The pregame menu is presented on game load if there are no existing saved games. It displays:

• Your starting character
• The custom Objectives for the seed, if any
• The flags used when generating your seed
  • If the flags are too long to fit on screen, use the up/down arrows while “New Game” is highlighted to scroll the display.
• The version of Free Enterprise used to generate the seed
• A four-icon hash/verification code, used to verify whether this randomization correctly matches another independently-generated one.

Note that the window borders on the pregame screen are positioned at the outer edges of the screen, to assist with cropping for video streams.

The Custom menu can be accessed from the pregame screen, and allows you to change the default settings when starting a new game. This allows players in competitive settings to make personal adjustments without incurring a time loss during gameplay.

From the pregame screen, you may set the default names for the 12 different characters in Free Enterprise.

Name distinguishers will change a character's name when joining your party, to help differentiate between multiple instances of the same character.

• The normal name distinguisher appends a random letter/number to the character's name (or changes the last letter if it already 6 letters long).
• The silly name distinguisher changes the first letter of the character's name and sometimes appends/changes a letter at the end.

If a character's sprite is missing from this screen, that means the character has been explicitly excluded from the seed using Cno: or Conly: flags. In situations where you may not see every character (eg. with Cmaybe or Cdistinct: flags), a character's sprite will still be visible on this screen if they could theoretically be found. That is, character visibility on this screen cannot be used to determine which characters are actually present in the seed.