Updates

Your house now has room to grow. The storeroom at home was a flat size whatever the house was, and three of the four upgrades need more space than it had - so the materials would not fit and the refusal blamed storage for something that was a sizing mistake. Each house now holds its next upgrade's materials with a little room to spare, and it grows as the house does. Nothing you own has moved; the room just got bigger. The dot on the store icon goes away when you collect. The reward is claimed against the server's clock and the dot was reading your phone's, which meant that for most of the world it stayed lit all day over a reward that had already been taken - and in the other half it hid one that was waiting.

The contract on the President is playable end to end. It starts with a checklist, and nothing about it happens by accident. You need stealth trained, something to do it with, and a hideaway you own at least ten minutes away by car - somewhere you had to drive to and walk into to name. Every line says what to go and do about it, and the button stays dead until all of it is true and you are inside the red ring. The last fifteen parcels are a game. The detail is on the screen as it actually stands: agents at their real distances with cones of vision that sweep as they turn. You tap to take one step in, and only while nobody is looking your way. The man nearest him does not go round - he looks one way, holds, and turns back, and learning his rhythm is the whole difficulty. Training widens the gaps and slows the outer rings; it does nothing about him. Then you run. However it ended - hit or miss, both are hunted exactly as hard - every force on the map runs at two and a half times strength for twenty-four real hours and they are all looking for you. Being found is rolled against the time you spend out in the open, and it is worse in a city than on a country road. The hideaway you named is the only address nobody is watching. The front page tells you how long is left and whether the ground under you is safe. Get taken and it is thirty days and nothing. Survive the day after a kill and it pays five million.

The President travels with a detail now. Ten agents in four rings around him, at 15, 25, 50 and 100 parcels, and they go where he goes. The ground is marked on everyone's map: red inside 25 parcels, yellow out to 75. Cross into 50 and somebody comes over and asks you three questions. Agree to turn around and you walk back the way you came, free and out of pocket nothing. Refuse and they hold you five minutes - the drive is the five minutes, so you are released standing outside the station rather than starting a walk from wherever they stopped you. No charge and nothing on your record. The detail cannot prosecute anybody; what it can do is take you away from him. Training buys ground. A little stealth makes you uninteresting out at forty parcels, more gets you closer, and nothing anybody can train gets you inside the last fifteen. There is a Stealth skill to train for it, under the street branch. An office nobody turns up for is now an office you lose. Five days without logging in and the seat is vacated. There is no detail around a President who is not on the map, so a President who never plays is one nobody can reach, campaign against or get near - which was a way to hold power permanently by not playing.

Characters are drawn properly again. Hair and eyes were rendering as nothing at all, so every character came out bald with black eyes and changing hairstyle appeared to do nothing. Mustaches were not drawing either. Both are fixed, and your saved appearance is unchanged - it was always stored correctly, it just was not being drawn. Eight appearance options have been removed for being flat, unshaded artwork: five eyebrows, two hairstyles and one garment. Beside a properly lit face they read as a hole rather than a choice. If you had one of them selected your character now wears the nearest surviving option, and everything else you picked is untouched. Deliveries are three times faster. A truck used to take at least ten minutes whatever it carried, which was tolerable for one and tedious for a convoy of six. The minimum is now three minutes and a full bill of materials lands in about nine instead of thirty. The price is unchanged, so driving it in yourself is still the cheaper way.

There are eight kinds of house now, across four sizes, and every sort of ground can build all the way to the top. Rural land was capped at a house, which was wrong: the largest house in the game was called a Manor and the countryside would not have one. Each size now has a country form and a town form, and they are genuinely different buildings with different bills. Cabin or Cottage, then Farmhouse or House, then Villa or Townhouse, then Manor or Penthouse. Out in the country a house grows into a villa and then a manor. In a city it becomes a townhouse and then a penthouse. The planners still have their say - no townhouse on farmland, no manor in the middle of a city - but nowhere is a dead end any more. Your house is also called what it actually is for where it stands. Freight convoys are spaced by the yard instead of by the clock. A truck now waits until the one in front is five parcels clear before it pulls out, so a convoy strings out along the road properly whatever it is carrying and however far it is going. A heavy load takes longer to clear the yard, so the truck behind it waits longer.

