How to Install Assetto Corsa Competizione and Join a Server

The first thing Assetto Corsa Competizione takes away from you is the assumption that a fast lap is the point. You will do a fast lap. Then you will do forty more, and the twelfth one will be half a second off because the left front is cooler than it was and you did not notice.

That is the game. It simulates one class of car — GT3, mostly, with GT4 and some relatives alongside — across one championship's calendar, and it does it in more depth than it does anything else.

It is also a game where nobody types an IP address, which is the part worth explaining before anything else.

How you actually get into a race here

Most of this site is about copying an address into a console. This game does not work that way, and pretending otherwise would waste your evening.

Multiplayer sits behind a menu in the game with a list of servers in it. You browse, you filter, you join. There is no developer console with a connect command, no address bar, and no way to bookmark a server as a Steam link the way you would with a Source game.

What that means in practice:

• Public lobbies are the drop-in option. Open the list, find something running a track you know, join. Quality varies from a clean race to four cars in the wall at turn one.
• Rated servers filter by your driving record rather than your lap time. More on that below, because it is the thing that makes this game's multiplayer different from every other racing game's.
• Private and league servers are password-protected and you get the password from the people running the league. Not from a server list, not from here, not from anywhere public. That is deliberate.

Listings for the game collect on the ACC hub, and what those listings mostly do for you is tell you a league or community exists at all — which, for a game where the good racing is behind a password, is the harder half of the problem.

Getting the game

Assetto Corsa Competizione is a paid game on Steam, with a fairly long list of optional track and car packs sold separately. Buy the base game first. The DLC matters only when a league you have joined runs a track you do not own, and you will know when that happens because you will not be able to load the session.

Install it from your Library like anything else. It is a substantial download by the standards of the older games on this site — this is an Unreal Engine title with laser-scanned circuits, and the disk footprint reflects that.

Our Steam guide is the prerequisite read if Steam is unfamiliar.

The hardware conversation

This is the one game in this set where the honest answer is that the peripheral matters more than the PC.

A wheel and pedals transform it. Not because the game refuses a controller — it does not — but because ACC's entire feedback loop is information arriving through the steering, and a thumbstick removes the channel that the simulation spends its budget on. You can drive it on a pad. You will be driving with the volume down.

A basic belt or gear-driven wheel with a pedal set is enough to get the whole experience. Load cell brakes and direct drive are refinements that people who are already committed argue about.

On the PC side, the thing that hurts is a full grid at night in the rain, which is when the engine is doing the most work. A machine that holds a comfortable frame rate in a hotlap can drop badly at the start of a wet race with thirty cars ahead of you. Test that specific scenario before you sign up to a league, not after.

The rating system, and why it decides your evening

ACC keeps a record of how you drive, not just how fast.

The one that governs access is Safety Rating. It goes up when you complete clean laps in traffic and down when you make contact or go off, and a low number closes doors — the better-organised rated servers set a minimum and will not let you in below it.

There are several other ratings tracking things like consistency, pace and how well you know a given circuit. They are informative rather than gatekeeping. Safety Rating is the one to watch.

The practical consequence is that your first few hours should be spent building it rather than spending it. Run in sessions where you can complete laps without incident, even if that means running mid-pack and letting faster cars past. A driver with a good Safety Rating gets into races full of people who also have one, and that is a completely different sport from a public lobby.

Lifting for a car you are not fighting costs you two tenths. It is the best two tenths you will ever spend.

Practise before you join anything

Twenty minutes offline saves an evening of apologies.

Pick one car and one circuit. Not five. The GT3 field is closely matched by regulation, so the differences between cars are small preferences about braking stability and how the rear behaves on entry, and swapping constantly means you never learn any of them.

Run the practice session until you can do ten laps without a mistake, then look at what changed across them. Tyre temperatures and pressures move as you run, and the car at the end of a stint is not the car you set off in. There is a narrow optimum pressure window and the game shows you where you are relative to it — chase that rather than a number somebody posted online, because it moves with ambient temperature.

