Railborn Glossary
Starter edition: terms below follow the official English naming from the Steam page, trailers and developer updates. The list grows as Early Access content is verified.
Railcar
A single buildable car of your train. Stack floors on top and add modules piece by piece.
Branching tracks
The world's railway network. Choosing a branch decides which regions and resources you can reach.
Farms
Onboard plots for rare plants found in the world. Grown crops feed the crew and feed further production.
Power systems
Generators and wiring that move power between modules. A module without power is decoration.
Water
Captured and distributed around the train; farms and survival both depend on it.
Tech upgrades
The upgrade tree that unlocks new modules, tools and capacity as you research.
Vesper
The planet Railborn takes place on, named in the August 2026 dev update.
Atlas
An evil tech corporation in the lore. Its abandoned bases hold plants required to unlock technology.
Vesperite
An ore found on tunnel ceilings; a taller train lets you reach it.
Bypass tower
A structure that marks a secret track shortcut you open on foot.
Bogies
The wheeled base units a railcar sits on. Decks and structures attach on top of them.
Deck
A buildable floor platform. Stack decks to grow the train upward, up to three floors in the current build.
Oxygen (O2) tank
A tutorial fabrication and your ticket outside. The atmosphere is not uniformly safe, and the HUD tracks your reserve.
Minimap
The bottom-right on-foot map added in the August 2026 update, tracking your surroundings when you leave the train.
Power Tower
An experimental October 2026 feature that charges your power meter while exploring and reaches high areas. May not ship in Early Access.
Thunderstorms
Weather that makes the train your shelter, added with the July 2026 update alongside tunnels.
Tunnels
The dynamic tunnel system from the July 2026 update; Vesperite ore hangs from some tunnel ceilings.
Early Access
The Steam release model Railborn launches under, planned for summer 2027 per the official schedule update.
Playtest
A limited official test round announced through Steam and Discord. See the playtest guide for sign-ups.
Demo
The public pre-release build, planned for Oct-Nov 2026 in rotating week-long windows. Scope not announced.
Washbear Studio
The two-person studio in Ottawa, Canada behind Railborn, previously known for Parkasaurus.
Why the naming matters
Railborn's community is growing before launch, and conversations on Steam and Discord live or die on shared words. Calling the same object a railcar, a car or a wagon splits discussions and searches. This page pins one English name to each concept, sourced to the Steam page, trailers and dated dev blogs, so that guides, comments and future translations all point the same way.
How terms get added
A term joins this glossary when it appears in official English media with enough context to define it in one honest sentence. Terms the developers have mentioned without explanation wait on this page rather than getting guesses. When Early Access ships with final in-game text and localization files, every entry gets checked against the game itself and this page becomes the reference for translated versions of the wiki.
Frequently confused pairs
- Vesper vs Vesperite: Vesper is the planet; Vesperite is the ore found on its tunnel ceilings.
- Bogies vs decks: bogies are the wheeled units on the track; decks are the floors you stack on top of them.
- Bases vs the train: bases are Atlas's abandoned surface structures holding technology plants; the train is your own moving base.
- Playtest vs demo: playtests are limited invite-style rounds for the newest systems; the demo is a public, time-windowed build of the opening hours.
Naming rules for contributors
Use the official English term everywhere, including image alt text and page titles. If officials rename something in a dev blog, the glossary changes the same week and the news page records the change.
Entries last reviewed 2026-10-26 against official sources.