How commuters find their way

28 October 2026

The real opponent in Tildown is traffic. It never takes your money and never knocks anything down, but it decides whether your districts keep growing. Here we show how the game calculates it and why we built it that way.

Morning rush hour in a Tildown city with high-rises, a hotel and many cars on the streets — Half past seven in a city of 142,000: this is when most people drive to work.

Every road keeps count

Every connected home sends its workers off to work, a little over four in ten residents. They take the shortest route to the nearest commercial or industrial building that still has jobs free. Every road tile along that route counts how many commuters roll across it.

One tile of ordinary road carries 400 commuters, a main road eight times as many. From 85 percent load, the homes behind it grow more slowly, and at 100 percent their level stands still. That is all: a jam never costs money and never downgrades anything. Tildown is meant to stay a calm game, and for us a jam is a puzzle, not a punishment.

The home tells you where it sticks

A tapped villa with its commute drawn in, turning red at the end; the building panel names the bottleneck at 173 percent — A villa’s commute: it only turns red shortly before the destination, where the bottleneck is.

Tap a home and the game draws its residents’ commute into the city, in the same colours as the traffic view. The building panel also names the bottleneck: in the picture, a road at 173 percent, about eleven tiles away. “📍 Show” jumps straight there.

This is the most common aha moment in the game. The jam rarely sits inside the district itself, but where many routes come together, often on the last tiles before the first shops or factories. A new road outside your own front door does little then.

The whole city at a glance

Traffic view: almost all roads teal, one main axis amber, a few spots red — The traffic view in the morning: teal is free, amber is busy, red is a jam.

With the map button at the top right and 🚦 Traffic, every road takes on the colour of its load. It turns amber from 70 percent and red from 100. In the city above, most of it flows, it is busy mainly along one main axis, and a handful of spots are jammed.

Amber is only a warning. Homes feel nothing until 85 percent, which is why the expensive upgrade only pays off where it really turns red. Often a short stretch of main road is enough, right where the routes come together.

Detours, but not at any price

For a long time, every commuter stubbornly took their one shortest route, even when it was full. In big cities, whole districts stood still as a result, even though there was room right next to them. Today the game calculates a second time: if a route is more than 85 percent full, a home sends part of its commuters onto a way out. That is at most half of them, and only if the way out is at most eight tiles longer and noticeably freer.

We also tried a calculation that balances the traffic of the whole city at once. It swung back and forth and tended to make the overflow worse. The limit of eight tiles, on the other hand, is something you can keep in mind while building: a relief road that loops far around stays empty, even in a jam.

The cars on screen

The same city at night with lit windows and only a few cars with headlights — The same view just after eleven at night: only the late and night shifts are still on the road.

The cars you see driving around are not the calculation itself, but a picture of it. If the game steered every single resident through the city as a car of their own, no phone could keep up with a big city. So Tildown calculates traffic as flows on the roads, and the visible cars follow those flows. Each one drives to one of the nearest workplaces of its home, just as the calculation sends that home’s residents.

Every resident also has a day of their own. A good two thirds start between quarter to six and quarter past nine, most of them around half past seven. Others start later in the morning, work the late shift into the evening or drive at night. That is why mornings are busiest, things flow more calmly at midday, and at night only a few headlights are still out.

Switching to the train

Railway line with trains and a station between industry and the city centre, next to an underground station with Park and Ride — Tracks, a station and Park & Ride: anyone with a long way to work switches by themselves.

At a certain size, roads are no longer enough. In Tildown you don’t plan tracks and stations into lines: commuters switch by themselves wherever the train shortens their route. They walk the last six tiles before a station. Anyone who lives further away drives the stretch before that.

Those six tiles were not there from the start. A rail commuter used to vanish from the road entirely, no matter how far it was to the platform. Two stations anywhere in the city solved every jam. That was convenient, but it would have made it irrelevant where you build them. Now a station belongs in the middle of the district.

Smooth in big cities too

With hundreds of thousands of residents, traffic is the biggest calculation in the whole game. In big cities it therefore runs in the background on a processor core of its own, so the picture does not stutter while your city grows.

How to clear a jam in practice is covered in our tip Avoiding traffic jams. The basics are in the traffic chapter of the guide.