Mario Kart World Knockout Tour Guide: New Routes 1.7.0 (Switch 2)

Knockout Tour may be the most compelling mode in Mario Kart World, and Nintendo has now expanded it with fresh racing routes—just over a year after the game debuted alongside the Switch 2. The latest step comes through an update that adds more variety to a playlist that previously felt too small.

Nintendo Adds Two New Rallies To Knockout Tour

With the release of Mario Kart World’s 1.7.0 update, Nintendo highlighted two major additions tied to the Switch 2 launch lineup. The most significant change lands in Knockout Tour, where two brand-new routes have been added: the Drill Rally and the Boomerang Rally.

Thanks to these additions, the total number of routes available in Knockout Tour is now ten.

Mario Kart World is positioned as a Switch 2 launch standout, delivering in the areas that matter most to players.

Why Knockout Tour Needed More Routes

Mario Kart World’s interconnected course structure hasn’t been received warmly by long-time series fans—except for how those courses are repurposed in Knockout Tour. The main drawback for that mode up to this point was simple: there were too few rallies to choose from.

With only eight sets of interconnected courses, Knockout Tour can start to feel repetitive quickly. This gets even more noticeable during online play, where you can’t always pick which rally you want to run next, making the limited rotation harder to tolerate over time.

Drill Rally And Boomerang Rally Details

Each Knockout Tour course is built by combining six tracks from Mario Kart World, with the design allowing you to travel between them during a single run.

Drill Rally: You begin on Wario’s Shipyard, located in the bottom-right corner of the World map. From there, you race across multiple courses, and the route is designed to span the map’s breadth. The rally ends as you cross the finish line at Bowser’s Castle, which sits in the opposite corner of the map.
Boomerang Rally: This one links six courses into a boomerang-like layout, which is likely the inspiration behind the rally’s name. The run starts at Salty Salty Speedway, takes you through six different courses, and concludes at Whistlestop Summit for the final stretch.

While additional small adjustments may be included in the background, Nintendo has only announced one other clearly identified feature from the 1.7.0 update for Mario Kart World: new sticker options in photo mode.

World already offers a strong photo mode built around its open-world setup, letting players capture pictures freely. Now, players can also add stickers and frames to those photos to make them look even better.

What This Suggests For Mario Kart World Going Forward

Whether Nintendo will keep adding content after release is always hard to predict. For Mario Kart, it can feel like post-launch additions aren’t strictly necessary—especially after decades of the franchise not relying on frequent expansions.

Even so, players are expecting continued updates for World. That expectation has grown in part because the game hasn’t matched the high bar set by Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Today’s update is another sign that Nintendo is still looking for ways to refine and extend Mario Kart World—an approach that makes sense as more players pick up Switch 2 systems and move into regular, daily play of the newest Mario Kart entry.