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Solar Club Letter: April 2026

Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown · Community Announcements · April 30, 2026

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Season 6’s mid-season update is scheduled for May 6! This update brings more Detective Missions with a difficulty improvement to all of them, a new vehicle, bug fixes, and more! Patch Notes are now available below.

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We also want to discuss the two biggest pain points of TDUSC, that being optimisation and networking. We’ll detail our next steps, what we are working on, and other topics related to both. That said, let’s talk about the update!

What’s In the Letter?

⏭️ Season 6 Update 1

Season 6’s mid-season update arrives early next month with more content, features, quality of life improvements, and more! Let’s take a look at this in more detail.

Release Date

The update is planned to release on May 6, 2026. If this date changes, we’ll be sure to let you know.

As for the maintenance, it will be mentioned in the Patch Notes, which will arrive on May 6, 2026. Expect the server maintenance at 9:30am CET and last up to 6:00pm CET. As usual, we will keep you updated on our progress during the day too.

Detective Mission Improvements

Detective Missions first arrived in Season 6 with 15 to be found through Ibiza and Hong Kong Island. In the mid-season update, we have added another 15 while improving the immersion and difficulty of all of them. That said, let’s talk about all of these improvements in detail!

First, we’ve improved the spawning of these events. Since there are 30 missions total, 20 on Hong Kong Island, and 10 on Ibiza, you’ll be able to see a more varied amount of mission difficulties available each rotation. We also decreased the time it takes for them to respawn upon completion.

Next, we heard your complaints regarding the wiretapping UI so we decreased the opacity of it to provide a cleaner look while still allowing players to understand what the task is. We also moved the wiretapping UI to the top of the screen.

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One thing you might notice is that there are some new UI elements in Detective Missions as seen on the left side of the screen. This is what enhances the difficulty and immersion of these missions; and it’s also why we moved the wiretapping UI to the center top portion of the screen!

Now what happens is the AI is more aware of the player and what they do in the world based on two mechanics; sight and sound. Throughout each mission, the target will not react to your maneuvers in the world, depending on if they can see and/or hear you or not.

With this new system, there are also now stages to the mission ending. As you keep making mistakes, you’ll increase your target’s awareness, and they’ll be more sensitive to future mistakes too!

Honking your horn, revving, driving in the wrong lane, drifting, and many other scenarios will affect your detection. This will be a lot easier to understand with the gameplay video on YouTube now! Check it out!


▶ Watch on YouTube

To discuss the improvements and details to Detective Missions, here is what our Lead UI Developer has to say!

“To enhance the immersion of your investigations, we are introducing two new indicators: visual and auditory detection. Located near the minimap, these icons will alert you in real-time if a suspect has spotted or heard you. This mechanic is designed to heighten the tension and realism of detective missions, pushing players toward absolute discretion.

To up the stakes, the detection gauge is now persistent: once a suspect has been alerted, their vigilance will never fully return to zero. Every mistake leaves a lasting mark, making your mission increasingly perilous as suspicions mount.”

- Thibault (TDUSC Lead UI Developer)

Oh and don't forget, with this update, you will be able to continue to solve the puzzle behind Detective Missions. We have already seen some community members on the right track, but completing the secret mission will be the hardest part! We'll be keeping an eye out, and if the community gets stuck, maybe we can help out...

Dodge Viper SRT Coupe Freedom Rush Edition

A new vehicle arrives! The Dodge Viper SRT Coupe Freedom Rush Edition will be available in the online store for players. This features a custom bodykit and aero fit onto the in-game Dodge Viper SRT.

In this bundle, you’ll be able to find the following items:

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Of course, let’s showcase some gameplay of that new Dodge Viper! Check out the YouTube video below to see some gameplay of the vehicle arriving in the mid-season update!


▶ Watch on YouTube

Upcoming Fixes

We have many fixes and improvements arriving in Season 6’s mid-season update, so let’s discuss that!

PS5

Xbox

PC

We’ll have the full Patch Notes available on May 6 at 10:30am CET, so stay tuned!

We also want to be honest about our current development speed of TDUSC. With the extending of Seasonal releases which are no longer 3 months, we find there are some fixes we wished would be in this update, but are not. For example vehicle dynamics fixes, sound improvements, etc. Rest assured, the team is working on TDUSC with all their efforts, and we hope you appreciate their continued work. Each letter will discuss the next fixes for the coming updates as usual, and with the longest period between an update happening between Season 6’s mid-season update and Season 7, we think we’ll have a lot more quality of life improvements, bug fixes, and more for Season 7. Thank you for your patience and continued support!

⏭️ Network

We’re working hard on improving the networking infrastructure of the game, and it's time share with you our next steps on fixes and improvements!

