No Two Worlds Play Alike
Custom world sizes, custom game speeds, custom rulesets: every PlaneSim world is a separate persistent economy built to its own recipe, fixed at creation and printed in full on the World Configuration screen.
Every PlaneSim world is a separate, persistent economy with its own settings, chosen when the world is created. The wiki's habit of writing "by default (your world may differ)" is not hedging. The numbers you play against are the world's, not the game's, and before founding an airline the world's configuration deserves the same scrutiny as your first route.
The clock
Every world has a genesis date and a time scale. At 1x, a game day takes a real day; accelerated worlds run faster; a manual world moves only when an operator advances it. Everything in the game runs on game time: bookings, maintenance, loan payments. The world picker shows each world's clock, status (active or paused), and speed before you join, and the strip at the bottom of the game screen always shows your world's date and time scale.
The scale you choose decides the rhythm of your sessions, since a week of network planning compresses or stretches with it.
Switches that change how the game plays
Some systems are switched on or off per world. The big four:
| Setting | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Traffic-rights regime | Generous worlds default-grant routes touching your home country; restrictive worlds make most international flying a negotiation with the map |
| Slot ledger | Off: airport capacity is a shared hourly check. On: slots are owned property in 15-minute buckets, with use-it-or-lose-it seasons (180 days by default) |
| Operational delays | Off: flights run exactly on schedule. On: departures pick up noise, lateness chains through a tail's day, and punctuality feeds your image |
| Reserve substitution | Off: a broken or checked aircraft simply cancels its flights. On: an idle reserve can take over the whole rotation |
Any one of these reshapes strategy. A restrictive traffic-rights world turns route planning into a negotiation with the map before it is anything else. A slot-ledger world makes a constrained airport something you hold, season after season, rather than something you merely fly to. Delays decide whether a tight rotation is efficient or fragile.
Numbers that get tuned
Beyond the switches, worlds tune the economy itself: how far ahead passengers book (3 days by default), demand seasonality and weekday rhythm, maintenance costs and check intervals, loan pricing, lease bands, staffing costs, and how many AI carriers fly alongside you and with which personalities. The mechanics described in the wiki hold everywhere; the constants do not. Two worlds with identical switch settings can still be different economies.
The map is part of the deal
A world's airport footprint is set at creation and never changes. It can be a simple count (300 by default), but it can also be locked to whole regions or continents, banded by airport size, or built from an explicit list. That is why one world spans the globe and another is Europe only. Whichever shape it takes, the airports that exist on day one are the airports that will ever exist.
This permanence is why configuration is identity rather than preference. A Europe-only world is not a smaller copy of a global one; it is a different competitive geography for its entire life, and every airline founded there is shaped by that boundary from its first slot request to its last.
Read the actual rulebook
None of this has to be inferred or asked about in chat. World → Configuration prints the world's live ruleset in full: demand, the choice model, image, regulation, maintenance, staff, service, finance, lessors, operations, reserves, alliances, and AI, straight from the server with no fog gate. It is the world's actual configuration rather than documentation of it. When a wiki page cites a default and your world disagrees, that screen is the one telling the truth.
The habit to build is simple. Check the picker at play.theplanesim.com for the clock and status, join, then read World → Configuration before you commit capital. The full guide to what varies is in the wiki's world config basics article. A veteran of one world is not automatically a veteran of the next, and that is by design.