Hello all! Since it doesn’t look like we’re getting a concrete DLC announcement before Christmas, it appears we’ll be left alone to speculate until the developers return to work in 2023. While I was thinking about the Scottish route by Rivet Games, which seems to be the likely candidate for the next release, I remembered the traces of past DLCs found in the game files. For example, Bremen-Oldenburg was found through mastery decal names, and Birmingham Cross City was found through achievement titles. There are also these Steam Database file depots which regularly get updated, through which people were able to link the US Loco DLC (which turned out to be the Acela) to Boston Sprinter months ago already. My question is: Have the data specialists in the community found anything about new DLCs in the files, or has Dovetail perhaps been a bit more secretive this time around? Thanks!
Updating this post with info I found on SteamDB myself: At first glance, there are no obvious signs of the new DLC(s) such as concrete file names, achievements and statistics. But perhaps they’re just more careful with that stuff now because DLCs were often leaked that way in the past. If we look at the depots (essentially an internal listing of all the DLCs for the game), we can see multiple unnamed ones near the end. This is standard practice, like keeping some parking spaces ready for future content. However, multiple of these depots are constantly being edited these days, and one of them even has a file size (above 4GB, so could be a route). If we look at the history (https://steamdb.info/app/1944790/history/), it’s also very interesting to see which existing DLCs are being updated at the same time as the secret depots. We can see changes for WCL and SOS (presumably Rivet’s UK expansion pack and accompanying steam improvements/fixes), Boston Sprinter (Amtrak Acela Loco DLC), Class 20 and TVL (Class 20 Livery Designer Functionality). It’s a bit more difficult to find traces of Glasgow-Edinburgh and the Niddertalbahn because these are standalone DLCs with no major connections to existing content. As I said, I’m not experienced at all with SteamDB, so I’m not able to jump to any more concrete conclusions here. But I think it’s fair to say we might see more concrete stuff appear in the coming days as all the developers return to work after the holidays and start making changes to the game again. Maybe some more experienced “data miners” can jump in and add things I may have missed.
It is likely one of the unnamed/encrypted file depots in the development branch that get updated periodically. The one for the Amtrak Acela has been there for a while, easily recognizable because it always gets internal updates at the same time as the Boston route.
