v0.60.0Colossal Worlds — 4096×4096 MapsSeptember 14, 2026
- ✦New Colossal map size: 4096×4096 tiles, four times the area of Gigantic — available in Singleplayer setup, the multiplayer lobby (which also gains Gigantic) and the Scenario editor
- ✦Town and industry caps scale with the area as before, so a colossal world allows up to ~2,000 towns and ~4,000 industries; the Scenario editor now uses the same area-based caps instead of its old fixed 60 / 120 limits
- ✦Generation was re-audited for the new scale and four hidden quadratic scans were removed: processor siting re-filtered the whole industry list on every attempt (2.4 billion checks at 4,000 industries), the town fill checked every town against every lot and rescanned every highway point per town, and hamlet placement tested every town, industry and hamlet per attempt — all now run on the spatial grids the generator already builds, with identical results on existing seeds
- ✦Memory: the rain map (a second 67 MB elevation-sized field on a colossal map) is released the moment the terrain is classified, and the zoomed-out terrain image is baked at half resolution above 2048² so the canvas stays under the iOS size ceiling
- ✦Town-site scouting and geographic naming sample a coarser lattice only on colossal maps; every size up to Gigantic generates exactly as it did in v0.59
- ✦Setup shows a note that a colossal world takes several minutes to draw and needs a desktop-class device — the world is generated once and the game itself runs on the same culled renderer as before
v0.59.0Chalk Dust & Whistles — Placeholder SoundscapeSeptember 13, 2026
- ✦Every button in the game now taps: main menu, lobby, dock, build trays, panels and dialogs all give a chalk tap on press — one page-wide listener, so nothing had to be wired button by button, and controls that already had their own click sound don't double up
- ✦Windows open and close audibly: a short rising slide when a panel or the pause menu opens, a falling one when it closes
- ✦Ambient soundscape that follows the camera: a soft wind bed over open country, lapping water when the view is over sea, lakes or rivers (scaled by how much water is on screen), and a low engine rumble that grows with the number of vehicles in view
- ✦Vehicle calls picked from what you're actually looking at: two-tone train whistles, deep ship horns, bus air-brake hisses and short truck horns — plus birdsong over forest and gulls over the water
- ✦The world is quiet from orbit: everything fades in as you zoom in past ~2.5 and reaches full volume around zoom 8.5, and traffic sounds fall silent while the game is paused
- ✦New Ambient Sounds toggle in Settings (main menu and pause menu); the whole layer also follows the existing Sound Effects slider
- ✦All of it is synthesized in-browser as placeholders — real recordings drop into the same hooks later. Performance: the ambience updates 4× a second off the render loop with a 40-point terrain sample and one pass over on-screen vehicles; nothing runs in the simulation or crosses the wire in multiplayer
v0.58.0Fleet BadgesSeptember 13, 2026
- ✦Zoomed-out vehicle icons: once the map is far enough out that the vehicle sprites shrink to a few pixels, every vehicle wears a fixed-size chalk badge in its company colour, so you can follow your fleet — and your rivals' — from the whole-map view
- ✦Four glyphs, one per category: bus, truck, train and ship, chalked in white on the coloured badge with a dark outline so they read over roads and water
- ✦The badges fade in as you zoom out (fully on at zoom 4.5, gone by 5.5) instead of popping, and hand over to the real sprites as you zoom back in
- ✦Two toggles in Settings (main menu and pause menu): Vehicle Icons — Mine and Vehicle Icons — Rivals, so you can watch only your own network, only the competition, or both
- ✦Cheap by design: one pass over on-screen vehicles per frame, a fixed 8px radius (no per-zoom geometry), category lookups cached per vehicle type, and nothing added to the simulation or multiplayer snapshots
v0.57.1The Chain BoardSeptember 13, 2026
- ✦New Chains window in the dock: the full production chain on one chalkboard — raw producers on the left, processors in the middle, town demand on the right, with each industry's inputs and outputs written on its card
- ✦Every industry type shows how many of them exist on THIS map (×7, or a greyed-out "none"), so you can see at a glance whether a chain is even completable on the world you generated
- ✦Tap any cargo to trace it: everything that doesn't produce or consume that commodity dims, so "who makes fuel and who wants it" is one tap away
- ✦Tap an industry type to list every one of them on the map — name, level, how much output is waiting, and flags for declining, offshore and starved-of-inputs works
- ✦Tap one in that list and the camera jumps straight to it with its window open, production history and all
- ✦Pure UI: the board is derived from the industry definitions and the map's own industry list when the window opens — no new simulation work, and nothing extra travels in multiplayer
v0.57.0Supply Chain GraphsSeptember 13, 2026
- ✦Every industry window now carries a Production & Demand chart: what it produced, how much was hauled out, how much output is sitting in the yard, and — for processors — how much input cargo arrived and how much it still holds, one point per game month over the last 4 years
- ✦Bottlenecks are called out in words under the chart: "the stockpile is full — output is not being hauled away fast enough" when a works is backing up, and "no input cargo arriving — production is stalled" when a processor is starved
- ✦New Cargo tab in the Stock Market panel: units delivered per game month across the whole network, with three breakdowns — By Company (each rival in its own colour, so you can see who is out-hauling whom), By Cargo, and By Destination (the towns and industries actually receiving your freight)
- ✦Passenger arrivals count as deliveries too, so a bus empire shows up on the same graphs as a coal railway
- ✦The busiest ten lines are charted and the destination list is capped at 24, so a 500-town map keeps the chart readable and the history small
- ✦Costs nothing in the simulation loop: deliveries and production are tallied into plain counters as they happen (one addition per event, no allocation) and only turned into history on the month boundary — and in multiplayer the new history travels once per game month with the existing price histories, not on every snapshot
v0.56.1Legible LabelsSeptember 13, 2026
- ✦Town and industry name tags are ~20% larger at every zoom level (towns 11–19px, hamlets 10–13px, industries from 10px), so names are readable without leaning in
- ✦The population line under a town name is now amber chalk with a dark outline instead of translucent white — it no longer disappears where a white road runs under the label
- ✦No render cost: the same single text pass per label, just bigger glyphs and one extra outline stroke on the population line (drawn only at zoom 8+)
v0.56.0Faster Wires — Multiplayer Sync OverhaulSeptember 13, 2026
- ✦Orders no longer wait for the beat: the host publishes a snapshot the moment it applies a guest's order (or its own), so building a road, placing a station or buying a vehicle shows up on every screen in one round trip instead of "sometime in the next 1.5 seconds plus the next round trip"
- ✦Snapshots are now deltas: the whole network (every point of every road and rail), the route list and depot inventories were re-sent in full every 1.5s even though they only change when someone builds — they now travel only when they actually changed, which cuts a typical mid-game snapshot from megabytes to tens of kilobytes
- ✦With snapshots that light, the beat runs at 1 per second instead of 1 per 1.5s: money, cargo and rival readouts on guest screens refresh 50% more often
- ✦No more stacked-up publishes: on a slow connection the host used to fire the next snapshot while the last one was still uploading, so guests fell further and further behind — a publish now waits for the previous one to land
- ✦Smoother vehicles on guest screens: a snapshot used to throw away every vehicle's path, forcing a fresh pathfinding search per vehicle on the very next tick (a CPU spike on every beat) and snapping every vehicle to the host's position. Vehicles still on the same leg now keep their path and ease toward the host's position instead of jumping
- ✦Missed-delta safety net: every snapshot states when each heavy section last changed, so a guest that lost a realtime event notices its network is stale and asks the host for a full refresh (the host also sends a full snapshot every 60 beats as a backstop, and to every late joiner)
- ✦Host CPU: the network JSON was being rebuilt every 1.5s; it is now rebuilt right after an order and every third beat otherwise (rival builds still propagate within ~3s), and station transfer pools, barrier states and price histories are split out so the heavy sections really do compare equal between builds
v0.55.0The Crown Passes — Host MigrationSeptember 12, 2026
- ✦Multiplayer games no longer die with their host: if the host's connection drops, the remaining players elect a new one and the world carries on from the state it was already in
- ✦A host who deliberately leaves now hands the crown over on the way out — the lobby only closes when the very last player leaves, instead of ending the game for everyone the moment the host quits
- ✦The takeover is announced in-game ("The host disconnected — you are the new host, the game continues") and the new host immediately gets the host's powers: the authoritative simulation, speed and pause control, incoming orders from the other players, and the AI-restart controls
- ✦Only one host can ever exist: every client independently elects the SAME candidate (the earliest-joined remaining player), that client alone writes the claim and then re-reads it to confirm it stuck — and a host that finds someone else holding the crown steps down to guest instead of running a second simulation, so an old host reconnecting can't fork the game
- ✦Takeover triggers after 20 seconds of silence from the host — 5 seconds after the existing "connection to host lost" warning, so a brief mobile hiccup still just reconnects rather than changing hands
- ✦Costs nothing in normal play: the election rides on the snapshot-freshness timer guests already ran, adds no extra polling, and the promoted client keeps the map and state it has been syncing all along — no reload, no regeneration
v0.54.0AutosaveSeptember 12, 2026
- ✦Singleplayer games now autosave themselves: every two minutes of play, and once more the moment you switch tabs, close the app, or navigate away — an accidental refresh no longer costs you your empire
- ✦New Continue button at the top of the main menu: one tap resumes the most recent autosave, with the company name, date and balance shown so you know what you're walking back into
- ✦Three rotating autosave slots (a bad one can never be the only copy left), listed in their own Autosaves tab in Load Game and the pause menu's Load screen — loadable and deletable like any other save. They're kept separate from your ten manual device slots, so autosaving never overwrites a save you made yourself
- ✦Refreshing or closing the tab mid-game now raises the browser's "leave site?" confirmation, so the muscle-memory Ctrl+R gets one chance to be taken back
- ✦Autosaves resume paused, exactly like a manual load, so you can look around before the clock starts
- ✦Costs nothing while you play: the autosave only encodes when the simulation has actually advanced since the last one (a paused or idle game writes nothing), it reuses the same compact save codec as manual saves, and it never runs during a multiplayer session — those worlds live on the host
v0.53.2Streets That Stay ConnectedSeptember 12, 2026
- ✦Fixed towns losing their through streets: the "trim streets nobody lives on" pass judged every street purely by the plots fronting it, so a central street whose houses all front the perpendicular lanes carried no plots of its own and was deleted outright — taking the link between the two halves of the town with it
- ✦Plot-less streets that JOIN two surviving streets at different points are now recognized as connectors and kept at full length, so main cross streets, ring lanes and the spine of a ribbon town survive even when every building fronts a side lane
