Week of June 8, 2026 — Team modes are here & Orbital Beam

Hey racers! Highlights: Team modes are here & Orbital Beam. Here's everything new this week.

New Brutal Rounds

• Antlions can't cross water now. In an Antlions round, water is a hard wall to the swarm — they prowl the shoreline instead of walking across it, just like zombies can't. Put a pool, river, or moat between you and the antlions and you've shaken them; an island in the water is a safe haven.
• New brutal round: Antlions! Sand is no longer just slow — linger on it for a couple of seconds and an antlion erupts from a nearby dune and comes after you (and staying put just keeps summoning more). Antlions can chase you anywhere, but they're a touch slower than your kart on good ground and they burrow back home a second or two after you lead them off the sand. They don't kill on contact — they shove, and a shove at the wrong moment is what puts you in the lava. Industrial thumpers pound the ground on a steady beat at a few spots in the sand: antlions can't stand the pounding, so inside a thumper's ring is sanctuary — every slam hurls them back out, while your kart rolls through untouched. Maps with barely any sand never roll the round, and it won't stack with Heatwave (the heat would cook the habitat).
• New brutal round — Heatwave: as the camera pulls out before the race, a heatwave rolls across the arena and you watch it transform — patches of sand bake into lava, ice melts into open water, grass dries out to dirt, and some dirt cracks open around bonus ability pickups (with good odds of an Ice Cannon — the heat scatters its own antidote). Every changed tile keeps a scorched rim so you can always tell what's new, and there's always still a path to the goal.
• Heatwave strikes twice: partway through the race a second, smaller wave hits — a "Heatwave incoming!" warning flashes on screen with an alarm, and the doomed tiles flicker with what they're about to become, so get clear before they flip.
• Heatwave rounds feel hot: a warm haze settles over the arena, embers rise off freshly scorched ground, the burn rolls in with a searing sizzle, and a low heat-shimmer drone hums under the music until the round ends.
• New medal — Firewalker 👣: finish Heatwave rounds without ever touching a scorched tile. The arena changed; you refused to acknowledge it.
• Heatwave joins the normal brutal rotation and can stack with other twists (it skips maps without enough sand or ice to scorch, so it always lands with real drama).
• New Bunker brutal round — a last-one-standing battle royale. The goal sinks underground behind a silo door at the start, so there's nothing to race for: a wall of lava closes in from the edges, herding everyone together until only one racer is left alive. The moment you're the sole survivor the goal erupts back up for you to claim the win. Zombies don't count as "alive," so an infection can't keep the goal buried. Works on every map.

New Maps & Modes

• Bonus orbs are now scattered on the map in team modes. Every round in a team mode drops one or two glowing golden orbs out on the course (more on bigger maps). The first racer from either team to drive over one banks +1 point for their team — a quick side objective to fight over while you race. Orbs favor the quieter corners off the direct line to the goal, so grabbing one means leaving the racing pack to detour for it. Each orb is a one-time grab: once it's collected it's gone until the next round, and the round summary now tallies how many bonus orbs each team snagged.

