General OpenTTD • OpenTTD Cargo Income Calculator — web tool (all 33 vanilla cargos)

Hi all,

I built a web-based cargo income calculator for OpenTTD and wanted to post it here for feedback.

The tool: smart-calculators.net — OpenTTD Cargo Income Calculator.

What it's for

You pick a cargo, type in the route distance and how long the trip takes, and it tells you what each delivery will pay. It also lets you compare cargos side-by-side, so you can see which one earns more on a given route before laying the track.

Quick example: at 100 tiles and 40 days in transit, 200 tonnes of coal pays around £14k per delivery; iron ore on the same run pays around £12k. The calculator works that out for any cargo in vanilla OpenTTD — all 33 cargos across the four climates.

It also flags the "sweet-spot" distance for time-sensitive cargos like valuables, where extending the route stops being worth it past a certain point.

What it doesn't do (yet)

• NewGRF cargos with custom paymentRate
• JGRPP variant economies (cargodist etc.)
• Multi-leg feeder accounting (treats total transit time as a single number)
• Subsidy multipliers

If any of those would be useful for the way you play, tell me and I'll add them.

Feedback

If you put in a cargo / distance / transit combo and the number looks wrong, send me the inputs so I can reproduce. NewGRF setups where vanilla rates obviously don't apply are useful to hear about too.

Disclosure: I built the calculator. Happy to answer questions in the thread.

Statistics: Posted by yulorien — 11 May 2026 13:40