Changelog. Everything that shipped, newest first. Dates are the day the work landed on main.
v0.18 Save and resume in beta
Fixed (owner, play test). Trading posts no longer hand out drug hauls, and caravans never carry drugs. The dealers are the only supply, as intended.
Added. Sharing hope.industries in a chat now shows a picture of the city and a line about the game.
Changed (owner, play test). Nobles no longer draw on a commoner who comes within arm's reach. They shout for the guard, and a royal guard walks over and walks you to the nearest gate. Nothing stops you coming straight back in. Nobles wear a tall hat with a gold band now, so you can learn to keep your distance. The "Are you sure?" warning reads the same rules the people do: walking into a town with a weapon drawn, or a town that dislikes you while you are armed, warns at any level and offers to holster; and a walk that crosses a dangerous border on the way somewhere else stops at the border and asks, the keyboard included.
Fixed (final review). A resumed city no longer re-runs every hour of trade since day one in its first frame, so stocks, moods, fields and bounties are what you left. Shop shelves are saved: what you bought stays bought. Haul and courier jobs survive a resume with their deadlines. A resume picks up in place without the waking line, the intro or a camera swoop. Tapping a ripe plot, a mule, a barn or your own bed from across the square now walks you there and does the thing. Rioters fight their own town's guards at last. Carts go home by road. A wolf surge is three wolves, not three per gate. A tap beside an opened box walks there instead of saying it is empty. Rumour times no longer land in the middle of the sentence. Two houses for sale in one town are told apart.
Fixed (owner, play test). The title screen holds a lot now; it scrolls on phones instead of running off the bottom.
Save and resume. The city saves itself once a minute of play, on every change of layer or town, when you sleep, and when you press the new Save & quit button beside Settings. One slot. The title screen shows Resume when a save exists, with its seed, size and day, and warns that Begin throws it away; starting a new city deletes the old save. Resume rebuilds the city from the seed and lays the save over it: the clock, you and your sheet, bag, standing, grudges, bounties, faith, hunger and effects, the towns you have seen, your jobs and the story so far, every chest opened or yours, the towns' stocks and moods, the fields, your homes, the talk of the town, what the dealers think of you, and where everyone is and whether they live. Caravans on the road, hunters on your trail, a running event and the night pack are not kept; they start fresh. A save from an older version is reported on the title screen and left alone rather than loaded wrong.
v0.17 Named items with histories 2026-10-21
Fixed (owner, play test). A chest opens only from the square beside it, no diagonals, and never through a wall; you cannot talk to someone through a wall either, you walk round first; and a tap on the roof of a house you can enter walks you in instead of landing on the floor under it.
Names and pasts. The best rolls, a chest or two in the big towns, and now and then a fallen fighter produce a weapon with a name, Hollow Tooth, Widow's Patience, Second Regret, and a past: who made it, who first carried it, what it was used for. The same seed finds the same blade in the same chest. The past keeps growing while you carry it: every life it takes, every town it passes through, every event it was there for, every shop that sold it. The bag has a Past button that tells it; a shop that buys a named item puts it on the shelf with its story and a price to match; after a famous blade's third life the criers know its name; and the stats screen at the end lists the named items you held. Puzzles and specials may hand one out.
v0.16 Homes, inns and sleeping bags 2026-10-21
Sleeping bags. Two items, a shabby bag and a good one. Roll one out from your bag and you sleep till morning where you stand, as a bed does, but rested only so far: the shabby bag to 40% of your hit points, the good one to 75%; a bed still heals to full. Where you may: the poor in the scattered cities and the wastes, the middle class there and on the farmland too, anyone anywhere unsecured below ground. Anywhere else a guard or a resident moves you on. The poor start with a shabby bag; the general store and the junk dealer stock it, the outfitter sells the good one. Sleeping out in the wastes is a gamble: the pack may find you.
Buying a home. One or two houses in every town carry a for-sale sign. The town hall sells the deed (the trade hall where there is no hall) at a price the local economy sets: the class's base, moved by the town's stock and its mood, so a house in a town in trouble is cheap and one in a loved, well-fed town is not. One home per town, any number of towns. Your home has your bed, a chest of your own you can stash things in from the bag panel, and it makes you a resident: that town's guards judge you by your standing, not your class, and every night in your own bed earns a little standing with its people. A poor player who buys into the dense city can climb to liked and keep it; the hill sells to nobody it does not already like. The hall buys back at the day's price minus a cut, so a deed is a way to move coin between towns and a bet on the economy; selling ends residency. The start home is a deed too, and the poor start without one. The Standing panel lists your homes with a walk button; the big map marks them.
