Scartown news and update log

Whoever runs a gang can put somebody out of it. They keep everything they are carrying and can apply again whenever they like.

Founding a gang makes you its owner straight away. Until now a new gang belonged to nobody until its first application arrived.

A gang war is no longer a way round who can be attacked. New players, staff and anybody in a cell are out of reach in a war, the same as in the street.

A Discharge Chit no longer shortens implant recovery. The hospital page always said it did not; now it does not.

A gang battle always reaches the Events of whoever was in it. The notice used to be lost when the fight and the page saved at the same moment.

Pressing a button no longer throws you back to the top of the page. Raiding, repairing and anything else you do twice in a row leaves you where you were.

A gang's feed no longer carries a line for every hideout raid. It keeps the war being declared and the war ending; the War Room still has every raid.

The hospital ward is listed longest stay first.

The crime level bars say what percentage of the way to the next level you are.

Pharmacy prices are up: a Ration Bar is $2,000, Beef Jerky $250 and a Field Dressing $500.

The "this page is an older copy" warning has been taken off the top of the page.

Attack and mug contracts no longer lose their progress. The city counts the fight now, not the browser.

The Heights, the Undercity and Vantar Spire open earlier. Travel now needs level 16, 22 and 30.

A warning at the top of the page stays up instead of flashing red for half a second and disappearing.

Salvage drops were adjusted: more Scrap Steel, less of the others.

Dunn's board says plainly that some of his contracts need somebody hurt.

Mission sites now ask for a crime level of their own. The Old Quarter wants 1 to 2 and it climbs district by district to 7 under the Spire, so the deeper you go the more a locked cache or a side door asks of you.

Raiding a hideout now costs twice as many action points per hit.

Crime levels come faster. The early levels take about a third of the action points they used to. The top of the ladder has not moved and nobody loses a level.

A gang being raided is told about it. Every raid shows on the gang's own feed, and leaders get a notice.

A mission choice card that spends an item now reads your belt rather than your bag. The button is dead unless the thing is actually on your belt.

Bail is priced on the minutes you have left instead of a flat fee, so a short sentence is cheap. Being bailed out by somebody else now costs the same as walking out yourself.

Crime has levels now. Level 2 is exactly what a maxed bar was worth, so a full bar becomes level 2 and nobody is worse off: the same payout, the same odds, the same bust chance. Above that, every level adds five points to what a job pays and takes two off your chance of being caught. The mission sites ask for a crime level to match.

The row of links under the Citizens title is the two logs now. Item Market, Credit Market and Report a Player have come off it: Report a Player is in the menu on every page anyway, and both markets are in Explore under City Hall, so all three were second ways to somewhere you could already get. The logs had no other door at all.

Every fight you have is written down. There is an Attack Log of the ones you started and a Defence Log of the ones that came to you, both reached from Citizens and from Full Statistics, fifty at a time and going back to your first fight rather than to some cut-off. A row says whether you won, who it was against, what kind of fight it was, the damage each way and when. Open one and it says what level they were, what level you were at the time, how many rounds it went, what you were carrying, and what the fight paid or cost you. Names are links, so an argument about who has been coming for you is one click from the person's profile. You are shown your own weapon and your own armour and never theirs, because a log that lists what everybody who ever touched you was carrying stops being a record and starts being a scouting report. There is no blow by blow in it: you watch that happen on the result page when the fight does, and keeping every swing would cost about ten times what the whole record costs and be a wall of text nobody reads twice.

A gang can be handed to somebody else. Until now the only way out of the chair was to leave, which passed the gang to whoever had been in it longest rather than to whoever you meant. The owner now has a button against every name on the roster. It asks twice, because it makes them the owner and leaves you an ordinary member with no permissions and no way back from your side.

Storage is sorted the way your bag is. The back room was one flat list, so forty different things meant reading the lot to find one of them. It now uses the same headings in the same order as the Items page, with a count against each, and the bag at the foot of the page is grouped too.

The city can put a notice up. When there is something worth saying, an announcement sits above every page until you close it, with a line about what it is and sometimes a link to the rest. Closing it is remembered on your account rather than in the browser, so it stays closed wherever you log in next.

An energy refill is priced by how much you are short, one credit a point, rather than a flat twenty. The flat price quietly gave a big character about ten times what it gave a small one for the same money, which was never the intention. Everybody now pays the same rate for the same bar. Happiness is fifty.

Dunn posts one board a day and it stays posted. Emptying the board used to refill it on the spot, so you could take everything, drop it, and draw again until you liked what came up. It now comes round tomorrow instead.

