Freight Fate v1.6.0

Added

• Contextual route and weather audio. Driving now uses in-cab rain, snow, wind, fog horn, and thunder cues plus short route-event sounds for hazards, construction zones, inspections, tolls, state crossings, rest stops, weigh stations, facility gates, and docking. The road bed is back in the mix so the cab does not feel dry while moving. The experimental vehicle engine sound redesign is still being tuned and is not part of this release.
• Route rest, toll, and settlement realism. Route planning now uses richer truck-stop data, handles shoulder-sleep edge cases more cleanly, and accounts for toll and settlement details more explicitly.
• Air-brake startup and reservoir behavior. Trucks now build air pressure before departure, keep spring brakes engaged until the system is ready, and model service and emergency reservoir pressure while driving so braking feels more like a heavy truck without stranding new careers.
• Driving status menu. Pressing Tab while driving now opens a spoken status menu with load, trip, truck, route, and route-stop details from the road.
• Better route stops. Dispatch-supported freight now relies on curated truck-relevant route stops only: placeholder midpoint POIs no longer count as real route support, long-haul lanes must include explicit fuel-capable stops, and route summaries/GPS stop details now give clearer parking certainty.
• Auto-updater. The packaged game now checks GitHub for new releases when you reach the main menu. When one is found, a fully spoken prompt offers "Download and restart" (downloads the update, swaps it in, and relaunches the game for you), "What's new" (reads the update's changelog line by line), "Remind me later", and "Skip this version". A new Settings entry, "Update channel", picks between stable releases and preview builds, and "Check for updates" checks immediately.
• Real pickup and loading flow. Job offers now name the origin facility as an actual stop on the trip instead of flavor text. After accepting a load, you check in at the listed facility, load only while stopped, then plan the loaded trip to the destination.
• Company terminal dispatch flow. New careers and continued drives now frame the service-area hub as a company terminal or yard instead of a generic city spawn. Dispatches start with a local deadhead move from the terminal to the shipper, and delivery settlement parks the truck at the destination area's terminal or yard for the next assignment.
• Destination facility docking. Deliveries no longer settle just because the truck reached the destination city. The game now warns at speed, keeps you in control until a full stop, opens a facility menu with a dock/yard cue, and requires "Dock and deliver" before payment. "Check paperwork" previews facility, cargo, payout, deadline, and damage details without completing the load.
• Real freight facilities on job boards. Cities now offer freight from classified locations such as terminals, warehouses, ports, intermodal yards, air cargo areas, manufacturing plants, food terminals, industrial parks, retail distribution hubs, and bulk facilities. Cargo is filtered by plausible facility type.
• Highway exits. Rest stops now sit at proper exits. They are announced a few miles out ("Press X to take the exit for it"); X signals for the exit (and X again cancels), you slow to 45 or less for the ramp — any faster and you blow past it — then half a mile of ramp and brake to a stop, and the rest stop menu opens by itself. The ramp is off the highway: hazards and speeding checks pause while you are on it. Pressing T while stopped on the highway at a stop still works.
• Explicit highway stop positions. Route data now stores named highway amenities with explicit mile positions instead of spreading rest stops evenly across a leg. The first curated offline stop set uses sourced rest areas and travel centers, keeping the game playable without live map lookups.
• Reverse gear and missed-stop recovery. Trucks can now back up. Automatic players can hold Down while stopped to reverse slowly, then touch Up to brake and return to forward drive; manual players can press the clutch and Backspace for reverse. If you miss a rest stop, slow down, back up carefully, stop, and press T.
• Cruise control. K sets cruise at your current speed, matching common highway driving expectations, and holds it with a slow throttle governor through grades. K again, any braking, the emergency brake, a stall, or taking an exit cancels it — and a hazard warning hands control straight back to you. Space reports speed.
• Region-flavored road hazards. The hazard pool now mixes nationwide staples with local flavor for the region you are driving through: dust devils and tumbleweeds in the Southwest, deer and farm equipment in the Midwest, rockfall in the Rockies, elk and standing water in the Pacific Northwest, and more.
• Separate voice for driving events. Road events — hazard warnings, collisions, weather changes, rest stop and city announcements, HOS and fatigue warnings, speeding, inspections, speed callouts — now speak through a dedicated Windows SAPI voice, so a screen reader reading menus or echoing keystrokes can no longer cut off a "Brake now!" mid-sentence. A new Settings entry, "Driving event voice" (default: separate SAPI voice), switches events back to the screen reader. When SAPI is unavailable, or is already the main voice, events fall back to the main channel automatically.
• Emergency brake. Hold B while driving for the hardest possible stop: instant full application plus the spring brakes (about 1.6 times the service brakes, still subject to weather grip and brake fade), with a loud air-dump cue. Use it for hazards and for rest stops you would otherwise overshoot. Mentioned in the tutorial, F1 controls, and the manual.
• Roadside mechanic. The pause menu while driving now offers "Call a roadside mechanic" once damage is past 25 percent: a field patch back down to 25 percent damage for a 500-dollar callout plus 110 dollars per percent repaired (a steep premium over the garage). The repair takes 90 in-game minutes against your deadline and duty window, and the bill is due even if it puts you in debt — never a dead end.
• Time and weather in the city. A new city menu entry speaks the clock, the time of day, the day of your career, and current conditions in town (live Open-Meteo data when real weather is enabled).
• Sleep in any city. A new city menu entry, "Sleep 10 hours", gives a full night at your terminal: fresh hours of service, zero fatigue, and the clock advances 10 hours. Previously a spent duty window followed you into the city with no remedy except driving — illegally — to the first rest stop of the next run.

