SuperTuxKart is a 3D open-source kart racing game. It aims towards fun for players of all skill levels, with item boxes giving random items, nitro, drifting and more. Realism is not the focus.

STK offers an online multiplayer mode, a local multiplayer mode, and a single player mode against AIs with both custom races and a story mode to complete to unlock new karts and tracks. It features Grand Prix where the goal is to get the most points over several races.

Its 21 tracks will take you in varied environments. From the beaches of sunny islands to the depth of an old mine, from the streets of Candela City to peaceful countryside roads, from a spaceship to the mountains, you have much to explore and discover.

The game also features additional game modes besides normal races: time trials, follow-the-leader, soccer, capture-the-flag and two types of battle mode.

Find more here!

See our Team page for information about the people behind SuperTuxKart!

GPU

The GPU is usually the limitation for STK’s performance. Cards meeting the minimal requirements have the OpenGL support to run the game, but require low resolution and low graphics for smooth play. Cards meeting or exceeding the recommended requirements can run STK’s most demanding track at 60FPS/1080p with the modern rendering pipeline on graphics 4.

• Recommended: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950, AMD Radeon RX 460, or stronger; At least 1 GB VRAM (video memory).
• Minimal: NVIDIA GeForce 470 GTX, AMD Radeon 6870 HD series card or Intel HD Graphics 4000; At least 512 MB VRAM (video memory).

CPU

The CPU performance might be the limitation depending on graphics card and graphics setting, mostly for online play which is more CPU-intensive. Good CPU performance helps ensure high framerate and more importantly smoothness. For STK, single-thread performance is paramount.

• Recommended: Core i5-2400 single-thread performance or higher. This includes AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs, most Intel desktop CPUs since 2012 and recent mid-to-high end mobile CPUs.
• Minimal: Any Intel or AMD dual-cores processors. Very old models and low-clocked mobile parts may struggle, especially in online play.

Other requirements

• At least 1 GB of free RAM
• Disk space: 700MB

Optional

• (If you prefer playing with a joystick) A joystick with at least 6 buttons.

You can try your luck and run the game. STK features a fallback renderer which uses only OpenGL 2.1 / GLES 2 / DirectX 9 which should work on most devices, but it has no modern rendering pipeline.

First there was TuxKart. Work on this happened (roughly) between April 2000 and March 2004. In June 2004, the ‘Game of the Month’ project of the Linux Game Tome decided to improve TuxKart. This was done between June and December 2004. (Most links to the old forum thread pages are broken, archives here: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]. Unfortunately, this project ended in a big disagreement, and it was finally decided to save the current state as “SuperTuxKart”. While some graphical improvements were done, the code base itself was very unstable and practically unplayable. Nobody worked on (Super)TuxKart for several years.

In 2006, Joerg Henrichs (a.k.a. “Hiker”) picked up SuperTuxKart, fixed the outstanding bugs and performance issues without any involvement of the original game designer or the Game of the Month project. With the help of “Coz” a first release of STK was done in September 2006.

In May 2007, version 0.3 was released. It added high-score lists, a new track (Island), the time bomb, MacOSX support, and OpenAL support.

In February 2008 version 0.4 was released. This version used Bullet Physics to improve the collision handling. “Auria” joined and started improving tracks (Shifting Sands, Lighthouse).

Version 0.5 was released in May 2008. It included many improved tracks, unlockable challenges, Follow-the-leader game mode, and more translations (OS language detector and matching to closest translation).

Version 0.6 was released on January 22, 2009. It had significantly improved gameplay; better physics with Nitro and skidding. The sound system was also improved, more interesting music was added and many new tracks and karts were added. It also saw the first special multi-player arena for 3-Strikes battle and new items/powerups to use.

Version 0.7 was released on December 20, 2010. It contained several significant improvements including: a new 3D rendering engine, Irrlicht, a new GUI (Graphical User Interface), new kart and track animations, new tracks, karts and items/powerups, and support for shortcuts/alternative paths. Versions 0.7.1, 0.7.2, 0.7.3 were released shortly after with more improvements.

Version 0.8 was released in December 2012, adding a story mode and new challenges, improved AI and skidding, reverse mode, new tracks and music. The menus were also improved. This was followed by 0.8.1, which added and updated tracks, added the Soccer and Egg Hunt modes, and other graphical and gameplay enhancements.

In 2015, we released version 0.9, a groundbreaking release powered by a brand new game engine called Antarctica, adding advanced graphical features which would have been impossible in previous versions. These features include dynamic lighting, instanced rendering (allowing for a large increase in vegetation), and more. 0.9 has been followed by three point releases, which have added additional features and new tracks.

In April 2019, we released version 1.0, with for the first time support for online multiplayer. Besides this major feature, there have been new tracks and updated tracks, the addition of SuperTux challenges in the story mode, many balancing tweaks, and many more improvements and fixes.

Hiker then officially announced his choice to retire from the project after leading it for 13 years. Auria also stepped down from her role of co-lead but remained involved with the project.

