Not Enough Ballast - Track Terrain Fix

Not Enough Ballast – Track Terrain Fix

Keeps ballast under your tracks and grass out of the way in crowded rail yards.

Missing ballast in a busy yard? Terrain covering the track bed, or grass growing through tracks that should be clear?

Railroader's terrain builder has a limit of 256 curve modifiers per rendering group. Dense track areas can exceed that limit, leaving some terrain and surface-mask calculations incomplete.

Not Enough Ballast addresses this truncation in the game's shared terrain builder. It handles both the terrain beneath the tracks and the masks used for surface and vegetation placement.

What it does

The mod divides over-limit calculations into smaller pixel regions. Each region uses the game's own shader and the original input, keeping the relevant curves in their original order. The regions are then copied into the final terrain or mask texture.

This preserves the native shader's nearest-two-curve behavior instead of layering separate batches onto already modified terrain. Version 1. 2. 1 also handles the small base textures used by masks, correcting the remaining truncation that could leave vegetation through tracks.

Requirements

Railroader with Unity Mod Manager 0. 27. 10 or later installed for the game.

FUSE and RailLoader are optional, not requirements. The fix targets the game's terrain builder rather than one particular content loader. This does not guarantee compatibility with every mod combination.

Installation

Installs through UMM drag and drop. Manual installation is also supported.

UMM install (drag and drop)

1. Close Railroader completely.

2. If you used an earlier build, remove the old folder from Railroader/Mods first. Keep backups outside Mods.

3. Open the Unity Mod Manager desktop application, select Railroader, and open the Mods tab. UMM must already be installed for the game.

4. Drag Not-Enough-Ballast-1. 2. 1.zip into the ZIP drop area on the Mods tab. Do not extract the ZIP first.

5. Let UMM finish installing the mod and confirm it appears in the mod list.

6. Start Railroader, check that Not Enough Ballast is enabled in Unity Mod Manager, and revisit the affected area.

Manual install

1. Close Railroader completely.

2. If you used an earlier build, remove the old folder from Railroader/Mods first. Keep backups outside Mods.

3. Extract the BMR. NotEnoughBallast folder from the ZIP into your Railroader/Mods folder. Future updates replace the files in this folder.

4. Start Railroader, check that Not Enough Ballast is enabled in Unity Mod Manager, and revisit the affected area.

A full restart is required after installing or updating. The mod does not edit save files, original game assemblies or track positions.

Performance

There is no continuous scan, per-frame update loop or background vegetation-removal process.

Groups with 256 or fewer modifiers use the original game path after a count check. Over-limit groups need extra GPU rendering and readback work when the game builds or rebuilds the affected tile. The first affected build also runs a GPU reference comparison, so heavily modded areas can take additional time to build.

This is a terrain correctness fix, not an FPS-boost mod.

Safeguards and limitations

The release keeps a runtime check that compares a supported 256-curve input rendered normally against the same input rendered in spatial regions. If the comparison or GPU readback fails, the mod logs a warning and returns to the game's original handling.

Each region must still fit at most 256 conservative curve influences, with a maximum of 64 regions. Extremely concentrated overlap or unsupported shader/output configurations can therefore still fall back to the original limit. This mod does not remove every possible terrain limit.

It also does not repair incompatible track layouts, misplaced scenery or switches whose tracks do not intersect. Missing ballast caused by those issues may need a separate fix.

The 1. 2. 1 test build was checked in a heav