Map Transits: How Tarkov's Locations Connect

The problem this guide solves

You finish a raid on Customs with a quest item for Shoreline in your rig, and the only thing standing between you and the next objective is a loading screen and a lobby menu. Or worse: you do not know which exit on your current map actually leads toward the map you need, so you extract, re-gear, and queue again like everyone else.

Tarkov's thirteen locations are not isolated battlegrounds. They are nodes in a connected network, and the transit system is what turns that network into a gameplay tool instead of trivia. A transit lets you leave one raid and load straight into a neighboring location, carrying your character, your gear, and everything you picked up along the way. Used well, one deployment can chain across two or three maps, which means more quest progress, more loot runs, and fewer risky re-entries through the front door of a contested map.

The catch is that the network is directional, partly gated behind keycards and quest chapters, and documented almost nowhere in-game. New players routinely assume every map is reachable from every other map, or that transits work both ways. Neither is true. This guide lays out the complete verified transit graph as it stands in the current build, flags which legs cost items or only run at night, and explains how the Tour chapter uses transits to drip-feed you map access during your first hours.

Everything below is checked against Patch 1.1.5.0, the build that went live in early September 2026 alongside Season 1 content. Transit layouts and entry requirements are exactly the kind of thing Battlestate adjusts between patches, so treat the specific requirements here as a snapshot of this version rather than permanent law.

At a glance: the transit network in sixty seconds

If you only remember one screen from this guide, make it this checklist.

The network has two workhorse hubs. Customs connects to Factory, Reserve, Interchange, and Shoreline, making it the busiest crossroads in the game. Shoreline is the gateway to the endgame: from its piers and resort basement you can reach Lighthouse, Terminal, the Labyrinth, and the Icebreaker. Ground Zero and Streets of Tarkov form the only clearly two-way shuttle on the chart.

Three maps are one-way destinations with no onward transit at all: the Labyrinth, Terminal, and the Icebreaker. Entering any of them is a commitment, and two of them also refuse to return insured gear. Plan your kit around that before you buy a ticket in.

What a transit actually is (and what it is not)

A transit is an exit that ends your current raid by starting another one. Instead of the results screen and your stash, you get a loading bar and a spawn point on the neighboring map.

This is different from a normal extraction in the ways that matter. Extraction ends the raid and banks your loot; a transit keeps the session alive and moves your character, worn gear, and carried items into the next location. That distinction drives every tactical decision in this guide, because a successful transit means you are still in the field with the same kit you started with, including whatever damage, hydration, and inventory state you had when you crossed.

One verified rule makes transits especially valuable for questing: items that leave a raid through a transit keep their found-in-raid status. The same exception applies to goods sent home through the BTR driver's delivery service. Since so many Tour and trader quests demand found-in-raid turn-ins, a transit chain lets you sweep a quest item off one map and carry it into the next without gambling it on a second deployment. Die in the second raid, though, and the normal rules of loss still apply.

What a transit is not: a free ride, a guaranteed exit, or a two-way street. Several legs demand a keycard, a quest item, or a specific time window. Most edges on the graph run in one direction only. And the three endgame destinations are deliberately designed as terminals in both senses of the word: once you commit, the only way out is that map's own extraction.

Why you start with one map: the Tour and map gating

On a fresh character you cannot simply click every location on the map screen. Nine of the standard maps are marked as initially reachable only by transit, with direct selection unlocking as you progress the Tour story chapter.

The Tour is the guided main questline every new account picks up automatically, and it doubles as Tarkov's map-unlock ladder. It walks you through locations in a deliberate order, and each step opens the next node on the network. The chain runs like this: extract from Ground Zero in the tutorial raid, then pay Therapist 250,000 rubles to open Streets of Tarkov. Survive Interchange (or visit it three times) and Ragman's step unlocks Skier plus Customs. Survive Customs and hand over five found-in-raid building materials to unlock Mechanic and Factory. Hand Mechanic two found-in-raid weapons after a Factory run to unlock Prapor and Woods. Kill any three targets on Woods to unlock Peacekeeper and Shoreline.

