Stage in DirtBound

The Stage menu calls it “a mountain road nobody has seen before”, and that is close to the truth. Each stage is built from a number, shown as Stage #238602 or similar in the top left corner of the screen. The same number with the same length, landscape and theme gives the same road again, which is how Replay this stage works after the finish.

Setting up a stage. Pick a length (1, 2, 5 or 10 km, or Endless), a landscape (Varied, Lowlands or High mountains) and one of four seasonal themes. The preview card on the left shows the road you are about to get, and the Random button rolls a new one. The first stage on a new browser starts at 1 km in the Lowlands so you are not thrown onto a long technical road. After that the menu remembers your last choice, and the saved default is 5 km.

How the clock works. The timer starts as you leave the line and stops at the finish banner. Time gets added in two ways:

• Back on the road: +5 seconds. Press R, or let the game do it. It puts you back automatically when no wheel has touched the dirt for 3 seconds, when you push the controls for 2 seconds without moving, when you drop off an edge or when you end up more than 30 m from the road.
• Spectator hit: +10 seconds. Fans line the corners. Run into them and they fall over, the car is put back on the road and the clock takes 10 seconds. A crowd knocked down in one hit counts once.

Grass is not a shortcut. Off the road your top speed falls to 62% of what it is on the dirt, so cutting a corner wide only pays when it is very short.

Where your times go. Your best time for a stage is kept in your browser. Normal stages have no online leaderboard. The one stage that does is the daily challenge , which is a short rally stage that everyone drives on the same day.