Cables

There is so much that we'd like to add to our games eventually! The input and feedback from you, the truck sim fan community, is a tremendous source of inspiration for us.

For the upcoming 1.31 update, a new feature that has spent quite a few years on the wish list is finally almost ready to be released - trailer cables!

Let us give you a quick preview in motion:

As you can see in the video, our developers were able to implement physically simulated trailer cables to both Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator. And believe us - it was far from easy. These „trivial“ things tend to be much more demanding than they appear, both for programmers when it comes to coming up with fast and robust code, as well as for the vehicle design team to revisit all the existing tractors and trailers and adjust them to the new feature.

We think that you may also like to see this preview image:

Trailer cable support will come for every combination of any truck and trailers, including double and triple trailers where applicable. We will provide three simulation options:

• Simulated cables visibly connecting your truck to all the trailers.
• Simulated cables visibly connecting your truck to the first trailer only.
• Cable simulation turned off completely.

Event: Trade Connections - Sweden

Let us invite you to join a new World of Trucks event. This time, we are looking north!

We have received a lot of rather positive feedback during the previous World of Trucks events. It is clear that a lot of players enjoy having a new challenge and a goal to fulfil, and the little rewards may also play a role. ;)

Our ambition is to arrange the events more frequently in the future, even though honestly we seem to struggle a bit to balance the production, testing, and release pipeline to process all the various projects and game updates running in parallel. It may bite us too this time - with the new event now starting, we may end up overlapping it with the planned open beta of update 1.31 for both games.

We hope that spending the time performing the event deliveries feels good on its own, but for some of you, having a little context backstory can improve the enjoyment even further, so here we are...

As you know, our ETS map design team is currently working hard on the upcoming Beyond the Baltic Sea world expansion. You can imagine how much material of all types would be needed if this was all happening in the real world. There are so many kilometers of roads to build, so many buildings, intersections, industries and landmarks, so much landscaping! Maybe we can all help shorten the world-building process by transporting any supplies that we can up north? We'll need to build a new ferry on Sweden's Baltic coast to facilitate the transport of goods over to Finland!

Now straight to the rules of this event:

• You need to own DLC Scandinavia to be able to participate.
• You need to be connected to World of Trucks service for the online jobs to register!
• To earn the reward for this event, your goal is to complete a delivery of any cargo to or from Sweden with at least 10 different other countries in the rest of Europe. You can review your recent deliveries in the LogBook if you are logged in to World of Truck.
• The event will last for one month.

If you'll pass this requirement, you will get the reward, which includes:

• 'Viking Warrior' - dashboard statue
• 'Northern Lights' - main menu background
• 3 random country pennants

As you probably remember from the previous events, we are taking advantage of Steam's Inventory infrastructure to "drop" the rewards to you. As a consequence, the individual items can be traded or even sold through Steam. Just remember that if you get rid of a particular Inventory item, you will no longer be able to see it in the game's Upgrade Shop and equip your truck with it.

Tioga Pass

From time to time, we like to revisit a region already covered in our games, and change things around, or add a new route. You can look forward to such retouches appearing especially in Europe later this year ;). For today, we would like to show you a new route that we are adding to American Truck Simulator's California.

With the scale of our worlds compared to reality, we simply have to focus on major road arteries to form the road network. There is usually not enough room to even think about squeezing in any lesser roads. But we enjoy making exceptions and based on feedback from our fan community, so do the players. We have noticed a bit of empty space next to the Sierra Nevada, did a little research, and felt that it would be a great opportunity for one of our new map designers do cut his teeth designing a pass across the mountain range. There was just one small problem - typically commercial trucking is restricted in US national parks! Still, this region is so scenic and the task was so tempting, we decided to give it a go, and to find an excuse in the game for allowing the player to travel across the mountain pass.

The national park in question is considered one of the most beautiful and possibly scariest of them all. But no need to fear. While it's home to many legends and mysterious creatures - be it Wendigos, Seeahtiks, various ghosts or famous Bigfoot – all the encounters took place far away from the road on which you'll travel.

The road in question is one of the very few connections leading through this territory, as almost 95% of this area is considered wilderness. Its designation is CA 120 - the famous Tioga Pass. If you immediately thought that we were talking Yosemite National Park, you were right.

