Euro Truck Simulator 2's next update will put hidden roads on the map when you discover them

Trucking up to Aberdeen — (Image credit: SCS Software)

SCS Software has revealed the first new feature of its upcoming 1.44 update for American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2, and it's a big one. Unmarked roads, once explored, will no longer be unmarked.

If that previous sentence made your brain hurt a bit, let me explain. Unmarked roads are essentially little exploration opportunities that crop up during play in both ATS and ETS2. As you haul freight along the games' meticulously crafted roads and highways, you'll occasionally come across small dirt tracks leading off into the wilderness. Following these tracks will reward players with shortcuts and environmental surprises.

As implied by the name, unmarked roads don't appear on the game map, remaining hidden even once you'd 'discovered' them. However, that's going to change as of update 1.44. SCS provided the breakdown as to how this change will work via a Steam event announcement. "Once you drive onto an unmarked road, you will be notified about having done so with a message in the route advisor, and the explored road will appear on the map as an orange dashed line, with any unexplored part ahead of you shown in gray."

An image of the updated map, with a dotted gray line showing the location of an unmarked road — (Image credit: SCS Software)

The studio's reasoning for the change is to ensure that player are "immediately aware" that they have found an interesting location, and also "know where to go" if they want to revisit that point. It seems like a reasonable quality-of-life improvement, although one might argue that revealing the whole route at once slightly diminishes that sense of venturing into the unknown.

You can read the full announcement here. The post doesn't offer any further info regarding what update 1.44 will bring. But given the scope of the previous update, which introduced new roads, new truck types and a host of other features, expect this to be the first of several major new additions.

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.