Adding a room to your house can be ordered in one go. The whole bill of materials arrives as a convoy of trucks, three seconds apart, the same way a building site can be supplied. Your Home shows what it costs delivered and how many trucks it takes, and says so when everything the extension needs is already at the house or on the road. This is the case that gains the most from it. An extension has nothing to mark out and nothing handed over a piece at a time, so its whole bill has to be standing at the house on the day - and it was the one thing that could not be ordered all at once.

The game now speaks American English throughout. Spelling and wording have been made consistent everywhere you read them - menus, the manual, refusals, the feed and the site. Airplanes are airplanes and trucks are trucks. Nothing about how anything works has changed, and nothing you own is affected. One record kept on your character, the profit you have actually taken on shares, was stored under a British spelling; it carries over exactly as it was.

Building materials can be ordered all at once. Standing on a site with something marked out on it, one order covers everything it still needs: one truck per material, leaving the depot three seconds apart, on a single bill. You can watch the convoy come in on the map, which now draws every truck on the road to you instead of only the one in front. It orders only what is genuinely short, so anything already in your hands, standing on the ground, or on the road is counted - ordering twice tops the bill up rather than doubling it. Calling it off refunds every penny, either one truck or the whole convoy. Deliveries are no longer one at a time. Several can run at once, up to eight, so an ordinary order can go out while a convoy is still on its way. Nothing else about delivery changed: the price is still a quarter over the counter, a truck still takes the better part of an hour, and driving the materials in yourself is still the cheap way to do it.

Your own airplane is on the front page now. Standing at a city airport or a town strip with a plane of yours parked on it, the home screen offers the hangar directly instead of making you go into the address, down to the airfield section and into the sheet from there. It names what is on the apron, or counts them if you have more than one, and takes you straight to picking where it goes.

What is for sale is now the town you are standing in, and nothing else. The property board used to be drawn for a whole city region, so standing in a small town offered you a warehouse forty minutes away in the city as though it were down the road - and because a town belongs to the city around it, walking from one town to the next did not change the board at all. Walk into a town now and the board is that town's. Out in the country between them there is none, because there is nobody out there to sell you anything. Every town has property for sale, down to the smallest, and every town has a market to sign at. Several of them did not. Town buildings were placed by searching for the nearest parcel of the right sort anywhere on the map, which for a town short of that sort put its market, its shop, its freight yard and its dealership in the next town along. Redlynch had none of them and was a pub and a bus stop. Every town venue is now built on that town's own ground, so all thirteen have the full set. Which makes a quiet town a real place to start. The same money buys more of it, and nobody else is looking.

You can take a business public. A shop or a works you own can be floated on the exchange once it has taken real money over the counter. It values at the building plus what it has proved it can sell, issues 10,000 shares, and you keep 70% of them - the rest are sold to the market and the money lands in your bank. That listing is the only thing on the exchange without a ceiling. The twenty companies the world came with are pinned to what they listed at and always come home. Yours is priced off what the business actually takes, so a shop that sells more every week is a share price that climbs every week, past anything else on the board. The catch is real. While it is listed the building is not yours to sell, and taking the company back off the exchange means buying every public share at whatever it is worth by then - which for a company that has done well is a great deal more than the flotation ever raised.