Map Editor

• Place a locked door + key. New "Door" tool in the editor: click to drop a door, then click again to place its key — doors and keys are always paired one-to-one. Right-click a door or key to remove the pair. The shapes and pairing are assigned in-game each round, so you just decide where they go.
• Two new placeables: Laser Gate & Crusher. The Hazards palette gets two timing puzzles. A Laser Gate is a laser barrier strung between two pylons that blinks on a steady rhythm — it sits open, shimmers a warning, then snaps solid and blocks the lane, then opens again. While it's solid you bounce right off it (it won't kill you — but park one over lava and the shove sends a message), so read the beat and slip through on the off-beat. A Crusher is a heavy steel slab that slides back and forth across a corridor on a rail like a Thwomp: get clipped mid-swing and it shoves you aside, but get caught as it slams home against the wall and it crushes you flat. Authors place and rotate both from the editor; rival AI racers time the gaps and cross when the coast is clear.
• Maps can have fences and walls now. The editor has a new two-point Barriers tool: pick Fence (a top-down wooden plank fence with posts) or Barrier (a concrete highway barrier with hazard stripes), click a start point, then click an end point to drop a solid line across the map. With the Select tool you can click a placed barrier to grab and drag either end, and delete it with the ✕ handle, the Delete key, or a right-click. Press Escape mid-placement to cancel.
• Two new Boons: Recharge Spring & Slipstream. The helpful-placeable family grows. Drive over a Recharge Spring and your punch bar instantly refills and your punch comes off cooldown — a pit stop that makes you immediately battle-ready. The spring is a shared charge: once a racer drinks from it, it visibly drains and refills over a few seconds (a filling ring shows when it's ready again), so timing and racing a rival to it matter. A Slipstream is a wind-current corridor that steadily carries you along the way it points — get shoved or driven backwards through it and the current fights you and pushes you forward again. Authors place both from the Boons palette (rotate the Slipstream to aim it; chain a few to build a long tunnel). Place either one on water and it switches to a watery look — the spring bubbles up as a foam-white well, and the Slipstream becomes a flowing river current — so it reads against the blue. As with all boons, rival AI racers drive straight through them.
• New placeable: Vortex Well. A whole new flavour of hazard — a force field that pulls your kart around instead of bonking it. It drags everything inside its ring toward the centre: carry speed and you slingshot past, but crawl in and you're drawn down into the swirl. The very middle is calm, so if you get caught you can build up speed in the centre and power back out through the ring — annoying and slow, never a dead end (unless someone parked it over lava). It even tugs on antlions during an Antlion round — the whirlpool drags the burrowers off their hunt, though they keep clawing toward you. Authors place it from the editor's Hazards palette and drag a handle to size it from a small eddy up to a wide whirlpool; rival AI racers steer around the core.
• New placeable: Dash Arrows. The first of a new family of Boons — helpful objects that aid racers, the flip side of hazards. Drive over a Dash Arrows pad and it gives you a quick burst of speed in the direction it points; hit it backwards and it fights you, so aim matters. Authors place and rotate them from the new Boons palette section in the editor. Rival AI racers treat boons as free help — they drive straight through instead of dodging.
• The Featured bar is a touch friendlier: maps now make the Featured playlist at a balance score of 85+ (was 90+), so a few more well-built tracks earn the badge.
• The map editor's fairness check now works fully on a controller: when a pad is connected, the "press Esc to hide" prompt shows the right face button (B / ○) and you can dismiss the balance overlay with it.
• Maps built with water are now scored and sorted correctly — water counts toward a map's character and balance check instead of being treated as blank ground, so a water-heavy map gets the credit (and the right playlist) it deserves.
• Map names now follow one consistent style (Title Case With Spaces) across the whole library — so names read cleanly everywhere instead of a mix of swim_fish_swim, RaceCondition, and 4suns!. New submissions are tidied up automatically.
• New Water tile in the paint palette, so you can build swimming shortcuts and water-and-lava gauntlets of your own.
• When the balance check says your map won't make Featured, the editor now draws the evidence right on the map: the race route from each start gate with its time (green = the faster side, red = the slower one — that gap is the fairness penalty), a marker showing how far off-centre your goal sits, and a legend translating every deduction into a concrete fix. Routes are drawn as real racing lines — straight across open ground, bending only for lava, holes, and bumpers (which they dodge the same way the AI racers do). The overlay stays up while you paint corrections; press Esc to hide it.
• Fixed: clicking the buttons on the "Submit anyway?" dialog (or any editor confirm dialog) no longer paints the map underneath — your brush is fully inert while a dialog is open.
• New "Start:" picker next to the AI toggle on two-gate maps: choose which start gate YOU spawn at when previewing (Auto keeps the old balanced placement), so you can test each side on demand instead of hoping the coin flip lands your way. Bots still fill both gates.
• Turning on "AI racers" for a preview now fields a proper grid of 6 bots to race against, instead of the lone bot the lobby's auto-scaling used to give a solo tester.
• New "Fairness" button: run the balance check any time while editing — no upload needed, no name/author required. It now fans out several routes from different start points along each gate (not just one), with each gate's time and spread shown, so you can see at a glance how even the start is. Same legend of fixes the submit check shows, and a ★ toast when your map would make Featured.
• The balance check is friendlier to real maps where the routes are just estimates: the race-length penalty now weighs less, since estimated racing lines can't account for ability pickups or skilled ice/grass play. Most maps keep their tier; the change only stops near-miss maps from being sunk by route-estimate noise.
• Spawn fairness now looks at every start point on every gate (not just one per side): the ideal is that they all reach the goal within about a fifth of a second of each other, and a broadly uneven start — whether between two gates or across one wide gate — costs a bit toward the Featured bar. The routes and their spread are drawn right on the overlay so you can see exactly where the unfairness is.

