Preview snapshot 2026-06-28

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

• State troopers can pull you over for speeding. Routes now have patrol windows -- hotter on busy interstates, in construction, and in dense regions, cooler out on the plains, with a night DUI bump. Speed badly inside one and a trooper lights you up: signal with X, brake to a stop on the shoulder, and sit through a license and logbook check that ends in an on-the-spot ticket (paid immediately, escalating with each stop) or a warning if it's a first, marginal stop or your reputation is strong. Run from the stop and it's logged as evasion -- a heavier fine and a serious reputation hit. Speeding the patrols don't catch still accrues the quieter safety-record cost at settlement. Relaxed mode keeps patrols light.
• Consult the controls without leaving a drive. The pause menu now has a "Controls and help" entry that opens the how-to-play reference straight to the driving keys -- page through it, read it line by line, then escape back to the road. The keys list also now includes S, A, and U.
• HTML player manual. Portable builds now ship USER_MANUAL.html alongside the Markdown one: the same manual rendered as a clean, accessible web page (semantic headings and real tables) you can open in any browser.
• Three new on-demand driving keys. S reads the posted speed limit where you are -- the zone if any, and how far over you are -- so you no longer have to dig into the status menu. A repeats the last route announcement, for the one you missed before you could react. U reads what is coming up: imposed speed limits, stops, and exits ahead, so a zone or gate never blindsides you. All three are listed in F1 help and the manual.
• Drowsiness has real consequences now. Push past severe fatigue and you start to nod off: a rumble-strip jolt and a warning give you a moment to steer or brake and stay awake. Catch it and you carry on; miss it and you drift onto the shoulder for damage and lost speed. Keep driving exhausted and the nods come faster and harder until a third miss forces you off the road. Sleep is no longer optional once you are running on empty -- and in relaxed mode, where hazards are rare, managing fatigue becomes the heart of the drive.
• Posted speed limits that change by corridor. The flat 70 everywhere is gone. The limit now comes from the highway and region -- rural Interstates run 70 in the Midwest and East, 75-80 across the West, US highways and state routes slower -- and drops to an urban limit on the city stretches. Crossing into a new limit is spoken like a sign ("Speed limit 75"), the limit restores correctly when you leave a construction zone, and speeding is judged against the corridor you are actually on.
• Seasons and temperature. Your career now moves through the year, and the weather follows. A regional temperature model (a seasonal swing plus a day-night swing, warmer in the desert and Gulf, colder across the northern tier) decides whether precipitation falls as rain or snow and whether storms can brew, so snow is a cold-season risk, thunderstorms a warm-season one, and a Great Lakes January night freezes while a Gulf Coast one does not. Because hazards are weather-gated, snow squalls and ice now show up in winter and hail in summer, on their own. The terminal time-and-weather readout names the season, and weather reports include the temperature in your units. With live weather turned on, the season follows the real-world calendar so it matches the live conditions you are pulling in; otherwise it follows your career clock.
• Cargo weight now changes how the truck drives. Gross weight is the tractor-and-trailer tare plus the actual payload, so a heavy load pulls away gently, lugs harder on grades, and burns more fuel, while a light load or an empty pickup deadhead is noticeably brisker. Heavier freight is now a real trade-off, not just a number on the dispatch board. The driving status screen shows gross tonnage alongside the cargo weight.
• Load-sensitive braking. The foundation brakes have a fixed force ceiling sized for the rated gross, so a load heavier than the rated weight is brake-capacity limited: it decelerates more gently, takes longer to stop, and heats and fades the brakes sooner. Loads at or below the rated gross brake exactly as before. Overloading a run now bites on a downgrade or a panic stop.
• Grounded, context-aware road hazards. Hazards now only happen where and when they plausibly would. Standing water and hydroplaning need wet weather; snow squalls, bridge-deck ice, and black ice on shaded grades need snow; dense-fog brake-lights need fog; crosswind shoves and dust storms need high wind in open country; rockfall and runaway-truck hazards need mountain terrain. Deer and elk are biased to dawn, dusk, and night, with regional species. The implausible ones are gone -- no more farm equipment merging onto the interstate or a dust devil on a clear, calm day.
• Smoother truck engine audio. The engine sound now follows RPM more naturally, with smoother transitions as you accelerate, shift, and settle into highway speed.

