Freight Fate v1.8.6

Added

• A warning before every steep grade. Any climb or descent of three percent or more that runs for at least three quarters of a mile is now called out before you reach it, with how steep it is, how far it runs, and -- going down -- what to do about it before it starts. In a manual that is picking your gear and setting the engine brake; in an automatic it is setting the engine brake and braking down to speed, which is what puts the transmission in a lower gear for you. Short dips stay quiet, so on a mountain route you hear the hills that matter and nothing else. Terse speech does not get these announcements at all -- press G whenever you want the grade instead. The advisory is there so you can decide before the hill starts: when in doubt, take manual control of the speed rather than leaving it to cruise.
• G speaks the grade. Press G while driving for the slope under the wheels, how much further it runs, whether the truck is holding it or losing ground -- and the next steep grade ahead with how far off it is. It answers "why is my speed building" without waiting for anything to be announced.
• Review recent spoken messages while driving. Use the message review controls to move through general and critical announcements, jump to the first or latest message, switch categories, and copy the current message to the clipboard. Contributed by Day Garwood (@day-garwood) in PR #122.
• Tire sounds now react to your speed. On supported audio systems, the tire hum rises and falls as you accelerate or brake. Above a crawl, soft road-seam thumps add texture through sound and controller vibration. Contributed by Swarup Baral (@swarup-developer) in PR #114.
• Linux players get an AppImage. Alongside the tarball, each release now ships FreightFate-<version>-linux-x86_64.AppImage: one file you mark executable and run, with no extraction step. It carries the libraries the Ubuntu build needs, so it also runs on Fedora, Arch, and openSUSE, and every build boots on Fedora before it ships. Because the AppImage itself is read-only, saves live in ~/.local/share/FreightFate instead of a saves folder beside the game. In-game updates work too: the game downloads the new AppImage, swaps the file in place, and restarts — and if the AppImage sits somewhere your user account cannot write to, the game tells you where the downloaded update was saved instead of failing quietly.
• An armed exit now counts itself down. Once your signal is on, the exit calls out again at two miles, one mile, and half a mile. No more hearing about an exit once, five miles early, and never again until you have missed it. On the terse speech setting the countdown stays quiet, so terse drivers hear only the original announcement.
• Delete a career's cloud backups. Each career in the Cloud backup menu now has a Delete item that removes every kept backup of that career from your orinks.net account, after a spoken confirmation. Your saves on this computer are never touched, and a career that is still on this computer with cloud backup turned on simply starts a fresh backup the next time it saves. Handy if a save was backed up by mistake, such as someone else's career you had copied onto your computer.
• Copy your delivery summary to the clipboard. The delivery complete screen has a new item, just before Continue, that copies every settlement line as plain text so you can paste the whole run into a message or a forum post. The game confirms out loud once the text is really on the clipboard, and tells you if the copy did not take.
• Share notable deliveries to your own Mastodon account. A new Settings, Online option posts a short public summary, with the FreightFate hashtag, when a delivery earns you an achievement, a level, or a perfect streak milestone. Routine runs are never posted. It is off until you turn it on, and linking your Mastodon account happens in your browser on orinks.net using the same sign-in as driver setup; the Mastodon account item walks you through it and can check whether the link took.
• The R key now tells you how far along you are. The route report leads with your trip progress, like 53 percent there, followed by the miles left. It is the same figure the online drivers board shows for you, and the Tab status menu has a matching Progress line. Deadhead drives count too.

Changed

• The R key now answers just "where am I". Two short sentences: how far along you are and how far is left, then the road you are on with its direction, the state you are in, and the city it is taking you toward. If you have planned a stop, the distance counts down to that stop instead of the destination, so R tells you how far to the place you are actually driving at. The nearest named place, the grade, the zone, and the next maneuver are gone from it, because each of those already has its own key or lives in the Tab status menu. U still reads what is coming up, and Shift R still reads the next exit.
• Shorter driving readouts that fit a braille display. The clock, route, weather, and fuel reports now put the answer in the first few words, so a one-line braille display shows what matters without panning. The C key leads with the time and whether you are on schedule instead of burying the verdict at the end, and on the terse speech setting it skips the calendar, the appointment restatement, and the stop-planning advice, all of which the Tab status menu still carries.
• Speech verbosity is now a simple choice between terse and normal. The chatty level never said anything normal did not; it only repeated your speed a little more often. If you had chatty selected, the game now uses normal, and everything you heard before is still there.
• Rest stops no longer let you sleep twice for nothing. When you are already fully rested at a rest stop, choosing a sleep option now warns you that it would only move the clock and your deadline forward, and asks you to press Enter again to confirm. This is the same safeguard the terminal bunk room already had.
• Everything online now lives in one Online menu on the main menu. The drivers board, orinks.net account setup, Profile sharing, cloud backup and restore, Mastodon sharing, and Discord presence moved out of Settings into a single Online menu, so restoring a save on a new computer or checking who is hauling no longer means hunting through settings categories. The board sits first because viewing it shares nothing about you. Choosing Online inside Settings still works and opens the same menu, and every toggle keeps the familiar Enter, Right, and Left arrow controls.
• Walking away from a parked truck now takes you off the drivers board. If your truck sits stopped with nothing changing for half an hour, you leave the public board just as if you had paused the game, and the board stops calling you a driver who is on duty. The moment anything changes, like rolling again or pulling into a stop, you are back on the board within seconds. Deadhead drives also now say how far along they are, on the board and in Discord, so a long empty run never looks like a parked truck.
• Test builds now introduce themselves as development builds. The main menu welcome and the update screen used to read a bare version number that looked like a stable release. A nightly or source build now says, for example, "version 1.8.6 development build", so you always know which kind of build is talking. Stable releases sound the same as before, and version numbers no longer skip when a stable release comes out.

