SuperTuxKart is a free, open-source, cross-platform kart racing game, with over 5 million downloads and two decades of development history.

SuperTuxKart blends intuitive controls for beginners and advanced mechanics for experts, with 21 original tracks to discover, a Story Mode, as well as local and online multiplayer to play with your friends.

SuperTuxKart also features additional game modes such as Time-Trial, Soccer, and Egg Hunt, with hundreds of community-made addons to always keep the game fresh.

Find out more on our ‘Discover’ page!

The SuperTuxKart team provides official binaries for Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, and Switch Homebrew.

SuperTuxKart is also available unofficially on iOS through the AppStore, and in the package managers of select BSD distributions. Linux users can also get the game as an AppImage, as a Flatpak, or as a Snap.

Yes! SuperTuxKart is available for free, without any kind of active ads or microtransactions.

Some new tracks are available in early access for donators as part of our gift package, they will however be made available to everyone for free in upcoming releases.

The SuperTuxKart team has a firm belief that software should respect and serve its users. This means respecting privacy, but also being respectful of the users’ time and fun. This disqualifies nearly all forms of advertisement. However, we may name sponsors in the credits, or include passive environmental advertising elements (like billboards near race tracks) provided they fit the game’s aesthetic.

SuperTuxKart runs well on most devices. You might want to use the integrated benchmark to optimize your settings to get the best mix of eye-candy and smoothness for your device.

Desktop

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 mobile CPUs.
• Minimal: Any Intel or AMD dual-cores processors. Very old models and low-clocked mobile parts may struggle, especially in online play.

Mobile

• Android: Android 5.0 or later
• iOS: iOS 13 or later

By default, SuperTuxKart uses a render resolution below 100% on mobile to improve performance.

Other requirements

• At least 1 GB of free RAM
• Disk space: 800MB

Optional

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

SuperTuxKart features a fallback renderer which only needs OpenGL 2.1, GLES 2, or DirectX 9. It lacks the advanced graphical effects that make the game pretty, but it should work on most devices.

The SuperTuxKart project as we know it exists since 2006, when Hiker began working on it, with roots in the older TuxKart.

Over the years, with the help of many contributors, the game grew to become a reference among open-source games, with steady improvements in graphics and gameplay alike.

Thanks to this recognition as well as its open nature, SuperTuxKart was and is used in many projects, including numerous academic papers and demos from major companies.

By the release of version 1.0 in 2019 with online multiplayer, SuperTuxKart was a mature project. Hiker passed the torch, and the project continued with a focus on polish and stability.

Now, our team is actively working on writing the next page of history with SuperTuxKart Evolution, with a myriad of novelties in the works.

You can consult our illustrated history of SuperTuxKart for an in-depth exploration of the game’s history.

No! The Mario Kart series is the most widely recognized franchise of kart racing games, but there are many others.

There are many major differences between SuperTuxKart and Mario Kart, and while we sometimes look at other kart racing games to see how SuperTuxKart compares, SuperTuxKart continues evolving in its own unique direction.

The ‘clone’ claim usually comes from sources that try to give a simplified explanation of what SuperTuxKart is while having only a superficial understanding of both game series.

SuperTuxKart is currently led by Alayan, who manages the code and coordinates the team’s efforts, and by Sven, who focuses on visual art and the creation of new tracks. Both have been involved in the project for nearly a decade.

Samuncle, who was the game’s lead artist for many years, currently plays an advisory role, while BcfWorld manages STK’s online services.

Among the most significant past team members are Hiker, project leader from 2006 to 2019, Auria who assisted him for a decade, Devee who created and maintained the Android version, and Benau, who was co-leader from 2019 to 2025.

As is the nature of a libre and open-source project, a great number of people made contributions to SuperTuxKart over the years, from small changes to major improvements.