Inns. Every dense and high town has an inn with a taproom and rooms, every scattered city a flophouse, and the farmland bar lets a room over the bar. A bed costs a fee by the town's class and your rank with its people: loved sleeps for half, liked for less, disliked pays more, hated is turned away. Pay at the counter and you sleep as in your own bed, whole in the morning, with the same jump of the clock; your bag stays yours and nothing is stored there. The night pack and raiders do not come in. Innkeepers have small jobs: a guest who left without paying, a parcel for the next town. Inns are shops and places: the evening crowd uses the taproom, and the talk there is the town's.
v0.15 Hunger 2026-10-21
Hunger. A meter beside your hit points fills on the game clock, fed to starving in about a day and a half of play, with the same pauses as the clock. Peckish is only a line in the log; hungry costs an action point and a little aim; starving drains hit points every hour and slows your walk, and it will kill you. Bread, stew, ale, a sack of produce and a hot meal at any bar feed by their own amounts on top of what they heal; a bar meal also lifts the mood for a while. Sleeping does not feed you, and the cells feed you only a little. What you eat is a little real demand in the town you eat in. It is a checkbox on the spawn screen, on by default and remembered; off, the meter is hidden and food only heals, as before. Dev test has a switch for a meter ten times faster.
v0.14 Visible logistics 2026-10-21
Mules and carts. Caravans look like caravans now: a mule for every six units of load walks behind the trader with a pack sized to its share, and a big load goes on a handcart that keeps to the roads, slower and with an extra guard. Raiders and the pack go for the mules first; a mule that falls drops its goods where it lies and the caravan goes on lighter. A mule nobody is guarding (its trader dead, no guard near) can be taken: tap it and it falls in behind you until a trading post buys it with its goods. Taking one under a living trader's eye is a theft like any other.
Docks, porters and shelves. Every trading post has a crate dock: seven stacks, one colour per kind of goods, as tall as the town's stock of each, so a shortage is a bare patch of ground and a glut is three crates high. Shop stalls carry goods on the counter, a full spread, a thin one or nothing, swapped with every sale and restock, so a town in trouble looks like one before you read a price. Porters live at the dock and carry crates to the shops through the day, and when the harvest comes in they run crates from the barn to the post.
Fixed. Shop stalls by the door never actually appeared (the spot was always counted as taken); some shops have them now.
v0.13 Bounties and memory 2026-10-21
Witnessed crimes. You cannot kill a town, leave the fight and walk back in as a stranger. An assault, a murder, a theft, a drug sale, a trespass in the King's ring, a caravan robbery: if somebody saw it, it is written down with the town, the time and the witnesses. A guard who saw it knows on the spot; a townsperson runs for the nearest guard, or shouts if one is close, and it becomes known when they get there. Nobody saw it, nobody knows: that is what the sneaking is for. Kill every witness before the guard hears and it stays unknown. Everyone who saw remembers: they keep away from you and will not talk, and a shopkeeper who saw you steal will not serve you, whatever your standing.
The bounty. One per class, the sum of its known crimes; petty ones fade over days, murder and robbery never. The Standing panel shows it. Past a line the boards post a wanted notice and the criers call it, and guards who see you stop you on the street, never inside a fight: pay the fine (two and a half times the bounty), go quietly, or fight, which is a crime of its own. At a high bounty the class sends three hunters after you, who track you across the city; killing one raises it. Pay it down at the hall for the sum, or through a dealer for a markup and their good opinion. A grudge is not a bounty and does not clear with payment. Nobody hires you while a notice is up.
The cells. Go quietly and a guard marches you to the hall (or the gate post) in a short scene: the first time you cannot skip it, from the second a tap does. Then you sleep the sentence away in one go, from a night for petty things to ten days for murder; the clock jumps as the home bed does, a third of your coin and any contraband are gone, the bounty is cleared, and missed services count against your faith. Today a lost week costs little; it will cost more as the clock gets teeth.
