General Info, FAQ, Hints and Links

An accumulation of useful hints, links, etc that I originally gathered for myself, but then thought they might as well be turned into a proper guide. Take a look through the hints, because you will probably find a couple useful things that you didn't know about before.

Links/ Resources

When you find bugs or crashes, please upload your save here:
https://www.sovietrepublic.net/support
Official facebook page, they sometimes post teasers there:
https://www.facebook.com/workersresources/
Game development roadmap:
https://trello.com/b/0haBaHmz/soviet-republic-roadmap
Wiki:
https://workers-resources.fandom.com/wiki/Workers_%26_Resources:_Soviet_Republic_Wiki
Default map info:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/784150/discussions/0/1640913421086752104/
Industry flowchart (missing uranium and aluminium):
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/993513415397714189/39DD06F0A5B9D8E27A4C82449709BA5A5D96DAF7/

Hotkeys/ Cheats

- Hold 'Ctrl' while placing a building to rotate it with more precision and to disable its automatic connections. Pressing 'R' will rotate it in 90° steps.
- Hold 'Shift' while placing roads to drag a rectangle to batch upgrade a lot of roads at once.
- Use the 'mousewheel' while placing roads, pipelines, etc to set the desired curvature. Hold 'Ctrl' for more precision or hold 'Shift' to get the old curve behavior.
- 'Q' and 'E' raise and lower pipelines, cableway pylons, underground infrastructure, etc
- 'Esc' closes the last active window.
- '1' to '0' activates whatever you put on your hotkey bar at the top. Press 'Alt + a number' to swap to another hotkey bar page.
- 'F1' toggles the grid overlay
- 'F2' toggles the topography overlay
- 'F3' toggles the underground view
- 'F4' toggles the snapping of new infrastructure to existing
- 'F7' displays frames per second and performance information
- Holding 'Alt' while playing in windowed mode will make an icon appear in the top right that lets you resize the screen
- 'Ctrl + T' colours your roads green and red to show traffic congestion
- 'Ctrl + G' hides the GUI
- 'Ctrl + F' empties a vehicle's fuel tank and 'Ctrl + H' resets a vehicle's schedule. These are for debugging. Use them only when you try to get stuck vehicles un-stuck.
- Hold 'Ctrl + B' in vehicle list to display coordinates
- Hold 'H' to display nodes on your infrastructure, making it easier to see if something isn't properly connected
- Pressing 'M' toggles the minimap
- Pressing 'N' boosts the growth of grass and crops. (Technically this is a cheat, but it doesn't require cheat mode. Also, it even happens when you type 'n' in text boxes, like when you enter the name of the save.)
- While placing signals, you can press 'Ctrl' to toggle the coloured rail block overlay.

- 'C + H + E' activates cheat mode. With cheat mode active, you get a bunch of additional options in the settings menu, letting you do stuff like activate the map editor (which you can also use to build new rural buildings/ churches/ etc) and access various debugging options.
- While cheats are on, pressing 'Ctrl + R' allows panning the camera with an xbox controller cinematically (clicking the sticks might cause a crash)
Outdated hotkeys: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1708935253

"What's special about this game? How is it different from Cities: Skylines?"