The back half of the Tour leans on transits directly. One step sends you to a watchtower radio on Shoreline's southeast corner to make contact about Terminal, with a warning not to kill the guards or spam the radio. Later steps unlock Reserve after a successful Shoreline extract with five PMC dogtags turned in, open Lighthouse for a 20,000 dollar fee, and finally send you into the Lab itself by transiting in through Streets or Factory with a TerraGroup Labs access keycard, which also earns the Pathfinder achievement.

Two caveats worth stating plainly. First, Interchange is the odd one out: its official wiki page carries no Tour-unlock note, so its exact unlock path is unverified as of this patch even though the Tour clearly sends you there early. Second, until a map is unlocked you can still sometimes reach it by transiting from a neighbor, which is exactly why understanding the graph matters from your very first week. The Tour is covered step by step in our Tour walkthrough guide.

The complete verified transit network

Here is the full graph, edge by edge, as verified against the official wiki's map pages for the current build. Read each row as one-directional unless it says otherwise.

Notice what the shape of the graph tells you about flow. Customs, Woods, and Shoreline sit at the center, each with three or four onward legs, while maps like Interchange and the Lab sit near the edges with one or two. If your raid plan depends on reaching a specific destination, your entry map choice is already half the battle: spawning into the wrong node can mean an extra hop, an extra raid timer, and extra exposure.

The three one-way end maps deserve emphasis because players keep learning it the hard way. The Labyrinth, Terminal, and the Icebreaker accept inbound transits but offer no outbound ones. Their own extraction points are the only way home, and those extractions have their own conditions, from key-locked paths to flare zones and paid helicopter seats.

Factory: the small hub with an endgame door

Factory looks like a warmup map, and on paper it is: a compact multi-level chemical plant with seven to eight players by day, five to six at night, and short twenty to twenty-five minute raid timers. But its transit list makes it quietly important.

From Factory you can transit to Woods, to Customs, or into the Lab if you carry a TerraGroup Labs access keycard. That third leg is what elevates the map from tutorial territory to infrastructure: the Lab has no direct map-screen access for most players, so Factory functions as one of its two physical entry corridors. The wiki's Factory page even marks the flooded area as a key point of interest precisely because of the Lab connection.

Practical implication: if your plan is a Lab run, staging through Factory means you only need to survive one short, fast raid before the keycard check. The trade-off is that short raids attract confident, geared players and Tagilla roams the entire map with no fixed territory. At night, Cultists join the roster. Treat Factory as a corridor, not a farming ground, when a keycard is in your secure container and the real objective is one map further on.

Customs: the crossroads of the whole region

With onward transits to Factory, Reserve, Interchange, and Shoreline, Customs connects to more destinations than any other single map. If Tarkov's network has a Grand Central station, this is it.

That position matches its design role. Customs runs ten to twelve players on a thirty-five minute timer and sits at the heart of the early and mid-game questlines, which means traffic through it is constant. Its four legs also make it the natural pivot for chain raids: a Customs run can end in a Reserve raid for military loot, a Shoreline raid for resort keys, an Interchange raid for mall tech, or a quick Factory hop, all without touching the lobby.

The map fights back, of course. Reshala holds the dorms, the new gas station, or the ZB-013 scav base; Partisan roams everywhere; the Goons trio appears at the scav base; and Cultists come out at night. When you route a chain through Customs, budget time and ammunition for at least one of those encounters near the transit side of the map. The detailed boss spawn positions live on the Customs map page and the boss pages.

Shoreline: the gateway to every endgame map

If Customs is the crossroads, Shoreline is the harbor. All four of its onward transits matter, and three of them lead to maps you cannot reach any other way.

The simple leg goes to Lighthouse, no special requirement attached. The other three are gated. Terminal requires an in-game night window between 21:00 and 6:00 plus an access item shown to the port garrison over the radio. The Labyrinth requires both a Labrys access keycard and a Knossos LLC facility key, and the transit point sits in the resort's west wing basement. The Icebreaker requires the Sudak-Tudak marine repair kit and departs from the pier area.