Every town has an airstrip now. The airlines still only fly between the five cities, because that is where they can fill an airplane - but your own airplane can put down on any of the thirteen town strips as well, and all three of them are light enough for grass. Airplanes are still bought at a city airport, and no strip has a ticket desk. The exchange has been rebuilt. Every company now has a trading range of its own and takes its own time to get round it: a utility creeps a tenth either side over ten days, a crypto holding company halves and doubles inside two. Holding a share for a month now hands you back roughly what you paid, so the money is in buying near the bottom of a company's range and selling near the top. Every listing tells you where in its range it is, what that range is, and how long the round trip takes. Share prices were badly wrong in both directions and are fixed. Prices could compound away without limit, and a market event applied its effect on every tick instead of once - which is what put the whole board in the billions, and then, when a downturn started, took it to a twentieth of its value in an afternoon. Prices are now anchored to what a company is worth, and a market event moves that worth rather than multiplying it forever.

The hangar now invoices every fortnight by the size of the airplane, and airplanes are sold only at an airfield. A motorcycle is twice the speed of a car, with nowhere to put anything. Staff are hired at the building itself rather than from the list of deeds, and the route line passes behind the traffic the way it already passed behind the buildings. Behind the scenes: the admin console takes a code from an authenticator and only signs in devices that were approved from a device you already use, and the console app on a phone is now the whole console rather than a moderation queue.

Airplanes are sold at the airfield only, and the hangar invoices every fortnight by the size of what is in it. A motorcycle is now twice the speed of a car, with nowhere to put anything - the trade is the hold. Staff are hired at the building itself, under Your building, rather than from the list of deeds. And the route line now passes behind the traffic the way it already passed behind the buildings, so it never covers a police car, another player, or your own van.

The seats and the boards. A President for the world and a Mayor for every city, elected by the players each week; the winner is dealt three decrees and must pick one that helps everyone one way and costs everyone another. Four boards everyone can see: a rich list with a title on top, cities competing for a season (the winner lives cheaper), crew turf drawn on the map and taxed, and a wanted board that names a face only once somebody has put a name to it. Bounty hunting is a new career; the syndicate takes contracts. Shops and works can hire staff - a runner fetches stock, a clerk sells, a hand works the bench - and you can watch them on the map. Release checks no longer leave test accounts behind.

The line showing your journey now runs behind the buildings it passes instead of over their roofs. The car on it already did — that was fixed a while back — so you could watch a car slide behind a tower while the road it was driving on carried straight across the top of it. Deliveries get the same treatment, and so does every screen that draws a route rather than just the full map.

And every property you own or can buy has a "Show on map" button on it. A name, a weekly figure and a condition bar tell you nothing about whether the shop is on the high street or behind the gasworks, which is most of what a building is worth.

Moving house is done on the map. Instead of a list of eight street names — which is eight strings nobody can tell apart — the city comes up with a pin on every address your rent will buy. Tap one and it tells you what is within walking distance of it, what the deposit is, and how long the van takes, and draws the drive from your current front door; nothing happens until you press the button.

Drawing it turned up something worse behind it. The addresses a given rent offered were being picked from anywhere nearer your city than any other city, which is half a county — so the typical "Rented Room in Oakridge" was about three hundred parcels from Oakridge, in a different town entirely. They now come from inside the city you are renting in, which is what makes the rent ladder mean what it says: the cheap end is out toward the edge, the dear end is in the middle where everything is close.

A fix for 0.36.0, which went out unable to start. The game checks that your copy and the server agree about what the world looks like before it lets you play — they derive it from the same code rather than sending a map back and forth — and 0.36.0 failed that check for a reason nobody could have seen coming: the shape of each town was worked out with a sine and a cosine, and the last digit of a cosine is not the same on every kind of computer. One machine drew the towns a ten-thousandth of a billionth of a parcel from where another drew them, and from there the two built different cities. The outlines are snapped to a grid now, which is arithmetic every computer agrees on exactly, and the release process checks the two agree before anything is published.

The map has been redrawn, and this one is worth reading about. No road runs through a building any more - the width a road is drawn at and the space the planners left for it were two separate numbers that disagreed, and about three thousand buildings had tarmac straight through them. Every town now has at least two ways in and out instead of the single trunk road it answered its city by, and the long stretches between places have an older, slower road bowed well off the motorway, so avoiding the main roads is a route you can actually take. Out along those back roads there are farmsteads: remote lots, miles from anywhere, that you can buy and build on. Because the board was redrawn, some addresses have moved - anything you own or were standing on has been carried across.