What counts. Fights ranters start, self-defence against anyone already hostile, skirmishes you are pulled into and killing raiders or the night pack are never crimes. The Dev test section lists the crimes on record and has a switch that turns memory off.
v0.12 Crops and weather 2026-10-21
Growing fields. The farmland's plots grow now: sprout, young, tall, ripe, stubble, each its own look, swapped as the plot moves on. Wheat, corn, cabbage, and every world has one crop of its own with a name like Ash Beet or Lamp Gourd. About four days from sowing to ripe in ordinary weather; rain and wet ground hurry it, two and a half days without rain stall it unless a pond is near, and a storm flattens some of what was ripe. A ripe plot nobody takes goes over in two days and is resown a day later. A dev switch labels every plot on the big map and shows the running wet index.
Harvest. When a plot ripens, the farmhands walk out to it and carry the sacks back to the barn one at a time, a sack on the back; every sack in the barn is food in the farmland's economy, which feeds the other towns by caravan, so a flattened or failed plot is a shortage somewhere down the line and the prices and unrest that follow. The farmland's own kitchen garden only makes a little now. Tap a ripe plot to fill a sack yourself (a farm worker who sees you may object, and the farms remember) and tap the barn door to hand sacks in, or sell them to a grocer. Two new events read the fields: a drought after days without rain, and a harvest festival when every plot ripens together.
Animals and fields. Cows and sheep that wander onto a growing plot trample it back a stage; a farmhand nearby shoos them off instead. Chickens do no harm.
Farm work. When a plot is ripe, a farmer or the board offers a day's work: carry sacks from the plot to the barn until the light goes at eight, paid by the sack at the end of the day (the rate climbs with how much of the farm is ripe at once) plus a loaf for every three, and you can call it a day early. It shows in the Work panel with the clock. Work for the same farmer twice and they start offering steadier things: sowing a stubble plot out of season, fixing a fence. Nobody hires you while you are visibly high, and nobody will once your name is on the board.
v0.11 Conspirators and events 2026-10-21
Conspirators. Some towns have a ranter or two on a corner near the plaza, shouting over their heads: the President is counting the moon, the pigeons built the second gate, wake up. Nine lines in ten are nonsense; one in ten is true, and worth hearing: a cache in the tunnels, a dealer's corner, which town is short of what, a caravan on the road. Hand one a bit of food and they will tell you a true thing for certain. Townsfolk give them a wide berth and complain about them. Each has a goose chase for you: go and see what is under the third lamp in the next town; there is usually a boot, and once in a while there is coin. Hear a ranter out three days running and they decide you are one of the good ones: when a fight starts near them, they wade in on your side, whoever it is against. Now and then one decides you are one of THEM and comes at you for no reason, and backs off after a couple of hits; those fights never bring the guards and never cost standing. Everyone knows they do this.
The town talks. Everything that happens is remembered with a place, a time and the names: a caravan lost on the road, a priest or a dealer or a guard killed, a shop robbed, a stash taken in the street, somebody cursed, a new priest elected, a new face on a dealer's corner, a shout-down at the gate. Townsfolk tell you what happened last night before the old lines, their own town first and freshest first, and it fades over a couple of days; criers call it out; ranters have their own version. The Log panel opens with what happened. Priest succession and dealer replacement now run through one roles mechanic, so later anyone can be replaced the same way.
Unrest. Every town has a mood, calm to boiling, that drifts back to its own baseline but climbs with ranters, shortages, a bust in the street, a caravan lost, a priest or a guard killed, a theft, a curse; services and full bars bring it down. A tense town's guards search more and stop tolerating even people their class likes, and its prices twitch up. The Trade menu shows each town's mood, and a dev switch draws the number over every town on the big map.
Events. Once an hour each town rolls the dice on something happening, so the same seed is the same city with a different week. The first events: a sickness (medicine runs short, half the town stays home, the priests are busy); a holy day (shops shut, the church full all day, cheap drink after); a guard crackdown (far more searches, dealers will not deal, drug prices climb); a wolf surge (wolves stray up to the gates round a wasteland). Each is announced by the criers, posted on the boards, talked about in the street and written in the log. The Dev test section of Settings has an event console to fire any event in any town.
