This build
0.8.0Current build
The build below is the one the browser version is serving right now.
How the numbering works
- 0.x.0 there is something new to play with.
- 0.x.y fixes and small improvements, nothing to relearn.
- 1.0 the finished game.
The browser version updates itself: reload the page and you have the newest build. What is not in it yet is on the roadmap.
0.8.0 · Improved demand simulation
0.8.0
Current build
New
- Households buy panels, heat pumps, batteries, cars, insulation and chargers themselves, weighing what each costs against what it saves.
- Every world sets those prices, and they fall over a run.
- Sell metered customers an hourly tariff at a margin you choose. They charge when power is cheap.
- Grants replace rollout programmes: set a rate on a station’s streets, pay for what households fit.
- Town cards show the share of homes on each technology. Station cards show the payback.
Better
- Households pay retail for gas and petrol, not the wholesale price a power station pays.
- Electric cars spread street by street against the pump price.
- Heat-pump manufacturing and electric mobility left the development tree. A Grant Office replaced them.
- The petrol a colony still burns counts towards its carbon footprint.
- A straining transformer says what is on it.
- Smart metering reaches nearly every home. Rooftop solar stops at three quarters of roofs.
- A power station or store that takes a full block keeps two tiles clear of a town’s edge, so the town can still grow past what you built for it.
- Wood and refuse read as a flow the region grows rather than a market you can buy more of. A gauge on the card shows the burning fleet against that ceiling.
- An event card can be held quiet for three months instead of switched off for ever, and the interruption settings name the month it wakes in.
Fixed
- Statistics, the asset register, contracts and grants named themselves wrong on the completion card.
- Station tooltips flickered while the clock ran.
- Load & Supply left the gap between demand and output unexplained. A dashed line now carries the charging and the losses, so every term on the chart adds up.
0.7.3 · Your units, and a shorter cookie bar
0.7.3
New
- Temperature, distance, wind speed and mass read in metric or US units. The game picks one up from your browser when you arrive, and the menu switches it.
Better
- The cookie bar asks in three lines instead of ten. Everything it used to say is still there, one click away under What is stored.
0.7.2 · Control and visual optimisation
0.7.2
Better
- Control and visual optimisation.
0.7.1 · A charging battery no longer takes the town off
0.7.1
Storage that is filling up gives way to the network before your customers do.
Better
- Surplus a battery cannot take because nothing can carry it to the battery is spilled and billed as spilled. It lands in Finance under Surplus disposal and on the Load & Supply chart, where it names the wire you need, instead of arriving as an outage with no explanation.
Fixed
- A battery could put the lights out in the town beside it. How hard to charge was decided on the colony total, without asking what the wires between the surplus and the pack could carry, so a battery pulling its full power through a transformer that could not pass it put that transformer over its rating. Protection then disconnected the streets behind it, because a charging battery was not something it was allowed to interrupt, and the pack went on drawing everything it wanted with the transformer still overloaded. Charging gives way first now: the pack takes what the network can carry and no more, and nobody is disconnected for it.
0.7.0 · The Record, and a first term
0.7.0
A live score in the top bar, and a five year first term with five goals.
New
- The Record: a live score in the top bar. One point per hundred megawatt hours delivered, weighted by clean, reliable and affordable.
- Hover it for the multiplier and its three parts.
- Points fly off the map where you earn them and where the lights go out.
- Click it for the last forty things that moved it, and a chart against par and your best run.
- The bay says whether you are ahead of your best run or of par.
- The end screen counts the Record up, settles the term, the warming headroom and the balance sheet, and draws the run.
- First Term: a five year world at the top of the rack. Wind from day one, one new settlement in year two.
- Five goals on it, easy to hard: a second machine, a year in profit, the new town wired, a quarter from wind, the founders station retired for a year. One term each.
Better
- Grades are struck against each world’s own par.
- The annual review opens with the Record.
- New players land on the First Term, from the console and from the lesson.
- The sideboard keeps Reliability and Renewable; the other four tiles and the Fuel & Carbon and Planet cards are gone.
- Old saves load with a rebuilt Record. Old finished runs stay but are not compared.
- Development fits a short screen without cutting the reading band, and the Record bay wears an expand mark so it reads as something that opens.
