Railborn Update 016: Tower Power!

Power Tower: the headline experiment

The blog calls the Power Tower the studio's most experimental feature yet. It serves two purposes: it charges your power meter while you are out exploring, and it works as fast traversal to high areas you cannot reach on foot. Washbear is candid about the uncertainty: the feature might be overpowered, it might not make it to Early Access, and even the name is a placeholder, with the blog asking the community for better suggestions. Nothing about it, including the name, should be treated as final.

Height advantages: go high to scout

The second segment is tactical advice rather than a new system. Railborn's world holds interesting destinations that are easy to miss, and the blog's recommendation is to drive the train up very steep slopes for a better vantage point. When in doubt, go high. This fits the game's confirmed vertical building: the September 2026 schedule update set the current build's cap at three floors, and the August update already established that height reaches resources like Vesperite ore on tunnel ceilings.

Chopping: a small change with a big lesson

Harvesting wood no longer requires a mouse click per axe swing; you hold the button and keep swinging. The blog presents this less as a feature and more as an example of how much development time quality-of-life work consumes for a two-person studio. Every convenience has to be weighed against the next content or fix.

Playtest Pics: screenshots with every update

Each dev update from now on includes a few recent playtest screenshots: nice moments, odd finds and bugs. For followers of the game this turns the blog series into a running visual changelog of the current pre-release build.

What Update 016 means for Early Access

Everything in this post carries the studio's standing disclaimer that features may change before and during Early Access. The Power Tower in particular is explicitly at risk of being cut. The release plan itself is unchanged: Early Access in summer 2027, with a public demo planned for Oct-Nov 2026 (see the release date page and demo status).

Feature context lives on the power and water page and the train building page; the beginner guide covers the chopping loop from your first hours. All dated announcements are indexed on the news page.