Gameplay & Balance

• New ability — Orbital Beam: call down a telegraphed strike from orbit that melts ice to water, scorches sand into lava, and torches any kart caught in its line.
• Aim the Orbital Beam like a bomb and fire it: the strike locks onto that line "from orbit" and a clearly-marked beam glows and pulses faster and redder for a 5-second countdown so everyone can see exactly where it's about to hit. Invulnerable karts, Star Power holders, and zombies shrug off the burn — but watch your own footing: it'll torch you too if you linger in your own beam, so fire it and clear out. Carve a new hazard across the track, cut off a chokepoint, or zap a rival caught in the open — a quick racer has five seconds to escape the line.
• Where the Orbital Beam drops fresh water right beside the lava it just made, that new edge hardens into the same impassable stone seam as natural water-and-lava borders, so you bump along it instead of being shoved across into the lava.
• AI racers now read telegraphs and scramble clear — they steer out of an Orbital Beam's marked strike line before it fires, and out of a charging lava-explosion blast, instead of sitting in ground that's about to turn deadly.

Quality of Life

• Locked doors and keys. Some maps now have a locked door sealing off the way through — a dark barrier stamped with a shape (a circle, triangle, diamond…). Somewhere on the map sits a matching shaped key. Grab the key and you carry it like an ability (it orbits your kart, and you can still punch and use abilities normally); the camera pulls back so everyone sees which door it opens. Carry it into that door and it swings open for all players, with a zoom-out and a little unlock flourish. Get knocked out or infected while holding a key and you drop it on the ground for someone else to grab — and if the collapse lava reaches a dropped key, it's gone for the round, so the door stays shut. Every grab, drop, and unlock shows up in the combat log. Which key opens which door (and the shapes) is shuffled every round.
• Double-tap punch to lunge — now on dry land, not just water. Tap punch twice quickly while holding a direction and your kart hops forward, the land version of the swim stroke you use to cross water. It's a quick repositioning move to dodge a hazard, scoot off sand, or duck a burn — not a way to go faster: the hop is short, it empties your whole stamina bar, and you're left slow and winded for a moment afterward, so a racer who didn't lunge will pull ahead. Like the swim stroke it's still a punch, so it shoves anyone you barge into. Speed-streaks and a whoosh sell the burst.
• Bots now lunge to save themselves. The racing bots use the new lunge to dodge a closing zombie, antlion, or hockey puck — a quick shove clear when contact is about to land.
• You can't drive through fences and walls. The new map barriers are solid — run into one and you'll slide along it instead of passing through, exactly like the stone seam between water and lava. They don't hurt you; they just block the way, so maps can now have corridors, pens, and chicanes. AI racers know about them too: they route around barriers toward the open ends instead of grinding into them.
• Water doesn't flash to lava when the world collapses anymore — it slow-boils. When the closing lava front reaches a patch of water it now spends about three seconds heating up — a tiered simmer → boil → rolling-boil warning with bubbles and rising steam — before it finally turns to lava. That's a few extra seconds to scramble across (or off) the water while it's still safe.
• A killstreak fire shield now lets you walk on water. Carry a flame into water and instead of getting doused on the spot, your shield lets you stride straight across — no swimming, with steam hissing off you the whole way. The flame burns down while you cross (just like it does on lava), so a big pond can still snuff it mid-crossing and drop you into the swim. Fire is now a real shortcut across water.
• Flames burn out instead of blinking off. A fire shield running out — on lava or boiling away on water — now fades out with a last steam puff rather than vanishing in a single frame, and burning karts kick up matching effects underfoot: embers on lava, steam on water.
• There's a combat log now. A small feed in the top-right corner flashes the moments as they happen — who knocked out whom, who melted into the lava, who grabbed an Ice Cannon, who snagged a bonus orb, and who's crossing the finish line — each with the racer's kart and name. In team modes the names and kart rings show their team colors, and finishes (and orbs) show the points they banked. Rows fade after a few seconds, and the ones you're in stand out.