The riot. Ranters convert listeners, slowly, and faster the more of them a town holds. Past three ranters and a tense town, it tips: the ranters take the plaza and fight guards and anyone near, the shops shut, the crier runs. A rioter who wanders into another town seeds a ranter there. It ends when the guards put it down, when a priest preaches it down from the plaza (a faith that preaches on street corners is better at it), when you finish the last rioter yourself, or after half a day; if the guards are all dead when it runs out, the rioters won and the town stays boiling.
Fixed. People and animals attacked by a wolf or a raider in the street now actually run; they used to stand there and take it.
v0.10 Three faiths and one god 2026-10-21
Religion. Every world has one god with a new name and three faiths that follow it by different ways, one per class: the Order of the Second Loaf, the Walkers of the Patient Lamp, the House of the Mended Fence. Each has a greeting, two or three customs (one preaches on corners, one walks into the wastes to think, one forbids hats indoors and cannot explain why), service days and an hour. Towns build churches: a spired house on the hill, a chapel in the middle and on the farms, a ring of benches round a crate in the shacks, and every faith has at least one somewhere. A priest stands at each with two followers, and the townsfolk hold their class's faith or none, by how devout the town is. Killing a priest costs 80 standing and turns the congregation; a new one is elected from the followers a day later.
Faith among the people. On service days, at the hour, the faithful walk to their church and stand the service, if it is in their own town or straight through a gate; a follower with no church to reach loses the faith in two or three weeks. Devout towns put preachers on street corners by day, calling you to come (there is bread after, usually), and now and then a preacher spends the day on a corner in the next town. People who linger near a preacher sometimes take up the faith. Faiths that walk into the wastes to think send a few pilgrims out of the gate after the service and back two hours later.
Your own faith. You start with the faith of the town you wake in, and it is worth something: each faith gives one of three perks, the shield (armour and hit points), the spear (hit and damage) or the table (charisma and prices), about a level's worth at low devotion and twice that at full. Devotion starts from how devout your town is, rises with every service you stand and falls with every one you miss. When a service of your faith begins, a job appears with the church marked; standing inside (or in the circle) for a little while counts, the priest greets you over their head, and your class thinks a little better of you. Miss four in a row and you are an atheist with no perk, and the preachers say so. Stand another faith's services three times and you convert; the faith you left is cool with you for three days. Priests sell a charm, token or small book of the faith that raises devotion when used away from a church and wears out after five uses. The Standing panel shows your faith, devotion and perk, and priests will tell you about theirs.
The thing below. Something owns the tunnels now: one creature in the whole world, spawned in the dark stretches far from you and back a day after it dies. It hunts, it hits hard, and a hit can leave you cursed: worse luck, and a point of blood at the start of every turn you fight (never the last one; it cannot kill you on the way to a church). The screen goes grey with it. Any priest at their church lifts it for free, with a flash. A charm, token or small book of your faith holds it off for a day at the cost of two uses. The talk around town knows when someone has been cursed. The curse is the first lasting status effect; poison and sickness will use the same frame.
v0.9 Drug wars 2026-10-21
The trade. Dealers hand out jobs with a clock on them: a parcel for a dealer in another town, or a sale to a regular who will not come to them. Late and the cut shrinks; very late and both dealers are done with you, hostile at the next meeting, no exceptions. You can also offer a parcel to almost anyone in talk; bars and halls are the place, the hill is where people shout for the guard. Once you are in the trade a Trade button opens the menu: which towns are buying what and at what price, the dealers you know and how they rate you, and your open jobs.
Searches. Walk around with a weapon drawn under a guard's eye and, unless their class loves you, they may stop you: hands where they can see them, and a search. Nothing found: "put that away and act normal", your choice to holster or to refuse and fight. Drugs found: into the river, and every dealer you know hears about it. Walk through a guarded gate armed and the gate guard steps out: "HEY! Put that weapon away", with the same two choices. Once per guard and once per gate a day.
Dealers. Some dense and scattered towns have one, by the bar or the gambling hall, gone at the worst hours. They will not talk to anyone the middle class loves or the hill likes; below that a charisma check opens the door, harder the more legitimate your standing and easier the more the poor like you, once per dealer. Then they sell this world's drugs at the town's price and buy them back; nobody else will touch the stuff. Every dealer keeps their own opinion of you, and business warms all of them a little. At night a guard who catches a dealer at it starts a scuffle. A dead dealer's corner is taken in a couple of days.