- ✦Streets no longer end in the middle of a block: a trimmed street now runs out to the nearest junction with a surviving street at each end, instead of stopping at the last house and leaving a dangling stub
- ✦Result: far fewer isolated street fragments and orphaned building clusters — the grids in the screenshots (East Redmond, Little Elmwood, Southwick, Great Kingston, Saint Cedarville) keep their spine
- ✦Junctions are found by hashing every street point into a coarse grid — one pass over the town's points instead of comparing every street against every other, so generation time is unchanged even on 60-street cities
- ✦Note: map generation changed, so the same seed produces slightly denser town networks than v0.53.1
v0.53.1No More Spur SpaghettiSeptember 12, 2026
- ✦Fixed industrial areas turning into a bundle of near-parallel roads: every industry used to cut its OWN dirt spur all the way to the highway, so a dozen works in one district drew a dozen overlapping lines across the same countryside
- ✦Industries now connect to the NEAREST road, whatever it is — including another industry's spur. Works are served closest-to-the-network first and each finished spur immediately becomes part of the network, so a cluster grows one shared lane out to the highway with short branches off it, the way real industrial access roads work
- ✦Shared spurs are surfaced before generation finishes: a track carrying two or three works is gravelled, and a busy shared one (four or more) is paved as a proper road, so the district reads as a hierarchy instead of a fan of identical dirt tracks
- ✦Costs nothing at generation time — the shared-road lookup reuses the same spatial index the spur pass already built, and each spur still pathfinds exactly once (to a much closer target, so most searches are now shorter)
- ✦Note: map generation changed, so the same seed produces a different industrial road layout than v0.53.0
v0.53.0The Chalk Dock — In-Game UI OverhaulSeptember 12, 2026
- ✦The whole interface moved to the bottom of the board, OpenTTD/Cities Skylines style: one chalkboard dock spanning the full width of the screen — construction on the left, your company readout in the middle, every management window on the right
- ✦The top of the chalkboard is nearly empty now: just the menu button, your balance, and the date with the speed controls. The old left-hand tool column, the eight-pill panel bar and the mobile tab bar are all gone, replaced by the single dock
- ✦Build trays: Road, Rail and Water each open a tray that rises out of the dock with proper tiles — icon, name and price — grouped into Infrastructure, Lines, Stations and Depots, instead of a cramped scrolling sidebar (Road is open when you start)
- ✦Build options are laid out in the open along the tray's foot: every road class, every track class (with its speed cap), curved/straight, catenary, sound barriers and parallel snap as chips you can see and tap. The old nested flyout menus — the ones that kept getting clipped by the scrolling sidebar — are gone entirely
- ✦New company strip in the middle of the dock: your colour, company name, score, fleet, lines and stations at a glance, with the standings list now chalked above the dock instead of hanging off the top bar
- ✦The "what do I click now?" hint is a chalk strip sitting directly on top of the dock, so it never overlaps the build tools; the live cost card moved to the left edge and the minimap now sits neatly on the dock's shoulder
- ✦One chalkboard palette across the whole HUD — the same slate-green and bold chalk-line borders as the management windows, with amber chalk for whatever is selected. No more black glass bars over a chalk world
- ✦Phone and desktop now run the exact same dock (it scrolls sideways on narrow screens) with 44px tap targets and 13–14px labels throughout, so there's no separate mobile layout to fall out of sync
- ✦Notifications moved to the top of the screen and the challenge goal banner to the top-left, clear of the dock; chat sits above the dock on the left
v0.52.0Rival Watchdog — AI AuditSeptember 12, 2026
- ✦New AI Diagnostics window (top bar "AI", or the AI tab on phones): every rival's live script status — Building, Thinking, Saving up, At route cap, No target, Repairing, Fleet stalled — with its line and fleet counts, how long since it last acted, and how long its decision cycle is
- ✦Stuck rivals are called out in red: a company whose decision loop has stopped running, whose vehicles cannot reach their next stop, or that is sitting on lines with no vehicle. One button restarts a rival's scripts (or every stuck one at once) — clearing failed-path backoffs, its avoided-target memory and dead lines, and forcing its whole fleet to re-path. In multiplayer this is a host-only control
- ✦Every rival now keeps a full thought log — not just what it built, but why it did NOT: "Every worthwhile industry is held by a rival it avoids", "Short of cash ($4,120 of $10,000 reserve)", "Rail Millfield – Ashford refused (would cross a rival's rails) — hauling by road instead". Expand it per company in the panel, or download all of it as a JSON file for tweaking
- ✦Fixed the bug that made rival pacing random: each AI's "evaluate every N ticks" check re-rolled a random offset on EVERY tick and compared it to the clock, so a personality's cadence was a coin flip — a rival could sit idle for minutes or think three times in a row. Each company now has a fixed decision phase and really does evaluate once per interval
- ✦Rivals repair their own broken lines: when a line has no physical connection (rail platforms that never met the main line, a town with no road link), the AI now builds the missing track or road itself instead of leaving trains and trucks stranded forever — and if it truly cannot connect it, it closes the line and frees the slot
- ✦Rivals can borrow like you can: a cash-starved AI takes a $10,000 loan to keep expanding instead of freezing for the rest of the game once its reserve dips below its risk tolerance
- ✦Fixed rivals stranding themselves on orphaned lines: if the vehicle purchase failed (or a fire-sale took the last vehicle), the route stayed on the books forever and counted against the company's route cap — those lines are now rolled back exactly like a player's failed order, and exclusive offshore contracts are only claimed once the line actually opens
- ✦The AI decision cycle moved out of the engine into its own module, so the 1,300-line engine file is 300 lines lighter and the rivals' logic is testable on its own
- ✦Performance: the log is a per-company ring buffer written only on decision cycles (about once every 20–35 seconds per rival), status entries only on change, and multiplayer snapshots carry just the last 30 entries per company — health readouts are computed only while the panel is open
v0.51.1Flat World CleanupSeptember 12, 2026
- ✦Removed the last traces of the retired terrain-height system from road planning: the highway planner was charging a slope penalty read off the generator's internal noise field — invisible hills and valleys the flat chalkboard never draws — which quietly bent every road along contours the player cannot see. That was the real cause of the hooked, meandering short links between neighbouring towns
- ✦Hill ground no longer costs roads extra: hills are drawn as plain chalkboard like grass, so routes were detouring around nothing at all. Roads now react only to things that actually exist on the map — water, mountains, boulders, and the towns and industries they should skirt
- ✦Deleted the old wobbled road router left over from before terrain-cost pathfinding, including its "steer downhill to avoid steep climbs" pass
- ✦The town window's fake "Elevation: 1240m" readout (a number invented from the noise field) is replaced with the town's monthly growth rate
- ✦Saves are smaller again: the height map was stored at a byte per tile purely to feed that readout, and is no longer written or loaded — the height and moisture fields now exist only during world generation, where they legitimately decide where water, mountains and town sites go
- ✦Note: with the phantom slope cost gone, roads route differently again — the same seed produces a straighter network than v0.51.0
v0.51.0Stitched Grids (Town Generation — Phase 4)September 12, 2026
- ✦Bordering towns are now stitched together: wherever two street grids touch or sit within a couple of blocks of each other, up to five short streets link them along the shared border (spaced a block apart), so neighbouring grids read as one connected town instead of two islands joined by a single highway
- ✦Highway tie-ins: a town whose grid edge sits right beside a passing highway now gets a connecting street to it (up to two per town) instead of only touching the network through its designated exits
- ✦Direct routes between close towns: a short hop now leaves from the street that actually faces the neighbour rather than looping round to a far-side exit, and its route pays a growing penalty the further it strays from the straight line — no more hook-shaped highways between adjacent grids
- ✦Neighbouring towns close their loop far more readily (a 25% detour through a third town is enough, down from 80%), so the ring roads the trunk tree left open between close towns now get built
- ✦Very short trunk links (under ~28 tiles) are laid as regular streets rather than highways — a few blocks of 4-lane highway between two grids never made sense
- ✦Bridges are cheaper in the road planner, so a highway no longer hugs an entire lakeshore to dodge a 20-tile crossing
- ✦Performance: stitching runs only on town pairs whose grids are actually near each other, uses spatial grids for the point matching, and the straight-line bias costs one distance check per expanded cell — it applies only to short links. Note: map generation changed, so the same seed produces a different road network than v0.50.0
v0.50.0Save AnywhereSeptember 12, 2026
- ✦Load Game from the main menu: a new full-width button opens your saves without generating a new world first — from this device, your account, or a .chalk file
- ✦Ten device slots (up from three), now kept in the browser's IndexedDB instead of localStorage: the old 5 MB ceiling is gone, so large and gigantic maps finally save. Your three existing slots migrate automatically the first time you open the save screen
- ✦Account saves: signed-in players get ten cloud slots that follow them across devices — the compressed save is uploaded to private storage and only you can list or load it
- ✦Save files: download any game as a compressed .chalk file (a back-up you own, or hand it to a friend) and open one from any device with "Open save file…"
- ✦The save format itself is far leaner: the per-tile terrain and height maps are packed as raw bytes and the whole file is gzipped in-browser, so a mid-size world is a few megabytes instead of tens — and the moisture map (unused after generation) is dropped entirely
- ✦Loaded games resume PAUSED so you can look around before the clock runs, and the pause-menu save/load screens share the same three-tab panel as the main menu
- ✦Multiplayer sessions hide Save/Load in the pause menu with a note (the world lives on the host) instead of failing on click
v0.49.1Bug Sweep: No More Cheating TrucksSeptember 12, 2026
- ✦Fixed vehicles (yours AND the AI's) driving in a dead-straight line between stations, ignoring the road network: when a leg couldn't actually be reached over roads or track, the pathfinder quietly handed back a two-point straight line and the vehicle drove it cross-country. Land vehicles now WAIT and retry until a real connection exists, and the route line no longer draws a phantom shortcut — ships are unaffected, they still sail open water directly
- ✦Fixed whole blocks of town streets being orphaned from the network: boulders were splitting streets the same way rivers do, and with a rock roughly every nine tiles that chopped a town's grid into dozens of disconnected stubs. Towns now quarry away the boulders on their own built-up ground, so streets run through cleanly (countryside roads still steer around rock outcrops)
- ✦Money is no longer reported down to tenths of a penny: cash balances are rounded to the cent every step, and every finance readout (HUD balance, Financials, company value, loans, income and net profit) prints whole dollars — share price still shows cents
