Freight Fate 1.9 tester snapshot 2026-08-31

Preview snapshot for players who want the newest features before the next stable release. Expect rough edges; your save files stay compatible whenever possible, but back them up first.

Changes since the previous snapshot

Added

• A real credential ladder, built the way real trucking licenses work. The old endorsement menu is now Licenses and training at every terminal, and it runs the length of the career. Carrier certificates come first: refrigerated, flatbed securement, heavy-haul, and high-value are company training, sponsored free at their usual levels or paid for early, and flatbed securement now covers steel and lumber. Then come the real CDL letters, earned by written test: the doubles endorsement opens twin-trailer parcel freight anywhere in the country, tank vehicle keeps liquid bulk, and hazmat opens placarded chemical freight -- after a paid background check that takes about a month of game days and clears on its own while you keep driving. Holding tank and hazmat together is the X combination, and bulk fuel now asks for both, exactly like a real fuel tanker job. Late in the career, the TWIC port card opens container work off the secure side of the ports, and the LCV certificate -- which needs the doubles endorsement and a clean recent record -- opens heavy turnpike doubles, but only between states whose road networks really allow them. Courses cost money and game time, every locked course says exactly what is missing, and Career stats lists everything you hold, everything still in the works, and how many days each check has left. Money buys a head start, never a skip: a sponsored course can be booked at most one level before the company would pay for it, so a rich rookie cannot buy the whole ladder on day one.
• You can train out of the automatic-only restriction. A fresh CDL earned on an automatic carries the real-world restriction that says so. Book manual transmission training at any terminal -- a day at the school and a skills retest in a manual truck -- and from then on, any run you drive on the manual gearbox pays a small manual-spec differential in the settlement, named as its own line.
• New credentials are announced twice, so they cannot be missed. A clearance earned mid-delivery used to be spoken once inside the arrival summary and gone. Every new grant is now repeated the next time you walk into a terminal, a cleared background check is announced there too, and an unlocked specialty job on the board now says you are cleared for it.
• A new song on the country stations. "Four Sources and the Truth", a country song about trusting the forecast -- and if the last verse sounds like it knows a certain weather app, it does. It joins the rotation on The Rawhide 98.1, Big Wheel Country 104.5, Prairie Line 95.7 and Big Sky Country 99.3, same as the rest of the country library. Press Tab at the wheel to hear what is playing.

Changed

• Bulk fuel now requires the hazmat endorsement alongside tank vehicle. Gasoline is placarded freight in the real world, so the fuel-tanker jobs now ask for the X combination. If you already haul fuel, book the hazmat course under Licenses and training; the background check runs while you keep driving, and your other tank freight is untouched.
• Steel and lumber now ride on the flatbed securement certificate. They used to sit under heavy-haul and no training at all; securement is its own company course in real trucking, so it is its own certificate here. It is sponsored at level 2, at or below where that freight appears, so nobody who could haul steel or lumber yesterday has lost it today.

Fixed

• Quitting while the truck is moving now asks first, and tells you the cost. The game only saves at stops, and quitting to the main menu mid-drive used to throw away everything since your last stop with a warning that spoke while the quit was already happening -- too late to change your mind. Now, if the truck is moving, quitting asks first and says exactly what you would lose -- "You will lose 67 miles since your last stop. Quit anyway?" -- with Keep driving as the first choice. Quitting while parked is instant, the way it has always been.
• Updating the game actually works now. Two things were broken, and either one alone made the game offer you the same update over and over. First, the download: the game put a hard time limit on the whole download, and a full build can never fit through it, so accepting an update failed partway every time. The time limit now applies only to reaching the server -- as long as the download is making progress it keeps going, the game announces every quarter, and Escape still cancels. Second, the install: even a finished download was copied with a folder address written in a form the copying tool refuses, so nothing was actually replaced and the game came back up on the old version, offering the same update again. The address is written plainly now. Because the broken updater cannot install this fix on itself, please download this build once by hand; updates after that take care of themselves.
• The Mac build starts again. The latest Mac download failed on launch with an error about a missing sound library, because a piece the game depended on quietly changed shape on the machines that build it. Everything the game needs is now built directly into the app, so it no longer depends on anything being installed on your Mac.
• The game answers your keys the moment it starts. On some computers, opening the sound device takes a long time -- up to sixteen seconds was reported -- and the game used to sit at the main menu ignoring every key until it finished. The sound device now opens in the background while the menu comes up and starts listening right away; the menu music and your volume settings kick in the moment the device is ready. If sound cannot start at all, the game still says so out loud at the main menu.
• Heavy-traffic jams now clear when the slow zone does. The slow vehicles that fill a heavy-traffic stretch used to keep their jam pace forever: one tester's cruise sat locked behind a truck doing 44 on an open 70-mile-per-hour interstate for over a hundred miles, because the jam vehicle ahead never sped up and never left. Jam traffic now disperses within a mile or two past the end of the zone that caused it, and the road opens back up the way a real backup does.
• The approach countdown counts down again after you take your exit. Once you took the destination exit, pressing R kept repeating the highway's leftover distance -- one tester heard "4 miles to go" four times over a minute, the last one three seconds after he was already at the gate, and had to brake hard. Off the highway, R now counts the approach itself down -- half a mile, a quarter mile, then feet -- and it moves as you do.
• A stuck screen reader can no longer freeze the whole game. One tester's run ended with the game locked solid at a highway on-ramp, with nothing to do but close it. The cause: every spoken line made the game wait for the screen reader or SAPI to finish taking it, and the one time that call never returned, the truck, the sounds, and the keyboard all froze with it. Speech now runs on its own track: if the voice ever stops responding, you lose a few sentences -- the message log still has them -- the sounds keep playing, the truck keeps driving, and speech comes back on its own when the voice does.
• The first-day briefing says your city's name properly. It used to say the map's internal name for your starting city -- "parked at Chicago Company Yard in the chicago underscore i l underscore u s service area" -- instead of "the Chicago service area". It speaks the city the way every other line does now.