18 Wheels of Steel: American Long Haul
I purchased this game ages ago on Steam in one of their bulk sales events. I let the game go mostly un-noticed since then. Until recently when I decided to try it out last weekend on my desktop. While the game is simple and may seem rather boring at first, it actually has some depth. I am not normally a fan of racing / driving games, so that is likely a big bias against the game on my part in the first place. However I was surprised by how it held my attention.
Getting my first delivery complete was a big accomplishment, but I made the mistake of going from Detroit to San Francisco with Waste, as I thought that was the only thing that I could transport at the beginning, since it was all I could haul from the first industry I stopped at. Sure I ended up banging the trailer up a lot, and getting pulled over for speeding and running red lights that I really made no money at all on that run. So, what did I do? Well I found no real incentive not to cheat. So I cheated.
First I disabled police. To do that you go into the config.cfg file located in the game files in My Documents. It varies upon install and Steam installs are likely slightly different then store bought installs, so just search for config.cfg and look for a file which starts out with the first line being “# prism3d variable config data”. To modify the police and fatigue, you may turn “uset g_fatigue” and “uset g_police” to “0”. Modifying other lines in that file may mess up the game settings, so unless you know what you are doing, I do not advise playing with any other lines.
Then, since that first run of mine made me broke, I decided to give myself more money. So I saved the game, and then found the save folder under /saves/ in the same directory that the config.cfg file was in. You can do a lot of interesting stuff in this save file, but you can not mess with the encrypted lines. Doing so will corrupt the save file. You can safely mess with the following attributes:
police_chase: false
Turning this to true, may enable police to actually have to chase you to give you a ticket. I haven't tried this yet, but it seems likely.
money_account: 50000000
This will modify your current money.
cargos_till_next_hire: 0
This will make it so that you can hire a new driver right away. Usually this is at 3. Setting it to 0 will enable you to go to a hotel and hire a driver right away. Of course this doesn't do you any good unless you have a contract to place the driver into. But if you have a couple contracts, you can always find a hotel, park there, save, set this to 0, then load and hire a new driver. Rinse and repeat for how ever many drivers you need.
It is kinda fun to strive for a large empire. However I am unsure if you can see your own trucks on the highway. Please let me know if anyone has encountered this!