ATS Road Trip: 1.62 Adds 11 Tourist Boards and a Route 66 Board
Three weeks after the Road Trip: Ford DLC launched, SCS Software has told us where Atlas goes next. The 1.62 update for American Truck Simulator is built partly around the exploration feature, and it more than doubles the number of states where you will find something to tick off, from seven to sixteen before Route 66 is even counted.
At release, Atlas only covered California and the Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota DLCs. SCS promised the rest of the map would follow gradually. This is the first batch.
Eleven new Tourist Boards
Each board comes with fresh Points of Interest, Viewpoints and Photo Trophies, and every completed board gives you a new postcard. The split looks like this:
| State | New Tourist Boards |
|---|---|
| Nebraska | 2 |
| Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana | 1 each |
| Washington | 1 more |
That is eleven boards and eleven postcards in total. Washington is the only state on the list that already had Atlas content, so it gets an extra board on top of what launched in September.
A board for Route 66
The bigger addition is a new kind of board. Route 66 turns 100 this year, and since the Illinois DLC arrived in May the whole road now exists in ATS. SCS is marking both with a Route 66 Cross-Border Tourist Board that runs through Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.
Ownership matters here. Whatever map DLCs you have, the route shows up as a single active board in Atlas and in the world. Visit it and you uncover all of its locations in the states you own. You can explore those freely, but the special postcard only unlocks if you own every map expansion on the route and visit every location. Finish it properly and you also get a Route 66 air freshener for the cab.
SCS has thought about players with gaps in their collection. Activating the board without all the DLCs brings up a pop-up listing what is missing, and the board’s location list in Atlas marks which spots you cannot reach and which DLC each one belongs to. It will still appear in the list of all Tourist Boards, but it will not count against your Atlas Overview or Career Progress statistics.
Our take
A cross-border board is a smart fit for Route 66, which only makes sense as one long drive. It also shows how Atlas can grow beyond single states. The catch is plain: the full reward asks for eight map expansions, so for many players this will be a partial board for a while.
SCS has not given a date for 1.62 in this post, only that the boards arrive with the update.
Source: SCS Software blog. Images and video: SCS Software.
