Progress in over the hill is recorded per player, and every player must personally reach an objective checkpoint for it to count. That single rule explains most of what can feel confusing in co-op. Friends can help you get there, but the checkpoint does not register for anyone who has not been there themselves.
Progress also moves between solo and multiplayer in both directions, so a session played together counts toward your own record rather than being a separate track.
What per-player progress actually means
The mechanic is straightforward once stated: each objective requires the individual to arrive at the checkpoint. Being in the same convoy, watching a teammate drive it, or being towed past it does not satisfy the requirement for you.
That design is deliberate. It keeps co-op from being a case of one player carrying three others through content, and it means an objective is a thing you drove rather than a thing you were present for.
Every player must reach the objective checkpoint themselves for it to count toward their own progress. — official multiplayer behaviour for objective progression
Progress moves between solo and co-op
The second official confirmation is that progress transfers between single-player and multiplayer sessions in both directions. Time spent in a four-player convoy advances your personal record, and time alone advances the same record.
This matters for how you plan a session. Progress is not partitioned into a "co-op track" and a "solo track" — it is one record with two ways of advancing it. There is no separate co-op unlock pool that you need to grind separately, and nothing is lost by switching.
Why fast convoys lose objectives
The failure mode follows directly from the per-player rule. When a group moves quickly, team arrival is not individual completion. One player reaching an objective does not mark it for the three behind them, and if the convoy keeps moving, the gap widens.
On terrain with rivers, peat swamps, slick steep slopes and rock to climb, keeping four vehicles together is genuinely hard. Someone will be slower, and someone will stop to deal with a recovery. If the group's default is to press on, the slower players end up driving past checkpoints they never actually reached.
There is also no local couch co-op to soften this — online co-op supports 1 to 4 players, crossplay is confirmed, and local multiplayer is not planned. So the whole group is remote, and every gap has to be closed over voice or chat.
Group habits that avoid progress drift
The practical fix is to make individual arrival a group action rather than an assumption. Stop at each checkpoint and confirm out loud that everyone has crossed it. If someone is mid-recovery, wait — the winch is confirmed equipment and cabins work as fast-travel points, so a short pause is cheaper than a missed unlock.
Trails with southeastern approaches and a climbing technique at the start are recorded in the challenge material, which is the kind of route where a fast group can roll straight past a checkpoint without noticing one. Treat a known trail's objectives as a checklist to run, not as terrain you clear.
The recovery checklist works the same way. When a group stops to help one vehicle out of trouble, remember that the time spent is not progress for anyone else — nobody's checkpoints advanced while a single winch was being run.
A useful pre-session agreement is to name checkpoints out loud rather than assume them. If someone is re-attempting a trail the group already cleared, the others know their own objectives are unaffected and can decide whether to wait or push to the next one. That removes the most common source of friction, which is a player feeling left behind when nobody realised they had not crossed yet.
What objectives and trail challenges unlock
Unlocks are confirmed on both sides: objectives and difficult trails can both unlock vehicles. Completing content is how the garage fills, which is why recovery equipment is confirmed at launch while vehicles are not all available immediately.
The demo confirmed three vehicles upgradeable and customisable. The in-game names visible in the demo UI are Protector, Burro and Trail Burner. Earlier reported names of Roamer and Sentinel were exterior comparisons rather than in-game names, so the demo UI names are the ones to trust.
| Confirmed unlock source | What it does |
|---|---|
| Objectives | Unlocks vehicles per the demo announcement |
| Difficult trails | Unlocks vehicles |
| Trail challenges | Community reports of 3 challenges, 2 unlocking non-initial vehicles |
| Pebbles | Demo unlock currency, spent on unlocking and upgrading |
One community report links the Rocky Ascent route to unlocking Burro. That is a single unverified report, so treat it as a lead rather than a route description. Community screenshots also show placeholder garage entries you cannot drive out of, which suggests the full list exists internally.
What does not automatically sync
The official confirmation covers objective checkpoints only. So it is not safe to assume that exploration, collectibles or vehicle unlocks transfer automatically across the whole team.
The distinction is precise and worth respecting. A teammate driving a trail you have not driven does not log the checkpoint for you — you can see them do it and still need to go. Whether collectibles behave differently has not been stated, and the fact that the one confirmed rule is checkpoint-based does not extend to the rest of the progression.
What remains unknown before release
Several progression details are 待确认. The unlock tree's depth is one — how many objectives sit between vehicles is unpublished. Shared inventory rules are another, since it is unknown whether consumables or materials pool across the group. Whether any reset option exists for a player who wants to replay content is also unstated.
Multiplayer infrastructure is the largest gap. Host migration, matchmaking, private rooms and what happens when a host disconnects are all unaddressed in the available material, as is whether crossplay pairing is partitioned by platform. With no local multiplayer planned and progress strictly personal, how a four-player session survives someone leaving is a practical question with no published answer. Track all of it as open.