If you have been building in Transport Fever 3 and keep bumping into the map size ceiling, this walkthrough is for you. I’m going to show you how to flip a single setting that unlocks the experimental map sizes, so you can build on Huge and Megalomaniac terrain instead of the stock options. It’s a short process, but it involves poking around in your Steam userdata folder, which is enough to make plenty of people nervous, so I’ll walk through it carefully.
The reason I’m writing this up is that the file path trips people up — it’s buried inside a numbered Steam directory that most players never touch, and the game ID tucked into that path is different from the older Transport Fever titles. I checked the location logic against the same convention used in Transport Fever 2 so you don’t have to guess. Once you know where settings.lua lives, the actual edit takes ten seconds.
Finding the settings.lua File
The file you’re after is settings.lua, and like in Transport Fever 2, it sits inside your Steam userdata directory. The path differs by operating system, so find your platform below and substitute your own user number where the placeholder is.
| Platform | Path |
|---|---|
| Windows | C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\<user-number>\3493540\local |
| Linux | ~/.local/share/Steam/userdata/<user-number>/3493540/local |
| Linux (alternative) | ~/.steam/steam/userdata/<user-number>/3493540/local |
| macOS | /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Steam/userdata/<user-number>/3493540/local |
If you have no idea what your user number is, don’t go hunting through folders. The quickest trick is to open the Transport Fever 3 map editor, click import heightmap, and the game will show you your local file path along with a button that opens a file browser straight to that spot. The folder you actually want is the parent folder of the heightmap’s folder — keep that in mind, because landing one level too deep is the most common mistake here.
Editing settings.lua
Once you’re in the right folder, you should see a file named settings.lua. Open it with a plain text editor — the kind of program you’d use to open a .txt file. Do not use something like Microsoft Word, because a word processor can mangle the formatting and break the file.
With the file open, scroll down until you find this line:
experimentalMapFeatures = false,
Change false to true. Make sure you keep that trailing comma intact — it’s easy to delete it by accident when you’re editing by hand, and the setting won’t parse correctly if you do. Save the file, restart Transport Fever 3, and you’re done. When you fire the game back up, you should see the Huge and Megalomaniac map size options waiting for you in the map editors.
One More Setting Worth Flipping
While you’re already in settings.lua, I’d suggest enabling experimentalTunnelAndBridgeMinHeight using the exact same method — find the line and flip its value to true. What this buys you is the freedom to build bridges and tunnels at any height, which opens up a lot of creative room once you’re working on those giant maps. Since you’ve already gone to the trouble of editing the file, it costs you nothing extra to turn this on at the same time.
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Conclusion
That’s the whole process — locate settings.lua, flip experimentalMapFeatures to true, and optionally turn on the tunnel and bridge height option while you’re there. Restart the game and the larger map sizes will be yours to build on. Have fun spreading out across a Megalomaniac map.