- Primary Subject: American Truck Simulator (Version 1.61)
- Key Update: Developer SCS Software faces significant map compression challenges as ATS expands into the densely populated East Coast using its established 1:20 scale ratio.
- Status: Confirmed
- Last Verified: October 9, 2026
- Quick Answer: SCS Software maintains a 1:20 map scale in American Truck Simulator, though dense East Coast geography presents tightening map compression challenges.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 makes its 1:19 scale look easy, and I covered why here. Its American sibling has a harder time with almost the same number. American Truck Simulator launched on February 2, 2016, with two states and a map built at 1:35.
Within five months, SCS Software admitted in a blog post that map scale was probably the thing players complained about most, and that it would rebuild the whole map at 1:20.
That ratio has held through all 21 states on the map today, and it gets harder to make work the further east SCS goes.
SCS rebuilt the entire map once, in 2016
The blog post, called The Rescale, went up on June 23, 2016. SCS said the change would put ATS on the same footing as Euro Truck Simulator 2 and leave more room for densely populated areas in future expansions.
It also explained why it couldn’t wait. “It’s either now or never,” the post said, because every new state would make a big change harder later. At the time, that meant reworking just California, Nevada, and Arizona.
The open beta went live on November 15, and update 1.5 made it official on December 12. Roads outside cities got 75% longer, and Santa Maria was added to California. SCS hasn’t rescaled ATS since.
SCS picked 1:20 partly because of the workload
About a year later, a developer posting as Max explained the thinking on the SCS forum.
The launch map was really 1:34.5, he said, and the team looked at 1:28, 1:25, and 1:24 before landing on 1:20. It matched ETS2, and in his words, it was an “acceptable amount of work.”
He also said a map’s scale “just describes how much work you want to invest.” On a paper map, he added, it’s “how much paper you want to fold and carry.”
Every mile that stays in the game is a mile somebody at SCS fills by hand, right down to the billboards.
Cities don’t follow the ratio at all, and SCS has never said what scale it uses for them.
The West had miles to spare
Compression barely hurts out West. A 200-mile drive across Nevada becomes about ten miles in the game, and most of what gets cut is sagebrush.
From New Mexico in 2017 through Montana in 2022, SCS mostly had that kind of open country to work with.
The reworks still show where things pinch. California was rebuilt in four phases between 2021 and 2024, and along the way Oakdale was dropped for San Jose and Modesto.
The Route 66 rework in February swapped Holbrook for Winslow, and the Nevada rework announced in July adds Fallon. The scale stayed at 1:20 through all of it.
Texas and Chicago are already feeling the squeeze
Texas came out on November 15, 2022, with 29 cities, and Texarkana later brought it to 30, still the most of any state in the game. Thirty sounds like plenty until you look at how big Texas is.
Illinois, released May 14, 2026, is the more obvious case. In its Chicago preview, SCS wrote that Navy Pier was “represented creatively within the game’s scale.”
The drivable downtown covers the Loop, parts of Streeterville, and the Near South Side, under what SCS called the largest skyline it has ever built.
Rhode Island would take about two minutes to cross
The Northeast is where the math gets ugly. I-95 from Washington, DC to Boston runs about 440 miles, which comes out to 22 miles in the game, or roughly 20 minutes at highway speed.
Rhode Island’s 42 miles of I-95 shrink to about two. All of Delaware would fit into around six square miles.
Those are my own back-of-the-napkin numbers, and they don’t account for how SCS handles cities. Still, the cities along that corridor practically run into each other, and there isn’t much empty land between them to cut.
ETS2 has been here before. It fits Luxembourg and Germany’s Ruhr area at 1:19, though German players on the SCS forum have pointed out the Ruhr cities that never made it onto the map. An East Coast DLC would probably go the same way.
SCS hasn’t said how it will handle the East Coast, and it hasn’t announced a single Northeast state. The next step east is Indiana, announced on June 5 and still listed on Steam as “To be announced.”
It will be the first ATS state in the Eastern Time Zone.
SCS has earned the benefit of the doubt
I’m looking forward to seeing how SCS pulls it off. The studio has a strong record of making places feel real at a twentieth of their size, and a lot of that comes from legwork.
SCS regularly sends map teams on research trips, and the Indiana one put four people on the road for nine days to photograph courthouses, murals, billboards, and the small details that are hard to make out on Street View.
Map DLC lead Dubak said the team had worried Indiana would be mostly fields and found rich cities and varied scenery instead.
Homework like that is why I’m optimistic about every state still to come, East Coast included, even if 1:20 means a few towns don’t make it.
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