Fixed
- Emissions and money barely moved the old score. Both now weigh every hour.
- Renewable share no longer waits for the year to close.
- Retiring the founders station now removes it, and a January booking no longer slips a year.
0.6.2 · Wasted power costs money
0.6.2
Power your fleet makes and the colony cannot use is no longer free. It is dissipated for a price, the price is on your books, and the energy behind it is drawn on the Load & Supply chart so you can see the nights it is happening on.
New
- Surplus your fleet cannot stop making is now disposed of at a cost, and the cost has its own line in Finance under Surplus disposal, with the megawatt hours it represents beneath it. You pay to produce that energy and you pay again to get rid of it, so a machine running all night into a colony that does not want it is losing money twice.
- The Load & Supply window draws what you spilled. It is a band of its own on the load chart, only over the hours something was thrown away, and the summary reads it three ways: the energy, the share of everything your fleet made, and what disposing of it cost.
- The annual review names a year that spilled. The card says how much of your generation went to waste, what it cost on top of the fuel that made it, and the two things that fix it, storage sized against the surplus or load worth serving at night.
Better
- The storage discharge price in Operating policy goes lower than it did. It stopped at a point where storage still asked more for its energy than the cheapest machine on a young colony cost to run, so every setting below the default did the same nothing. Eager storage is now something you can ask for.
- Disposal counts in your cost of supply, which is the figure the regulator judges your tariff against. A fleet that wastes half of what it makes no longer reports the costs of a well run one.
- The control room no longer starts a machine that is far too big for the load when a smaller one can carry it. A reactor whose minimum output is thirty megawatts stays cold on a colony drawing seven, and the small plant beside it does the work, instead of the reactor running all night and spilling the difference. It is still started when nothing else can keep the lights on.
Fixed
- A battery on a small colony filled up once and then did nothing for the rest of the run. It was asking more for its energy than the one cheap machine it was competing against, so the control room never called on it, so it never emptied, so it had no room the next time there was a surplus to catch. Storage now asks less for its energy the fuller it gets, because a full pack cannot take anything and making room is worth something. On the starting settlement that is the difference between a battery that sits at 100% all winter and one that pays for itself.
- Surplus made by a machine running at its minimum was sent straight to disposal even with a battery standing beside it with room to spare, because the decision to charge was taken earlier in the same moment, before that surplus existed. It is offered to storage first now, which is what the System balance panel has been telling you all along.
- The frequency climbed to an impossible reading whenever supply ran ahead of the load, and sat there. A colony with more generation than it can use now runs at fifty hertz, because the surplus is going somewhere, and the reading falls only when customers are being disconnected.
0.6.1 · Spilled power says why
0.6.1
The System balance panel tells the two kinds of spilled power apart, what your fleet could not stop making and what nothing carried to the load, and the frequency reading is a real number again.
Fixed
- Spilled power was one figure with one explanation behind it, that your fleet could not go any lower and storage was the answer. Generation that reached nobody because nothing carried it was counted in the same figure, and storage does not move power down a corridor that is already full. The panel names the two separately now, and the second one sends you to the line or the station at its rating.
- The frequency in the System balance panel and in the control room read about 100 Hz at every clock speed but the slowest, because the nominal 50 Hz was being added on top of the real figure. It reads the true number now.
0.6.0 · Named machines, and an honest renewable share
0.6.0
Every plant and store carries a name you can change, the development bench says when it is standing idle, and wood has left the renewable share for a line of its own.
New
- Every plant and every store is named the day you order it, Wind_1, Wind_2, Battery_1, numbered per type, and the name follows it into the register, the control room and every card that mentions it.
- You can rename any machine from its own panel: click the pencil beside its name, or double click the name. Leaving it blank gives it back the name the game chose.
- The development bench says when nothing is on it, amber after a month, orange at six, red at a year, and it names the points it has banked and not spent.
Better
- Wood no longer counts toward your renewable share. It has its own line beside it, so a colony burning wood reads what it is running on, and the score reads that number too.
Fixed
- Sponsored landmarks were being sited on top of a town, drawn through the housing. An airport or an institute now takes ground clear of every town, and the offer lapses rather than putting one on the streets.
- The breakdown behind the renewable share only appeared on the first run after a page load. It appears on every run.