Grid Town v0.8 — Release Notes

The last update was about the game growing up around the town — a real front door, a daily habit, a place to build out on the water. This one is about the grid itself growing up. Power now behaves more like it does in the real world: a reactor you can't just switch off, clean energy you can actually watch go to waste, and storage that rewards a plan instead of a reflex. And the Daily is no longer a one-shot — you can go back and study it.

A grid that plays by real rules

Two changes that make the physics of the grid, not just its economy, part of the puzzle.

• Nuclear that acts nuclear. A reactor is no longer a flexible plant you dial up and down. It's must-run baseload — cheap and rock-steady, but it can't throttle, so when you overbuild it, the extra power it makes at night has nowhere to go and simply spills. That spilled energy is money you paid for and can't sell, so nuclear becomes a real siting-and-sizing decision instead of a free "always on" button. It also needs cooling: a reactor runs at full output only with water within a tile of it, and runs derated on dry land.
• See the power you're wasting. When your clean sources are making more than the town can use or store, a live cue now tells you — "spilling ~8 MW clean" — right where you read the evening forecast. It's the answer to a question the game never used to show: at a sunny midday, are you charging batteries with that surplus, or throwing it away? The moment it says you're spilling, you know the next thing to build is storage, not another panel.

New ways to get smarter

Two optional upgrades that reward understanding the grid, drawn as cards you can choose to adopt.

• Smart Dispatch. An opt-in upgrade that teaches your batteries to ration. Instead of dumping their whole charge the moment the sun drops and then leaving you on gas at 11 p.m., they hold a reserve and spend it across the night — so the same storage covers more of the evening.
• Site Exploration. Geothermal is no longer just handed to you. You prospect the map to find where the ground runs hot, and unlock the vents you actually discover — so a clean, always-on source becomes something you earn by reading the terrain.

The Daily, deeper

The Daily Grid stops being a single throw of the dice you either win or miss.

• Replay any day. A new Daily Archive sits right alongside today's challenge: a scrollable list of past days, each with its weather, its goal, and the score you got. Any of them replays as practice — it never touches your streak or stats, so you can go back and finally crack the day that beat you.
• Re-read the brief without leaving. Forgot what today's forecast warned you about? A "Today's Challenge" button by the speed controls re-opens the day's full briefing mid-run, then hands you straight back to the grid.
• A win you can see coming. Reaching a Sustainable City means holding four conditions steady for a stretch — and now a prominent green countdown rides the day clock while you hold it, the same way the Daily's "final day" warning does, so the last seconds before a win feel like the moment they are.
• Fairer goals, day by day. Every day's target was re-calibrated against real bot play, and a few structurally harder scenarios got their own fair floors, so a genuinely tough day is honestly labelled as one instead of quietly capping a good run.

Clearer, faster play

• Faster by default. The speed controls were re-geared: the old 1× was slower than most people wanted, so every gear steps up — the game opens quicker, and the top speed is faster than it has ever been for building out a big grid.
• A demolish mode that finds the coal. When you go to tear something down, fossil plants — the gas and coal you're usually trying to retire — now pulse brighter than everything else, so the plant you're hunting for is easy to spot.
• The menu pauses the world. Opening the menu now pauses the game underneath it, and the run-ending confirmations were restyled to match the main menu, so a moment of "wait, what were my options" no longer costs you homes.
• Rotate the view on screen. The camera-rotation buttons are visible by default now, and the keyboard shortcut is spelled out — so turning the map to see behind a hill is discoverable instead of hidden.
• A live win checklist. As you close in on a Sustainable City, the goal readout shows exactly which of the four conditions you've met and which one is still holding you back.

Better on your phone

• Place without fighting the map. On touch you can now pan the map while a placement is still pending — a drag near the marker fine-tunes it, a drag anywhere else just moves the camera — so you no longer have to cancel a build just to look around.
• Your finger stops hiding the tile. The build marker now sits just above your fingertip on touch, so you can see the exact spot you're about to build on.
• No dead-end taps. Tapping a source you can't afford now tells you so, instead of arming a build you can't place.

Smaller fixes & polish

• Wires that make sense. A shop, factory, or data center now runs its wire to the power source that feeds it — green when it's powered, amber when the grid is short — instead of drawing a misleading line to the nearest house.
• Buildings that arrive with weight. Shops, factories, and data centers now drop and settle into place as they're built, matching the way power plants and houses already do.
• Softer coastlines. The water's edge got a gentler, less jagged shoreline — a purely visual pass that leaves the map you play on exactly as it was.
• One less black box. The little hanging shop sign was rendering as a dark panel at night and oversized by day, so it was removed; the lit storefront windows already say "open for business."
• The Historical experiment, tuned. The experimental day-by-day energy transition got a smoother opening — your first upgrade choice now arrives on day one — plus a clearer coal must-run heads-up and a round of economy tuning.
• Music that comes back. The soundtrack now resumes reliably after the browser pauses it.

Play the beta at gridtowngame.com, or read what changed in v0.7.

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