Every lane starts at one of your terminals. The opening fee scales with distance and with how busy the destination is — a slot into a major freight hub costs several times what a small terminal costs, before you have moved a single pallet.
Distances are road distances, not straight lines. Stockholm to Helsinki is 400 km across the water and 1,075 km the way a truck actually gets there, over the Åland ferry. Rotterdam to Milan is about 1,130 km through the Gotthard. Chicago to New York is 1,280.
The world's roads are not one network but forty, and between them you pass a gate: a border crossing, a ferry, a tunnel or an alpine pass. There are 259 of them — the Åland and Baltic ferries, the Channel, the Irish Sea, Gibraltar, Messina, Bass Strait, Cook Strait, and the Mont Blanc, Gotthard and Brenner passes among them.
Gates do not appear as a separate charge on the cost sheet. They are priced in equivalent kilometres inside the road itself, so a ferry that measures 190 km may count as 780, and both the driving time and the diesel bill come out right without a toll line you have to reason about separately.
Some terminal pairs have no road at all, and the game will say so. Panama to Bogotá is 700 km straight and impassable: the Pan-American Highway breaks for a hundred kilometres of roadless jungle at the Darién Gap. Sydney to Auckland is water. Morocco to Algeria has been a closed border since 1994, so the freight goes north over the Gibraltar ferry and round through Europe. That is an answer, not a fault.
You can open a lane you cannot yet drive. Nothing stops you buying Helsinki to Lisbon on day one; the game will simply refuse every departure until you own a rig with the range and the weight rating to make it. Opening lanes ahead of your fleet is a legitimate strategy if you expect the fee to rise as you grow, and a waste of money if you are wrong.
A new lane shows no demand at all. To see it you buy a survey, and the price scales with the size of your company — information costs more when it is worth more to you.
This is the central economic decision in the game. You cannot compute demand yourself; the model and the data behind it live on the server and are not published. So every survey is a bet: you are paying to find out whether a lane is worth driving, and sometimes the answer is no and the money is gone.
Some things you can reason about before paying:
None of that is precise enough to replace a survey, which is the point.
Rates are set per class and persist until you change them. Every lane opens at its reference rate, and the forecast beside the sliders updates as you drag.
Beside each slider is a rate band: the range the market on that lane expects to pay. The band is not a rule and the game will happily let you price outside it. What the band tells you is where you stop being a normal haulier on that lane and start making a statement — well under it you are a discount operator whether you meant to be or not, well over it you are selling something the shippers have to be able to see. A revenue desk at your base narrows the band around the actual profit optimum; without one you get the floor and the ceiling and have to reason your way to the middle.
Which customers you keep when you move depends on who is on the lane. Spot shippers leave over a small increase that a long-standing account never registers; time-critical shippers do not appear at all below a certain standard, whatever the rate. The five groups are described in What you carry, and the survey is what tells you their shares on this particular pair.
The forecast uses the same code the server runs when you dispatch, so it is not an estimate — it is the answer, given the truck, the survey and the current diesel price. The only thing that can change between forecast and outcome is the fuel market and how many other departures you run that day.
A practical method: set the rig you intend to use, then walk the dry-cargo slider from one end to the other and watch the result figure rather than the fill. Peak profit is usually a little above the reference rate on thin lanes and a little below it on dense ones, but the shape depends on your load plan and your rig, so find it yourself.
Pick a ready truck standing at the lane's origin and dispatch. Four checks run on the server before the departure is accepted:
Then the outcome is computed and locked in. The run takes real time — driving hours at the rig's schedule speed, plus half an hour for the gate and the weighbridge, plus one to three hours at the ramp. The driver's hours are already in that clock: nine driving hours in twenty-four is 765 km a day, so a 1,500 km lane is two days out and two back, and one departure a day on it is a perfectly normal service.
You do not need to be online when it arrives. Everything that came in while you were away is settled the next time you open the game, in one go. Closing the browser costs you nothing.
Firms in the same alliance can charter slots from each other. Put your name on a partner's departure and you sell space on a truck you do not operate; let them do the same on yours. The operating firm still drives the truck and still carries the cost — what changes is that the lane reaches customers who would otherwise never have seen it.
This is the cheapest way to reach a market you cannot serve, and the cheapest way to give a partner access to yours. It is also a commitment: a slot charter is worth having only if the partner runs the lane properly, because your name is on a departure you do not control.
Diesel is deducted from your tank at departure, so you must buy it in advance. Run dry and the departure is refused.
CO₂ quota works differently: if you do not hold enough, the truck still leaves, and the uncovered emissions are bought on the spot at 75% over the market, charged to that run's cost sheet. A standing auto-buy order cuts the premium to 15% — cheaper, but still dearer than covering yourself at a price dip. Either way nothing breaks and nothing is refused; you just pay for not planning.
Prices for both move every 30 minutes. The spread is wide enough that timing your purchases matters and narrow enough that it cannot win the game for you.
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