This makes Shoreline the single most strategically loaded location on the chart. It runs ten to fourteen players on a forty-five minute timer, hosts Sanitar with his three heavy guards around the resort, the pier, and the cottages, plus roaming Partisan, the Goons at the southeast weather station, and Cultists at night. Every endgame push funnels through here, which means the resort basement and the port are among the most contested transit approaches in the game. Bring what you need before you load in; none of the gated items can be acquired reliably mid-raid.

One practical note: Shoreline's size works for you. Forty-five minutes is the second-longest standard raid timer, so a transiting player can cross the map, handle one fight, and still reach a gated transit point inside the window, provided you know where you are going before the raid starts.

Terminal: the night-only ferry to the docks

Terminal is a fortified evacuation point held by Russian forces at the southern port, and getting in is an event in itself: a Shoreline transit between 21:00 and 6:00 in-game time, with an access item presented over the garrison radio.

Two mechanics define the map. First, your character state resets after the raid ends, whether you extract or die; only the access item is consumed. Second, each raid rolls exactly one classic boss from a fixed list: Glukhar, Killa, Reshala, Sanitar, or Tagilla, spawning around the container ship berths. Black Division troops and scavs fill out the roster, and parts of the port sit under mortar coverage. It runs one to five players on a forty-five minute timer.

The extraction is a Zubr boat whose seats scale with your party size, and holders of the Secure container Alpha-1 must carry it on their person to board. There are no onward transits: Terminal is an end map by design.

Honesty box: our research verifies the access-item requirement but does not pin down which specific item the radio operator accepts, and no verified source in our corpus names it. Treat that detail as unverified in this build and confirm it in-raid or on the current wiki page before you stake a kit on the trip. Everything else above, including the night window and the one-boss rule, comes straight from the verified map data.

Labyrinth and Icebreaker: ticketed, one-way, and unforgiving

The two remaining end maps share a profile: steep entry tickets, no onward transits, and insurance that never comes home.

The Labyrinth is a Knossos LLC bunker with a Greek theme, entered only through the Shoreline resort's west wing basement with a Labrys access keycard plus a Knossos LLC facility key in hand. It runs one to five players on a thirty-minute timer, opens with five trap-rigged spawn chambers you must disarm, and its corridors are lined with tripwires, spike pits, and poisoned razor wire that drains 140 health per minute if you blunder into it. Shadow of Tagilla roams the whole bunker, and Vengeful Killa appears once the Shadow falls. Insure nothing you cannot replace.

The Icebreaker is the nuclear icebreaker Boreas, owned by Paradigm Shipping and stuck in the Gulf of Finland. Entry requires progress in the Boreas story chapter plus the marine repair kit, with transits from Shoreline's pier or, since Patch 1.1.5.0, from Lighthouse. Finishing the Stick to It questline unlocks direct map selection so you can skip the transit entirely. Enemy numbers scale with your party size, insurance does not return, and the only way off is a helicopter called by green flare that charges 2,400 euros per head. It runs one to three players on a fifty-minute timer, the longest in the game.

On framing: some outlets describe the Icebreaker as PvE-exclusive. The accurate reading from the primary coverage is that it is a PvE-oriented map for one to three players that you can also enter from PvP mode, but without matchmaking against random players; you fight AI only. It also hosts two bosses, the Wedge in the third-deck gym and Knight on deck zero, which the boss pages cover in detail.

The Lab: transit in, and insure nothing

The Lab is TerraGroup's underground facility beneath the city, and the transit system is its front door. You get in from Factory's flooded area or from Streets of Tarkov, and either way the TerraGroup Labs access keycard is consumed as the price of admission.

The map runs eight to ten players on a thirty-minute timer with no conventional boss; the threat is Scav Raiders, who can spawn in response to extract activations that are announced over the facility's loudspeakers. Insurance never returns anything lost here, full stop. That single rule shapes the entire economy of Lab runs and is the reason experienced players treat the keycard as a one-way fare rather than a ticket stub.

For transit purposes, one edge matters most: the Lab connects onward to Streets of Tarkov. That means a Lab raid does not have to end at a power-restoring elevator or a backpackless ventilation shaft; it can end on the city streets, inside the downtown network, one hop from Ground Zero. The full extract puzzle, the colored keycards, and the raider triggers get their own treatment in our Lab guide.

