Transport Fever 3 Production Chains
Every cargo in the game comes from one of 32 industries and ends up either in another industry or in a town district. Pick a cargo below to follow it both ways. Add a climate to see which links drop out on that kind of map.
Raw materials
Intermediate products
Booster products
End products
Pick a cargo to trace it.
You will see which industries make it and what they need, who takes it off your hands, and the shortest full chain behind it. Not sure where to start? Try , the longest chain in the game, or , the shortest.
How long each end product's chain is
End products are what town districts actually ask for, so they are what grows a town. The count below is the fewest industries you need running somewhere on the map, from the mine or farm up to the last factory, taking the cheapest option wherever a step has alternatives. Short chains are the ones to start a save with; the long ones pay once a town reaches the levels that ask for them.
| Beverages | Commercial | 4 | Grain, Sand |
| Books | Commercial | 7 | Logs, Crude Oil |
| Bricks | Industrial | 2 | Clay |
| Canned Food | Commercial | 5 | Fish, Iron Ore, Coal |
| Cement | Industrial | 2 | Stone |
| Clothes | Commercial | 6 | Wool, Crude Oil |
| Fuel | Industrial | 2 | Crude Oil |
| Furniture | Industrial | 5 | Logs, Sand |
| Vegetables | Commercial | 1 | Vegetables |
| Vehicles | Industrial | 10 | Rubber, Iron Ore, Coal, Crude Oil |
Boosters: two ways to raise output
Raw industries such as mines, farms and oil wells produce on their own, and their output grows as they add plots around them. You can push it further by delivering a booster cargo: Fertilizer to the crop, cotton and rubber farms; Tools to the clay pit, sand pit, coal mine, quarry, fishing grounds and oil platform; Machines to the oil well and sand excavator, and on the industry list also to the livestock farm and furniture factory. The iron ore mine and logging camp take no booster cargo. A booster eats from the input stock and stops the moment the stock runs dry, so a single delivery does little; it needs a line that keeps coming.
The second booster works on every industry, raw or not: bring workers in by passenger line. If enough of them turn up often enough, throughput rises. That makes a short bus line from the nearest town to a steel mill one of the cheapest upgrades in the game.
Cargo that goes nowhere is destroyed
Industries keep producing when nobody collects, but once the output stock is full the extra items are thrown away. Unused industries also close: ten years without production or shipping starts a 730-day countdown, and the industry disappears when it ends unless it starts working again. Industries you do not intend to serve can be ignored safely; ones you do rely on need a pickup that never stops.
Where to go next
To turn a chain into amounts, use the production planner. The industries and cargo list has every production ratio in one sortable table. Climate zones explains which chains each climate cannot finish, and how revenue is counted tells you which of these chains are worth the track.