Sharpen Up has been taken off the board. It asked for six points in any crime skill but only ever counted your highest one, so anyone training a second trade got nowhere. Anybody still holding one has the slot back.

The gym takes the number you ask for. The amount to train had nowhere to type in it and the plus and minus moved a tenth of your energy at a time, so on a full bar you could not land on the number you wanted. It is a box now, plus and minus move one at a time, and Max is still there for the lot. A personal trainer also starts on None every time you walk into the gym, because a trainer is a bill for every point of energy and one left sitting on the page from earlier is money nobody meant to spend.

Dropdowns stay open and take your answer. On a phone the trainer box did nothing at all; on a desktop it shut again before you could pick. Every list in the game now waits for a real choice, and nothing redraws over an open one: not the clock, and not news arriving from the city.

There is a second badge now, and it means less than the one it sits beside. Amber with a shield still reads Admin: whoever runs the city, who can hand out any item in the game and read any mailbox, and who cannot be attacked for exactly that reason. Blue with a shield reads Staff, and a staff badge is only a badge. It says this is somebody who helps out and is worth asking, and it carries nothing else at all: no staff room, no ban button, no item they can conjure, and no shield either. Staff are attacked, robbed and put in hospital like anybody standing in the street, because a helper the city cannot touch is a helper the city learns to resent. Both lists live on the server rather than in the game, so no button anywhere promotes anybody, and the badge legend is in the Help pages with everything else that a colour means.

The way into a war is under the hideout bar, where the war already is. It used to be the seventh button in the gang page tab row, which on a phone wrapped below the fold: the most time-sensitive room in the game was the hardest one on the page to find. There is a banner there now naming the gang you are fighting and what the War Room is for, with the way in beside it, running the full width of a phone screen. A gang at peace gets one quiet line saying so and no button, because a War Room with no war in it is a door to an empty room. The phone tab bar has stopped rearranging itself as well: a war used to take the Citizens slot for as long as it ran, which moved the floor under people mid-game. The war still shows as a count beside Gang, and the room is one tap from there. And the hospital board names whoever put you in the bed without repeating their gang after it: which gang somebody runs with is on their profile, and the board is a list of who is lying down, not a war report.

A gang attack goes through the attack page and ends on a result page, like every other fight in the city. It used to fire the moment you pressed a name on the war roster: the screen blinked, a line of text said you had won, and a whole fight had happened somewhere you never saw. Now the roster takes you to the same page everything else does, where Gang Attack sits beside Leave, Mug, Hospitalize and Brutalize with the reason written next to it when you cannot use it, and the result opens the way a street fight does, with the rounds, the blow by blow and the health both sides finished on. It also says the thing only a gang attack has: which way the points went and what the matchup was worth. The fight itself has not changed at all; you can just watch it happen now.

The Donator House reads as one page rather than three. It opens with what the place is for rather than a paragraph about what not to expect, then your credits and your donator status, then the two ways to get more sitting right under the number that made you want them: Purchase Credits, which walks down to the packs, and the Credit Market, which is the free one. The small print under the packs says what it needs to and stops.

Credits can be bought with a card. Five packs, from $5 for 500 credits up to $100 for 13,000, with the bigger packs paying a better rate: 100 credits a dollar at the bottom and 130 at the top. Prices are in Canadian dollars, which is what the game banks in, so a card from anywhere else is converted by its own bank at its own rate; the page says which currency it is charging in rather than leaving it to be discovered on a statement. Payment goes through Square, on Square\u0027s own page. Scartown never sees a card number and never stores one. Credits are added when the money actually clears, never when the browser comes back from the payment page, because a return address is a line of text anybody can type and the only thing worth trusting is what the bank says. If you beat your own payment home the page says so and fills itself in when the confirmation arrives; you never need to pay twice, and paying twice is not possible. Whoever referred you takes five percent on top of what you bought, out of our end rather than yours, which is what the referral page has always promised. Every purchase you have ever made is listed on the Donator page with what it cost and how it went, including the ones that did not go through. Nothing in the shop decides a fight, every credit in it can still be earned for free through referrals or bought off another player on the Credit Market, and credits are not refundable once spent.

A charged back payment takes the credits back even if they have been spent. If a card payment is reversed after the credits have gone, the full amount comes off the account whatever is left in it, so the balance goes into the red rather than stopping at zero, and the account is suspended until it is settled. Anything already traded on stays where it is: the people who sold to them did nothing wrong and are not going to be robbed to fix it. Taking back only what was left would have taught everybody that the way to steal from the city is to spend quickly, which is not a lesson worth teaching. A dispute that comes back in the player\u0027s favour lifts the suspension and puts everything back.