Fixed

• Roadside fuel rescue now leaves your truck safely stopped. After running dry, rescue refuels the truck but clears its previous highway motion before you restart, so you pull away normally instead of resuming at road speed.
• Adaptive cruise no longer runs away down a hill. Cruise could only ever add throttle, so on a downgrade it simply came off the fuel and let gravity carry the truck -- fifteen miles per hour or more over your set speed, with nothing said about it, and a speeding fine at the bottom. It now reaches for the engine brake when the truck starts to gain on a descent and snubs the service brakes when the engine brake is not enough, holding your set speed on grades as steep as eight percent. It hands the engine brake back when the hill ends, and never touches the switch when you set it yourself. Climbing, cruise now answers a hill as the wheels reach it instead of taking ten seconds to work up to full throttle. Cruise is still an assistant, not a driver: on a steep or long grade, when in doubt, take manual control of the speed. Braking hands the truck straight back to you.
• Cruise tells you when a grade has beaten it. If the truck is running well past your set speed down a hill, or has lost a lot of it climbing, cruise says so once, names the speed you are actually doing, and tells you to brake or gear down -- or just to brake, if you are driving an automatic. Before this it drifted in silence. It waits until the grade has genuinely won and stayed won, so a gear change or a stretch of nearly level road never sets it off. Treat it as your cue to take over: when in doubt, brake rather than waiting to see whether cruise recovers the speed.
• Automatic speed control now slows in time for construction zones. At highway speed, adaptive cruise begins braking when the advance warning is announced and reaches the work-zone limit before the speed keeper takes over, so the game no longer fines you while its own controls are still slowing down.
• Automatic speed control now slows in time for heavy traffic zones. The same early braking that construction zones already received now applies to heavy traffic zones. When the advance warning sounds, adaptive cruise begins easing down to the posted limit and hands off to the speed keeper at the zone boundary, so the transition is smooth and you enter at the right speed. Contributed by wleicht (@wleicht) in PR #127.
• The rest-stop arrival cue now leaves real time to set the brake. Trip pacing no longer consumes the whole stopping buffer while even a slow voice is still speaking. Terse speech now says "Stop now." If you set the parking brake when the stop announces your arrival, the truck can finish stopping and open the rest-stop menu; continuing past without stopping still misses the stop.
• A destination exit stays ready after it is announced. On Standard or Fast trip pacing, slowing down while the callout spoke could shrink the action window, so pressing X answered "No exit coming up." The exact announced exit now remains available through a human reaction window, while expired and already-passed exits still cannot be armed. Braking, inspection, and other safety warnings also finish before the signaling confirmation.
• Short hauls no longer pay several times more per mile than long ones. A guaranteed minimum meant a fifty mile hop could pay over a thousand dollars, four to five times the per-mile rate of a real cross country run, so short hops were always the best money. Short jobs still pay a premium per mile, the way real freight does, but it now eases down smoothly as the distance grows. Pay for medium and long routes is essentially unchanged.
• The updater no longer hides a developer snapshot released the same day as a stable build. On the developer snapshots channel, a stable release published in the small hours used to mask that morning's snapshot -- even when the snapshot carried newer fixes -- because the two were compared by date alone. Updates now compare by the actual publish moment, so whichever build is genuinely newest is the one offered.
• Driving past a pickup or delivery entrance no longer goes silent. Arriving at a facility used to announce itself once; if you rolled on -- easy to do with cruise re-engaged -- the game said nothing more for the rest of the drive, and the delivery quietly went late. Now the gate repeats its instruction every ten seconds while you are still moving, cruise drops each time so the truck is never held at speed past a dead end, and the S key answers with the gate itself -- "At the receiver. Stop to dock." -- instead of a speed limit that stopped mattering when the route ended.
• The road tells you the truth about the terrain. Stretches that were quietly called mountain in flat country -- the East Texas piney woods, the Hill Country's gentle dips -- now read as the flat or rolling ground they really are, so the status readout no longer puts you in the mountains where no Texan would. The real climbs you brace for still call out as mountain grades, and every famous grade -- the Grapevine, Monteagle, the Siskiyous, the run up to the Continental Divide -- keeps its name. Thanks to nromey, PR #107.
• Starting a new career no longer talks over itself. Naming your driver and picking a home region and city used to leave those screens announcing themselves again on the way out, each one cutting off the last, before the terminal menu finally spoke. The screens you have finished with now stay quiet, so you hear your new career's terminal and nothing else -- and the stray announcements no longer fill up the message review history either. Contributed by Day Garwood (@day-garwood) in PR #129.

A note on what comes next

Work on Freight Fate 1.9 is underway on its own branch, and preview snapshots of it will start appearing before long. Until then the 1.8 line is in maintenance: pull requests against it are being accepted only for major and minor bug fixes, not new features. Have a feature in mind? Open an issue for it and it can be picked up for 1.9. Feature pull requests are welcome again once 1.9 preview snapshots begin.