Current Work

On April 15th, we had a maintenance on the game that did the following:

These changes brought a welcomed improvement to the community and created better chances to see other players in the open world, successful race starts and grouping, and much more.

You can also expect the vehicles in the Solar Hotel to rotate daily based on the usual player achievements (such as most driven, most money earned, etc.).

The team is also hard at work on some of the following bugs:

We cannot confirm a specific release date, but we’ll confirm with you in the next letters closer to the next Seasonal release date. 

Despite these improvements on networking on April 15, and our further commitment to network fixes, we know this can be better, and there’s a lot of work going on to improve the overall reliability of the servers. Let’s talk about that now.

What’s Next

Amongst these fixes, the network team is working on ‘Servers V2’. Let’s discuss what that means for the players, and what we are doing to achieve this goal.

To achieve this, we have a lot to work on. One of the first things is transferring our server from Windows to Linux. This is important because it means we can reduce the deployment time of server maintenance. This means each update, you’ll have less downtime.

Next, we have to rewrite the entire server code for TDUSC. This is a large amount of work, but it is necessary to improve how players interact with others. With this rewrite, you can expect:

‘Servers V2’ also makes some important improvements for our developments. Together the rewrite, and the transfer of VM’s from Windows to Linux means we will be able to integrate cross-region and crossplay with much more ease than before. We know these features are important to the community, and we want to make sure they work just as well as any other feature when they arrive.

This upgrade will also help us improve the reliability of our ‘8-player grouping’ system, which we know is also asked by the community very often.

We do not have a release date for this server upgrade yet, but we’ll continue to keep you up to date on our progress on this, so stay tuned as we hope to have more information on this before the end of the year!

Before we end off, here is what the Lead Online Developer has to say to go into more detail on why we are moving to Linux, ‘Servers V2’, and what all this means for the players!

“TDU has always been a Windows game from the beginning with only Peer-to-Peer communication. But since the release of Solar Crown, we had to shift the workload to centralized servers to ensure a global online experience, shared by everyone. We had first started on Windows servers since we were focused on the client part of the game, because it was easier to share code between the client app and the servers.

However, with the beginning of Year 2, we decided to put the pedal to the metal on the migration to Linux for our server code and infrastructure. Why Linux? Because it's a more stable operating system for network communication and machines that need to keep an uptime for several months. It will allow us to use standard tooling and processes that have been used in the industry for the server parts of thousands of games, like using the right tool for the right job. Also, as some of you may know, maintaining a complete MMO server infrastructure with all the machines, services, databases and network configuration, is not an easy task especially with an Online team of our size. Linux will allow us to automate a lot of things, from deployments and migrations (with the purpose to reduce the maintenance time during a release) to alerting and error recovery. All of this will allow us to reduce the operational time we spent to keep the servers in a good condition, and focus our team on bringing new features and enhancement to the game.

But it's not only a mere operational choice, it will also have an impact on you, the players. With our ‘Servers V2’ initiative, we will also take the opportunity of this big rework to stabilize our session system, and add a proper matchmaking mechanism. We heard the complaints about the lack of people on the game, especially in the open world, and most of this comes from the session dispatch and matchmaking which almost create one session per 2-4 players. We already have pushed an update to this in S6P1, but we want to do more with ‘Servers V2’. We want to make our sessions full of players, to really have this "MMO open-world" feeling where a lot of players can drive with each other, and interact in game. We read your comments, and with our opening on the PS+, and the S6, you had a glimpse of how many players there's in TDU Solar Crown in the Solar Hotel, the Casino or in Workshops. Our goal with ‘Servers V2’ is to make sure that you have this kind of feeling anywhere on the map, at any time.

‘Servers V2’ is an initiative, not a milestone set for a specific release. We plan on releasing part of it with each new release, you already got a taste of it with the technical maintenance we performed earlier in April, and you'll have another part of it in S6P1. We'll keep you in the loop of our progress through the future letters and changelog, so stay tuned ! We're impatient to present you our changes and read your feedback on it!” - Sylvain (TDUSC Lead Online Developer)

⏭️ Optimisation

Optimisation is just as important as the network fixes, and we know we have some ways to go on the improvement of the KT Engine to achieve this. Let’s discuss what we are working on next to improve 

What’s Next

We are currently working on quite a few improvements on the game in terms of optimisations, and bug fixes related to graphical issues of the game. For example, we are aware of the fact we bump into memory limits (our top one crash on PS5 remains to be out of memory issues), and as higher resolutions require more memory, there is fewer left for the world textures. This is why you may notice crashes on Quality mode, then you would on Performance, and is also the reason why you may notice textures sometimes downgrade when playing on Quality. To eliminate this issue, we are better uniformizing our allocation for world textures on consoles. Not only will this eliminate the aforementioned issues, but it will also improve the frametime, improve the average FPS, and eliminate frame drops that players have been noticing on consoles.

