About the Game
Fly from Tokyo to LA, the short way.
Build your dream airline network on a custom-made globe of the Earth as you listen along to the game's original music. Or if you want, you can even play on terraformed Mars!
Compete with other airlines.
Advertise, construct hotels or steal concourses at airports to gain the upper hand against your competitors. Then, kick them out of your hub airports or purchase them outright in a hostile takeover.
Hub-and-spoke or point-to-point?
You decide. You can centralize your network to build a hub or utilize the game's flexibility to send your planes on long multi-city cycles.
Airports are ever-evolving.
At the start of the game they can spawn with random bonuses, and as the game continues you must make decisions such as building hubs, lounges and more in order to optimize your network.
Choose your flyer.
Play as the luxurious Flamingo, which receives bonus income from all lounges. Soar further than others with the Eagle, who gets a boost to plane range. Play as the Crow, Gull, Ostrich or more...all with their own unique bonuses.
Play with your friends.
Invite or join your friends through Steam and build a global airline network together.
Screenshots
13 images
Version Information
Steam Patch Notes
Official update history
v21-pre2
Features
- New 'everything at start' option to try and develop all major airports at game start (caution: game is not balanced for this).
- Flying into a region will make airports develop there faster.
- Paying to develop a city in an unopened region will now also open related airports in that region.
- Two new filters in the 'Airport Connections' tab: one for routes that only other airlines fly, and one for your own hubs.
- Can now click on a plane's airline avatar in the route GUI.
Changes
- Changed how new airports spawn. Airports will now open in groups of three per region, and the largest city in a region will always open.
- Increased preferred passenger queue sizes by 2.5x.
- Route lines are drawn thinner.
- Buying home rights will cost fewer Puffin Tokens now.
- General contract wording improvements.
- Increased the hardcoded airport limit from 2,000 to 3,000.
- Changing a route will reset the autobalance cooldown, avoiding cases where like autobalance would immediately assign a plane after you do.
Bugfixes
- Fixed a bug where major airlines that spawned mid-game would not have AI shareholders.
- Fixed a bug with contracts that could end simulation ticks early.
- Fixed a bug that could occur when an airline bought a regional carrier at one of its own hubs.
- Fixed a bug where right-click duplicating a plane wouldn't work.
- Fixed a bug where a route's autobalance setting could get messed up when planes were reassigned.
- Fixed a bug where only the host could select their starting location.
[img src="{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45002107/26253ce22f03cf1617c6cae178447a1ac61150d9.png"]
v21-pre1
Features
- New home region rule to fix AI spaghetti routes. New game rule, new UI in-game.
- Game is now won by accumulating 1,000 points. You get points per home region that you lead.
- New bird, the Owl, that takes the lead in regions faster.
- Spending ~4 quarters in a row with negative cash now bankrupts major airlines.
- Can now move the map with arrow keys.
- Long route lines now arc higher over the globe than before.
- Trunk routes are now thicker, and also brighter.
- Split the world into more smaller regions for the new home region gameplay.
- Added approximately 250 new cities, mostly in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Changes
- Route lines are now drawn in each airline's color by default.
- Lots of AI improvements, and changes to make them work with the new home region system.
- Regional airlines now tend to start in larger regions.
- Major airlines now start in unique regions.
- AI will now sell stock more aggressively to fund its other purchases.
- AI will now think twice before taking out a loan.
- Cities in a region get a small demand boost.
Bugfixes
- Fixed a bug where some city populations were wrong.
- Fixed a bug where "CEO Rating Low" wouldn't appear during play.
- Fixed a bug where clicking the airport concourse button would have delayed responsiveness. Also fixed some other buttons.
- Fixed a bug where AI airlines would try to buy out regional airlines whose headquarters they did not fly to.
- Fixed a bug where AI airlines would not properly calculate the valuation of their buyout targets.
- Fixed a bug where AIs were paying for a new credit rating too frequently.
- Fixed a bug where AIs would judge routes by the profitability of *every* airline flying it, preventing them from cutting their losses when they were being attacked.
- Fixed a bug with the statistics charts.
- Fixed a bug where airlines founded mid-game did not get enough money to survive.
- Fixed a bug where AI airlines would rent and abandon concourses frequently.
[img src="{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45002107/48db6fcc5d04d1f8781f031c1c2508686755d341.png"]
Features
City connection screen reworked; should better explain the demand to other cities.
