This Is How Iceland Is Being Created for Euro Truck Simulator 2: SCS Collects References Directly on Location!

A team from SCS Software traveled to Iceland for the research, including several employees from map development as well as members of the marketing team. By that point, the DLC was already at an advanced stage of development, so the trip was not intended as an initial, fundamental exploration. Many locations and sections of road already existed in the map editor. The team was therefore able to specifically collect missing references, compare existing work with reality and document areas for which only limited material was available online.

An important point was assessing size, distance and spatial impact. Although mountains, valleys and waterfalls can be documented in photos, their actual dimensions are not always easy to determine from them. This is relevant for Euro Truck Simulator 2 because Iceland has to be heavily compressed to fit the game's scale. Roads, landscapes and landmarks have to be brought closer together without making the surroundings appear to have completely different proportions. The journey was therefore also intended to help assess which elements appear particularly dominant and which distances are crucial to the typical landscape.

During the week-long drive, the team mainly traveled along the western half of the Ring Road , roughly from the area around Mývatn in the north to Vík in the south. Different forms of landscape were documented along the route, including fjords, lava fields, rivers, waterfalls, mountain regions and open areas. Larger towns such as Akureyri and Reykjavík were also part of the route. For map development, it was not just the landscape itself that was relevant, but also how roads, settlements and transitions in the terrain interact.

The journey was particularly helpful for locations where only a few suitable online references were available. These included smaller coastal towns and port areas, among others. Such places often require details that are hardly visible in standard tourist photos: road widths, access roads, building arrangements, changes in elevation or the exact location of harbor entrances and side roads. On site, these areas could be photographed from several perspectives and then compared with the existing map version.

The typical character of the Icelandic landscape also plays a role in its implementation. Many regions are sparsely populated and consist of long open stretches, volcanic terrain and few major roads. For the virtual map, this means that not every area needs to be filled with buildings or objects. Instead, the surroundings must also appear credible in places where, for long stretches, there is nothing to see but landscape, road and individual farms or small settlements. The on-site images provide additional references to better assess the density of vegetation, development and roadside objects.

During the journey, the team was also able to ride along for part of the route in a Volvo FH16 XXL with 780 hp . This made it possible to view part of the surroundings directly from the perspective of a heavy truck. This is relevant to the development of a truck simulator because roads, curves, guardrails, gradients and lines of sight appear differently from this seating height than they do from a normal passenger car. Such impressions can also be taken into account when adjusting road layouts and landscape proportions later on.

In September, SCS finally published a detailed documentary about the journey. It combined real footage from Iceland with scenes from the developing game map. At the same time, further details about the DLC were shown, including smaller roads and more remote areas that do not consist solely of the Ring Road. This includes, for example, a hidden connection leading toward Þingvellir National Park, which crosses a narrow bridge.

The Iceland DLC is, as of October 3, 2026 , still in development and does not yet have a published release date. However, the journey shows that many areas had already been developed enough to be compared directly with their real-world counterparts. The purpose of the research was therefore primarily to review existing work, fill gaps in the references and document individual landscape and road areas in greater detail.

Players will later find it difficult to determine which individual detail can be traced directly back to this journey. Instead, the collected photos and impressions will feed into many smaller decisions: How large does a mountain appear in relation to the road? How densely are houses arranged in a town? How open is a landscape really? And which sections of road need additional details to appear credible despite the compressed scale?

How important is on-site research to you for an ETS2 map DLC—or in the end, does it mainly matter that the landscape feels coherent?