Why am I always late?

[Maj.Woody]

I always play with rest periods on and do not wish to turn it off. I always take the route provided by the GPS and I take my rest periods when the meter is red, yet for some reason, on long trips I usually arrive late. What am I doing wrong here? How do I fix this?

[🦊 Hermit]

Originally posted by The Pitts:

Sorry Hermit but I think your logic is flawed. In the scenario you describe the 19 hours includes the nine hours of sleep, there would only be ten hours left to drive and that can be achieved within the next duty cycle.

If the player needs an extra sleep period then the game will add an extra sleep period. End of. I can understand that your gut may tell you otherwise, but with the vanilla game this has been proven to the degree that I can take the information in a save game and accurately recreate the start and end times for the delivery window for each job, as shown in the Freight Market. I am happy to share the full calculation but suspect that no one is actually interested at that level.

With respect, I don't believe it is flawed, because as I stated above the game calculated enough time for one sleep stop and no more. 19 hours driving time left on the delivery, 11 hours driving the shift, then the player would need to stop again for another rest with 8 hours still to drive. The time for the delivery will run out in 8 hours, but the truck is stationary for 9 hours while the second rest stop happens, meaning the player is already late when they wake up from the stop. Then they have to drive the remaining 8 hours, meaning that they will be a full 9 hours or more late at the time of delivery.

And I would actually be interested in seeing those numbers, if you would be willing to share. I'm by no means the best at maths so I'm not sure how much of them I would be able to understand, but I am curious about them.

And just to be clear - I'm not meaning that the game will only add one sleep period and never another, it's clear that it does do that. What I'm saying is that the game will add just the right amount of sleep periods, assuming that you start the job with the full 11 hours to begin with - it doesn't take into account if your sleep schedule is short at the time of picking up the load. Hence why, as I have said, countless times when I have taken a job without sleeping first to reset my timer, I have been in a position where I had to rest and yet doing so would put me late...and this has happened so frequently that for years now I have deliberately based my gameplay around resetting my sleep schedule before every job I take, in order to prevent that happening.

[The Pitts]

Originally posted by 🦊 Hermit:

With respect, I don't believe it is flawed

Your original statement:
"For example, there may be a job with 16 hours of drive time. The game will calculate those 16 hours, add on 9 hours for one sleep, and present the delivery time at around 25 hours (give or take, this is just an example). If the player takes the job when fully rested, then they will only need one sleep before delivery, and all will go fine.

But if the player takes the job when they only have 5 or 6 hours left on their current clock, then they will need to rest when there is 19 hours left on the delivery. Then they can drive another 11 hours, meaning they cannot make the remaining distance without a second rest. But that second rest will add on another 9 hours to their arrival time, meaning that they will be late for delivery. And if they do not want to be late, they must drive way past their time and incur fines for doing so."

We have started with a driving time of 16 hours. Let's say you had six hours left on the clock and you manage to take it right down to the wire to sleep. At that point you do NOT have 19 hours driving time left on the delivery, you have 10. You might have 19 hours left on the delivery window in this simplified scenario (in the game you would have at least an extra 67 minutes even for urgent deliveries) but you sleep for nine of those, and you now have an 11 hour duty cycle in which to complete your delivery with only 10 hours left to drive.

Originally posted by 🦊 Hermit:

I would actually be interested in seeing those numbers, if you would be willing to share. I'm by no means the best at maths so I'm not sure how much of them I would be able to understand, but I am curious about them

There isn't much mathematics involved, just standard add, subtract, multiply and divide across a fairly simple to follow set of calculations. However, it is difficult to avoid making this a wall of text.

Let's start with some definitions, firstly from /def/economy_data.sii in base.scs:

        simulation_avg_speed: 62.0      # km/h

        default_time_zone: 120          # +2 hours
        default_time_zone_name: "CEST"

        maximum_driving_time: 660       # how long the driver can drive (in minutes)
        sleeping_time: 540              # length of sleep (in minutes)

        delivery_window[0]: 400         # easy
        delivery_window[1]: 250         # medium
        delivery_window[2]: 90          # hard

those values will be referred to using the names they are given by SCS.

Secondly from a saved game.sii in the player unit:

 driving_time: 398

NOTE that this is how long the driver has been driving since their last rest period AS LONG AS fatigue is turned on.

and in the job_offer_data unit:

 urgency: 2
 shortest_distance_km: 2027
 ferry_time: 0

where urgency can be 2 for Urgent, 1 for Important and 0 for normal jobs and that since none of those names in game.sii clash with the ones in economy_data.sii we will refer to them using their SCS given names too.


