One world, the real one#
Freight & Fire is played on the whole Earth, built from OpenStreetMap. Every building on the map is a real building, every road a real road and every railway a real line, in the places they really are. There is one world and one server: the warehouse you build in Leeds is there for every other player too.
From orbit to the street#
One camera goes from 40 metres up to 30,000 km.
- The globe. Zoomed right out, the Earth is a low-poly globe: land coloured by climate and cover, ice caps, lakes and rivers, borders, the main roads and railways, and the names of the places big enough to show from that high.
- The regional map. Coming down, it flattens into a map like a web map's: coasts, woods, parks, towns, fields, motorways and main roads, railways and rivers, each in its own colour.
- The street. Within about 10 km, the streets come in, in 3D: every building (many drawn as models of their kind, terraced rows in Manchester, painted rows in Washington, pastels in the tropics), the roads with their traffic, lights and lamps, the railway with its sleepers, signals and level crossings.
Getting about#
- The search at the top finds any town on Earth by name (over a hundred thousand of them), or takes
lat, lon. The camera flies there over the map, up and back down again. - The wheel zooms toward the mouse; right-drag grabs the ground, and from high up it spins the globe.
- See Controls & settings for every key.
Mapping this area…#
Nobody has mapped the whole Earth's streets in advance. When you go somewhere new at street level, the game asks for it, and the server builds that part of the map from OpenStreetMap there and then: the corner of the screen says "Mapping this area…" while it works.
- The patch under you is mapped first, then the land around it.
- A dense city centre takes around 20 seconds for the first patch, a little longer if it is the first time anyone has been anywhere near it.
- Once mapped, it is there for everyone. The start cities are mapped in advance.
Until it arrives you still see the regional map beneath you, so you can keep flying about.
What the map means for business#
- Land is for sale in parcels cut from the real map: each field, meadow, orchard or wood as it is mapped, and the bigger ones and the land nobody has mapped cut into parcels of up to 5 ha, all bounded by the real roads, railways, rivers, water and buildings. Built land is not for sale as land: its buildings are. Build → Land draws the parcels on the ground. See Making money.
- What land can yield depends on what is really there: farm goods on farmland and meadow, fruit on farmland, orchards and vineyards, logs from woods, water beside rivers and lakes. Quarries, mines and oil are hidden deposits under some of the land.
- On land you own you draw fields (any four corners) and place storage, anywhere on it as long as nothing overlaps. Nothing goes on land you do not own.
- Crops grow only where their climate allows: cotton within 40° of the equator, corn 50°, sunflowers 55°, fruit 60°.
- Buildings you can buy are the real ones: houses and flats (residential), shops and offices (commercial), sheds and works (industrial).
Traffic#
Streets near the camera are full of traffic built from the real road network: cars, vans, lorries and buses, stopping at the lights and giving way at junctions, driving on the side of the road the country drives on. Your trucks drive among them in your company's colour.