City Memory

LIVE road scars from real incidents   PLANNED the campaign scar ledger, infrastructure knowledge and civil engineering

City Memory is the idea that Night City should remember what happens on its roads. Places where cars keep crashing accumulate history, the city responds, and that history becomes something players can read and use.

What a player sees today

• Incidents are recorded with positions. When a car crashes or goes off during a race, the server records the kind of incident, its severity and where it happened.
• Road scars. Each run, recent incidents are drawn back into the world as scars, so the places that hurt people look like it.
• Race Week reacts to how the run is going: more incidents than usual pushes the city's tolerance down sooner. See Race Week.

What is designed but not built

The full design, written in October 2026 and explicitly not yet authorised for building:

• A campaign scar ledger: incidents clustered by road segment and radius into a burden that grows through levels 1-4, physical incidents only, ending with the campaign.
• An infrastructure knowledge ledger that carries what the city learned across runs.
• Civil engineering as engineering pointed outward: a small snapping kit of barriers and pieces, built and dismantled by anyone for modest money, judged by the race.
• An end-of-cycle Night City map with a danger heatmap and infrastructure pins, chosen publicly at rollover.

None of this is a promise. It is recorded so the design is not lost. See the Roadmap.

For developers

• Where it comes from: the incident table (session, driver, kind, severity band, delta-v, x/y/z, time, evidence) written by ncm_league, and ncm/online/resources/ncm_world/server/scars.lua, which reads recent positioned incidents and redraws them each run.
• Design authority: docs/ncm-online/49_CITY_MEMORY.md (SPEC: owner intent, not authorised); DECISION_RECORD L312-L313.