G'day Rat Racers! Here is a set of bug fixes and game adjustments to improve the gameplay experience.

• Item balance has been adjusted: - Boost obtained from consuming Cheese dropped by another player reduced from 64ms to 16ms - Portable Dash Ring drop chance increased from 18% to 19% - ??? Item drop chance decreased from 2% to 1% - ??? Item no longer randomly explodes in circumstances where it has otherwise no reason to self-destruct.
• Missiles now warn the player they're locked on to with an "INCOMING" crosshair.
• Being baited by the Cheese Item now causes slowed sparks to appear on the player's vehicle.
• Reworked the Collision Detection for the Cheese item when dropped. This fixes the following issues: - Sometimes collisions with dropped Cheese in Replays didn't replay correctly. - When already eating a piece of Cheese, players were briefly blocked by dropped Cheese on the road.
• Improved CPU artificial intelligence in cases where targeting an Item Container's more favourable than targeting a Dash Ring.
• Optimised CPU and memory garbage collection performance of Item Containers and their visual effects.
• Optimised CPU and memory garbage collection performance of Mini Volcanoes' fireballs in Volcanic.
• Optimised CPU and memory garbage collection performance of Coconuts present in Beach.
• Optimised CPU and memory garbage collection performance for ALL Explosion effects.
• Optimised CPU and memory garbage collection performance of Bombs, Cheese and Shields.
• Introduced asynchronous race loading; if this causes hangs, please launch the game with "-disable-async-load" in your Steam launch options.
• Fixed a hang on AMD graphics cards running Radeon Software 22.6.1 when loading into a race or back into the menus.
• Fixed a rare crash on NVIDIA graphics cards when loading into a race or back into the menus.
• Fixed a rare hang on NVIDIA graphics cards when loading into a race or back into the menus.
• Changed certain physics interactions to be more deterministic; now Replays should reproduce close to exactly the same as the original match it was recorded from, as well as making bomb bounces more predictable.
• Fixed a bug that allowed players to cancel gravity while in freefall by using certain items.
• Fixed a bug where thrown away items (in Item Containers) that hadn't yet landed on the ground could physically block players.
• Fixed a bug that made it possible to throw away items while eating.
• Fixed an edge case with Missiles at their maximum flight speed where it was possible for them to miss a target going around a corner while also going round said corner themselves.
• Fixed Replays showing the incorrect estimated race time. Older replay files will show --'--"--- instead.
• Fixed a case where it was possible to fail to finish a race in Forest if the player finishing was too far to the sides of the finish line when crossing it.