ETS2 First Hours Walkthrough: What to Do in Your Opening Session

Most ETS2 guides tell you what to buy and where to drive. Few tell you the actual sequence — what to do minute by minute when you're staring at the main menu for the first time. This is that guide.

I've restarted ETS2 from scratch three times (new profiles for testing different strategies), and the opening hours follow a surprisingly consistent optimal path. Here it is.

First 30 Minutes: Tutorial and Setup

The game throws you into a Quick Job immediately. It's a tutorial delivery — short, easy, designed to teach you GPS, coupling, and the delivery zone mechanic. Complete it. Don't skip it. The basics matter.

Once you finish that first delivery, park somewhere and open settings. You need to change a few things before you touch another job:

Turn Traffic Offenses OFF. Not forever — just for your first 15-20 hours. Speed cameras in Germany and Austria will eat your profits alive while you're still learning the roads. The fine for going 5 km/h over the limit is something like €550. That's a whole short delivery's profit.

Set Parking Difficulty to Safe Parking. The parking mini-game with keyboard controls is genuinely hard. You'll get to it later. For now, you need to focus on driving, not backing a 16-meter trailer into a loading dock the size of a postage stamp.

Bind Cruise Control to C (or whatever key you prefer). You'll use it constantly. Set it to 80 km/h on highways and you'll never get a speeding ticket again.

Set Mirror Quality to at least Medium. You need to actually see what's behind you. Low mirror quality makes distance judging impossible.

Now take the €400,000 loan. Go to the main menu, Company tab, Bank, Take Loan. Then drive to the nearest Volvo dealer, find a used Volvo FH16 (around €95,000), and buy it. You now have about €305,000 left. Don't spend it. That's your garage fund.

First 90 Minutes: Five Deliveries

For your first five deliveries with your own truck, stay inside the Luxembourg-Berlin-Rotterdam triangle. These routes are short (150-700 km), well-paved, and have high job density so you won't waste time driving empty between cities.

Route ideas: Luxembourg to Rotterdam (320 km, ~€6,000), Rotterdam to Berlin (700 km, ~€14,000), Berlin to Luxembourg (650 km, ~€12,000), Luxembourg to Brussels (210 km, ~€4,000), Brussels to Rotterdam (150 km, ~€3,000).

After five deliveries, you should have earned about €40,000 and hit level 3 or 4. That's enough for your first skill point investment.

Hour 2: Skill Points

Long Distance to level 2. That's it. This one investment unlocks jobs up to 500+ km, which pay significantly more per kilometer. Everything else — High Value Cargo, ADR, Eco Driving — can wait.

I made the mistake of spreading points across three skills on my first profile. Took me 30% longer to hit level 10 compared to my second profile where I focused Long Distance exclusively.

Hours 3-5: Building Capital

With Long Distance 2, you can now take jobs up to about 800 km. Rotterdam to Milan (1,100 km, ~€22,000) is the best route I've found at this stage. Berlin to Paris (1,050 km, ~€20,000) is a close second.

Drive at exactly 80 km/h with cruise control. Every km/h above 80 costs you about €0.15 in extra fuel. That sounds trivial but over a 1,000 km trip, 90 km/h costs you roughly €150 more in fuel. Not worth saving 8 minutes.

Rest when the yawn warning appears. A €300 rest stop fee is cheaper than €2,000 in accident repairs from driving tired — and yes, the game adds input delay when your driver is fatigued.

Hour 5+: First Garage

Once you've saved €180,000, buy a garage in Luxembourg or Rotterdam. Upgrade it to three slots (€150,000 total for two extra bays). Don't hire drivers yet — they need trucks, and cheap trucks cost €95,000 each.

Keep driving until you have enough for three base trucks plus the hiring fees (about €300,000 total). Then hire three drivers, assign them the trucks, and set their training policy to Long Distance.

At this point you've built the foundation. Your drivers generate passive income while you take whatever jobs you want. From here it's just scaling — buy garages, hire drivers, repeat. The game opens up completely once that first garage starts producing.

What to Avoid

Don't buy map DLCs until you've explored the base game's 71 cities across 12 countries. Scandinavia and Iberia are fantastic but you won't realistically reach them in your first 20 hours.

Don't upgrade your personal truck before buying a garage. Truck upgrades are comfort purchases. A garage generates income forever.

If you're on keyboard, consider switching to mouse steering or a controller. The binary left-right tapping of keyboard controls makes every turn a series of micro-corrections. An Xbox controller costs $30 and transforms the experience.