Vancouver, BC, Canada, October 15, 2026 – Softree Technical Systems released RoadEng Version 12 today, with new tools for forest road design. Path Explorer AI, which searches the terrain for the best location for a new forest road, can now work around the roads, landings and crossings engineers already know. Version 12 also adds hydrology tools for road drainage and culvert design, plus Digital Pre-Planting, a new tool for planning plantation rows.
Path Explorer AI, introduced in RoadEng 11, finds road locations that meet grade and design constraints. In Version 12, routes can tie into existing roads, so new construction goes only where it is needed. Engineers can send routes through waypoints such as landings, saddles or preferred crossings, and set tangent segments the route must follow, such as a bridge crossing or a required approach into a junction. Path Explorer AI can also now locate a complete road network across a block, not just one route at a time.
“RoadEng has long been the standard for forest road design, and Version 12 is another big step forward,” said Jamie Black, RPF, Operational Planning & Road Design Team Lead at Forsite. “The 3D visualization and integrated hydrology tools help me produce better designs, but Path Explorer AI is what has changed how we plan road location. The new controls let the designer make the critical calls, and we can compare several feasible routes in minutes. We’ve now used it to plan more than 100 km of road for a range of clients.”
In an independent study published this year in the Croatian Journal of Forest Engineering, researchers from the University of Banja Luka and Šume Republike Srpske compared Version 12 Path Explorer AI with a field-designed forest road in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The AI designs needed at least 45% less estimated earthwork. The researchers concluded that AI-driven corridor planning has clear potential as a practical design tool, especially when paired with high-resolution LiDAR terrain data.
Version 12 also adds hydrology tools to the Location module for the first time. The new Streams and Ponds and Drainage Area to a Point tools identify streams, ponds and drainage areas and show where water flows and accumulates, so engineers can see where a proposed road crosses or redirects water before committing to a location. Drainage Area to a Point also provides inputs needed for culvert sizing.
“We recently used the new Version 12 hydrology tools to assess drainage on several roads with saturated subgrade problems. They helped us pinpoint the cause of the problem and work out a solution,” said Les Higgs, BC Ministry of Forests.
Digital Pre-Planting is a new tool that brings RoadEng’s terrain analysis to silviculture. Developed with Forest Growers Research’s Precision Silviculture Programme in New Zealand, it helps plan the establishment of plantation rows, balancing tree spacing and stocking requirements with the operating limits of in-block equipment on moderate and steep slopes. Foresters build a terrain model from LiDAR or other elevation data, import or draw block boundaries, divide the block into planting polygons by slope and aspect, set planting parameters and generate the layout. The result is a geolocated planting plan that can guide future operations and be shared with regulators.
Other updates include new grading tools, 3D road cut visualization and improved alignment management.
Path Explorer AI is available with Softree Optimal, the optimization add-on for RoadEng.
For more information about RoadEng Version 12, visit www.softree.com/version-12
About Softree Technical Systems
Softree Technical Systems is a Canadian civil engineering software company based in North Vancouver, BC, founded in 1989. Its flagship product, RoadEng, is used by engineers in more than 75 countries to design rural and resource roads for forestry, mining, renewable energy and infrastructure projects.
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