Freight Fate

An accessible, audio-first cross-country trucking simulation. Haul freight between more than 600 American cities, manage fuel, tolls, weather, and deadlines, and build a driving career entirely by ear.

Freight Fate is designed for blind and low-vision players first: every screen is fully voiced through your screen reader (NVDA, JAWS, SAPI, VoiceOver, Speech Dispatcher, and more through the native Prism speech bridge), and the road speaks to you through a rich procedural soundscape. A simple visual display mirrors all speech for sighted players and helpers.

Features

Score display in Settings, Speech can read reputation and dispatch trust as both a description and number, percentage only, or description only. A trust line reads, for example, "Dispatch trust: full. Reputation 85 out of 100."

• Career mode — accept jobs inside metro freight markets, deadhead to specific origin facilities, deliver to specific receivers, earn money and experience, level through a 30-rank trucking career, unlock cargo endorsements, then buy into a leased-on owner-operator path when your career and working capital are ready.
• Realistic freight markets — the 623-city route graph acts as metro service areas, while each market expands into representative ports, rail and intermodal ramps, air cargo areas, parcel hubs, distribution centers, cold storage, food processors, farms/elevators, manufacturing plants, steel and automotive sites, chemical terminals, construction yards, mines/quarries, lumber/paper facilities, cross-docks, and company yards.
• Real driving — a tuned Class 8 truck simulation: 450 horsepower, ten gears (manual with clutch, or automatic), air-brake pressure, parking brakes, engine braking, grades, stalls, brake fade, and fuel economy.
• Business progression — choose a grounded company-driver carrier with assigned equipment plus modest wage and dispatch tradeoffs, or start as a higher-risk leased-on owner-operator with owned starter equipment and real operating costs. Owner-operators can add specialty trailer programs for reefer, flatbed, and bulk freight, then prepare for a limited own-authority direct-freight mode with trailer ownership at the end of the career arc.
• Trucks and upgrades — owner-operators can earn their way into a heavy hauler with more torque and a bigger tank (and worse aerodynamics), and outfit any truck with an engine tune, aerodynamic kit, long-range tank, or reinforced brakes. Every purchase changes the physics.
• A living market — each cargo class has a pay rate that drifts day by day, and each metro weights freight by regional specialization. The job board tells you when electronics are tight or bulk freight has gone loose; chase the tight markets.
• A living road — dynamic regional weather that changes grip and safe speeds, construction and traffic zones, road hazards that demand quick braking, curated rest stops and service plazas with parking certainty, carrier-paid toll-road settlement charges, and roadside rescue when you run dry.
• Real-world weather (optional) — flip Settings → Speech and weather → Weather source to "real world" and each city uses its live current conditions from the free National Weather Service API. If it is raining in Chicago right now, it is raining in your game. Works without an API key and falls back to simulated weather offline. A separate calendar setting lets career dates and seasons keep advancing while live conditions remain enabled.
• Route planning — route options per job with distance, highways, state context, grade/terrain, toll events, curated POIs, and weather forecasts. Geometry coverage is broad, while generated placeholder POIs are reported as data gaps instead of dispatch-ready truck stops. Facilities add local pickup and delivery realism without pretending that every suburb or shipper needs a separate highway node.
• Original audio — sound effects and music are original project assets, with sources documented in the audio credits. The Rust audio engine plays them through Hearken, the game's own Rust audio engine, with the engine note pitch-tracking RPM in real time. If no sound device can be opened, the game continues silently and says so rather than failing to start.
• Screen reader native — menus with first-letter navigation, contextual F1 help everywhere, on-demand information keys while driving, a message log you can walk back through from any screen, and a choice of terse or normal speech verbosity.
• Discord Rich Presence (optional) — when Discord is running, your profile can show what you are up to: in the main menu, at the terminal, driving a route, resting, or delivering, with the broad route and cargo. Only general game activity is shared — never your save files or personal details — and it is on by default but easily switched off under Discord presence on the Online menu, on the main menu. The game starts and runs whether or not Discord is open.