1. Calculate the 'time spent driving' as shortest_distance_km multiplied by 60 divided by simulation_avg_speed

2. Calculate the 'time for rest' as 'time spent driving' plus ferry_time plus the smaller of driving_time and maximum_driving_time

3. Calculate the 'number of rest periods' as 'time for rest' divided by maximum_driving_time then subtract 1 and round up to the nearest integer

4. Calculate the 'total resting time' as 'number of rest periods' multiplied by sleeping_time

5. Calculate the 'total time for job' as 'time spent driving' plus ferry_time plus 'total resting time'

6. calculate 'window length' as delivery_window for the urgency

7. calculate 'start of window' as current game time in minutes plus 'total time for job' minus one quarter of 'window length' rounded down

8. calculate 'end of window' as 'start of window' plus 'window length'

9. if necessary adjust the window times to allow for the time zone of the target city and convert back to day of the week, hours and minutes

Phew, let's hope I didn't mess anything up converting my Rust source back to pseudo-code!?

Originally posted by 🦊 Hermit:

it doesn't take into account if your sleep schedule is short at the time of picking up the load

Hopefully you will be able to determine from step 2 above that it does exactly that, by factoring in how long you've been driving since your last sleep (up to the maximum permitted driving time).

It should also be apparent from all of that that mods can indeed affect this, by changing the key economy_data.sii values.

[🦊 Hermit]

Originally posted by The Pitts:

We have started with a driving time of 16 hours. Let's say you had six hours left on the clock and you manage to take it right down to the wire to sleep. At that point you do NOT have 19 hours driving time left on the delivery, you have 10. You might have 19 hours left on the delivery window in this simplified scenario (in the game you would have at least an extra 67 minutes even for urgent deliveries) but you sleep for nine of those, and you now have an 11 hour duty cycle in which to complete your delivery with only 10 hours left to drive.

Ah yes, I see what you mean now. Thank you very much for pointing that out, and I apologise for getting confused (I said above I was no good with maths XD). Yes, I admit and agree that my example above was flawed. But hopefully at least it gave some idea of the point which I was trying to make.

Originally posted by The Pitts:

There isn't much mathematics involved, just standard add, subtract, multiply and divide across a fairly simple to follow set of calculations. However, it is difficult to avoid making this a wall of text.

Hmm, that's an interesting read. I did struggle a little to understand all of it, but that's my own lack of comprehension not your work transcribing it, you did a good job and I thank you for that. So these are taken directly from the game files themselves, pretty much as-written?

In that case I do not dispute what is found there in terms of what they say and how they are supposed to work. But may I ask then, do you know of any cause or reason as to why I would experience the different behaviour in my game which I have seen so often and which I have stated earlier in the thread - namely, that I take a normal (not Just-In-Time) job with limited driving time left, am forced to sleep twice or more along the way, and end up arriving late despite the fact that I was not held up on the journey, did not take an alternate route or have any accidents, and maintained an above-average speed throughout? And all of this with no mods to affect the economy, indeed to start with no mods at all and the game running completely vanilla?

[kaki_gamet]

@Pitts - 3. should have the -1 before to divide by 660, all others are fine : )

"3. Calculate the 'number of rest periods' as 'time for rest' from which subtract 1 then divide by maximum_driving_time and round up to the nearest integer"

Glad I have not to put on an even bigger wall of text ^^'

@Hermit - no idea other than those already written before : / Too defensive driving, slower than speed limit, following slow vehicles, or Detours, or going to sleep too early compared to the 11 hours allowed, or having Route Advisor set to anything different than Best (the default mode used for job computation), or traveling in zones that are notorious for their high ratio of slowdowns like many roundabouts, many villages, border checks, etc.; until Italia DLC you would met not many of those situations but starting with Baltic DLC you will see many (maybe Iberia is a bit better on the matter) -.- I tend to drive in CEST time zone, I feel safe there ^^'

[🦊 Hermit]

A few of those could be elements for occasional journeys, this is true. Such as following slower traffic or having to sleep a little early because the next rest stop would have been too far along the road, for example. But these issues would surely not have been so consistent as to affect a large majority of my jobs.

And the other ones such as route adviser and border checks etc - I have always left the adviser in the standard mode, and a lot of these experiences were back when I played the game in the past, when I had just the base game, Going East and the at-the-time newly released Scandinavia. So there weren't the border check and toll booth proliferations that some of the later DLCs have given us. Since that time I started sleeping before taking any jobs in order to prevent these issues from happening, and recently when I picked the game up again I continued that strategy as a matter of course.

