Your wreck stays on the road

The daily road now remembers who died on it. When a daily challenge run ends in death, your burnt-out vehicle stays where you fell, on everyone else's copy of that day's road. The next driver can read how far you got, pick your wreck clean, watch your last seconds and take your advice. Or ignore it, and join you on the verge.

That's the big one, but it isn't the only change. Further down: Behemoths that call for help, monsters that stop appearing right in front of you, and survivors you can actually race to. It's a long post, so grab a jerrycan.

Wrecks of real players

Every daily challenge gives everyone the same road, the same vehicle and the same rules. So it was always a bit strange that you drove it alone. Now you can see where everyone else went wrong.

• A wreck for every death. Each one is a charred copy of the vehicle that driver died in, pushed onto the verge on the side of the road where it happened. If several drivers died in the same spot, their wrecks line up in rows out into the field, so a bad corner starts to look like a scrapyard.
• A signpost beside each one. It gives the driver's number and how they did: DRIVER 4821 / 8.4 KM · 612 KILLS / LASTED 14:02. You'll soon be measuring yourself against the wrecks you pass.
• A body count. When you set off, a message tells you how many deaths the road has seen today and how many drivers they came from.
• Your own wrecks too. The death screen tells you where yours now lies, and it's there on your very next try.

Heavy vehicles can smash straight through a wreck. To stop one stubborn player filling the road, each 250 m stretch shows the three newest wrecks, one per driver. On the Low graphics preset you get one wreck per stretch and no signposts, to keep things running smoothly.

Only daily challenges have wrecks. Normal runs still get a road of their own, so nobody else's there to find.

Salvage: strip the dead

A wreck is also a source of parts. Roll slowly past one (under 9 m/s, about 32 km/h) and your crew strips it, or just smash through it and take what falls off.

• Cash, based on what that driver had: $150, plus $5 for every kill they got, plus 2% of what their vehicle costs, up to $3,000 a wreck. A driver who died in a big vehicle after a long, bloody run is worth slowing down for.
• Spare parts: 6% hull and 5% fuel.
• Diminishing returns: each wreck can only be salvaged once per run, and each salvage pays 20% less than the one before. The more of a road's dead you pick over, the less is left.

Slowing down is the catch, because it's rarely a safe thing to do with a horde behind you. Is that $800 and a bit of hull worth stopping for, right where someone else just died? And yes, you can salvage your own wreck from the last try. Nobody's judging.

Last moments: watch how they died

Each wreck also carries the final 12 seconds of that driver's run. As you close in, a pale blue ghost of their vehicle appears on the road just ahead of you and replays those seconds: the swerve, the panic, the last mistake. It flares up on the spot where they died, then fades away over the wreck.

You can follow it or steer well clear of it. Sometimes it's the only warning you get that the road ahead is about to go badly.

Warnings: leave a message for the next driver

If you've played Dark Souls, you know how this goes. When a daily run ends in death, the death screen lets you leave one warning on your wreck, built from a phrase and a word:

• "Try nitro"
• "Beware of spitters"
• "If only I had a bigger vehicle"
• "Patience killed me"
• "The handbrake saved me"
• "Nothing ahead" (which may or may not be true)

There are 10 phrases and 37 words. There's no free text, so all of it stays on topic, and how honest it is remains up to the dead.

When you pass within 40 m of a wreck with a warning, it pops up in a card on screen. If it helped, or just made you laugh, appreciate it with G, Back on a gamepad, or a tap on the card. You can do that once per wreck. The card shows how many drivers have appreciated it, and if you pass your own, you'll see your count.

What gets sent

Wrecks are the first thing in Dead Mileage that talks to a server, so here's exactly what goes up when a daily run ends in death: the road, where the run ended and the 12 seconds of driving before it, your vehicle, kills and run time, and an anonymous driver number the game picks for you once. There's no account and no name. Your IP address isn't stored; the limit on how many wrecks can be posted in a day uses a one-way hash of it instead. If the server is ever down or slow, the road just has no wrecks on it and the game carries on without waiting.

Harder roads

The rest of this update is about the fighting, on every difficulty and every daily challenge.

• Behemoths call for help. Behemoth fights used to be one on one. Now, every 10 to 14 seconds, a Behemoth calls in its own: screechers for your first Behemoth of the run, runners and crawlers for the second, bloaters for the third, and brutes from the fourth on. They pay half, so there's no farming them for cash while the boss waits.
• No more monsters popping in close by. Monsters now arrive further out, most of them in the haze ahead of you. Behind the camera they appear from 45 m away, and in view from at least 70 m, and they grow in over 0.6 seconds rather than simply appearing. You'll see more of a horde coming down the road towards you.
• More of them, and they take more killing. Because they now start further away, 20% more monsters spawn, and guns deal 5% less damage. Expect this to feel tougher.
• Survivors are a real race. The monsters after a stranded survivor now set off from the far side, from a distance timed to your arrival. Whether you get there first depends on your driving.

Smaller fixes

• Small rocks and loose stones get knocked aside instead of stopping the car dead.
• The TURN AROUND warning now covers every garage, not only those down a side road. It stays up while you're more than 50 m past the garage and not heading back.
• Dirt tracks no longer float or sink where a garage has levelled the ground.

Today's road

Happy Halloween! Today's daily is Night of the Hearse: a hard road with far more monsters than usual, a hearse with a level 3 flamethrower and a grenade launcher, and two shotgunners riding along. The dead are out in force, but they pay well. It's a good road to leave your first wreck on.

The roads are still fairly empty, so your warning may be the first one somebody reads. Make it a good one.

See you on the road. Or beside it.