Every city has its drugs. Two or three a world, with names like Velvet Dust and Saint Tonic, each a pill, a powder, a smoke or a tonic with its own pros and cons fixed for the run: quicker in a fight, faster on your feet, numb to a blow, a steadier hand, a cruel eye; and you talk nonsense, your hands shake after, the comedown hurts, the world leans against you, the ground will not hold still, the colours go wrong, everything twitches, the map swims. Take one from the bag and the HUD says what you are on and for how long; the high wears into a comedown with the cons alone. Taking more refreshes, never stacks. Towns want them; nobody sells them yet.
v0.8 Eyes, cover and sticky fingers 2026-10-21
People have eyes now. Nobody reacts to a weapon they cannot see: a wall, a building or a big tree between you and a guard keeps you unseen, and at night everyone sees half as far unless you carry a light. Guards see ten tiles, ordinary folk six. A dev switch puts an eye over anyone who has you in view.
Crouch. A button above the action bar on the left, or Z. Crouched you move at half pace and waist-high things, crates, hedges, benches, a counter, hide you from anyone looking and from anyone shooting; people spot you a tile later, three with Soft Step. In combat it is a stance: a point of AP to drop or rise, cover against the shots at you, and your own shots from a crouch suffer unless the weapon is steadied with a free hand.
Keep your distance. Nobody comes within seven tiles of the King or four of the President. A guard who sees you inside the ring walks over, says so, and shoves you two tiles back; three times in a day and the guards stop being polite. Crouch behind cover and they will not see you; in some noble districts a hedge line runs to the back of the palace for exactly that.
Sticky fingers. Every item in a shop has a Pocket button beside Buy, with your odds on it: Luck, Soft Step and a low standing with the class help, dear things are harder, and nothing can be tried while the keeper has eyes on you, so wait for them to turn. Every theft is a reaction test, a marker sweeping a bar and a window to stop it in (a dev switch makes it a plain roll). Caught, the keeper comes round the counter, the guards come, the shop bans you and your standing drops. You can also pick a pocket in talk; a civilian who catches you shouts for the guards, a guard draws.
Shots need a line. A wall between you and a target makes the shot impossible, and the tooltip says so; a crate, a hedge or a bench in the way costs 25 points of hit chance, shown as "(cover)". The people shooting at you obey the same rule and move instead of firing at masonry.
v0.7 Trade, and a city that fights its own fights 2026-10-21
Towns have an economy. Every town makes some goods and eats others, hour by hour: the farms grow food, the dense city makes arms, tools and medicine, the shacks scrap materials, the hill makes luxuries. What a town is short of costs more in its shops and fetches more when you sell it there; what it has in plenty is cheap. Your own buying and selling moves the numbers. Caravans between towns come next.
Every town has a trading post. A counting house on the hill, a trade hall in the middle, a stall in the shacks, with a trader on the step. Ask for the ledger: what this town is short of and has in plenty, with the prices that follow, and what every other town wants and has, then buy and sell at the local price. The caravans will leave from here.
Caravans on the roads. Every few hours a carrier leaves a trading post with a load of what the far end is short of, two guards walking behind, and crosses the city, gates and wastes and all. Arrivals fill the other town's stock and drop its prices; a caravan that meets the pack or the raiders and never arrives leaves a shortage behind it. Rob one yourself and the bundle is yours, and both towns know it. The poor and the hill never trade directly; everything goes through the middle. A dev switch draws the routes on the big map.
Hauls for hire. Every trader has a load for the next post and a clock on it. Take it and the bundle is in your bag and the hours are counting on the Work panel. On time pays well and lifts your standing with both ends; late and the pay shrinks to match; very late and both posts hold a grudge, which means attack on sight, no exceptions. The load counts in the economy: it leaves one town's stock when you take it and lands in the other's when you hand it over.