• New hazard: the Rotor. A bumper mounted on a spinning arm that sweeps a full circle around its pivot like a clock hand — touch the head and you're flung off just like a regular bumper, but the safe gap comes around and around, so you have to time your dash through its ring. Map authors can place and aim them in the editor (Hazards palette). Rival AI racers dart across the ring between passes rather than treating it as a wall.
• New hazard: the Geyser. A vent that sits quiet, bubbles up a warning, then erupts and launches anyone standing on or near it — harmless between bursts, so the telegraph is your cue to step off (and a chance to time a rival onto it). Map authors place them from the editor's Hazards palette.
• New hazard: the Proximity Mine. Sits armed and quiet until a kart strays too close, then blinks down a fuse — just long enough to scramble clear if you're quick — before blowing up and flinging everyone still nearby, so the leader who trips it can catch the chasing pack in the blast. One use each. Map authors place them from the editor's Hazards palette.
• Karts now build up to speed. Instead of hitting full pace the instant you press a direction, your kart starts a little slower and winds up to its top speed over a couple of seconds of holding a steady line. Cut a hard turn or stomp the brakes and you dump that momentum and have to wind back up — so committing to a clean racing line is now faster than constantly jinking around. Top speed itself is unchanged; you just have to earn it.
• New hazard: the Bumper Wall. A pinball-style slingshot line that flings your kart straight off its face the instant you touch it — same springy sting as a round bumper, stretched into a whole wall. Map authors can place and rotate them in the editor (look in the Hazards palette) to fence off shortcuts or bank karts around corners. Rival AI racers steer wide of them rather than ride them.
• Matches now warm up before they bite. The first couple of rounds favor friendlier, more open maps so everyone gets racing — the real gauntlets (the maps where karts barely make it off the start line) are kept out of rounds 1–2 whenever the playlist has anything gentler to offer. Mid-match the map draw is the same shuffle as before, but once anyone reaches match point the rotation turns up the heat and deciding rounds skew toward the catalog's hardest maps. Works in every playlist — one with no easy maps just shuffles like it always did.
• The lobby got a full redesign. You now spawn on a grass plaza with all four stations arced around the spawn pad — Skins and Bots front and center by the road, Playlist and Game Mode on the plaza's edges — and a grass road leads straight to the start spinner on its own clean clearing, ringed by a few slippery ice patches in the surrounding dirt. The practice terrain moved out to the edges where it can't ambush you: an ability alley up north (bomb, speed, slow, cut pads), an ice rink in the north-east corner with a lava pocket melted into its edge, a bumper court and splash pool to the east — the pool's far shore runs into the lava springs and its sand beach, so you can see how water, lava, and sand collide (and walk the stone seam that forms where water meets lava) — and a sand drag strip down south. The sand hides treats too: Speed-Up and Ice Cannon pads in the drag strip, and Star Power pads on the lava springs' shore for the brave.
• Team modes are here — Crimson vs Jade! Pick Team Race or Brutal Teams: finishes and knockouts bank team points, deaths cost one, and the first finish past the target wins.
• Team scoring in full: first across the line banks +5 for your side, second +3, every other finisher +1, and knocking an enemy out earns +2 — but every death costs your team a point. Points float over the kart that earned (or lost) them. Once your team holds the target score, the next FIRST-PLACE finish by anyone on it wins the match on the spot — and deaths can knock your team back under the line, so match point is something you defend. If the rounds run out first, the leading team takes it. Your kart keeps its own colors and cosmetics; your team shows as a Crimson or Jade glow under your wheels, with the team score front and center all race.
• Teams stay fixed for the whole match — nobody gets shuffled mid-game. New players joining a team match are placed on the smaller team, and with bots set to Auto the grid fills to an even split.
• No friendly fire from punches: a teammate's punch simply does nothing, so you can brawl shoulder-to-shoulder without launching your own side into the lava. Abilities are still everyone's problem — a bomb doesn't care what team you're on (but you earn nothing for roasting a teammate with one, and their death still costs your team a point — careful with those). During an infection round, zombies bite whoever they like — even old teammates.
• In a Brutal Teams bunker round, the vault door opens once only one team is left standing — then the whole surviving squad races for the goal together.
• AI racers understand teams: bots never waste punches or abilities on their own side, and they'll aim their bombs, swaps, and blindfolds at the enemy team.
