Freight Fate v1.8.1

Added

• Online sharing now tells orinks.net which game version you are running. When Profile sharing or cloud backup is on, each post carries the release the game was built from, such as a stable version or a nightly date. It is used only for moderation and troubleshooting, is never shown publicly, and the spoken "Hear what gets shared" disclosure now mentions it.
• The major toll turnpikes now charge realistic tolls. Running the Kansas Turnpike, the Oklahoma turnpikes, the New York Thruway, the Pennsylvania and Ohio turnpikes, the Indiana Toll Road, the Illinois Tollway, the Mass Pike, the Maine and West Virginia turnpikes now adds an estimated commercial toll to the run -- so a toll route is a real cost to weigh against the free way around.
• The map explodes from 249 cities to 623, coast to coast. Since the last stable release the drivable network has more than doubled: 623 cities to pick up and deliver in, joined by about 139,000 miles of real truck routes. Dead zones that used to have nothing drivable for hundreds of miles -- the mountain West, the northern plains, the Nevada Great Basin, Appalachia, the Gulf coast -- now connect city to city on the real roads, town by town. The entries below tour the new country region by region; each nightly snapshot's notes carried the town-by-town detail. Special thanks to nromey for the mapping work behind it. And watch your fuel out there -- some of the new country is a long way between diesel pumps.
• New England and the Northeast fill in. Rutland, Keene, Lewiston, and Barnstable bring Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Cape Cod onto the map; Watertown and Jamestown open New York's north country and Southern Tier; Williamsport, Altoona, State College, and Meadville put the Pennsylvania mountains on real routes; and fourteen short-haul runs stitch the corridor from Boston and Manchester down through Providence, Hartford, and Philadelphia to the Chesapeake, including the Bay Bridge run to Dover and Salisbury and the New York Thruway up the Hudson Valley.
• The Mid-Atlantic and Appalachia connect through the mountains. The whole Interstate 81 freight run is drivable -- Staunton, Wytheville, Marion, Abingdon, Bristol, and Kingsport -- with Interstate 64 east over Afton Mountain into Richmond. The Kentucky parkways and the coalfields open thirteen storied mountain runs, from Pound Gap and the Cumberland Gap to the New River Gorge road to Beckley, with Paducah and Owensboro on the western parkways; Cumberland lands on the Interstate 68 climb over the Alleghenies; Lynchburg anchors US-460; and Jackson and Cookeville break the long Interstate 40 haul clear across Tennessee into real stops.
• The Carolinas and the Southeast coast come together. Durham and Spartanburg finish Interstate 85 through the Piedmont; Petersburg, Florence, and Lumberton close the Interstate 95 gap, so the East Coast's busiest freight run finally drives city to city; eastern North Carolina adds Greenville, Jacksonville, New Bern, and Rocky Mount; and Myrtle Beach brings the Grand Strand onto coastal US-17.
• Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi fill in from the mountains to the Gulf. Interstates 75 and 85 stop in real towns the whole way -- Dalton, Cartersville, Valdosta, Tifton, Cordele, Opelika, and LaGrange -- Columbus and Albany open the wiregrass, and Dothan, the Peanut Capital, ties three states together. The Delta and the Blues Highway open at Greenville, Clarksdale, Oxford, Tupelo, Grenada, and Hattiesburg, while Gadsden, Cullman, Selma, Natchez, and Panama City round out the Deep South. Louisiana fills in too, from Ruston and Natchitoches to Hammond and bayou-country Houma, with Alexandria anchoring the middle of Interstate 49.
• Florida runs border to border. Pensacola and Crestview break up the Panhandle, Ocala and Palm Coast fill the peninsula's spine, and Daytona Beach, Sarasota, North Port, Fort Myers, and Naples line both coasts -- with the run from Naples to Miami crossing the Everglades on Interstate 75's Alligator Alley, no services for eighty miles.
