Preseason is on!

The night crews have left their marks on every road, and now it is your turn to run them. Preseason, our first season, is on: six contracts a week, a twenty-step standing with prizes, and tickets to race the crew's own ghosts. Find Race is now ranked: one click puts you in a race on any of our ten tracks, you bring your own tune, and Auto-requeue carries you into the next race. This update also brings a Route Book told by three crews, a garage you earn by racing, crates of paints and karts, 16-racer rooms, replays you can watch from new cameras, and a drift that bites harder on entry.

Check out everything that's new at: https://municipalghosts.com/updates/preseason/

We also wanted to tell you where the game is and what comes next. Municipal Ghosts has been in an open Steam Playtest since September, and in that time we have shipped a new build most weeks. Nearly every one changed because of something you told us: in Discord, in a crash report, or in a replay of a drift that went wrong. The game is unfinished and you play it anyway, and then you tell us what is fun and what is not. A racing game lives or dies on how it feels in your hands, and we cannot find that alone. Thank you.

This autumn we rebuilt the drift model from the ground up. The old one had grown too many special cases. The new one is a few simple rules, and tok-tok, cuts and U-turns all come out of the same physics on every kart. This update keeps going in that direction: the drift entry is now a throw, you keep more steering after you release Shift, and every kart has its own weight. We also halved the catch-up pull and doubled the draft, so a race is won on the line you drive. Each handling change starts the Time Attack and Drift boards fresh, and we do not take that lightly. Your earlier records stay saved on their old boards.

Earlier updates mostly did one big thing. This one is several pieces of work that ran side by side: the Route Book chapters, the garage and shop, the new online systems and the replay viewer. Some of it is early on purpose. Cells, levels, crates and the inventory are the parts of a game that are hardest to get right on paper, and we want to shape them around how you actually play. Expect the numbers to move. Preseason is the same: its contracts, prizes and length can still change while we learn what a season should feel like.

Then there are things we know matter and have not reached yet. Some tracks still wear early scenery. Rivals need a rebuild for the new handling. Steam Deck and Linux support is still experimental. These are on the list for the next updates, alongside more tracks and karts.

We hope you enjoy Preseason. Thank you for racing with us, and come and find us in Discord.