New Career (Setup Wizard) | The Undercut Wiki

The setup wizard is the four-screen dialog that turns “New Career” into a living world: a budget tier, a home country, a team name. It runs once, takes about thirty seconds, and every choice it takes is baked into the save — none of the three can be changed later without starting over. This page covers what each answer actually does in code, and what the game builds behind the loading bar once you hit Finish.

How to open it

Main Menu → New Career. That does not launch the wizard straight away — it opens the series chooser in the right panel first:

Row	State	What it does
Prime Formula Series	enabled	Starts the standard career → the setup wizard
Atlas GT Series	greyed	Not implemented
Crown Touring Championship	greyed	Not implemented
Custom Mods	enabled (hidden in the Steam Next Fest demo build)	Opens the mod-pack picker

Picking Prime Formula Series opens the wizard. Picking a mod pack skips or replaces parts of it — see The mod-pack routes below.

Escape / B backs out one step at a time; from the Welcome screen it cancels back to the menu.

Step 1 — Welcome

A single confirmation panel (“Register” / “Cancel”). No data. On a gamepad, A registers and B cancels; the buttons advertise their bindings.

Step 2 — Budget

Three options. This is the single biggest decision in the wizard, because it sets two independent things — starting cash and starting reputation — and reputation is what gates who will talk to you.

Tier	Starting budget	Starting reputation	Wizard blurb
Small	$40,000,000	30	”Limited resources, maximum challenge”
Medium	$60,000,000	50	”Balanced start with room to grow”
Large	$90,000,000	70	”Full backing, high expectations”

Notes that matter:

The AI grid reads the same table. BudgetTier::amount() is the single source used by the team builders, so a Large career does not make you richer than the field — it puts you in the rich half of a field that spans all three tiers.
The numbers carry a +$20M uplift over the historic 10/30/60 values, added specifically to absorb the per-season car-build drain. Do not budget as if the old figures still applied.
Reputation (starting_reputation) is the gate on sponsor and supplier offers and on driver acceptance. A Small team is not just poorer, it is offered a visibly worse market on day one.
The budget tier is also an input into your team value (team_value(infrastructure, budget_tier, reputation, championships, wins, cash)), which sets how much cash an equity sale raises and how large a bank loan you can take. See Finance.

Arrow keys / stick move the highlight, Enter or A confirms, and the mouse can click a card directly.

Step 3 — Country

A scrolling, searchable list of every country the game considers “motorsport-capable”. The list is not hand-written: it is every row of country_regions.txt whose weight gdp × 0.3 + car_market × 0.7 reaches 3.0 or more, and which maps to a real display name.

Each row shows the flag plus two numeric badges, each with a hover-help bubble:

Badge	Hover text	What it really is
GDP	”Country wealth. Higher = more sponsors emerge from this country.”	The country’s GDP score from `country_regions.txt`
Car	”Car-industry size. Higher = more suppliers and driver talent from this country.”	The automotive-market score from the same row

Read those two badges as a description of the world, not of your team: every procedural sponsor, supplier and AI team draws its origin through pick_weighted_country, which weights by (gdp × 0.3 + car_market × 0.7)². Picking Luxembourg does not thin out the sponsor pool; the pool was always going to be dominated by the big automotive nations.

What your own choice concretely changes:

Driver recruitment. driver_acceptance_prob adds a flat +0.08 to the acceptance roll for a driver whose nationality matches your team’s country (and a further +0.05 if it matches your engine supplier’s country). That is a meaningful edge on a marginal signing — see Scouting.
Your private test circuit. dev_circuit_for_country hashes the country’s ISO code (FNV-1a) into a seed, and derives 10 + seed % 6 turns and a 3500 + seed % 3000 m lap. Your country therefore permanently fixes the layout and length of the track used by Private Testing and shown in the Infrastructure dev-circuit preview.
Identity. The flag on your team in Standings, World Data, the Team Profile, and the country-of-origin marks baked onto the car and race suit.
Country page. Your country is flagged as “host” on its Country Profile.

Controls: type to filter (letters and space; Backspace deletes), mouse wheel scrolls, 12 rows visible at a time. Clicking an already-selected row confirms it. On a gamepad, Select opens the on-screen keyboard for the filter field.

Step 4 — Team name

A free-text field, maximum 24 characters, ASCII, non-control characters only. Leading/trailing whitespace is trimmed and an empty name refuses to advance. The panel repeats your budget tier and country as a last confirmation.

The name is more load-bearing than it looks: world_pool_seed(&team_name) seeds the world manufacturer pool, so two careers with the same team name generate the same ~35-maker industrial world. Renaming is not offered anywhere in-game.

Confirming calls CareerSave::new(team_name, country, budget_tier, appearance) and the career is created.

Team identity (the fifth, deferred step)

Livery, car model, race suit and logo are not part of the wizard. They are asked once, as a mandatory interstitial, at the phase 3 → phase 4 transition (Suppliers → Drivers), and only when logo_name is still empty. The screen has no Back or Cancel.

What it offers:

10 procedural logos, generated from "<team name> Logo <i>" and tinted with your body colour.
12 car models (CAR_COUNT = 12 — only the recolourable PNG bodies; the legacy SVG range is not offered to new careers).
11 race suits.
A top-down race livery variant, previewed with the exact zone baker the 2D race renderer uses (livery_editor::bake_livery_image) — minus the sponsor logos and driver number, which are not chosen yet.
Three colours — Body, Accent 1, Accent 2 — picked from the shared COLOR_PALETTE.

