Ubisoft Annecy crammed an absurd amount of madness into Riders Republic's 250-square-kilometer mega-park, fusing seven iconic US National Parks into a single biome-colliding sandbox. If you've spent all your hours grinding standard sponsor contracts, spamming trick battles, or wrestling through chaotic 64-player Mass Races, you've missed out on an entire layer of the game. Tucked away behind sheer rock faces, frozen alpine peaks, and sun-scorched canyon ravines are functional secret "Funkies" relics, bizarre real-world tributes, and environmental oddities that never show up on your default playlist map.
Finding these hidden pockets isn't just about bagging easy Stars or checking off a trophy list; it fundamentally changes how you traverse the Republic. From cardboard flying wings that defy the physics engine to mysterious desert monoliths and abandoned gold rush operations, hunting down these secrets rewards curious riders with some of the wildest rides and photo spots in modern PC gaming. If you love deep-dive hunting like discovering secret locations and hidden rewards in Everspace 2, exploring this gargantuan outdoor park delivers that exact same thrill on two wheels—or wooden planks.
The Legendary Relics: Finding the Weirdest Secret Rides
While traditional progression hands you sleek carbon fiber bikes, high-end snowboards, and razor-sharp racing wingsuits, the Republic holds eleven legendary "Relics" scattered across its wildest corners. Grabbing a relic immediately unlocks an offbeat "Funky" vehicle variant in your sports gear wheel. These rides trade competitive speed stats for hilarious quirks, custom visual effects, and unexpected physics profiles that make free-roam riding unforgettable.
The first must-grab relic is the Cardboard Plane, tucked away along the snowy ridgeline of Yosemite Valley near Pine Creek. Pinpoint your compass north toward the sheer granite bluffs; you'll spot a ramshackle wooden lean-to draped in tarps. Interacting with the wreckage rewards you with a literal cardboard box wingsuit. While it packs sluggish horizontal acceleration, its ultra-low weight lets you skim mountain drafts with a uniquely floaty glide ratio, perfect for thread-the-needle flybys through narrow canyon gaps.
Down south in the frozen waterways of Grand Teton, you'll encounter the legendary Surfboard. Resting against a solitary fishing hut on the northern shoreline of Peters Mill, this relic strips away standard snow edges entirely. Taking the surfboard down a slick ice chute produces zero carving bite—you have virtually no turn authority, turning steep descents into a pure test of brake checks, raw momentum management, and hilarious high-speed wipes. Much like hunting down rare armaments in hidden reward hunts across RPGs, tracking down all eleven relics completely flips your perspective on how terrain can be conquered.
Other critical relics worth scouring the map for include the Adventure Bike, parked high on a dusty cliff overlooking the Colorado River (an old-school steel touring frame weighed down with panniers and luggage bags, boasting surprisingly tanky shock absorption on chunky scree fields), and the Destroyer, a brutal motorized snow sled buried near the highest glacier ridge in Grand Teton. Check out the full breakdown of our favorite secret rides below:
| Relic Name | Region & Landmark | Handling & Physics Quirk | Best Free-Roam Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cardboard Plane | Yosemite (Pine Creek Ridge) | Ultra-light airframe; abysmal boost recovery; extreme float. | Gliding low through narrow slot canyons and forest canopies. |
| Surfboard | Grand Teton (Peters Mill Lake) | Zero lateral carving edges; ice-like friction on powder. | High-velocity straight-line speed runs down frozen rivers. |
| Adventure Bike | Canyonlands (Colorado River Ledge) | Heavy turn resistance; maximum shock dampening over boulders. | Scenic bikepacking down sheer, unpaved canyon drops. |
| Folding Bike | Mammoth Mountain (Santiago Peak) | Tiny wheel radius; twitchy steering; rapid rotation speeds. | Pulling dizzying flat-ground spins and roof drops at Republic Hub. |
| Old School Skis | Grand Teton (Grand Teton Peak North) | Classic wooden slats; minimal carving; massive straight-line drag. | Vintage-styled retro photo mode shoots and chill cruiser runs. |
| Pizza Delivery Bike | Mammoth (Canyon Lodge Suburbs) | Heavy tail swing; loose rear traction; squeaky acoustic FX. | Sliding tight urban asphalt corners and cruising road lines. |
🎮 Riders Republic
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View on Steammoz Store →The Alien Monolith and Area 51 Secrets in Canyonlands
Back in late 2020, hikers stumbled across a polished metal prism jutting mysteriously out of a remote red sandstone slot canyon in southern Utah. The viral story captured the world's imagination, and the developers at Ubisoft Annecy quietly paid homage to it right inside *Riders Republic*'s sprawling Canyonlands biome.