Route screen now shows the load factor, a.k.a. what percent of seats on the route's flights are occupied.
Changes
You can now 'ignore' contracts to get them off your screen.
Route screen overall on-time rate has been demoted to a badge.
Load factor and AI fleet planning now use actual empirical flight data to more intelligently estimate load.
Bugfixes
Fixed an old bug that made planes taxi for longer than intended. Let me know if your planes are turning around too fast now.
Fixed another old bug so that now planes who wait overnight to take off can take off right at 5:00 AM.
Fixed a bug where you could get building contracts for super expensive things, basically trapping you into failure.
Fixed a bug where autobalance would send your plane to the hangar if a competitor was losing money on that route.
Fixed a bug where share heists disrupted the market more than intended.
Fixed a bug where the share heist button didn't accurately describe what it did.
Fixed a multiplayer bug.
Fixed the standing class autobalance setting sometimes silently resetting or otherwise behaving oddly.
v20.2-pre2
Features
- Plane models can now be retired at a specific quarter via ObsoleteAfterQuarter.
Changes
- New Regulatory Complaints game rule to disable these.
- Core game data now ships as readable JSON files in the game's install folder under StreamingAssets/Defines, so modders can use them as reference files.
Optimizations
- Removed some unused files from the game install.
Bugfixes
- Fixed plane models not going obsolete after save reload
- Fixed AI airlines forgetting to undermine rival favor after save reload
- Fixed the government instantly allowing new airlines to enter the market after save reload
- Fixed issue with loans sometimes not paying off.
- Fixed issue where planes would not age off the used market.
- Fixed math issues that were causing the Puffin/Dove income perks to not work properly.
- Fixed stock some issues with stock prices not recovering quickly after crashes.
- Fixed the AI sometimes trying to buy shares of an airline that had been taken fully private.
- Fixed competitor ticket prices sometimes not syncing properly to the UI.
- Fixed some multiplayer display issues including antitrust cooldowns sometimes not working properly, and exclusive rights.
- Fixed floating income text sometimes showing negative at very high values.
- Fixed some quarterly finance line items being put in the wrong table rows.
- Fixed a bug that prevented panic selling from triggering in some instances.
Notes
Modding guide not released yet, some undocumented features include overriding existing planes. You can set "Enabled": false to take a plane out of the game entirely if e.g. you don't like the Roebling becauses it's too fast.
{ "Id": "puffin.roebling", "Enabled": false }
In general, you should be able to easily override fields like this:
{ "Id": "puffin.pico", "Cost": 12000, "Capacity": 90 }
v20.2-pre1
This is a preview patch, so you must be on the PREVIEW branch to try it.
Changes
- Congestion is now measured only against the queue capacity of airlines who actually operate at the airport.
- Since congestion drives demand suppression, expect stronger suppression at hubs now. This will change how the game plays, so feedback appreciated here.
- Since congestion drives demand suppression, expect stronger suppression at hubs now. This will change how the game plays, so feedback appreciated here.
- The Congestion tooltip now shows each queue's fill against its own capacity (for example 208/204, overflowing) instead of its share of all queued passengers.
- Renamed "Throughput usage" to "Boarding throughput" to clarify that it specifically measures how fast that passengers who are already at an airport can board their planes.
- Improved changelog
Experimental
- Experimental mod support (proof of concept, may break in future updates). You can drop JSON files into the Mods folder next to your saves to add custom airports and plane models to new games.
[img src="{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45002107/3ce833a7d4885bf0fe2ce6c0c66ab40d871c8575.png"]
Adding new planes
Create a file in the folder named
*.models.json
{
"AirplaneModels": [
{
"Name": "Nano",
"Manufacturer": "Sawtelle",
"Description": "A very small plane.",
"Capacity": 30,
"Speed": 300,
"Range": 800,
"Cost": 6000,
"FuelEfficiency": 1.10,
"LaborUnits": 100,
"Size": "Small",
"ComfortBonus": -1,
"Prerequisites": []
}
]
}
Adding new airports
Create a file in the folder named
*.airports.json
{
"AirportDefines": [
{
"Name": "Santa Catalina",
"Country": "United States",
"Population": 4000,
"Offset": -7.0,
"LatLon": [
33.36998071192645,
-118.42445465228586
],
"IgnoreCountry": false,
"RegionOverride": "Western U.S.",
"Neighborhoods": [
"Avalon",
"Two Harbors",
"Pebbly Beach"
]
}
]
}
[img src="{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45002107/c07abbdff11a7b331f674476550a6497a5ed32e8.png"]
The improved Suppressed Demand tooltip and info badge.