People fight each other now. Wolves take sheep and the odd farmhand, raiders go for guards and for anyone crossing the wastes, guards clear raiders and wolves out of their district. Near you it happens in front of you, with the same hits and misses as your own fights; far away it is settled while you are elsewhere, and you find what is left. Walk into a fight and the ones fighting your enemy are on your side for it. Anyone in a fight, yours or theirs, wears a red crossed-swords mark over their head.
v0.6 Towns with names, and the groundwork for a living city 2026-10-21
Every district is a town with a name. Ashford, Barley Hollow, Rustpile, Velmont Heights, Cinder Flats: the hill sounds grand, the middle sounds plain, the shacks sound like what they are, the wastes sound bleak. The type still shows under the name when you cross a gate. Quests, stories and the work board use the names. The big map labels a town once you have set foot in it.
Drag to turn. Hold and drag sideways on the view and the camera turns, a notch of 45 degrees at a time, the way a phone expects. A tap still walks or talks; pinch still zooms; Q, E and the buttons still work.
The big map zooms. Wheel, pinch, or the +/− buttons while it is open; drag to pan; double-tap to see the whole city again. The frame is a little smaller and the close button sits inside it, where you can reach it.
Talking is a shout at four tiles. Click anyone further off and you walk into earshot and then talk, instead of being told they are too far. The notice board reads from two tiles away and a tap anywhere on or around it counts.
The dev switches in Settings fold away under one heading, so the panel is short again. They remember whether you left them open.
Gates keep their width. Every gate now has two towers without exception and a clear approach three tiles deep on both sides, as wide as the gate, that no wall step, corner fill, lot or prop may take. No more two-tile gates that pinch to a one-tile squeeze. The generator checks every gate after building and the tests fail if one is blocked.
Doors you can get to. Every building is placed only where its door has a clear apron, two tiles wide and two deep, and a two-tile-wide way to a road; the apron is paved and kept clear, and where the road is further off a path is laid to it. No more doors jammed against the neighbours or reached through a one-tile squeeze.
Chests and crates tell you what they are. Hover says "something inside", "nothing in it" or "opened, empty"; every crate and chest can be looked into, from any side, from two tiles away; an opened one shows its lid thrown back so you can tell from across the street.
Gear on the body. Body armour shows: a leather coat or plate over the shirt, on you and on the guards and raiders who wear it. A holstered weapon rides on your back, a knife on your hip. A poor roll looks dull and rusted, a fine one bright, and the best catch the light with a glint. Metal on your gear has a real shine; "Gear shine" in Settings turns it off, as does low resolution.
Animals stay in their own ground. Wolves, boars and the night pack no longer wander or chase through a district gate into town; they keep to the district they live in.
You can see what is attacking you. When a fight starts with something standing in the mist of an unvisited district, the mist opens around every fighter and the map shows them, without revealing the district itself.
The subway stops pretending to be the street above. Walking the tunnels under another district no longer warns you about its guards, and once a class likes you (standing 20 or better) its class rules stop applying: no more "an armed commoner is not welcome up there" when you are welcome.
Standing has six ranks now: loved, liked, neutral, disliked, hated, exiled. The Standing panel shows the rank, a bar, and how far the next one is; the log tells you when a class changes its mind about you. The rules read the ranks: a drawn weapon draws a reaction from disliked down (a small slight no longer does it), the high class stops talking and serving at hated, the middle class at exiled. A faction can also hold a grudge, which means attack on sight, weapon or not; nothing does that yet, but the failed deliveries and betrayed dealers to come will.
Sprawls render on phones again. Every lit interior carried its own light; on a sprawl those dozens of lights pushed the lit shaders past what a phone's GPU allows and it drew nothing but sky. Interiors now borrow from the same six-light pool the street lamps use, lit while you are inside. Every device gains: a lit pixel no longer weighs up every lamp in the city.
For the next phone bug: Settings has a "GPU bisect" set of switches that hide one family of things at a time, and a "Copy diagnostics" button that gathers everything a bug report needs into one block. That block is what found this one. The debug overlay shows the last error.
v0.5 Grudges, markers, gates that make sense, and something hidden 2026-10-20
Standing has teeth. Fall below zero with a class and its people act on it when they see a weapon in your hand: the armed and the brave attack, the rest run, and its guards come for you from further off. Holster the weapon and they leave you be. A proper wanted system comes later.
Know who you are about to annoy. A red spinning marker over the King and the President, a small pale one over every guard.