Salvage weighs nothing and sells for a quarter of what it is marked at. It used to go across the counter at face value, which made a bag of scrap the steadiest income in the city: no risk, no cooldown, no way to lose it, and better money per hour than most of the things you can get hospitalised doing. Scrap Steel now fetches $50 rather than $200, Copper Wiring $75, Optic Cluster $225, Ceramic Plate $350, Power Cell $650 and a Vantar Data Shard $3,000. The Salvage Crew still takes a quarter over the rate, so the career is worth exactly as much relative to everybody else as it was. Nothing anybody has to buy got dearer: Workshop recipes cost what they always did. The trade is that salvage is now free to carry. Every piece of it weighs nothing at all, so a bag is never full of scrap and nothing worth having has to be left on the floor to make room for it. Sell it a piece at a time or clear the lot, the rate is the same either way.

Gang permissions can be handed out and taken back. The table a leader ticks was drawing its boxes from a field the city never sent: the roster said who was in the gang and what level they were, and nothing about what any of them was allowed to do. So every box drew empty however many permissions had already been handed out, a tick appeared to do nothing because the page redrew it off a moment later, there was no way at all to take one back, and handing somebody a second permission quietly took away the first. The permission itself was being saved the whole time, which is why somebody could use a power the leader could not see they had. The leader now gets the state of every box, ticking and unticking both stick, and one permission no longer costs another. Nobody but whoever runs the gang is told who can do what, so it does not leak to the rest of the roster or to a rival. A tick box also no longer fights the finger on the way down: it was being cancelled and then put back by the redraw, which is what made a working control feel dead.

The item page was quoting a price the fence does not pay. Salvage goes across at face value rather than the usual share, and the salvage trade pays a quarter over that, but the item page worked the trade-in figure out for itself as a flat share of the standard price and so told you Copper Wiring was worth $165 when the till handed over $300. The Sell button in your bag had the same hole for anybody working the salvage trade: it quoted the plain price and then paid the better one. Nothing about what a fence pays has changed. There is now one place in the game that decides it and every screen reads that, because a price is only worth anything if the number you are shown is the number you get. The row also says why salvage is not the usual share, rather than leaving it looking like a mistake.

The bars on Home say when they are full again. Energy, action points, hit points and happiness have always shown what you had and nothing about the wait, so somebody sitting on two energy had no way to tell whether the answer was five minutes or an hour, and the only way to find out was to keep reloading. Each of the four panels under Character Information now carries the time until that pool is back to full, and says full when it already is. The figure is worked out from what your character actually earns, so humanity, donator status and the house you own are all in it, and a cell shows as frozen rather than as a wait that is never going to end.

The bars on a phone had colour in them again. The four fills on the status strip were being given a class and no colour to go with it, so every bar on a phone read as an empty track no matter how full the pool was. They match the tiles on Home now.

A day of donator status is a full day. It used to run to the next midnight, which meant the same twenty credits bought twenty four hours at breakfast and ten minutes at ten to twelve, measured against the server\u0027s clock rather than yours, so there was no way to know which you were getting. It is twenty four hours from the moment you pay, and it stacks onto whatever you already have the same way the thirty and sixty five day packs do.

Donator House is just Donator on the menu, and the Help Tutorial is just Help. Help now opens with where to go when the answer is not on the page: an email address, and a link straight to whoever runs the game, with a button to write to them without hunting for the mailbox. That link is worked out from the staff badge the city already sends rather than from a name typed into the page, so it keeps pointing at the right person through a rename, or a different person entirely.

Buying a credit lot bought one credit. Taking the quantity box off the credit board left the browser looking for a box that was no longer there, and when it found nothing it fell back to asking for one: every purchase posted a quantity of 1 and leaned on the city to correct it to the whole lot. The city does correct it, so this only showed up against a server that had not been updated yet, which is the worst kind of bug to ship because it works perfectly everywhere you test it. The browser asks for what is actually on the row now. Both ends say the same number rather than one of them being right and the other being fixed up on arrival, and there are checks over both.

Explore has moved up the City menu to sit under the Bank. It is the way in to half the places in Scartown, and at the bottom of the list under Travel it read as the last thing anybody thought of rather than one of the first things worth opening.

A credit lot is bought whole. Winding a number up and down to take nine credits out of somebody\u0027s forty made the Credit Market feel like the item board, which it is not: a lot is an offer at a price, and the useful figure is the total leaving your pocket, not the price of one. The row shows the total in bold and the button says how many you are taking. The rule is enforced where it has to be rather than only on the page, because a picker removed from the screen is still a picker to anybody posting straight at the server: ask for part of a lot and you get the lot. The button also checks you can afford the whole thing now instead of the price of a single credit, which would have lit it up for somebody who could not pay at the till.