• The lobby's room settings now read as one tidy status card — Mode, Bots, and Playlist side by side in a single panel (with the limited-time claim banner riding on top when one is live) — instead of a stack of separately-floating pills.
• New Game Mode station in the lobby (the ⚔️ purple ring, top-right): drive in to pick what kind of game your room plays. The pick is room-wide, shows on a banner at the top of the lobby for everyone, and locks in when the race starts.
• New game mode — Brutal FFA: every single round is a brutal round. No mercy rolls, no warm-up — the chaos starts at round 1 and never lets up (brutal rounds can still stack extra modes on top, just like before). A warning banner at the round-1 gate reminds everyone what they signed up for. Standard FFA stays the default — and the mode your room picked sticks around for the next match, too.
• The join page now shows each room's game mode on its card (brutal modes get a red badge), so you know what kind of game you're walking into before you click Join.
• The in-game Codex now covers the Bunker brutal round and the Water tile — both had shipped without their reference cards, so the Learn page finally explains the buried goal, the closing lava ring, and how punch-swimming works.
• Controllers now rumble. Feel the hits you land and take, the heavy shake of a volcano or a collapsing arena, the green-light launch at race start, the splash and paddle of swimming, the steam hiss when water snuffs your flame, the rising countdown and ground-shaking blast of an Orbital Beam strike, and a jolt when you fall to lava, turn zombie, or cross the finish. New "Rumble" toggle in the settings menu (on by default) if you'd rather race quiet.
• The AI racers can swim now. Bots punch-to-swim across deep water just like you do, so they'll stroke their way over a water crossing instead of getting stuck at the shoreline — and they'll cut through a stretch of water when it's genuinely the faster line, while still taking the dry route when one's clearly quicker. (Water is slow going for everyone, bots included, so they won't dive in unless it pays off.)
• New terrain: Water. You barely drift in deep water on your own — to actually move, punch to swim: each stroke shoves you in the direction you're holding, so good swimmers can cut a watery shortcut across a map in a pinch. Swimming is a real punch, so it still knocks rivals around (and spends stamina), and the water drags on the hit. Climb out and you're briefly dripping wet and sluggish until you shake it off. Bonus: water puts out your flame — drive in while you're burning from a killstreak and the fire hisses out.
• Where water meets lava, the water's edge hardens into stone you can't cross — you bump along it like the edge of a hole, so a swimmer can't be shoved into the lava across that seam. Water is otherwise fully open to swim through.
• In infection rounds, zombies can't swim — water is a wall to them, bouncing them off the edge like a hole. So diving into water is a genuine escape from the horde (you swim, they can't follow).
• New "Default" map playlist — now the lobby default. It plays mostly Featured maps but rolls a wildcard each round, so about 1 in 5 races pulls in a community map for variety. The plain "Featured" playlist (Featured only) is still there if you want the curated mix with no surprises.
• AI racers (and the editor's balance-check routes) no longer try to thread pin-point gaps between cells that a kart physically can't fit through — those count as walls now, and tight-but-passable squeezes are only taken when no wider lane exists. Maps whose only entrance really is a pin-point now correctly read as having an unreachable goal.
• You can now DRIFT on ice: hold your punch charge while sliding and your kart digs in — you slow down a touch and get real steering control back. Your charge ring frosts over icy blue, frost spray kicks up behind you, your kart visibly leans into the carve, and you hear the skid hiss (nearby rivals' drifts too), so a drift never reads as a wind-up punch.
• New end-of-match medal: Smooth Operator — awarded for drifting the furthest on ice. Only clean drifts count: if your charged punch lands on (or clashes with) someone it was a wind-up, not a drift, and burning up in lava wipes the run you were on.
• New achievement trail: earn the Smooth Operator medal 20 times to unlock Powder, a kicked-up frost spray trail — and while it's equipped, your drift lean gets noticeably more dramatic.
• Releasing a punch on ice now scrubs a little less of your speed than on solid ground (15% more glide kept), so coming out of a drift doesn't slam you to a halt.
• AI racers have learned to drift: when a bot starts skating off its line on ice it now digs in with a held charge to regain control, releasing as soon as it's back on course — you'll see their charge rings frost over too.