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

There are two main ways to support SuperTuxKart’s development:

• You can contribute with a donation. All the money received is used to cover the project’s costs and to help make development work sustainable. Donations are essential for SuperTuxKart to compete with proprietary games.
• You can contribute by directly making an improvement for the game. Check the Get involved page, it references information about contributing code, visual art, translations, and more. If you want to create something new, you should share your plans with the current developers and artists through the forum. This will greatly improve the chance that you contribution will be accepted.

Simply participating in the community, and promoting SuperTuxKart through word-of-mouth, are also small ways to help!

SuperTuxKart Evolution is the name of the next major release of SuperTuxKart.

A continuation of SuperTuxKart’s long history, it will at the same time bring considerable change ; with a vast amount of new content and a strong focus on higher and more consistent quality.

It aims to offer players the experience of a new game within the same game series.

Check our blog for a general overview. The main points are:

• At least 8 new tracks,
• Significant gameplay and graphical updates to all tracks carried over from 1.5,
• Significant changes to game mechanics and physics, while keeping the essence of the SuperTuxKart feel,
• New powerups as well as a revision of existing ones,
• Several new karts, as well as new animations and other improvements for existing karts,
• A new user interface rethought from the ground up,
• A new Story Mode with over 40 challenges, including new cutscenes and new challenge types.

Many other elements of the game not covered in this brief summary are also planned. Many of the planned changes affecting the code are indexed in the STK Evolution milestone on GitHub.

We’ve chosen SuperTuxKart Evolution to signify that this is a new game within the same game series, rather than merely a big update.

SuperTuxKart Evolution will bring an unprecedented number of changes and novelties to every aspect of the game (see ‘What changes are planned for SuperTuxKart Evolution?’), and 2.0 was inadequate to convey this.

There is continuity in code and assets, but that’s the norm between a game and its sequel. Unlike most software which are defined primarily by their function, video games are primarily defined by the experience they provide through their gameplay and their story. Major changes to either are the essence of a new game.

That’s why we consider SuperTuxKart Evolution a new game.

Please see our History page for more details.

You can find blog posts covering major changes on our blog, as well as development videos on our YouTube channel. SuperTuxKart’s in-game news (in the ‘Online’ menu) provide notifications for new blog posts.

Short posts are also published every week on our Patreon page. These posts often showcase Evolution’s improved visuals, but they also discuss the design choices we make, code changes, and other aspects of game development.

Keep in mind that it takes time to prepare new videos and blog posts, and that we prefer to unveil novelties when they are ready. There is always a significant amount of 3D visual art that has been done but which hasn’t been showcased yet.

Likewise, many changes present in the code of the Evolution branch have not been publicly showcased yet, although you can browse the code history if you are interested.

A 1.5.1 release is currently planned to bring bugfixes, localization improvements, and minor features.

No active development is planned afterwards, however the 1.x online services (online accounts, addons repository, server directory) will remain available even after SuperTuxKart Evolution’s release.

SuperTuxKart 1.5 features 9 different powerups: zipper, bubblegum, plunger, bowling-ball, cake, swatter, parachute, basket-ball, and swapper (also known as switch).

Check the in-game help menu for more details.

The game modes available in SuperTuxKart 1.5 are:

• Normal race, a racing mode with powerups to boost your kart or hinder rivals.
• Time-Trial, a racing mode without powerups, emphasizing raw driving skills.
• Soccer, in which two teams compete to score goals with a ball or a puck.
• Egg Hunt, in which a player explores a track to find eggs hidden in various locations.
• Battle, in which players use powerups to attack each other and score points. It has several subvariants, with Three-Strikes-Battle, Free-For-All, and Capture-the-Flag.
• Follow-the-Leader, a form of elimination race in which players are not allowed to overtake a leader kart.

Normal Race, Time-Trial, and Follow-the-Leader support Grand Prix mode, in which several races are played in a row. After each race, points are scored based on the kart’s final position, and the kart with the most points at the end wins the Grand Prix.

SuperTuxKart offers a Story Mode in which players have to win a series of challenges, featuring normal races, time-trials, and Grand Prix.

Time-Trial and Egg Hunts support the recording of replays, with the possibility to play against an existing replay to try and beat it.