- ✦Fixed the close (X) button doing nothing on several floating windows: the button sits inside the panel's drag handle, and starting a drag there swallowed the click. Panel headers now ignore drags that begin on a button or input
- ✦Multiplayer AI safeguard: an AI opponent that arrived without its own company id (an older lobby format) failed every ownership check and sat idle for the whole game — AI companies are now always assigned a unique id
v0.49.0Name That TownSeptember 11, 2026
- ✦Thirteen town-naming themes to pick from when you generate a world: Classic (the original storybook names), Chalky, Goofy, North American, Northeast US, The Carolinas, European, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Mexican & Latin, Brazilian, and Pirate
- ✦Chalky fills the map with chalk-country puns — Smudgeley, Squeaky Hollow, Blackboard Bend, Eraserville, Dry Erase, Longdivision — with hamlets called things like Chalkford Smudge and Slateford Tick
- ✦Goofy goes full internet: Skibidiville, Rizzburg, Big Chungusville, Touchgrass, Delulu Dunes, Joemamaton, and hamlets named Bruhtown Moment or Yeetville Lore
- ✦Pirate turns the coast into Tortuga, Gallowspoint, Krakenmouth, Rumrunner and Smugglers Notch — with Cove, Cay, Anchorage and Reef hamlets
- ✦Every regional set is drawn from real place names (100+ per theme) — the Carolinas set alone runs from Summerville and Cheraw to Sighisoara-free Sylva, Bryson City and Ocracoke country
- ✦Each theme also carries its own prefixes and hamlet suffixes, so huge maps keep generating fresh compound names in-theme (Kita-Takayama, Novo Kostroma, Villa Guanajuato, Black Tortuga) instead of running out
- ✦The picker sits in Singleplayer setup, the multiplayer lobby (host chooses, guests see the theme before readying up), and the Scenario editor — so a shared scenario or lobby names identically on every client
- ✦Existing saves and challenge maps are untouched: anything without a theme set simply uses Classic
v0.48.1Nature First — Big World FixesSeptember 11, 2026
- ✦Fixed the "stuck at Sketching the terrain" hang on maps with many towns: the town-namer had only 42 names and looped forever the moment a 43rd town needed one — towns now take compound names (North Millfield, Port Ashford, Little Quincy…) with a bounded search, so 500-town maps generate
- ✦The natural world now comes FIRST: forests, water and boulders are all laid down before a single town, industry or road — towns never found themselves in a boulder field, streets split around rocks like they do at water, industries and homes keep clear of them, and highways pay a steep detour cost to blast through one (so they route around)
- ✦Boulders are back to their natural density (the temporary 900 cap is gone) — they no longer probe the road network at all, since roads now avoid them instead of the other way round
- ✦Town and industry sliders are uncapped again: the 64 / 160 hard limits were a workaround for the hang above, and spacing now shrinks with the requested count so the number you pick is actually what you get on the map
- ✦Highway planning rebuilt for hundreds of towns: the trunk network uses a proper O(n²) Prim's algorithm (the old form rescanned every tree node — 140 million steps at 500 towns), every route only rasterizes the avoidance zones near its own corridor instead of all ~1,500 on the map, and pathfinding reuses one set of scratch arrays instead of allocating and clearing ~4 MB per search (there are ~1,800 searches on a max-settings world)
- ✦A single hopeless route (e.g. two towns on opposite sides of an ocean) can no longer flood the entire cost grid — searches have an expansion budget and fall back to a straight bridge
- ✦Town spacing, industry spacing and industry-vs-town clearance checks all moved onto spatial grids — the old every-town-against-every-industry scans were quadratic in both sliders
- ✦The loading screen now tells the truth: progress labels carry live counts ("Routing the highways (212/640)", "Building the towns (37/120)"), the loader yields a real browser task between stages so the label can't lag behind the work, and new stages cover boulders, town founding, industry siting, traffic counting and countryside settling
v0.48.0Big World LoadingSeptember 11, 2026
- ✦Large and Gigantic maps actually generate now: the old generator could sit for 5–10+ minutes on a 2048×2048 world (often until the browser declared the page unresponsive) because several generation passes rescanned the ENTIRE road network for every probe
- ✦Proper loading screen: world generation is now sliced into stages that hand control back to the browser between slices, with a chalk progress bar and a live stage label ("Raising the land", "Routing the highways", "Building the towns") — the page stays responsive and can no longer be flagged as hung
- ✦Highway routing rebuilt for speed: town and industry avoidance zones are now painted into the terrain cost field once per road instead of being distance-tested against every avoidance circle at every step of the search — on a big map that was thousands of distance checks per search step, and it was by far the largest cost in generation
- ✦Road, boulder and driveway placement now use a spatial index instead of scanning every point of every road (industry driveways, industry-on-road nudging, roadside homes and boulder scattering all shared that same brute-force scan)
- ✦Ring-road candidates are capped at the 300 shortest instead of every possible town pair — each candidate ran its own network search, which grew quadratically with town count
- ✦Boulder count is capped at 900 (a gigantic map was generating ~3,500 purely decorative rocks, each one probing the whole road network)
- ✦Town and industry sliders are now capped at 64 towns and 160 industries: placement is inherently pairwise (spacing, supply chains, highway backbone), so the old area-based limit of 500+ towns on a gigantic map multiplied generation time with no gameplay upside
- ✦Multiplayer world generation goes through the same staged loader, so every client shows progress instead of a frozen tab while joining a big map
v0.47.1Iron Roads — Rail Overhaul Part 4: The Depot Train BuilderSeptember 11, 2026
- ✦Reorderable rakes: every unit in the train now has forward/back arrows, so a loco added late can be moved to the head instead of forcing you to clear and start over — locomotives are tinted amber in the strip so the powered end is obvious at a glance
- ✦Bulk car adds: cars get a "+5" button beside the "+", filling a coal or grain rake in one tap instead of five, and both buttons stop dead at the 12-unit limit
- ✦Cargo filter for wagons: chips built from what this year's cars can actually haul cut a twenty-wagon list down to just the hoppers, tankers or coaches you're after
- ✦Capacity is now broken down by cargo — a mixed rake reads "passengers 40 · coal 200" instead of hiding both behind one total, alongside speed, unit counts, purchase price and monthly running cost
- ✦Saved rakes: name and store a finished train, then recall it at any depot with one tap (up to 12 templates, kept on your device). Loading a template in a later era quietly skips units that have left production and tells you how many
- ✦A Clear button empties the rake, the unit counter shows how close you are to the 12-unit cap, and remove buttons are always visible — they used to appear only on hover, which no touch device could ever reach
- ✦Mobile pass on the whole builder: 14px minimum labels, 36–44px tap targets and focus rings on every control, matching the rest of the depot panel
- ✦The builder is now four small components instead of one file, so the depot panel re-renders less while you shop
v0.47.0Iron Roads — Rail Overhaul Part 3: Parallel Tracks & Modular StationsSeptember 11, 2026
- ✦Parallel-track snapping: hover 1.5–4 tiles beside one of your lines while building rail and the cursor locks to a twin alignment at exact platform spacing (2.5 tiles) — the new track copies every bend of the line it runs beside, so double-track mains come out clean instead of hand-wobbled
- ✦Track alongside roads: the same lock works beside highways and town streets (3-tile clearance), so a railway can shadow a road through a valley without crossing it — amber twin ticks replace the green join ring while you're locked, and the hint bar tells you which line you're following
- ✦Joining still works exactly as before: hover ON the track to merge into it, or near a track END to continue the line — a Parallel snap toggle in the rail Style panel turns the lock off when you need to cross a road at a right angle from close in
- ✦The host validates parallel builds with the same geometry as your preview, so what you see in multiplayer is what gets laid
- ✦Modular station artwork rebuilt from the station's REAL platform tracks: every Extra Platform gets its own island slab between the tracks with yellow safety lines on both edges, Platform Extensions lengthen the slabs, and multi-track stations grow a footbridge with stair landings across all tracks
- ✦The headhouse now faces the road: the station building and its canopies sit on the driveway side, with dashed canopies over the far platforms — freight stations line every outer platform with crates and span all tracks with a gantry crane (two on Freight Terminals)
- ✦Module consistency fixes: Platform Extension slots now appear just past the station's actual track ends (extensions are one-ended, so the span was drifting off-centre), and a new Extra Platform copies the existing platforms' full span so all tracks share the same ends
- ✦The Station Builder's Harbor Crane finally has its own icon
- ✦Performance: platform tracks are grouped per station once per render pass (not per station per frame), parallel snapping reuses the single network scan the regular snap already does, and station slabs are plain rectangles with safety lines batched into one stroke
v0.46.1Iron Roads — Rail Overhaul Part 2: Level CrossingsSeptember 11, 2026
- ✦Level crossings are now real objects on the map, not just a fee: every place your track crosses a road gets drawn crossbuck signs, and from 1935 a pair of barrier arms
- ✦Road traffic actually stops for trains: as a train approaches, the barriers swing down (turning red) and buses and trucks hold at the crossing until it clears — a vehicle already on the track drives clear instead of parking on the rails
- ✦Busy mainlines through town now create real traffic consequences, so grade separation (crossing on a bridge) and routing around streets become worthwhile decisions
- ✦Crossings are cleaned up automatically when the track under them is demolished, and they sync to multiplayer guests — guests compute barrier state locally so road vehicles hold correctly between host snapshots
- ✦Sound barriers are now era-gated to 1980, alongside High-Speed Lines — modern noise-abatement engineering, so early-era companies live with the town complaints (the toolbar shows the unlock year until then)
- ✦Performance: crossings live in a spatial grid rebuilt only when the crossing list changes, barrier state is evaluated once per simulation step by walking trains (few) rather than crossings × vehicles, and the artwork drops to a single dot below zoom 3 with arms drawn only from zoom 4
v0.46.0Iron Roads — Rail Overhaul Part 1: Track ClassesSeptember 11, 2026
- ✦Four era-gated track classes: Light Rail (1900, trains capped at 2.5 speed, 0.7× cost), Standard Track (1925, cap 3.5), Heavy Mainline (1950, cap 5.0, 1.6× cost) and High-Speed Line (1980, cap 8.5, 3× cost) — a fast locomotive on cheap track crawls at the track's limit, so the line has to grow with the fleet
- ✦Build cost AND monthly upkeep rise with each class (0.7× → 2.4× per tile), and catenary and sound barriers add their own upkeep — the "Network upkeep" line in Financials reflects it
- ✦Upgrade Track tool: pick a class in the toolbar and click any of your sections to re-lay it — you pay only the class difference at a roadbed discount, and station platforms touching the section follow for free (a station never throttles its line)
- ✦Tracks finally look like tracks: ballast, cross ties (dense wooden ties on light rail, steel-era ties on standard/heavy, a continuous slab on high-speed lines) and twin rails at gauge, in a distinct chalk tone per class — with tunnels and catenary drawn on top