The two markets are two places. They were a single entry under Explore with a pair of tabs behind it, which meant the Credit Market only existed to somebody who had already gone looking for the item one and noticed a tab. Item Market and Credit Market are separate entries now, and each is its own address: a link points at one of them, the Back button returns to whichever you came from, and a reload lands where you were rather than on whichever board a variable happened to be holding. The tabs are still there for hopping between the two; they are links now rather than a switch.

Nobody\u0027s name is on the Market any more. A listing used to say who was selling it, which in a city where anyone can be mugged in the street turned the board into a list of targets sorted by how much each of them had just been paid: buy a thing, read the name, go and take the money back. The seller is not on the page and not in what the server sends either, because hiding it in the page alone would have left it one network tab away from anybody who thought to look. All a listing says now is whether it is yours. The line a seller gets when something sells has never named the buyer and still does not, so it is blind from both ends.

The Market is two markets. Things and money are different trades, and one list holding both buried each in the other. The Item Market is what it always was, five percent to the city on every sale. The Credit Market is new: put your credits up at a price each and another player buys them for cash. The city takes nothing out of a credit sale, so the whole price reaches the seller. Credits leave your account the moment you list them, exactly as an item leaves your bag, so nothing can be sold twice or spent while it is sitting on the board, and taking a listing down puts them back. Twenty listings is still twenty listings, counted across both markets together. The Donator House has a button through to it, because that is the one page in the city where somebody is already wondering how to get credits.

The Donator House will always buy a credit off you for $200, which means the player market has a floor under it: there is no reason to let one go for less than the city already pays. What anybody will pay above that is between the two of you, and that is the first real exchange rate credits have ever had.

A day of donator status costs 20 credits rather than 12. At twelve it was cheaper per day than the thirty day pack, so buying in bulk was worse value than buying a day at a time, which is backwards and quietly punished anybody who committed. The ladder runs the right way now: 20 for a day, about 17 a day for thirty, about 15 a day for sixty five. Nothing else in the shop moved.

Referrals pay properly, and they pay later. Somebody who signs up on your link is now worth nothing at all until they reach level 10; at that moment they get 100 credits and you get 250. The old terms paid the newcomer 25 the second the account existed, which is not a referral scheme, it is a farm: register, collect, abandon, repeat. Nothing is worth anything now until a character has actually been played to level 10, and both halves land together.

And referrals actually settle. The sweep that pays them out lived in exactly one place: the referrals page. A referrer whose invitee hit the level while they were not looking simply stayed unpaid until they next thought to open it, which for most people is never. Any session start settles it now, so a payout lands as soon as anybody at all logs in. Claiming the referral is also what authorises the money, so two sessions arriving at the same instant can no longer both pay it. There was no test over any of this; there are twenty now.

Apply to as many gangs as you like. The rule was one open application in the whole city, enforced right down at the database, so shopping around meant withdrawing from one queue before you could join another and hoping the second gang was quicker to answer than the first. Now you can have something waiting at every gang on the list at once and let them compete for you. The first gang to accept takes you, and every other queue you were sitting in lets you go at that moment. The one thing still refused is applying to the same gang twice, which only ever put you in one queue twice over.

An application no longer vanishes without a word. A leader was told when one arrived and told nothing ever again: accepted, declined, withdrawn or pulled because the player joined somewhere else, every one of those left the queue in silence, and the only way to find out what had happened was to read the database. Your gang events record all four now. If somebody is accepted elsewhere, the gangs that lose them are told which gang took them and why their queue is one shorter. This was the change that made the rest safe: letting a player sit in five queues at once means four of them lose a row every time somebody is accepted, and doing that quietly would have turned one confusing disappearance into a steady stream of them.

Respect means something again. It has been on every gang page since gangs existed and no player could move it by a point: the only thing in the game that ever wrote it was the Rumble payout, and Rumbles have been switched off, so every gang in the city sat on the same 1000 and the gang list, which sorts on respect, was ordering identical numbers. Winning a war writes it now. Break a rival hideout open and the gang points your raids banked are paid to you twice over: once as points, which you spend on the hideout, and once as respect, which you cannot. Respect only ever goes up. A gang that loses a war keeps what it had and simply does not climb, so picking a fight and coming off worse costs you the escrow and nothing else. Nothing else in the game touches the number, which is what makes the gang list a ladder of wars actually won rather than of money in hand.