Bug Fixes

• In team modes you can tell who's holding an ability again. The dashed "ability armed" ring now always sits in a clear gap outside a kart's Crimson/Jade team glow instead of merging into it — on bigger or cosmetic-skinned karts the two rings used to overlap into one band, hiding whether a teammate or rival was loaded.
• Join a room mid-round and the moving bumpers' rails now draw where they actually are — they used to show the rail starting from wherever the bumper happened to be at the moment you joined, instead of its true track.
• Two map hazards placed so their coordinates added up to the same total used to silently cancel one of them out at round start — every authored hazard now spawns.
• Firing the Ice Cannon (or tossing a bomb) while facing an in-between angle — easy to do steering with the mouse — no longer launches a broken projectile that could crash the whole room. The shot now flies exactly where you're facing.
• AI racers can finally get past moving bumpers. They used to treat the bumper's whole sweep as a wall — lining up in front of it and shuffling back and forth forever without ever crossing. Now they time it like a player: hold just outside the strike zone, drift toward the end of the bumper's run where the gap stays open longest, and dart through behind it as it sweeps away. On slow ground, where no perfectly safe window exists, they'll chance a crossing right behind the bumper rather than freeze.
• An ability grabbed in the lobby but not used no longer lingers on your HUD once the race starts. The server already dropped it at the gate (lobby pickups don't carry into the race), but the icon used to stick around looking usable; now it clears with the rest of the lobby.

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Includes v0.41.1, v0.41.0, v0.40.2, v0.40.1, v0.40.0, v0.39.0, v0.38.2, v0.38.1, v0.38.0, v0.37.0, v0.36.0, v0.35.5, v0.35.4, v0.35.3, v0.35.2, v0.35.1, v0.35.0, v0.34.1, v0.34.0, v0.33.0, v0.32.3, v0.32.2, v0.32.1, v0.32.0, v0.31.4, v0.31.3, v0.31.2, v0.31.1, v0.31.0, v0.30.3, v0.30.2.

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