The city keeps its own records. Three crews left notes along the routes, and now you can read them. A Route Book told in chapters, a garage you earn piece by piece, races that find you, ghosts that race you, and a drift that bites harder on entry.
A drift now starts as a throw. The kart rotates fastest the moment you press, then settles into its angle, so the entry feels like a decision and not a slow push.
The stored entry torque lands at once and the steering fades in behind it over 0.3 s. Tok-tok, cuts and U-turns all start sharper.
Reverse, hold the brake and drift: the nose swings round the way you point it, and the drift ends when you face forward again.
Every kart now has its own hitbox, its own mass and a small handling character. Contact knows who is heavier. Kart 77 keeps the default tune.
Trailing karts get twice the pull they had, and the draft bonus is half of what it was. Packs stay close without the slipstream deciding the race.
If you press drift during its cooldown, a red DRIFT RECHARGING note and a cue tell you why nothing happened.
Handling changed, so Time Attack and Drift boards start fresh. Your earlier records stay saved on their old boards.
The Route Book is now told in three chapters. Each belongs to a crew who drove these roads before you, and each entry is a route, a technique and two lines in that crew's voice.
Route Book art, as it appears on the entry cards in game
Route sheets. Practical, counts the strings out loud. Chikurin Pavilion, Sprint Dash, Last Tram Descent, Relay Heights.
Resonance. Engineers who argue about names. Tok-Tok Circle, Hairpin Chain, Pumpworks, Sasanami.
Maintenance notes. Aliases and work orders. Fogline, Crooked Hill, and two runs of Watanabe Pass.
Six drawers fill as you finish entries. The sixth stays sealed until the other five are full. Every entry is open from the first launch: the book suggests an order, it never locks a route. Close the last one and the results screen says so.
The garage is now an inventory. Start with a base set of karts, rims, drivers and paint, and earn the rest by racing. Nothing you earn makes a kart faster.
Finished Time Attack, Drift, offline and room races pay Cells and XP. Route Book entries, course bests and top-10 board places pay too.
Every level pays Cells, and every fifth level adds a drop. Locked items still preview in the garage, so you can see what you are working towards.
Got a duplicate? Salvage it for Cells, or trade three in for one new item.
A full-body wrap for the Overspool kei truck: panel art, numbers and wear, projected over the kart's own paint.
Rooms now carry every player's paint and livery. Rival karts, seat cards and spectators show them as their owners chose.
Settings > Audio > My Music plays a folder of your own MP3, FLAC and WAV files on the station instead of the album.
Join the online race queue with one click and keep doing what you were doing. A plate at the top of the screen counts the wait, and the game asks before it moves you into a race.
An opt-in queue that matches you with players near your standing. Your rating moves with your finishing place and shows beside it on the results board.
Ask everyone online to join your room. The call also reaches the players' Discord.
Copy invite link gives you a Steam link to your room. A friend who clicks it in Steam chat starts the game and joins you.
Turn on GHOST FIELD in Time Attack to race up to three other players' board ghosts at once: the times just ahead of yours.
When someone passes your Time Attack time on Steam, the game tells you who.
A new room screen with clear seat labels and a start gate: the race starts when everyone is ready, and the host can ask the room to ready up.
The replay viewer gets a camera list, a trackside broadcast camera and two ways to read a line: your path as a string of ghosts, and the full lap painted by speed.
FOLLOW, TRACKSIDE, TOP and FREE on keys 1 to 4. TRACKSIDE cuts between posts along the recorded line, like a broadcast.
B shows the PATH: a ghost every 0.25 s over the last 3 s. M shows the LINE: the whole lap coloured from slow to fast, with a km/h key.
SAVE REPLAY works in every build, online races included, and races from older handling versions stay in your history.
The lit bars that crossed the road every 10 m strobed at speed. They are gone. Alternating cyan and lavender kerb blocks carry the speed cue along the edges instead, and Tok-Tok Circle and the other proving grounds get a start and finish checker.
Time Attack and Drift records start fresh in this update. Earlier records stay saved on their previous boards. Update to race online.
Municipal Ghosts has been in an open Steam Playtest since September. In that time we have shipped a new build most weeks, and 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. Thank you. A racing game lives or dies on how it feels in your hands, and we cannot find that alone.
So we want to tell you more about what we are working on, and why.
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. Night Shift keeps going in that direction: the drift entry is now a throw, reversing gives you a real J-turn, and every kart has its own weight. Each handling change resets the Time Attack boards, and we do not take that lightly. Your old 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, the new online systems and the replay viewer. Some of it is early on purpose. Cells, levels and the inventory are the part of a game that is hardest to get right on paper, and we want to shape them around how you actually play before the game is finished. Expect the numbers to move.
Other things are more experimental. Find Race is switching on in stages while we watch how it behaves. Ghost fields, physics mods and the track editor are ideas we like a lot, and they will stay if they keep earning their place.
Then there are things we know matter and have not reached yet. Some courses still wear early scenery. Rivals need a rebuild for the new handling. Steam Deck and Linux support is experimental. These are on the list for the next updates, alongside more courses and karts.
Thank you for racing with us. If you have not yet, add Municipal Ghosts to your Steam wishlist, and come and find us in Discord.
Dead Air Works