Changed

• Menus can read just the option, not its place. A new Speech setting, "Menu position announcements," turns off the "N of 10" position spoken after each menu option, so menus read only the option itself. On by default.
• In-game help and manual now cover the new systems. The how-to-play pages, the F1 driving help, and the user manual were brought in line: the calendar and seasons, weather that bites (traction loss, drag, visibility), the always-available shoulder and lot sleep, cruise that declines low-speed local roads, and -- newly documented anywhere -- state-trooper speeding pull-overs (signal with X) and real changing posted limits.
• The calendar reads as a real date, in more places. The career clock now speaks an actual date that advances as time passes -- "March 21," then "April 1," and so on (a new career starts March 21) -- instead of only a day number. It is announced on the C clock readout, the Tab status menu, and the on-screen status, not just at the terminal, with the season alongside it. With live weather on, the date and season follow the real-world calendar.
• Weather you have to drive to, not just hear. Three conditions that used to be flavor now bite. High wind and storms add real aerodynamic drag, so they cost top speed and fuel. Driving well over the conditions-safe speed on a slick road risks a traction-loss incident -- hydroplaning in rain, sliding on snow -- so the safe-speed readout finally has teeth. And low visibility (fog, heavy rain) shortens how much warning you get before a hazard, so you have to actually slow down to see and react in time.
• Speed-limit changes now say why. A changing posted limit is announced as "Speed limit reduced to X" or "raised to X" instead of a bare number, and an urban drop names the city ("reduced to 55 approaching Boston"), so a mid-drive change is no longer a mystery.
• No cruise on low-speed local roads. Adaptive cruise will not engage on a facility access road, gate, construction zone, or heavy-traffic stretch -- the low-speed local roads a real driver takes manually -- and says so if you try.
• Relaxed mode now feels emptier on the road. Relaxed hours-of-service mode already made random hazards and trooper patrols rarer; it now also thins ambient traffic and the odds of a random roadside log check, so a relaxed run centers on driver responsibility -- hours, fuel, fatigue -- with fewer interruptions. Fixed checkpoints (weigh stations) and construction-zone enforcement are unchanged: a real violation still catches you. Realistic mode is untouched.
• Live weather now reports the real temperature. With live weather on, the cab speaks the actual temperature from the nearest National Weather Service station instead of the modeled seasonal estimate, so the degrees match the conditions it is already pulling in. The seasonal climate model stays the fallback whenever live data is unavailable or a station omits its reading.
• Dial your cruise speed with Plus and Minus. Once adaptive cruise is set, Plus and Minus raise and lower the target by 5 -- the accelerate and coast buttons on a real truck -- so you can engage as soon as you are rolling and dial the speed up to where you want it instead of having to reach it manually first. The truck accelerates up to a higher target on its own, and the posted limit cap still applies, so a higher set speed never makes it speed.
• Adaptive cruise now respects the posted limit. Cruise eases off to hold a with-traffic pace (about 5 over the posted limit) instead of carrying your set speed straight through an urban drop or a lower-limit stretch -- so it keeps you moving naturally without driving you into speeding strikes, tickets, and trooper stops. It still follows slower traffic and widens its gap in bad weather, and a short cue says when it eases off for a lower limit (the "Speed limit X" sign cue still names the number).
• The air-brake system has real sounds now. When pressure builds, you hear an air-dryer purge as the compressor cuts out instead of a generic beep, and low-air and spring-brake warnings sound a proper low-air buzzer. The spoken cues are unchanged, so nothing is lost if you rely on them.
• Speeding now costs you out loud, the moment it happens. When a speeding strike is recorded, the cab calls out the running fine ("Speeding strike. The limit is 65. Speeding fines now total 160 dollars, due at delivery.") instead of the cost landing silently on your settlement. Judged against the corridor's real posted limit, with the usual ~10 mph leeway before a strike lands.
• Posted speed limits can now come from real map data. Where a corridor carries an OpenStreetMap maxspeed tag, the game uses that real posted limit instead of the highway/region approximation -- and falls back to the approximation only on stretches OSM has not tagged. Those limits are included in the game data where available; the urban reduction near cities and the spoken limit-change cue are unchanged.
• The lane-drift rumble is now directional. When you wander toward a lane edge, the rumble strip plays from that side -- drift right and you hear it on the right -- so the ear it lands in tells you which way to steer back.
• 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

• Adaptive cruise starts slowing before big speed-limit drops. When the posted limit ahead falls sharply, adaptive cruise now looks far enough ahead to begin braking before the lower-limit point instead of waiting until the truck is already in the slower stretch. Pressing Space while cruise is on now also includes the cruise set speed in the speed readout.
• Delivery windows match the slower, real route model. New dispatch deadlines now use the route's posted-limit profile, city approaches, facility gates, HOS breaks, sleep, and practical slack instead of a flat mileage average. Older active trips that were saved under the faster estimate get a one-time fair deadline floor when they resume, so a source update does not make an in-progress load suddenly late.
• Metric weather readouts use metric safe speed. Pressing V with metric units enabled now reports the weather safe speed in kilometers per hour.
• No more "dot dot" at the end of menu items. A menu or list item that was already a full sentence (like a settlement summary line) got a second period appended before its "N of M" position, which a screen reader voiced as "dot dot". The readout now adds a period only when the text does not already end in one.
• You can always find somewhere to sleep. A sleep option is now reachable at any time, so the hours-of-service clock can never strand you with nowhere legal to stop. Stopped on the open road with no route stop nearby, you can pull over and sleep on the shoulder (poor rest, possible parking ticket); the wording escalates when an HOS limit is closing in with no reachable stop. Any break/fuel stop you reach -- even one with no sleeper facility -- now offers an emergency sleep in the lot: a legal 10-hour reset with poor, cramped rest. The "no stop visible" warning also names the shoulder-sleep out, so it is a plan rather than a panic. (Proper sleeper stops still give the best, fully-rested 10-hour sleep.)
• The automatic no longer gears up while you brake. Braking from speed could trigger an upshift because the box only watched engine RPM; it now holds the gear for engine braking and downshifts cleanly as you slow to a stop.
• "Air pressure ready" no longer repeats back to back. The parking-brake release threshold sat exactly at the compressor cut-in pressure, so the ready state flickered every 100-125 psi cycle and re-announced. The cue now fires once, only while the parking brake is actually set (its whole purpose is "you can release it now"), and only re-arms after a genuine low-air depletion.
• Snapshot players move to stable when it catches up. On the preview snapshot channel, the game now offers the stable release whenever it is as new as -- or newer than -- the latest nightly, so once those changes ship in a stable build you converge back onto stable instead of being left on an equivalent nightly.

Removed

• Legacy prototype files and duplicate data files.

Compatibility

• All 21 original cities and all 27 original direct legs are preserved verbatim, so old profiles and mid-trip snapshots load and resume unchanged.