The Steam Awards 2018 have arrived and we are calling on you, the community to vote! There are several different award categories this year, where you can nominate your favorite games. There are awards for games that have been continually supported since their release, games with the best-looking environment and even an award for your favorite developers!



Our fans were quick to spot the announcements of the Steam Awards, and immediately brought it to our attention with numerous supportive messages on all social media and communication channels. It's so wonderful to be a part of this fantastic truck simulation community!

If you choose to nominate us for this years awards, we will be very thankful for your vote and for your continued support of our games. You are of course completely free to in your choice, but judging from the many messages we have seen, the opinion is kind of settling on these particular choices. Synchronizing your votes is probably not a bad idea to avoid having our two games competing against each other ;)

Thanks!

A part of our hard-core fan community has been asking us for ages to involve them in the testing of our games, to allow them to see under the lid sooner. Last week, we decided to do a little trial and released an Experimental Beta of ETS Update 1.33. This was a build of the game which was not yet deemed stable enough for a large-scale public beta release, but having more feedback based on it would be a benefit for us to identify potential issues faster with more eyeballs on the new features. We only announced it on our forum and hoped for the best. The volume of feedback has proven that this was a successful experiment, spotting certain issues this early has definitely helped us a lot.

With this experience, we may consider adding another step to our regular testing progress. We are always starting with internal betas, and continue first through a closed beta test with our much-appreciated stable cadre of trusted volunteer testers. Now the new step may be a still-raw experimental beta for the most daring of you before we reach the widely publicized open beta release ahead of the final game update.

Thanks to everyone involved in the experimental beta, we are now able to launch the ETS2 Update 1.33 Open Beta sooner than anticipated!



This update brings some long requested features, as well as some of the most desired trailers. The double flatbed is the first of them, now with an option to be converted to a container trailer. With that also comes the Krone Boxliner, for owners of the Krone DLC. Another highly demanded addition is the brick trailer - a great white whale amongst trailers - which can be added to your fleet now. That will, of course, rob you of the joy of "hunting" this one on the freight market - the choice is yours :)





The system changes also bring certain features eagerly anticipated for quite some time. Generally the most important is the option of Steam cloud-based profile. No more profiles lost or deleted by mistake! No more need for keeping profiles stored on a flash drive for those playing on more than one PC! While this function needs some more testing, we hope to give you a safe place to store your profiles pretty soon.



Last but by no means least on the list of requested functions, we give you reusable truck and trailers configuration templates. This feature should make life easier, or so we hope, for everybody - but especially those who like to have a completely unified fleet of heavily modified trucks. We're sure that owners of fleets consisting of dozens of trucks and trailers would agree :)





And the additions don’t stop there. Rain is said to have a calming Zen effect (a lot of our players are after the soothing experience of just driving through the cool countryside in our games), so to improve this effect, we improved the graphics effect of rain. Raindrops on the glass should behave more realistic now. Speaking of the driver's point of view, you should feel (and see) the improved physics right after you start your truck. The center of gravity for almost everything in the game was tweaked, along with suspension, damping and braking. We are trying to find the right balance to make driving enjoyable for users of steering wheels and gaming controllers, as well as for players just using the keyboard. Driving your rig should feel different now, hopefully for the better. The newly added music shuffling may also help in this.

To close the list of important changes, we've added a cvar for people having issues with blinking lights. Try different settings with writing g_disable_beacons 0/ 1/ 2 in the console. We hope that one of these will suit you well.

So enjoy all the new additions, but please remember: It's only an open beta, not a stable public version - so you may encounter bugs, instability, and kinks. It's completely okay if you want to wait for the final release. But if you're interested in helping us to move there faster, we'll appreciate all of your feedback on our forum and your bug reports in this section.

If you wish to participate in the open beta, you can find this version in the public_beta branch on Steam. The way to access it is as follows: Steam client → LIBRARY → right click on Euro Truck Simulator 2 → Properties → Betas tab → public_beta → 1.33 public beta. No password required.

• Double flatbed trailers (Scandinavia map expansion required)
• Buyable container and brick trailers (flatbed variants) and cargo market
• Steam cloud based profiles
• Reusable truck and trailer configuration templates
• Physics improvements (suspension, damping, braking, COGs)
• Rain drops behavior on glass improved
• Music shuffling
• Country and city name localization settings
• g_disable_beacons (for people having issues with blinking lights, 0/1/2)
• Krone Boxliner ownable (Krone Trailer Pack required)

• Due to the number of changes, most mods will need some work to catch up!