To track down the Utah Monolith Easter Egg, switch to your Rocket Wing and chart a course directly south of the Canyonlands' central needles, hovering over the maze of red sandstone hoodoos near Elephant Canyon. Look for an extremely narrow, shadow-drenched dead-end fissure where the sunlight barely cuts through the rock. Nestled tightly against the sheer red walls sits an unblemished, gleaming steel pillar that reflects dynamic PC lighting in sharp, crisp fidelity.
Standing next to the monolith triggers subtle, low-frequency hums and strange electronic crackles through the audio mix. It's a surreal departure from the loud, high-tempo licensed soundtrack blaring throughout the rest of the game. Just a short wingsuit glide to the west, keep your eyes on the cracked desert floor: if you catch the late-afternoon sun at a low angle, you will spot faint geometrical scorched patterns in the dry scrubland that closely resemble alien crop circles. It's an eerie, atmospheric touch in a game that otherwise revolves around neon ski suits and explosive adrenaline.
The Ghost Town and Mining Ruins of Mammoth Mountain
While Zion and Bryce Canyon get plenty of love for their visual splendor, the forgotten 19th-century mining settlements scattered across the eastern face of Mammoth Mountain offer some of the coolest environmental storytelling in the game. These aren't just decorative background assets; they are fully ridable historical playgrounds.
Tucked into an avalanche chute below the timberline lies an abandoned mining ghost town. Here, you'll discover half-collapsed timber cabins, dilapidated processing sheds, rusted ore carts resting on crooked rails, and a massive timber water flume that snags the mountain contour for several hundred meters. If you bring a high-end slopestyle bike like the Marin El Roy or a nimble freeride rig, this entire mining outpost turns into a natural wooden terrain park.
The rusted flume works as an uninterrupted 500-meter grind rail hanging perilously over rocky drop-offs. Sliding the old track rails demands absolute balance mastery—especially if you're playing with manual landing and grind assists turned off in the PC settings. Exploring the interior porches and shattered roofs also reveals scattered collector items, vintage period newspapers pinned to timber beams, and secret ramps positioned to vault you directly through cabin second-story windows.
Ubisoft Easter Eggs: Steep Tributes and Assassin's Creed Leaps
Long before *Riders Republic* dropped riders into North American national parks, Ubisoft Annecy defined the extreme sports genre with 2016's *Steep*. The development team clearly hasn't forgotten their roots, planting numerous tributes to their alpine predecessor throughout the snowy peaks of Grand Teton.
High atop the jagged ridgeline near Grand Teton's ultimate peak sits an abandoned wooden weather station. Perched on its rusted steel radio antennae is a faded, weather-beaten sticker bearing the iconic orange-and-white *Steep* mountain logo. If you idle near this cabin in photo mode with ambient audio cranked up, you'll occasionally hear faint radio snippets playing ambient acoustic melodies from the *Steep* original score—a hauntingly beautiful touch for players who spent hundreds of hours traversing Mount Blanc and the Matterhorn.
That's not the only corporate nod hiding in the wilderness. If you climb to the absolute highest spire in Bryce Canyon—specifically, an impossibly thin natural sandstone pillar poking hundreds of feet above the canyon floor—you'll spot a single wooden perch extending horizontally out into empty space. Approach the edge with your character, and a familiar eagle shriek echoes across the canyon basin, mirroring the iconic Leap of Faith viewpoints from the *Assassin's Creed* franchise. Vaulting off the beam on skis or a bike provides one of the longest sheer vertical free-falls in the entire map.
Ubisoft loves leaving breadcrumbs across their major engines; just look at the dense weapon balances and references we broke down when evaluating Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon weapons ranked. In *Riders Republic*, finding these self-referential shrines serves as a love letter to the publisher's history of massive open worlds.
The Secret Stunt Challenges Nobody Talks About
The official in-game map marks dozens of red Stunt Challenges that push your technical timing, manual handling, and air-brake management to absolute failure points. However, the open-world community has uncovered a series of "off-book" stunt lines that aren't officially tracked by game markers but offer sheer mechanical satisfaction that rivals any official event.