The gangs already standing have been given a past. Every gang that existed before today starts somewhere between 1,103 and 2,036 respect instead of all together on the same figure, so the list reads as a city that has been fought over rather than one where nothing has ever happened. It is a one-time seeding and it does not touch anybody founded afterwards: a new gang opens on 1,000 and climbs by winning, which is the whole point of the number.

The gang page has two doors out of it. Gang Mail sits in the tab row and opens your mailbox on its own Gang Mail tab, because writing to your gang is something you think of while looking at your gang even though the board itself lives with everything else that arrives. Nothing is duplicated: one list, one unread count, and that count stays on Mail. Beside Battles is Declare War, which opens the list of gangs to pick a target from and says so when you get there. While a war is already running there is nothing to declare, so the same slot becomes the way into the War Room rather than a button that refuses you.

Declare War is a permission and now behaves like one everywhere. A leader has always been able to hand it out on the Members tab, and the city has always honoured it, but a rival gang\u0027s page worked out who could declare from the rank alone. Somebody ticked for Declare War was told to go and find their leader, on the one page in the game that actually offers the button. What a member may do on the gang\u0027s behalf now travels with the gang, so every page asks the same question the city asks.

Gang wars are rebuilt. Raiding a hideout no longer pays a gang on the spot: every landed raid banks one point against the war, and that pile only changes hands when somebody breaks a hideout open. The winner takes what its own raids banked; whatever the losing side banked is torn up. Points taken off a rival member in the street are the other half and work the other way round, moving at once and staying moved whatever happens to the war afterwards, and losing a fight you started now pays the same band to them. A raid costs a share of your own action point bar rather than a flat fifteen, so it asks the same fraction of a day from a new player as from a veteran.

A raid told you what it did four screens above your thumb. The answer appeared in the bar at the top of the page, which on a phone is well off the screen from the button you pressed, so raiding read as nothing happening at all. It prints under the button now, and it says what it did rather than what is left: you attacked the hideout for so much damage, with where their hideout stands as a quieter note beside it.

A hideout patches itself up. One percent of its maximum every five minutes, war or no war, worked out from a timestamp rather than ticked, so a gang that walks away from a fight comes back to a sound building and a server that was asleep catches up in one sum. Anybody in the gang can put a shift in as well, spending the same action points a raid would cost and putting back about half what those points would have taken off somebody else. A repair costs no gang points at all, so patching up never competes with upgrading, and it is the one thing a member with no rank can do for the hideout.

The hideout upgrade table is four things instead of five, and all four are things a gang can feel. Reinforced Walls adds 200 hit points a level, Refresh Rate adds half a point to the five minute repair, Member Capacity makes room for two more people, and Repair Skill adds five percent to what a shift puts back. Every one of them costs a hundred for the first level and doubles after that. Lookouts, the Armory, Fixers and Quarters are gone: two of them were invisible percentages on a fight nobody watches and Fixers was never actually implemented. Every gang has been paid back every point it ever spent on the old table, and every gang now opens with a hundred points on the shelf so a new one has something to lose in a war on its first day.

A gang holds eight people, and two more for every level of Member Capacity. There was no limit before, which meant the winning move was to be the biggest gang in the city and there was nothing else to spend a decision on.

Nobody walks out of a war. Leaving mid war was the cheapest way to stop being worth points to the other side, and it left whoever stayed carrying a fight they had not started. See it out.

A gang attack is a real fight. It gave no experience at all, never wrote your health back, and put the loser in a bed for a different length of time from every other attack in the game, which made it the one free swing in Scartown: no cost, no consequence, and nothing to show for it. It is a Leave attack with a flag on it now. Full experience, twenty to forty five minutes in a bed, and the health you finish the fight on is the health you walk away with. It sits on the attack page with the other four rather than only in the War Room, greyed with the reason when you are not at war, so somebody who has never been in one can see that it exists.

The War Room takes a tab of its own while a war is live, with the number of wars beside it in red, and the same number appears beside Gang in the menu. It was five taps down through More, Gang and a tab on the gang page, which is a long way to go for the page you want oftenest for the few hours a war actually runs. Citizens stands aside for it and goes back in the drawer, one tap away.

The red mark beside Gang went out when the war did. Whether there was a war on was worked out in exactly one place, on the way into loading your gang, and nothing recomputed it when a war ENDED: you could break a hideout open, win the war, and the city would still be telling you one was running until the next full reload. One function answers that question now and every path that can change the answer asks it, including the breach itself.

