Freight Fate 1.9 tester snapshot 2026-09-03

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

• You can play from a braille display with speech off. A new row in Settings, Speech, called Output, switches between speech and braille and braille only. Braille only sends every line the game would have spoken to your screen reader's braille display and says nothing: menus, readouts, and the road events that would otherwise come through the separate driving event voice. It works with NVDA and JAWS, the two screen readers that can show a braille display through the game. With any other voice the game keeps speaking and the row tells you so, and if your screen reader quits mid-drive, speech comes back on its own until it returns. Asked for on AppleVis.
• Career 1.9 now has a Linux download. Each tester snapshot ships a Linux tarball and an AppImage alongside the Windows and Mac builds, and every one is started on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch and openSUSE before it is published. Speech comes through Speech Dispatcher, the same way Orca speaks, and sound plays through your desktop's PulseAudio or PipeWire. If the game says at the main menu that it started without sound, see the Linux note under Troubleshooting in the manual.
• Career 1.9 runs on the Blazie BT Speak and BT Braille, and other ARM Linux computers. Each tester snapshot now also ships a Linux tarball and an AppImage built for 64-bit ARM, the processor in the BT Speak, the BT Braille and the Raspberry Pi, alongside the PC ones. They are named linux-arm64 and linux-aarch64, they are started on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE on an ARM machine before they are published, and the in-game updater only ever offers the kind of Linux build you are running. The manual's download table says which file to pick.
• Hear when other drivers go on or off duty. A new row on the Online menu, Say when drivers go on or off duty, off by default. Turn it on and the game says when another driver sets off or signs off, like Road Star is on duty, wherever you are, including while driving; the line waits its turn behind anything urgent and never mentions you. It works without an orinks.net account and shares nothing about you.
• Choose how often you hear that a career is backed up. A new row in Settings, Speech, called Say when a career is backed up, sets whether the short all-clear after a save is spoken every time, once a session for each career, or never. Backups keep going whatever you choose, and a backup that is refused is always spoken. Every time is still the default. Asked for by MariahL, who heard the line a lot on a long run.
• Back up this career now. Each career's screen on the Cloud backup menu now has a row that sends this computer's save to your orinks.net account straight away and tells you the result: backed up, already backed up, or why not. Before, a career could only go up on its own after a save, or from the screen that appears when the cloud copy has changed on another computer, so a backup that got stuck left no way to send your career by hand.

Changed

• Spoken lines are shorter everywhere. Road cues, menus, readouts, the help screens and every settings description now say the fact and stop. A ramp cue says traffic light at the end, red, and no longer tells you to roll down and stop at it; the light, stop sign and stop bar lines, the exit and arrival cues, the rest stop and city menus and the hours reports all lose the coaching that followed the fact. Every distance, speed, price, exit number and go or no-go word is still there, in the same order as before. Asked for by braille display readers, for whom every extra word was another cell to read.
• The Drivers on duty list no longer has a Refresh row. It keeps itself up to date about once a minute while it is open, the same way the list on orinks.net does, so there was nothing for the row to do that waiting a moment did not. If orinks.net could not be reached, the list tries again by itself.

Fixed

• A load staged at your own yard no longer sends you on a drive to it. When dispatch hands a new hire a load that ships from the very company yard the truck is parked in, accepting it used to start a two-mile deadhead from the terminal to the terminal. The shipping office is a walk across the yard, so the pickup now opens straight away and you check in from there.
• The speed keeper hands the pedals back at a facility gate instead of the gate calling its speed a miss. Letting the keeper hold the gate zone's 15 all the way to the entrance used to end in "you carried past the gate, too fast to make the entrance" and a loop through the next turnaround, because the keeper sat a hair over the number it was holding. The gate now says the keeper is handing off, gives you the usual moment to brake, and only a truck still over the limit after that is looped. In the same spirit, a driver who braked to a stop short of the gate when told to, then rolled the last stretch a little quick, gets the gate's own warning and a moment to stop instead of an instant loop-back.
• The rest key a truck length short of a gate now names the gate. Pressing T while stopped and parked just short of a pickup or delivery entrance used to open the emergency shoulder-sleep question. It now says how far ahead the gate is and to roll up to it and stop there.
• The paperwork at a delivery quotes a company driver's wages. The "estimated net driver pay" line read the carrier's full rate, hundreds of dollars more than the settlement then paid; it now uses the same wage figure the dispatch board quoted when you took the load.
• Adaptive cruise no longer surges on the way down to a lower limit. Once cruise had started easing for a lower speed limit ahead, slowing made the limit drop out of the distance it was looking at, so it sped back up, found the limit again, and eased again: four brake-and-surge cycles and four "Posted limit lower" lines on one approach into Providence. It now keeps aiming at a limit it has started slowing for until it reaches it.
• "Pickup ahead" and "Destination ahead" are no longer repeated after you are at the gate. When the gate's own "At the facility, stop" line cut one of them off, the cut line used to come back behind it and tell a stopped truck to slow down for the gate it was sitting at.
• Two spoken lines that ran into their neighbour now read as their own sentence. The distance in a route status report ("Half a mile to the gate") and the toll estimate after a toll point's name.
• Your choice of driving event voice now survives closing the game. Picking Windows OneCore, or any other separate voice, on the Driving event voice row used to come back as the previous voice the next time you started the game, unless you changed it again and then touched another setting. The game was reading back which voice was speaking before the switch had finished and writing that older answer over your choice. It now keeps what you picked. Reported by MariahL.
• On a road with one lane your side, traffic behind you stays behind you. A faster car, truck or state trooper coming up behind used to drive straight through the cab and go by with a whoosh, on a road where there is no lane to pass in. It now falls in behind at your speed and holds a following gap, the way a queue forms behind a slow truck on a two-lane highway.
• Adaptive cruise starts slowing for a lower speed limit early enough at every time setting. At the faster time settings the road passes under the truck much quicker than cruise was allowing for, so it could still be easing down when the lower limit arrived. Cruise now begins slowing far enough out to be at the new number when it reaches the sign, the same way the spoken warning already works.
• Pulling onto the highway, the speed keeper builds speed down the acceleration lane again. Coming up an on-ramp, the keeper could go on holding the last street corner's slow speed for the whole acceleration lane, so the truck reached the end of the lane at 19 miles per hour with traffic running 40 and cruise had nothing to take over at. The corner is now behind the truck the moment it is on the ramp, and the keeper builds toward the merge from there.
• Crossing a state line no longer asks the weather service over and over. For the stretch after a state line the game was looking up the weather again every few hundred yards, dozens of times in a minute, all for the same reading. It now asks once for the stretch, as it does everywhere else.