It is 09:00 CEST on Wednesday, September 3. The Undercut is out. Early Access starts now, on Steam, at $14.99 with –12% for the first seven days.
The build that opens Early Access is 0.5.4 — 0.5.3 with a week of your bug reports folded into it. That is not a coincidence, and it is the whole point of what follows.
Thanks
Most of 0.5.4 came from bug reports. Demo players, alpha players, testers running early builds on hardware and setups I do not have: the changelog below is largely a list of things you found and sent in, with save files, screenshots and steps to reproduce. Thank you.
That work happens on the Discord: discord.gg/sh6u6rMNeJ — bug reports, save files, balance discussion, modding.
⭐ 0.5.4 — what shipped with launch
Displays & performance
- High-refresh and high-resolution screens are supported properly.
- The resolution picker in settings is patched.
- Fixed: the game could crash on exit on Windows.
Race weekend
- Fixed: cars weaved left and right through corners on the hand-traced circuits.
- Fixed: team logos in the timing tower showed scattered fragments instead of a logo.
- Fixed: the lap counter vanished behind the pit-wall buttons at raised HUD scale — and the status row is shorter.
- Fixed: the qualifying run plan scrolls with the triggers, like every other screen.
- Fixed: simulated practice reported incidents against the wrong driver and flag, and its clock reached 00:00 with cars still lapping.
- Fixed: the minimap position numbers could be drawn upside down in Quick Race.
Career & world
- Driver market rebalanced.
- Car performance reads the way it reads. The weakest factory no longer builds a car that displays as zero, and development room follows the factory instead of contradicting it — a poor factory used to have more room to develop than a great one.
- Sponsors are shared across disciplines. A brand can back a single-seater, a touring car and a GT at once, from a catalogue roughly 40% larger. Every development series fields backers now; six of ten had none. See sponsors.
- Fixed: a sponsor your marketing had secured at 100% could still be taken by an AI team short of one.
- Scouting produces three times the work units per level — 45/GP at level 1, 180 at level 10.
- Race and championship prize money up 20%.
- AI teams can no longer rebuild or shed facilities between two races. They invest at the rollover, like you. Loans and share sales remain their in-season levers.
- The circuit pool is a choice again: hand-curated layouts or the legacy procedural generator, for new careers (Settings → Career).
Interface
- A new launch card: an Early Access notice with a button straight to the Discord, where the updates and the modding community live.
- Fixed: the career sidebar was drawn over by apps at raised UI scale, and caught clicks meant for them.
- Fixed: the turn card named the turn you had just left instead of the one opening.
- Fixed: opening Settings from the pause menu could pick a resolution by itself.
- Fixed: Escape then Enter on the main menu dropped the game out of fullscreen instead of quitting — a latched Alt from Alt+Tab.
- The end-of-phase button reads “Testing” on the step that opens the pre-season test.
Controller (Steam Deck)
- The selection ring takes any stick or the D-pad. It listened to the right stick alone, which the Deck’s default template drives as a mouse — so nothing could be selected: not the infrastructure departments, not the buttons inside a negotiation popup.
- Tabs step through the bar in the order they are drawn, and the bumpers are no longer reversed.
- The bumpers also raise and lower a work-unit or salary figure in the negotiation popups.
- The weekend repair screen takes Start to continue; it had no controller binding at all.
Tutorial
- The walkthrough opens on the pre-season instead of touring all twenty sidebar apps first.
- The welcome card draws the two title-bar buttons it talks about, rather than naming a colour and printing a web address.
- New guides: the Private Testing tab, and an end-of-turn note that nothing is spent until the turn is ended.
- Fixed: the weekend loadout and run-plan guides never appeared at all.
- Fixed: a step highlighting two apps lit everything drawn between them.
- Sarah’s voice re-recorded for every line that changed, and for seven that had never been recorded.
Modding & languages
- Fixed: dropping a single mod pack in
mods/applied it to every new career, including ones started unmodded — rewriting their drivers, teams, sponsors, calendar and rules permanently. - An English-only translation template (
lang/TEMPLATE.txt) for machine translation, and the language editor ships with it.
🏁 This is Early Access, and I mean it
The game you are downloading is a full career manager: a race weekend from free practice to flag, eleven series racing in one world, ~400 drivers with hidden traits and real career arcs, R&D, sponsors, contracts, scouting, modding tools, six languages, gamepad and Steam Deck support.
It is also not finished, and I would rather say so on day one than have you discover it on day three. There is polish left in the UI, balance passes left in the economy, and rough edges you will find before I do. That is what the update cadence is for — 0.5.4 exists precisely because a week of reports turned into a week of fixes.
How to help: use the in-game bug report (it now ships the log and the right config), or bring it to the Discord. A save file attached to a report is worth ten descriptions.
🗺️ What comes after launch
Five headline updates, each roughly 30 to 45 days apart:
- Weather & setup — dynamic weather, a full rain system, and a reworked setup system.
- Era update — a tech tree unlocking technologies from the early ’90s onward, plus an engine development overhaul.
- Playable Touring Car series — different cars, different budgets, different politics.
- Playable GT series — endurance thinking and multi-class traffic.
- Multiplayer — manage against people instead of a simulation.
Between and around them: continuous bug fixes, balancing and quality-of-life work, features driven straight by player feedback on the Discord, and a few things that are not on this page.
Every update along the way is free for Early Access owners. Version 1.0 is the destination, not a separate purchase.
The full roadmap lives here.
Lights out
Early Access is live now: $14.99, –12% for the first seven days. A career saved in 0.5.3 opens in 0.5.4 — save compatibility from here forward is something I intend to protect.
Twenty devlogs, a demo and an alpha got the game to this line. It is the start of the season, not the end of it.
See you on the pit wall.
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— Staz