- ✦Bridge type follows the track class: light rail crosses water on X-braced timber trestles, standard/heavy on steel girder bridges with a zigzag truss, high-speed lines on concrete viaducts with arch scallops
- ✦Sound barriers: build them with new track (toolbar toggle) or add them to existing sections ($20/tile). Unwalled track running through a town now erodes that town's opinion of your company every month (up to -1 per town) — a hostile town refuses building permits, so barriers matter on lines through the middle of town; you get a one-time warning per town when complaints start
- ✦AI rivals build their lines with sound barriers included, so town politics apply to them the same way without locking them out
- ✦Performance: rail geometry (normals and tie positions) is computed once per section and cached, ties only draw from mid zoom and thin out below zoom 7, and zoomed-out rails share a single stroke per class — the track-speed lookup piggybacks on the existing catenary scan (one check per train every 1.5s)
- ✦Existing saves and running games: all pre-existing track counts as Standard (the same 3.5 behaviour as before), nothing slows down retroactively
- ✦Coming next in the rail overhaul: parallel-track snapping for multi-track mains, level crossings with barriers where road traffic stops for trains, an improved depot train builder, and richer station artwork
v0.45.1App Store Scan FixesSeptember 9, 2026
- ✦Dark mode is now declared to the operating system: the chalkboard is dark by design, and the app tells iOS/Android so native form controls, scrollbars and the browser chrome follow the dark scheme instead of flashing light
- ✦Phone-wide readability floor: no text on screens under 768px renders below 14px anymore — every remaining 9–13px micro label (panel stats, badges, hints) steps up automatically, while the desktop HUD keeps its compact sizes
- ✦Phone-wide touch floor: every button, text field and picker outside the bottom drawers is now at least 44px tall on phones, closing the last undersized tap targets the scan flagged
- ✦The last native drop-downs (developer panel: challenge difficulty & goal type, bug and suggestion status, bug tracker status; roadmap phase) now open as bottom sheets on phones too
- ✦Pull-to-refresh is intentionally off in the app shell, so the Challenges and Scenarios screens gained an explicit refresh button (spins while reloading, also clears cached leaderboards)
v0.45.0Android ReadySeptember 9, 2026
- ✦The phone's back button now works properly: opening Singleplayer, Multiplayer, Challenges, Scenarios or Settings from the main menu is a real navigation step, so back returns to the main menu instead of closing the game
- ✦Much faster first load: the Changelog, Roadmap, Feedback, Bug Tracker, Thank You, Dev and marketing pages are now downloaded only when you open them, so the game menu boots on a fraction of the previous download
- ✦Page navigation now slides and fades instead of snapping, with a chalkboard "Chalking things up…" loader while a page arrives
- ✦Every remaining drop-down (bug category, scenario difficulty & win goal, AI style/skill/stance) now opens as a thumb-friendly bottom sheet on phones — unchanged on desktop
- ✦Readability pass for phones: the bottom tab bar, build toolbar labels and prices, depot vehicle stats, lobby buttons and helper text, and the AI rival editor all step up to properly legible text sizes; desktop keeps its compact HUD
- ✦Build tool descriptions are now printed under each tool on touch devices — the old hover-only tooltips were unreachable with a finger
- ✦Bigger touch targets: HUD speed controls, toolbar rows, road-type and style pickers, lobby buttons and the lobby refresh all meet the 44px minimum on phones while staying compact on desktop
- ✦Screen-reader and keyboard support: icon-only buttons (speed controls, game menu, lobby refresh, new seed, copy code) now announce what they do, and keyboard focus draws a visible ring instead of nothing
- ✦Account deletion is now also reachable from the main menu's Settings, not just the in-game pause menu
v0.44.1Editable RoadmapSeptember 9, 2026
- ✦The Roadmap page is now editable in place for developers: add, edit, and delete entries straight from the board instead of going through the developer panel
- ✦Drag any card between Planned, In Progress, and Done — or reorder within a phase — and the board saves the new arrangement immediately
- ✦Progress is set with a slider (in 5% steps) in the edit dialog, alongside title, description, category, and phase
- ✦Everything is admin-only: the public roadmap view is completely unchanged for players
v0.44.0Real Highways (Town Generation — Phase 3)September 9, 2026
- ✦The highway backbone now links TOWNS only: a spanning tree between settlements plus loop links wherever the detour through the tree was long, so the map has a proper road network with rings instead of a single branching tree with industries dangling off it
- ✦Roads are sized by the traffic they carry: every town pair sends its travellers along the shortest route, and each link's class follows its load — 4-lane highways on the busy trunk, 2-lane highways between mid-sized towns, paved 2-lane roads to smaller places, gravel to remote villages (previously class was just distance)
- ✦Terrain-aware routing: highways are now pathfound over a terrain cost map instead of a wobbled straight line — they follow valleys, avoid steep climbs and hills, and cross rivers and mountains only where a bridge or tunnel is genuinely the cheapest option
- ✦Proper bypasses: a highway that doesn't stop at a town skirts around it (its street grid and exit roads are a penalty zone) instead of slicing through the middle, and industries are given a wide berth too
- ✦Industry spurs: every industry gets its own dirt spur road from the edge of its compound to the nearest highway point (or the nearest town exit when the highway is far), so a farm no longer forces a highway detour
- ✦Highway point density is unchanged, so the road graph stays the same size and vehicle pathfinding performance is unaffected
- ✦Note: map generation changed again, so the same seed produces a different road network than v0.43.0
v0.43.0Town Character (Town Generation — Phase 2)September 9, 2026
- ✦Street layouts are now chosen by settlement size and terrain instead of rolled at random: villages get a simple crossroads or a ribbon along the road (an organic tangle on rough ground), towns a block grid or medieval web (grids in flat valleys), cities a grid, 60° mesh, or ring-and-radial system
- ✦Coastal towns run along the shore: their main street is aligned parallel to the nearby water, with a shoreline ribbon for smaller places and a shore-aligned grid for cities
- ✦Arterial main streets: every town gets a wider 4-lane main street through its center and cities get two crossing divided avenues — drawn bolder at every zoom level and never trimmed
- ✦Exit roads now leave from the ends of the main streets, so the highway comes straight into the high street instead of a back lane, and inherit the arterial's road class
- ✦Parcel-based building fill: lots are packed edge to edge along every frontage with widths set by zone — narrow shopfronts (3 tiles), homes (3.6), wide industrial sheds (5) — so blocks read as continuous built-up streets with gaps only at crossings
- ✦The high street is commercial: frontages along the arterials near the core fill with shopfronts, with homes behind and industry at the edge
- ✦Parcel outlines and building footprints now follow the real lot width at high zoom — shopfronts sit shoulder to shoulder while sheds sprawl
- ✦Note: map generation changed again, so the same seed produces different towns than v0.42.0
v0.42.0Full Towns (Town Generation — Phase 1)September 9, 2026
- ✦Towns now fill the grid they're given: street layouts are sized to the buildable radius instead of overshooting it by 15–40%, so the outer third of every town is no longer empty asphalt
- ✦Buildings are placed from the town center outward with a smooth density gradient (packed core, gently thinning edge, back rows only near the core) — replacing the random 12%/60% skips and the hard fill cutoff that left grids half-empty
- ✦Every town gets 2–4 designated exit roads (villages 2, cities 4) that reach past the buildings for highway hookup — highways now attach to those exits instead of any stray street corner
- ✦Streets split cleanly at rivers, lakes, and mountains instead of skipping points — a street no longer silently jumps a river, and vehicles no longer path over a phantom crossing
- ✦Streets nobody lives on are trimmed after the fill (blocked by water, a highway, or a neighboring town), while exit roads and highway attachment points are always kept
- ✦Industries and chalk boulders now keep clear of town exit roads too
- ✦Note: map generation changed, so the same seed now produces different towns — existing saves are unaffected, but Challenge maps look different from this version on
v0.41.0Rival Minds: Smarter AISeptember 8, 2026
- ✦AI companies now play to WIN, not to wander: every rival keeps a ledger of which lines earn money and stacks extra vehicles on its best ones — contested lines first, so it out-hauls whoever shares the stockpile — and extends the cargo chains it already dominates instead of picking random industries
- ✦Rivals react to YOUR network: every AI has a stance — Compete (moves in on your profitable lines, same cargo, delivered to your own market), Avoid (steers clear of anything you're serving and hunts untouched markets), or Adaptive (competes only when your line is rich and it has the cash)
- ✦Two new AI personalities: Cartel Freight Syndicate (a monopolist that locks down whole cargo chains) and Quicksilver Haulage (a fast, fickle opportunist chasing whatever pays right now) — seven rival styles in total, each with a default stance
- ✦Five skill tiers: Passive (slow, small, never challenges you) and Easy below Normal; Hard and the new Tycoon above it — Tycoon rivals act every ~20 seconds, start with 1.6× cash, stack up to six vehicles per line, and go straight for your single most profitable route
- ✦Rivals panel intel: each AI company now shows its style, stance, and skill, plus a "Recent moves" log — "Opened a competing coal line at Grey Mountains Mine against you", "Backed off your grain line — opened Millfield Farm instead", "Added a truck to its contested line to out-haul the competition"
- ✦New rival setup in Singleplayer AND the multiplayer lobby: one-click preset lineups (Friendly, Classic, Cutthroat, Tycoon Table, Mystery), a Random "mystery rival" option whose style is revealed in-game, and a per-AI stance override that forces any personality to Compete / Avoid / Adaptive
- ✦Multiplayer hosts get the full rival editor in the lobby (previously just a count slider); guests see the exact lineup — name, skill, and stance — before readying up, and mystery rivals resolve identically on every client
v0.40.1Smooth CameraSeptember 4, 2026
- ✦Panning and zooming no longer re-render the whole interface on every mouse or finger movement — the map reads the camera directly and the HUD/minimap catch up a few times a second, so dragging and pinch-zooming feel immediate
- ✦Hovering the map only updates the interface when the thing under your cursor actually changes, and cursor tracking now runs only while a road/rail build tool is active
- ✦Town streets are now visible at EVERY zoom level, including fully zoomed out — drawn as one batched chalk sketch per town when far away (a single draw call instead of one per street), and with full curved, cased detail when close
- ✦Highways of the same type now share a single stroke when zoomed out, and every road is culled by a precomputed bounding box instead of being re-scanned each frame
- ✦Mountain peaks, pine trees, and boulders are stored in a spatial grid so only on-screen ones are visited, and are drawn as a handful of batched strokes instead of thousands of individual ones
- ✦The chalk-grain texture is created once instead of on every frame, and the detailed-terrain cache reuses its offscreen canvas instead of allocating a new one each time the camera settles
- ✦Owner-color lookups for vehicles, stations, depots, and route lines are resolved once per frame instead of per item
