Hauling runs on a schedule. Every truck has a week grid — seven days by twenty-four hours — and every departure you place in it is driven for you, hour by hour, whether you are watching or not. Come back after being away and the summary shows what ran, what it earned, and anything that stopped.
There is no separate "manual" mode and no penalty for automation: a scheduled departure earns the full demand it can win. The skill is in the plan itself. Freight does not spread evenly over the week — factory freight books against weekday production, spot loads appear when a shipper is caught short, and express parcels only move between ten at night and six in the morning, because that is when the sorting hubs work. Survey a route and its Hours view shows the whole pattern: how much freight remains to be won, hour by hour, after the competition and your own departures have taken theirs — and, at the flick of a toggle, how much moves on the pair at all. The gap between the two is the fight. Nights are thinner in general freight, but so is the competition — that trade is yours to make.
Suggest schedule fills a sensible generic week for a truck: weekday departures, a lighter weekend, quiet nights. It is a starting point, deliberately unaware of any route's real pattern — a schedule tuned against the Hours view will beat it. Place and remove departures by tapping the grid; driving time and terminal turnaround are drawn so you can see when the truck is actually free.
The speed in the grid is not the speed on the speedometer. A rig that holds 85 km/h when the driver may legally drive averages around 32 across the day, because the schedule carries the rest period inside the hour. Rotterdam to Milano through the Gotthard is 1,130 km — out, back and the ramp time at each end. A truck you commit on Monday morning is not free again on Monday, so the cost of a wrong route is measured in the departures you could not make instead.
The game clock runs faster than the wall clock: a full game week passes in a few real hours, so seasons turn, fleets age and weekly bills arrive at a pace you can actually watch. Being away is safe — the schedule keeps running for a generous window — but a plan nobody tends slowly goes stale as diesel prices, seasons and rivals move around it. Tending the plan is the game.
Wear does not pause because you are away. Set the auto service threshold on the schedule card and the truck is serviced automatically the moment it crosses it — at the workshop's normal price, with the missed departures reported to you. The craft is in planning ahead of the rule: a service placed in the grid as a block, in a natural gap in the week, costs the same money and zero departures. The wrench icon is a weekly service appointment; the full overhaul remains a manual decision, and its longer workshop stay blocks the grid while it lasts.
From time to time a shipper will offer you a one-off haul, outside your route network, paid up front at about 35% above the normal rate. It might be a machine that has to move today, a distressed consignment, or a trader shifting freight somewhere you do not normally run.
Spot loads expire within the hour. There is no way to plan for them and no way to catch one while you are away — the only requirement is that you happen to be here. That is the entire mechanic: a reason to look in.
To accept one you need a truck free at the loading terminal with enough pallet slots and enough range, and diesel in stock. It runs the load after what is already booked, and scheduled departures missed while it is away are skipped.
Demand on a terminal pair is shared between everyone who runs it — but not as one lump. Each kind of customer judges the operators separately: spot shippers go to whoever is cheapest, time-critical freight to whoever is reliable, contract customers to whoever never drops a departure, long-standing accounts to names they know. A discount operator and a premium operator can share a pair almost without touching each other, while two fighting over the same segment will feel it. Your reputation still weighs in every segment — it is the multiplier on whatever position you have taken.
What the competition divides is the customers, not the pallets in your trailer. You see your share of the market, put a truck on it that fits, and run that truck full — which is how a real haulier answers competition, with the right size of vehicle rather than with half-empty trailers. Overcapacity is punished separately, by saturation, and it is punished for everyone on the pair.
Twenty-four computer-run hauliers work this world through the same model you do. Direction matters less than you might think: Rotterdam–Milano and Milano–Rotterdam are the same market here. Your survey shows the demand for the whole pair; the share you win depends on how you price, equip and run the route against the others on it.
Now and then the world does something. Some of it is economic — a boom, a downturn, a crude spike that lands on every diesel bill and nowhere else — and some of it belongs to road freight alone: snow closing the alpine passes and the ferry crossings behind them, drivers walking out and picketing the depots, customs queues measured in days rather than hours. While an event is running, a banner at the top of Operations tells you what it is and how long it lasts.
Two of them repay careful reading. A health emergency is not a crisis in this industry, it is a redistribution: people stop going out and start ordering in, so groceries and parcels surge on the trunk routes while the building sites go quiet and the heavy haulage order book with them. Border queues are stranger still: demand rises and your ability to meet it falls at the same time, and a reefer trailer standing sixty hours at a crossing eventually loses its load. Everybody wants to haul there and nobody can get through.
The calendar matters as much as the headlines. October and November are the peak — Christmas stock moving out to warehouses and shelves, with Black Friday the highest single point of the road freight year. The harvest fills August and September, building work fills the summer, and January and February are the trough. In peak season the spot market swells; in the trough the contracts keep the network running.
Events change demand on departures, never on surveys. What you paid to learn stays the baseline; the event is a temporary multiplier on top of it. A player who is logged in during a peak can raise rates and take the extra revenue; a schedule left untouched runs straight through on last week's rates.
Logging in on consecutive days builds a streak, shown in the top bar. Every seventh consecutive day gives you 5 cargo tokens. Miss a day and it resets to one. It is the only way to earn tokens repeatedly, and it rewards coming back rather than playing for a long time in one sitting.
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