In SuperTuxKart, you can drift to take tighter curves and to obtain speed boosts. Simply press the appropriate key or button (indicated in the in-game tutorial or in the ‘Controls’ tab of the Options menu) while turning and the kart will start to drift.

The initial hop of the kart helps to turn tighter. As long as you keep the drift input pressed, the kart will be forced to keep turning, but you can adjust how tightly.

If you hold the drift long enough, spark particles will change and you will get a speed boost once you release the drift. In SuperTuxKart 1.5, there are 2 drift levels depending on how long the drift lasts.

The key to mastering drifting is to carefully position your kart before you initiate the drift.

To fire a powerup backwards in SuperTuxKart, simply activate the powerup while also looking back.

Go in the Options menu and check the ‘Controls’ tab to check or change the input needed to look back. On touchscreens, tap the rearview mirror to look back.

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.

Online, many players make heavy use of the drifting mechanic. If you feel slow compared to them, you can probably stand to drift more.

Picking good trajectories and using nitro in small bursts is also important.

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 powerups backwards).

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 do so by editing a config file.

Open the folder mentioned in the question ‘Where is the configuration stored?’. From there, open the file ‘players.xml’, and replace all occurrences of ‘none’ with ‘hard’ (or ‘easy’ or ‘medium’, indicating the highest level at which you have solved a challenge).

Yes, all your progress and settings will be carried over if you are updating from a compatible version, such as 1.3 or 1.4 to 1.5.

If you are updating from an incompatible version, such as 0.9.3 to 1.5, you will get a new user profile. Your progress and settings in the old version will remain safe and available when playing with the old version.

Be aware that new compatible versions may introduce new setting parameters. If you have two compatible versions installed at the same time, the older version will not recognize settings specific to the newer one, and playing with the older version will reset changes you might have done to those new setting parameters.

There are several methods available:

• Reduce your graphical settings. You can use the integrated benchmark to test the changes. When using the modern renderer (graphics level 3 and up), you can reduce the render resolution. SuperTuxKart’s UI will remain crisp but the rest of the game will be upscaled from a lower resolution.
• Set a lower value in the game’s frame-limiter. Frames don’t all take the same amount of time to render. By letting your hardware rest after fast frames, you get more thermal headroom for slower frames.
• Reduce the game’s resolution.
• For online play, stick to nearby servers with a low latency. Higher latencies increase the load on your CPU.

If you are using a keyboard, and some keypresses don’t register when pressing multiple keys simultaneously, this is not a bug in SuperTuxKart but a physical limitation of your keyboard: most keyboards only support a limited number of simultaneous key presses (for more detailed information, please check here).

Most keyboards work properly with SuperTuxKart’s default key bindings, but custom key bindings may trigger this issue. The solution is to use a gaming input device (gamepad, or gaming keyboard), or to tweak your key bindings to find a configuration that your keyboard will be able to register simultaneously.

If the game seems to register phantom inputs, behaving as if you pressed a key while you did not, 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 inputs can be received from gamepads or other similar devices that the OS sees as a gamepad.

Check SuperTuxKart bug tracker and search first to see if your problem has been reported already. If it has not been reported, open a new issue and provide all relevant information that could help developers track down the problem’s cause.

All versions from SuperTuxKart 1.0 to SuperTuxKart 1.5 use the same configuration location. The precise location depends on your operating system and on the installation method:

• 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’.

Keyboard, gamepad, and gaming wheel are all perfectly fine input methods to play SuperTuxKart and feel in control of your kart. Use whichever you are most comfortable with.

While keyboard controls often have the reputation of being inadequate for racing games, this is not the case in SuperTuxKart. In fact, a majority of the game’s best players play on keyboard.

The touchscreen controls available on mobile are more challenging, because thumbs need to do most of the work. It is still possible to play very well, but there is an extra degree of difficulty.

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 probably something is wrong with your compiler setup. (Check if you have all dependencies, re-run CMake, …)