Developer snapshot 2026-07-03

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

• Game controllers are now supported, alongside the keyboard. Plug in an Xbox, PlayStation, or other compatible controller and drive by feel: the right and left triggers are the gas and brake, the left stick steers, the left bumper is the clutch, and the A and X buttons shift up and down. Menus map to the D-pad, the A button confirms, the B button goes back, and the Back button reads controller help. The first controller is picked up automatically, hot-plugging and unplugging are detected mid-game (unplugging pauses the drive), and spoken prompts name controller buttons when you are on a pad and keys when you are on the keyboard. Turn it off under Settings, Gameplay, Controller. The keyboard always stays active. Thanks to ironcross32.
• Set the parking brake to let time pass while you wait. Pressing your parking brake while stopped now means deliberate waiting: the clock runs at double your trip pacing -- weather blows through, daylight comes, and dock time passes without the game ever dropping to real time. Pressing it again to leave returns to normal pacing instantly. Only your own brake press arms the fast-forward; the brake the game sets for you at trip start or after a rest stop never does, so pre-trip setup stays cheap. Each pacing setting keeps its relative feel while waiting: relaxed 20 times, standard 40, fast 80.
• The Pacific Northwest fills in with eight new cities. Tacoma, Everett, Olympia, Bellingham, and Yakima in Washington and Medford, Roseburg, and Pendleton in Oregon join the map with truck-routed corridors, real named ports, mills, and freight facilities, and real truck stops along the way. The region finally has short local runs -- Seattle to Tacoma is a 34-mile hop instead of nothing closer than Portland -- and the empty I-84 corridor gets its first stop at Pendleton. Thanks to liamerven.
• Appalachia, the Heartland, and the Southern Plains grow by eighteen cities. Appalachia becomes a real Valley-and-Ridge region: Asheville, Johnson City, Beckley, Harrisonburg, Winchester, and Hagerstown line the I-81, I-77, and I-40 mountain corridors, Roanoke gains its rail yard and distribution work, and the western reaches of Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland now count as Appalachian country. The Heartland adds Sioux City, Grand Island, North Platte, Columbia, Joplin, and Rolla along I-70, I-29, I-80, and I-44; the Southern Plains add Salina, Dodge City, Garden City, Enid, Lawton, and San Angelo with their grain, beef, and oilfield freight. Every new city carries real named facilities and every corridor has named truck stops. Thanks to liamerven.
• Repeat the market watch on the dispatch board. The board speaks which freight is tight or loose when you open it; pressing Tab now repeats just that market watch, so you can re-check it without leaving and reopening the board.

Changed

• During a manual drive. hold down the clutch (shift) then press W to shift up gears, and q to shift down gears .

Fixed

• Getting up to highway speed no longer costs an hour of game time. Truck physics runs in real time so shifting and braking stay playable, but the clock billed every real second at full trip pacing -- so the couple of real minutes a loaded rig needs to work through the gears cost most of a game hour, burning daylight, deadline, and duty clock. Clock compression now ramps with road speed: near real time while stopped or maneuvering, your full pacing setting once at cruise. Distance, fuel, fatigue, and the hours of service ledger all follow the same effective rate, so the simulation stays consistent -- acceleration now costs about five game minutes instead of forty-five.
• The dispatch board no longer offers trivially short hauls. Because each city stands for a whole freight area, a job to a neighbor under 25 miles was a pointless across-town hop; the board now skips those destinations and fills from real routes instead.
• The dispatch hours warning now respects a fresh clock. Sleeping off your hours before visiting the dispatch board no longer leaves every long haul flagged with "may not fit your duty clock." The warning compared your time until the next HOS limit against the route's full legal plan -- including the overnight sleeps every multi-day run needs anyway -- so it fired even right after a reset. It now only warns when hours already spent this shift would force an extra rest that fresh hours would avoid, and the board note says sleeping first will clear it.
• The low-air alarm now sounds on a cold start. Starting the engine for the first time with the air tanks low used to stay silent; the warning now plays as soon as the engine is running with pressure below the threshold, so you know to wait for the compressor before releasing the brakes. Thanks to hannes16.
• Erie and Evansville moved to their right regions. Erie sits on the Lake Erie shore between Buffalo and Cleveland, so it is now Great Lakes country rather than Appalachia; Evansville, down on Indiana's Ohio River border, is now the Mid-South rather than the Great Lakes. Spoken region names, weather flavor, and regional hazards on runs through both cities now match the geography. Thanks to liamerven.