Gates. Districts only open gates to the types they are allowed to: Gate Control only to the nobles, the nobles to Gate Control, Farmland and the Dense City, the Dense City to nearly everyone. Gates stay clear of the corners where three districts meet, and no district is ever an island.
Shorter days. A game hour is a minute and a half; a day is 36 minutes. Lights and the sky were rebalanced to match.
Storms no longer stall. The cost was never the rain: it was everyone in the city planning a route home in the same frame. Route planning now gets a slice of each frame and the rest wait a moment.
Something hidden. There is a thing in the city that does nothing, a thing that does nothing yet, and a key. An old farmer has a story about it. Listen to the people on the hill.
A visitor. Someone who should not be on the hill sometimes is. They have lost something.
Off-screen people cost almost nothing now. Anyone the camera cannot see is not drawn or animated, and is moved a couple of times a second by the full distance they would have walked, so they are always where they should be when you turn the corner. A 20-district city went from 381 animated rigs a frame to 64.
You start with a full torch.
Walls read as walls. Where a district border runs diagonally the wall blocks used to touch only at their corners and looked like a row of columns; the inside corner of every step is filled now. Wall grain is fixed by position, so neighbouring blocks match at the seam. House corners and gables no longer flicker: the walls that fade separately used to overlap there.
A third of the triangles. Every voxel face used to be its own quad, and the per-voxel colour grain meant none of them could merge. The mesher now merges neighbouring faces with the same shading and nearly the same colour into one quad, keeping the grain as a soft gradient at the corners. A sprawl went from 1.2 million triangles a frame to 410 thousand, a town from 1.1 million to 500 thousand.
A gambling hall in every Dense City: a row of slot machines, a croupier who is honest about the odds, and a share of the evening crowd that goes there instead of the bar, so the bar is less often full to the door. Walk up to a machine and pull: pairs return the bet, three of a kind pays six, three sevens twenty.
Mist over the unknown. In the world itself, every district you have not stepped into lies under a rolling mist that hides its streets, its people and most of its roofs, the wastes and the plain beyond the walls included. The edge is not a line: the mist thickens over a few tiles, its border wanders with the weather of the noise, and wisps drift over into streets you know and thin out. Walk in and the whole district clears. The wastes are the exception: the mist rolls back over them the moment you leave, every time. Switches in Settings.
The map keeps secrets. Districts you have not set foot in are under fog, and a district clears whole the moment you step into it; the map remembers everywhere you have been, the wastes included. The big map names only people you have actually talked to.
Gates are two tiles wide, every one of them. The road to a gate may be a single tile; the opening never is.
The bottom bar on wide screens had grown to half the height; it is back to two rows. A debug overlay (fps, frame breakdown, renderer and GPU) and shadow and resolution switches are in Settings for chasing slow phones.
The subway was sealing itself. Lamps were placed as solid blocks, and one in a one-tile branch cut off everything behind it: in a 20-district city only 7 of 20 stations could be reached. Lamps are poles you walk past now, and generation checks that every station and every carved tile is reachable. Tunnel walls between you and the camera sink out of the way, and rats stand on the rails.
Portrait phones get the screen back. The bottom strip is a fifth of a tall screen instead of a third: bars, a two-line log you can read, and a row of icon buttons. Tap the log for the whole backlog of this life in bigger text.
Big worlds run. Every route anyone planned asked "is someone standing here?" by scanning every person in the city, for every tile it considered. One lookup table rebuilt each frame replaced that: in a 30-district sprawl the per-frame cost of the townsfolk fell from about 40 ms to 5. The see-through lens only tests the buildings near you now.
The subway sinks the tunnel walls between you and the camera the way the surface does, and the rails lie flat so the rats stand on them instead of under them.
In combat the selected enemy or tile keeps its label (hit chance and cost, or AP to walk) up until you tap elsewhere. A Full button goes fullscreen where the browser allows it.
Touch. A Cam button in the bottom bar shows or hides the rotate and zoom cluster, and remembers. The big map has a proper close button; tapping a place still walks there. In combat the first tap on an enemy or a tile only selects it and shows the hit chance or the cost; the same tap again attacks or moves. Any other tap just moves the selection, so a slip never costs a turn.
v0.4 World sizes, a website, the way out of the subway 2026-10-20
hope.industries. The game lives on a web page now, built from the repo and deployed by GitHub Actions to Cloudflare (a Worker serving static assets) on every merge to main. This changelog and a lore page are linked from the title screen.