The new route is coming in the next update of ATS, the upcoming version 1.31. This addition to the game map, as well as many other small and not so small touches and additions to California, Nevada, and Arizona, will, of course, appear in the game for free for all the game owners, as a small token of gratitude for the loyalty of our fantastic trucking community!

Community Driver Seats #7

Before we kick the engine in our hype train again with some posts related to new and upcoming game features, let's calm it down a little bit and take a look at another set of community's driver seats photos. Would you like to take a ride through New Mexico or Italia on such gaming setups? We sure would!

As always - thanks everybody for sending your cool photos to us. And if you consider your setup at home worthy of sharing with us, you can always send your photos straight to the inboxes on our Facebook profiles: ETS2, ATS or SCS Software. Also, don't forget to keep an eye on our Instagram and Twitter profiles too if you don't want to miss anything important about us, our games, and projects.

Mighty Griffin additions under development

When we added the new generation Scania R and S series trucks to Euro Truck Simulator 2 recently, we have intentionally emphasized the standard factory options and avoided aftermarket tuning. The first impression of an all-new vehicle should be how the manufacturer intended it to look. When tons of screenshots and videos recorded with the new trucks in our game hit the Internet, the depiction of the vehicles should be reasonably close to how they leave the factory, that's what our licensing partners prefer.

Some months have passed now, and we can afford to venture into the realm of aftermarket at last, to take inspirations from and reflect on what we have seen at truck fests around Europe and on various tuning forums. It's time to revisit Mighty Griffin Tuning Pack and see how we can update it with yet more chrome and yet more toys for truck tuning fanatics!

Many tuning parts are completely new and the rest got a lot of love too as they needed rework to fit the new trucks' cabin shapes and dimensions. But the additions are mostly finished now and the final package is about to enter testing phase now.

From sun shields, window trim, windshield frames, stone guards, masks, masks' ribs through both front and rear mudflaps, bumpers, front grilles, bull bars, door trims, logo, badges to chassis covers, side panel, us-styled exhausts and more - this update brings a massive amount of combinations for these recently added trucks.

If you already own Might Griffin DLC, these additions will appear in your game for free, of course. If you still don't, perhaps it will be a reason to reconsider ;).

The DLC update will come live alongside the next update of Euro Truck Simulator 2.

We also have a small teaser for you of another 'work in progress' development in the picture below. Can you guess what this concept picture will be good for?

Squirrel at SCS: Making Truck Sims

Back in November, SCS Software was celebrating 20 years in the business. We invited a lot of industry friends for our celebrations, and also journalists, youtubers, and streamers. We were delighted to see that Squirrel, one of the most dedicated YouTube creators and Twitch streamers covering our sims, also accepted our invitation.

As Paul traveled to Prague all the way from the UK, he also took the opportunity to spend more time with us to make it worthwhile, with the goal of creating a video report from our office, also interviewing several members of the team.

Lots of time has passed, life intervened in a very unwelcome way, unfortunately. We are happy to see Paul back on the scene, and it looks like all the editing and cutting of the source material is finally done, as the final videos just popped up on Youtube. We're more than happy to share them with you! Hope you'll find them interesting...

Meanwhile in Oregon

A new map region usually means, among other things, some new industries inspired by typical real facilities identified by our location scouts. Today we want to share a few work-in-progress images from American Truck Simulator: Oregon map expansion development. They are depicting one of the new industrial prefabs we're working on: a shipyard.

Oregon related articles:
Something's cooking
Which way to go? Beaver knows!

Beyond the Baltic Sea

After our recent teaser post with screenshots, we have seen a lot of speculation and wild guessing initially. Very quickly though, the majority opinion has settled. It probably wasn't overly hard, as we have placed quite a few hints here and there to give you a chance to find out the right answer on your own. And you were right!

We are happy to confirm that the next world expansion that we are building for Euro Truck Simulator 2 is the region Beyond the Baltic Sea (working title). You can see it in the schematic map below.

This new DLC will include the whole of the three Baltic states Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, but also southern Finland and bits of Russia including Russia's second largest city Saint Petersburg.

It's quite a lot of ground to cover with unique architecture, industry, and transport infrastructure; an area that will be very different from the rest of the world we have so far.

Keep an eye on our blog and social media channels to learn more about Euro Truck Simulator 2: Beyond the Baltic Sea map expansion in the coming weeks and months!