Freight Fate v1.8.0

Added

• Report a problem straight from the main menu. A new Report a problem option, just above Quit, opens the Freight Fate bug report page on GitHub in your web browser and tells you where to find your game log: the file game.log in the logs folder next to the game. The game now also keeps the previous run's log as game.prev.log, so if the game crashes, the evidence survives restarting it to file the report. Crashes inside the game's audio and video engines, which used to vanish without a trace, are now written into the log as well.
• 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.
• 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.

Changed

• Career stats at the terminal is now a browsable list. Instead of one long spoken paragraph, arrow through your level, reputation, deliveries, lifetime miles, and earnings one line at a time; Enter repeats a line. The screen also gains your rest status: whether you are fully rested or how tired you are, plus your hours of service at a glance.
• Sleeping at the terminal no longer swallows 10 hours by accident. If your hours of service are fresh and you are not tired, choosing Sleep 10 hours now warns that sleeping would only move the clock forward, and asks you to press Enter again to sleep anyway. So an extra press on the sleep option can never quietly cost you a rested clock.
• New installs now start at relaxed trip pacing. Fresh installs default to the relaxed pace, which gives you the most real time to hear and react to spoken warnings like exits and hazards. Existing players keep whatever pacing they already chose, and standard and fast are still one setting away under Settings, Gameplay, Trip pacing.
• All music now plays at the same volume. Six tracks, including the main menu themes, Open Road, Night Haul, and Small Hours, were much louder than the rest of the soundtrack. They have been brought down to match, so the music volume slider now behaves the same no matter which track is playing, and the menu no longer greets you louder than the drive that follows.
• Real-world weather now refreshes three times as often. With the real weather source turned on, the game checks the live conditions for your destination every five minutes instead of every fifteen, so fog rolling in, a storm firing up, or skies clearing reach your drive much sooner. If your connection drops, the game holds the last known weather for the same half hour as before switching to simulated conditions.
• Downloaded builds no longer expose the game's world data files. The world now ships built into the game program itself, so there is no data folder to browse or accidentally edit next to the game. Nothing changes about how the game plays, and source checkouts keep their editable data files.
• Downloaded builds now ship their sounds as a single packed file. The browsable sounds folder is gone from the download; all sound effects and music travel in one pack file the game reads directly. Every sound plays exactly as before, the sound and music credits ship as a readable file next to the game, and source checkouts keep their editable sound files.
• During a manual drive. hold down the clutch (shift) then press W to shift up gears, and q to shift down gears .
• Hours-of-service rules are more realistic. Realistic mode now tracks the 11-hour driving limit, 14-hour duty window, 30-minute break requirement, 60/70-hour weekly limits, roadside inspections, and legal sleeper-berth split rest. Rest menus now make the choice explicit: short breaks, poor emergency sleep, full sleeper sleep, or sleeper split planning where the stop supports it.
• 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. Limits are baked at build time (truck-specific maxspeed:hgv preferred where present); the spoken limit-change cue still calls out posted-limit changes as you drive.
• 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

