Transport Fever 3 Cargo Guide: Chains, Warehouses and Delivery Times

Cargo is where Transport Fever 3’s economy gets deep: 36 cargo types flow through 32 industries in chains that turn iron ore and coal into the steel a vehicle factory eats, and crude oil into the fuel a town burns. This guide covers the three systems that decide whether your freight empire prints money or bleeds it: chain logic, the new warehouse transfer mechanic, and the delivery-time economy. For the money math itself, the Transport Fever 3 calculator estimates line income before you commit track.

How do cargo chains work?

Industries consume inputs and produce outputs in fixed recipes. The official wiki’s industry table maps every relationship; the load-bearing patterns:

• Logs → Saw Mill → Planks (+ Sawdust) → Furniture / Paper Mill
• Iron Ore + Coal → Steel Mill → Steel / Sheet Metal → Machine & Vehicle Factories
• Crude Oil (platform or well) → Refinery → Fuel / Chemicals; Chemical Plant → Fertilizer / Plastic / Dyes
• Grain + Meat or Vegetables → Food Factory → Canned Food
• Wool → Weaving Mill → Fabric → Textile Factory → Clothes
• Fish → Commercial District or Food Factory (see our fishing guide)
• Sand → Glass, Clay → Bricks, Stone → Cement, Rubber → Tires

Three production rules shape strategy:

1. Raw industries always produce — farms, mines and logging camps output even with no inputs, so first-mile lines have guaranteed freight
2. Full storage destroys surplus — an industry whose output storage is full keeps producing but the excess is lost; keep hauling or the chain chokes itself
3. Demand grows networks — new industries spawn when demand is sufficient, and an industry inactive for 10 years starts a 730-day shutdown countdown, so abandoned branches physically die off

Climate gates some chains: paper mills and printing presses exist only on Subarctic maps, for example.

What do warehouses do?

Warehouses are Transport Fever 3’s headline freight addition — buildings that store cargo and transfer it between transport modes. The core rules from the official warehouse manual:

• No road connection needed. A warehouse works purely by sitting inside a station’s catchment radius — trucks, trains and ships hand cargo to it and pick it back up
• Universal vs Specialized. Universal warehouses are cheap and mix cargo. Specialized ones take modules — Liquid, Bulk, Flatbed or Goods — each holding a single cargo type at a time
• Specialized modules freeze the delivery timer of the cargo they hold and load/unload faster. That is the killer feature for perishables on multi-leg routes (more below)
• Configure in config mode, demolish outside it. Adding or removing modules happens in configuration mode; bulldozing outside it removes the whole warehouse

One sharp edge the manual states plainly: town buildings and factories cannot draw cargo directly from a warehouse. The warehouse is your interchange, not a delivery endpoint — someone still has to carry the last leg.

How does cargo payment work?

Launch-week community testing (Steam discussions, October 2026) converged on a model with clear differences from Transport Fever 2:

• Payment lands on final delivery to a town building or consuming factory — warehouses and intermediate transfers pay nothing
• Distance is straight-line between origin and destination, not your actual route length
• Multi-leg routes split revenue proportionally by the distance each carrier covered — the truck that ran 20% of the kilometers takes 20% of the payment
• Hub shuffling is dead. The TF2 trick of re-billing cargo across intermediate stations no longer pays; revenue is computed once for the journey

That is why the calculator’s income model calibrates against a payment you observe in your own game rather than pretending to know the exact coefficients — the economics are new and patches may tune them.

What is delivery time and why does it matter?

Every cargo has an acceptable delivery window measured from pickup. Fish and meat sit at the short end; the panel listing every cargo’s limit hides in the rightmost tab of the finance view — genuinely easy to miss in your first hours.

Consequences for network design:

• Long single-leg routes risk the timer expiring — split them with a warehouse (specialized modules pause the clock) or use faster vehicles
• Perishable chains want short, direct geometry — a fishing port, a warehouse in the dock’s catchment, then a quick truck run into town (exactly the setup in our fishing guide)
• Slow bulk haulage fits non-perishables — stone, ore and coal tolerate leisurely timetables

How do you keep a chain profitable?

• Serve the demand end first: a chain pays at its destination, so secure the buyer before scaling collection
• Mind vehicle-cargo matching: freight classes (Universal, Liquid, Bulk, Flatbed, Goods) pair with wagons, trucks, ships and warehouse modules — matched pairs load faster
• Aim near full, not empty-running: community benchmark is a line “constantly ~75% loaded”; feeder branches running partial loads are normal as long as the trunk pays
• Feed your industries boosters: workers by passenger line, fertilizer/machines/tools by freight — a boosted chain lifts every vehicle serving it
• Check the delivery timers before adding legs to an existing route

New to the game overall? Start with the beginner tips, and pick your first chain’s home with the starting position guide.