- ✦Road casings now switch on slightly after building rotation (zoom 7 vs 6.5) so the two detail layers no longer flip on in the same frame
v0.40.0Tycoon Tuning: Economy, Rivals & SmoothnessAugust 17, 2026
- ✦Money stops snowballing: your network now costs real monthly upkeep — every road, rail, station, and depot carries a maintenance bill that grows with your empire (a small starter network pays almost nothing). The new "Network upkeep" line in the Financials panel shows exactly what your infrastructure costs you
- ✦Long-haul payouts trimmed: the distance bonus now caps at 4.5× (was 6×) — one mega-distance line can no longer bankroll your whole company by itself
- ✦Borrowing is a real decision: loan interest doubled to 1% per month, so leveraged expansion has to actually pay off
- ✦AI rivals no longer retire early: an AI that hit its route limit used to stop doing anything forever — now it keeps competing by adding more vehicles to its most profitable lines
- ✦AI difficulty matters more: hard opponents act ~50% faster and easy ones ~30% slower than before, instead of everyone sharing the same speed limit
- ✦Major smoothness pass: the game no longer rebuilds its entire interface 20 times per second while the simulation runs — HUD numbers now refresh a few times a second while vehicles keep animating at full frame rate, eliminating a big source of stutter (especially with panels open and on mobile)
- ✦The map renderer's draw loop is now persistent instead of being torn down and restarted on every simulation beat — steadier frame pacing across the board
v0.39.4Audit Pass IV: Ghost Roads & AI FixesAugust 9, 2026
- ✦Fixed vehicles driving on ghost roads: demolishing one section and building another in the same breath could leave the routing network stale — vehicles kept pathing over the demolished road (or missed the new one) until something else changed. The network cache now catches every build
- ✦Station catchments had the same blind spot — a station could keep serving towns via a demolished road (or ignore a freshly built link); catchments now refresh correctly on every network change
- ✦Fixed AI companies reusing the wrong station: an AI opening a passenger line could reuse its nearby truck stop (which accepts no passengers), or a road route could reuse a dock — the route then ran forever earning nothing. AI now only reuses stations of the matching transport type that actually accept the cargo
- ✦Fixed a Developer Panel trap: turning breakdowns OFF also silently disabled depot servicing, so vehicle wear-slowdown became permanent and unfixable — servicing now works regardless of the breakdown setting
- ✦Big performance win on large maps: station catchment calculation no longer scans every point of every road for every step of its search — network changes late-game (with hundreds of roads) previously caused multi-second stalls when catchments rebuilt
v0.39.3Polish Pass IV: Chalkboard PanelsAugust 8, 2026
- ✦Every in-game management window now sits on the chalkboard: Finances, Routes, Vehicles, Income, Stock Market, Rivals, station & depot windows, the map info card, and the town panel swap their generic black/navy glass for the game's slate-green chalkboard with a bolder chalk-line border
- ✦Panels finally look like they belong to the same hand-drawn world as the map they float over, instead of a modern app UI pasted on top
v0.39.2Polish Pass III: Offline & Instant LoadAugust 8, 2026
- ✦Chalk Lines now loads instantly on repeat visits: a service worker caches the game's files on your device, so after the first visit the game shell opens straight from local storage instead of re-downloading everything
- ✦Play offline: once you've visited, the game opens without a connection — singleplayer and challenges work fully offline (multiplayer, leaderboards, and community scenarios still need the internet, of course)
- ✦Fixed the install manifest having gone missing again — "Add to Home Screen" and desktop "Install app" are restored, now with proper app categories and a maskable icon so the home-screen icon isn't awkwardly cropped on Android
- ✦Game sync traffic is never cached — multiplayer orders and snapshots always go straight to the network
v0.39.1Polish Pass II: Shortcuts & PanelsJuly 31, 2026
- ✦Keyboard shortcuts for desktop play: Space toggles pause/play, and 0-3 set the game speed directly — shortcuts never fire while you're typing in chat or a text field
- ✦Singleplayer games now auto-pause when the tab or app goes to the background (browsers throttle background timers, so the sim used to limp along at an unpredictable crawl while you were away) — a notification greets you when you return
- ✦All floating management panels (Finances, Income, Stocks, Vehicles, Routes, Rivals, station & depot windows) now wear the chalk font, and their mobile bottom-drawers use the chalkboard palette instead of a generic navy
- ✦Panel windows are now draggable by touch and pen on Windows touchscreens and tablets, not just with a mouse
v0.39.0Polish Pass I: App-ReadyJuly 31, 2026
- ✦Chalk Lines is now installable as an app: fixed the broken install manifest (the page linked one that didn't exist), so "Add to Home Screen" on phones and "Install app" in desktop browsers now works with the proper name, icon, and chalkboard colors — a real step toward the mobile & desktop releases
- ✦Mobile app-shell fixes: pull-to-refresh and rubber-band scrolling can no longer yank a running game off screen, and touch controls lose the grey tap-highlight flash
- ✦Chalk theming pass on the in-game UI: the top HUD bar, scoreboard, notifications, mobile tab bar, build hints, and the whole pause menu now use the hand-drawn chalk font and chalkboard palette instead of a generic system look
- ✦In-game Audio settings: the sound-effect and music volume sliders finally appear in the pause menu's Settings tab (they only existed in the main-menu settings before) — changes apply live and are saved
- ✦Your balance turns red in the HUD when you're in the negative, so debt is visible at a glance
- ✦Multiplayer resilience: a guest's order that fails to send (flaky mobile connection) now retries automatically instead of silently vanishing, and hosts get warned when their updates stop reaching the other players — plus an all-clear when the connection recovers
- ✦The pause menu now scrolls on small screens instead of clipping the bottom of long tabs
v0.38.9Road Station OverhaulJuly 28, 2026
- ✦Driveways are now real roads: stations and depots connect to the network with a drawn dirt roadway instead of the faint dashed line that buildings get — and vehicles visibly drive along it
- ✦Vehicles no longer cut across terrain around stations: a station's driveway is now the ONLY way in and out, so buses pull into the lay-by and trucks roll up the yard drive instead of beelining over grass — and through-traffic can't shortcut through a station's forecourt anymore
- ✦Smarter station snapping: bus stops, truck stops, terminals, and depots now land on the side of the road you actually clicked (they could previously teleport to the far side), and roadside stops snap from further away
- ✦Station expansion reworked: ghost slots are no longer a loose ring — modules now snap flush onto the station's edges and onto the edges of already-placed modules, growing outward in clean rows (ghost slots draw as edge-aligned squares showing the real footprint)
- ✦Tighter expansion collision checks: module slots now also respect other stations' placed modules and keep clear of driveways, so an expansion can never block a building's road link
- ✦Tapping between two adjacent ghost slots now picks the NEAREST one instead of an arbitrary neighbor
v0.38.8Live Build Cost PopupJuly 25, 2026
- ✦New live cost card while building: drawing a road or rail section shows an itemized chalk estimate that updates as you move the cursor — base roadway/track, building demolition, level crossings, rail overpasses, and catenary, each priced separately
- ✦The total turns red when you can't afford the section, with your current balance shown, so you know before you click
- ✦Selecting any station or depot tool shows its construction cost in the same card while you pick a spot
- ✦The small on-map price tag near the cursor stays, now backed by the same full estimate (it previously ignored crossings, overpasses, demolition, and catenary)
v0.38.7Rail OverpassesJuly 25, 2026
- ✦Rival rails can now be CROSSED: build over another company's line and a grade-separated overpass is built automatically — no company can wall off the map with a rail line anymore
- ✦Overpasses are somewhat costly ($4,000 per crossing, comparable to bridging a river) and are itemized in the build cost breakdown
- ✦A set of closely parallel tracks (like a rival's multi-track main line) counts as ONE overpass with ONE fee — a single structure spans the whole set
- ✦Crossings must be reasonably steep (30°+): shallow weaving across a rival's line is refused, and running along, joining, or ending on rival rails is still forbidden — as is bridging over a rival's station platforms
- ✦Overpass spans render as elevated chalk bridge sections arching over the rival line
v0.38.6Company-Only Train RoutingJuly 25, 2026
- ✦Trains now route EXCLUSIVELY over their own company's rails: each company gets its own private rail pathfinding network, so a train can never ride a rival's track (or shortcut along their line) between stops
- ✦Road vehicles no longer treat railways as roads: rails were part of the shared road graph, letting trucks and buses occasionally drive along train tracks — road and rail networks are now fully separate
- ✦AI companies play by the same rules: AI trains run on the AI's own network only, and the AI now verifies its rail build succeeded BEFORE founding a train line — if the track is refused (e.g. it would cross a rival's rails), it opens a road service instead of stranding a train with no network
- ✦Route lines on the map now trace the owner's own network, so a rail route no longer draws itself along a rival's track
- ✦Each company's rail graph is cached separately, so the per-company split costs no extra simulation time
v0.38.5Per-Company Rails & Station MakeoverJuly 25, 2026
- ✦Rail networks are now strictly per-company: building track no longer snaps onto a rival's rails (fixing accidental merges into enemy networks), and new track that would run onto rival rails is refused outright
- ✦Rail stations and train depots only snap to and sit on your OWN track — the build preview's green snap ring now ignores rival rails too, so what you see is what you get
- ✦Rail station makeover: stations now render as true top-down complexes rotated to their actual track angle — twin platforms flanking the through track with yellow safety lines, a station building with roof ridge, and a dashed canopy over the far platform
- ✦Freight stations get their own look: crate stacks along the platform and a gantry crane spanning the track instead of a passenger building
- ✦Road stations redrawn top-down and aligned to their road: bus stops and truck lay-bys are now marked lay-by strips with bay dividers and a shelter; terminals are yards with slashed loading bays and an office (cargo terminals stack crates too)
- ✦Previously rail stations always drew horizontally with a fake disconnected track sketch — the real platform track now runs straight through the drawn station
v0.38.4Station & Roadway AuditJuly 25, 2026
- ✦Fixed level-crossing detection: the old check compared segment endpoints instead of testing real intersections, so rails crossing a road mid-segment often paid no crossing fee while near-parallel tracks got falsely charged or rejected — crossings are now detected geometrically
- ✦One physical crossing now means one $500 fee (a single crossing could previously be charged several times as multiple path points brushed the road)
- ✦Rails crossing town streets now count as level crossings too — same fee and angle rule as highways, closing a free-crossing loophole
- ✦Station platforms can no longer be built through a road: a new station whose platform track would cross a roadway is refused with a clear message
- ✦Transport Fever-style demolish protection: a road with a bus stop, terminal driveway, or depot driveway attached can't be pulled out from under it, and track with a rail station on it can't be demolished — remove the building first
- ✦Demolishing a rail station now also cleans up any signals and waypoints sitting on its platform tracks
