GTA 5 has been out for over a decade, and in all that time, nobody has stopped that train. Rockstar built the thing to be unstoppable, a running joke so persistent it became internet legend. Crimson Desert, Pearl Abyss's open-world fantasy action game, also has a locomotive rolling through its world. Players, being players, immediately started asking the obvious question.
What science looks like in Pywel
YouTuber BjornTheBear took it upon himself to run a methodical series of tests on the train, documenting everything in a video that has since picked up serious attention from the Crimson Desert community. The methodology here is exactly what you'd hope for: throw everything at the front of the moving vehicle and see what sticks.
First came the obvious attempts. Dropkicks, physical attacks, spells. None of it left a mark. Pearl Abyss clearly anticipated that players would try to rough up the train with their standard combat toolkit, so those protections were already baked in.
Then came the bigger options. The mech? Completely useless. The dragon, one of the more spectacular tools in Crimson Desert's arsenal, stood on the tracks and breathed fire at the oncoming locomotive. The train did not care. It passed straight through, unbothered.
The answer was trees all along
Here's the thing: the solution turned out to be far more mundane than anyone expected. A single log placed on the tracks does nothing, too flimsy to register as a real obstacle. But stack a few together and the train will actually pause, at least temporarily.
The full stop came from a specific placement. A log laid perpendicular across the tracks caused a brief slowdown, but it was a log pointed directly toward the oncoming train, end-first, that brought it to a complete halt. The working theory is that the train's collision detection treats the broad side of a trunk as negligible, while the end of one reads as a solid, immovable object. A small quirk in how the physics engine handles tree geometry, and suddenly Crimson Desert does something GTA 5 never managed.
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This appears to be an unintended interaction with the game's collision system rather than a designed feature, so there's a chance Pearl Abyss could address it in a future update.
What this means for open-world sandbox culture
The broader story here isn't really about trains. It's about what players do the moment an open world gives them enough tools to start experimenting. Crimson Desert has been out for a few weeks and people have already discovered space travel by flying high enough, watched NPCs build a statue over multiple real-time days, and found speed-gliding tricks that may or may not be bugs. The train is just the latest entry in a growing list of unexpected discoveries.
GTA 5's unstoppable train became a meme precisely because Rockstar's world felt so complete and deliberate that even its limitations became famous. The fact that Crimson Desert's train can be stopped, accidentally or not, says something about how Pearl Abyss built its physics systems. There's enough genuine simulation underneath the surface that players keep finding edges the developers probably never mapped out.
For everything else happening in the game right now, browse the latest gaming news to keep up with what the community is uncovering. The Crimson Desert roadmap already has boss rematches, new difficulty settings, and additional pets confirmed for the next three months, so the player experimentation is only going to get more creative as the content expands. Make sure to check out more:
