Changelog

This build

0.9.4-aCurrent build

The build below is the one the browser version is serving right now.

The previous version, 0.8.4, stays playable at legacy.powerstate-game.com, with its own saves. Move a colony across with Export and Import.

0.9.4-a · A split tool, contracts that end with the run

0.9.4-a 7 October 2026 Current build

New

Split, beside Demolish in the build bar (key B), cuts a line in two at any tile. Each half can then be switched or removed on its own.
A Challenge run can be given up from the Challenge panel with New run. The run given up is not ranked.

Better

No contract runs past the end of a run. Terms offered late are shorter and pay less, and a town asks for hydrogen only for the years left.
Each town and the Climate Board offer one contract at a time, and an offer you turned down does not come straight back.
A landmark pays by how much load it adds to your colony, so in a large colony it pays less than before.

Fixed

A 20 kV line drawn straight across a 110/20 kV substation now connects to it.
Contracts still running when a run ends are settled. One that is met is paid; any other ends and its advance is paid back with no penalty.

0.9.4 · The Challenge & More

0.9.4 5 October 2026

The Challenge: everyone plays Teksas, the same dry desert map, for 20 years and is ranked on one leaderboard by the Record. Wind and solar behind a full line are turned down instead of cutting towns off, separate grids run on their own plants at their own price, and spilled power now costs points. Turbines have new blades and stand on the ground, and a big colony runs far faster at 400x.

See what 0.9.4 brings, in pictures

New

Challenge: everyone plays Teksas, a dry desert map, for 20 years and is ranked on a leaderboard.
Teksas has no rivers, lakes or sea, so no dams, no geothermal and no plants that need cooling water. Its colony starts on one regular gas turbine with nothing developed, in hot summers and mild winters.
Pick a player name for the Challenge leaderboard.
A Challenge run scores the Record, the same as any other run.
During a Challenge run the header shows your Record and your place.
The Challenge card shows a picture of the map.
A Challenge run has its own save and never takes one of your five slots.
Plants turned down by a full line show a line full icon.
Each separate grid has its own price. The merit order in the control room shows the largest grid and names the price on the others.
In new colonies the weather crosses the map as fronts. Wind and cloud reach the far side up to about two and a half hours after the near side.
Wind turbine blades carry day markings: red and white bands, a red tip, or none. Some towers have a red band or green rings.
Turbines side by side turn at slightly different speeds, so a wind farm no longer moves in step.
Discord: a link on the start screen, on the site and in the About window.

Better

While protection holds a line open, each side of it runs on its own plants until it recloses.
Asked for 400x, a forty year colony now runs at about 130x instead of 20x, at the same frame rate.
A run opens on a finished map instead of one still drawing itself.
Onshore wind turbines stand on a round foundation in gravel instead of a concrete plate.
Plant lights and their megawatt figures are drawn over everything, so a rotor or a building in front no longer hides them.
Cloud shadows, steam and smoke look like clouds instead of flat circles.
The Load & Supply bay in the header opens the full chart, and so does the whole Load & Supply card on the sideboard.
Runs finished before this update are kept but not compared with new ones.
Saves from earlier versions still open. A colony saved by this version does not open in 0.9.3-a.

Fixed

Wind and solar overloading the line they export over no longer disconnect customers. They are turned down to what the line can carry, and other plants make up the difference.
A town on a separate grid, with no line to the rest of the colony, is powered by its own plants. They no longer need Must run to keep it supplied.
Spilled power now lowers your score.
Only power delivered to customers earns points. Scores are lower than before, about 15% on Standard, and a run can drop one grade.
Deleting, renaming or importing a colony in Saved games now updates the start screen at once.

0.9.3-a · Movable windows, inland wind, a capped price

0.9.3-a 1 October 2026

New

Windows can be moved by dragging their title bar. A double-click on the title puts a window back.
Reset window positions in the menu puts every moved window back.
The Load & Supply window can show sunlight on its chart.
The Emissions tab in Statistics shows each month’s emissions by sector and by fuel.

Better

New colonies have usable wind inland, not only along the coast. Existing colonies keep their map.
In a shortfall the price is capped at $3,000 per MWh instead of $10,000, and the price readouts say Shortfall.
When surplus power goes to the dump banks, the price is minus $30 per MWh.
The price chart shades shortfalls red and draws prices below zero.
Emissions over time in the Emissions window opens Statistics on its Emissions tab.
With no map layer on, lines no longer show their loading in percent.
Saves from earlier versions still open. A colony saved by this version does not open in 0.9.3.

Fixed

The price was the bid of the last machine called on. It is now the bid of the dearest machine running.

0.9.3 · Line switching and battery roles

0.9.3 30 September 2026

Lines can be switched on and off, by hand or automatically. Batteries can be kept as backup.

New

Lines can be switched between active and inactive with the lever on the line card.
The line card shows how switching a line changes the load on other lines, and asks again before a town would lose power.
Automation can switch a line when another line goes over a set load.
Automation can switch a line for part of the year.
Pick the line an automation watches by clicking it on the map. The watched line is marked while the card is open.
A single line can run above its rating for 4, 12 or 24 hours from its card.
Batteries can be set to Backup: kept full and used only when the grid is short.
Batteries can be set to Spare power: charged only from power that would otherwise be curtailed or spilled.
Plants set to Must run can be given a minimum output on their card.
Wind and solar plants set to Must run are not curtailed.
Plant cards have an output cap. It was only in the Control Room before.

Better

Must run now starts a plant that is off.
Plant settings have the same names on the plant card and in the Control Room.
Lines that end at a junction are named after the nearest town.
The line card keeps its height while the game runs.

Fixed

Must run did nothing on wind, solar, geothermal and hydro plants. It now works on all of them.
Lines run above their rating did not lose condition. They now do.
The overload alert no longer shows for a line you allowed to run above its rating.

0.9.2 · Weather on the Load & Supply chart

0.9.2 30 September 2026

New

The Load & Supply window can show temperature or wind speed on its chart, with its own scale on the right.

0.9.1 · Carbon counted whole, dams across rivers

0.9.1 29 September 2026

The carbon intensity now counts every tonne the colony emits, farming, land and industrial processes included, less what you capture, and the Emissions window shows the same figure worked out from the same tonnes. Plants say when a shortfall is theirs because they are still starting or ramping, dams are built across their rivers, and districts live on the build bar.

New

The Emissions window has a Last 12 months view, and opens on it. A Carbon intensity tile divides the net tonnes on the diagram by the electricity supplied in the same window, and on Last 12 months it is the figure in the header.
A shortfall caused by plant that is still ramping up or still starting says so, in the outage record, the alert and the balance tooltip, and the alert names the plant it is waiting on.
Every unit shows what it is doing: starting up, ramping up or down, steady, off or cooling down. Its card shows what it can reach within 15 minutes, the fleet table and the register have a Potential column, and the lamp on the map fills as a unit starts.
A building signed for on the contracts desk carries a plug mark on the map until your cable reaches it. It turns orange six months before the date and red for the last two. Hover it for the contract, click it for the building.
Districts have a tab on the build bar: start a new one with +, pick one to open its card beside it, and draw its blocks from the same tab. Opening the tab puts the Districts layer up.
A Power plants page on the website lists every machine in the game with its picture, its figures and the programme that unlocks it.

Better

Carbon intensity counts every tonne the colony emits, from power, heating, vehicles, industry, farming and land, less what you capture, divided by the electricity your grid supplies. The monthly charts, the year reports and saved colonies are converted to the same figure.
A Climate Board target signed before this version rose by what farming, land and industrial processes add, so the cut it asks for is the same size. New Climate Board offers size the cut they ask for on what the colony burns, not on its farming and industrial processes.
The Record’s Clean factor reads the same twelve months as the carbon figure in the header, and its curve was rescaled to the new figure, so a colony scores about what it did. The top of the curve now takes capture enough to cancel the farming and processes.
The carbon tooltip shows the net tonnes and the electricity behind the intensity, and a Power plants alone row with what your plants emit for the same electricity.
The dam is built across its river as a gated barrage with the river running through it, and its powerhouse stands on the bank. The build bar shows the same dam.
The Districts layer reads as ground: each district is a soft wash with one name plate, and the wires show only their overloaded and strained badges while it is up.
The gameplay tour is filmed in the new country, and one of its clips is the game itself, played with the mouse.

Fixed

An overloaded line disconnected customers while batteries behind it kept charging. The batteries now stop charging first, and the power they give up is shown as spilled for want of line capacity, not as a reason to build storage.
At sunrise a few megawatts of customers were disconnected for want of generation while batteries were charging. The batteries now give way first.
A heat pump offer counted what its power emits against the whole colony’s carbon figure and overstated it about four times. It now uses what your power plants emit.
The Record bay read ×1.60 at 0 g/kWh in the planning phase.
A Local Sub built on town ground that was waiting for power left that plot’s fine clock running while it was being built.
The Settlements list said a town was supplied while some of its blocks were waiting for a station.
Hovering a Local Sub over streets waiting for power said they would come off their present stations. It now says they are waiting for one.
The Emissions window’s carbon price tile rounded a price under $1/t to $0. It shows cents below $10.

0.9.0 · Economy & Heating & Immersion

0.9.0 27 September 2026

Every town block now heats the way it looks, and when a system wears out its owner fits whatever heats the home for least. Fuel prices, the carbon price, and the grants and rules you set on the districts you draw move that choice. Towns lay heat networks where they pay and set the heat price at what it costs to supply. Heat pumps and electric heaters are load on your grid, and the town’s large heat pumps buy your power. Power plants ramp and start like the real machines, the merit order decides a day ahead which are started, and the fair price is the cost of supply plus $22/MWh. New colonies are founded on an island, a coast, a lake or river country.

See what 0.9.0 brings, in pictures

Highlights

Seven ways to heat on every block: heat pump, gas, oil, LPG, wood, electric heaters and a heat network, seeded from what the block is.
Nothing is replaced while it works. A worn out boiler is replaced with whatever costs its owner least a year, homes and firms each at their own cost of capital.
Districts: draw them over your towns and set a heat pump grant, a retrofit grant, smart meters, an industry stance and a boiler rule once for the whole neighbourhood.
A district can set a boiler rule: no new oil or LPG, no new fossil boilers, or gas boilers ready for hydrogen only.
Towns lay their own heat networks where heat pumps would not heat the homes for less, mostly under flats, and you can watch the pipes go in block by block.
A town’s heat operator orders large heat pumps and electric boilers. You connect them, and it pays you for its heat pumps’ power. It builds its own heat stores.
Heat pumps and electric heaters are load on your grid, and the town pays you for its heat pumps’ power.
Plants change output at a realistic rate and take time to start from cold, so the merit order decides a day ahead which are started and which are kept warm.
The regulator judges your tariff by the dollars it sits above a fair price: the cost of supply plus $22/MWh.
Batteries, dams and stored hydrogen are valued on a two week forecast instead of the recent average price.
An Emissions screen traces every tonne the colony emits from the fuel to the atmosphere.
Four kinds of map: an island, a coast, a great lake or river country.
New art: a large heat pump, an electric boiler and a heat store for the towns, and 84 pieces for the country, from trees and herds to boats and cottages.

New

Districts: once the Grant Office is developed, draw named districts over your towns with a pencil on the new Districts map layer.
Grants and the smart meter rollout moved from each local substation to the district, so one decision covers a whole neighbourhood.
A district can pay a heat pump grant, or charge a levy on new heat pumps that households pay to you.
A district can pay a retrofit grant toward insulation and other work on its buildings.
A district can roll smart meters out to a share of its homes each month.
A district can promote industry, paying the works a development rate while its industrial ground grows, or discourage it and let it shrink.
The district card shows its people, homes, demand, heating and the stations that carry it, and what it cost you last month.
The asset register has a Districts tab.
An Emissions screen on the command rail shows every tonne the colony emits as a flow from fuel to sector to the atmosphere, for right now, a month, a year or the whole run.
Hover a flow on the Emissions screen to trace it, or click a block to pin it. A table lists every source, its share and whether the carbon price reaches it.
Industrial processes and farming are counted as sources of their own.
A Heating map layer colours every block by how it heats. It outlines the heat networks, shows their pipes going in, and marks the network each town would lay next.
The tile, district and town cards show how the homes heat. The tile card also shows what a block could switch to, whether that is the gas main, room for a wood store, room for a heat pump or a heat network in the street, and says why it heats the way it does.
Most flats have no room for a heat pump, so a block of flats heats with gas or electric heaters unless a heat network reaches it.
Oil and LPG move to gas where the gas main reaches, and a rising carbon price moves gas to heat pumps. Wood holds. Firms decide on a steeper curve than households.
A district’s boiler rule takes options away on the day a boiler is replaced. Homes it moves off the choice they would have made cost opinion for about a year, less where a heat pump grant paid part of the bill.
Electric heaters are a load of their own: storage heaters charging overnight in homes, and panel heaters at work. Station cards show them.
The emissions screen gives oil, LPG and wood their own rows and heat networks their own sector. Statistics shows the colony’s heating mix over time.
A dense town can start with a heat network, fed by local heat supply.
Each September from the second year, a town lays a heat network where enough owners sign up and heat pumps would not heat the homes for less. Once its pipes are in, it extends to touching blocks the same way.
A new heat network takes time: six months of planning, then pipes one block at a time, with first heat after about fourteen months. The homes on each block switch over within about three years, and a roadworks marker shows the block being dug.
The town sets the heat price at what the heat costs to supply. Households on a heat network pay it, and a heat bill above gas makes them a little slower to buy cars, solar panels and insulation.
Heat Network Supply: once a network’s pipes are in, its heat operator orders a large heat pump, then an electric boiler if your grid spills power. The game builds each one, you connect it to your 20 kV network by the date on the contract, and the town pays you for the cable.
Once a heat pump on a network is running, the town builds its own heat store beside it.
The town pays you the hour’s wholesale price plus $22/MWh for a large heat pump’s power, and runs it whenever its heat at that price costs less than local heat supply. An electric boiler runs only on power your grid would otherwise spill, and pays nothing for it.
Town heat plant gives way first when your grid is short, before any home or firm, and local heat supply makes the heat instead.
You can subsidise a heat network in a town that would not lay one yet. You pay part of the heat pipes, the town starts building now, and it takes that part of the pipes’ cost off its heat price for good.
The carbon from local heat supply is on your carbon bill, like the colony’s gas boilers.
Hydrogen Gas Grid: hydrogen your vessels have no room for goes into the towns’ gas by itself and is paid the bulk gas price. While any boiler there is not ready for hydrogen, the blend is capped at about 7% of the gas’s energy.
Once you make hydrogen, a town may offer a contract for a set amount of it a year, for five years. Whatever is short at the end of a year, the town buys at the market price for hydrogen and bills you for it, plus a fine for each MWh.
The town card can convert a town to hydrogen. You pay to swap every appliance that is not ready yet, and two or three years later the town burns your hydrogen and nothing else. You can stop a conversion, or take the town back.
Finance shows the power you sell to heat networks, their carbon, your heat network subsidies, the hydrogen you sell to the gas grids, and what a town billed you for hydrogen you did not deliver.
Finance shows heat pump levies and the industry development rate.
New colonies are founded on one of four kinds of map: an island, a coast, a great lake or river country.
Rivers wind across the map from their sources. Lakes have bays and islands.
The map carries on past its edge into country and sea that fade into haze.
Country roads link the towns, with stone bridges over rivers and farmsteads along the way.
Herds, deer, waterfowl and boats move around the country.
Cheap power draws people to a town. Below the price local incomes carry comfortably, a lower tariff grows the colony faster and lifts demand a little; a tariff near the limit of what people can afford slows growth before hardship sets in.
The merit order decides which plants are started and shut down as well as which run. For each hour of the next two days it is run against the expected load, wind, sun and what the stores plan to deliver; a slow plant is started so that it is on the bars for the first hour it is in merit, and kept at its minimum through hours it is not when it would be wanted back before it could restart, or when keeping it warm costs less than the restart.
In a surplus the dearest bid is backed off first, wind and solar included at theirs. A dam with a low lake is turned down to its licensed flow before any wind is curtailed; when the lake is at its spillway, wind is curtailed first.
A plant that stops for a short while restarts hot: faster, and at 40% of the cost of a cold start. Before, every restart was cold.
Once the control room is developed, the dispatcher keeps enough firm plant on to survive losing its largest machine. A battery answers a trip in a second and counts as that reserve, so a colony with storage carries no extra iron; one leaning on a single big unit keeps a second on at its minimum load. The desk shows whether the fleet is N-1 secure.
When a running machine trips, the frequency now falls at a rate set by the spinning mass on the bars. If the fast response cannot catch it, underfrequency protection sheds load to hold the frequency up, and if even that is not enough the colony cascades to a blackout. Carry a battery or a second machine behind your largest unit, or a trip takes customers with it. The control room shows the depth of the last dip.
The control room shows the system’s spinning mass in seconds, and how fast the frequency would fall if the largest running plant tripped. Wind, solar and batteries carry none of it, however much they are generating.
The balance panel shows Response, what answers a falling frequency within seconds, and Headroom, what the fleet could add within the next quarter hour.
A plant warming up to run shows as Starting up until it is on the bars.
Batteries, dam reservoirs and stored hydrogen are valued on a two week forecast of demand, wind, sun and river flow, and of what the rest of the fleet would cost to run instead. The recent average price no longer sets what stored energy asks for.
On the policy desk, Selling price is now Value of stored energy, What to pay to charge is set as a share of that value, and When to burn it scales the same forecast for stored hydrogen.
Build cards and asset cards show Variable production cost, and Dispatch value where a plant is run at a different figure.
The dam card says how the operator plans its water two weeks ahead.

Better

Station cards name the districts their streets are in, and a block’s card can start a district from that block.
Woods are drawn tree by tree, so their edges are ragged instead of square.
Fields are drawn as parcels with hedges.
Shores are rounded, with a wet band and foam, and water gets deeper away from the shore.
Town edges blend into the country with gardens, allotments, orchards, cottages and farmyards.
Gas for homes costs less in Long Winter. At the start, a gas boiler heats for less than electric heaters in every scenario but Mandate, where gas is dear enough that electric heaters compete.
Thermal plants change their output at a limited rate. A reactor or a coal station moves slowly; a gas turbine still reaches full output in minutes, which is the reason to own one.
Plants take time to start from cold: minutes for a gas turbine, hours for a coal station, a day and a half for a reactor. Starting one costs fuel and service life, so a plant kept running is cheaper than one cycled daily.
A battery covering the evening peak is now a coal station that does not have to be lit for it, rather than only the energy it stores.
A supercritical coal plant is more flexible than an ordinary one, not less, which is true of the real machine.
The build card quotes a plant’s ramp rate only where it can actually hold the machine back.
Capacity not called on is now Capacity standing idle, and no longer counts a cold plant that would take hours to start as though it could answer now.
The plan for the day ahead ranks plants with your internal carbon price included, so it decides what is started as well as what runs.
The plan for the day ahead counts a battery for what it can hold up through the whole evening peak, not its full power for one quarter hour, so a low battery no longer keeps a coal station cold.
The clearing price reads $0 in a surplus and $10,000 per MWh while load is being shed, the game’s value of lost load. Dynamic contracts pass it on up to $1,000 per MWh; fixed contracts do not.
Saves: old runs load and keep the map they were founded on. A substation that offered grants becomes a district of its streets at the same rates. Plants are on the bars as they were, and the stored energy forecast is built at the next dispatch.

Fixed

The fair price was the cost of supply plus 22%, so an expensive fleet was allowed a bigger margin than a cheap one. It is now the cost of supply plus $22/MWh, and opinion, city growth and the regulator read your tariff in dollars above it. Demand reads against what local incomes carry instead. The pricing desk’s dial above the fair price is in dollars too.
A dam was held at 40% of its plate through quiet hours whatever the lake held, draining a low lake overnight and spilling wind beside it.
A plant that finished warming up and was walked off in the same interval paid nothing for the start. It now counts, and the plant stays on for its minimum run from the moment it arrives.
A hydroelectric dam switched on and off between one moment and the next like a battery. It now runs above a minimum load or waits, and always passes a little of its river.
Damming one river refused you the next river along. Two dams may not share a stretch of the same water, but two rivers that happen to run close together are two rivers, and each will carry its own dam.

0.8.4-b · Dam reservoirs, firm capacity, asset cards

0.8.4-b 16 September 2026

Hydroelectric dams now have reservoirs. Firm capacity leaves out batteries and the electrolyser, so it can read lower than before.

New

Hydroelectric dams store water in a reservoir and can run at full power through the evening peak.
The dam card shows how full the reservoir is, what the river brings in and how long full power lasts.
Dam reservoirs fill through spring and summer and are drawn down over autumn and winter.
The year briefing chart shows batteries and expected wind and solar above firm capacity, marked as not firm.
The asset register and the year briefing open an asset’s card beside the list.
Substations named in problem cards and the annual report open their own card.
The city card lists every reason a town is flagged.
Clicking a town’s name in the settlement list opens its city card.

Better

Hydroelectric dams are 25 MW for $72M, down from 45 MW for $118M.
The generation mix hatches wind and solar and puts them at the end of the bar.
The year briefing lists batteries and the yearly average of wind and solar apart from firm capacity.
The year briefing chart names the firm capacity line on its scale and hatches everything above it, so what is not firm cannot be read as part of it.
Menus and cards use plain words: scenario instead of charter, achievement instead of commendation.
The capacity contract is renamed Generating capacity, since it counts wind and solar.
Saves: old runs load as before. Dams already built become 25 MW and start with a reservoir 60% full.

Fixed

Firm capacity counted batteries at full power. Batteries are left out of it now, and so is a hydrogen turbine that may not buy fuel.
The electrolyser was counted in firm capacity and the generation mix, although it only draws power.
Towns fed by a single line were flagged as needing attention when nothing was wrong.
The Cities tab could show Supplied for a town the settlement list was flagging.
A 110/20 kV substation showed as overloaded when a local substation below it was full.
Dragging with the middle mouse button cancelled the build tool. It now only pans the map.

0.8.4-a · Storage fixes, kiosk sizes, a demand chart

0.8.4-a 10 September 2026

One battery could sell its charge to another and pay the conversion loss twice, and several finance and storage readouts were quoting numbers worked out the wrong way. Local substations can now be built at a chosen size, and the dynamic tariff shows the day it shapes.

New

A 20 kV to 400 V station can be built at a chosen size, instead of placing a small one and reinforcing it four times over the following year. Needs Grid Reinforcement.
The dynamic tariff margin has a chart under it: the colony’s day as it stands, and the day it settles into at that margin.
Hovering a 20/0.4 kV station lights up every street it supplies. While reassigning streets, hovering a block lights up the station that carries it instead.
The finance screen names the price at which works start closing, above the rate they close at.

Better

The year briefing price card set supply cost and what households can afford side by side, as though they were one sum. It now says when a tariff is below cost.
The building fabric grant card says what it does to output, not only what it saves a household.
Long duration storage was undersold. The policy screen said these return well under half of what they take, which is true of the hydrogen chain but not of a flow battery at three fifths.
Substation cards, the asset register and the town table print the design temperatures instead of the words cold evening and heatwave afternoon.
The map draws faster on a built out colony, and the ground fills in at high speed instead of staying a stand in.

Fixed

Two grid batteries could charge and discharge in the same quarter of an hour, sending energy in a circle and paying the conversion loss twice.
A battery could draw more power than the network was told about, so an overloaded circuit shed a town instead of turning the battery down.
A full battery said Charging above the word Full. It is fetching back the trickle it leaks standing still, and now says Holding.
A developed battery read 164 of 120 MWh, dividing by the wrong number. The build rack understated storage the same way: a long duration battery on the shelf said 250 MWh and 10 hours where the one delivered holds 362 MWh and runs for 14 and a half.
The finance screen built a month from a single quarter of an hour, reading a loss at night and a gain at noon on the same month. It now reads a settled month, and the rows say at this price.
The low money warning came back every thirty days for as long as it was true. It now appears once, and the cash figure in the header carries it after that.
Ask works to come down reported the whole town’s load while the order only touches the works. The button now names the megawatts it takes off, and Measures in force reads 3 months left rather than 2160 h.
The quiet hours dial for hydrogen shared the one for batteries, so winding it up shut the electrolyser out of the cheap hours as well.