• Arkansas and the Ozarks open up. Fayetteville and Bentonville climb the real Boston Mountains, Jonesboro reaches the rice-country Delta, Harrison and Mountain Home carry the winding Ozark truck routes, Hot Springs crosses the Ouachita ridges, the Interstate 49 line finishes across the state from Fort Smith to Texarkana, and Pine Bluff, El Dorado, Stuttgart, and Russellville tie the farm and timber country into Texas, Louisiana, and Tennessee.
• Texas and Oklahoma become town-by-town country. The US-287 Ports-to-Plains spine runs from San Antonio clear to Denver through Vernon, Childress, Dumas, and the Oklahoma panhandle; US-281 and US-75 open north-south routes beside the crowded interstates; Temple completes the Interstate 35 spine; Uvalde and Eagle Pass open the border country; the plains add Plainview, Big Spring, Brownwood, and Pampa; Longview takes its place on Interstate 20 toward Shreveport; and Oklahoma links up through Stillwater, McAlester, Muskogee, Durant, Ardmore, Bartlesville, and Ada.
• The Great Plains ladder is complete. Interstate 80 across Nebraska is now continuous past the hundredth-meridian marker, Kansas adds Lawrence, Emporia, Hutchinson, Great Bend, and Liberal, the Dakotas add Jamestown, Pierre, and Aberdeen, a Black Hills freight run links Cheyenne through Scottsbluff country to Rapid City, and the Missouri and Iowa heartland fills in from Sedalia and Saint Joseph up through Ames, Fort Dodge, and Mason City, with Cape Girardeau and Poplar Bluff anchoring southeast Missouri.
• The Midwest and Great Lakes lattice comes together. Twenty-nine new cities across five states -- from Springfield, Flint, and Kalamazoo to the Upper Peninsula's Marquette and Sault Ste. Marie and the Iron Range's Hibbing -- plus central Indiana around Indianapolis, Ohio's Zanesville, Mansfield, and Youngstown, Wisconsin's Fox Valley, and nineteen short runs lacing Detroit, Toledo, Fort Wayne, and Milwaukee together. Terre Haute and Effingham break the long Indianapolis-to-St. Louis drive, Dubuque anchors the US-20 Mississippi crossing, and every city comes with real, named freight facilities: haul taconite pellets from the Hibbing mine, steel out of Gary Works, and new Subarus from Lafayette.
• The Rockies and the Great Basin connect end to end. Wolf Creek Pass and the Million Dollar Highway open Colorado's steepest crossings, with grades past eleven percent over the San Juans; Durango and Farmington meet at the Four Corners; fifteen runs link the northern Rockies from Missoula to Miles City; the Silver Valley opens Interstate 90 over Lookout Pass; Rawlins lands on Interstate 80 across Wyoming, with Logan and Moab opening Utah; New Mexico adds Hobbs, Alamogordo, Roswell, Carlsbad, and Socorro; and Nevada's US-93 and US-50 -- the Loneliest Road in America -- cross the Great Basin through Ely, Austin, and Fallon.
• Arizona and the desert Southwest fill in. The Verde Valley, the Beeline Highway, and Route 66 country open Camp Verde, Sedona, Payson, Winslow, and Holbrook, with Prescott in the highlands; copper country climbs US-60 through Globe and the Salt River Canyon to Show Low; the border adds Nogales, Sierra Vista, and Douglas; the Colorado River runs from Lake Havasu City down to Yuma; and US-89 reaches Page and Lake Powell across the Navajo Nation.
• California and the Pacific Northwest round out the coast. San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara complete the US-101 coast run, Modesto and Merced fill Highway 99 through the Central Valley, the Redwood Highway reaches Eureka, the eastern Sierra opens the long US-395 run beneath Mount Whitney, the Cajon Pass climb connects Riverside to Victorville, and fourteen Cascade-pass runs -- Stevens, White, and Santiam, real grades with brake checks -- tie Seattle, Tacoma, and Salem to the Columbia Basin, with The Dalles seating the Columbia Gorge.