We aren’t leaving the PC behind though. We are also currently working on performance improvements which not only affect PC only, but all platforms too and with all of the previously mentioned improvements, we also plan to work on other areas of the KT Engine and TDUSC in the coming months. To discuss that more, here is what the CTO has to say on what we are working on next.

“We are continuing the optimization work made possible by the delivery of the new version of the rendering engine (Season 5).

Among the current or planned projects: better use of the framegraph, rebalancing the load between CPU and GPU, optimization of memory usage, improvement of algorithms, among a lot of things and of course, we are continuing to improve the rendering: car optics or DLSS 4.5 support for example

These improvements will arrive over the course of the next seasons.” - Fabien (TDUSC CTO)

Some improvements and features we have worked on that won’t make it for Season 6’s mid-season update, but rather Season 7 are:

Stay tuned to future Solar Club Letters, as we’ll be sure to continue to detail what we are working on next for TDUSC.

⏭️ Improving TDUSC

In Season 7, there’ll be a new ‘Live’ tab in the game, which brings a massive improvement to the endgame loop of TDUSC with both Live Events and the Solar Pass.

However, with the arrival of Season 7’s live enhancements, we also want to use this time to address two issues players have mentioned. The first, is the Casino Car, the Mercedes-AMG GT Black Series, which is currently only available through a winning mechanic at the Wintory Casino slot machine. This also means that due to the restrictions of gambling in some countries, not all players will have access to this vehicle. We are still working on a solution that can be fun for players, no matter if you’re in a restricted country or not, and no matter if you already own the car or not.

The other complaint is the use of AI in our live event icons. Our Live Event assets are currently outsourced, and the outsourcer who produces this uses AI to create the icons. Instead of continuing with this, our team has worked on an internal tool that allows us to create icons in-house, using our own vehicle assets, without the use of AI. Here are some photo examples of our tool.

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To talk more about these improvements among some other things regarding Season 7’s ‘Live Enhancements’, here’s what TDUSC’s Game Director has to say!

“In our previous Solar Letter, Thibault and I shared some initial details regarding our progress on this feature. This overhaul is set to fundamentally transform the Live experience, giving you compelling reasons to jump back in every day, week, and month with a fresh rotation of challenges to complete.

Since our last overview, development has moved at a great pace. To be honest, we’re having an absolute blast during internal playtests! We have now entered the polishing phase, where we are fine-tuning the experience—specifically focusing on the feature's onboarding to ensure it feels seamless from the moment you launch the game.

In parallel, we are working on a related topic that we know you’ve all been waiting for: new event types within Live Events. We are currently adding modes such as new Taxis, Convoy missions, Time Attacks, Domination, and more. Our goal is to have these ready for the start of Season 7, and we are quite optimistic about meeting that target.

The team is making incredible headways, and we are actually pushing this even further than we originally planned. We truly can’t wait to get your feedback on this new feature!

Finally, I’d like to mention that the team is also working on several unannounced features, including on the highly anticipated Housing system... The future of TDU has never looked brighter!.”

- Guillaume (TDUSC Game Director)

🖼️ Community Spotlight

Yup! It’s time to announce the winners for the month of April!

Winners

Last month we asked you to take photos to match the theme ‘Pagani Is Life’! There were A LOT of good entries but here are the top 3 voted photos of the month by the TDU team!

  1. Discord member Leggedema wins this month's Community Spotlight!

  2. Discord member K1DDING wins second place!

  3. Discord member Leon JHK wins third place!

Congrats again to the winners! You all win 2,500,000 Solar Coins and Jaguar branded clothing!

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 ‘tdusc-photos’. Here, you can send the best pictures you've taken in TDUSC, but make sure to put %communityspotlight4 in your message post!

Here are the rules:

Note: Posting in this channel means you allow your picture to be used by Nacon/KT for promotional use.

May Theme

Professional Photographer - Your photo must feature a scenic view (car not needed in photo) in either Hong Kong Island or Ibiza! Good luck!

❤️ Final Message

We want to thank you for your continued support for TDUSC. The team members appreciate it, and we hope our continued effort to improve the game pays off in the coming Seasonal releases. As usual, we’ll see you in the next Solar Club Letter, because we aren’t going anywhere.

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This announcement was written and published by the developers/publisher of Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown on Steam; it is mirrored here unedited for readability, with full credit and a link to the original above. © the respective rights holders. Rights holder and want it removed? Email us — we take it down promptly.