Download and play

1. Open Freight Fate releases.
2. Choose the latest numbered stable release. Stable is recommended for most players. If you want to test Career 1.9, choose the newest prerelease build. Its dated tag looks like 1.9-tester-20260829, spoken as "1 point 9 tester, August 29, 2026." In Settings, choose Update channel: developer snapshots to receive later Career 1.9 prerelease builds. A career saved in a tester build may not load in an older stable release.
3. Under Assets, Windows players should download the file ending in -windows-portable.zip. Career 1.9 testers using an Apple Silicon Mac should download the file ending in -macos-arm64.zip. The Career 1.9 Mac build does not support Intel Macs. Career 1.9 testers on Linux have a tarball and an AppImage each for PCs (-linux-x64.tar.gz, -linux-x86_64.AppImage) and for ARM64 machines such as the Blazie BT Speak and BT Braille or a Raspberry Pi (-linux-arm64.tar.gz, -linux-aarch64.AppImage). Choose the archive for your machine's processor. AppImages run directly; tarballs need extracting. Both need the ALSA sound library (libasound2 on Debian and Ubuntu, alsa-lib on Fedora and Arch), which nearly every Linux desktop already has.
4. Extract the zip file. On Windows, open the extracted FreightFate folder and run FreightFate.exe. On an Apple Silicon Mac, move FreightFate.app to Applications. If macOS blocks the first launch, open System Settings, choose Privacy & Security, and allow Freight Fate to open.

For a complete player-facing guide to careers, dispatch, driving, route stops, saves, settings, audio, speech, and troubleshooting, see the Freight Fate Player Manual.

Want to help with code, docs, or world data? Start with the Freight Fate contribution guide.

Run from source

Career 1.9 is a native Rust game, and its build, packaging and data tools are Rust too (cargo tools help lists them).

Install these prerequisites first:

• Git
• Rust through rustup
• CMake 3.24 or newer: the Prism speech bridge, SDL2 and the Opus decoder are compiled from source.
• On Windows, the Visual Studio Build Tools (see the standalone build below). On macOS, the Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install). On Linux, GCC 13 or newer, ALSA's development files (libasound2-dev on Debian and Ubuntu, alsa-lib-devel on Fedora) for sound, and the SDL2 development packages the nightly Career 1.9 workflow installs.

Hearken's Getting started gives the install commands for each of these on macOS, Windows and Linux. It also installs the hearken command, whose hearken doctor checks that nothing is missing, and hearken play orinks-games/Freight-Fate clones, builds and starts the game in one step.

Then clone Career 1.9 and run the game:

git clone https://github.com/orinks-games/Freight-Fate.git
cd Freight-Fate
cargo run --release -p freight-fate

Cargo fetches everything the game links, including Hearken, its engine for speech, sound and the radio, which comes from its own git repository; there is no native audio library to download first.

The first Cargo build takes longer because it compiles the workspace. Later runs reuse target/.

On macOS, the repository supplies the CMake compatibility setting needed to compile its bundled SDL2. Source builders do not need to add CMAKE_POLICY_VERSION_MINIMUM to a private .cargo/config.toml.

Build a standalone copy

After installing Git, Rust and CMake (Prism is compiled from C++ source), run the release builder for your platform from the repository root. On Windows, from PowerShell:

./build-release.ps1

On macOS or Linux, from a terminal:

./build-release.sh

Either script checks the prerequisites, installs the pinned Rust toolchain, builds the native game, fetches and verifies the public music pack, checks the staged game, and writes the archive for that platform to dist/: the Windows portable zip, the macOS app zip, or the Linux tarball. Players using those archives and contributors using these standalone build scripts do not need to find or copy audio files themselves.

Windows also needs the Visual Studio Build Tools with the "Desktop development with C++" workload and its optional C++ ATL component (Prism's speech backends include atlbase.h); the script checks for both and prints the winget or Visual Studio Installer command that adds what is missing. Linux needs GCC 13 or newer, ALSA's development files, plus the SDL2 development packages the nightly Career 1.9 workflow installs; on Ubuntu 22.04 the script picks up gcc-13/g++-13 itself when the default gcc is older. macOS builds SDL2 from source, so do not install Homebrew's sdl2.

For iPhone and iPad builds and the touch gestures, see docs/ios.md.

Advanced maintainer overrides

The release script passes extra options to cargo tools build-release. Maintainers can use --tag or --cargo-target-dir when preparing a specific release. FREIGHT_FATE_MUSIC_URL and FREIGHT_FATE_MUSIC_SHA256 remain emergency overrides for pinned release inputs. Normal players and ordinary source builders do not need these overrides.

If the build succeeds but the archive seems to vanish on Windows, check your antivirus: freshly built unsigned executables are sometimes quarantined on sight. Add an exclusion for the dist/ folder or restore the file from quarantine.

Controls

Freight Fate plays with the keyboard or a game controller, and both stay active at all times. Spoken prompts name whichever you last used, so "press X to take it" on the keyboard becomes "press D-pad down to take it" on a controller.

Keyboard

Menus

Key	Action
Up / Down	Navigate
Enter	Select
Escape	Back
Home / End	First / last item
Any letter	Jump to the next item starting with it
F1	Contextual help

Messages, on every screen

The message log works the same way everywhere in the game, driving included. It keeps the last 200 things the game said, in one history shared by menu speech and driving events.