• Drive the Overseas Highway to Key West. Key West joins the map at the very end of the road, reached from Miami down US-1 through the Florida Keys -- Key Largo, Islamorada, Marathon, Big Pine Key -- across the Seven Mile Bridge, all the way to the southernmost point in the continental United States.
• You can now cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. Cape Charles joins the map on Virginia's Eastern Shore, and the run north from Norfolk takes you out across the seventeen-mile Bridge-Tunnel -- diving into two tunnels beneath the shipping channels, past Sea Gull Island, out to where no land is visible in any direction, and up the Delmarva peninsula to Salisbury. It carries a hefty truck toll, because of course it does.
• Cloud backups now prove they were accepted by orinks.net before restore. orinks.net validates and signs each private revision, and Freight Fate verifies that signature before touching a local career. Public Profile sharing stays separate: detailed career statistics come only from an accepted backup and are omitted when no verified revision exists.
• Optional Profile sharing stays quiet during driving. With Profile sharing on, Freight Fate can queue automatic road-journal posts, achievements, and updates for the public driver profile. Detailed career statistics come only from the latest private Cloud Backup accepted by orinks.net. Offline posting retries in the background and never adds a spoken interruption while driving.
• Exits now come straight from real-world maps -- with the correct exit names and numbers. On the Interstates, your stops and your destination exit are announced with their actual exit number and name and the places they point to -- "Exit 33, Yemassee," "toward Beaufort and Port Royal," "Durham" -- taken directly from real map data, so you always know the right exit to take. This now covers the whole Interstate network.
• Routes now carry the real posted speed limits. Instead of estimating a limit from the road type, every leg on the map now carries the actual posted speed limits from map data (interstates, US highways, and more), so your truck runs the real limit on the road it is driving. Rural roads without published limits still fall back to a sensible estimate.
• Truck-stop names read cleanly now. Spoken stop names across the map no longer include bare initials like "T A" or leftover store numbers.
• Every run now names the real towns and country you pass. Those are checkpoints -- the actual places along a route, spoken as you reach them -- and the map went from about 550 of them to over 2,500. Instead of empty miles, a haul now names the towns you pass and the state lines along the way, all from real geography, and real elevation data means the grades are felt and not smoothed flat. Thanks to nromey.
• Over 1,700 truck stops are now named along your routes. Real travel centers, truck stops, and rest areas -- Love's, Pilot, Flying J, TA, Petro, and independents -- each pinned to its real location, so every route now has at least one place to fuel or park, and even the emptiest rural stretches point you to a real diesel pump you can pull a rig into. For now these are just named on the map; making them do something -- rest, showers, repairs, and buffs -- comes in a later update. Thanks to nromey.
• Some hauls now offer more than one way to drive them. Where two real truck routes reach the same place, the map keeps both, so a run can offer a choice -- a faster interstate or a shorter back road -- instead of a single fixed path. Is it winter, and you'd rather take a southern route than a mountainous northern one? We've got you covered. Thanks to nromey.
• See who else is hauling right now with the new drivers board. A new Drivers online item in the main menu reads the live board from orinks.net: each driver's name, what they are doing, their route and cargo, and how fresh the report is. If you want to appear there yourself, set up sharing under Settings, Online. Drivers are Orinks accounts now: the game opens the orinks.net setup page where you sign in, pick your driver name and whether the public board lists you at all, and copy a Driver ID and a one-time posting token; back in the game you paste each from the clipboard and choose Connect and save. Nothing is ever shared before that, the game speaks exactly what gets shared, and only broad in-game activity goes out, like "Driving: Chicago to Dallas, steel coils", never your save files, real name, or location. You leave the board within minutes of going off duty or turning sharing off.
