Grid Town v0.7 — Release Notes

The last update was about the town growing up and asking for more power. This one is about the game growing up around it. Grid Town now has a real front door, a daily challenge worth coming back for, a new way to build out on the water, and a much tighter economy. It also plays like a proper app on a phone for the first time.

A brand-new front door

The whole opening was rebuilt as a "Power & Light" municipal charter — a letterpressed, aged-paper home screen that sets the tone before you play.

• A real main menu. Instead of dropping you straight into a card, the game now opens on a proper menu: today's Daily Grid, the full game and its other modes, how to play, your stats, and settings — each one a tap away, over a living Grid Town rendering in the background.
• How to Play, up front. New here? A short set of intro cards walks you through the idea before a guided first game, all in the same charter style so nothing feels bolted on.
• The Daily Grid is front and center. The daily challenge now opens as its own screen inside the menu, not a modal stacked on top of it, with the forecast and a Begin button on one clean surface.
• Asked once, honestly. A first-visit notice explains that the game counts anonymous gameplay events to see what to improve — no ads, no accounts — and you can play either way.

Wind on water

Offshore wind is the headline new way to build, and it comes with a new place to build it.

• A water-only clean source. Offshore wind is built out at sea, not on land. It runs on the same wind as onshore turbines but reaches roughly twice as far, so a few well-sited farms can carry a real share of the load — the coast's answer to a river's dam.
• See the good sites before you commit. Just like solar and wind on land, the water now shows a site-quality preview while you place — brighter water is a better spot — and the build marker reads clearly out on the sea.
• New coastline maps. A new map type puts an ocean bay on one edge — the only place offshore wind can go — so choosing the coastline is choosing a different puzzle.

New shapes on the map

• Nuclear takes real room. The nuclear plant now occupies a 2x2 footprint instead of a single tile. Build mode outlines the exact 2x2 blocks where it can go, so its size and siting read at a glance instead of surprising you.
• Hydro reads and pays like a dam. Hydroelectric dams were reworked so they behave like the real thing — sited across the river, steady and clean — and the game is clearer about when a dam is holding back the water a battery would otherwise use.

A tighter, more honest economy

A round of balance work aimed at one thing: making storage a real choice with real trade-offs, not a button that skips the hard part.

• Batteries cost you something to cycle. Grid batteries are cheaper to build but hold less, and they now lose a little energy every time they charge and discharge — so leaning entirely on storage no longer lets you quietly skip the gas bridge across the evening.
• A leaner opening. Starting cash was trimmed so the first few days ask more of you, and gas stays an honest bridge early on rather than something storage alone papers over.
• Business income you can actually see. The money a shop, factory, or data center pays you now shows up in the income and net readouts, so a full-game economy adds up on screen instead of feeling like it vanishes.

The Daily Grid, sharper

• Reworked commercial scenarios. The commercial and industrial daily challenges were rebuilt so each day's businesses arrive the same way the full game's do, and every day's goal is calibrated from real play data — the old targets turned out to be far too easy, so they were retuned to actually discriminate a good run from a lucky one.
• A fair start. A 30-second grace at the very start of a Daily means the one house that begins in the dark no longer quietly caps your score before you've had a chance to power it.
• More to brag about. The shareable result card gained new titles and stopped handing out the same one so often, so what you share reflects how you actually played the day.

Much better on your phone

• A full-screen menu. On a phone the menu is now its own full-screen experience, sized natively to the device, with no game world showing through behind it — and it fits every screen from a small Android to a tall iPhone without clipping or scrolling.
• One tidy control cluster. The on-screen controls that used to crowd the top of the screen — pause, speed, sound, and the way back to the menu — now live behind a single settings button, so the corner stays clear while you play.
• Laid out for real screens. The whole menu and its submenus were re-flowed and validated on real mobile browsers, so nothing overflows and no screen ever needs to scroll to reach a button.

Smaller fixes

• Offshore counts on the graph. Offshore wind is now included in the supply totals, so a coastline grid no longer reads as "short" when it is actually well supplied.
• No double dams. You can no longer stack two dams on the same river site.
• Cleaner details. Stat labels line up, a leftover stats box no longer flashes for an instant on load, and the build guide's number shortcuts follow the visible rows without gaps.

Also since v0.6

Several smaller updates shipped between v0.6 and this release. They did not get notes of their own, so they are folded in here:

• A harder, fairer Daily (v0.61). The daily difficulty was re-passed to deepen the genuinely hard days and lower the "green" floor, so a clean run has to earn it.
• Storage and dispatch, rebalanced (v0.61). An earlier battery pass made storage cheaper and smaller and flipped the build order of nuclear and hydro, and the Source panel started showing per-type fleet totals and how full your batteries are.
• Legibility, not new mechanics (v0.61). The game began explaining, in plain terms, why a hydro dam blocks a battery from charging — and player-facing text was swept clean of stray dashes.
• Mobile polish (v0.64–v0.65). The bottom "peek" bar gained a live production-versus-demand duck curve, opening the detail sheet no longer pauses the game or hides the graph you were reading, grid-upgrade cards were restyled to match the build guide, and a tutorial bug that locked hydro at the wrong time was fixed.

Play the beta at gridtowngame.com, or read what changed in v0.6.

These release notes are written by Claude, based on direction from Trevor Hinkle.