World size (experimental). The title screen offers Demo (6 districts), Town (12), City (20) and Sprawl (30). Bigger worlds draw their districts by weight with exactly one Gate Control, and enough wasteland that towns sit apart with empty ground between them. A stress test, not a balanced game; big ones are slow to generate.
Rain you can see. Rain is a few hundred streaks with tails instead of nearly two thousand invisible points; storms no longer drag the frame rate down. Thunder trails each strike by its distance, and distant thunder rolls between strikes.
Doors. Buildings no longer put their door within three tiles of a wall, water or the map edge. Tapping a doorway or its frame walks you one square inside.
The subway. You can see yourself down there again (the player hung off the hidden surface group). A green spinning marker over every station's stairs and a Stairs up button that walks you to the nearest and climbs. Below level 5 the stairs ask before you go down.
Notice boards carry a spinning diamond, amber while there is work on them.
Townsfolk heading for shelter re-path a few at a time instead of all at once.
v0.3 Lights, weather, what you wear, finding your way 2026-10-20
Street lamps light at dusk, with a real pool of light under the six nearest you. The subway's brightness follows the ground above: lit under the rich, black under the poor.
Carried lights. Torch and lantern burn out and are gone; flashlight, headband flashlight and Miner's Helm recharge in daylight. Lights come on by themselves from dusk to dawn and underground. A run starts with a torch at a quarter.
Four worn slots: hands, off hand, body, head. Spear, bow and rifle take both hands; a knife, club or pistol leaves the other hand for a shield or a light, and shoots straighter with it free. Bucklers, iron shields, leather caps, steel helms.
Weather. Sunny, cloudy, rainy, storm on a seeded schedule, with cloud shadows crossing the ground, rain, lightning that never lands near anyone, and townsfolk who go home when it pours.
Quest guidance. Track one job; the map shows a search area and the compass a blip, both switchable. Auto-walk back to the giver or to any tap on the big map, with an at-your-own-risk warning when the route crosses dangerous ground.
Settings panel with the audio mixer, guidance toggles and a dev corner: fast day/night, time of day, the sky.
The glyphs over heads are drawings, not Unicode, so phones stop showing boxes.
v0.2 Weapons that reach what they should 2026-10-20
Reach is the weapon's. A knife lands one tile away and no further, a spear two; guns and bows reach far and lose accuracy with distance, and a rifle is clumsy at point blank. The hover tip shows the chance and the cost before you commit.
New weapons: club, spear, bow, rifle.
A warning before you walk into dangerous ground, in a gate guard's words when one is near, until level 5.
Music twice as loud; the soundscape slider starts at zero.
Also in this version: shops and bars you can walk into, with keepers behind counters and drinkers talking at the bar; more explorable houses and crates beside the ruins; an audio mixer with four buses; a richer score and a soundscape per district; the World Guide for whoever writes the next stories.
v0.1 First numbered build 2026-10-20
Version on the title screen, a compass that turns with the camera, the player as an arrow on the map, the camera's footprint drawn RTS-style.
From the first play session: the controls panel hides on phones; a big map with every shop, landmark and person worth finding; people stand still while you talk to them; the title says this is a six-district sample.
The big map centred on phones, a grey x-ray lens, trader and barkeep signs over heads.
Pre-release The eleven milestones 2026-10-19 to 2026-10-20
1–2 Module architecture, the six-district city generator, the title screen over a live demo city.
3 Population: citizens, guards, fauna, behaviours, class hostility rules, allied combat, the night pack, touch controls, tall walls with tower-flanked gates and the wastes beyond.
4 Player systems: the four stats, XP and levels, skills, items with seeded rolls, shops, loot, your bed.
5 Combat expansion: two sides, grenades, the x-ray lens.
6 Quests and dialogue: templates, boards, markers, skill checks, standing per class.
7 The story spine: three routes to the Gate Key, JSON story modules, the console, two endings.
8 Audio, all synthesised.
9 The subway: a second map under the city.
10 Town life: routines by the hour, bars, the crier.
11 Performance and polish: chunked instancing, culling, the minimap.