• Switching screen readers no longer leaves the game silent. The game now notices within a few seconds when your screen reader closes or changes, for example going from NVDA to Narrator and back to NVDA, and reconnects its speech to whichever voice is running, telling you which one it picked. While Narrator is running, the game keeps its own Windows voice so that moving through menus still cuts speech off crisply; Narrator itself only carries the game's speech as a last resort when no other voice on the machine works. This also works if you start the game before your screen reader: speech simply begins once the screen reader is up. Your speech rate, voice, and separate event voice settings carry over to the reconnected voice automatically.
• Release archives no longer ship the build machine's log. The packaging smoke check writes a log inside the build folder; it is now stripped alongside saves before archiving, so a fresh download starts with an empty logs folder instead of a confusing leftover run.
• Save migration now explains itself. When the game folds an old save folder into the active one on first run, it writes what moved from where to the game log and leaves a small saves-moved.txt breadcrumb at the old location, so an unexpectedly familiar career is traceable instead of haunted.
• Spoken help now teaches the W and Q gear keys everywhere. The engine start walkthrough, the transmission setting, and the manual-transmission page of How to play still told manual drivers to shift with the number row; they now describe holding the clutch and pressing W to shift up and Q to shift down, matching how the truck actually shifts. The left and right arrows also now toggle the Haptics setting like every other gameplay setting row, instead of doing nothing there.
• 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.
• Trucks into New York now take the George Washington Bridge, not the Holland Tunnel. New York freight now routes to the Hunts Point market in the Bronx over the GWB on I-95 -- the Hudson crossing a full-height rig can legally use -- instead of the height-restricted Holland Tunnel that I-78 feeds into. Trips from New Jersey and Pennsylvania have realistic mileage and exit cues as a result.
• Truck speed limits are now capped in Oregon and Idaho too. Posted limits on those states' fastest roads are held to the legal truck maximum (65 in Oregon, 70 in Idaho), matching the existing handling for California and other truck-restricted states.
• Control now stops speech in menus too, not just while driving. Left or Right Control already silenced the driving event voice; it now also stops the current speech in every menu and in the how-to-play reader, so a long readout -- job details, cargo loading, a full help page -- can be cut short with the same key everywhere.
• Dispatch, garage, and driving tools feel clearer. F1 on a dispatch job now opens a reviewable job-detail view with line-by-line facts, long-haul pay has a stronger floor, drive-start speech is shorter in terse mode, the horn loops while held, truck and upgrade wording is clearer, and the garage can service tire wear and wash road grime.
• Reverse now has its own backing cue. Shifting into reverse with the engine running now starts a backing loop through the main audio backend, and automatic reverse selection still gets a spoken confirmation. Thanks to ashleygrobler04 for the original reverse-loop PR.
• Lane drift now cues direction before the rumble strip. When lane drift is enabled, a short beep now plays from the side you drift toward, and a dedicated centered-lane chime confirms when you are back in the lane.
• Hazard clears are easier to hear, and speech backs off faster. Passing a road hazard now plays a short achievement-like confirmation sound, and urgent events plus driving warnings clear stale spoken messages so old alerts do not keep piling up. The brake-now hazard warning cue was also remade as a short, louder alert.
• First-rig menu music refreshed. The first-owned-truck menu bed now uses a cleaner, longer copy and plays for its full length before the menu rotation advances.
• Driving realism polish. Metric speed warnings, speeding strikes, trooper stops, cruise messages, and the speed-limit key now use the selected units consistently. Missed destination exits reroute you via a safe turnaround instead of telling you to reverse down the highway, and recovery no longer loops gate-speed tickets. Dispatch warns when your current hours are too short for a load, including when every listed job is risky. Bobtail repositioning now counts as off-duty personal conveyance, dispatch board facility names are less repetitive, impossible short delivery summaries are floored to a practical road time, and automatic shift audio no longer flares at full throttle during gear changes.
• Engine brake and throttle no longer fight each other. The engine brake now refuses to switch on while you are accelerating, and pressing the accelerator turns it back off so the truck can make power normally.
• Destination exits keep the route status honest. Taking a delivery exit now clears the remaining route miles before the dock menu opens, and the GPS no longer repeats the destination exit with a second generic interchange cue.
• Real posted speed limits win near cities. City approaches still use a slower fallback when the route has no posted speed-limit sample, but real baked maxspeed data is no longer capped just because the route is near a city.
• Truck speed limits now respect state caps. Baked route speed-limit data now applies lower truck maximums in states that cap commercial trucks below the general posted limit, and reversed routes read the correct limit profile.
• Stops no longer announce speculative truck parking. If a stop's parking is confirmed, that still gets spoken; otherwise speculative parking wording is dropped from route cues so the game just announces the stop.
• 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.
• Adaptive cruise no longer gets you fined while braking for a lower limit. When the posted limit drops sharply, cruise now gets a clean chance to slow the truck instead of letting the speeding timer fire while it is already braking down.
• Route status explains road grade clearly. Pressing R now reports the current grade as a percent and uphill, downhill, or level instead of saying the vague phrase "Grade level."
• 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.
• 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.
• Exit warnings now arrive early enough to act on. At highway speed on standard or fast pacing, the destination exit callout used to fire so close that by the time it finished speaking the ramp was gone. The warning distance now grows with your speed and pacing, so you always get roughly the same amount of real listening and braking time, and the exit can be armed as soon as you hear the callout.
• Exit announcements no longer say the same name twice. Messages like "missed exit 5B for exit 5B" and "Signaling for the exit for the warehouse, destination exit for the warehouse" now speak each exit and facility name exactly once. Distances also read naturally: "in 1 mile" instead of "in 1 miles".