Changed

• How-to-play driving guidance. The main-menu guidance for driving controls is shorter and more direct.
• Early career progression and pay. Low-level jobs now pay enough to make early progress feel worthwhile after operating costs, and higher levels unlock clearer differences in range, cargo, endorsements, and long-haul opportunities.
• Truck acceleration and shifting. Loaded trucks reach safe highway speeds more plausibly, top gear behaves more like mild overdrive, and automatic shift cues are easier to hear without adding air-brake sounds to gear changes.
• Freight market terminology. Player-facing market wording now uses trucking language: tight, loose, and steady, replacing the old generic market labels.
• Real terrain on real highways. A geography audit corrected 20 of the 106 legs. The famous grades are now mountains: Monteagle on I-24 (Nashville-Atlanta), the Cumberland Plateau on I-40 (Knoxville-Nashville), the Pennsylvania Turnpike's Allegheny crossings (Philadelphia-Pittsburgh and Baltimore-Pittsburgh), and US-95's Idaho canyon country (Spokane-Boise). Rolling country stopped pretending to be flat: I-70's Missouri River hills, the Flint Hills and Arbuckles on I-35, Tennessee's Highland Rim on I-40, Wisconsin's driftless coulees on I-94, the Carolinas' piedmont, Connecticut on I-95, and the desert passes on I-10 (San Gorgonio, Texas Canyon) among others. Genuinely flat country — the high plains, the Gulf coast, Florida, and the Illinois prairie — stays flat.
• Realistic deadlines. Dispatch can no longer ask for the impossible. Deadlines are now built from the hours a law-abiding trucker actually needs — driving at an achievable 55 mph average, plus the 30-minute break every 8 driving hours and a 10-hour sleep for every 11-hour shift the distance demands — with 20 to 50 percent shipper slack and a flat hour for fuel on top. San Antonio to Dallas now quotes a workable 7-to-8-hour window instead of a sprint.
• State trooper groundwork. The next law-enforcement milestone is outlined: patrol intensity by corridor, CB chatter warnings, pull-overs, immediate fines, and an enforcement setting.
• Portable saves. Profiles and settings now live in a saves folder inside the game's own directory (next to the executable in release builds) instead of the per-user data directory. Existing saves are migrated over automatically on first launch; the originals are left in place.