• Your careers can now back up to the cloud. Turn on Back up saves to your Orinks account under Settings, Online, and after each game save your career quietly uploads to your own orinks.net account -- so a dead hard drive no longer means a dead career, and you can pick up the same driver on another computer. It uses the same one-time sign-in as the drivers board, nothing extra to set up, and backups are private to your account: they never appear on the drivers board or anywhere public. The new Restore a cloud backup menu reads your backups aloud, newest first, and brings one onto this computer -- keeping the save it replaces beside it as a fallback. Played the same career on two computers? The game notices and asks which copy should win instead of silently overwriting either. Cloud backup is off until you turn it on.
• The map now has real time zones, and your clock changes as you cross them. Drive west out of Tennessee on I-40 and you will hear "Crossing into Central Time. It is now 2:15 PM." With terse speech on, it is just "Central Time." Every spoken clock -- rest stops, sleep, city arrivals, the driving status screens -- now reads the local time where your truck is, and the clock readouts name the zone, like "2:15 PM Central Time". Delivery deadlines are also quoted the way a real receiver would say them: in the destination's local time, like "deliver by 6 PM Central Time tomorrow", on the dispatch job details and in the driving deadline readouts. Hours of service, deadlines, and pay are untouched; only what the wall clock says changes. Boundaries follow the real lines, including split states like Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, the Florida panhandle, and far west Texas.
• The Great Lakes split into three regions that each feel like themselves. The Upper Midwest covers Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan's Upper Peninsula; the Great Lakes keeps the lower-lakes industrial belt from Chicago through Detroit to Buffalo; and the new Corn Belt takes interior Illinois, Indiana, and southern Ohio. Each has its own weather, fuel prices, freight market flavor, and road hazards, so a winter run out of Duluth no longer sounds like a summer haul into Cincinnati.

Changed

• The engine no longer jumps in volume the instant an automatic shift finishes. It now eases back up to full pull over a brief moment, so completed shifts sound smooth instead of abruptly snapping back under load.
• Route alerts no longer repeat at one mile. Fuel stops, rest stops, and other actionable exits now speak once at five miles. State lines speak once as you cross them.
• The soundtrack now uses the finished music throughout the game. Menu, daytime driving, and nighttime driving tracks have been replaced with their full-quality versions, normalized to match the existing music. Urban Roll also joins the menu rotation as a separate track from its driving version.
• Automatic shifting now follows real heavy-truck strategy. Lower gears use progressive shift points, the starting gear responds to load and grade, light trucks can skip unneeded gears, and braking selects a useful lower gear instead of stepping through every ratio. Engine audio now unloads between gears instead of sweeping upward as one continuous high-pitched tone.
• Freight Fate checks for updates again when you leave a terminal. Returning to the main menu from a city terminal or pickup facility now starts a quiet background check, so an available update can be installed before you finish the session.
• Pausing now takes you off the live drivers board. The pause menu used to keep you listed as "Paused"; now it counts as going off duty, so the public board only shows drivers who are actively hauling. A quick pause and resume will not bounce you off the board, and Discord presence still shows "Paused" to your friends while the menu is open.
• Dispatches and route planning now always name the state with each city. A job reads as "to McCall, Idaho" even when no other McCall exists, so an unfamiliar town still tells you roughly where you are headed. And each route option now says which cities it passes through right in the option itself -- "through Boise, Idaho, then McCall" -- instead of only in the F1 help, so you can weigh routes the same way the end-of-trip summary describes them. Thanks to a player suggestion.
• Automatic direction changes can now be simple or deliberate. Simple is the casual default: keep holding the control after the truck stops to change between forward and reverse. Deliberate keeps the safer two-step behavior from the previous snapshot: stop, release the control, then press it again. Choose the style you prefer under Settings, Gameplay. Manual shifting is unchanged.
• Online settings are now gathered in one place. The Discord presence toggle moved from Settings, Gameplay to Settings, Online, alongside the drivers board and the new cloud backup options. And before you have set up your Orinks sign-in, the first Online item now says "Driver profile: not set up" -- setting it up is one step that unlocks both the drivers board and cloud backup.
