Grid Town v0.9 Release Notes

The last update was about the grid growing up: power that behaves like the real thing, clean energy you can watch go to waste, storage that rewards a plan. This one is about everything around it coming to life. The Daily is no longer a single challenge a day; it's a 90-day campaign of scenarios drawn from real grid events. Weather now rolls in and changes the problem in front of you. And the whole game moves: you can see the power travelling down the wires, watch your money climb and fall, and feel a win or a loss actually land. It's the biggest release Grid Town has had.

A 90-day campaign of real challenges

The Daily Grid grows from a single daily puzzle into a season you can play through.

• Ninety days, each its own story. Every day for three months is a scenario grounded in something that really happened on a grid: a datacenter boom moving into the county, the day the wind stopped and lit a gas crisis, a coal plant's last shift, an eclipse punching a hole in the solar belly, a record-quiet holiday when there's more sun than the town can use. You get the day's setup, the job, and a forecast, then you build.
• Industry moves in. Days now bring commercial and industrial loads, not just houses: datacenters that draw the same at 3 a.m. as at 3 p.m., factories that run a heavy day shift, shops that light up in the evening. Powering them is the puzzle: a flat 24/7 datacenter and a solar-shaped town are very different grids to keep clean.
• A fair target for every day. Each day's goal, the carbon-free hours that clear it, is set by real bot play on that exact day, so a genuinely hard scenario is honestly labelled as one instead of quietly capping a good run. Days carry a difficulty tier so you know what you're walking into.

Weather that changes the game

The sky is no longer a constant. Six weather events can arrive mid-run, each one telegraphed before it hits, so it's a challenge to prepare for, not a gotcha.

• Deep Freeze. A Texas-grade cold snap: heating demand spikes while unwinterized gas starts falling over and the wind dies. Winterize and fill storage before it lands, or the failures stack the way they really did.
• Heat Dome, Drought, and Smoke. A heat dome reddens the sky and drives demand up; a drought quietly runs the rivers low, so hydro makes less; wildfire smoke rolls in and cuts every solar panel to a fraction of normal for the day.
• Storm Gale and Solar Eclipse. A gale spins the turbines up until they have to feather and cut out, so all that wind vanishes at once; an eclipse slides across the sun and takes the solar with it for a couple of hours. Each announces itself first, then bites.

The whole game feels alive

A pass over the game's motion and feel: the juice that turns a working simulation into a place that reacts to you.

• See the power move. Energy now travels visibly along the wires: bright motes flow from a source to the homes and plants it feeds, with a little wink where it arrives, so at a glance you can read where your grid is actually sending power.
• Money that moves. Your balance counts up and down instead of snapping, with small floating chips for what you just spent or earned, so the cost of a build and the trickle of income are things you feel.
• Wins and losses that land. Reaching a Sustainable City now plays as a real moment: the camera pushes in on the lit town, world-anchored confetti bursts over it, and the victory card reads like a proclamation. A loss gets its own weight, too, instead of a flat "game over."
• Everything settles into place. Finished builds drop and land with a beat, panels tilt to track the sun across the day, menus and the day report slide and print in rather than blinking on, and the zoom eases toward your cursor. Small things, but together the map stops feeling static.
• The calm you can see. A dunkelflaute, the still, sunless stretch that's the hardest thing to plan for, now reads as weather on the map, so the quiet that drains your batteries is something you can watch coming.

Fairer, clearer clean power

Several changes so the grid tells you the truth about how you're doing and why.

• Partial power counts. A big industrial load you can only partly cover now banks the share you did serve, instead of blinking fully dark the moment a cloud passes, so an honestly-run clean grid gets the clean hours it earned.
• A forecast that doesn't lie. The day's demand forecast now projects a flat datacenter as flat and a factory on its real day shift, instead of forcing every load down the shape of a house, so "you have more than enough" means it.
• Why you're not a Sustainable City yet. Run all-clean but never earn the star? The score screen now explains it: a Sustainable City needs firm cover, always-on clean power or gas held in reserve, that can carry the evening peak on its own, so one still, dark night can't black you out.
• The grid reads every load. The grid-health readout now tracks factories, datacenters, and shops as the loads they are, so a no-homes industrial day reports its plants instead of insisting there's nothing to power, and when a load goes dark, a quick note names the likely reason: the wind dropped, the sun faded, the batteries ran dry.
• A real chance to recover. Going broke used to end the run almost before you noticed. Now a visible countdown gives you a genuine window to sell a plant or light more homes and climb back out before it's over.

Smaller fixes & polish

• The camera keeps up. As a town grows, especially an industrial day that spawns its plants out on the edges, the view now widens to keep the whole grid in frame, instead of leaving new arrivals off-screen.
• Plants stay on solid ground. Factories and datacenters no longer perch on cliff edges or over the water, and geothermal is sited within reach of the loads that would want it.
• Cleaner water, cleaner grass, unbroken wires. The river reads as clear blue instead of a turquoise wash, the ground lost a few odd bright-green patches, and a wire that crosses a hill now draws straight through instead of getting chopped by the terrain.
• Plainer names, clearer words. Every challenge got a copy pass: obscure names made plain ("Becalmed Coast" is now "The Day the Wind Stopped"), jargon explained, and the fussy dashes swept out.
• Loads aren't sources. The "power sources" count no longer mistakes a datacenter or factory for a power plant.

Play the beta at gridtowngame.com, or read what changed in v0.8.

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