The trap: a sponsor can lock your body colour. If any already-signed sponsor has wants_car_color, the Body palette row is veiled, non-clickable, and prints “Color agreed in sponsor contract — ”. The pre-selected swatch is the palette entry closest in hue to that sponsor’s primary colour. Because sponsors are signed in phases 2–3 and identity is chosen in phase 4, this is decided before you ever see the screen. If you care about your livery colour, check the sponsor’s terms before signing.

Keyboard: Left/Right cycle the car, Shift+Left/Right cycle the suit, Enter finishes.

The mod-pack routes

Two shapes of pack, both reached from Custom Mods:

New Series pack — the ordinary wizard runs, and the pack overrides the generated content inside CareerSave::new_with_pack before anything derives state from it. Sponsor offers are regenerated afterwards from the modded database.

Imposed pack — the wizard is skipped entirely. build_imposed_world builds a fully staffed grid (rosters, infrastructure, history, and a complete car rolled for every team via ensure_ai_inventories_initialized + apply_shared_engine_pool) using placeholder player values of “Player” / gb / Medium. You then get the team picker: one card per grid team showing its logo, its recoloured livery car, its driver line-up, and a stat line of Reputation N · Infra X.X/10 · $YM. Click a card to select, click again (or press Take over …) to confirm.

take_over_team then moves that team wholesale into the player slots — name, country, budget tier, cash, infrastructure, reputation, sponsors, drivers, suppliers, colours, car model, logo, part inventory, dev projects, career wins/championships, team history, founding year — seeds known_designs so R&D works from day one, refills the WU pool, and parks you on phase 6 (Development) with zero turns used. One “Next Turn” from there runs straight into the season presentation. There is no pre-season to work through.

What a fresh career is populated with

CareerSave::new_with_pack builds, in order:

Subsystem	Size / rule
Driver pool	400 generated drivers
Sponsor database	random 36–50 public brands, plus `sponsors_per_marketing_level × 10` hidden “premium” brands unlocked by Marketing level
Supplier database	random 4–8 per category (tyres, fuel), plus one engine supplier per available motorist in the motorist pool
Motorist pool	generated from the game DB (empty in demo builds)
World manufacturers	~35 procedural makers seeded by team name, with the PFS engine suppliers merged in by name
Engine pricing	`apply_engine_arch_pricing` applies the architecture premium once, at creation: V8 −10 %, V10 −20 %, V12 +15 % on client cost
Circuit pool	`career_cfg.circuit_pool_size`, default 50 (clamped 20–60)
Calendar	`CALENDAR_ROUNDS = 20` drawn from the pool — the season is a subset of the world, which is what makes contracts and comebacks possible
Announced rounds	the first 2 rounds only; the rest are announced progressively
AI teams	generated by `generate_ai_teams`, each on the same three-tier budget table
Player logo	a team-logo index no AI team is already using
TV rights	season 1’s broadcast package credited immediately (`apply_tv_rights_package`)
Driver IDs	every driver in the world gets its numeric identity
Dev series	PF2 / PF3 built after the mod pack, so they align on the final calendar — see Development Series
Inbox	one mail: “Welcome to the Prime Formula Series!”

Advanced

CareerSave::new ends in ..Default::default(). That silently fills any field the literal forgot with an empty Vec / zero / None, and nothing can compile-error on it — that is exactly how every new career once shipped with an empty world circuit pool while still drawing a calendar from it. The guard today is a test (circuit_pool_tests::a_new_career_has_every_subsystem_populated). If you are modding and a subsystem looks empty in a fresh save, that trap is the first suspect.
Six pre-season phases, not six turns. TOTAL_PHASES = 6. Phases 2, 3 and 4 run TURNS_PER_STEP = 5 turns each; phases 1, 5 and 6 are single-turn. Phases 2 and 3 additionally share one 10-turn negotiation window — the Hub and sidebar both count them together as “Negotiation — Turn X/10”.
OFFERS_PER_PHASE = 3 — three offers per turn in the negotiation and recruitment phases.
The season is 20 GPs (TOTAL_GPS = 20), matching CALENDAR_ROUNDS.
Prize money defaults: race_prize_total $2,025,000 per race, championship_prize_total $222,750,000 for the season. Both are top-heavy exponentials (per-race P1 ≈ 15 %, P20 ≈ 0.8 %, a 20× ratio). Overridable in Settings → Career sliders.
Budget tier is not a difficulty slider you can walk back. It permanently anchors the budget bar on the Hub: the tile fraction is current_budget / budget_tier.amount(), so a Large team that has spent down to $30M shows a redder bar than a Small team sitting on the same $30M.
Country cannot be changed, and it owns your test track. If you plan to lean on Private Testing, remember the lap length is a hash of the ISO code, between 3.5 km and 6.5 km, with 10–15 turns. There is no way to re-roll it.

Common mistakes

Choosing Small “for the challenge” and then signing a marquee driver. Reputation 30 plus $40M means the acceptance rolls are against you and the salary is not affordable; the 3-consecutive-red-GPs bankruptcy rule does the rest.
Assuming Large means an easy field. The AI teams draw from the same amount() table — Large only guarantees you are among the well-funded, not ahead of them.
Picking a country for its GDP badge, expecting more sponsor money. Sponsor origins are drawn globally, weighted by that score for every brand in the world. Your own country’s concrete effects are the driver-nationality bonus, the test circuit and your flag.
Ignoring the sponsor colour clause. Sign a wants_car_color sponsor in phase 2 and your team’s body colour is decided before the identity screen ever opens.
Reusing a team name across careers and expecting a different world. The manufacturer pool is seeded from the name.
Expecting to name the car or pick the livery in the wizard. Identity is a separate, mandatory interstitial at the start of phase 4 — with no Back button.