Map Combo Beginners Guide — ETS2 & ATS
This is the map combo beginners guide for Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator.
I’m not covering one specific combo here — I’m covering the principles that work for any combination, on any version. Whether you’re watching this on 1.60 or something newer, the logic stays the same.
Requirements
Before downloading anything, two things need to be in order.
First — the game itself. ETS2 and ATS are Steam titles. You need a legitimate copy. That’s it, no workarounds needed.
Second — map DLCs. You need all of them. Not most, not the ones you like — all of them.
Mod developers build on top of official DLC assets. If you’re missing even one DLC, mods that use its roads, cities, or terrain data will fail or cause crashes.
For ETS2 that currently means all paid map DLCs: Iberia, Road to the Black Sea, Beyond the Baltic Sea, Italia, Vive la France, Scandinavia, Going East, West Balkans, Greece, and Nordic Horizons. For ATS: every state DLC released to date, which as of 1.60 includes Illinois.
One thing worth knowing: both games receive periodic free reworks of older regions. SCS rebuilds areas from scratch and ships them as free updates — Benelux, Germany, Austria for ETS2; Route 66 and California for ATS, with UK coming next for ETS2. These are not separate purchases. They arrive with game updates and automatically improve existing DLC content. Mod developers build on top of these too, so keeping your game updated matters just as much as owning the DLCs.
Budget tip: Paid DLCs go on deep discount during Steam seasonal sales — Summer, Autumn, Winter. If you just bought the game, wait for the next sale before spending on all of them. It’s worth it.
Collecting Mods
The easiest starting point is a ready-made combo guide — like the ones on trucksim.top — where someone has already listed all the links in one place. Use the most recent date you can find, because mod versions change with every game update.
Most mods are hosted on Sharemods, MediaFire, Trucky or similar file hosts. Some require a free account, some have slow download speeds on the free tier — that’s normal, just factor in the time.
A few things to know before you start downloading:
Map backgrounds are critical. They look like optional extras but they’re not — they contain map data, zoom levels, and extensions that the combo needs to function. Always include them.
Patches and road connections are not optional. Every combo needs connection patches between maps, and usually a combo fix file that sits at the bottom of the load order. These are small files that most beginners skip — and then wonder why the combo crashes.
Extra mods need caution. Weather mods, real company mods, sound packs — these can conflict with map mods. If you want to add something not in the guide, add it alone first and test before adding more.
On piracy: Don’t use unofficial repacks of paid mods. Beyond the ethics, you simply can’t verify what’s in the file. Stick to official sources linked by the developers.
Installing Mods
All mod files go in one folder:
- ETS2:
Documents / Euro Truck Simulator 2 / mod - ATS:
Documents / American Truck Simulator / mod
Files should be in .scs format. Some downloads come as .zip — if the zip contains .scs files inside, extract them. If the zip itself is the mod, it can sometimes work as-is.
Keep this folder clean. Remove mods you’re no longer using. My active ETS2 mod folder runs over 100GB — if you let outdated files accumulate, troubleshooting becomes a nightmare.
Always create a separate profile for map combos. Don’t mix a big combo with your main save. This protects your existing progress and makes testing much easier.
Performance Settings
Good news here — this got simpler with recent engine updates.
Config file: Navigate to your game’s config.cfg. Find the line uset r_buffer_page_size and make sure it’s set to the default value of 10. Some older guides told you to raise this — that advice is now outdated and can actually hurt performance on current versions. Reset it to 10 if you changed it.
Steam Launch Options: If you have memory allocation parameters in your launch options — specifically -mm_pool_size, -mm_max_resource_size, or -mm_max_tmp_buffers_size — remove them. The engine no longer needs manual memory allocation. The game manages it better on its own now.
What you can keep:
64bit -nointro -unlimitedlog -rdevice dx11
That’s enough. Clean and simple.
Load Order
This is where most beginners go wrong. Load order is not optional and it’s not flexible — wrong order means a broken combo, guaranteed.
The mod manager starts empty the first time you open it. You move files from your mod folder into the active list one by one, and the position of each file in that list is the load order.
The key principle beginners miss: fixes don’t go in one block at the bottom — each fix sits directly above the map it patches. A fix file needs to load after the map it’s correcting, so it sits above it in the list. Road connections between two maps sit above both of them.
Map background goes at the very top — it needs to see the entire combo below it to extend and render it correctly.
This is why you cannot improvise the order. Don’t try to figure it out yourself — just follow the exact sequence from the guide you used. The video description shows the full list. Copy it exactly.
Troubleshooting
If the combo doesn’t load or crashes:
Check these first, in this order:
- Are all map DLCs installed and activated in Steam?
- Is every file from the guide present in your mod folder — including patches, fixes, and backgrounds?
- Is the load order exactly as shown in the guide?
- Are there any extra mods active that weren’t in the guide?
Most failures trace back to one of these four. There’s no shortcut — if something is wrong, you go back through the checklist.
The game log file (game.log.txt in the same folder as config.cfg) will show you exactly which mod is causing a conflict if you want to dig deeper.
After a Game Update
This is the reality of live-service games: when ETS2 or ATS updates, most map mods need to update too. You can’t run 1.59 mods on 1.60 — the game will tell you they’re incompatible.
When a new version drops:
- Don’t update the game immediately if you’re mid-combo
- Wait for mod authors to release updated versions — this usually takes a few days to a couple of weeks for major mods
- Check trucksim.top or the channels you follow for an updated combo post before rebuilding
Patience after a game update saves a lot of frustration.
That covers everything you need to build a working map combo from scratch. If you have questions, drop them in the comments.