TL;DR: This game makes things that you take for granted in other games feel like a rewarding accomplishment.
W&R is a sandbox small-country building game, and often gets compared to Cities: Skylines. However, while C:S is for the most part a creative game about painting a city onto an empty canvas, W&R puts a whole lot more detail into simulation and logistics aspects.
Besides city building, W&R is also a game of industry chains and transportation logistics. You manufacture various goods and set up truck or train routes to transport resource between factories, to supermarkets inside your cities, or to export them either to the NATO or Soviet outside world.
You need to take care of your citizens, educate them, so that you don't run out of teachers, keep them away from pollution or their lifespans will drop, give them necessary goods or they will flee your republic. Your population is important, because you need them to keep your industry running. You need to ferry your citizens to your factories via buses or similar, so that they can actually work in them.
W&R gives you a lot of freedom in your decision making. You always get the choice to produce something locally, or to import it from foreign lands. And when you decide to import, there is still a question of exactly which of the required materials you want to import. You could immediately build a vehicle factory and start manufacturing cars using foreign resources for money. Alternatively you could decide to create mechanical components locally and instead import the steel that you need to manufacture those.
Probably the most detail can be found in W&R's building construction industry. You can use money to pay foreigners to build a building for you, which will take maybe a couple seconds to be done. Or, you build the building yourself, using lots of different resources, workers, machinery, and time. Even a simple thing like an asphalt road becomes a complex, multi-step process. First, dumper trucks deliver gravel to the site, then a bulldozer flattens it out, then more dumper trucks carrying asphalt arrive, so that an asphalt paver can pave the street. Finally, a street roller gives it the finishing touch. Your construction office will automatically send out these vehicles to deliver the required resources to the construction site.
There is no "end" to the game, but your ultimate goal to achieve should be ruling over a 100% self-sufficient republic.

"Are people simulated? What do those bars mean?"

Your citizens are simulated in detail. The following stats are tracked: Their health (and lifespan), happiness, food satisfaction, clothing satisfaction, government loyalty (which currently has no function), their preferences for sport, culture, alcohol and religion, and finally their education level, what kind of electronics they own and if they own a car.

The game displays most of these stats as bars, but it should be noted that half of these bars are pretty different in their function. The first set of stat bars are for happiness, food, clothing, health and government loyalty. These denote satisfaction or quality. You want these MAXED out.
The other set of stat bars are for sport, culture, alcohol and religion. These don't show how satisfied people are, but instead show the individual preferences of the people. How high these bars are just shows how likely people are to be searching for these kinds of activities during their free time. These preferences will fluctuate up and down and can also be influenced by the player with radio and TV station propaganda if the citizens actually own the necessary electronics.

People don't have set jobs, instead they search for any nearby place with available jobs at the beginning of each workday. When unloading workers at a train station, they more or less "flow like water" into whatever jobs are available in the vicinity.
After a citizen's work shift or free time has run out, they will teleport home, unless they have a personal car.

"It says X amount of my people can't enjoy culture, even though I have a cinema. What's wrong?"

The short answer is that if it's a small amount of people, like 5 in an apartment building of 100, then you can just ignore it.
The long answer is that this is a fairly complex issue and could have been caused by lots of random factors. The only real way to figure out what caused this for you is by clicking on your citizens, finding one that is about to satisfy his culture need and then putting the follow cam on him to see what path he takes.
The most likely cause is some sort of unlucky timing. The citizen went to the cinema in exactly the moment when no one was working there, or he was at a bus stop in exactly the time frame where no buses drive. Another thing that can happen is that citizens try to satisfy multiple needs during one free time schedule, meaning they first go shopping and then try to satisfy another thing, like culture, afterwards. If the buildings are far apart, or if the first building is overcrowded and they have to wait there a long time to satisfy their first need, it's possible that the person ran out of free time before he was able to reach the cinema.

"How the hell do train signals work? Are they broken?"

These are the basics of block signals:
1: A "block" is the portion of track between signals.
2: There can only ever be one train per block.
3: Whenever tracks meet, they merge into the same block. Even if they are two tracks that cross each other orthogonally.
4: If you want a train to stop even though the following block is free (to keep the train from entering and blocking a junction), you use chain signals. Chain signals only let trains pass if the following signal is green.
5: Since version 8.2, the game now has an exception to the block signalling rule. Trains can enter the same block as long as their paths don't collide, which works more similar to a path signalling system like you might know from Transport Fever.

