Freight Fate v1.7.0

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.
• Discord Rich Presence (optional). When Discord is running, your profile can show broad game activity -- the main menu, the terminal, driving a route, resting, or delivering -- with high-level route and cargo context. Only general game status is shared, never save files or personal details. It is on by default and can be switched off in Settings → Gameplay → Discord presence, and the game starts, plays, and exits cleanly whether or not Discord is open.
• Bigger freight map. The playable network grows to 194 cities and 437 routed legs, adding many more regional hubs, shorter connector lanes, and route-backed freight choices across the country.
• Highway exit callouts. Interstate drives now announce upcoming interchanges the way a real sign reads them -- "In 2 miles, exit 7 for US-1 North toward Trenton and New York" -- with the exit number, the route you would take, and its control cities. Exit data is sourced from OpenStreetMap and snapped onto each corridor.
• Grounded exits and onramps. When a rest stop sits at a real interchange, the exit prompt and ramp now name its number ("Signaling for exit 113, the Petro Stopping Centers"; "You take exit 113"). Each run also opens with an onramp callout -- "Merge onto I-65 South toward Indianapolis" -- and highway changes name the new road and direction.
• Optional lane drift. Gameplay settings now include off, light, and realistic drift so players can add a gentle steering task, rumble-strip warnings, and off-road consequences without making the default drive harder.
• Packaged changelog and manual. Portable builds now include CHANGELOG.md and USER_MANUAL.md in the game folder so release notes and the player manual are available offline.
• Player manual. A new public manual now gathers install, career, dispatch, driving, saves, settings, accessibility, and troubleshooting guidance in one linkable place.
• Music remakes. The main menu theme, Open Road, and Night Haul now use new Suno remakes while keeping their familiar Freight Fate music slots.
• Music rotation. All menu and driving music beds now play once and rotate through their active pool instead of looping.
• Quieter music by default. New settings now start background music at half volume so speech and driving cues stay comfortably in front.
• Expanded music beds. Freight Fate now includes longer menu, facility, daytime driving, and nighttime driving music. Menus and freight facility screens use a career-aware pool, and active drives use stable day/night pools that rotate without reshuffling abruptly while you are on the road.
• Truck cab sound refresh. Engine start, idle, shutdown, horn, gear shift, parking-brake set and release, and highway road ambience now use an updated in-cab vehicle sound set, thanks to Darren Duff. The start cue is trimmed so the idle loop takes over cleanly.
• Night driving ambience. Night drives now play a new recorded in-cab night ambience loop.
• More music. New night beds: a menu theme for careers loaded after dark, and a late-night driving piece.
• New drowsiness yawn. The fatigue yawn cue uses a fresh sound, thanks to Darren Duff.
• New achievement system. Careers now track achievements across a range of categories, with a spoken main-menu viewer and a chime when you unlock one. Existing careers carry over. Note: a career saved on a preview snapshot may not load on an older stable release.

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.
• Truck-legal routing everywhere. Every corridor's geometry, elevation, and grades are now derived from OpenRouteService's heavy-goods (driving-hgv) profile. The original cross-country legs (NY-Boston, the I-70/I-80 spine, and about a hundred others) were still on the car-routing engine; they now match the rest of the network with truck-legal paths and real truck elevation. Their grade profiles are finer too -- the old car-engine legs had a single grade per corridor, where the truck engine breaks each into the real run of climbs and descents -- though no leg's overall terrain rating changed. Distances were already accurate, so pay and deadlines are unchanged. The refreshed route data is included in the game, so driving still works fully offline.
• Real weather now uses the National Weather Service. Optional live weather switched from Open-Meteo to the U.S. National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov). It is still free and needs no API key, reads each city's nearest official station for current conditions, and keeps the same seamless fallback to simulated weather when offline.