• The horn sounds like a real horn held down. Instead of restarting the same short honk over and over, holding the horn now sustains one steady blast for as long as you press it, and when you let go the horn rings out and fades the way a real one does rather than cutting off abruptly. Pressing the horn again while it is still sounding no longer layers a second horn on top.
• Abandoning a job now asks you to confirm. Choosing Abandon job from the pause menu opens a Yes or No prompt that starts on No, so you have to arrow down to Yes to actually give up the load and pay the penalty. Choosing No takes you straight back to the pause menu with the job intact.
• Cities that share a name now always say their state. With two Jacksons, two Portlands, and three Springfields on the map, dispatch offers, route planning, GPS announcements, and delivery summaries now say "Jackson, Mississippi" or "Jackson, Michigan" wherever the bare name would be ambiguous. Cities with a unique name keep their short spoken form, and a few places that used to stutter their state twice, like "toward Jackson, Michigan, Michigan", now say it once. Existing careers and saved trips carry over unchanged.
• Job details always tell you the state. Not sure where Baton Rouge is? Open a job's detail view from the dispatch board and the origin and destination lines now always include the state, like "in Baton Rouge, Louisiana", even for cities with a unique name. Board offers stay short.

Fixed

• The Mountain Grade driving track sounds right again. The daytime mountain music bed has been replaced with a corrected recording, normalized to sit at the same volume as the rest of the soundtrack.
• Controllers are left alone when controller support is off. With the setting disabled, the game no longer starts up the controller system or grabs a connected pad; turning support on in Settings, Gameplay activates it, and turning it back off releases the controller again.
• Engine sound now stays present through automatic gear changes. Shifts still ease the engine tone briefly, without the repeated volume pumping that could sound like the engine was dropping out.
• Starting the engine no longer dips in volume. The running engine sound now meets the tail of the ignition sound at the same level, then settles smoothly down to idle instead of briefly dropping out.
• Manual and automatic transmissions behave reliably on steep grades. The diesel governor now holds a safe low-gear road speed without quietly damaging the engine, and automatic trucks avoid shifts that cannot pull the hill.
• Transmission changes now apply when you return to an active drive. The game announces the new automatic or manual mode instead of waiting until the next trip.
• Destination signs no longer send you down an early exit. Navigation now favors the interchange nearest the destination over an earlier sign that happens to mention the same city.
• Speeding fines now follow you on bobtail runs. Empty repositioning trips charge accumulated speeding-strike fines and announce the cost in the arrival summary instead of silently letting the fines disappear.
• A few routes now name the right highway. On the runs from Denver to Salt Lake City, Santa Rosa to Stockton, and Clarksville to Huntsville, the game announced a highway the route never actually takes; it now names the road you are really driving.
• The truck now warns you while the engine is over-revving, instead of surprising you with damage at delivery. Holding the engine at redline -- easiest to do by backing up fast for a long stretch -- quietly ground the truck down, and the first you heard of it was a big damage number on the end screen. Now a warning sounds and the game tells you the engine is taking damage and the current total, repeating while it goes on, so you can ease off and slow down before the repair bill grows. Thanks to a player report.
• Online setup now tells you when orinks.net refuses your pasted credentials, instead of blaming your connection. If the server answered but did not accept the Driver ID and token, the game said "could not reach orinks.net, check your connection," sending you off to troubleshoot a network that was fine. It now says the credentials were not accepted and asks you to re-copy them from the setup page. The token paste item also checks that the pasted text looks like a real driver token -- they always start with the letters F F D and an underscore -- and says so when it does not, catching a wrong copy before anything is sent. Thanks to a player report.
• Music keeps playing while the game is paused. If a music track ended while you sat on the pause menu -- or in settings, help, or any other menu over a drive -- the music went silent until you resumed driving. The next track now starts on its own, so a long pause no longer means a quiet cab.