Key	Action
Comma	Repeat the last spoken line; press again quickly to step one line older each time
Period	Move toward newer messages
Ctrl+Comma	Jump to the oldest message
Ctrl+Period	Jump to the newest message
Left / Right bracket	Switch between all messages, general messages, and driving events
Ctrl+C	Copy the message you are on
Ctrl+Shift+C	Copy the last thing the game said, on any screen

Driving

Moving the truck:

Key	Action
Up arrow (hold)	Throttle
Down arrow (hold)	Brake
B (hold)	Emergency brake — the hardest possible stop
Left / Right arrow	Steer. With lane keeping on full, a tap changes lanes instead
E	Start / stop engine
P	Release / set parking brake. Setting it at speed grinds flat spots into the tread and costs real tire wear — it is the emergency backup, not a brake
H	Horn

Gears and the engine brake:

Key	Action
Left Shift (hold)	Clutch (manual mode)
W	Shift up a gear (manual mode)
Q	Shift down a gear (manual mode)
N	Neutral (manual mode)
Backspace	Reverse (manual mode)
Alt+T	Switch between automatic and manual shifting, mid-drive
J	Engine brake on / off
1, 2, 3	Engine brake stage (one, two, three)
Alt+J	Whether J arms the automatic engine brake or leaves it to you

Speed control:

Key	Action
K	Automatic speed control on / off. Parked with the brake set, it latches a high idle instead
Shift+K	Resume the last speed after braking canceled it
Plus / minus (keypad too)	Raise / lower the remembered open-road target by 5

Route actions:

Key	Action
X	Signal for the next announced exit, or cancel that signal. Also signals a pull-over when a trooper lights you up
T	Plan the next sleep-capable stop while rolling; at a stop, open its menu; fully stopped away from stops, open emergency shoulder sleep
Enter	Go inside on a city-service arrival, or open a facility arrival once fully stopped
Tab	Driving status menu
Escape	Pause menu

Asking the truck and the road questions:

Key	Action
Space	Speed, gear, RPM, the speed-control mode in use, and air pressure
S	Posted speed limit. On a ramp with a signal, the light and the distance to the stop bar
D	The one safe speed for right here — weather, an armed exit, and the bend ahead already folded in
G	The grade under the wheels, whether the truck is holding it, and the next grade ahead
R	Route progress, distance left, and where you are
Shift+R	Next listed highway exit
U	What is coming up: imposed limits, stops, exits, and bends
C	Clock, deadline, date and season, and the hours limit that comes first
Alt+A	Time at the wheel so far this shift
Alt+S	When your 30 minute break is due
Alt+D	What ends this shift, and where you can stop before it
F	Fuel and range
V	Weather and forecast
L	Lane position, and whether the lane beside you is open or blocked
I	Lane locator on / off — a soft tock once a beat, panned to where you sit inside your lane. Available on lane keeping partial or off
A	Repeat the last driving announcement
F1	List all controls
Left or Right Ctrl	Stop the driving event voice mid-sentence

The radio:

Key	Action
M	Radio on / off
Page Down / Page Up	Tune to the next / previous receivable station (semicolon and apostrophe also work)
Ctrl + a tuning key	Jump a whole dial category
O	Save or unsave the current station as a favorite
Y	Station, volume, and streamer-safe status

Controller

Plug in an Xbox, PlayStation, or other compatible controller and the game picks up the first one automatically. It detects a controller connected or unplugged mid-game — unplugging pauses the drive — and you can switch back to the keyboard at any time. Button names below use the Xbox layout; the equivalents map automatically on other pads. Turn controller support off under Settings → Gameplay → Controller if you prefer keyboard only.

Menus

Button	Action
D-pad Up / Down	Navigate
D-pad Left / Right	Adjust the selected option (hold to repeat)
A	Select (like Enter)
B	Back (like Escape)
Back / Select	Contextual help (like F1)

Driving

Button	Action
Left stick	Steering
Right trigger	Throttle
Left trigger	Brake (press fully for the hardest stop)
Left bumper (LB)	Clutch (manual mode)
A	Shift up a gear (manual mode)
X	Shift down a gear (manual mode)
Y	Automatic speed control on / off
B	Speak speed, gear, RPM, speed-control mode, and air pressure
D-pad Up	Route progress
D-pad Down	Take exit / signal a pull-over
D-pad Left	Weather and forecast
D-pad Right	Clock, deadline, and the full hours of service report
Left stick click (L3)	Horn
Right stick click (R3)	Engine brake toggle
Start	Pause / resume
Back / Select	Controller help

Hold the right bumper (RB) as a modifier for a second layer of driving bindings:

