Hello TDU community! As August comes to an end, we have another Solar Club Letter to deliver. In this letter, we’ll be going over what you can expect to see in the following updates for Season 4 and Season 5.
What’s In the Letter?
Season 4 Mid-Season Update
Mid-Season Casino Features
Poker Delay
Casino Improvements After Season 4
Season 5
Engine Improvements
Hong Kong Island Timecycle
Ibiza Timecycle
Release & Further Details
Season 6 Community Mission Choice
Vote Results
What’s Next?
Community Spotlight Rewards
How To Enter
Rewards
Permanent Removal of SARD, QA & Optimisation
🎰 Season 4 Mid-Season Update
In July, we released the long-awaited Casino feature for TDUSC. This feature brought one slot machine, which allowed you to win the Mercedes-AMG GT Black Series, a clothing shop, and a car part shop. We enhance this further in the mid-season update, which will be released on September 10, 2025. Now, let’s go into the details.
Mid-Season Features
We will have a wide array of bug fixes in TDUSC coming in the update, with the patch notes being shared a day before the update, as usual. Some of these fixes range from the friends list working to trophy/achievements being fixed for players. We can also confirm Daily Challenge rewards will be fixed in the update too.
The Casino will be getting 2 new features on the launch of this update. These are:
Gold Dragon Slot Machine: This high-payout slot machine arrives at the launch of the season! Try to win 1,000,000 Casino Chips, which will convert to 2,000,000 Solar Coins when you cash out! This slot machine features new sounds and animations, too!
Ability to Cash-Out: You can now cash out your Casino Chips! Not much else to be said here, but all you have to do is go to the same Bank Teller at the Casino and convert your Casino Chips back to Solar Coins at the same 2 Solar Coins = 1 Casino Chip ratio.
Poker Delay
We don’t like disappointing our community, but we also know releasing an unfinished product is just as disappointing, if not more. That said, we have made the hard decision to delay poker to the launch of Season 5. The reasoning behind this is that we want to make sure the networking of Poker is flawless and completely bug-free on its launch, which aligns with our next steps to work on improving the overall release and polish of features in future Seasons too.
However, we'd like to share with you our progress on Poker with 5 minutes of gameplay. The gameplay linked below is still a work in progress since we are polishing the animations and networking to have a more fluid experience for players.
We’re sorry for this delay, but we feel it's worth it to make sure that when features arrive in TDUSC, they are well polished to match the players' expectations.
Casino Improvements After Season 4
There are areas of the Casino we would like to improve. We do not have a set date for these improvements yet, but in our goal to be more transparent with the community, we’d like to share this.
Ability to Sit Down: Yes, will sit down at various locations in the Casino. It’s a small feature, but it’s a step to let our players experience TDUSC in a more TDU way, by being able to interact with the spaces around them.
Progression in Casino: One of the things we realise about the Casino is that players spend a lot of time here; however, their time is not rewarded in any form of progression. This is something we are investigating to improve. We’ll, of course, communicate with you when we have the concept ready to go.
Mercedes-AMG GT Black Series Reward: This is a topic that has been brought up often by the community, as the Casino is not available in all countries due to some government restrictions. To help these players out, we are looking into how players in such restricted countries can gain access to the vehicle.
🆕 Season 5
Season 5 is the next update following the release of our Season 4 Mid-Season update. This will bring KT Engine improvements, Taxi Missions, and much more, which will be announced as we get closer to the release of Season 5. Let’s discuss some details we already know a little further!
Engine Improvements
The KT Engine is going over various improvements for Season 5, but we plan to continue to improve the Engine after Season 5, too. These improvements will be done to our water shaders, lighting, timecycle, skybox, weather effects, and of course, optimisation! We don’t have the full details on the optimisation improvements yet, but it is something we will communicate closer to the release of Season 5, with gameplay on PS5 and Xbox Series consoles too, so that no matter what you play on, you get to see what you can expect with Season 5.
Season 5 will not be the end of our optimisation efforts either, this is something we will continue to improve over the next Seasons after too!
Hong Kong Island Timecycle
We shared some work-in-progress screenshots of Hong Kong Island in the Developer Documentary, but we want to show you further improvements since then. Let’s take a look at some areas around the map you may notice.
Let’s start at the Solar Hotel exterior with the Lotus Evija!
Hong Kong Island has many areas to find a good look, here is another example of it in the Season 5 Aston Martin DBS Superleggera. Here you can also see the improvements on the clouds and skybox!
Nighttime on Hong Kong Island has a lot more of a vibe to it now, doesn’t it? Before it gets dark, you’ll see this beautiful night tone, but it settles darker as you approach midnight!
Watching the sunset on Hong Kong Island is something we all love to do in TDUSC, and we hope you enjoy its new look in Season 5!
