IN DEVELOPMENT · WAITLIST OPEN
RUN FREIGHTIN REAL TIME.
Deadhead is a freight operations simulator on real-world geography.
Run a trucking company: take loads, dispatch a fleet, keep drivers
legal, and manage cash against a market that moves without you. One
shared world, running 1:1 with the clock — it never pauses, and it
never resets.
One month free, then $3.99 a month . Nothing else is
ever sold. How pricing works
17 markets on the map
207 facilities running
1:1 with the clock
DISPATCH · TRUCK 03
HOS 06:12
NET $4,218
LANE — CEDAR RAPIDS ▸ CHICAGO
248 mi
CEDAR RAPIDS
CHICAGO
DES MOINES
DAVENPORT
MINNEAPOLIS
ST LOUIS
ACTIVE LOAD EST. PAY
Corn · 20t
$699
CLASS 8 + HOPPER · DRY
DRIVER RESTING
6:12 UNTIL LEGAL
Federal hours-of-service. The world stops your truck, not a timer you can buy out of.
DERIVED
Numbers that come from reality — population from census data, consumption from USDA and EIA, rates from published freight data.
UNPAUSED
A world that runs while you sleep. 1:1 with wall-clock time. No fast-forward, no pay-to-skip, no reset.
UNBUYABLE
Nothing that affects the game is for sale. One subscription, one tier. No purchase moves rates, capacity, or what you can see.
THE WORLD
Real geography, real names. The map is OpenStreetMap data, not invented terrain. Phase one is a slice of the US Midwest — 17 markets from Des Moines to Green Bay, with 207 facilities placed onto the real map by rule. The map expands over time and is never reset.
One shared world. Every carrier you compete against is another player. There is no single-player mode and no private server. When a load disappears off the board, somebody took it.
1:1 with wall-clock time. No pause, no fast-forward. A 248-mile run takes as long as a 248-mile run. The world keeps running whether or not you are connected.
Drivers are people with legal limits. US federal hours-of-service is simulated: the 11-hour driving limit, the 14-hour window, the 70-hour cycle. A truck stopped at the roadside is not a bug and not a paywall — it is the rule working.
Failure is a debt spiral, not death. Cash goes negative, a grace period opens, and trucks are sold to raise it — but never the last one. Receivership stops at a preserved core of one tractor and renegotiates the debt instead, so a company can shrink to its smallest and still be a company. Nothing is deleted, and nothing about being away from the game is unsafe.
THE ECONOMY
Freight is priced per lane. A lane is an origin market, a destination market and an equipment class. Its rate moves with the balance between loads offered and capacity available, and individual facilities nudge that rate by how badly they need the load moved.
You are paid by the ton-mile; you pay by the mile. Revenue rises with what you carry, while fuel, wages and hours rise only with how far you drive. That asymmetry is what makes a bigger trailer worth buying and worth its more expensive driver — and a flat fee on every load is what keeps a short run from being worthless.
The anchors are real. Population comes from census data. Consumption comes from USDA and EIA per-capita figures. Rates and operating costs come from published freight-market data. Most tycoon economies are numbers somebody felt were fun; here, "is this balanced?" is a question you can check.
Industry chains, not spawned cargo. 29 commodities move because something downstream needs them. Corn becomes ethanol and distillers' grains; soybeans become meal and oil; those feed livestock, which becomes boxed meat.
You are a carrier, never the owner of the cargo. Contract freight for steady work, a spot board for what is going now. You own the fleet; facilities are leased. Your money comes from moving other people's goods, on their payment terms.
Cash is the real constraint. Standard terms are 30 days. About a third of postings pay in two instead, at 5% less — the board shows which, so taking one is a decision you make before you roll rather than a rescue afterwards. Misjudge it and factoring will advance cash against invoices you already hold: a 3% fee, and a slice withheld until the shipper pays. Planning ahead is cheaper than digging yourself out, deliberately. That decision, repeated, is the game.
PRICING
One subscription. One tier. Nothing else exists.
Monthly $3.99 $3.99 / mo 3 months $10.99 $3.66 / mo 6 months $19.99 $3.33 / mo
What it buys: the right to issue commands — dispatch, hire, assign, buy equipment, take loads, factor invoices. That is the whole list.
