Drive the Post-Soviet World: The Best Eastern-European Maps in Proton Bus Simulator

Here is a fact that surprises people: the single most-downloaded map on this entire site is a Russian city that does not exist. It is called Ponaex, it is completely invented, and Proton Bus Simulator players cannot get enough of it.

That tells you something about the game. The post-Soviet modding scene — Russia, Belarus, Poland and their neighbours — quietly runs the Proton Bus Simulator map catalog. This guide covers the best of those maps, the real cities and the fictional ones, and why they drive like nowhere else. It is a companion to our wider guide on the real cities you can drive in Proton Bus Simulator.

The post-Soviet scene runs the map catalog

Look at the download charts and one region dominates. The Russian, Belarusian and Polish maps are, by a wide margin, the most popular on the site — Ponaex City alone has been downloaded nearly ten thousand times.

There is a good reason. Many of these maps are ports from OMSI 2, the veteran German simulator with a huge Eastern-European mapping community — the excellent Borisov map started life as an OMSI project. Add the Russian-speaking scene's deep love of accurate city transit, and you get a steady supply of dense, detailed maps most Western players have never heard of.

The surprise: the most popular map is a city that doesn't exist

Back to Ponaex. It is a fictional Russian metropolis — not a copy of any single city, but a distillation of many. Its makers built it to feel like Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod or the outer districts of Moscow: Soviet-era Khrushchyovka apartment blocks, Stalinist facades, narrow historic streets and chaotic intersections.

And that is the lesson. A map does not need a real licence to feel real — it needs the right character. Ponaex nails the post-Soviet mood so well that it outsells almost every real-city map in the catalog. The same goes for the fictional Zernik in Poland and the trolleybus town of Zurbagan, both invented, both loved.

Drive Ponaex the way it was meant to be driven and pair it with a boxy Russian bus — a LiAZ, LAZ, GAZ or an old Ikarus. The map was built around exactly that kind of high-floor, rear-engined machine, not a sleek Western low-floor.

Real towns you can actually drive

Fiction is only half the scene. Some of these maps rebuild real, specific places — and they are wonderfully off the beaten path.

Borisov recreates the real Belarusian city of Barysaw (Барысаў), on the Berezina River about 74 km north-east of Minsk — a town first recorded in 1102 and best known to history as the place where Napoleon's army made its desperate 1812 crossing of the Berezina. In the sim it is all residential blocks, industrial zones and the grey, honest scenery that sets Eastern Europe apart from a tidy German suburb.

Further north, Kolpino maps a real suburb on the southern edge of Saint Petersburg — a single street, Ulitsa Pravdy, with 23 stops, built around the historic Izhora engineering works. And for something totally different, Suzdal drops you into an ancient town on Russia's Golden Ring, all white-stone churches and blue domes.

Real or invented? A quick map

Because the scene mixes real and fictional so freely, here is the quick sort:

Why these maps drive differently

Drop a Western low-floor bus onto Ponaex and it feels wrong — and that is the point. Post-Soviet maps are built for post-Soviet buses.

The streets are narrower and the layouts older, so you work the wheel more. The natural bus is a high-floor, rear-engined workhorse like a LiAZ, with a step up at the door and a heavy tail — nothing like the flat, low German city buses these maps were never designed for. If you want to understand why those buses look and feel so different, we dug into exactly that in why Soviet buses look so different.

What to drive on a Russian map

The rule is simple: match the bus to the country. On any of these maps, reach for a Russian or Belarusian bus — a LiAZ for the city routes, a little PAZ for the tight suburban runs.

The Borisov mapmaker even recommends a specific pairing: the LiAZ 5292.65, the modern articulated standard across the region. Browse the LiAZ bus mods and pick your era, and the map will suddenly feel like a real city route rather than a foreign import.

How to install a map mod

Installing any of these is quick.

1. Download the map's .zip file.
2. Extract it into Proton Bus Simulator's maps folder with any file manager.
3. Launch the game, open the map list, and pick your city.

It is the same on Android and Windows. Add a Russian bus, and you are running a route through the post-Soviet world.

Hero image: a street in Borisov (Barysaw), Belarus. Photo: Denis Blisch, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.