Course Building Tips for Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit

Add me to the group of folks that thought Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit was going to be a gimmicky mess when it launched, but with just a weekend of play under my belt, and a Mario Kart that has been charged 7-8 times, add me to the new group of folks admitting to being wrong. Mario Kart Live is an absolute blast – I initially thought this would just be fun for my kids, but my wife and I are enjoying it as well.

We have learned over the past few days the do’s and don’ts of building custom tracks in our basement, but there is one main thing you shouldn’t do. Although you’ve likely already figured this out, we are here to help if you haven’t!

When racing around your home, the AI opponents will not be hampered by real world obstacles. If you build a bridge, these other karts simply treat it as a straight away. So while you waste time going up and then coming back down, they are just zooming through, putting you at a major disadvantage. But that isn’t the tip we want to share.

When creating your custom tracks, there is a specific amount of space on each side of your vehicle that will ultimately create ‘the track.’ We noticed quickly that when we used obstacles to create a corner – driving around our Kitchen island for example – if we took the corner really tight on the inside, a good portion of our track would actually create itself inside our island. When it came to race time, while other players could take the created tracks inside corner (as they ignore the kitchen island), I was forced to take the outside every single time. In 50 CC this isn’t a problem, as catching up is really easy. But on 150? This is enough to lose you the Grand Prix over 5 laps per race.

Further, some courses spawn items on the course, both good and bad. Often, we found spawned mushrooms in locations we couldn’t reach, as well as those valuable coins that help you unlock stuff across Mario Kart Live. In other situation, goombas or bananas would spawn on the only part of the track we could drive on, meaning we either had to veer REALLY far off course to avoid, or we ultimately hit these items.

There is another problem that is created by this kind of track building – Chain Chomps and Bullet Bills. Both the Chain Chomp and Bullet Bill will take control of your kart to a degree (as they would in normal Mario Kart). However, these are virtual power-ups on your kart, which are using the built track as a reference point. More often than not – likely 95% of the time – getting one of these near a real world obstacle meant I was crashing into said obstacle, losing any advantage the power-up might have given me.

Real world obstacles are fun, and can nicely show players where to drive. While we don’t at all recommend removing these obstacles, consider taking a wider path around them next time so that when your track is created, it isn’t going through things your real world kart cannot!

We hope you enjoyed this building tip! Stay tuned for more!