0.8.4 · Export Savegames, Report a bug, fixes and balancing

0.8.4 8 September 2026

Colonies can be saved to a file and loaded again on any browser, and a new Bug report key sends what went wrong to the developer. Air conditioning is now something households take up over time, the peak a substation is sized against reads the same on every screen, and a built-out colony no longer slows the clock.

New

The command rail has a new Bug report key. Write what went wrong, tick the box to send the colony with it, and it goes to the developer. There is no account behind it and no way to answer it, so write by mail if you want a reply. About lists everything a report sends.
Export this colony writes a save to a file you keep. Import a colony loads it back, on this browser or another one. Both are in the menu.
Households take up air conditioning over time, instead of every colony having it from the first day. The briefing shows how quickly a world takes it up.
Cooling depends on where a town stands. Ground varies by about a degree and a half across a map, and a dense town runs another degree warmer.
A Local Warmth map overlay shows which ground runs warm and which runs cool.
The operating policy screen has a What to pay to charge dial. Kept low, the batteries will not start a power station to fill themselves.
The operating policy screen has a Buying hydrogen setting. The turbine can run on your own hydrogen only, buy on the market only when the colony is short, or buy whenever it pays.

Better

The year report opens on six gauges with the full figures folded underneath, and the planning briefing reads its chart in one line.
The load and supply figures name what is charging. Batteries filling and electrolysers making hydrogen are on separate lines.
Cooling has its own band on a substation card and its own term in the flow reading, next to heat pumps.
The Homes tab counts how many households have cooling.
The map draws a large network in about a quarter of the time it took. A colony with hundreds of circuits keeps its clock speed at 120x and 400x where it used to fall behind.
The header readouts, the weather porthole and the dashboard charts take far less of each frame at fast clock speeds.
The settlement rail and the town markers on the map answer at once on a large network instead of checking every circuit each frame.

Fixed

The year plan quoted a substation peak of up to twice the real one.
The peak a substation is sized against only looked at a winter evening. On most worlds the summer afternoon is worse, and the register, the town table and the year report all read the milder season.
When fast batteries charge was labelled backwards. Turning it up charges on fewer hours, not more.
Opening a substation card changed how quickly households connected heat pumps and cars.
The control room claimed an internal carbon price was changing the running order whenever one was set, without checking.
Turn down first described a cheapest-plant option that does not exist.
A custom world lost its household fuel and equipment prices when it was shared.
Share it out under What charges first only shared power when there was a surplus, not on quiet hours.
At 120x and 400x the ground took ten times longer to sharpen after a zoom or a pan, and the stretched stand-in tiles stayed on screen for seconds.
Equipment that was only old was reported as damaged. A station in the last years of its design life lit the unplanned outage warning, carried a fault light on the map and was listed as damaged in the register, with nothing wrong with it. All of those now ask whether a machine is worse than its age explains.
The oldest plant on a colony was the least likely to break down, which is backwards. A machine is now more likely to fail as it wears, not less.
Night Shift could not be won on any world. It counted the rooftop panels households fit for themselves, which you have no say over, so it was lost in the first month of every run. It now reads only the solar you build.
A colony saved by an older version of the game could take up the whole of a browser and refuse every save after it, while Saved games read as empty.
Colonies that had been deleted or replaced could leave data behind that still took up room. It is now reclaimed when a browser says it is full, before any colony is replaced.

0.8.3-b · You choose which colony to replace

0.8.3-b 2 September 2026

When all five save slots are full, the game used to replace the colony that had gone longest without being saved. Now it asks which one.

Better

Starting a new colony with all five slots full now asks which colony to replace. Nothing is deleted until you pick one and confirm.
Keeping a run as a new colony now works when all five slots are full. It asks which of the others to replace, and leaves the colony you are playing alone.

0.8.3-a · Saving works again

0.8.3-a 1 September 2026

The last release offered five saved colonies, and a browser could hold about two. Once it was full every save was refused. Saves are now about four times smaller and five long colonies fit with room to spare.

Better

Saves are stored compressed and are about four times smaller. Existing saves still open, and are stored the new way the next time they are written.
The message shown when a save is refused now tells you to delete a colony from Saved games.
Opening the menu no longer reads every stored colony to build the list of them.

Fixed

Saving failed once you had a few colonies stored. A save was too large for the space a browser gives the game, so the fourth one was refused and every autosave after that failed.
Starting a new colony when there was no room left said nothing at all. It now tells you, and names any colony that had to make way.
Quick play warned that it would replace the colony you were last playing. It replaces the one that has gone longest without being saved, and only when all five slots are taken. It now says so.