A raid could be refused over action points you were plainly holding. Both war routes read whatever the last save happened to record instead of projecting the bars forward the way every other route in the city does, so a player sitting on a full bar was told a raid costs fifteen and they had one. Refreshing appeared to fix it because refreshing is what pushed the real number up. Both routes project now, energy as well as action points.

Gang mail is mail. It was a tab on the gang page with its own counter beside Gang in the menu, which meant two inboxes, two counters and two places to look, and between them you could not tell from the menu whether somebody had declared war or somebody had written a letter. It is the fourth tab in your mailbox now, showing only if you are in a gang, and its count folds into the envelope with everything else. A letter can be answered two ways: Reply All puts a RE: back to the whole gang, and Reply writes privately to whoever sent it and lands in their inbox. Sending one no longer writes a line into the gang events either.

A gang named in an event opens that gang. Player names have been links for a day; the gang beside them was dead text, so a line saying a rival beat you for their gang gave you one thing to click and not the other. Gangs are matched by name or by tag, under exactly the same escaping rules as a handle, and never inside a link that is already there.

Nothing says "while you were away" any more. An event read one way if you had the tab open and another if you did not, which is the same news told twice and the second telling was always the odd one. What happened to you happened. Where you were standing when it did is not part of it.

Permissions are boxes you tick. Every one was a button whose label was its own state, so a permission nobody held showed a box saying No and there was no Yes anywhere on the page to press: the only way to hand something out was to press the word No and trust it. They are unticked checkboxes now, drawn from the gang\u0027s own record every time, so the tick only moves once the city has agreed to it.

Applying to a gang says so where you pressed the button. Sending an application jumped you to the gang picker with nothing but a flash bar to explain why, which reads as the button having thrown your message away. You stay on the gang\u0027s page and it tells you plainly that the application has been sent and that they will review it. The gang page opens on Members rather than Summary, which is what people open it to see.

Gang Wars is a page. Under Dark Side on Explore, listing every war running in the city with both hideouts and what each side has dealt, or saying plainly that there are none. A war is the most public thing two gangs can do to each other and there was nowhere to read about one you were not in. Game Stats has come off that page in the same pass.

The ward board names whoever swung. Losing a gang fight put "Ambushed by" and a gang tag on the board, which belonged to group attacks: with those switched off it read as though a crowd had turned up when in fact one person did. It says you lost a gang battle to that player, with their gang beside the name rather than instead of it.

The Boss Tag is out of circulation. It read a boss for free, which is the one thing a boss fight is meant to charge you a round for, and it was the only item in the game that could be used at a boss and nowhere else. Copies in a bag, on a belt or on the storage shelf are cleared on the way in and listings for it have come off the Market. Reading a boss costs a round again, for everybody.

Items no longer carry a tag saying when they may be used. The green "(between fights)" beside a name was the same sentence the description already ends with, in two words and worse ones. The descriptions stay, and so does the rule.

A fence will buy off the shelf. The back room was a one way door: anything you wanted money for had to come out, be carried, and be sold from the bag, which on a full stack of salvage is a refusal at the weight limit, and on a shelf of forty is three trips. Every row in Storage now reads Sell then Take out. Sell settles for the number in the box beside it, at the same price a fence pays for the same thing out of your bag, and asks once before it goes through the way every other sale in the city does. Stored gear still weighs nothing and still cannot be equipped, used or listed until it comes out. A key, a trophy and anything signed to you have no Sell on the shelf, the same as they have none in your bag.

Sell all salvage has come off the Workshop. The line above it counts what is within reach, which means your bag and the back room together, and the button under it only ever emptied the bag, so the number the page quoted and the money it handed over were describing two different piles. It is still on the Items page, standing over the pile it actually sells, and the back room now sells a row at a time from Storage.

Evasion tuning says what it does. A level one evasion line on a piece of armour reported itself as making you 1 points harder to hit, on the bench and on the item both. It is a percentage, one point of it a level, the same as defence beside it, and it now reads as one.

An address is worth what you paid for it. Sell the safehouse you are in and the whole price goes back into your bank, and you move into the Cardboard Box. Nothing is lost on the deal and nothing is earned: it is the money you put in, back out, for a deposit on somewhere better or for anything else you had in mind. Buying straight from where you are does the same sum without the trip, so moving up only ever costs the difference between the two addresses. Selling asks twice before it goes through, because walking out of a hundred and sixty million dollar house on a stray tap is not a mistake anybody should be able to make.

The safehouse page is about what an address costs. The full rate point and the gym multiplier were two more columns of arithmetic worked out from the ceiling beside them, on a page most people open to find out what they can afford. Both are gone, the ceiling stays, and what you can do on each row reads as words rather than a row of boxes: Buy, or Current and Sell on the one you are in.