Moving house is a move now. Upgrading used to change a number and leave you in the same doorway, so the rent bought a bigger sitting room and nothing else. Each rung of the ladder is offered its own addresses - the dearer the rent, the more there is within walking distance, and the screen tells you how many minutes to the market and the bank before you commit - and once you choose, the van drives there at a van's speed with you in it.

A house you built yourself is finally somewhere to live. Move in and nobody charges you rent, because you own the roof; the place is the size you built it rather than a rung somebody lets you. And you can build another room on: bricks, timber, glass and a fee, and the sitting room holds more. The planners have the same say over an extension that they had over the house, so a cottage on rural ground stays a modest thing.

And the map has had a proper look at. Every town used to have a starburst of dead straight streets shooting out of it into open fields - the street planner was being handed a square box round each town and its first cuts ran the width of that box, corners and all - so towns are laid out on a town-shaped piece of ground now and the streets stop where the houses do. The trunk roads are inked like trunk roads, amber against the white of the streets, and a motorway becomes an ordinary main road once it is inside a city, which is what a motorway does. The countryside has color in it: the land is shaded by its own shape rather than washed one flat green, and the fields are a patchwork instead of a lawn. Woods are darker, shopfronts are warmer than houses, and a farmhouse out in the country looks like one.

Menus and the map's zoom buttons no longer sit underneath Android's navigation bar.

Your home is one place now. "Your Home" gathers the living room, whatever you have parked outside and going to bed - three things that used to be three separate cards, each with another job as well - while the deed, marking a lot out and feeding materials into it stay where the rest of the property system is. Standing on empty ground only offers you the lot if you actually hold the deed to it, and when you do it is named by its address rather than "The lot", which was true of several thousand parcels. And taking something off is no longer a single tap on the row: a worn item, a fitted furnishing or a carried weapon opens a page about it first, with a button of its own for the part you cannot undo where you stand. Carrying a weapon was worse than that - tapping the one you were holding did nothing at all, so there was no way to put it down.

The blank screen between the two opening cards is gone, and the Living World Online card now holds for three full seconds the way the Roejin one does. Loading the world builds the whole map on the spot, which locks the phone up for a moment - and it was starting before the title card had actually been drawn, so that moment was spent on an empty screen, with the card flashing past afterwards as everything caught up. The card is on the glass first now, and its three seconds are counted from when it is really there rather than by a clock the freeze was eating.

The Roejin card at the start is back on screen for three full seconds, and so is the title card after it. The studio mark had been flickering past: the world was being loaded underneath it, which is seconds of the phone being busy, and its animation caught up in one jump. The world now loads under the title card instead, which has its own three-second minimum, so nothing waits longer overall.

Every vehicle on the map now drives nose first. They were all drawn tail first - a truck crossing the country trailer-leading, a police car reversing down every street it patrolled - because the front bumper was being placed at the wrong end of the heading; the headings themselves were always right. And a vehicle on a street that runs behind a building is now behind the building rather than painted over it. Claiming a quest or an achievement no longer trips the anti-cheat, which had not been told that board rewards are a way money arrives. The country has a shape now: two snow-capped ranges in the corners with the highways cut through them in passes, rolling shaded hills, eight lakes, streams running off the high ground into the river, woods on the lower slopes, green fields between - and it is all drawn behind the roads, the towns and every venue exactly where they were. And the police keep to their patches: the city force stays in the main cities, the sheriff has the towns, the country and the edge of town, and the state patrol has the highways and the back of beyond.