- ✦Stations are now anchored at 0.1-tile precision, so the building no longer drifts up to 0.7 tiles off its own platform track or road anchor after placement
v0.38.3Road Picker FixJuly 25, 2026
- ✦Fixed being unable to switch road types while building: the road-type menu opened as a side flyout that the scrollable toolbar clipped, so its options were invisible and unclickable — the road type and build style menus now expand inline inside the toolbar
- ✦The 2-Lane Highway is now available from 1900, so dirt roads, 2-lane streets, and 2-lane highways are all buildable from the very start of the game
v0.38.2Rail Station Placement ReworkJuly 25, 2026
- ✦Rail stations no longer require existing track: place one anywhere and it builds its own platform track (aligned with the nearby road), ready to be connected to your network later — track built afterwards snaps onto the platform ends
- ✦New road-link rule: every rail station must be within reach of a roadway — passengers and cargo arrive by road, so a station in the middle of nowhere is refused
- ✦Rail stations now get a real driveway to the nearest road, so their catchment (towns & industries they serve) actually flows through the road link — previously a station far from roads silently served nothing
- ✦Snapping onto existing track still works exactly as before, including through-station platforms at track ends
v0.38.1Infrastructure Overhaul — Part 2: Visual ModulesJuly 25, 2026
- ✦Transport Fever-style module placement: pick an expansion in the Station Builder and pulsing chalk ghost slots appear around the station on the map — click the one you want and the module is built exactly there
- ✦Modules are now drawn in the world: loading bays with parking slashes, fenced storage yards stacked with crates, plank piers reaching into the water, and dockside cranes — all in your company color
- ✦Rail platforms build on the SIDE you pick, and platform extensions grow the end you pick, instead of auto-choosing
- ✦Ghost slots only appear where a module actually fits: clear of roads, rails, stations, depots, and already-placed modules — piers must reach into water
- ✦What you see is what the host validates: in multiplayer, slot picks are re-checked host-side like every other order
- ✦Mobile fix: tapping empty map now places stations, depots, and modules — placement previously required a mouse
v0.38.0Infrastructure Overhaul — Part 1July 25, 2026
- ✦Strict placement rules: stations and depots can no longer be dropped anywhere — footprints may not overlap roads, rails, other stations, or depots
- ✦Bus stops & truck stops must sit on a road (they snap tight to the roadside); terminals and cargo yards are built BESIDE the road and connect with a driveway that vehicles actually drive through
- ✦Unified Road Depot: the separate truck depot and bus station are merged into one depot that buys and services every road vehicle (buses and trucks alike), with 8 vehicle slots
- ✦Full rail station roster: new Passenger Station (local halt) and Freight Terminal (high-volume, all cargo) join the Passenger Terminal, Freight Station, and mixed Train Station
- ✦Seven era-gated road classes: Dirt Road and 2-Lane Street from 1900, 4-Lane Street (1925), 2-Lane Highway (1930), 4-Lane Avenue (1935), 4-Lane Highway (1955), and 6-Lane Highway (1970) — locked classes show their unlock year in the menu
- ✦Divided roads (avenues & big highways) draw a dashed center line; every class gets distinct chalk width and brightness
- ✦Rebuilt build toolbar: every station and depot type is listed with its own icon, name, and cost, with rich hover descriptions — no more identical map-pin rows
- ✦Coming in Part 2: visually placed station modules with Transport Fever-style ghost slots
v0.37.1Audit Pass III: Vehicle Physics & BalanceJuly 24, 2026
- ✦Fixed the biggest physics bug in the game: vehicle speed depended on how densely a road/rail's curve points were sampled — vehicles crawled through tight splined curves and rushed along sparse straights; movement is now arc-length correct, so a vehicle's speed is constant in real world-tiles everywhere
- ✦The delivery-speed premium finally works: the old decay curve pinned virtually every delivery at the minimum 0.7× payout — retuned to the real time scale, so average services now earn ~1.0×, genuinely fast lines earn up to 1.3×, and slow or worn-out haulers drop toward 0.7×
- ✦Closed a train composition exploit: a multi-loco train now runs at its SLOWEST locomotive's top speed instead of its fastest — pairing a cheap express loco with a heavy freight hauler no longer granted both stats at once
- ✦Overtaking now compares effective speeds including age and service wear, so a worn-out vehicle gets passed by a fresh one of the same model (stopped/loading vehicles were already passable)
- ✦Pathfinding no longer re-runs every tick for a vehicle whose leg became unreachable (e.g. a demolished network) — failed lookups now back off for ~3 seconds, removing a hidden performance drain
- ✦Cheaper catenary checks for electric trains (bounding-box test instead of exact distances per track point)
v0.37.0Share Price HistoryJuly 24, 2026
- ✦New Prices tab in the Stock Market panel: chalk line graphs charting share prices over the last 4 game years, one point per month
- ✦Company Shares view draws every company's share price in its own company color — eliminated companies' lines stop where they were absorbed
- ✦Industry Stocks view charts the top 8 industry listings (industries you hold a stake in are always included and flagged in the legend)
- ✦Ranked legend shows each line's current price per 1% block at a glance
- ✦Price history is fully synced in multiplayer, so guests see the same charts as the host
v0.36.2Challenge RefreshJuly 23, 2026
- ✦Two new challenges: Coal Baron (an easy steam-era starter — reach $250,000 in 10 years on a cozy map) and Iron Horse Sprint (score 15,000 points in a tight 8-year dash)
- ✦The original two challenges got clearer descriptions, and the lineup is now ordered easiest-first
- ✦Challenge cards now show the start year and map size alongside the goal, time limit, and difficulty
- ✦Leaderboards for score-based challenges now show each run's final score instead of irrelevant money totals
v0.36.1Main Menu ReshuffleJuly 23, 2026
- ✦The main menu is reorganized: Singleplayer and Multiplayer take the top spots as big full-width buttons, with Challenges, Scenarios, Tutorial, and Settings as a tidy 2×2 grid of side-by-side cards below
- ✦The first-visit tutorial nudge is now a proper chalk popup over the menu (with a dimmed backdrop) instead of a banner squeezed confusingly right above the Tutorial button
v0.36.0Company GraphsJuly 23, 2026
- ✦OpenTTD-style performance graphs: a new Graphs tab in the Stocks panel charts every company side by side over the last 6 game years
- ✦Seven metrics to compare: company value, bank balance, operating profit, cargo delivered per month, fleet size, and kilometres of road and rail built
- ✦Chalk-drawn charts with a legend ranked by current value — eliminated companies' lines simply stop where they were absorbed
- ✦Stats are sampled every game month and fully synced in multiplayer, so guests see the same history as the host
- ✦HUD cleanup: the top-right panel buttons are now one tidy segmented bar with grouped sections (finance · fleet · rivals) instead of eight floating pills
v0.35.1Camera Edge FixesJuly 23, 2026
- ✦The camera now treats all four map edges the same: previously the top and left edges were pinned to the screen edge (hidden under the HUD and toolbar) while the bottom and right let you scroll half a screen into the void
- ✦Every edge can now be pulled comfortably toward the center of the screen, so building in corners and along the top/left borders is no longer a squint-and-guess affair
- ✦Zoomed all the way out, a map smaller than your screen is centered instead of stuck in the top-left corner
- ✦Minimap jumps to locations near the top and left edges now center them properly instead of stopping short
v0.35.0Stock Market — Hostile TakeoversJuly 23, 2026
- ✦Hostile takeovers are live: hold more than 50% of a rival company and a red Takeover button appears — absorb their entire network: routes, fleet, stations, depots, roads, rails, cash, debt, offshore claims, and industry stakes
- ✦Minority shareholders of the taken-over company are automatically bought out at market price (the raider pays), and the victim's stakes in other companies transfer to the raider too
- ✦Taken-over players are eliminated: a chalk defeat screen announces who absorbed you — in multiplayer the game continues without you
- ✦AI raiders: cash-rich AI companies now buy up floated shares of the weakest rival (aggressive personalities raid harder), strike the moment they cross majority control, and you get warned every time an AI buys into your company
- ✦AI self-preservation: cash-starved AIs float their own shares to raise capital, but never past 40% — they won't hand you an easy takeover
- ✦Floating a majority of your shares is now a real gamble: the cash is instant, but the takeover risk is too
v0.34.0Stock Market — IndustriesJuly 23, 2026
- ✦New Industries tab on the Stock Market: buy stakes in any industry on the map, up to 49% total investor ownership — industries always stay independent
- ✦Industry stock prices are fundamentals-driven: production output, industry level, live market prices of what it produces, and a heavy discount while it's declining — growth events lift your stake, decline slashes it
- ✦Dividends come from cargo ACTUALLY MOVED: every game month, investors split 15% of the value of freight hauled out of the industry — service an industry yourself and your stake pays double duty
- ✦Unserviced industries pay nothing, and each listing shows its live yield estimate per 1% so you can spot the money-makers
- ✦AI companies now invest too: they buy stakes in industries along their own routes with spare cash — and dump their entire position the moment an industry starts declining
- ✦Portfolio tab now shows your industry stakes with per-stake monthly yield, and Financials tracks industry dividend income separately
- ✦Investor stakes are visible on every listing (company-colored) and fully synced in multiplayer — next up: hostile takeovers
v0.33.0Stock Market — CompaniesJuly 23, 2026
- ✦New Stock Market panel (top bar / mobile tab): every company is now listed with a live share price, a 4-year price chart, and its ownership breakdown
- ✦Companies are valued for real — cash, fleet (depreciated by age), roads, rails, stations & depots, plus capitalized recent profits, minus debt — and repriced every game month
- ✦Float shares of your company in 5% blocks for an instant cash injection at market price (5% underwriting fee) — and buy them back later at a small premium
- ✦Rivals can only buy shares you've floated (max 75% of a company can leave the founder's hands) — raising capital is a real strategic risk: cross 50% outside ownership and you're takeover bait
- ✦Shareholders earn monthly dividends — 30% of a profitable company's operating profit, split per share held — tracked as dividend income in your Financials
- ✦My Portfolio tab: your capital structure, who holds your shares, your stakes in rivals, and total dividend income
- ✦Financials panel now shows your company value and share price alongside your balance
- ✦Fully multiplayer-safe: trades are validated host-side like every other order — coming next: industry stocks, then hostile takeovers
v0.32.0Tutorial UpdateJuly 23, 2026
- ✦New guided tutorial: an 8-step "First Line" walkthrough teaches the core loop — pan the map, draw a road, place bus stops, connect a route, buy a bus, and watch the first fares roll in
- ✦The tutorial plays in a real game world (small calm map, no AI rivals, generous cash, breakdowns off) — steps advance automatically as you actually do them, in any order, and the game keeps running when you finish
- ✦Chalk instruction cards point at the exact buttons to press, with a pulsing chalk ring around each highlighted control — every step can be skipped, and you can exit anytime and keep playing
- ✦Tutorial lives at the top of the main menu, and first-time visitors get a one-time "New here?" nudge to try it
- ✦Rail and ship tutorials are on the roadmap next
v0.31.2Search Visibility PassJuly 23, 2026
