Wreckfest 2 News — May 19, 2026
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
NEW CONTENT
- New half-car, with a ragdoll driver!: Half a Crusader
- New European RWD 00s wagon: Stahlwagen
- New European FWD 90s hatchback: Valken
- New US based racing venue with three layouts: Mora Raceway
- A long, full tarmac track perfect for racing;
- A shorter contact racing focused sprint track;
- A high speed tarmac oval.
- 7 new Challenge events for your enjoyment.
TUNING
- The first version of tuning system is here!
- With brakes, differential, suspension, gearing and even steering that you can tune to your liking, allowing in-depth customization of the car.
- Settings can be saved into presets that you can load later, also in the multiplayer lobby.
- You can access the tuning settings either in the Garage or Pre-Race Screen.
SYSTEM
- Fixed a number of crashes and improved game stability.
- Fixed an issue which caused game settings not being saved.
- Improved build packaging to allow smaller update sizes for future updates and patches.
RENDERING
- Optimized game performance.
- Optimized game VRAM usage.
- Improved texture compression quality.
- Fixed a number of memory leaks.
- Improved auto exposure.
- Fixed car tag jittering.
VEHICLES
- Major visual damage upgrade thanks to updating the physics simulation engine to Extended Position Based Dynamics and switching to signed distance field (SDF) collisions for more accurate object collisions and interactions.
- Improved tire simulation.
- More realistic tarmac tire model.
- Various improvements to car setups.
- Stability Control assist now works in a more physically correct way.
- Improved Traction Control profiles.
- A big set of new Crap-It decals.
GAMEPLAY
- New Suicide Racing game mode, available for the new high-speed oval.
- Gameplay damage is now more consistent between different cars.
- Different types of dynamic objects now cause more appropriate gameplay damage.
- Mechanical damage is now triggered more appropriately depending on the car state.
- Improved attacker/defender detection logic to assign status correctly, as a result score attribution is improved so you get score when you should and no score when you shouldn't.
- You can now score a mechnical hit on the opponent by targeting their wheels, engine or radiator; these come in two flavors, either a damage state incrementing hit (for example ENGINE HIT) or a terminal hit (ENGINE DESTROYED, for example).
- Improved the way consecutive (chained) scoring works so no score is now silently throttled.
- RAMMING, HEAD-ON, T-BONE, REAR-ENDER and BARRIER SLAM scores now have three rating tiers, visualized by stars in the scoring notification. To improve the rating you need to cause more health damage to the opponent car.
- You can now score 180° and 360° SPIN in addition to the 90° SPIN, classified as stars too.
- The BARRIER SLAM score is now attributed more reliably when you ram the opponent to an obstacle.
- There's now a new TRADING PAINT score for light contact. You will be awarded this score whenever you do any health damage to the opponent car but not so much that you would be awarded RAMMING, HEAD-ON, T-BONE or REAR-ENDER score..
AI
- Improved AI turning behavior for more accurate and natural racing line following.
- Added more variety to AI racing lines and better track width coverage.
- More natural AI behavior on the opening straight.
- Improved AI stability and handling during jumps.
- AI can now dodge oncoming traffic.
- Improved Novice and Amateur difficulty levels.
- Fixed single AI cars breaking too far ahead of the pack.
- Added a new "Random" AI Set.
- Improved AI Set generation.
USER INTERFACE
- Car selection now displays the car thumbnails rendered with the currently selected design for the car.
- Please note that to trigger thumbnail generation for your existing designs you need to go into Crap-It and hit save once.
- Tachometer is now displayed with an appropriate RPM range based on the max engine RPM.
- The red zone in the tachometer now starts before the actual RPM limit like in a real car.
- Compass is now displayed in the derby modes too, showing the other cars and their health.
- Current player position is now shown in the car tag.
- When car is on low health (under 25%), the car tag is visible from a further way and the health bar is rendered red to make it easier to target these cars.
- When a car is wrecked, the health bar is now removed completetely and the car tag dimmed to make it easier to avoid hitting dead cars.
- It's now possible to disable car tags with the new "Show Car Tags" setting in Settings/Gameplay, and you can also bind an input (in the Settings/Bindings tab) to toggle car tags on/off during gameplay.
- Player list now has three modes: compact (four players), full and off, configurable in the Settings/Gameplay tab. You can also bind an input in the Settings/Bindings tab to cycle between the different modes during gameplay.
- You can now choose between Metric and Imperial units in the Settings menu.
- Audio Settings can be now reset back to defaults with the Reset to Defaults button.
- Event creation weather selection now defaults to the new "Random" option.
- Chat overlay is now easier to read and scales better across different resolutions/aspect ratios.
- Miscellaneous HUD scaling improvements across resolutions and aspect ratios.
- Many other improvements to HUD visuals and layout.
ONLINE
- New lobby car quick select: you can now choose the car, design, tuning preset and assists in a consolidated overlay at your own pace without being kicked back to lobby when the track is changing.
- Improved chat filter to reduce false positives.
- Shared paint designs are now always correctly displayed.
- Car restrictions can be now configured for an event loop too.
- Car upgrades and tuning can be now disabled as per server settings for spec lobbies.
- Lobby can be now configured to only allow using an inboard car camera.
- Car Class and Performance Points are now displayed in the lobby.
- The player list in the ESC menu and post-race screen now reflects the current standings.
- You can now view more details about networking quality by setting Network Stats to full in the Settings/Gameplay tab, and you can also disable the stats completely as per your discretion.
- High ping warning is now active only for 5s, rearmed when ping is 50ms below threshold.
- Spectators can now use the spherical camera too.
- By default, the community server now automatically promotes the Steam account that launched the server (if available) to admin role. This can be disabled by setting "disable auto-admin" to false.
- Empty chat messages are now properly ignored and do not trigger spam warning.
- Unnecessary "Tag not registered." messages are no longer shown in the server console.
- The build now ships with SERVER_CONFIG_GUIDE.pdf to make it easier to run a server.
- Cleaned up internal data from the server config JSON.
AUDIO
- Major car audio bus re-structuring and changes to dynamic mixing setups.
- NPC car mix configuration is now adjusted to favour cars approaching from behind camera.
- Added audio mixing support to toggle off cockpit reverb if the car has no roof.
- Car distance attenuation fall-off range is now longer and less steep whenever camera is not parented to a car.
- Because of all the structural changes to audio bus setup, the car mix levels may have shifted a bit. Please check & dial in your game audio mix settings as needed.