Starting with OpenTTD 14, the Cheats feature has been renamed to Sandbox options to more accurately reflect their nature and usage. The feature is now also accessible from the Options and Settings menu. The terminology "cheats" has been retained in the article for historical purposes.
OpenTTD has a variety of Cheats to make gameplay easier. Cheating is not, and never will be possible in multiplayer games the way it is mentioned in this article, but see below for more information on multiplayer cheating.
- Ctrl + Alt + C -To access the cheat menu press Ctrl + Alt + C. This only works in single player games. If you have another program that responds to this shortcut running, please use Ctrl + Alt + Windows/Super + C. If your keyboard does not include the Windows keys, you'll need to use the Ctrl + Alt + C combination, and in order to do that you'll need to first change that other program's settings, close it to prevent it from responding to the combination or adjust hotkeys.cfg.
- On a Macintosh, press Control + Cmd (⌘) + C [Or, failing that, Ctrl + Alt(⌥) + C] to access the cheat menu.
Most of the cheats are self-explanatory but a brief description is available anyway.
Contents |
The Main Window
| Types of Cheats (Numbers Correspond) | |||
|---|---|---|---|
 |
Type | ||
| 1. Increase Money | |||
| 2. Play as Company | |||
| 3. Magic Bulldozer | |||
| 4. Tunnels cross | |||
| 5. No Small Plane Crash | |||
| 6. Modify Production Values | |||
| 7. Edit Maximum Map Height | |||
| 8. Change Date | |||
Increase money by £10,000,000
Increases (or decreases) available money by £10,000,000. You can press it as many times as you like. Money cannot decrease below zero with the decrease button.
Possible Settings: Any numerical value which is a multiple of £10,000,000 ($20,000,000), greater than zero.
Playing as company #
Allows you to play in any company (whether it be an AI company or another human company from a loaded multiplayer save), control their vehicles, etc.
Save your game before using this cheat because an assertion error may occur and you'll lose all you have been working on.
Possible Settings: Company Number from 1 to 15
Magic bulldozer
The Magic bulldozer allows you to destroy Industries and other normally immovable objects such as lighthouses.
You can look here to see Magic Bulldozer in action: 
A shot of the town before it will be destroyed with magic bulldozer. Notice that the immovable object (telephone pole) will also be destroyed.
The town after being destroyed.
Possible Settings: On or Off
Tunnels may cross each other
Allows you to build tunnels that intersect underground.
Possible Settings: On or Off
Jetplanes will not crash (frequently) on small airports
Large Aircraft don't have a tendency to crash all the time on small Airports. They will still crash occasionally though, with the same frequency as crashes at other airports.
Possible Settings: On or Off
Enable modifying production values
Allows you to modify the amount of cargo produced by industries.
Possible Settings: On or Off (Although the production value max is 2,040 tonnes/2,040,000 kilograms)
Edit the maximum map height
Allows you to change the maximum map height for the current game. Note that you can't set this lower than the height of the tallest mountain on the map.
Possible Settings: 15 to 255
Change date
The time is at your hand! You can go back in time or travel to the future with this cheat. Click on the date to enter the desired year directly, instead of incrementing or decrementing it with the arrows.
Unfortunately, it doesn't affect inflation or expired vehicles. To regain access to expired trains, open the Console and type reset_engines. Any vehicles or stations (future Airports) that become available while you are cheating, will still be available when you go back to the original date. Also, traveling before the year in which you began your game prevents the financial information from working properly.
Possible Settings: Any year from 0 to 5,000,000
Deprecated
During the course of development of the game, new cheats have been added while others are removed. This section lists settings that were previously cheats, but can now be found elsewhere.
Allow Electric Trains to run on normal track
Since OpenTTD 0.7.0, this cheat has been moved to the Advanced Settings menu, where it can be found under the Vehicles » Trains subcategory. This setting disables electric rails altogether.
Build while in pause mode
Since OpenTTD 1.1.0, this cheat has been moved to the Advanced Settings menu, where it can be found under the Limitations category.
Switch climate
This cheat is not available in OpenTTD 1.2 and newer, because it is an awful hack that is likely to break the game badly and isn't even really useful.
Switch climate cheat: a temperate landscape with a toyshop and a house from toyland, a printing works from arctic and some palm trees from tropical climate
Possible Settings: Temperate, Sub-arctic, Sub-tropical, Toyland
Cheating in network games
The cheats listed on above are not available in multiplayer games. There are two ways to enable cheats in Multiplayer:
- Modify the source code and recompile the game running on the server, something which is heavily frowned upon.
- Enable cheats in a single-player save game and then load the game at the "Start Server" menu.
If you must do this you should at least inform the clients that they are playing on a server with cheating enabled. There are, however, other ways to "cheat" in a multiplayer game. See Multiplayer cheating for more information on this and how to avoid it.
Cheat Effects
If you use or used a cheat in a specific game session, your score will not be included in the High Scores list; in that session, still cheating can be good for debugging/sandboxing purposes. (It's easy to gain money in this game, even with harder NewGRFs, but sometimes you just want to test something out.)