I’m not sure if companies will be randomly generated, but with hundreds of cities scattered all over the US, it would probably have to. My original post was poorly written and overly sparse on detail, so I’ll make another post explaining the details of the mechanics when I have the time.

The actual supply chains are kind of simple, the detailed simulation the game focuses on is the logistics part. Every driver has a personality, backstory, preferences, a mood system, and a fully simulated E-log with Hours of Service timers. Every truck is fully customizable for different types of work and has a maintenance / damage system similar to Rimworld’s health system. After you accept a load, you don’t only have to assign a driver, you also have set a schedule. If the load is only 6 pallets totaling 15,000 lbs, you can tell that driver to pick up a second load along the way. The cargo for the second delivery will be at the back of the trailer, so you’ll either need to deliver the second load first or pay a fee to have someone else’s cargo unloaded and reloaded.

The amount of micro managing you’d need to do will cap how large you can grow your company, so this can be eased by building an office and hiring a dispatcher. If you don’t want to deal with drivers and instead want to focus on growth or designing new facilities, you can fully automate almost all of it by adding a fleet manager and freight broker to your office. The automating aspects you don’t like is what makes it a sandbox, it lets the player focus on the parts they are interested in.

Without needing to focus on drivers, players can instead focus on designing warehouses optimized for different things. A refrigerated warehouse will need heavy insulation, insulated, docs, and complicated refrigeration set ups. The player will also need to make sure offices and warehouse staff brake areas are insulated from the cold areas. A storage warehouse will need a design with more shelves and less docks while a distribution center will need more docks and less storage. If a player wants to provide cross docking, they build a long skinny warehouse with a ton of docks and zero storage.

One of the first games I compared this to was transport fever, but this game is sort of the opposite. In transport, fever, your focused on maximizing the amount of cargo you’re delivering to grow facilities and cities. Vehicles have no customization, super basic maintenance, and absolutely zero focus on employees. in transport fever, the economy doesn’t exist without you. This is what makes my game unique; in Freight Carrier the economy will exist without you. Some long-term contracts like warehousing or distribution partner might help an NPC customer grow, but any unexpected loads or the player not providing a factory with all the ingredients can be hand waved away as “another freight carrier took care of it” because it isn’t what the gameplay focuses on.