Assetto Corsa EVO Mods: What Works in 2026 (SDK, Prism & the New Rules)

If you’ve arrived here wondering which version of Content Manager to install for Assetto Corsa EVO, the answer is none of them – not Content Manager, not CSP, not Pure. They don’t work on EVO and, they never will. The good news is that you don’t need any of them. Modding EVO is now live, and installing a car is the easiest it has ever been in an Assetto Corsa title. Today we’re going to look at why the old tools are gone, what the new SDK can do, which mods are worth your time, and how to get them into the game.

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Why old tools fail | The Kunos reversal | The SDK today | The mods worth having | Installing a mod | The new ecosystem | What’s missing

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Why Content Manager, CSP and Pure don’t work on EVO

The original Assetto Corsa’s modding stack – Content Manager, Custom Shaders Patch, Pure – was built by hooking directly into the 2014 renderer. It was exceptionally clever stuff at the time but really quite beginner unfriendly.

So, EVO doesn’t use that (now 12 year old) engine. It isn’t Unreal engine either, which is the platform ACC ran on. Kunos built something entirely new, which Marco Massarutto informed us about back when the game was still being called Assetto Corsa 2 and in its very early stages of development: “We are developing new technology for the engine. We will not use Unreal because we need greater flexibility”. Fair enough.

So nothing transfers – there’s no shaders patch, no launcher, and no 3rd party app sat between you and the sim. The entire system lives in the game’s own interface, plus a mods folder. It’s far simpler, and unless you’re a mod developer, you won’t miss the old system for too long.

How Kunos ended up fully open

Kunos’s position on modding has moved a long way in the past 24 months. In October 2024, the plan was mods only after version 1.0, and only through official vetting – understandable, given the licensing agreements a game like this carries, the new security issues that AI can possibly introduce – which leaves Evo mods a universe away from AC’s open ecosystem.

Then, in April 2025 the tools were pulled forward into Early Access. And, by February 2026, Massarutto had revealed all: “we are going to provide all the community with the modding tools with no limitations.” So, what does the new SDK do?

What the SDK does (and where 0.9 left it)

The ACE SDK v1 shipped in update 0.7 on 3 June 2026, through the Tools section of Steam (start here). It’s a car editor, and at first the cars it produced were single-player only. Update 0.8 in early July added multiplayer support – so community cars can now run on servers that allow them.

Then came the 0.8.1 release which added a server-side validation check: any mod built before it needs re-exporting through the SDK (the process generates a JSON auth) or servers will reject it. If a car that worked online last month suddenly won’t load, this is almost always why.

Update 0.9, released 26 August, changed nothing for modders. It brought the Audi R8 LMS GT2, the R8 V10 performance quattro and the Mazda RX-7 FD Spirit R, online Special Events leaderboards, mandatory multiplayer pit stops, and a new GT slick tyre model. Kunos says it isn’t the final Early Access update either.

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The big gap remains tracks. The SDK is cars only – there are no track tools at all, so there’s still a fair bit of game development expected to appear. On circuit mods and new tracks, Massarutto has floated a LiDAR-based terrain editor, but nothing has shipped yet.

The mods worth a look

How many EVO mods are worth having? Coxy The Older Sim Racer put a number on it in September: “probably only about 12 or 15 mods” that “are any good or will probably progress into something that can be raced.” That sounds harsh until you remember the SDK is only three months old, and I’m quite certain there’s a lot of developers trying to decide their development strategy on AC and AC Evo moving forward.

The named tier starts with Pessio Garage. They began with the Abarth 1000 TCR, built partly to learn the SDK, and have followed it with the Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Competizione “Daytona” – hosted on OverTake and already at v1.2. Coxy’s verdict on the Daytona: manual box, vintage tyres, proper heel-and-toe territory – “it’s really hard to drive… because that’s what they’re really like.”

Ceky Performance have the Porsche 992 GT3 RS Manthey pack and the BMW M3 Touring 24h. The M3 exists twice, which is worth knowing before you download anything: there’s an older free version on ModLand and the maintained version on their Patreon at about £7. YSGiant drove both and was blunt about it – “don’t try the free one.” The Patreon build has the working brakes, the lights and the updated handling. Ceky has said, relayed in YSGiant’s video, that all their cars will eventually be free.

Below that sits the work-in-progress tier – a Honda Civic EG6 is coming along on OverTake, for one. random callsign’s survey of the early mods found the tells of a scene learning a new SDK: seatbelts floating in mid-air, wipers and doors with no animations and, a speedo that doesn’t read. He wasn’t putting the boot in – the modders are relearning physics and materials on an engine nobody has worked with before, and the quality is climbing month on month. I respect these game developers a lot – it’s a tall order to make the shift after so long in the old ecosystem.

How to install a mod

An Assetto Corsa Evo mod arrives as a single .kspkg package file. It goes in Saved Games\ACE\mods on your Windows user profile – you’ll need to create the mods folder the first time you get setup – the .kspkg sits directly inside the root of mods\, rather than getting tucked into a subfolder of its own. That folder-inside-a-folder mistake is still the number one cause of “my mod won’t appear!” posts, so if a car doesn’t show up, check that first. Installed cars appear in Brand Central alongside Kunos’s own.

Agreeing with the overall sentiment from most of us, random callsign called it simpler than modding the original game: “this is just drag and drop.” He’s right, though he also raised the catch: the path is fixed to your Windows-profile drive, with no option to point it at a games drive, and the packages are big – a single car can run to hundreds of megabytes unpacked. Watch your C: drive!

If you want to build rather than install, the SDK lives in the Tools section of your Steam library.

The ecosystem

Kunos ships no launcher and has announced nothing like Content Manager, so the community is assembling one in pieces.

The Ronin Racing launcher is the closest thing to the old workflow: it’s free, built by the Ronin Racing community, with a live EVO server browser and automatic mod and livery installs when you join a lobby that needs them. Anyone who remembers manually chasing down a server’s car list for AC1 will appreciate how much easier this all is.

For finding mods in the first place, OverTake.gg now runs a dedicated EVO downloads section – cars, server tools, apps – and ModLand has its own EVO section too. acmods.net and the new curated evomods.gg are helpful additions to the list.

Then there’s Prism, by Real Sim Roads – our shaders story. Prism bills itself as the first “custom shaders patch” and “content manager” for EVO, its approach is a proxy DLL swapping compiled shaders in memory, with nothing on disk touched. The current spec lists 71 shader replacements, spectral rendering, HDR and tonemap control across GT, AgX and ACES, plus a lightweight content-manager app. It is a subscription: $4 a month at the early rate, slated to rise to $7. There are a couple of caveats before you reach for your card: the claims are Prism’s own, independent testing is still thin, and a paid CSP-equivalent is quite the culture shift for AC modding. CSP was free.

What’s still missing

The most obvious gap is tracks. The whole world of community circuits – the thing that made AC1 feel infinite – doesn’t exist here and can’t until Kunos ships track tools. Every mod in the scene is a car.

Audio is locked away from the SDK too – current mods can’t touch audio at all. YSGiant’s plea speaks for the whole scene: “please, someone make sound mods for Evo.” I’m sure that will materialise.

And finally, there’s a question the community definitely hasn’t settled yet. The SDK’s arrival produced a rush of Patreon-gated cars with free-eventually promises attached, and Kunos has said nothing about paid mods and licensing either way. 12 years is a good run for a mods business – I’m sure these guys have a plan.

So that’s EVO modding in September 2026. If you’re still running the original game, our Content Manager and CSP guides cover that side properly.

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