Finland is one of the many new countries featured in the upcoming DLC 'Beyond the Baltic Sea'. You will be able to drive through the more populated southern areas, where you can explore Finland's largest cities, industrial centers and where most of the Finnish population live. At this time, Finland is one of the most northern areas you can drive in the world of Euro Truck Simulator 2.


Some of you may know that when it comes to trucking in Finland, the HCT will be an important part of your experience. High Capacity Transport is currently one of the less common types of freight transport found within European countries. The most interesting types of HCT found consists of a truck, a semitrailer dolly, and a semitrailer. We hope that these new pieces of information about upcoming content will make you even more excited. We can't wait for you to cross the border to explore the Beyond the Baltic Sea expansion and see what lies ahead!


https://store.steampowered.com/app/925580/Euro_Truck_Simulator_2__Beyond_the_Baltic_Sea/

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!

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!


https://store.steampowered.com/app/925580/Euro_Truck_Simulator_2__Beyond_the_Baltic_Sea/

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!

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...



Spooky scary Euro Trucks
Haul candy, pumpkins, bones
They won't scare your trucker souls
On European roads

Spooky scary US Trucks
Haul skeletons and ghosts
Trick-or-treat on your way to
ATS' Steam store

ːsummerghostː

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:


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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mUzRIsHkO4

A lot of work has been invested into St. Petersburg and specifically also into Western High-Speed Diameter in the upcoming Beyond the Baltic Sea map expansion. We have shown you a few screenshots already, but today we'd like to show you even more.

So we sat behind the steering wheel and made a video for you. Here is the Western Diameter through the eyes of a Euro Truck Simulator 2 truck driver!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFaO5TGR55k

https://store.steampowered.com/app/925580/Euro_Truck_Simulator_2__Beyond_the_Baltic_Sea/

Let us invite you to a join another World of Trucks event!



As you have no doubt noticed, with Update 1.32 we have started working on upgrading the territory of Germany in Euro Truck Simulator 2. We'd like to bring the community's attention to this ongoing work with the help of this event, and maybe get the right kind of inspiration for another major round of map improvements that we want to start working on right after we are finished with Beyond the Baltic Sea DLC.

Reworking Germany is no easy task! It's the core region of the ETS2 game world through which many deliveries are taking place, and we want to make sure that the results are solid. Now, at least in a sort of virtual way, you can help us, too!

So far, we have re-touched the northern part of the country, and we cordially invite you now to re-visit it with the event deliveries. But many more roads are to be rebuilt from scratch, there are new intersections coming, so many cities are waiting for a facelift and cleanup. This will take a ton of material and technology of all kind, but also various goods and supplies to sustain the hard-working construction crews on their long shifts. Therefore, we would like to ask you to start pumping up the economy of Germany in the game with deliveries to and from the country. Just to be clear, a successful wrap-up of the event doesn't yet trigger a new content drop for Germany. We are working hard on it, and this event may motivate us to work even harder ;).

• This is a community event - there is a personal goal for each participant, and there is also a global shared goal to complete the event.
• To earn your personal reward for participation, your goal is to complete a delivery of 10 cargoes to or from Germany, each starting or ending in different countries in the rest of Europe. The deliveries must be longer than 300 km.
• A total of 50 million tons of material, machinery, goods, food, and supplies must be transported by the community during the event.
• In order to qualify for the community reward, you must complete at least your personal contribution.
• The community reward will be granted once 50 million tons of cargo are delivered.
• You need to be signed up and connected to World of Trucks service for the online jobs to register.
• To verify if you comply with the rule to deliver to/from 10 different countries, you can review your recent deliveries in the World of Truck's LogBook.

For your personal contribution of delivering 10 cargoes, you will receive:

• Brandenburg Gate dashboard mini-replica
• 3 random country pennants, possibly including rare German Pennant

If the community goal is achieved, you will also receive:

• German Shepherd bobblehead dashboard toy
• Golden Stag dashboard statue
• 'Under the Bridge' background for the game's main menu

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.