0.8.3 · Five colonies, a new policy screen, and one chart

0.8.3 31 August 2026

Highlights

Five saved colonies in this browser instead of one, with named save slots and autosave.
A rebuilt Operating policy screen with live readouts, and you can change policy without pausing the game.
Load and supply is now a single chart, with axes, hover details and a legend you can filter.
Removing equipment now takes three months and can be cancelled, and you can rebuild aging equipment in place.

New

The Operating policy screen has been rebuilt, with a section each for batteries, hydrogen, balancing and plant order.
Each policy setting now shows a live readout of what it is doing right now.
A policy setting lights up when the dispatcher acted on it in the last step.
Preset buttons set every policy setting at once.
You can now change operating policy without pausing the game.
Sections for equipment you have not unlocked yet now say so, instead of showing an empty readout.
Hydrogen has its own settings: how much the turbine may draw from your store, and how much to hold in reserve.
A setting controls when the electrolyser and flow battery may charge: only from surplus, in quiet hours too, or whenever there is room.
A setting controls what charges first: batteries, long-duration storage, or an even split.
Five save slots. You can name, rename and delete them.
Autosave now writes to the slot you are currently playing.
Save as a new colony copies your current run into a fresh slot and keeps playing there.
A Saved indicator appears in the top right when the game stores your progress.
If your browser blocks saving, the game now warns you in red instead of failing silently.
Removing equipment now takes three months to complete, and it stops working the moment you order it.
You can cancel a removal at no cost any time before the crews arrive.
You can rebuild aging equipment in place for less than the cost of replacing it.
Load and supply is now a single chart: generation stacked, demand drawn over the top, and unserved power below the line.
The chart now has axes: megawatts up the side, dates along the bottom.
Hovering over the chart shows every source and line at that moment in one tooltip.
Double-click a name in the legend to show only that series, and double-click again to bring the rest back.
Click a source in a chart legend to hide it, including on load and supply.
Storage now shows on both sides of the line: discharging above, charging below.
Station cards now show the demand they carry across the year, with the coldest and hottest evenings marked.
Machine cards now show the most a machine can be asked to deliver, and why that is less than its rated figure.
The register now has a CO₂ column, and points out the three biggest emitters.
The yearly report now prices network losses: the energy lost in the wires and what it cost to replace.

Better

Wind and solar now sit on top of the generation stack, so the steady plants below read flat and the weather is the shape on top.
The demand line now turns red over the hours when supply fell short.
Hydro and geothermal now run to fill storage instead of shutting down when demand is low.
Capping a plant below its rated output now also limits how fast it can charge storage, not just how much it generates.
Paused plants now cost 60 percent less to keep than running ones.
Line cards now break the route down section by section, so a shared line no longer shows one confusing number.
Line cards now say when both ends are still connected by another route.
Load and supply now flags when a shortfall and a spill happen at once, meaning the power could not reach where it was needed.
The pricing screen can now set a margin up to 25 percent above the fair price, and shows when the regulator caps it.
Local substations are now named after their street instead of repeating the town name.
The salt cavern now unlocks alongside electrolysis, rather than several tiers before anything can fill it.
A flagged town on the side rail now says what is wrong with it.
You can now reinforce a full substation directly from its row in the register.
Every build card has been rewritten to say plainly what a machine does, what it needs, and what it costs.
Removing the only power source feeding a town now asks for confirmation and names the town, like removing its last line already did.

Fixed

Removed the firm reserve setting, which starved storage while claiming to hold back capacity.
The storage reserve setting now works: it sets how far a battery will discharge before stopping.
The electrolyser now pays the running cost listed on its build card. It was previously charged nothing.
Town substations now cost something to maintain, like every other substation.
An overloaded line now sheds only the customers it feeds, instead of every town on the map.
A hydrogen turbine now bids based on what its fuel cost, so a full cavern makes it cheaper to run.
Overhauls are no longer cancelled by scheduling a removal and then cancelling it.
A rebuild you have paid for is no longer lost when you schedule a removal.
Open cards no longer scroll upward on their own while you are reading them.
A margin above the fair price is now kept when you save.
A margin above the fair price is no longer displayed as a discount.
The saves screen now correctly says colonies are stored in your browser, not as files on disk.

0.8.2-b · A new start screen

0.8.2-b 25 August 2026

New

The start screen opens on three cards: Scenario, Weekly Challenge and Custom.
Quick play on the Scenario card starts the selected world straight away.
The Weekly Challenge is in development. The same world and run for everyone, new each week.

Better

Standard is marked as the world to start on, and every world has its own Open button.
The five year world "A new beginning" is gone. The lesson leads to the Standard scenario instead.

Fixed

The start screen fits on short screens without scrolling.

0.8.2-a · Wind, hydrogen and development prices

0.8.2-a 24 August 2026

New

The development tab now shows the expected prices for assets you unlock, to help you plan better.

Better

Wind turbine power curve updated to match modern turbines.
Hydrogen tank and cavern no longer connect to the grid.
The electrolyser model improved.

Fixed

A battery could charge and discharge in the same half hour, which made the generation mix disagree with supply.

