ETS 2 Coaches and ATS Road Trip: How Mode Switch Works

Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator are no longer only about trucks. With Coaches coming to ETS 2 and Road Trip adding cars to ATS, SCS Software needed a way to keep the different careers apart. The answer is Mode Switch, and the studio has now explained how it works.

Three modes

The games are being split into Truck Mode, Car Mode and Coach Mode:

• Truck Mode stays as it is: cargo and your trucking business.
• Car Mode, introduced with Road Trip, is about exploring and building a reputation with customers.
• Coach Mode is about running routes and keeping passengers comfortable.

What is shared and what is not

Each mode has its own progression, statistics and vehicles. Car Mode even uses reputation instead of experience points. Two important things are shared across all of them:

• Money
• Map exploration: a road discovered in a car stays discovered when you go back to your truck, and the other way round

Switching

You can open another mode to manage that career whenever you are not driving. The actual switch happens when you press Drive. You can only have one active job across all modes at a time.

For now, navigation stays tied to the mode you last drove, so you cannot plan a route for the new mode until you set off. SCS says it is looking at making this smoother later. The map shows where your other vehicles are parked, and after switching you continue from where you left that truck, coach or car.

Fatigue changes

Mode Switch is also behind the recent change to fatigue. Fatigue Simulation is now split into two parts:

• Rest State, how tired your character is, shared across all modes
• Mandatory Breaks, the legal rest periods, which apply to trucks and coaches but not to cars

Why it matters

It is easy to see Mode Switch as menu housekeeping, but it is the piece that lets coaches exist without breaking anyone’s trucking career. Shared money and exploration keep it one world, while separate progression stops a coach career from simply riding on years of truck XP.

Source: SCS Software blog. Images and video: SCS Software.