Come to think of it, might the age of my tests have something to do with it I wonder? Has this mission timescale logic been updated or adjusted at any point around the release of the France DLC or afterward? And if so, might the old system before the update have been less forgiving and caused the issues which I describe, but I have not seen the new, more forgiving system because I defaulted to my 'sleep before job' schedule and never tested anything else?

[kaki_gamet]

I doubt it has ever touched : / For me was even a surprise that the 62 Km/h were still there after so big overhauls of routing system. Only thing I didn't check is Cargo Market, if there it computes loading times on top of other things, times that are cargo/trailer related and again only access to those values is directly on site or through game files.

You may try and see if something changed for you (more confident, more aggressive truck), try to stay at speed limit or 5 Km/h above it when on tollway or if do you prefer the modding way, to reduce that 62 Km/h to say 60 Km/h would already give you more room, but on the other side all your hired drivers will be even slower than now ^^'

Ah! Come to mind of just now, Convoy. Not sure of what is going exactly behind the scenes there too but one thing is for sure, time flows fast even if you are on a menu. If you are using it often beware of this aspect too.

[The Pitts]

Originally posted by 🦊 Hermit:

do you know of any cause or reason as to why I would experience the different behaviour in my game which I have seen so often

Without being able to see some examples, with screenshots of the Take Job screen and before and after the rests taken en route, no.

I don't do a lot of Freight Market jobs these days (perhaps 1 in 10 jobs), in either ETS2 or ATS, but when I do I have no problem whatsoever delivering on time except for perhaps urgent jobs across borders or (mostly in ATS) with a heavy load and lots of elevation changes on routes with little or no highway. Equally I had few problems in that regard when all I was doing was Freight Market jobs (back in 2016 and 2017) and none when doing Quick Jobs at the start of my time with ATS (early last year). Your mileage obviously varies, but without some examples I have no advice to offer.

Originally posted by kaki_gamet:

@Pitts - 3. should have the -1 before to divide by 660, all others are fine : )

I did wonder whether I'd mess any of that up, but in this instance what I've written is what I've got coded (and which gives the previously validated results). The point of subtracting 1.0 after calculating the number of rests and then _rounding up_ is to cater for the one special situation we discovered where you do not get an extra sleep period added if the driving time works out to be exactly enough to deliver the cargo.

[Tha BKK]

Or try external contracts Job . It use real life clock you easier to decide .

[kaki_gamet]

@Pitts - Understood, that _rounding up_ was eluding my grasp, now is clear : )

[Maj.Woody]

Originally posted by neededlotus5:

drive 600 am to no later than 1230am then rest tired or not and this never shouid be a problem oh yeah and turn off rest mode because that was too anoying for me

Okay, I will try your idea on my next long trip. I would never turn off rest periods because managing them is really what is at the heart of trucking

[kaki_gamet]

They mean to drive for 6 hours (6am~12am) then sleep twice (18 hours), but then you need always jobs of about 6 hours (or World of Trucks jobs) : / In short, a way to avoid night.

[76561199277134685]

Do you control the rush time of work? If you say "what is that?", when you make a job selection, there will be tiny symbols from 1 to 3 on the side like this and >. In addition, the rest period is 9 hours. It would be good for both you and your in-game money (dollars, euros, etc.) to choose a job with the risk of it, because you will receive a considerable amount of penalty without delay. One suggestion I have is this: last until the character starts to "nap". I hope I was helpful. I wish you enjoyable games :)

[Smokey]

Never been late yet, maybe a bus job is better for you people since they always are late ^^
edit: have done many 2000+ km jobs with red time flag but never been late personal

[Smokey]

Originally posted by kaki_gamet:

They mean to drive for 6 hours (6am~12am) then sleep twice (18 hours), but then you need always jobs of about 6 hours (or World of Trucks jobs) : / In short, a way to avoid night.

Normally its monday you start the job and should end in sunday, unless you already are behind in game days..

[Maj.Woody]

Originally posted by ~{DCMT}~ Ryu:

It doesn't matter how long you have left on your sleep timer. The game will always give you enough time to complete the job being offered. I have taken jobs that were more than 55 hours of driving and needing to sleep 4 times and still had time left before I would be late.

What may kill you is taking an Important or Urgent job requiring one or more border crossings in the Baltic or Black Sea DLCs. While the game gives you enough time to drive and take sleep breaks, it does NOT compensate for delays at border checks or slower speeds and traffic on small roads and in cities/towns.

This was a run I did today. I took two rest breaks and drove on or close (over) to the speed limit
https://imgur.com/a/geqYYSu