Developer snapshot 2026-06-26

Automated developer snapshot of the dev branch, 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

• Relaxed mode now actually relaxes the road. In relaxed hours-of-service mode, random road hazards are much rarer, so the drive centers on driver responsibility -- hours, fueling, repairs, and fatigue -- instead of constant emergency braking. Realistic mode is unchanged. The Settings help for Hours of service spells out the difference.
• Dispatcher pay advances (no more soft lock). A broke driver who can no longer afford fuel can now draw a cash advance against the next load -- from the terminal hub or any in-trip rest stop -- and it is repaid automatically out of the next delivery settlement. The advance is offered only while cash is low and is capped, so it stays a recovery line rather than free money. A negative balance is no longer a dead end.

Changed

• Safety announcements no longer get buried, and you get more warning. Zone entries, construction and traffic warnings, and checkpoints now preempt ambient chatter (weather, tolls, state lines) on the event voice instead of queuing behind it -- so a "construction ahead" never arrives after you have already entered the zone. Zone warnings also lead by real time now, not a flat distance: the heads-up scales with your speed and pacing, so 70 mph at high time compression gets a usefully earlier callout instead of a couple of seconds.

Fixed

• The truck can no longer roll away while you rest. Opening a truck stop or rest-stop menu now sets the parking brake and cuts the throttle, the same way pulling into a pickup or delivery does. Before, a rig that crept in just under the stop threshold (or idled in gear) could keep drifting down the road while the driver slept. Returning to the road now reminds you to release the parking brake with P.
• Updater works in packaged builds again. Nuitka builds do not set the PyInstaller-era sys.frozen flag, so the game mistook every packaged copy for a source checkout: "Check for updates" reported running from source, the startup update check never ran, and logs/game.log was never written. Packaged builds are now detected correctly, restoring update checks, install, and crash logging.