Transport Fever 3 Campaign Guide: All 8 Missions and Star Goals

The eight-mission campaign is the best-paced introduction to the game and, for completionists, the only place where stars and medals live. This guide lays out every mission in the official order with its full star ladder and medal task, then covers the two missions players search for most: the desert convoy of Mission 3 and the oil race of Mission 5.

How the campaign works

You start it from the CAMPAIGN card in the main menu. Missions unlock one after another, and each mission keeps its own save, so a failed attempt costs you a run rather than the whole campaign.

The scoring is consistent across all eight:

• One star — the primary goal, whatever it takes
• Two and three stars — the same goal, done faster or better
• One medal per mission — a separate optional bonus goal
• Failure — triggered by missing certain critical challenges, not only by going broke

The stories are fictionalised takes on real transport history, and the manual is explicit that they are entertainment rather than history. The early missions are also the game’s tutorial, which is why they feel like guided tours.

All 8 missions and their star goals

The most useful habit in the whole campaign is to read the star column before you build anything. Mission 3, for example, is scored on truck losses rather than deliveries, while Mission 7 is scored on how fast towns are satisfied — two completely different opening moves.

Mission 3: Desert Adventure

Desert Adventure is the campaign’s maintenance and routing lesson: you keep an expedition convoy alive from Aqaba to a dig site in Wadi Rum, and the two higher star ratings are a strict truck-loss count. Build the Bedouin maintenance camps, thread your lines through their coverage with waypoints, and take the rocky detour over the dune crossing. The full route, in order, is in the Mission 3 walkthrough.

Mission 5: Oil for the People

Mission 5 turns the economy into a race. You have to extract the first 1,000 units of crude oil at the Ekofisk oil fields before a foreign corporation’s agent, Astrid Larsson, gets there first. Money is not the scoreboard — her delivery count is, and the deadlines only get tighter as you climb the star ladder.

The chain itself is standard vanilla cargo logic: crude oil comes from an oil platform or an oil well, the refinery turns it into fuel, chemicals and fertilizer, and each output has its own consumer. The cargo and warehouse guide breaks down that chain, and the rule that matters most here is cargo specialisation — crude oil is a liquid, so liquid tankers and matching vehicles load faster than universal wagons thrown at the same job.

A practical approach for all three stars:

• Secure the shortest crude-to-refinery link first. The oil field is the bottleneck, so the first line should exist to move crude, not to look finished.
• Do not wait for perfect infrastructure. Astrid’s counter advances continuously; every month spent gold-plating track is a month she gains.
• Keep the refinery fed before you chase fuel demand. A starved refinery delivers nothing, and the end products cannot be shipped faster than they are produced.
• Reuse the mission’s own tools. Maintenance, waypoints and line editing all appear before Mission 5, and a paused truck in the wrong place costs less than a rebuild.
• Plan the medal separately. Rescuing Lasse is a bonus objective on top of the race; if the clock is tight, take the three stars first and treat the medal as its own attempt.

Campaign achievements

Four of the game’s 41 achievements come from the campaign, all listed in the official achievements page:

Story Legend and Phalerist are the reason to look at the star ladder on a first run: a three-star push and a medal hunt can pull in opposite directions, and it is usually cheaper to plan two different attempts than to force both at once.

Tips that carry across every mission

• Read the scoring rule first and build for it, rather than building a textbook network and hoping the stars follow.
• Watch vehicle maintenance. Condition loss is a real mechanic in free game, and the early missions score you on keeping vehicles alive; the beginner tips cover the maintenance and headway basics.
• Respect delivery timers for perishable cargo before you build a long multi-leg food or fish route.
• Use the campaign as a sandbox for mechanics before you start a free game on a large map, where the same mistakes cost far more.
• If progress disappears, do not replay everything: the official troubleshooting page publishes profile files that unlock missions and medals.

Sources

Official

• Transport Fever 3 campaign manual — all missions, star goals and medals (Transport Fever 3 Wiki, Urban Games)
• Achievements — campaign and free game
• Industries and cargo — oil chain and specialisations
• Troubleshooting — recovering campaign progress
• Transport Fever 3 official FAQ
• Transport Fever 3 on Steam

Related video walkthroughs (every factual claim on this page comes from the official sources above)

• Bluewizard — Transport Fever 3: campaign, free play, map editor, mods and settings
• SeniacTWO — Transport Fever 3 Campaign 5: Oil For The People