Early Start

Early Start

Although I was never particularly interested in the really early days of railroading, I know that some people are. As such, the 1850 start date has always struck me as rather arbitrary.
This mod attempts to rectify that situation. You can pick a start year between 1800 and 1850 inclusive. In fact, if you edit the variable at the top of mod.lua, you can pick a year between 1701 and 1850.

What this mod does:
It examines the availability start date of almost everything in the game, and where appropriate, adjusts that value to reflect the number you chose when you loaded the mod.
If the game has something available starting in 1850, then the mod changes that to the year you chose. Trucks, buses, bridges, stations, roads, everything. The exception is rail stock.

The first load time option is the choice of year the game will start in. The mod will only apply this value if there are no transport lines defined, so it won’t keep restarting in 1820 every time you load your save.
There is a separate menu option to choose from when the vanilla rail vehicles become available. You can choose the years between 1830 and 1850.
There is also an option to override the start year for modded vehicles that normally start in 1850. They can start in the same year as you choose for the vanilla rail vehicles.

Known issues:
The game will still show as having started in whichever year you chose using the game’s own UI.
The date doesn’t get changed from that default until after the map is generated and loaded. This leads to a more important point.
If, using the game’s UI, you select a date from Era B or Era C, the generated map will contain both people and buildings which look decidedly out of place in 1825.
If you’re going to use this mod, you’ll want to select a date before 1900 from the game’s UI.
Once you are in the game, you will not be able to set the date to a value before 1850, even if you have the Sandbox mod installed. This is a game limitation.

Saved games:
If you have an existing saved game, the date will already be past 1850, and the mod will do nothing for you. No point in adding it.
I don’t recommend removing the mod from a saved game. You have likely built rail or street stations with the modified files that this mod provides. Changing or removing these stations will not be possible if you remove the mod.

This mod is best suited for use with SteveM4’s Early Rail mod series:
Early Rail #1: The Beginning
Early Rail #2: Before Rocket
Early Rail #2.5: The Rainhill Trials
Early Rail #3: The Rocket
Early Rail #4: Railway Mania

It also modifies the start year for a number of the vehicles in the following mods to help fill in the availability gap in the 1840s. If I’ve missed one you think is important, please let me know.
LNWR Megapack
Midland Railway Compartment Car Set
Generic British Passenger Coaches V2 (1850-1900)
Generic UK Freight Wagons v3
GWR Open Waggons
GWR Toad Brake Van
GWR Van Waggons
GWR Cattle Waggons & Ale Waggon
Teak Coach Set

Golden Spike Promontory Point Rolling Stock
Norris 4-4-0 ‘Virginia’
Baldwin 0-6-0 Locomotive with Tender
1840 Harlan & Hollingsworth Passenger Coach
Caboose

This is still a little rough around the edges. It’s modifying the appearance stats for pretty much everything. Please let me know if you have any issues.

v103 – added support for shared storage capacity provided by station buildings.
v104 – fixed the use of the placeholder bridge on map generation.

v106 – updated to work with SteveM4’s new series of Early Rail mods.
v107 – tweaked the menu cleanup options somewhat. Updated the list of rail cars with modified earlier start dates.
v108 – more changes to menu cleanup options.
v109 – stupid bug fix.
v110 – added a couple of more vehicles to the list with modded start dates.