Where are the Kenworths?

With my recent posts concentrating on Euro Truck and building a company from scratch it may seem that my American Trucks have fallen by the wayside. Indeed, I haven’t been as active in the US recently as I was in the past. My main Euro Truck profile was lagging behind my ATS profile in terms of Levels but in the past month has overtaken it. I achieved Legend in Europe first which was a surprise and I’m now level 65 whilst in ATS I only just passed Level 60. Why?

Several things have conspired to bring about this situation. Firstly, I completed all the original Steam Achievements for ATS some time ago. Five new ones were added with the Heavy Cargo pack and I have cleared out two of these. I completed a third one requiring a drive of over 1000 miles with Heavy Cargo but it didn’t register as complete so I’m guessing that one is broken or has to be done with a Freight Market job rather than an External job. The other two outstanding achievements are reliant on getting the Transformer as a load and that cargo just isn’t dropping in for me – curses on all RNG’s.

The elephant in the room all summer has been the long awaited state of New Mexico. Without it, setting up the over 1000 miles achievement is really difficult. Also, although some minor stretches of road remain to be driven, most of the map of the existing states has been covered and there is little new to discover. The game is crying out for new content. That’s an observation rather than a complaint – it’s clear that SCS want to get the content right and that they are putting a lot of effort into making New Mexico very different from Arizona. That is a good thing – it would have been so easy to go down the Copy Pasta road. But it does mean the wait has seemed interminable. The good news is that New Mexico has entered Beta testing so we have perhaps 4 weeks to wait.

Another factor was the recent Trade Connections – France event on World of Trucks. That required a lot of driving in Europe too. I completed the challenge in 6 days and I may put together a quick post on that later in the week. But concentrating on the event also took me away from ATS.

My activity in ATS is not entirely dead. I continue to go for a drive in the hope that the Transformer will drop in. I’m in Rolled Gold specifically for that reason as she is one of my heavy haulers. A couple of days ago we took a Walmart double trailer overnight into Bakersfield……And yesterday having spotted a Transformer job up in Elko we drove up there with a 9t load of cars in the hope that another one would spawn. Using a 625HP truck to shift 9t is overkill and not very fuel efficient! We’ll see if we can coax a Transformer out of the electrons later today.