The game highlights the separate blocks on the rails with colours when you use one of the tools to place signals. Blue blocks are just simple pieces of track, other colours like yellow, green, etc are blocks containing junctions. The rule of thumb is to place chain signals right before and inside of junctions (the non-blue blocks) to avoid problems.

More signalling examples:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1718149719
https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Train_signals

"What do you mean with "direct connection"? I don't need forklifts?"

A direct (or passive) connection is a pipeline/ conveyor/ industry connection that goes straight from one building to another, without passing through anything else (no other buildings, forklift garages, engines, crossings). That means if you have a "farm -> silo 1 -> silo 2" setup, then the farm is NOT directly connected to silo 2.
A factory that produces something will store that produced good equally in its own storage and in directly connected storages. It will send the goods to whatever storage is filled by a lower percentage. The factory will also draw required resources from directly connected storages.
A vehicle that loads/unloads goods at some building, also drains/fills the buildings directly connected to the one where its doing the actual loading/unloading.
A vehicle that loads at a cargo station that is connected to a silo, which is connected to a farm, will only be able to load from the silo, since that's the building that is directly connected to the cargo station. However, as a consequence of the first point, the farm will forward its future crops mainly to this silo, since that silo will be filled at a lower percentage.
Direct connections don't need power or forklifts.

"How do I prevent blackouts? What is the point of the low MW wires?" Electrical power mechanics

Don't put too many substations in a line. If you have a single medium wire that is connected to 3 substations via switches, then those 3 substations are bottlenecked by the medium wire. It means that the buildings that are connected to these substations are not allowed to consume more wattage than that medium wire bottleneck can handle (around 2.3 MW for the biggest medium wires).
Instead what you should do is create a power octopus that starts with a power transformer or power plant and spreads out in many separate medium wires. A transformer has 6 connectors for medium wires. Each of these can handle at most 2.3 MW.
A final thing of note is that the game won't let elecricity flow past the 19th building in a single line of connections from power source to end of the chain, so don't chain a crazy amount of switches/transformers together in one line.

The difference between the different types of medium wires is just how much MW they can handle. The only reason you would want to use the smaller ones is, because of lower resource costs and because they just look nicer. If you don't have money problems and are worried about overloading your electrical network, just always use the biggest ones until you get a better feel for how much wattage is required.

MWh / 60 = MW
It's 60, because in this game one "hour" has 60 seconds.

"How to survive winter?" Heating mechanics

The heating system in W&R works very similarly to the electricity system.
You have a heat plant that's burning coal to create hot water, you pipe this hot water around using pipelines that are ultimately connected to heat exchanger buildings, which function pretty much like electrical substations and deliver the heat water to all buildings in a radius.

Every building that can be heated has a heat water tank with a volume depending on the size of the building. The volume is displayed either in L or m3. 1 m3 = 1000 L.
The heat plant also has a water tank volume. If the water tank volume of all connected buildings combined is higher than the heat plant's tank volume, your heating power is reduced. Similar to wattage on your power plant.

There are two different sizes of heat water pipelines and heat exchanger buildings. The small ones support 100 m3 of water, the other 300 m3. Again, make sure your heat exchanger building isn't connected to more buildings than add up to its water volume (100 or 300 m3), or your heating power will be reduced.
By the way, small pipes can be connected to big pipe connectors.

The heat water temperature can go up to 90°C. You always want this to be as high as possible. Keep in mind that this might drop down if the outside temperature is too cold and it generally can take quite a while to properly heat up your heat water network.
Things might seem alright at normal outside temperature, but once it gets really cold outside, you might suddenly realise that your heating power is not strong enough, and then you're gonna get into a death spiral. It's important to be ready for the winter beforehand. Warming up heat water takes a while, especially when the outside temperature is low. Trying to kickstart a heating system during winter requires you to throw a lot of bodies at the problem.

