Hi everyone,

With the next update increasingly becoming a hot topic, a proper status report post is due. Technically, our statement didn't change much from the last Steam post, but it's time to reiterate. We frequently respond to questions about the progress on Discord, but understandably not everyone can follow that.

As most of you know, for several months now all of the team has been working on the first upcoming major Derail Valley update, titled “Hazmat.” Due to notable code differences between the game versions, we stopped releasing small updates to the public version and are entirely focused on completing the Hazmat one instead.

The Hazmat update will be big, and despite its name, will include a lot more than just hazardous cargo. We’re treating this update as if we were releasing the game for the first time, except this time around we have a lot more time to properly address things than when the game was originally released. We'll make everything in it as ready as reasonably possible, before announcing the release date.

Knowing it would take a while, we weren't sharing many details about the update in order not to prematurely over-hype it. It is still too early to know the exact contents of the update which is why we've been quiet, but when it does get announced we’ll need half a dozen video updates just to showcase the highlights.

I'm glad to say that, even though there were some very tedious, difficult and risky hurdles to overcome, at this point most of them are behind us. The update is progressing very well and we’re doing internal test builds on a weekly basis. Almost all of the core features and changes are now complete and usable in-game. For a while now we’ve been in the phase of testing, resolving bug fixes and doing general polish and balancing.

Our primary focus with this update was about giving the game a focus on gameplay, with more goals to strive for as a player, and more challenges to overcome - however, to achieve that, we had to make a lot of changes to the game that would otherwise make it unfair. Therefore, we’ve entirely revamped how derailments work, how couplers work, how you retrieve items, we’ve added speed signs and made a ton of core improvements that are yet to be revealed. With Hazmat we aim to get Derail Valley to a state where we can focus on adding new content, rather than the bug fixing.

That concludes this status report. The release announcement will still take a while, but if things go according to plan, it should be the next post coming from us!

-Slobodan