- ✦Chalk Lines now has its own hand-drawn chalk locomotive favicon in browser tabs, bookmarks, and home-screen shortcuts (replacing the platform default)
- ✦Search engines get a proper map of the site: new sitemap and robots rules list the public pages and keep admin/utility pages out of search results
- ✦Every public page (Changelog, Roadmap, Feedback) now has its own search-friendly title, description, and canonical link instead of sharing the homepage's
- ✦Richer game info for search results: structured data now includes the game banner, platform, language, and publisher details
- ✦Link previews got small upgrades too: image alt text and locale tags for social embeds, plus a chalkboard theme color for mobile browser chrome
v0.31.1Scenario Editor PolishJuly 22, 2026
- ✦Scenario leaderboards are now visible: every goal scenario card (Community, By Code, and My Scenarios) has an expandable leaderboard showing the fastest completed runs
- ✦Added a player-name field to the Scenarios screen so your runs show up on scenario leaderboards under your name instead of "Player"
- ✦Deleting one of your scenarios now asks for confirmation instead of removing it instantly
- ✦Share-code lookup results clear properly when you edit the code, so a stale scenario no longer lingers under the search box
- ✦Copying a share code now works in embedded browsers where clipboard access is blocked
- ✦Your scenario list no longer refetches needlessly every time the editor opens
v0.31.0Scenario EditorJuly 22, 2026
- ✦New Scenarios mode on the main menu: design your own maps and rules — map size, seed, water level, towns, industries, start year, difficulty, starting money, and an optional win goal with a time limit
- ✦Creating and saving scenarios requires a signed-in account; your scenarios are saved to your account across devices
- ✦Every scenario gets a 6-character share code — copy it and friends can load and play your scenario from the "By Code" tab, no account needed
- ✦Submit your scenario for review and it can be published to the public Community list for everyone to browse and play
- ✦Scenarios with a win goal get their own leaderboard, tracked just like developer challenges
- ✦New Scenarios tab in the developer panel to review, approve, or reject community submissions
v0.30.3Lobby Fairness FixesJuly 21, 2026
- ✦Fixed a race where two players joining a lobby at the same moment could silently knock each other off the roster — joins now verify they stuck and automatically retry if a simultaneous join overwrote them
- ✦Company colors are now guaranteed unique: no two human players can get the same color, and player colors also avoid the colors of the AI opponents in the lobby
- ✦Late joiners get the first free color instead of one that might already be in use after earlier players left
v0.30.2Audit Pass II: Bugs & PerformanceJuly 21, 2026
- ✦Multiplayer bandwidth slashed: host snapshots no longer ship every vehicle's full path (often hundreds of points each) — guests rebuild identical paths locally while keeping the host's exact positions, so big fleets sync far lighter and smoother
- ✦Fixed vehicles rubber-banding to the start of their leg on multiplayer guests after each sync beat
- ✦Fixed "Sandbox mode — no competition" quietly spawning 2 default AI companies anyway — zero AI opponents now really means zero, in singleplayer and multiplayer lobbies alike
- ✦Stations still served by a route can no longer be demolished (vehicles would shuttle to a ghost stop forever) — delete the route first
- ✦Bankruptcy fire-sales now clean up properly: a force-sold station takes its platform tracks and dead routes with it
- ✦Fixed a slow capacity leak where passengers with an invalid destination permanently shrank a vehicle's usable space
- ✦Big pathfinding speed-up: nearest-road lookups now use a spatial index instead of scanning the whole network (10k+ nodes on large maps) at every stop arrival of every vehicle
- ✦Station catchment areas are now cached between network changes instead of re-walking every road point for every vehicle at every stop — late-game stutter on arrivals is gone
v0.30.1AI Sea LegsJuly 20, 2026
- ✦AI companies now compete at sea: they open ship routes straight to offshore oil wells and fishing grounds, docking directly just like players
- ✦AI opponents respect exclusive contracts — they skip platforms already claimed by a rival, and race to claim unclaimed exclusive ones for themselves (maritime-minded AIs prioritize them heavily)
- ✦AI-claimed platforms show up in the industry panel like any other claim, and the claim is released if the AI's route disappears
v0.30.0High Seas UpdateJuly 20, 2026
- ✦Offshore industries: ocean oil wells and fishing grounds now spawn in open deep water — ships dock at them directly, no station needed (just click them while building a ship route)
- ✦Contracts at sea: some offshore platforms are exclusive — the first company to open a route claims the whole supply; others are a free-for-all open to every fleet
- ✦Ship roster nearly doubled: fishing trawlers across three eras, reefer ships, a livestock carrier, colliers & ore carriers, an extra tanker generation, a small harbour ferry, and majestic cruise liners with their own chalk sprite
- ✦New Ferry Pier station for passenger sea routes, and Ports now handle passengers too
- ✦Docks & ports are now fully modular: new Harbor Crane module (20% faster loading each) joins extra piers and storage yards
- ✦Fixed the map naming a dozen tiny puddles "Sea" — water bodies now merge properly and only genuinely large waters earn the Sea title (smaller ones are bays and lakes)
- ✦Offshore platforms get chalk artwork: stilted rig decks with helipads and flare booms, and buoy-marked fishing grounds with doodled fish
v0.29.0Maintenance MechanicJuly 20, 2026
- ✦Vehicles now visibly lose efficiency as they age and miss servicing — the Vehicles panel shows each one's live efficiency %, and worn vehicles slow down until serviced
- ✦Route vehicles past one of your matching depots to service them and restore performance (small fee per service)
- ✦The whole mechanic is host-toggleable at game setup: turn maintenance off for a relaxed sandbox where vehicles never wear out or break down
- ✦Three maintenance cost difficulties — Low (0.5×), Standard (1×), and High (2×) — scaling both servicing fees and age-related wear upkeep
- ✦Multiplayer hosts configure maintenance from the lobby; guests see the chosen rules before readying up
v0.28.0Income ReportsJuly 20, 2026
- ✦New Income Report panel: every active route shows its revenue, running costs, net profit, and profit margin — instantly see your most and least efficient lines
- ✦Routes are ranked with best/worst highlights, sortable by margin, net profit, or transport volume, with per-line passenger and cargo counts
- ✦Vehicles now track their true operating costs (monthly upkeep and depot servicing), so margins reflect real profitability instead of raw revenue
- ✦Company-wide totals strip: overall revenue, costs, and net across your whole network
- ✦Open it from the new Income button in the top bar (desktop) or bottom tab bar (mobile)
v0.27.0Sound FoundationsJuly 16, 2026
- ✦The game makes noise! Chalk-style placeholder sound effects for tool clicks, building, demolishing, vehicle purchases, new routes, and rejected actions — synthesized right in the browser, no downloads needed
- ✦Background music support is fully wired: tracks shuffle-loop during play, start with the game, and stop back at the menu (real tracks coming soon)
- ✦New Audio section in Settings: separate volume sliders for sound effects and music, saved automatically
- ✦Real audio files will drop straight into the same system as they arrive, replacing the synthesized placeholders sound by sound
v0.26.1Station Passenger InsightsJuly 16, 2026
- ✦Station panel now shows a full passenger breakdown: total waiting in the catchment, top destinations with chalk bars, and connecting passengers (⇄) sitting in the transfer pool
- ✦Per-line forecast: see how many of the waiting passengers each of your lines serving the station would actually carry closer to their destination
- ✦"Show on map" toggle draws chalk flow lines from the station to every destination town — line thickness shows demand, with waiting counts labelled at each destination
v0.26.0Balance Pass: Destinations & TransfersJuly 16, 2026
- ✦Everything now pays by distance actually delivered — freight revenue is based on the true haul from pickup point to final destination (carried through transfers), replacing the old flat route-length multiplier
- ✦Passengers now have real destinations: they board a line only if it takes them closer to where they want to go, ride to the best stop, and change to connecting lines at stations — reaching their destination across multiple routes
- ✦Per-leg passenger pay is based on progress made toward the destination, so short in-town bus routes break even or turn a small profit while doing their real job: feeding passengers to bigger lines and stations
- ✦Cargo transfers: flag any stop as a transfer point (⇄ in the route dialog) and vehicles empty ALL their cargo there even with no local demand — connecting vehicles pick it up and the final delivery pays for the full origin-to-destination distance
- ✦Transfer pools are exploit-proof: detours and back-and-forth hauling earn nothing, since total pay can never exceed the straight-line trip distance
v0.25.1Audit Pass: Security & PerformanceJuly 16, 2026
- ✦Security hardening: supporter purchases, game settings, challenges, roadmap entries, and bug-report statuses can no longer be tampered with from outside the game — admin-only data is now locked server-side, not just hidden in the UI
- ✦Session action logs are now readable by developers only
- ✦Big traffic performance win: vehicle-to-vehicle checks (queueing, overtaking) now use a spatial lookup instead of comparing every vehicle against every other — large late-game fleets no longer drag the simulation down
- ✦Faster vehicle updates: route lookups per vehicle are now instant instead of scanning the whole route list every tick
- ✦Esc now deselects the active build tool first, instead of jumping straight to the pause menu
v0.25.0Public LobbiesJuly 16, 2026
- ✦Public lobby browser: the multiplayer screen now lists open public games — see the host, player count, map size, and AI opponents, and join with one click
- ✦Hosts choose Public or Private when creating a lobby (private stays join-by-code only), and can flip visibility from inside the lobby at any time
- ✦The browser auto-refreshes every 10 seconds and hides full or abandoned lobbies
v0.24.2Steady StreetsJuly 16, 2026
- ✦Town street grids no longer pop in and out with zoom — streets now stay visible at every zoom level, just like highways, while buildings still unload when zoomed far out
v0.24.1Multiplayer Stability PassJuly 16, 2026
- ✦Pausing no longer breaks multiplayer: the host keeps broadcasting while paused, so guests see the pause instantly instead of vehicles driving on and a false "Connection to host lost" warning
- ✦Growing towns now sync to guests — new streets and buildings sprouted on the host appear on every client (late joiners receive the complete grown world)
- ✦Fixed a duplicate company bug when joining a running game after another player had left — late joiners now always get a fresh company
- ✦The host now validates guest orders: routes can only use your own stations, and vehicle purchases only go into your own depots
- ✦Saving and loading are disabled during multiplayer sessions — a local save of a host-owned world would desync on load
v0.24.0Industry Identity UpdateJuly 16, 2026
- ✦Every industry now has a unique name drawn from its closest town or geographic feature — haul grain from Millfield Farm, fish out of Azure Bay Fishing Port, dig ore at Grey Mountains Mine (duplicates get II / III numbering)
- ✦Industry growth now requires sustained service: 60+ cargo moved in two consecutive half-years to expand — a single big delivery no longer counts
- ✦Expanded industry info panel: level badge with declining status, live growth tracker (streak + cargo moved this half-year), stock bars for outputs, live market prices, and red supply warnings when a processor is starved of inputs
- ✦Industry levels, growth progress, and decline status now sync to multiplayer guests
v0.23.0Town Tiers UpdateJuly 16, 2026
