Hi Truckers,

The moment you’ve all maybe been waiting for has finally arrived; offline progress is live! That’s right, any time you’re offline your truck will keep on truckin’. Your progress is now saved in real-time so say goodbye to those extremely fun and not even remotely annoying desync issues. Now that offline progress actually exists, it’s probably a good time for a quick recap.

Offline progress aka Cruise Control™ effectively puts your truck on auto-drive the moment you disconnect from the server (we’ll let you know with an alert) and keeps going infinitely until you get back. When you do return, and you better damnit because those crates aren’t going to crack themselves, you’ll get another alert letting you know how far you drove, the amount of cash you earned, and any crates you picked up for completing a route. Boom.

A few things of note while offline I’ve mentioned several times in the past but I mean honestly I don’t even read my own posts at this point:

• Buffs are inactive
• Nitro will not trigger (including auto-nitro)
• Parts, upgrades, and shop bonuses are applied to offline power (speed)
• Overall power is reduced while offline

Yeah, that last bullet point. After almost two weeks of testing, we landed on reducing the offline power for a few reasons. First off, it’d blow your mind how fast you can drive across the game world when you’re literally doing anything other than playing the game. You could blow through all that tasty content while drowning in watermelon White Claws and binging Squid Game and if that sounds oddly specific I did that last week; mystery solved.

The point is, building a game so people can avoid playing it as much as possible felt equal parts stupid and hilarious, but also increasing route lengths to obnoxious distances felt like we were punishing the active players. We landed on reducing overall power while offline because it felt like the most fun/fair approach. Active players can keep on truckin’, while offline junkies still make a lot of progress without skipping the entire game. As an added and definitely calculated bonus, we realized this could provide opportunities to introduce “offline parts” like engines or totems that improve offline performance. We’ve always wanted to introduce “builds” to improve player agency and this is the first step in that direction. Let us know what you think!

In addition to offline progress, as mentioned the last few weeks, we needed three very specific alerts. “Alerts” are basically notifications over the game client when we need to tell you something, like the server is going down, you’ve been disconnected, and/or what kind of things you(r truck) did while offline. All three of these have been built, implemented, and tested. Done.

Lastly, with a little time left, we made a few small changes to the timers. The Daily Goals now refresh every 8 hours, down from 24 hours. You probably don’t need a lengthy explanation as to why, so to put it in simple professional game dev terms, it felt bad and now it feels less bad. We also shaved 4 minutes off of the Track cycle, so instead of races every 10 minutes or so, they run every 6. Have fun with that.

Before I wrap this up, I can’t resist the opportunity to thank our players once again. Y’all have been patient and supportive the whole time and we appreciate it. This patch has been a slog but a damn necessary one, damnit. Now that we’ve got offline and real-time progress we can completely focus on balance, polish, and content, and we’re f#$@ing pumped.

Pumped af rn,

Dan & Mike