Then do it again in the wet. Rain in ACC is not a modifier, it is a different track: the racing line is the worst place to be because it is polished and holds water, standing water will take the car away from you with no warning, and a drying track goes through a phase where the line is quick again and everywhere else is not.

Most people's first wet race is also their first spin. Have it in private.

What a race weekend on a server involves

A multiplayer session is not a single race. It runs through phases, and turning up for the last one is how new drivers end up starting from the back with the wrong fuel load.

Practice is open running. Use it to check that your car is loading, that your wheel is behaving and that you remember which way the circuit goes.

Qualifying sets the grid. The etiquette is the part people get wrong: a driver on a fast lap should not be held up by a driver on an out lap, so if somebody is coming and you are not pushing, get out of the way early and obviously.

The race is where the fuel arithmetic arrives. You need enough to finish and not much more, because carrying fuel you do not need is carrying weight you did not have to. The game will calculate it for you if you tell it how long the race is.

Longer races add pit stops, and pit strategy is set from an in-car display you cycle through with a control you have bound yourself. Set the stop up before you need it — deciding how much fuel to take while braking for the pit entry is how you end up stopping twice. Endurance formats add driver swaps, where two people share one car and the handover happens in the pit box.

None of this is difficult. All of it is easier to learn in an offline session than in front of twenty people who are waiting for you.

Joining a league, which is the real answer

The best racing in this game happens in organised leagues, and it is not close.

A league gives you a fixed grid of people who will be there next week, a rulebook, stewards who review incidents, and a password to a server that only those people can enter. It converts a game where a stranger can end your race in turn one into a championship where doing that has consequences.

Finding one is the work. Communities running ACC leagues collect on our communities page, and the ACC listings are worth checking for groups advertising open seats. Most leagues recruit on their own Discord and run a qualifying or trial night before they hand out the server password, which sounds unwelcoming and is the reason their races are clean.

If you end up running one yourself, the game ships a dedicated server tool that is configured through text files rather than an in-game menu — a different job from clicking Host, and closer to administering a web service than to starting a game. Our guide to running a whitelist that people actually apply to covers the admission side, which is the part that determines whether a league survives its third month.

Where you host matters more here than in most games. Everyone on the grid is braking into the same corner at the same moment, and a driver 150 milliseconds further away is genuinely somewhere else on your screen than on theirs. Our piece on choosing a hosting region applies directly, and for racing specifically it is worth reading alongside tick rate explained.

Problems worth expecting

The server list is empty or will not load. It depends on the game's own online service rather than on anything local. Try again rather than reinstalling.

You cannot join a session your friends are in. Usually a missing track or car pack. The game will not always say so clearly.

Your wheel behaves differently in-game than on the desktop. Force feedback settings in ACC interact with the wheel manufacturer's own software, and having both trying to help is worse than either alone. Set the manufacturer's software to something neutral and do the tuning in the game.

Your Safety Rating fell after a race you thought was clean. Being hit still registers as contact in some circumstances. It is frustrating and it evens out across a season.

Frame rate collapses at the race start. Thirty cars, one corner. Lower the visible opponents setting rather than the overall graphics quality — it is the single most effective change and it costs you almost nothing you will notice while driving.

If this is not quite the game you wanted

ACC is deliberately narrow. One class of car, one championship, one kind of racing, simulated deeply.

Assetto Corsa, its predecessor, is the opposite proposition — a broader and older simulation with an enormous amount of community-made content, a much looser modding culture, and servers you find in a list rather than through a league application. If you want to drive a road car up a mountain pass or race something that never existed, that is where that lives.

BeamMP is further still from a racing series and closer to a physics sandbox with other people in it. Different pleasure entirely, and a good antidote after a race weekend that went badly.

For everything else on the site, our guide to finding the best game servers covers picking somewhere to play. For ACC, though, the honest version is shorter: find people, not a server. The password comes after.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Assetto Corsa Competizione servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.