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What KOTT is

King of the Touge is touge racing for Assetto Corsa: timed laps and 1v1 battles on mountain passes, with lap times the server verifies. Communities run it on their own servers. Pick one and jump in. Browse communities

What you need to install

One paid game and two free downloads. Sign in with Steam on this site and that's all the account you need; Discord is optional.

1. 1
   Assetto Corsa On Steam, the paid game
2. 2
   Content Manager The free launcher that joins servers
3. 3
   Custom Shaders Patch 0.2.8+ Required for the in-game HUD
4. 4
   The track your community runs Content Manager can usually download it when you join

Timed laps, battles and layouts

Join a server and you can cruise, set timed laps, or challenge anyone on it.

• Timed laps. Press R any time: a 3-second countdown puts you at the start and the clock begins. Going off track or teleporting to the pits invalidates the lap; press R to go again. After a clean lap you go back to the start on your own (switch that off in the H panel).
• Battles. Challenge any connected driver with G. They accept with Y, you both line up at the start, and for the length of the battle you collide only with each other; everyone else passes straight through.
• Layouts. A server can host every layout of a pass at once: downhill, uphill, reversed. Switch between them in-game with E without reconnecting.
• See-through cars. Anyone you would pass through can be faded out, or hidden, at whatever strength you like. A car you could actually hit is never hidden.

In-game keys

Press H in-game for this list plus the HUD toggles.

How skill works

Every battle you drive feeds a skill score belonging to that community: its drivers, its standings. Beating a stronger driver earns more; losing to a weaker one costs more. The score shown is a careful estimate, so it rises as you prove it over more battles, and driving the same person again and again counts for less each time.

Results are worked out from the race itself rather than taken on trust from anyone's game, and lap times are checked the same way, so the standings mean something.

One server, every layout

A pass usually has more than one way to run it — downhill, uphill, a reversed direction, a longer variant. KOTT hosts all of them on one server, and drivers switch between them in-game without reconnecting.

That matters more than it sounds. The alternative is a server per layout, which for a community of twenty means three servers with six people in each — and a server with six people in it reads as dead, so people stop joining. Keeping everyone in one place is the difference between a community that feels alive and one that looks abandoned.

A busy server that still races well

The usual problem with everyone in one place is that everyone gets in the way. KOTT handles that in two layers.

Battles are isolated. When two drivers are racing each other they collide with each other and pass straight through everybody else. Someone cruising cannot punt them off, and their battle cannot ruin someone else's hot lap. The same applies to timed laps.

And you can see through what you'd pass through. A car you cannot collide with still blocks your view of the road and your line, for no reason — so drivers can fade those cars out, at whatever strength they like, up to hiding them entirely. It follows the collision rules exactly, which means a car you could actually hit is never hidden from you.

The server decides, not the client

This is the part that matters most and the part that is easiest to skip. In Assetto Corsa almost everything is computed on the player's own machine, so anything the client reports is a claim rather than a fact.

KOTT doesn't take the claim. Each car's position is projected onto the track's racing line server-side, every tick — and that single projection is what drives finish detection, gaps, and lap validity. When a battle ends, the winner is re-derived from the recorded trace and compared against what the server reported. If they disagree, the trace wins and the result is flagged rather than quietly recorded.

Practically: a corner-cut doesn't become a lap record, and a disputed battle doesn't silently become someone's win. That's what makes a leaderboard worth caring about.

Timed laps that can't be gamed

A clean lap has exactly one route into existence: the player presses restart, gets teleported to the start, held for a three-second countdown, and released as the clock begins. There is no other path in the code that can start a timed lap — that's enforced by a build-time check, not a convention.

Going off track or teleporting to the pits invalidates the lap immediately, and contact during a hot lap is policed so someone can't ruin a run and have it count. Splits are recorded per sector, so a player can see where the time actually went.

Battles, without a queue

Anyone on the server can challenge anyone else. Accept, and both cars are placed at the start line, counted down together, and released — the rest of the server keeps driving around you, and collisions between the pair are isolated from everyone else.

Results feed a skill rating scoped to your community. Your drivers, your standings. There's a same-pair cooldown built in, so two friends can't inflate each other's rating by trading wins all evening.

A cat-and-mouse ruleset is available too, where the roles of hunter and runner swap between runs.

The HUD your players get

Delivered by the plugin — nothing for players to download or configure beyond having a current CSP. It shows live timing and gap, the countdown lights, a driver list with what everyone is currently doing, challenge prompts, and the results screen after a battle. Your community's name appears when they join.

Your community page

Your server appears on your own page within about a minute of its first heartbeat, with a live map of who's driving where, a connect button, leaderboards, lap history and driver profiles — all under your name, colours and logo.

You also get the tools that keep a community running: bans, teams, news posts, and delegated admins so you aren't the only one who can act.

What stays yours

The server. We have no access to your machine — we can't start it, stop it, or read its files, and everything KOTT needs travels over a heartbeat your server initiates. Your track and car choices are yours; your players are yours; your community page is branded as yours.

