There’s some major changes coming to Forza Horizon 5 when the Series 4 update arrives later today, which will come as music to the ears of EventLab creators and players who don’t subscribe to Xbox Live Gold.

Updated: The patch is now live as of 1800UTC, and comes in at 11.5GB on Xbox Series consoles and 10GB on Xbox One.

Mike Brown, creative director of FH5 for Playground Games, detailed many of the upcoming changes in a special live stream as part of the regular Forza Monthly schedule.

Arguably the biggest single change comes to one of the game’s biggest single feature, EventLab. The EventLab function allows players to create routes of any type, anywhere (so long as it starts at a regular race start point), with any obstacles and scenery they wish, and even apply new sets of rules to create wild events. However, until now, it’s been quite the undertaking as events could not be changed once finished and published.

The Series 4 update will address that issue by introducing an edit function for EventLab. This will let you go back and change events you’ve already published — perhaps to fix any flaws or garnish it further — which dramatically improves functionality. It also means you’re now able to drive the route you want to make first, and then go back to add decoration and track furniture later.

For this Series there’s a bit of a shake-up in the Festival Playlist too. A lot of it seems to be keyed towards the main theme of the Series, Horizon World Cup, but some of the changes are set to persist.

Veteran players will immediately note on the image above that the number of points available this Series, and the points required to earn the prize cars, is far lower than before. That’s also reflected in the individual Seasons too.

Across S4, the prize cars will be available at 25 and 40 points, down from 25 and 45. In addition, the Exclusive cars — those that players can only acquire through the Festival Playlist — will be available at the lower score. That brings all the reward cars into range of players who don’t have access to online multiplayer.

You’ll also spot that the Series rewards are at precisely 4x that score, so if you get all four 25pt cars you’ll get the Saleen S7, and if you get all four 40pt cars you’ll win the Koenigsegg Jesko.

The reduced points come from a smaller number of events available through this Series too. Across S4 there’ll be no PR Stunts — Danger Signs, Speed Traps, Speed Zones, Trailblazers — in the Playlist, though they will return in S5 (there is, after all, an Accolade for them!) and a much smaller selection of online events. That again helps players who don’t have Xbox Live Gold and cannot play online multiplayer.

Notably, the Playlist rewards are almost all cars. The aim here is to provide players with cars in one season that they’ll need to take part in events in the next.

Horizon World Cup is the focus of some of these changes. This event will run across S4, and it’ll see players competing to represent their chosen nation in the automotive sphere.

Each Festival Playlist event has an entry list consisting of cars from France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the USA. Every time you complete an event, you win points towards the nation represented by the car you pick. There’s no need to win or place well, and you’re not limited to a single nation.

As the Series progresses, the various nations will accumulate more and more points, with one eventually crowned the winner. All players will then receive an in-game gift connected to that nation — which will likely be a car!

There’s a number of bugfixes in the update too, many of which focus on improving online stability. The particularly irritating bug which causes you to lose a Skill Chain if connection to Horizon Life drops will be fixed, as will a number of broken Accolades that don’t track or complete properly.

Completionist players will be pleased to note that, although it won’t be addressed in S4, a fix for the issues in previous seasons that prevented 100% is in final testing and will likely arrive in S5 ahead of its March 3 start date.

See more articles on Forza Horizon 5 Game Updates.