When should you repair the trainstation in SteamWorld Build?

Whenever you start a new game of SteamWorld Build, the train station is broken. It's one of the constants in this game. 

Repairing it costs a bit of money and some resources, which you don't have to spend straight away. In this post, learn learn when to repair the train station in SteamWorld Build and what the benefits are. 

First step: building houses

The first step to raising a successful SteamWorld Build village, is by building houses. These will be worker residences and you will see workers move in as soon as you build those residences.

These worker residences need to meet 3 basic requirements:

1. They need to be connected to a road; and
2. That road needs to be connected to the train station; and
3. They need to be in the vicinity of a General Store.

This trainstation connection requirement is the one we'll focus on here. 

Train station connection, but not working

The train station connection is a tricky one. In essence, all buildings need to be connected to the train station by road. 

But actually, that train station doesn't need to be active.

You can leave the trainstation unrepaired for quite a bit and focus on getting the basics up and running. Buildings like foresters and lumber mills, cactus farms and charcoal kilns and even the general store, service shops and warehouses will work just fine without having repaired the trainstation.

A simple set up with a non functioning train station, 6 Worker Residences and a General Store in SteamWorld Build

Repaired train station for upgrading workers

So when do you need to repair the train station? 

The answer is as soon as you are done laying the foundations of your village and want to upgrade workers to engineers. 

By the time you've provided them with all of their other needs, your workers require access to a working train station to be fully satisfied.

Select the train station and click the repair button in order to activate it. It won't break the bank and does provide several advantages.

Train station advantages

An active, repaired train station offers several benefits.

The first is obviously the ability to upgrade workers to engineers. Engineers open up a whole different load of buildings and production chains, as well as the option to open up the mineshaft and go underground.

But not only can you now continu with your village expansion, there are two other benefits to a repaired train station.

You can also start trading goods from the station. You can trade for money as well as trade for goods. So you can sell off your excesses to gain some money should you need it. You can also buy goods by trading away either money or your own excess goods. You choose!

Buying items from the train station in SteamWorld Build.

As well as trading goods, you can also buy items straight from the train station. These items are unmissable when the game advances and will give you advantages like:

• extra warehouse space
• extra miners
• more efficient guards
• more bots carrying products to and from warehouses

You can find items in the mine, but sometimes you just get too good a deal in the train station. Especially the items expanding your warehouse space are worth the money and rubies you'll have to spend on them. For more information on that specifically, read this guide on how to increase the storage limit in SteamWorld Build.