A Stim-Pack is spent before the door, not during. It was the only thing on the belt that worked mid-fight, which meant a boss could be answered four times over without ever giving up a round, and a belt of four took every site in the city to between 86 and 100 percent. It is a between fights heal now, the same as the Field Dressing and the Trauma Kit have always said they were, and the fight finally reads that field instead of taking anything that heals. A full belt of them now takes the sites to between 55 and 100 percent. It costs $3,000 rather than $1,500. Half your health back between waves is still the strongest thing money can buy; it is no longer an answer to a boss that is winning. The Ninth Street Underpass has had its boss softened to go with it, because that one fight was leaning on being topped up mid-swing and a level seven was failing the second site in the game one run in twelve.

A mod you are carrying is in your bag like anything else. Mods keep their own table because what they do is fitted rather than worn, and the bag, the back room and the fence all read a different list, so a mod you had not fitted yet was in your inventory and nowhere on your screen: not on the Items page, not storable, not sellable, and impossible to get rid of except by finding somebody on the Market to take it. The bench was the only place that knew you had it. They are on the Items page now, they go in storage, and a fence will take one for $825. That is deliberately poor money whatever the mod: it is enough to clear a drawer of tier one junk and plainly the wrong way to move a good one, which is what keeps anything worth having between players. A mod still weighs nothing, exactly as it did when it was not an item at all, so nobody is suddenly carrying more than they can lift.

A name in your events opens that player. Somebody mugs you, posts your bail, sends you cash or hands you something out of the gang vault, and their name in the line is now a link straight to their profile. Before this, an attack made the whole row one link, so the only thing you could do with a line was open the person who hit you, and every other line that named somebody was dead text: you read that a player sent you forty thousand and then went to the Citizens page to look them up by hand. Ten kinds of event carry the name now, and the line around it is ordinary text again.

Referral credits stop disappearing. Fifty credits for somebody you brought in who reached level five were paid onto your character by the city, but the payout was the one thing the city wrote without marking the character as changed. A tab you already had open still looked current, so the next thing it saved wrote back the total from before the credits landed. They arrived silently and left the same way. They stay now.

The Citizens page stopped counting at you. A head count of the register sat above the register, recalculated every fifteen seconds, next to tabs that each carried their own count of the same thing. None of it was worth reading. The line there now says what the marks beside a name actually mean: online is somebody active in the last ten minutes, away is within the half hour, and anyone unmarked has not been seen since. The friends and enemies tabs lost their tally the same way.

The item list gives its room to the item. What you can do to something was sitting in a column as wide as its longest row of actions, and on a phone that left the name of the thing squeezed into less space than the words describing what to do with it. The actions now fold onto a second line instead of pushing the name aside, and the weight column is headed Kg, which is what is under it. On a phone the name of an item has about sixty percent more room than it did.

Armor has its own material. A weapon and a suit of armor were tuned out of the same parts, which is why everybody ended up with a crate of ceramic plate they could not spend: plate was asked for exactly once, one unit, at level three, and copper wiring stopped being asked for above level three as well. Both were things you collected rather than things you used. There are two ladders now. Copper wiring is what a weapon tunes with and ceramic plate is what armor tunes with, both wanted at every level of the way up rather than dropping out halfway. The cash and the scrap are identical on both ladders, rung for rung, so nothing anybody has already paid for has moved and no tuning you have done is worth less than it was. Brutes give up plate now, which they always should have: they are the ones wearing it. Scrap steel is still the long pole in any bill, as it should be, but the other two are somewhere between a half and three quarters of it instead of a tenth, which is the difference between a material and a souvenir.

A notification you cannot clear is fixed. The number beside Events counted lines the Events page does not list. It lists what happened to you, not what you did, which is why tuning a weapon or paying for a perk point never appears there, and the city was marking those lines unread anyway. So the badge lit, you went to look, there was nothing new on the page, and the one thing that puts a badge down is looking. The city now raises a badge only for the kind of line that has somewhere to be read, the same rule the browser has always used, the counter agrees with the page it sends you to, and an empty Events page marks them read on the way out too. Anybody carrying one of these from weeks ago has it cleared the next time they load the game.

The Citizens tabs are just Citizens, Friends and Enemies. The count in brackets after each was already written out in full in the line underneath.