The project’s lead was transferred to Benau, a major code contributor since 2017, and Alayan, a major contributor for 1.0. Deveee, an important contributor for several years who is responsible for the Android version, remained in the team.

In January 2020, version 1.1 was released. The gameplay was not changed, as all 1.x versions are compatible. The major changes for this version were improved networking code and major UI improvements especially on big resolutions, along many bugfixes and enhancements.

In August 2020, version 1.2, was released. It improved gamepad support via SDL2 which supports hotplugging and gamepad mappings.

In September 2021, the most recent version, 1.3, has been released. It contains updates for many official karts.

For more details, please see the changelog, the blog posts or the list of resolved issues on STK’s GitHub.

No! The Mario Kart series is the most known of kart racers games, but there have been many others.

Some very old versions of STK tried to mimic Mario Kart, but this hasn’t been the case for a very long time. We sometimes look at it for inspiration, as we do with other kart games, but this is it.

Not only are there many significant differences in gameplay, but SuperTuxKart is evolving its own way and we are not trying to make it any closer to Mario Kart.

First, have a look at the Get involved page. It should contain all the information you need to start with coding, modeling, designing or whatever you’d like to do.

Before you start, you should contact the current developers and artists through the IRC, Telegram channel or the forum and tell us what you want to achieve. This will greatly improve the chance that you contribution will be accepted.

Most items (bowling ball, cake, plunger) can be used backwards. Just fire them while looking backwards.

No!

The speed limit and speed boosts are exactly the same for all the karts, AI or human. In lower difficulties, the AI might even slow down on purpose. The powerup probabilities when grabbing a gift box are also identical. There are minor differences in how quickly the karts can steer from a direction to another, but it gives no meaningful advantage to the AI and isn’t meant to.

The AI can sometimes have superhuman reflexes to use powerups, but if a human presses the right button at the right time, he can achieve the same result. There is also a lot of room to outsmart it.

If you struggle to beat the AI, focus on improving your driving to crash as little as possible while going fast, and learn to use skidding. On higher difficulties, skidding is essential to beat the AI.

Yes! After creating an online STK account inside the game and connecting with it, select the “Online” button in the main menu then “Global networking” to access networked gameplay through the internet. You can host your own server for others to play on, or join community-hosted servers. For the best experience, a stable connection and a low ping to the server are important.

When playing with a keyboard, you may experience issues when pressing multiple keys simultaneously, for instance trying to use nitro while accelerating and turning. In such situations, some keypress may not register. This is however not a bug of SuperTuxKart, but a phyiscal limitation of your keyboard, most keyboards can only handle so many keys pressed at the same time (for more detailed information, please check here). The solution is to use a gaming input device (gamepad, or gaming keyboard), or tweak the keys configuration to find keys that your keyboard will be able to register simultaneously.

This could include the kart always going left, or randomly braking, or other similar weirdness where the game seems to believe you pressed a key but you did not. If this happens, try going in the options menu, on the input screen, and check if you have gamepads there. Try to disable all gamepads except the device you are using. Sometimes, bogus input can be received from gamepads or other similar devices that the OS sees as a gamepad.

If there’s a penguin in the middle of the circle, someone’s shot a plunger at your face. You can do that to others by shooting the plunger backwards (see the FAQ entry about throwing items backwards).

Yes! See the Wiimote page for details.

First, look at the STK bug tracker and open a new issue if your problem hasn’t been reported yet.

• On Windows: It is in %APPDATA%/supertuxkart/config-0.10 (you can enter that in the Explorer and it will take you there).
• On Linux: It is either in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/supertuxkart/config-0.10 (first choice), ~/.config/supertuxkart/config-0.10 (second choice) or in ~/.supertuxkart/config-0.10 (third choice).
• On macOS: It is in ~/Library/Application Support/supertuxkart/config-0.10. Note that this directory may be hidden.
• On Android: It is in /storage/emulated/0/Android/data/org.supertuxkart.stk/files/supertuxkart/home/supertuxkart/config-0.10.
• With Snap: It is in ~/snap/supertuxkart/current/.config/supertuxkart/config-0.10.
• With Flatpak: It is in ~/.var/app/net.supertuxkart.SuperTuxKart/config/supertuxkart/config-0.10.

You can also watch the output in the terminal to see if there is a note on where the config files are stored or search for a file called “config.xml”.

This happens sometimes; The developers should be aware of that and it should be fixed soon. If GitHub Actions says that the current Git version compiles, but it doesn’t do so for you, then propably something is wrong with your compiler setup. (Check if you have all dependencies, re-run CMake, …)

The intended in-game way is to play story mode and beat all challenges.

If however you want to unlock everything without playing story mode, you can also cheat by editing a config file. Open the folder mentioned above in question “Where does STK store the user config file”. From there, open the folder “config-0.10” then open the file “players.xml”. Replace all occurrences of “none” with “hard” (or “easy” or “medium”, indicating the highest level at which you have solved a challenge).