Event: Trade Connections - Germany Summary

There were some bumps on the road, but the last few tons of the required amount have been delivered!

The number of people participating in this event was extraordinary, especially when taking into account the amount of new content introduced around the event, you managed to stay focused on the task at hand!

As you can see, tens of thousands of you participated in driving your rigs between different countries, and as the stats of the average length of jobs shows, most of you chose to drive the more scenic and longer routes rather than the shorter ones.

However, there are some who didn't manage to finish their personal goal yet, so we've decided to prolong the deadline of the event. The event system will keep registering your deliveries until November 15th, 00:00 UTC.

We hope that numbers above mean you've had some fun travelling the "old" Europe - because soon enough the borders will open and you'll have a whole new region to discover. So make sure your fleet is ready for a new expansion - you know how it is - first come, first served!

ATS: Special Transport Released!

The Special Transport DLC for American Truck Simulator has been released and is now available on the Steam store!



Do you have what it takes to deliver such large and heavy cargoes through the challenging roads of American Truck Simulator? It's not going to be an easy task, but if you pay attention to the road and work as a team with the escort vehicles, then you will be successful in delivering these special cargoes.

Key Features

• 11 huge cargoes (up to 170,000 pounds (85 tons), 21 feet (6.5 m) width, 17 feet (5+ m) height and 52+ feet (16 m) length)
• New Special Transport trailers
• Unique job routes for the Special Transport (most in the base map, some through New Mexico, more for Oregon to come later as a free update!)
• A combination of over 90 special transport jobs
• Custom AI escort & police vehicles
• Original intros for the cargoes and jobs, crowds and police cars along the routes
• New models, characters, and animations of people assisting or spectating the transport
• Curious pedestrians, journalists or transport co-workers along the routes
• Special Transport achievements

Gameplay Features

• Close collaboration with AI escort vehicles is required
• Enhanced AI behavior: clearing the path, stopping traffic, giving advice, pushing opposing vehicles to the side etc.
• Possibility to fail the given job on the spot if you don’t adhere to strict instructions or regulations 
• New checkpoints system to keep your progress in a special transport job safe

Towns and Cities

The countries which surround the Baltic Sea feature many beautiful coastlines, forests, and mountains. They are also home to many different species of wildlife such as whales, deer, and wolves, but these are not the only living creatures to inhabit these countries. Over 85 million people live around the Baltic Sea, who all come from many different backgrounds, cultures, and nationalities. In this blog post, we want to focus on the cities, towns, and villages that inhabit the countries in the upcoming DLC.

There will be many brand new cities to drive in 'Beyond The Baltic Sea'. You could choose to explore a large bustling metropolis or visit a small historical village. Each one of them has been hand crafted from scratch and feature many famous landmarks, historic monuments and much more! We hope that when you do cross the border, you will slow down a little to see the details which have been created by our talented team. We have seen and heard how excited the community is for this upcoming map expansion, and so we are especially excited to share these new preview images with you!

Volvo VNL coming to American Truck Simulator

It wasn't nearly as fast or simple as we initially expected, but it's coming at last. We're finally able to grow the number of trucks that are represented in American Truck Simulator!

The Volvo VNL (the previous generation for now – to prevent any misunderstanding) is the fifth truck joining the fleet of American Truck Simulator. It's a free DLC addition for every owner of the base game. If you update the game on Steam (which may or may not require a restart for some users), the game will automatically download it. It comes in variants 300, 730 and 780 with a number of other options to customize it to your needs and preferences. This is only a start; with the manufacturer now officially on board, we can all hope that the road to include their latest and greatest will not be as long and bumpy.

To whet your appetite to this long-awaited addition, we are happy to publish a video tribute to celebrate the moment, and a few screenshots, just a little taste before you get a chance to download it to your own PC :)

We know that the wait was long and difficult (especially for some of you, judging from your posts and comments). We want to express our sincere thanks to the whole of our fan community for your patience and loyalty. The vision for what American Truck Simulator - as well as Euro Truck Simulator 2 - should become eventually is grand and the way to get there is daunting. We are dealing with it one step at a time. 

This year, we maximized our efforts to sign more brands for our games - and we have achieved success on several fronts. Further fruits of our discussions with the transportation industry should come in the future, so please, consider today's game update as an early treat!

Trade Connections: Germany - Recomputing

The Euro Truck Simulator 2 community is doing a fantastic job delivering the World of Trucks event jobs. Hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo are transported every day.

However, we have to admit that we have underestimated the mountain of work it would take to deliver 50 million tons of cargo. In our initial assessment, we based the math on last year's Christmas event combined with the Operation Big Sur event progress. Unfortunately, we did not properly take into account the extra challenge of geography as required by having to visit 10 different countries. With the personal goal jobs on average requiring 3 or more times the kilometers driven compared to Big Sur deliveries, the progress is a lot slower than we computed. Our plan was for the event to last several weeks, but seeing where we are now, we don't want to risk that the fun will turn into a grind.