The most infamous of these is the Zion Arch Balance Line. Located along the southern boundary of Zion, an enormous natural sandstone arch spans a deadly 300-foot drop. The top surface of this arch is barely as wide as a bicycle tire, heavily pitted with bumps, cracks, and sudden elevation spikes. Riding the span from south to north requires pinpoint micro-adjustments with an analog stick or precise keyboard taps, demanding that you toggle off auto-braking and lean hard into manual balance.
Another community-favorite unmarked trial is the Canyon River Pipe Grind. Hidden deep inside the Colorado River gorge sits an ancient drainage pipe suspended across the rushing river rapids. Dropping onto this metal tube from an overhanging rock shelf requires pinpoint drop speed; too fast, and your rider overshoots into the churning white water; too slow, and you clip the cliff face. Nailing the grind end-to-end gives you pure bragging rights among dedicated PC freeriders.
| Secret Stunt / Off-Map Run | Recommended Loadout | Execution Difficulty | Key Technique Required |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zion Natural Arch Traverse | High-grip Trail Bike (e.g., Santa Cruz V10) | Very High | Manual throttle modulation; avoid over-steering on uneven rock seams. |
| Colorado River Drainage Pipe Grind | Slopestyle Bike or Snowboard | Extreme | Perfect launch alignment; precise manual grind centering. |
| Yosemite Half Dome Sheer Descent | Freeride Skis (Faction Prodigy) | High | Aggressive speed-checking; managing micro-air bounces over granite. |
| Redwood Canopy Tree Bridge | Rocket Wing to Paraglider switch | Medium | Low-speed stalling; mid-air transition control down into foliage. |
| Mammoth Mine Ore Chute Drop | Surfboard Relic | Legendary (Pure Chaos) | Pre-braking before launch; praying to the ragdoll physics gods. |
Pro-Explorer Optimization: PC Settings to Spot Distant Secrets
Scouring a 250-square-kilometer world on PC comes with a distinct advantage over console platforms: fine-grained graphical control. When hunting tiny wooden cabins, obscure monoliths, or tucked-away relics, your game's visual clarity and draw distances make a massive difference. You don't want relics or Easter egg structures popping into existence only when you're twenty meters away.
To turn your rig into the ultimate exploration machine, dive into the graphic configuration menu and make several deliberate adjustments. Much like dialing in your configuration for high frames in competitive shooters, optimizing Ubisoft's proprietary engine demands balancing rendering fidelity with frame stability. If you've previously tuned settings using our Far Cry 6 PC settings guide or tackled stutter issues in our Filament higher FPS optimization guide, you'll know how impactful geometry and terrain settings can be.
First, push Terrain Quality and View Distance to Ultra. This directly controls how far out the engine renders small world objects like smoke plumes from relic campfire sites, dilapidated mining sheds, and radio antennas. If your GPU is strapped for VRAM, you can easily claw back performance by dropping Volumetric Clouds to Medium and dialing Motion Blur completely off. Turning off motion blur is mandatory; high-speed wingsuit scouring becomes an unreadable smear when blur is engaged, making small landmarks virtually impossible to spot at 200 km/h.
Next, adjust your Field of View (FoV) slider. While a wide 110-degree FoV feels exhilarating during downhill bike races, it pushes background landmarks further away, flattening detail on distant cliff faces. Dropping your FoV closer to 85 or 90 when exploring expands distant terrain features, letting you spot odd geometry formations, hidden caverns, and relic sparkles across deep valleys without relying on binoculars.
Don't sleep on the game's built-in Photo Mode as an exploration tool, either. Tapping the photo mode key instantly freezes time and untethers the camera, allowing you to fly up to several hundred meters away from your rider. It acts as an ultra-versatile reconnaissance drone, letting you peek over sheer cliff edges, inspect shadowy cave entrances, and check behind frozen waterfalls without risking a ten-minute hike back up the mountain if you misjudge a jump.
Between the ridiculous Funky relics, mysterious desert tributes, and unmarked high-wire stunt lines, *Riders Republic* on PC is vastly deeper than its neon-drenched menu screens let on. Grab your favorite bike, kill the race HUD, head toward the furthest horizon, and see what the Republic has been hiding from you.