Changes
- Manufacturers are now much more responsive about opening new production lines when their backlog grows.
- New lines are triggered by how many days of work are queued instead of raw plane count. This should help esp. with slower-to-build planes like the PAX series.
- New lines also go to the model with the longest queue in days of work instead of the most planes.
- Overhauled the Suppressed Demand badge. See the screenshot!
- AI airlines are now much less aggressive about opening new routes if their existing network is struggling.
- AI stops opening new routes while more than 10% of its routes are congested.
- The airport Congestion tooltip now shows whose fault it is. Maybe it's your competitor's preferred queue!
Bugfixes
- Fixed passengers who prefer an airline that doesn't fly their route waiting instead of just boarding a competitor.
- Fixed demand suppression kicking in way too early.
- Fixed passenger groups losing their place in line when only part of the group fit on a plane.
- Fixed partially-boarded passengers sometimes jumping from the open queue into some preferred queue.
- Fixed passengers who were split across two planes losing their demographic and airline preference.
- Fixed AI airlines ordering planes past their own per-model fleet targets.
- Fixed AI airlines attempting to open new routes and construct buildings way too frequently.
- Fixed the Tourist Destination demand boost silently deleting itself after saving and loading.
- Fixed a multiplayer bug.
- Fixed some minor text issues.
v19.3
Bugfixes:
- Fixed bug where players would be unable to join a multiplayer game if the savefile was big.
- Fixed bug where airlines would not get money if they were forced to sell shares.
- Fixed bug where bulk order button would become clickable before you could actually afford it.
- Clicking on an airline's avatar in the route GUI will now navigate to that airline's stock trading view.
- Aircraft will now show 'Repairing' if they are repairing, to better inform players that they may need to build more hangars.
- Stale events will no longer show on game load.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed bug where AI would sometimes try to buy shares in dead airlines.
- Fixed bug where there were some blank tooltips in the stock trading view.
v19.1
Bugfixes:
- Fixed bugs with tutorial
- Moved the 'accept contract' button so that it is no longer hidden by the tutorial.
v18.1
Features:
- Added a "Random starting location" option in the New Game menu.
Bugfixes:
- "Veteran Veteran" achievement now takes into account used plane purchases.
Hello everyone, I'm back with a dev diary for Puffin Planes. I'll start posting occasional dev diaries instead of posting every single preview update as an announcement; this will help keep the library view cleaner. I'll still try to post patch notes to Steam and Discord though. By the way, did I mention that the game's on sale? Actually, I don't know why I'm mentioning this. If you are reading this dev diary then you probably already own the game. Maybe you can buy it for a friend? Anyways...
Coming Soon in v17.1
(And currently available on the preview branch)
New Main Menu
In order to redo the main menu windows, I first needed to reconfigure the main menu so that there was more space for them. To accomplish this I moved the action buttons over to the side.
[img src="{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45002107/eadb6c86a026186f07c5c366d397848e8a3d30b9.jpg"]
Airline customization
You may have spotted in the previous picture a new "Airlines" tab in the New Game menu. This lets you customize the airline! You can now customize a few additional settings such as the bird and the start location.
[img src="{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45002107/bd2f0d5d9b40cb3cf507bb79dc44df9fe6d41d90.png"]
Advanced game rule customization
I added many more game rules for you all to customize. I know I can't satisfy everyone's preference for how they want to play the game, so I thought I would at least give everyone more choice.
[img src="{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45002107/d766df5de7441ecf78e02bd99619f761217af844.png"]
Loans and your CRANE Score
You heard that right: loans! These are definitely not balanced yet, I'm afraid. In fact the whole v17.1 update is probably unbalanced as heck right now. But hopefully, armed with the new game rule customization options, I can get some feedback from playtesters on the appropriate balance this new mechanic.
[img src="{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45002107/5e21f3ecce9e6d075b3f952b6b92f91bb46c6aee.png"]
Full v17.1-pre4 Patch Notes
Features:
- New "Expand Airport" button on the Infrastructure GUI panel that allows you to add another building slot.
- Your airline now has a CRANE rating. This will affect how eager lenders are to give you money.
- There are four new loans available for you to take out.
- Whenever manufacturers launch a new model/block, they will offer discounts to each airline on their first 5 or 10 orders.