0.8.2 · Sound, seasons, and a quieter room

0.8.2 24 August 2026

You can hear the colony now: wind, rain and a transformer hum, all built in the browser. Breakdowns and storm damage stop the clock only when they are about to cost you customers.

New

The colony has a sound: wind, rain, a transformer hum and birds, following the weather outside your window. The pause menu carries the switch and two levels, one for the room and one for the desk.
Statistics counts unplanned outages: how often a machine has broken, how many stand in the shop today, and the condition the fleet is carrying.
The year strip wears the four seasons and the phase bar names the one you are in. The top of the screen takes its colour.
At 120x and 400x the porthole holds a pale moon on the night bow, waxing and waning at its true phase while the sun stands at noon.

Better

A machine breaking stops the clock only when there is not enough firm capacity left to carry the loss. Statistics takes the rest.
A gale that leaves a circuit carrying more than it can hold still stops the clock. Anything less stays on the map and in the register.
The weather bay folds to its porthole on a narrow screen instead of disappearing, and a standing extreme keeps its name across the foot.
Load and supply share one unit, so the reading stops resizing its own plate every time a digit crosses.
The operating year drops its headline and its second Control room button. The nav rail already holds that door open, on V.

Fixed

A wire drawn or pulled down while the clock is stopped now changes who has power on the same click, instead of waiting for play.

0.8.1 · Circuits, the merit order, and a pricing desk

0.8.1 23 August 2026

Circuits you can point at, the merit order on screen, a desk that files your tariff, and readouts that print what the game measured.

New

A tap, crossing or shared corridor divides a route into circuits, each selected, priced and demolished on its own.
The Control room draws the merit order: each machine at its asking price, the price setter ringed, details on hover.
Pricing Desk files your tariff each month at your chosen margin under the fair price, never above a cap or contract.
Heavy Corridors: upgrade a double circuit to four circuits on one tower line or four cables in one trench.
110 kV Quad Circuit carries 320 MW, 20 kV Quad Feeder 56 MW. Four is the most a right of way holds.
Every asset card offers maintenance: send a crew, see or cancel a booking. Substations, hydrogen vessels and capture plants included.
Statistics gains a Homes tab: heat pumps, cars, solar, batteries, smart meters and hourly tariff counted in homes, with history.
The rack’s locked chip opens Behind the lock: every machine you cannot build yet and its programme.
The Contracts lamp counts down your time to answer an offer; the card matches it and names the months left.

Better

Junction clamps are visible hardware, rimmed in the circuit’s colour. A route end joined to nothing wears a red ring.
Each section of a circuit takes its own colour: the busy half of a tapped trunk looks busy, the idle half idle.
Line cards and the register print the loss the dispatcher charges; a tapped circuit read close to double.
Each reinforcement rung lowers impedance as well as raising rating, so a reinforced route pulls load off longer ones.
The Control room refreshes while open. Reserves lists stored charge, what is held from trading, what is offered, spare capacity and Hold.
The storage measure is Sell the reserve into the market: a shortfall always reached the whole pack, the reserve stops trading.
Firm headroom held is now Charging headroom guard, under Storage, because it governs when storage may charge and nothing else.
The planning screen says when an overhaul gives nothing back; past overhaul and worn out now mean a spent design life.
The briefing’s electrification outlook is the colony figure weighted by homes, the one Statistics prints.
Heavy Corridors sits beside Cable Works on the development map, which now fits the screen without scrolling.

Fixed

Junctions divided routes by draw order, and a new colony’s feeders never divided. Every junction divides now, loaded saves included.
A route drawn with the clock stopped wore the disconnected mark until play resumed; so did every route after a load.
A 110 kV double circuit at 100% offered no upgrade, because the ladder stopped at two.
The planning screen sold overhauls that gave nothing back, and left substations and capture plants out of the maintenance table.
A kiosk or capture plant with a crew on site stays in service, and its card now says so.
A shortfall blamed on generation while your machines stood idle now names the wire in the way.
The tariff screen understated a month’s running cost, more at speed. Fuel, carbon and disposal are in now.
A wind farm card read 100% capacity factor in a light breeze. It reads against the nameplate now.
The price beside your tariff is labelled as the clearing price; no customer pays the carbon price inside it.
A statistics tile called total generation "energy delivered" while the tile beside it printed the losses.
The reactor card claimed it cannot follow load while the gauge showed it following. It now states its minimum.
Advice to sell surplus and to buy fuel forward outlived both mechanics; the cards now suggest something that exists.
Facility cards advertised a deferrable share of load that nothing in the game defers.
How to play said a nuclear station takes seven years. It takes five, as its card always said.

0.8.0 · Improved demand simulation

0.8.0 20 August 2026

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 18 August 2026

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 18 August 2026

Better

Control and visual optimisation.

0.7.1 · A charging battery no longer takes the town off

0.7.1 17 August 2026

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 17 August 2026

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 15 August 2026

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 15 August 2026

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 15 August 2026

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.