Guide with example pictures:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2167069569

Citizen Hints

- You can daisy chain public transport and force people to swap from one vehicle to another by placing two stations next to each other and telling one station to forward its workers/ passengers/ students to the other station. You can even tell people to walk huge distances by having them go through an endless chain of bus stops, each forwarding its passengers onto the next one.
- People will teleport home if they spend too much time in the same transport vehicle (see "TIME HINTS" below). However, people can travel forever, as long as they keep transfering to other vehicles. Going over 5 "hours" of total travel time will only cause a happiness penality.
- When a person waits for 1 minute at a bus stop and no building he cares about is in walking range, he will teleport home. However, when there ARE buildings he cares about in range of the stop, he will happily walk to them from the bus stop after having waited the minute. That means you can place down a bus stop without any buses to increase the walking distance of people.
- The more time a worker spends traveling to his work site, the longer his workshift will last as compensation.
- Third world migrants have high chance to arrive without education and with religious preference.
- Sport has a positive effect on health and alcoholism a negative.
- Uneducated workers (on complex education) cannot work in general, even though they get displayed as "workers" in bus stops.
- Civilians on populated maps start out in a state of hibernation, not needing goods/services until you introduce them to new housing or jobs.
- Citizens can only move to new flats (or student homes) automatically on their own if they are in walking distance of their current home. If a 21 year old finds no new place to live, he will flee the country rather than live with his parents. However, if a student living in a student home finishes his education, he will teleport to any free spot on the map. Force moving people into student homes can be a nice way of spreading educated people around your map.
- You need a lot more workers than jobs, depending on how far away the job site is. Aim for 2-4 times more workers than jobs.
- If the program rating of your TV or Radio station is higher than 30% and culture preference more than 70%, people will stay home and watch TV instead going to a cinema or theatre.

Time Hints

- Time is incredibly inconsistent in this game. "Hours" will pass differently quickly, depending on what type of civilian someone is, where they are and what they are currently doing.
- A calendar day takes a minute and the max production numbers per "workday" on factories are also per minute.
- Workers, passengers, students wait on public transit stations for 1 minute (unless the free time runs out for passengers)
- Tourists (with hotel) wait on public transit stations until their free time for the day runs out
- Tourists without a hotel wait on public transit stations for 10 minutes
- Workers, passengers, students, tourists (with hotel) stay in buses, trains for 6 minutes 20 seconds
- Workers, passengers, students, tourists (with hotel) stay in airplanes and cableways for 9 minutes
- Workers, passengers, students, tourists (with hotel) stay in ships for 12 minutes 40 seconds
- Workers stay in construction office buses for 12 minutes 40 seconds
- Tourists without hotel stay on buses and trains for 10 minutes
- Tourists without hotel stay on cableways for 14 minutes
- Tourists without hotel stay on airplanes for 20 minutes
- Tourists without hotel stay on ships for 40 minutes

Distance Hints

- Max range of pedestrians is 400m on a road with 100% walk speed.
- Max range of personal cars is 2km.
- The side length of a minimap square is 2.5km.
- The range of heat exchangers and electrical substations are a square area that is alligned with the grid, not a round radius. Exchangers: 380-536m Substations: 250-352m (these numbers are from center to side and from center to corner)
- The max distance pollution travels from the source building depends on how much pollution it puts out and appears to be something like 700m - 1000m for 10 - 40 pollution. Pollution doesn't stay on the same spot and travels to another location within the radius after some time.
- The max lengths of pipelines before requiring another pump:
For oil pipelines: 337m
For heating pipeline: 1000m
For cooling pipeline: 1387m