Fixed

• Pickup facility sounds. Pickup gates and loading now use the new facility ambience and dock cues instead of the older generic menu notification sounds.
• Preview builds stay in sync with release notes. Preview builds now pick up player-facing changes that have already been prepared for the next stable release, so their "What's new" text no longer falls behind.
• Save resume keeps traffic zones stable. Continuing a saved drive now seeds trip weather from the saved trip seed too, so traffic and construction-zone layouts regenerate consistently across operating systems.
• Updater connections on macOS and Linux. The packaged game's Python runtime looks for certificate authorities at paths that only exist on the build machine, so on macOS and Linux every secure connection — the update check, the download, and the real-weather fetch (which silently fell back to simulated weather) — could fail certificate verification. The game now ships its own certificate bundle (certifi) and uses it alongside the system store on every connection.
• Update errors now say what went wrong. "Could not reach the update server" covered everything from a dropped connection to a blocked DNS lookup. The check and download now speak the actual reason — "The secure connection could not be verified", "The server answered with error 403", "The server address could not be found", and so on. The packaged game also writes a session log to saves/game.log, so a player can share the full error when reporting a problem.
• Hazard warnings were unbeatable at highway speed. The reaction window was a fixed 3 to 4.5 seconds, but a full-service stop from 65 to the safe 25 miles per hour takes about 5 — even the emergency brake could not make it once you add the time to hear the warning. The deadline is now the braking time the truck actually needs from its current speed (on the current surface and grade) plus the rolled reaction window, so hitting the brakes promptly always succeeds — in rain or snow you get the longer stop those surfaces really take. Drowsiness now eats into the reaction part only instead of the whole window, since a tired driver reacts late but the truck stops no slower. Warnings also lead with "Brake now!" instead of ending with it, so you can be on the brakes before the sentence finishes.
• Collision stall soft-lock. A hard collision could stop the truck while the automatic transmission was still in a high gear; the engine then stalled the instant it was restarted, every time, stranding the player (it read as "too damaged to start", since the same crashes also max out damage). The automatic now returns to first gear whenever the truck is stopped in a higher gear, and restarting after a stall recovers cleanly.
• Pressing E with a bone-dry tank no longer dead-ends on "the engine will not start": the out-of-fuel roadside rescue now triggers from there too.
• The C key's arrival estimate was a constant. It always assumed 55 miles per hour, so it never responded to how fast you were actually driving. It now tracks your current speed once you are meaningfully rolling (and says so), falling back to a typical highway pace while parked, and names the basis either way.
• Abandoning a job lost the hours you drove. The world clock snapped back to the departure time while hours of service and fatigue kept the accrued wear, and the freight market did not advance. The time spent on the failed run now counts.
• Trip pacing now applies mid-trip. Changing "Trip pacing" from the pause menu's settings was silently ignored until the next delivery; the active trip now picks it up immediately.
• Unsafe engine shutdown blocked. Pressing E at road speed no longer shuts off the engine. The game now gives spoken feedback and requires a safe low-speed stop before shutdown.
• Delivery at speed blocked. Arriving at the destination at highway speed no longer completes the job. Settlement now requires the full stopped facility docking flow.
• Tampered saves are quarantined. Career saves now carry an integrity signature. Old unsigned saves migrate forward, but edited or corrupted saves are moved aside instead of being loaded as valid career data.
• Implausible route detours filtered. Route options now reject obvious short-haul detours that send drivers far out of the way, while still allowing meaningful alternate long-haul routes.
• State progress announcements improved. Trips now announce state crossings and nearby cities along the route, not only the destination state.
• Construction-zone warnings are actionable again. Construction zones now give a spoken GPS warning about 2 miles before the slowdown begins, and troopers will not clock construction-zone speeding until you have had about a mile inside the zone to react. Speech-first players can slow down in time again instead of being fined on the same update that first announces the zone.