The map no longer lags when you zoom out - a frame at the whole-country view went from over a second to under a frame's worth. Every screen has been gone over for legibility: the faint captions, the gold and amber, the skill-category and rarity colors, and the lettering on filled buttons have all been re-inked so nothing sits at less than 4.5:1 on what it is drawn on, and the scene headers at the top of the Work, Skills, Assets, Store and Casino screens are dark photographs with white lettering again rather than a pale wash. A line on the Work screen that ran off the edge of a phone is fixed. Map price tags no longer print over each other when pins cluster. And a name change you bought in the store can now actually be spent - it is on your profile, under Record.

You can fly without owning an airplane. Every airfield now sells a seat on a scheduled flight to every other city - $750 from New Avalon to Oakridge and priced on the distance from there - with three minutes on the ground before it leaves and three more before you get off. It is the fast way across the country and the expensive one - the coach is cheaper and more than twice as long, and an airplane of your own is quicker still and cheaper to fly than a seat costs. Flying starts at the airfield and nowhere else: nothing flies across town any more, and with more than one in the hangar you pick which one you are flying before it will tell you where it can go. The three airplanes no longer cost the same to fly, so the two-seater is now genuinely the cheap one. There are airliners crossing the country overhead, on a real schedule, for everybody. And every journey now shows you the road on the map before you take it, from whichever screen you started it on - including the drive to another city, which never used to ask.

The big one. The world is a square country now with New Avalon at the middle and the highways and a railway running out of it, small towns strung along the roads between the cities, and freight trains you can watch crossing it. Characters age: a life runs from 18 to 80 at fifteen real days to the year, and when it ends you carry on as their heir - who inherits the family home, everyone they knew, half of every skill they had, and whatever they left in trust, paid weekly. Start a pension in your twenties. Airfields at every city sell two-, four- and six-seaters that fly at two, four and six times a car, and a pilot can take you along. There is a "?" button now with guides, tips and a chart of every career in the game. And everything in the store actually arrives, which it did not before.

Everything on the road has a shape. Cars, pickups, vans, semi trucks, motorcycles and bicycles with riders on them, marked squad cars with light bars and unmarked ones for the federal people - drawn at the same angle as the city, pointing where they are going. Your mark on the map is whatever you are actually driving, and the same pictures are on the dealer lot and in the garage.

Mark a lot out for a building and feed it materials as they arrive - what has gone in is part of the structure and takes no room on the site. Empty land is a site compound now, not a free back room, and it takes building supplies and nothing else. Deliveries go straight into the build. The map sits at a shallower thirty-degree tilt, you can only furnish somewhere you actually live, and the City tab explains how the ground is zoned instead of listing every district by name.

Delivery vans move on the map as they should, and arrive in minutes rather than hours.

Every town has a freight depot on its outskirts, and a delivery you are waiting on drives out of one and across the map where you can watch it.

Order materials to a building site instead of driving them there: one material an order, one order at a time, at a quarter over what a full shelf would ask.

Shops and counters take your debit card: if the cash in your pocket does not cover it, the rest comes out of the bank and the game tells you so.

Things are sold in the shops that would sell them: machines and servers at electricals, weight benches at a new sports shop, workbenches at hardware.

Better desks and machines to upgrade to, a server for the spare room that helps whichever side of the law you are on, a skill for staying anonymous, and the training boost now shows in the rate.

Attributes you earn by doing rather than only buying, cybersecurity moved to the computer at home with a way to work heat off, travel options wherever you are sent, and a new mini-game.

Notifications when your training, travel or sentence finishes; trade goods and cash with other players; a standings board; and crew territory you can actually take and lose.

Text on the darker cards and the casino tables is readable again.

Police and people move properly again, private chats, a coastline and a map you can center anywhere, buildings you own rebuilt inside your own city, an exchange that actually moves and a property board that changes daily.

Five cities on one map with real country between them, a proper drive from one to the next, and where you live now opens better work and pays more on what you own. New jobs at the home computer, and four new mini-games.

The criminal side of the game becomes reachable, the city gets people in it, and a lot of things that were built but never switched on are now on.