We mentioned sunsets, but how can we forget the sunrises?
Ibiza Timecycle
In the Developer Documentary, we only mentioned we are working on Hong Kong Island; however, we decided to work on the time cycle lighting for Ibiza, too. This helps us improve how lighting works on vehicles and scenery, so Ibiza can look better than ever! Here are some sample work-in-progress screenshots on Ibiza!
We are excited for the community to see the further improvements to Season 5 as we get closer to the release!
Release & Further Details
Season 5 is planned for October release, with the exact date being revealed in the October Solar Club Letter. Behind the scenes at Nacon, we are also completing our sim racing stream room, which will help us create some nice livestreams and QnA’s and videos to showcase the update with you, along with the developers who made it happen in the future too. Details on this and more will come soon!
🎗️ Season 6 Community Mission Choice
In the Developer Documentary, we mentioned the community will get to choose between 4 different missions, and the winning mission will be the mission we see created for Season 6! Let’s take a look at what the winning mission is!
Vote Results
Here are the results from the poll! Detective has won by a large amount with Package Delivery and Photo Challenge falling behind with Adrenaline in last.
What’s Next?
We are nearly finalised with the full game concept of this mission, and as we get closer to Season 6, you can expect to hear more details about this. The results of this vote do not mean we won’t visit the other missions either, which includes improving the photo mode at some point. There are many things to bring to TDUSC, and we will make sure we continue to involve the community in these requests!
🖼️ Community Spotlight Rewards
It’s been a while since we did a community spotlight reward, and it’s for a good reason, too! Starting at the launch of Season 4’s Mid-Season update, we will be giving rewards to those chosen for the weekly and monthly Community Spotlights! Let’s go into the details of this!
How To Enter
First, join our Discord which can be found at Discord.gg/TestDrive. Once you join our Discord, you’ll see a channel called ‘community-spotlight’. Here, you can send the best pictures you've taken in TDUSC! You aren't limited to cars, too. Feel free to send pictures of your liveries, cars, sceneries, garage, etc. The community will vote for the best photo to be featured in-game and win some prizes!
Here are the rules:
Pictures must be high quality
Only 4 pictures are allowed in a post
You are only allowed one post per month; however, you can delete your post and make a new one to replace it within the month
Each week, we will randomly choose pictures to repost on our social media
The top 3 voted posts in the month will win prizes
The most voted picture in the month will be selected to showcase in the in-game news section in TDUSC. *(Starts Season 5)*
The thread will be wiped on the release of every Solar Club Letter
Note: Posting in this channel means you allow your picture to be used by Nacon/KT for promotional use.
Rewards
The rewards will vary in each weekly and monthly community spotlight, so you won’t know what you can win before the photos are chosen! Below are just some examples of what you can get!
Vehicles
Solar Coins
Solar Pass XP
Game Code
& More…
Starting Season 5, we will also be able to share a winner's picture in the in-game news section, which we think is a really nice touch for future Community Spotlight winners!
🏗️ Permanent Removal of SARD, QA & Optimisation
At the start of Season 4, we mentioned we would be adding SARD again as we expected it to achieve the results we wanted, along with the improvements it mentioned. That said, after player concerns and reports, we think it is best to part ways with SARD, and we will be permanently removing SARD from TDUSC in the upcoming mid-season patch for Season 4 on September 10th.
So if not SARD, what’s next? We will instead work on improving our own in-game report system, so if players do encounter cheaters in TDUSC, they will still be properly dealt with. When we have more information on this report system improvement, and our own improvements to prevent cheaters in TDUSC, in a future communication.
Another topic we want to cover is player concerns on quality assurance and optimisation. We understand your frustration with some bugs that appeared in our Season 4 update, and we are going to work on improving the polish of our seasonal updates to reach a standard that the TDU community expects. This is something that won’t change overnight, and as we continue to work on our new processes for QA, we hope to bring you a better experience for the launch of new seasons.
For optimisation, as we brought up earlier in the letter, this is something that we take seriously, as the players have reported. We will be working on this not only in Season 5, but in further seasons too, as we improve the rendering pipeline of the KT Engine. Our overall goal for Year 2 is to be able to release a new recommended and minimum PC guideline, along with improvements to console quality and performance modes. As each Season progresses in Year 2, we will let you know the improvements we make.
❤️ Our Final Message
We would like to thank the TDU community for their continued support and trust in us for creating a TDU game to remember. We’ll see you again in the next Solar Club Letter, where we will go into more detail about what the teams at KT are working on, and some progress on future season developments. We are excited to bring more communication with Q&As and livestreams later this year, too. Thank you once again for the TDU community's amazing support!
The TDU Team