Grid Town v1.0 Release Notes

The last big update brought the game to life: power you can watch move, weather that changes the problem, endings that land. v1.0 is about finishing the job. It fills the biggest gap in the game's strategy, gives the parts of the grid that had no upgrades a proper deck of them, makes the solar you build something you can see on every roof, and smooths the path for a brand-new player. It's the version where Grid Town stops being a beta and becomes the thing it was meant to be.

Grid Upgrades, properly built out

The between-rounds upgrade draft was the thinnest part of the game. v1.0 turns it into a real deck.

• Upgrades from the end of night one, in every mode. The draft no longer waits for day two. Finish your first night and you pick your first upgrade, so the choices that shape a run start shaping it right away, in the full game, the Daily, Sandbox, and Historical alike.
• Cards for the grid you actually have. The old deck was almost all about houses. The new cards cover the parts that never had any: big commercial and industrial customers get Anchor Tenant, Commercial Rooftops, Waste Heat, and Compute Flex; the newer power sources get Marine Works Yard for offshore, a River Compact for hydro, and Deep Bores for geothermal; and weather finally has answers you can buy, with Fleet Winterization, Storm-Rated Blades, Dry Cooling, and Grid-Forming Inverters.
• The old favorites reach your businesses too. Neighbors on Call, the Town Hall Hotline, and Power Purchase Agreements used to help only your homes. Now they extend to the factories, shops, and data centers on your grid, so a heavy industrial day isn't left out of the one system that was meant to help.
• All of it in the Daily. The new cards are admitted to the 90-day Daily campaign, and every day's fair target was regenerated to account for them, so the goals stay honest now that you have more tools to clear them with.

Rooftop solar you can see

Rooftop solar was a number on a card. Now it's on the map.

• Panels on every kind of roof. Homes, shops, factories, and data centers all grow solar panels on their rooftops, sitting flush to the roof instead of floating above it, and clear of chimneys and smokestacks.
• Matched to the real thing. The rooftop arrays use the same teal cell-grid look as a ground-mounted solar farm, so a town full of rooftop solar reads as one coherent build, and the panels catch the same charging glow and glint-sweep the farms do.

Historical Mode grows up

The experimental journey through the eras got deeper and genuinely harder.

• Pick your map. Historical now has the same Starting-Map dropdown as Sandbox: start on a river, a lake, or a coastline, and the era plays out on a map that suits how you want to build.
• A harder early game that tells the truth. The opening economy was reworked so the early eras bite: coal is cheap to build but genuinely dirty and pricier to run, gas arrives later, and pollution starts to cost you, so the dirty-but-easy start you're nudged toward is a trap you have to climb out of. The coal and gas inspect cards show the mode's real numbers, not the base game's.
• A reason to keep going. The full upgrade deck is woven into the era catalog, and a new endgame goal asks you to grow a bigger clean city once you've cleaned up the one you have.

A kinder first game

A pass over the tutorial and the phone experience, so a new player's first run teaches instead of rushing.

• The coaching keeps up with you. The green "good job" alerts linger long enough to read instead of blinking away, and the coach box now sizes to its text rather than leaving a lake of empty space under a short line.
• Learn to read the pollution meter. During the tutorial the grid is run close enough to the edge that pollution visibly climbs, and the meter gets a spotlight the moment it matters, so you learn what it looks like for the air to get dirty while it's safe to watch.
• Teaching tips work on a phone. The little "what's this" tips that reveal on hover on a desktop now reveal on tap on a touch screen, so mobile players get the same explanations.
• Small wording fixes. The tutorial asks you to press the lowercase "i" to inspect, matching the key you actually press.

Wins that stick, and a tidier frame

• A win you can revisit. Reaching a Sustainable City in a full game is now remembered, and the victory card can be reopened afterward, so the moment you earned doesn't vanish the instant you close it.
• A cleaner corner. The version number is gone from the top-left now that the game is out of beta; the "What's New" link stays.

Smaller fixes & polish

• A refreshed menu. Free-build mode is now plainly called Sandbox, and the way into the other modes got a clearer redesign.
• A nudge when the freeze hits. When a Deep Freeze is bearing down, the banner now points you at the Winterize button, so the counter to it is discoverable instead of hidden.
• The Daily stops over-explaining. The Daily results screen no longer shows the full-game "Sustainable City" explainer that didn't belong there.
• Clearer forecast. Coal reads as its own color on the forecast graph instead of disappearing into the dark ground.

Play at gridtowngame.com, or read what changed in v0.9.

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