What it does not buy: anything in the world. No purchase affects rates, capacity, or what you can see. A longer plan buys time and nothing else — no exclusive equipment, no loyalty bonus, no rate advantage. There is no second currency, no cosmetic store and no battle pass.
Why there is no free tier. Everyone competes for the same finite freight in one shared world. A free tier would have to be worse at something, and the only things it could be worse at are how many trucks you run and what you know — which would make paying an in-world advantage. So there is no free tier, and no advantage to buy.
One month free, with everything switched on. Time-limited rather than feature-limited, for the same reason. A month rather than a fortnight because standard payment terms are 30 days and the clock runs 1:1 — a shorter trial would end before a single invoice on normal terms came due, and you would have judged the game on money leaving. It runs through the App Store and Play Store, so it takes a payment method up front and cancels there.
Without a subscription you can still look. The board, the map, your company, your trucks — all of it stays readable. You see everything a subscriber sees and can act on none of it, because hiding the world from non-payers would make the subscription an information purchase, which is the thing that is not allowed.
One thing worth knowing up front. Loads taken on standard 30-day terms during a trial mature after the trial ends. If you let it lapse, your company holds real receivables it cannot collect, and subscribing collects them. We would rather say so here than let you discover it and think it was a trap.
If you stop paying, your company is not deleted. Nobody is dispatching it, so it stops earning while its bills keep arriving: it shrinks, selling trucks to cover what it owes. It is still there when you come back, and it can always be dug out — no company in this world can reach a state it cannot be recovered from.
ROADMAP
Ordered, not dated. A date on a pre-launch roadmap is a hostage, and this one is built by one person. What follows is the order things are intended in, and how far each one already is.
1 · More map. Phase one is 17 markets across the Midwest. Adding another is already a solved problem rather than a plan: markets live in content, the world rebuilds its structure on every boot and merges the saved companies back into it. That has been done to a live world holding a player with two trucks, $17,000 and $112,000 of debt — cash, fleet and debt came back byte-identical, and the token minted before the restart still worked. Of everything on this list, expansion is the part that already works.
2 · Live traffic. Real congestion feeding real arrival times, so a Tuesday afternoon into Chicago costs what a Tuesday afternoon into Chicago costs.
3 · Live road conditions. Weather, closures and incidents. On a real map in real time, a storm sitting across I-80 should be something you dispatch around rather than something you read about afterwards.
Two and three are one problem wearing two hats, and it is the hard one. This world is deterministic: the same seed and the same commands rebuild the same world, every time, which is what lets it be replayed, audited and restarted without anybody losing a company. Live outside data is by definition not replayable. The seam for it is reserved in the design, but it is the only thing on this list that fights the architecture instead of extending it — so it is last for a reason, not for lack of wanting it.
4 · Alliances. Contracts between players: hauling for another carrier rather than for a shipper, and committing capacity to someone who needs it. The least specified thing here, and the one most likely to change shape before it ships.
5 · And a long tail already reserved. Fleet ageing, so a 500,000-mile tractor is not worth what a new one is. Team drivers sharing a cab and a clock. Player-owned facilities instead of leased ones. Driver poaching between carriers. Regional hours-of-service rules, so Europe runs on Europe's. Fuel price swings against the surcharge, turning the gap into real exposure. Each of these has a seam left for it in the design rather than a promise made for it.
Nothing here is a commitment to a date, and the order can change. What will not change is that none of it will be for sale.
STATUS
World checking…
Clock watching for eight seconds…
World time —
Clock rate —
Build —
Deployed —
Why this watches the clock instead of pinging. Reads never touch the
simulation — they are served from published projections, which is what stops a
thousand people refreshing the freight board from slowing the world down. The
consequence is that if the simulation itself stops, the server keeps answering
normally with a world that is no longer moving. A ping would show green
straight through it.
So this asks twice, eight seconds apart, and checks that the world's own
clock moved between the two answers. That is the only question worth asking:
not whether the machine is up, but whether time is still passing in it.
This page is served from the same machine as the
world. So it can tell you the world has stopped, but it can never tell you
the machine has — if you cannot reach this page at all, assume the worst
rather than the best. Off-box monitoring is on the list.
