mathematical logic behind Urban Games’ auto-calculation engine, the realities of capacity scaling, and how to calibrate your fleet to perfectly match the vanilla progression curve.

1. The Physics-to-Economics Pipeline

In Transport Fever 2, a vehicle’s financial cost is not an arbitrary number pulled from thin air. It is a direct mathematical derivative of its physical capabilities. The engine assesses how much work the vehicle can do over time and prices it accordingly.

1.1 The Core Variables

Inside your vehicle’s .mdl file, the metadata block contains the defining physics parameters. These four variables dictate how the vehicle interacts with the game world:

Weight (weight): Defined in metric tons (t). A heavier vehicle requires more energy to accelerate and struggles on gradients, reducing its overall profitability.

Top Speed (topSpeed): Defined in meters per second (m/s), not km/h. To convert km/h to m/s, divide by 3.6.

Power (power): Defined in kilowatts (kW). This dictates how quickly the vehicle can reach its top speed against the resistance of its own weight and cargo.

Tractive Effort (tractiveEffort): Defined in kilonewtons (kN). This is the raw “grip” of the locomotive. High tractive effort is required to pull massive freight consists up steep hills from a dead stop.

1.2 The Balance Formula

If you build a modern electric locomotive with 6,000 kW of power and 300 kN of tractive effort, but set its weight to only 20 tons, you have broken the physics engine. The vehicle will accelerate like a sports car while pulling 50 coal wagons.

You must cross-reference real-world spec sheets. A heavy freight locomotive requires physical mass to prevent wheel slip. If you want high tractive effort, you must penalize the vehicle with a realistic weight variable (e.g., 120 tons).

2. The Auto-Calculation Engine: The Gold Standard

The most common mistake modders make is trying to manually guess the purchase price and maintenance costs of their vehicles.

In early versions of Transport Fever, modders hardcoded costs. If the developers patched the game to make the economy 20% harder, every single modded vehicle suddenly became overpowered because their hardcoded prices did not scale with the patch.

2.1 The -1 Override

To achieve perfect “Vanilla-Equivalent” balance, you must let the game’s internal engine calculate the financial values dynamically based on the physics variables you provided above.

In your maintenance block, set the values to -1:

maintenance = {
lifespan = 14600, — 40 years in days
price = -1,
runningCosts = -1
}

By utilizing -1, you guarantee that your vehicle will automatically scale with the game’s difficulty settings. If a console player chooses “Hard” mode, your train will instantly become more expensive to buy and run, perfectly matching the vanilla vehicles sitting next to it in the depot menu.

3. Capacity and Cargo Math

Cargo capacity is the primary driver of revenue. If your vehicle can carry twice as much cargo as a vanilla equivalent from the same era, it will generate twice as much profit, breaking the economic challenge.

3.1 The 4:1 Visual Scaling Rule

For passenger vehicles, Transport Fever 2 utilizes an abstract visual scaling rule to preserve rendering performance.

If you model a bus with 40 physical seats inside the 3D mesh, you do not set the capacity to 40.

The standard vanilla ratio is 4 to 1. You should divide your realistic capacity by four. A 40-seat bus should have a game engine capacity of 10.

If you set the capacity to a true 1:1 ratio (40), your early-game bus will generate the revenue of a late-game commuter train, bankrupting the transport network’s balance.

3.2 Freight Compartments

Freight does not use the 4:1 scaling rule, but it is strictly governed by physical volume.
If you create an open wagon for coal, look at the vanilla coal wagon from the exact same year. If the vanilla wagon holds 12 units of coal, your custom wagon should hold between 10 and 14 units. Do not assign it 50 units simply to make it the “best” choice in the menu.

4. Lifespan, Emissions, and Maintenance Decay

Vehicles do not exist in a vacuum; they age. As they age, their running costs increase and their emissions worsen, eventually forcing the player to spend capital to replace them.

4.1 Configuring Lifespan

The lifespan variable is calculated in in-game days, not years. The standard conversion is 365 days per year.

Vehicle Type	Standard Vanilla Lifespan	Days Variable
Buses / Trucks	15 – 20 Years	5475 – 7300
Steam Locomotives	30 – 40 Years	10950 – 14600
Electric/Diesel Locos	40 – 50 Years	14600 – 18250
Aircraft	20 – 25 Years	7300 – 9125

4.2 The Emissions Impact

Towns in Transport Fever 2 have an “Emissions” rating that negatively impacts their growth. A loud, dirty diesel train running through a residential neighborhood will suppress the town’s population limit.

When assigning audio files, the volume and refDist dictate the noise emissions.
If you build a massive, 8-axle diesel locomotive, it must produce high emissions. If you artificially lower the emissions variable to make it town-friendly, you remove the strategic puzzle of routing heavy freight around population centers.

5. Summary: The Pre-Publish Economic Audit

Before packaging your vehicle for the Mod.io API, run your metadata through this final balance check to ensure it integrates seamlessly into the core game loop:

The Auto-Calculate Check: Are price and runningCosts strictly set to -1 to ensure dynamic scaling across all difficulty levels?

The Mass/Power Ratio: Is the weight variable realistic relative to the tractiveEffort and power output?

Speed Conversion: Is the topSpeed correctly calculated in meters per second (m/s) rather than km/h?

Capacity Scaling: Have passenger compartments been properly scaled down (typically 4:1) to match vanilla revenue generation?

Era Parity: Does the overall profitability of your vehicle align with vanilla vehicles available in the exact same unlock year?

By adhering to Vanilla-Equivalent metadata, your mods graduate from simple digital toys to authentic, strategic logistical tools that command respect within the global player community.