Construction Hints

- Buildings can be placed extremely close together when the terrain is perfectly flat (when the grid is white).
- If you want to flatten a mountain or chasm, don't use the 'flatten' terrain options, because those use bulldozers and they don't handle extreme height differences well. Use the lower and raise terrain options, which use excavators instead. By the way, don't try to terraform rocks, that can take a long time.
- If terraforming is too slow for you, turn on cheats with C+H+E, then turn on the landscape editor in the cheat menu. The editor's terraforming tools work very easily and rapidly. In addition, the editor also gives you a "smoothing" option that lets you create smooth slopes.
- If all big cubes of a building footprint are green, you can place the building down, even if it says it can't. You have to click multiple times.
- Fields can be placed on non-level terrain, as long as it's smooth and not too steep. Check the grid to make sure no squares are coloured red.
- If you want to bulldoze roads, but the game tells you it can't be done, because the road section is used by vehicles, then you can attach little road pieces to the road to subdivide it into smaller sections. Hold H to see the length of a road section.
- Constructing buildings with built-in parking spaces requires a road connection. These buildings will also require a road connection for ambulances and firetrucks.
- Press 'Ctrl+G' while placing buildings to get rid of super annoying, obstructing tooltips.
- Holding 'H' highlights your infrastructure. It's useful for making it a little easier to see where your powerlines are. Loose powerline ends will have a purple node on them.
- You can remove the visual terrain scars of old construction by using the "Restore soil" button in the "Trees & accessories" category to regrow the grass.
- When a road is clipping into the ground, you might be able to bring it back up by placing a way point on it or by attaching a junction.

Interface Hints

- There's a minimap in the bottom right, which you can resize and see your map's resource deposits on.
- In the top right there is a button to enable various, very useful overlays, which help you find certain buildings or vehicles, let you check the resource storages of your buildings, and let you check other useful info, like how many people in an apartment building have been unable to work, because of missing kindergarten, etc. These overlays are also very useful for searching for problems in your electricity and heating networks.
- Use the hotkey bar at the top of the screen. It gives you 10 pages where you can store 10 items each that you can bring up by pressing your number keys. Swap between pages by pressing 'Alt + a number'.
- You can even put buttons like "relocate citizens", "assign construction to construction office", "move to depot" onto your hotkey bar, but that will still require you to have the right kind of info screen open to use.
- You can click on the temperature gauge at the top of the screen to cycle between information for temperature, wind speed, and sunshine.
- If you mark mod buildings as favourites ingame, then you will be able to access them from the non-mod build menu, too.
- In the economy screen, you can click on most of the rows to get to additional screens that give more detailed information.
- You can use the timelapse feature in the menu to save a specific location on the map and quickly move the screen back to it.
- If you want to hide the yellow mouse-over highlight when you've disabled the GUI, put your mouse over an info window before you press 'Ctrl+G'.

General Hints

- Open storages have faster un/loading speed when they are powered. The smaller storage is even faster than the larger one.
- When you buy the blueprint for a vehicle, you get an discount of around 87% on the blueprints of vehicles from the same family.
- The current max throughput of heavy aggregate cableways is around 30-45t per minute. Personally, I recommend going to "SovietRepublic\media_soviet\cabins" and quadrupling the resource capacity of aggregate cable cars.
- Tell your trucks to import resources at customs houses. It will save you a lot of money, since auto-purchasing resources directly at buildings comes with a transportation fee that is bigger the farther away the building is from the border.
- When using diesel train refueling stations, I think it is best to place them in a dead end piece of 2-way track. You need to make sure that trains coming from any route can path to the station and then again leave to any destination. Example: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/504754524079259678/705821410937012264/unknown.png
- When adding a new stop to a vehicle's schedule, the new stop will appear below whatever stop you have selected.
- It's actually possible to make money with max duration loans, thanks to inflation.
- Harvesters are too big to be carried by the in-game vehicles, but there are vehicles on the mod workshop that let you transport them. For example, see the V3S pack in the modding section here.
- Meat in an unpowered storage building slowly spoils at around a rate of 1t per 14 minutes.
- If your passenger buses bunch up too much, you can activate "line spacing" in the info screen of their line to force them to stay evenly spread out. Vehicles that are too close together will start driving with a max of 30 km/h until they are further apart.
- If you want a delivery to only happen once, you can add a vehicle depot at the end the vehicle's schedule. The vehicle will park there once it's gone through its schedule.