• Pasting your Driver ID and token now works on Mac. Setting up the online drivers board no longer crashes the game, or silently does nothing in the downloadable app, when you paste your Driver ID or driver token from the clipboard on a Mac. Thanks to a player report.
• No more "brake now" ambushes on the way to a pickup. The short facility access road you deadhead down to reach a shipper no longer springs road hazards or emergency-braking events; those belong on the open road, not on a two-minute crawl at yard speeds. Thanks to a player report.
• Reconnecting a controller no longer crashes the game or leaves it half-working. Unplugging a pad -- or having it change to another device and come back over Bluetooth -- could crash the game outright, or bring the controller back with the triggers and bumpers dead so you could steer but not brake. The game now recovers from the hot-plug instead of crashing, and fully re-acquires the controller when it returns -- even when the system hands it back under a new identity -- so braking, throttle, and the bumpers work again right away.
• Controller toggle actions no longer fire twice. On some controllers -- notably the Xbox Elite -- setting or releasing the parking brake, or starting or shutting down the engine, could trigger twice from a single press, so the action immediately undid itself. Each button press now counts once, even when the controller reports itself to the system more than once.
• Construction zones no longer stack or chain together. Slow zones were placed independently, so a construction zone could land inside another one, or two could start back to back with no open road between. Zones now keep at least eight miles apart, so "end of construction" always means open road ahead. Thanks to a player report.
• Metric mode now covers the whole weather report. With units set to kilometers, pressing V mid-drive still read the temperature in Fahrenheit and low visibility in miles. Temperatures now speak in Celsius and visibility in kilometers everywhere weather is described: the V report, weather-change announcements while driving, trip resume summaries, and the terminal weather check. Thanks to a player report.
• The engine sound now stops when you shut down to sleep. Going to sleep at a rest stop, motel, or on the shoulder shuts the engine down, but the engine sound kept playing over the night and after you woke, as if the truck were still idling with the engine off. The shutdown is now heard when it happens, and the idle goes quiet with it. Thanks to Darren Duff for the report.
• Using the accelerator to brake in reverse no longer speeds you up. In an automatic, pressing the accelerator while rolling backward is meant to slow and stop the truck, but at higher reverse speeds it could push you faster instead. It now brakes reliably all the way to a stop.
• Adaptive cruise no longer revs the engine when you press the clutch to shift. With a manual gearbox, holding the clutch under cruise control used to send the engine screaming toward the redline. Now cruise eases off the moment the clutch goes in, the engine settles back toward idle, and the speed is picked back up smoothly once you let the clutch out.
• The engine no longer re-cranks when you pick a trip back up. Resuming a saved haul with the engine already running -- or coming back from a menu mid-drive -- used to replay the ignition sound as if you had just turned the key. Now the running engine simply fades back in, and the starter is heard only when you actually start the engine yourself. When you do start it, the crank now blends smoothly into the running engine instead of being drowned out the instant it catches.
• Your truck no longer idles all night while you sleep. Bedding down for the night -- at a rest stop, in the sleeper berth, in a cramped lot, or on the shoulder -- now shuts the engine down first, and you will hear "You shut down the engine" as you turn in. When you head back to the road, start the engine as usual. Thanks to Bartholomue.
• Updating the game on Mac now works. Downloading an update used to end with "the download failed" and nothing installed, leaving Mac players to fetch each new version by hand. The updater now understands the Mac app bundle: it swaps in the new app after the game closes and reopens it for you, just like on Windows and Linux. Your saves are untouched. Thanks to vlad-a-c.
• Asking for job details on Back to terminal no longer crashes the game. On the dispatch board, pressing F1 while on the Back to terminal entry used to crash; it now simply reads the entry back, like any other menu item. Thanks to ironcross32.
• Resuming a trip no longer repeats a stop it already called out. When you continued a saved run, the game could re-announce a truck stop or rest area just ahead that it had already told you about before you saved. It now remembers what it said and stays quiet. Thanks to nromey.