- Tons of new game settings including over features like buyouts, plane maintenance speed, and so much more.
- Can now customize individual airlines before game start.
Changes:
- Bulk discount has been reduced from 20% to 15% of the plane cost.
- Increased fuel efficiency of the Atto from 0.85 to 0.95
- Reduced upkeep miles cost from 8/health to 7/health
- Inflation is now ~25% of what it used to be. The old "Normal" inflation is now the new "High", for comparison. The idea is to try and increase plane costs and add early-game loans rather than rely on inflation for a more engaging early-mid game.
- Rebalanced plane costs; smaller planes increased around ~2x, larger planes between ~3-5x.
- Production line base capacity has been nerfed from 8/hr to 6/hr; I felt planes were being built too quickly. But starting efficiency has been boosted to 100% to compensate at least at the immediate start of the game.
- AI will now be more aggressive in stockpiling planes.
- Moderately decreased the cost for manufacturers to open new production lines.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed the Comfort chart.
v17-pre13
Features:
- The Penguin: 2x speed and -50% service point cost for regular maintenance.
- The Ostrich: 15% chance of receiving an extra plane whenever you take delivery from manufacturer.
Changes:
- Tutorial now explains ordering new planes
- Removed retrofitting.
- Some plane models, such as the PAX-200, can now become obsolete.
- Airplane view in Network Overview now shows the model.
- Route ruler now configurable in the settings menu.
- Discontinued models now appear on the 'Models' tab of the Manufacturers GUI.
- Increased fuel efficiency of the Atto to make it easier to break even.
- Route ruler now only shows up if you have planes in your hangar.
- Nerfed the PAX-125 range from 4,000km to 3,300km base.
- Debug menu will now show you airports that you have never unlocked before, for help with the Completionist achievement.
- If a new model is researched and there are no production lines to steal, then the manufacturer will go into debt to open a new one.
- Moderate (25%-ish) decrease to the price of starter planes
- Tightened up research costs to make planes appear earlier on average.
- Plane labor unit cost increases again (sorry I keep going back and forth on this).
- Two new planes, the 'Levering Veteran ER' and the 'Sawtelle Macro'.
- Added some more flavor to production line names.
- Nerfs to % income policies such as the "Status Program" and "Low Cost Carrier" policies (now just a 2.5% boost across the board except for LCC)
- Nerfed the Puffin % income bonus from 15% to 10%
- Significantly increased crew costs (50% increase); aiming for plane operating costs to be around ~80% of revenue
- ...to compensate, base income is back! Should help you out early game; 500 per day.
Bugfixes:
- Route ruler now shows the stats for the highest block that you have.
- Fixed the Midvale PAX-250 research cost being absurdly low for testing purposes.
- Fixed a typo in teh "Establish a Hub" contract.
- Removed references to the abandoned "lease" concept from the game.
- Fixed the 'purchase' button for a new building showing NaN if you had no building selected.
- Fixed being able to create plane if you had enough money to unlock cities, or purchase the used plane, but not both.
v17-pre12
Changes:
- Larger planes now cost 50% more miles to maintain than smaller planes.
- Removed the 'Plane Factory' airport bonus.
- Improved End Screen OST by Rod
- Game Over screen now stops music
- Route Ruler will now only show models that you have in your hangar, rather than all models.
- Boost Pax are back; all airlines will receive a base "income" of passengers spawning to make early game more fair.
- Made some pitiful attempts at game balancing (I swear it's so difficult!)
- Raised the amount of starting miles from 25K to 30K
- Significantly increased most plane prices (by 2-3x for many of them)
- Production lines should now slowly reassign to models with busier backlogs (threshold is 2x total length in days)
Bugfixes:
- Fixed airplane costs (fuel, crew, etc) not scaling with inflation (mega facepalm)
- Fixed discontinued planes getting new production lines (e.g. PAX-125)
Current Release
Build 24854143
Uploaded Sep 07, 2026
System Requirements
How to Install
Puffin Planes.exe to play
Troubleshooting tips
• Run Redist/_CommonRedist installers if game won't start
• Add folder to Windows Defender exclusions
• Run as administrator
Download
Direct link available
Needed when extracting (WinRAR / 7-Zip) — not a site login.
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Download Puffin Planes for PC with a direct link or via torrent. Get the full version of Puffin Planes for free. Puffin Planes is a Casual released by CATINRAIN LLC.