Button	Action
RB + A	Start / stop engine
RB + B	Fuel and range
RB + Y	Release / set parking brake
RB + D-pad Up	Route progress
RB + D-pad Down	Open a route stop, or emergency shoulder sleep away from stops, when fully stopped.
RB + D-pad Left / Right	Lower / raise the open-road cruise target
RB + Start	Driving status menu

Radio

Button	Action
Right stick left / right	Tune to the previous / next station
Right stick down / up	Lower / raise radio volume (hold to repeat)
RB + right stick up / down	Radio on / off; save or unsave the current station as a favorite
RB + right stick left / right	Previous / next radio category
RB + left stick click (L3)	Radio status
RB + Back / Select	What the radio is playing

The left and right triggers are analog: hold them wherever you like for partial throttle or braking, rather than the ramped hold the arrow keys use. There is no controller emergency brake — press the left trigger all the way for the hardest stop.

Air-brake model

Freight Fate models air pressure without asking players to run a full CDL inspection before every dispatch. A cold trip starts with low pressure and the parking brake set. Start the engine, wait for the compressor to build air to 100 psi, then press P to release the parking brake. Repeated brake applications draw from separate truck and trailer air tanks, low air warns around 60 psi, and spring brakes apply around 40 psi. Normal driving should feel familiar; the extra detail mostly gives clearer warnings if you pump the brakes hard, ignore low air, or drive damaged equipment. Press Tab while driving to review primary, secondary, and trailer air, compressor state, parking or spring brake state, and brake heat.

The thresholds are grounded in official CDL and air-brake references: FMCSA describes typical 110-130 psi compressor cut-out, cut-in about 20 psi lower, and an 85-to-100 psi build-up check; the California DMV places low-air warnings between 55 and 75 psi; the Georgia DDS describes spring-brake and governor checks; and SGI lists 120-145 psi cut-out and 100 psi minimum cut-in. Build-up time is compressed for playability so startup is a short, understandable pause rather than minutes of waiting.

Development

Gameplay code and gameplay tests for Career 1.9 live in the Cargo workspace. Use the Rust checks for gameplay changes:

cargo fmt --all --check
cargo clippy --all-targets --locked -- -D warnings
cargo test -p ff-core
cargo test -p freight-fate

When changing packaging, release notes, translations or another tool, run its tests too:

cargo test -p ff-tools

The Python game was removed after its last release, v1.8.8.1, and the Python tooling after it; both survive only in git history.

Install the git hooks once per clone with git config core.hooksPath .githooks. The pre-push hook runs the release-note gate before publishing commits. User-facing changes need a player-facing CHANGELOG.md entry unless the entire change set is non-player-facing and uses changelog: none or [skip changelog].

World data

data/world_source/ is the tree you edit, but the game loads the indexed data/world_data/ tree. After changing world data, regenerate the index so the two stay in sync:

cargo tools index-world          # rewrite world_data/ from world_source/
cargo tools index-world --check  # verify in sync (CI and the commit hook do this)

The commit hook and CI both fail if world_data/ drifts from the source, so commit the regenerated world_data/ files alongside your source edits.

Both trees group legs by their starting state in files such as legs/TX.json and legs/CA.json, so a one-leg edit changes only its state's file.

Playtesting

Freight Fate is audio-first, so the way to review a playthrough is the transcript of what the game says. The Rust playtest harness drives the real game states headlessly and is used by the Cargo integration tests. Run a focused transcript test by name while iterating, then the whole game crate before landing:

cargo test -p freight-fate --test it transcript_shane_deadline -- --nocapture
cargo test -p freight-fate

A manual test scenario starts from the game binary itself: cargo run --release -p freight-fate --bin freightfate -- --playtest-road --find <feature> drops you at a road feature, and -- --playtest-sandbox --launch opens the full game in a throwaway save directory. cargo tools playtest-watch follows either session's log.

Changelog and snapshots

Player-facing changes should add a short bullet under ## Unreleased in CHANGELOG.md. Developer snapshots use those curated entries for release notes; they do not turn git commit subjects into player-facing copy.

Scheduled snapshots build only when new curated Unreleased entries are present, or when a commit message includes nightly: build or [nightly build] for an intentional snapshot refresh. Use changelog: none or [skip changelog] only when every commit in the change set is non-user-facing.

License

Freight Fate is licensed under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0: the source is public and free to use, modify, and share for any noncommercial purpose, but only the copyright holder may sell it or put it to commercial use. This is a source-available license, not an OSI-approved open-source license. Bundled audio credits and provenance are tracked in the Freight Fate audio credits. The window's text is set in Overpass, built into the game under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Audio: playback, decoding and the radio use Hearken, Freight Fate's own Rust audio engine (MIT or Apache-2.0), built on Kira and Symphonia. Earlier releases used the proprietary BASS library; nothing of it ships any more.