Ground Zero, Streets, and the one two-way pair

Ground Zero and Streets of Tarkov share the cleanest relationship on the chart: a bidirectional transit between the business center where the tutorial raid happens and the downtown core.

Ground Zero is deliberately built as the starter location, with matchmaking split at level 21 into a beginner pool of nine to ten players and a veteran pool of nine to twelve, on a thirty-minute timer. Streets is the largest standard map, twelve to sixteen players across banks, malls, and hotels on forty minutes, home to Kaban at the LexOs dealership and Kollontay around the Klimov mall.

The two-way link gives beginners a genuine tactical option: learn Ground Zero, then push into Streets when the downtown quests call, and retreat back if a raid goes sour near the boundary. It also makes the pair the safest place to practice transit mechanics before you start paying keycards and repair kits for the gated legs elsewhere.

What Patch 1.1.5.0 changed for transits

The current patch reworked Lighthouse and, buried in the same notes, quietly redrew one edge of the transit graph.

Lighthouse now has a transit point to the Icebreaker: a hovercraft docked at the waterside cottage pier. Before this patch, Shoreline's pier was the only ride out to the Boreas. The change plugs the newest map into the mainline network from two directions instead of one, and it pairs naturally with the rework's other moves, since the Rogues shifted from the water treatment plant up to the mountain chalets and a BTR now patrols the whole map.

A sourcing caveat belongs here. The 1.1.5.0 changes are documented in patch-note coverage we cross-checked between two outlets, but Battlestate's own detailed notes for this version were not in our research corpus, so treat the hovercraft pier detail as reported rather than lab-confirmed. If you are reading this after a newer patch, re-verify the exact transit location before planning a route around it. That is not hedging; it is how you survive Tarkov's patch cycle, where timers, keys, and spawn logic all drift between versions.

Chain-raid planning: turning the graph into loot

Knowing the graph is trivia. Exploiting it is a skill. Here is how to plan a chain that survives contact with other players.

Start from the destination and work backward. If the goal is Terminal, the chain begins on Shoreline at night with the access item already in your container. If the goal is the Lab, the chain begins on Factory or Streets with the keycard secured. The gated legs punish improvisation because their keys, kits, and time windows cannot be conjured mid-raid, so the loadout screen is where a chain raid is actually won or lost.

Respect the raid timers. Standard maps run thirty to forty-five minutes, Factory as short as twenty, and the Icebreaker a marathon fifty. A two-map chain can easily consume ninety minutes of real time, and every minute of it carries your accumulated loot. Transiting with a bag full of quest items from map one turns you into the highest-value target on map two, so route toward the next transit point rather than sightseeing, and treat the found-in-raid retention rule as the reason to move, not to linger.

Finally, match the chain to your party. Icebreaker scales its enemies to your squad size, Terminal's boat seats scale with your headcount, and several end maps cap parties at one to five players total. A five-man chain into a one-to-three-player destination does not work. Check the player counts on the maps listing before you commit a group.

Expected outcome and what to do next

After this guide you should be able to sketch the whole network from memory: Customs at the center, Shoreline guarding the endgame, Ground Zero and Streets trading shuttles downtown, and three one-way maps that eat keycards and never mail your gear back.

Your next moves, in order. If you are still unlocking maps, follow the step-by-step Tour walkthrough at /guides/tour-quest-walkthrough. To pick the right map for your level, read /guides/map-progression-guide, and to master the extraction side of every map you now know how to reach, continue to /guides/extraction-types-explained. Before attempting the gated destinations, study /guides/the-lab-guide and /guides/endgame-maps-unlock, and read /guides/insurance-guide so the no-return maps never surprise you.

For reference pages, the full map table lives at /maps, with per-map extraction and transit details at /maps/customs, /maps/shoreline, /maps/terminal, and /maps/icebreaker. Boss encounters along your route are documented under /bosses, including /bosses/killa and /bosses/sanitar. If this guide is more than one patch old when you read it, check /updates first: transit edges are exactly the kind of detail that shifts between versions.