- ✦Settlement tiers: Village → Town → City → Metropolis — each population tier unlocks new cargo demands (villages want food & passengers, metropolises demand goods, fuel and lumber too)
- ✦Growth requirements: towns only expand when enough distinct demands are well-served — a Village needs 1 cargo type flowing, a Metropolis needs 4
- ✦Town panel shows the settlement tier and a live growth tracker (Expanding / Stalled with demands served)
- ✦More varied town generation: skewed size distribution means plenty of villages, fewer cities, and the rare sprawling metropolis
- ✦Two new street layouts: organic medieval towns with curving spokes and wobbly ring lanes, and linear ribbon towns strung along one long main street
- ✦Block sizes vary more between towns, so no two settlements feel stamped from the same mold
v0.22.0Living Towns UpdateJuly 16, 2026
- ✦Denser, more varied towns: tighter building plots, back-row buildings near the core, and mixed zoning that breaks up uniform districts
- ✦Hamlets: small clusters of 1-5 homes now dot the highways between towns — they generate outsized passenger traffic, making them profitable interstitial stops on bus routes
- ✦Organic town growth: growing towns now sprout natural curving street stubs off their existing network instead of regenerating their grid — expansion steers around terrain, industries, other towns, and player/AI roads, rails, stations, and depots
- ✦Town politics: every town tracks an opinion of each company — deliveries earn goodwill, bulldozing homes for roads and rails destroys it
- ✦Hostile towns (opinion below 20) refuse building permits for new stations and depots inside their limits
- ✦Town panel shows every company's reputation, and hamlets get their own compact map labels
- ✦The game now lives at chalklines.dev — link previews and search results point to the new home
v0.21.0Rolling Stock UpdateJuly 15, 2026
- ✦Manual train composition: build trains at the depot from individual locomotives and cars — multiple locomotives, mixed cargo consists, and no more passenger/cargo-locked engines
- ✦19 new rail cars across 7 families (coaches, boxcars, hoppers, flatcars, tankers, stock cars, reefers), each with wood → steel → modern era generations
- ✦Underpowered trains slow down — add locomotives to haul longer consists at full speed
- ✦Specialized road fleet: flatbeds haul lumber, dump trucks haul coal/ore/grain, tankers haul oil & fuel, cattle trucks haul livestock, reefer vans haul food & fish
- ✦New tanker ships for oil and fuel on the water
- ✦Vehicle roster roughly doubled to 65+ distinct models — Economy/Pro variants removed in favor of real vehicles
- ✦Every car and truck family gets its own chalk sprite: log-stacked flatcars, slatted stock cars, load-heaped hoppers, white reefers, steam locomotives with smokestacks
- ✦AI opponents compose era-correct trains and pick cargo-matching trucks and ships
v0.20.3Roadmap RefreshJuly 15, 2026
- ✦Full development path published on the Roadmap page: short-term polish (vehicle art, new map types, map customization, multiplayer host settings) → depth & community (tutorial, aircraft, weekly challenges, scenario editor, sound) → mobile release on iOS & Android → Steam
v0.20.2Google AnalyticsJuly 15, 2026
- ✦Google Analytics 4 integration: page views across all pages plus engagement events (menu mode picked, game started per mode, shares, supporter purchases) — ready to go live the moment the Measurement ID is added
v0.20.1Share Button FixJuly 15, 2026
- ✦Fixed the main-menu Share button doing nothing in some browsers — it now always copies the invite link (with a "Link copied!" confirmation) when the share sheet is unavailable or blocked
v0.20.0Supporter PackJuly 15, 2026
- ✦Support the game! New $4.99 Supporter Pack — buy once from the main menu and get a supporter heart badge, with secure checkout handled by Base44 Payments
- ✦New thank-you page with chalk confetti after your purchase
- ✦Supporter status is remembered on your account across devices
v0.19.2Sharing & DiscoverabilityJuly 15, 2026
- ✦New Share button on the main menu — one tap opens your phone's share sheet (or copies an invite link on desktop) to bring friends into the game
- ✦Rich link previews: sharing the game on Discord, X, Facebook, or WhatsApp now shows a hand-drawn chalk banner with the game's title and description
- ✦Search engines can now properly discover the game (improved page metadata and structured game info)
v0.19.1Town Generation Fixes & Bug TrackerJuly 15, 2026
- ✦Fixed towns failing to spawn their streets and buildings (bare name label next to a highway gap) — over-shrunk town grids now keep a minimum viable size, always get at least a crossroads, and re-place buildings at full density if the first pass comes up empty
- ✦Fixed overlapping town road grids — towns now fully yield to already-placed neighbors and are capped at 55% of the gap to their nearest neighbor, so close towns merge cleanly instead of stacking
- ✦New admin-only Bug Tracker page: filter reports by status, write fix notes, tag the fixed-in version, mark bugs completed, and review the attached session action log
v0.19.0Demolition, Driveways & the Age of SteamJuly 15, 2026
- ✦Demolish tool now works: click your own road or rail segment to remove it (30% refund), or a station/depot (50% refund incl. modules) — platforms, signals, and waypoints on removed track are cleaned up with it
- ✦Games now start in 1900 in the age of steam — diesel arrives around 1940, electric traction in the 1950s
- ✦Whole vehicle roster renamed with era-authentic manufacturers and models, including wheel arrangements on steam locomotives (Baldridge 2-8-0 Consolidation, Norden 4-6-2 Pacific...)
- ✦Electric locomotives need catenary: build electrified track with the new "Catenary" toggle, or upgrade existing track with the Electrify tool ($30/tile) — off the wires, electrics crawl at quarter speed
- ✦Electrified track renders with pale blue overhead wire and masts
- ✦Road stops reworked: bus stops & truck lay-bys are pass-through roadside stops snapped to the road edge; new Bus Terminal and Cargo Depot are dead-end terminals connected by a driveway
- ✦Transport Fever-style driveways: stations and depots placed near a road keep their footprint off it and connect with a driveway stub, leaving room for expansion
- ✦AI opponents now respect vehicle eras — retired or future models are swapped for a period-correct equivalent
v0.18.0Time Scale OverhaulJuly 13, 2026
- ✦Full time-scale audit: games now target a 1-2 hour arc — one game year takes 6 real minutes at 1x speed (was 2)
- ✦Vehicles move at ~40% of their old pace, so hauls feel like journeys instead of teleports
- ✦Fast-forward now truly fast-forwards: 2x/3x speeds accelerate the calendar, economy, and AI along with vehicles
- ✦Station stops last longer, making modular loading upgrades matter more
- ✦AI opponents are capped at roughly one build action per 45 seconds — no more instant empire spam
- ✦Town growth, industry output, market prices, and breakdown recovery all retuned to the new clock
v0.17.0Modular Stations UpdateJuly 13, 2026
- ✦Station Builder mode: click any of your stations to open the new expansion panel
- ✦Modular expansions across road, rail and water: loading bays, extra piers, and storage yards
- ✦Rail stations grow with extra parallel platforms and platform extensions — real track that trains path onto
- ✦Modules speed up loading (25% per platform/bay/pier, 15% per extension); storage yards grow catchment by 4 tiles
- ✦Rail builder now warns live in red while previewing when a curve is too tight — before any money is spent
v0.16.0Track Builder UpdateJuly 13, 2026
- ✦Transport Fever-style building: choose Straight or Curved mode — curves bend smoothly toward your cursor
- ✦Roads and rails snap onto existing sections and automatically smooth the join, so networks merge without kinks
- ✦Chained building: each placed section continues from the last with a matching curve — click the anchor or press Esc to finish
- ✦Rail stations snap to track ends and extend the line with their own platform track — trains drive onto and through the station
- ✦Live build preview shows the exact final alignment, snap indicators, and cost
v0.15.0Flat Chalkboard & Fair Play UpdateJuly 13, 2026
- ✦Full flat-world art overhaul: plain dark chalkboard terrain with doodled mountains, pine trees and boulders
- ✦Bridges and tunnels: roads and rails span water and bore through mountains automatically
- ✦Smarter road generation: highways attach at clean town-edge points, steer around street grids, and industries no longer spawn inside towns
- ✦Detailed session logging: every player order and AI plan/move is recorded for debugging and cheat detection
- ✦Report bugs from the pause menu — your session action log is uploaded automatically for admin review
v0.14.0Chalk Lines — Community UpdateJuly 13, 2026
- ✦The game has a new name: Chalk Lines! Brand-new hand-drawn main menu to match the chalkboard art style
- ✦Singleplayer challenges: fixed-map goals set by the developers, with public leaderboards ranked by fastest completion
- ✦Public roadmap page showing planned features and progress
- ✦Public bug reporting — no account needed, reports are auto-tagged with the build version
- ✦Public suggestion box with community voting
- ✦Developer panel for tuning game settings (starting money, breakdowns, inflation, economy) and managing challenges, roadmap & feedback without code changes
- ✦Changelog is now the single source of truth for releases — the version badge updates automatically
v0.13.0Living World UpdateJuly 13, 2026
- ✦Industries now grow and decline: well-served industries expand to level 3 (more production, bigger compounds); neglected ones downsize and stagnate
- ✦Animated industry details at high zoom — rocking pumpjacks, drifting factory smoke, flickering refinery flares, blinking harbor lights
- ✦Geographic names on the map: mountain ranges, lakes, bays, seas, and rivers all get procedural names
- ✦Farms and ranches now have visible crop fields and pastures spread around them
- ✦Town specialization: harbor towns demand fish, highland towns demand coal
- ✦Relatable industry scaling — farms and ranches sprawl across the land while breweries and oil wells stay compact
- ✦Public changelog page (you are here!)
v0.12.0Industry Identity UpdateJuly 2026
- ✦Every industry type gets distinct artwork: furrowed fields, mine headframes, oil derricks, tank farms, sawtooth factory roofs, fishing piers
- ✦4 new industry types: Cattle Ranch, Quarry, Steel Mill, and Brewery
- ✦Town buildings get distinct silhouettes: pitched-roof houses, commercial towers, industrial sheds — plus barns and silos in the countryside
- ✦Chain-aware map generation: processors now spawn near suppliers so complete supply chains exist on every map
- ✦Fishing ports always spawn near the coastline
- ✦Fixed industrial-zone buildings rendering in the wrong color
v0.11.0Deep Economy UpdateJune 2026
- ✦Vehicle catalog expanded to ~90 models with era gating and Economy/Standard/Pro variants
- ✦Bank loans with interest, and bankruptcy sell-offs when companies go under
- ✦Vehicles age, need scheduled depot maintenance, and can break down
- ✦Delivery-speed payment decay: fast deliveries pay a premium
- ✦Global inflation keeps late-game vehicles affordable
- ✦Monthly upkeep costs for vehicles and infrastructure
v0.10.0ChalkZone Visual OverhaulJune 2026
- ✦Complete visual redesign: dark chalkboard map with pastel chalk aesthetics and hand-drawn font
- ✦Major rendering performance work at mid-zoom (chalk-grain textures, reduced draw passes)
- ✦Towns now settle in flat valleys instead of on mountainsides
- ✦AI companies place stations beside towns instead of on top of them
- ✦Always-visible version badge for bug reports
v0.9.0Multiplayer UpdateMay 2026
- ✦Online multiplayer for up to 16 players and AI companies
- ✦Lobby system with join codes, ready checks, and configurable AI opponents
- ✦Host-authoritative sync — join mid-game and pick up where the world is
- ✦In-game chat with company colors
v0.8.0Rails & Roads UpdateMay 2026
- ✦Block-based rail signals with train queueing
- ✦Rail waypoints to steer trains through specific junctions
- ✦Road vehicles overtake slower traffic using the oncoming lane
- ✦Station and depot driveways connect to the road network
- ✦Custom train consists — choose your wagon count