Modding

Places other than the workshop to find mods at:
http://transport-games.ru/files/category/150-workersresources-soviet-republic/
https://vk.com/club180696313

Scripts by Emil Sawicki to make buildings placable anywhere. These scripts add the line "$HARBOR_EXTEND_AREA_WHEN_BULDING" to every "building.ini" they find. It respects whether the line already exists in those files and doesn't double it:
For vanilla buildings:
https://pastebin.com/FA4hntB1
For workshop buildings:
https://pastebin.com/A3KK8Uri

If you want to know what all the tags in the .ini files for buildings and vehicles mean, in case you want to do some simple edits, like changing the resource capacity of something, check out these guides:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1885817861
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1861143159

Mod Recommendations

Here are just a couple mod recommendations.

BUILDINGS
Temporary housing, trailers/tents, etc:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2005247113
Gym, for sport during the winter:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1871835620
Tiny firestation:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1866638743
Larger kindergarten:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1877882740
The Centipede House:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2055018079
Khovrino Hospital:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2030815951
Leningrad SKK:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1994233413
Fish farm:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1995906910
Tiny cargo station:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1996421652
Offtherails has lots of useful buildings:
https://steamcommunity.com/id/OffTheRailsGaming/myworkshopfiles/?appid=784150
Lexar does, too:
https://steamcommunity.com/id/LexaR_Owl/myworkshopfiles/?appid=784150
Appartment buildings:
https://steamcommunity.com/id/kostas667/myworkshopfiles/?appid=784150
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198119183096/myworkshopfiles/?appid=784150
Futuristic buildings:
https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2290956304

VEHICLES
Official late game western truck:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1834540483
A bunch of additional V3S variants, because what else could you want. Also comes with a truck that can transport harvesters:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1999729955
Tanks:
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198356204114/myworkshopfiles/?appid=784150
More military vehicles (needs to be installed manually):
https://vk.com/club180696313?w=wall-180696313_644

MAPS
Russian Far Eastern Coast, very pretty map:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1936207783
Lyubinsk, big, pre-existing city:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1887054699
Iceland, ridiculous cliffs:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1946891253
Norwegian Island, this has no customs offices, meaning you NEED to import/export via ships:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1941326724

OTHER (need to be installed manually)
Improved customs that allow for multiple vehicles to pass through them simultaneously:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2091824985
Alternate texture pack:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2049540014
Tech tree mod:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2072854744
Jungle total conversion:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2265655140
Middle east total conversion:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2316641201

[bishopsteve39]

i may be in the wrong spot but when i start a new game none of my mods are there to use. im subscribed to them. my apologies if in the wrong spot

[Comrade Richard III]

it seems that n no longer grows grass without cheats enabled, probably due the crop growth

[Niety5]

C+H+E cheat mode doesent work for me

[YuriFR]

Here there is only super-important information! Fantastic! This content helped me in many things. Congratulations and thank you very much. :)

[Total Oh No]

I've updated the guide to replace some stuff that has changed and to add some new hints, hotkeys and the very useful "improved customs" modification as well as to reformat it a bit.

[Total Oh No]

Oh, I thought I already had that in the list. Thanks.

[Whitek3t]

Found another hint.

Meat stored in unpowered storages actually spoils.

[☭ ★ AlexDad ★ ☭]

I found another key combination:
ctrl + f9
ctrl + f8
ctrl + f5
ctrl + f1

[Vimes]

Excellent overall guide that seems to have covered much of everything.
Signals are akin to alchemy, or some other black arts. Lots of thoughts or opinions and sometimes I have a "gotcha" moment when I think that I have them figured.
Then I find two trains on the same track........

Thanks for sharing, a lot of work went into that. Great that it is updated and relevant to the latest build.

[Verden]

amazing work!