The plugin is open source under the AGPL, so you and your players can read exactly what it does. See /source.

Why didn't my skill change?

Only completed battles move it. A cancelled or expired battle, or one both drivers left, doesn't count. Your skill also belongs to the community whose server you drove on: driving somewhere else moves a different score. Each community's Drivers page, sorted by skill, shows where you stand there.

Do I need Discord to play?

No. Signing in with Steam is all you need. Linking Discord is optional: it lets the KOTT bot's profile and stats commands know who you are. You can link it from your profile at any time; linking Discord walks through it.

The result of my battle is wrong

Every result is worked out on the server from the race itself, so a report is checked against the full race rather than either driver's word. If the battle's page offers Report match, use it; its status updates on that page. Otherwise tell us on the Report an issue page with the pass, roughly when it was and the other driver's name.

Reporting a bug or an idea

Use the Report an issue page (also in the footer). For quick questions the Discord is the fastest path.

Where's the Discord?

https://discord.gg/y8nYwcn979, the same link as in the footer.

Connect doesn't open Content Manager

Content Manager registers a link handler (acmanager://) when it's installed. If Connect does nothing, either Content Manager isn't installed yet or the handler isn't registered.

• Install Content Manager from acstuff.ru if you haven't.
• Already installed? Open Content Manager once with admin rights; it registers the handler again.
• Or use the copy button next to Connect to copy the server's address, and paste it into Content Manager's "Add server" dialog.

I can't connect to a server

• Assetto Corsa must be the original game on Steam; Assetto Corsa Competizione won't work.
• Custom Shaders Patch (CSP) version 0.2.8 (build 3424) or newer.
• You need the track that server runs. Content Manager tells you on the connect screen if it's missing, and can usually fetch it.
• The server might be full or restarting: the servers list shows who is online.
• Still stuck? Ask on the Discord.

What you're agreeing to

• You run an AssettoServer instance with the KOTT plugin installed. It talks to KOTT over HTTPS. The machine stays yours — we have no access to it, cannot start or stop it, and cannot read its files.
• KOTT holds a killswitch. We can suspend a community for policy violations, abuse, or abandonment. A soft suspension lets in-flight races finish and refuses new ones; a hard suspension stops the plugin at its next heartbeat. You would normally hear from us first.
• Lap times, race results and ratings flow through KOTT. Your server is the race host; we are the record keeper.
• Your players are owed the plugin's source. The plugin is AGPL-licensed, and the in-game panel and /source already carry that offer. Don't strip them — that is what keeps you compliant.

What you get

• Your own community page with your name, colours and logo, plus leaderboards and lap history for your drivers.
• A ranking that is yours. Battles on your servers feed a skill rating scoped to your community — your drivers, your standings.
• Verified timing and race judging. Laps are validated server-side; battle results are re-derived from the race trace rather than trusted from the client.
• An admin panel for your community page, news, bans, co-admins and plugin bundle.

What you can run

Your licence permits Touge — one server that hosts cruising, solo timed laps and on-demand 1v1 battles together. Deliberately one server rather than three: splitting a community across modes leaves you with several half-empty servers, and an empty server reads as a dead community.

There is no ranked queue. Every battle is a challenge two drivers agree to on the server; win/loss records and the community skill ladder are per-community. A leftover Mode: MATCHMAKING in an old plugin_kott_cfg.yml boots as Touge with a warning rather than refusing to start.

Licence and renewal

Your licence lasts a year and renews itself. Once inside 60 days of expiry, any successful heartbeat pushes it out again — so a server that comes online even occasionally never expires, and there is nothing to remember.

If a server stays offline long enough for the licence to lapse, the plugin enters lockout and you'll need a fresh bundle from your dashboard.

When KOTT is unreachable

The plugin heartbeats every ~30 seconds. If it can't reach us:

• Six failures — degraded. Racing continues. Results queue locally and replay when the connection returns. Players see a banner.
• 24 hours — locked. New races are refused; in-flight ones finish. This exists so a disconnected server can't accumulate results nobody can verify.

Turning your own server off for a while does not trip this: the clock only runs while a server is up and cannot reach KOTT.

Being listed publicly

Your community page works from the moment your server connects, and anyone with the link can reach it. Appearing in the public communities directory is a separate request you make from your dashboard, because that directory is curated. Declining a listing never affects your racing, and you can remove yourself at any time without asking.

Install guide

Drivers

You need Assetto Corsa, Content Manager and Custom Shaders Patch 0.2.8 (build 3424) or newer; What you need to install has the links. KOTT servers ask for that CSP build, and Content Manager tells you on the connect screen if yours is older.

Server owners

You need an AssettoServer 0.0.55 install; the plugin is a few files you extract into it, with no separate service to run. Sign in to your community admin and open the Bundle tab (/community/<your-slug>/admin/bundle) to download your bundle. The README.txt inside it has the install and update steps. No community yet? Apply first.

Next

Apply — tell us about your community.