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.
• No more implausible interstate hazards. The random road-hazard pool no longer surfaces things that can't happen on a limited-access interstate, or that are really weather rather than a brake-now event: farm equipment merging onto the highway, sudden downpours and thunderstorm downpours, and hail. Real weather still arrives through the weather system, and genuine road hazards -- standing water, whiteout squalls, debris, stopped traffic, crosswinds, wildlife, rockfall -- stay.
• Phantom state-line crossings. Highways that run alongside a river border -- I-84 down the Columbia Gorge most of all -- no longer announce a flurry of back-and-forth state crossings the driver never makes. I-84 hugs the Oregon bank of the Columbia (the Oregon/Washington line) for about 100 miles without ever crossing it, but corridor sampling against a simplified boundary used to flicker across the line and fabricate the crossings; a Portland run could call the Oregon/Washington line four times before the real Oregon/Idaho border. The baked route data is now scrubbed of these round trips (71 across 20 legs, including I-5, I-24, I-29, I-79, and I-90 corridors), and the enrichment pipeline guards against re-introducing them.
• Salem connected to Portland. Salem now has a direct I-5 leg to Portland (about 46 miles). Before, Salem was wired to Seattle and Tri-Cities but not to Portland right next door, so a Salem-to-Portland run routed 176 miles the wrong way -- south to Eugene and back north through Salem -- and long hauls out of Salem were labeled I-84 from the start even though they leave on I-5. The redundant direct Salem-Seattle and Salem-Tri-Cities legs are gone; those trips now compose through Portland with correct per-highway signage (I-5 out of Salem, I-84 only once you reach the Columbia).
• Real weather warm-up. With real weather enabled, a drive now starts in neutral clear conditions and waits for live data, instead of briefly showing a simulated condition that the live data immediately replaced. That warm-up flicker could also wrongly unlock a weather achievement (for example, a rain achievement for weather you never drove in). Simulated weather still runs as the offline fallback when live data cannot be reached.
• macOS save location. Saves now live in ~/Library/Application Support/FreightFate instead of beside the app in Applications, matching macOS conventions. Existing saves found next to or inside the app bundle are moved into the new location on first launch.
• Empty reposition arrivals. Finishing a bobtail (empty reposition) run no longer crashes on arrival. The "Repositioned" summary screen now opens and reads its relocation summary instead of failing as you reach the new city.
• Speech setting previews. Adjusting speech rate, pitch, volume, or voice now previews with the voice being changed, so a selected SAPI or OneCore voice speaks its own new setting.
• Truck idling. The diesel now stays running through pickup check-in, loading, route planning, loaded departure, and active-drive resume instead of forcing a fresh engine start.
• Destination exits. Delivery routes now require taking the real signed exit for the destination when one is listed, instead of completing just by driving to the end of the highway corridor.
• Destination exit callouts. Destination exits now announce the signed exit and toward cities before the ramp, then tell you to press X; adaptive cruise cancellation includes that exit guidance.
• OneCore pitch. Windows OneCore speech now keeps its native default pitch unless the player changes the pitch setting.
• Metric driving status. Metric mode now reports driving status, speed limits, traffic, pickup distance, and legal-stop distance in metric units instead of mixing in mph or miles.
• Metric traffic speed. The traffic-queue speed shown in the route line now reads in kilometers per hour in metric mode, instead of staying in miles per hour next to the already-metric distance.
• Metric navigation cues. Spoken GPS guidance -- onramp, continue, stop, exit, traffic, and construction-zone callouts -- and the Map status screen now give distances in kilometers in metric mode instead of miles, matching the rest of the metric driving readouts.
• Metric speed limits. Construction and traffic zone callouts now speak the posted speed limit as a metric value in metric mode instead of the mph number.
• Live unit switching. Switching between miles and kilometers mid-drive now updates spoken navigation guidance right away, including the distances already laid out along the current route.
• Packaged update checks. The updater now recognizes standalone packaged folders more reliably, so switching to preview snapshots does not leave the update screen confused about how the game was installed.
• Quieter exit guidance. Ordinary highway exits now stay available in the route screen without being announced during the drive unless they lead to a stop you can actually take.
• Route key priority. Pressing R now keeps the next actionable route detail first, while Shift+R reports the next listed highway exit.
• State-line timing. State crossing previews now speak about 10 miles out instead of 2 miles out, giving the preview and crossing announcements more room at highway speed.
• Upper gear spacing. Automatic shifting now holds 9th gear longer before entering overdrive 10th, so the truck no longer reaches top gear around city-road speeds.
• Portable save folders. Snapshot builds now move nearby duplicate portable save folders into the active FreightFate\saves folder instead of leaving players with two likely save locations after extraction or updates.
• Clearer help. F1 help now focuses on what the selected item does for the player instead of repeating menu controls, and garage upgrade help explains how each upgrade changes the truck.
• Updater works in packaged builds again. Packaged copies are now detected correctly, restoring update checks, install, and crash logging.
• Facility approach speed cues. Pickup deadheads now use lower-speed facility access roads, deliveries slow through a final receiver approach, and the last gate prompts are shorter so stopping instructions land faster.
• Facility gate ambience. Pickup and destination facility screens now use a quieter loading-dock ambience that stays away from truck-idle rumble.
• Preview sound volume. The refreshed truck, road, weather, route, and facility sounds now start from consistent levels before the player's volume settings are applied, so lowering and raising sound effects behaves more predictably.
• Achievement speech routing. Achievement unlocks now speak through the screen reader voice instead of the separate driving-event voice, so players who miss or interrupt an unlock can still review it later from the Achievements menu.
• Facility and settings audio fixes. Terminal and yard screens now use the new facility-gate ambience, delivery completion no longer buries the dock and settlement cues under a generic menu sound, and volume settings persist into the next game session.
• Status and settings navigation. The driving status panel now opens into clear route, driver, truck, and map-style status screens, and Settings uses category menus for gameplay, audio, speech, weather, and updates.
• Menu navigation polish. Delivery completion now presents settlement, route, truck, and career details in one continuous list, while Settings keeps its category menus for easier browsing.