Hey everyone,

Mostly a deep save-system sweep this round. A few of you sent long reports and some screenshots over the past week, and digging into them turned up more than I expected.

Jukebox playlist

Two layers, stacked.

Every time the game shut down, an empty SavePlaylist was being written even if you had not touched the Jukebox that session, overwriting your saved playlist on disk with an empty array. Underneath that, the save plugin was storing raw string arrays without the type marker it needs to deserialize them, and the load path was silently returning null. So even on saves where the data was intact, the playlist looked empty on relaunch.

Both addressed. There is one unavoidable migration cost: anyone whose disk save was already wiped by the first bug will need to re-add their tracks once. After that, it sticks.

Lifetime distance counter

Some of you reported the counter reading high at startup, dropping mid-session, and jumping again on the next launch. The cache that holds total distance across all cars was being built before the current car was spawned, so the current car's saved odometer got included in the cache AND added live, double-counting it. Reordered so the cache always rebuilds with the current car excluded. Existing saves untouched, the display corrects itself on the next restart.

Achievements

  • Progress bars sitting half-filled while the achievement said "Completed!" - the UI was reading stale progress from saves where the unlock happened before the progress field was written. Bar now snaps to full on unlock and the unlock path always writes the target value back so it stays consistent.
  • Streak100, 500, and 1000 were not unlocking retroactively if your best streak was already past the threshold before those achievements existed. They check on launch now.
  • Crash protection if your unlocked-achievement list ever gets out of sync with the inspector list.

Wheel Drops

The whole timer save and load layer was throwing too many bugs to be worth keeping and it was very easy to exploit it, so I tore it out. The timer now counts down from 15 minutes fresh every launch. No more UTC vs local time mismatches, no more culture-sensitive checksum resets silently wiping Turkish saves, no more "the timer is stuck at 12:13" reports, no more "I just opened the game and there's already a new claim button waiting" complaints from the focus-event double-counting elapsed time on every alt-tab. Your pending drops (the ones waiting to be claimed) are still saved exactly as before, so you do not lose anything you earned.

While I was in there:

  • The CLAIM button getting stuck on screen and being clickable for duplicate claims is now blocked.
  • The button no longer freezes in a non-interactable state if the drop pool happened to be empty at claim time.
  • Max pending drops capped at 3 by request. Timer keeps ticking visibly even when you are at the cap, so you can see when the next cycle resets.

Upgrades

Reworked six upgrades that felt dead in late game when you are on cruise control with auto-refuel on. If something feels off please let me know.

  • Apex Commission now scales with how long you have sustained high CPM, not just the peak rate.
  • Nitrous Kit's burst scales harder at top speed.
  • Racing Tires lifts the rapid-typing throttle ceiling instead of only affecting 0-60.
  • Flywheel Mass builds a kinetic charge as you type and feeds it into the speed boost chain.
  • Aerodynamic Kit grants extra fuel savings while sustained above 50% speed.
  • Turbocharger lowers the CPM curve so the top of the band is reachable.

Also from Wightie's upgrade report:

  • The Global Auto-Refuel perk is gone, replaced by the per-car Auto-Refuel upgrade. The per-car cost in the first build of this was way too high, so it has been slashed by 50x. Most cars now sit between 88K and 130K credits to enable Auto-Refuel on. If you already owned the old global perk OR you have the DLC, every car you currently own AND every car you buy in the future will have Auto-Refuel granted automatically. You do not lose anything you paid for.
  • Idle RPM and Long-Range Tank now scale with the car's top speed, so they actually do something on a BB24.
  • Odometer Premium, Rare Plates, and Apex Commission credit multipliers got a meaningful buff at the high end.

Misc

  • Leaderboard tabs remember their Global vs Friends filter per board.
  • Skydeck car lots no longer collapse typer and driver selection into one car. Setting a driver in Skydeck stays a driver, setting a typer in the garage UI mirrors both.
  • Wheel rotation no longer stutters after long uninterrupted sessions, and front and rear rim scales are tracked separately so different-sized wheels spin at the rates they should.
  • Mountain Tracks road texture was looking stretched, retiled.
  • A pile of defensive checks around save key collisions, achievement crash paths, lifecycle event timing, and cross-platform cloud sync.

Big thanks to Wightie and Iris Nebula for the detailed write-ups with screenshots and step-by-step repros - that kind of report is gold and turns a "maybe a bug" into a "definitely this line of code".

See you on the road.

- Tolga