We would like to move on and focus the fanbase on new stuff that we are about to unleash. It's time to move the goal post.

We are re-scaling Trade Connections: Germany event community goal. The new goal is 15 million tons of cargo. A huge task on its own, and a lot of work is still left to do, but we feel that we are back with our feet on the ground.

The rules do not change otherwise:

To personal goal to qualify for the reward requires delivery of 10 cargoes to or from Germany, over the distance longer than 300 km, to or from 10 different countries.

The community goal is the delivery of 15 million tons of cargo between Germany and any other country, there is no distance minimum or any additional limit.

We apologize for the miscalculation and for asking too much of you. We always strive to bring you positive motivation and fun on World of Trucks, and this change is in line with our vision. See you on the road!

Halloween is Creeping Our Way

The ancient Halloween celebration dating back to Celtic harvest festivals and perhaps even deeper is almost here. Over centuries and especially in recent decades, it has evolved into a community-centered holiday directed mainly at the young. It is now actually the second largest commercial holiday in Northern America.

As every year, Steam Store is observing the holiday with a sale, and we are no exception with our games and DLC - discounts are in place over most of our library.

We are taking advantage of having available a Halloween-themed paint job pack for both of our flagship truck sims to come up with limited-time bundles. They should be very interesting for newcomers to the genre, mixing the base games with new cool add-ons. As the bundles are of the type "complete the set," they should also be attractive for trucking game veterans who are looking to complement their existing ATS or ETS2 portfolio with new stuff.

• Euro Truck Simulator 2 Halloween Special
• American Truck Simulator Halloween Special

We have a small surprise for the owners of ATS Halloween Paint Job Pack - we have added a new trailer paint job to the DLC...

Have fun on the road! :)

ATS: Special Transport - State of progress

Since the release of The Oregon map expansion for American Truck Simulator, we have been overwhelmed with the positive feedback, comments, and reviews from our community. Our social media pages have been receiving countless videos, articles, screenshots, 360 degrees pictures and more from the lands of Oregon. We have been sharing some of your posts and images on our own pages and if you follow us, you would have seen some of them. It has been very motivating for the team to see how our community enjoys a brand new map expansion, so keep sharing!

If you're still considering adding this map DLC into your ATS collection, maybe some of these reviews will help you. If you decide to search the internet for yourself, we're sure you will find tons of ATS: Oregon material.

Saving Content - 5/5
Geek Syndicate - 5/5
PC Invasion - 4.5/5
Game Debate - 8.5/10

We are also excited to share our current progress on the Special Transport expansion for American Truck Simulator. We've been very busy in the third quarter of this year with all sorts of projects, but we want to make it clear that this hasn't stopped the development of this upcoming game addition.

We are very excited to show you more of the Special Transport expansion, which brings special cargoes to the roads of American Truck Simulator. Our team is working hard on the finishing touches for this brand new addition, and we cannot wait to get you behind the wheel of these cargoes in a couple of weeks time.

In the meantime, we would love to share these screenshots of one of the special transport trailers with a cargo helicopter. Let the Special Transport hype begin!

FOR GAMES Expo this week

This week, October 25-28, the FOR GAMES annual expo takes place in Prague, our hometown. Our On the Road team will be there with our Sim Trailer, and we would like to invite you to meet us!

We'll be showing the recently released Oregon DLC for American Truck Simulator, but you will also be able to get a good look at the upcoming stuff - the Special Transport DLC for ATS, and Beyond the Baltic Sea DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2.

It's always great to come to a gaming show full of enthusiastic players and fans. The gaming show in Prague is not as big as last week's PGA 2018, so the waiting lines will not be that long hopefully. It was a very busy but super cool weekend we had in Poznań, check out this short video report...

Last but not least - we are hiring! SCS Software is in growth mode, we need more artists, designers, coders, tweakers, testers... This event is a great opportunity to chat with our team in an informal environment and learn what it takes to join us!

Event Community Goal Update

We are very impressed with the community effort during the current Trade Connections Germany event on World of Trucks. There were 5 million tons of material delivered in under a week! This is about 3 times ton-kilometers compared to the cargo delivered in the Big Sur event. And the numbers keep climbing up. Big thumbs up for your efforts!

The huge scale of the event is intentional. We wanted to provide a challenge that will take several weeks to complete so that more people have a chance to participate, as there were frequent gripes with our previous events that the duration was too short.

However, it seems that some players kept missing the 300 km limit. We are getting lot of inquiries about this, so we decided to remove it from the community goal requirements (the personal goal remains the same). To sum it up, the community goal is now thus:

(Update) Deliver 15.000.000 tons of cargo in total to Germany from any other country or vice versa. There is no distance limit for community deliveries.

Meanwhile, check out this little video presenting cool main menu background waiting for you as one of the community rewards...