An empty gang closes its doors. A gang whose last member walked out stayed on the list forever: a name, a tag and nobody in it, taking applications that no account left alive could answer. Leaving now disbands a gang the moment it hits nobody, and the vault goes with the last person out rather than into the ground, cash, credits and everything on the shelves. The button says Leave and Disband when you are the one holding the keys, so it is not a surprise. The four the city ships with are the exception and stay whether anyone is in them or not, because sitting there empty waiting for a new arrival is the whole of their job. A leader who leaves a gang that is still standing now hands the keys on as they go, to another leader if there is one and otherwise to whoever has been in longest, instead of leaving everybody behind locked out of their own vault.

What you can do to an item is written beside it rather than boxed up. Equip, Sell, Store and the rest were five buttons in a row on every line of your bag, which reads as a wall of boxes with the item lost somewhere behind it. They are words now, in the same teal as every other link in the city, separated by a bar, and never underlined. An action you cannot take yet is plain grey with nothing behind it to click, rather than a button that looks pressable and swallows the press. The same goes for Take out in storage and Strip on a fitted mod.

A dropdown holds its place. The page rebuilds itself every fifteen seconds so the clocks and the bars stay true, and a rebuilt list comes back on whatever is at the top of it. Choose what to put on the Market, pause to work out a price, and the choice was gone. Half-typed boxes were already being handed back after a redraw and lists are now handed back with them. A choice that is no longer on the list, because you sold the last one while the box still named it, is not forced back.

A Market listing opens the item. Buying something from another player was the one purchase in the city you could not read up on first: the shops link every name, your own bag links every name, and the Market showed you a word and a price. The name is a link now, on what is for sale and on what you have listed. Mods and implants have no page of their own, so those are left as plain text with the effect spelled out underneath rather than sent somewhere unhelpful.

One weapon, not two. Ranged and melee were separate slots, so everybody walked around wearing a gun and a blade and the game quietly fought with whichever of the two was better. That is not a choice, it is bookkeeping, and it meant the knife you never swung was a free socket for a mod. There is one Weapon slot now and it takes anything. Ranged and melee still exist as a distinction, they just live on the weapon class where they always really lived, so Gunwork still favours guns and Bladework still favours blades. Anyone who was wearing both keeps whichever they were actually fighting with, scored exactly the way the game was already scoring it, so no damage moves by a single point. The other goes back in the bag with its tuning and its mod intact and can be swapped to whenever you like.

Levelling past the tens got cheaper. The cost of a level was multiplied by a surcharge every ten levels, and four of those compound over a run to sixty: a single level in the forties had grown to cost longer than the whole of levels one to twenty, which is not a long game but an unreachable one. The surcharge has come down from 45% to 35%. Levels one to ten cost exactly what they always did, to the point, the twenties cost 93%, the forties four fifths and the fifties three quarters. Every band still costs more than the one before it.

Happiness says what it means. Buy a Shack advertising 150 and your meter read 525, because happiness banked three and a half sessions like everything else while the property page quoted the point where gym output starts falling off. Both numbers were true and nothing on screen said so. The property page now lists the ceiling, which is the number the meter shows, and names the full rate point beside it. A Shack reads 300 and full rate above 86. Nothing about what the gym pays has changed, only what you are told.

An event that happened once is reported once. The city and your own browser both write into your events, and for anything the city settles it was writing its line and the browser was writing its own copy on top. Claiming a contract, finishing a First Step: two lines every time. The log now refuses a line it wrote a moment ago, so the pairs cannot form whatever else goes wrong, and a log already full of them is tidied the next time you load the page.

Events are not replayed at you. An event you saw while you were online was never marked as read, so the next time your connection so much as blinked the city handed the whole lot back and you were mugged a second time, hours later, while you were away. Each one now carries a reference and the browser says which ones it drew, after the lines are on your character and your character is safely back with the city. A tab that dies in between loses nothing: the event simply arrives again, once.

Six kinds of news used to be thrown away. Whatever arrived while you were offline was handed over on your way back in and then marked read in one go, but the browser only knew how to draw eight of the fourteen kinds. A war declaration, a gang decision, a referral, a vault payout: written, deleted, never shown. Accepted into a gang while you were asleep and nobody told you. Every kind has a line now, there is a catch-all underneath for anything new, and a bail posted in the seconds while you were logging in can no longer be lost in the gap.

Mail is counted in one place. The envelope at the top of every page carries the unread number and goes straight to the inbox, and a line in your events as well was the same news twice with two things to clear. Mail is also out of the Explore menu for the same reason.

Storage is a place you can work. A stored item now opens its own page like everywhere else in the city, and a stack comes out in whatever number you ask for rather than all or nothing. The box starts filled in with the whole stack, so one press still empties the shelf and anybody who wants three of forty winds it down instead.

The gym says what the session paid. It used to report how far along the bar you were, as a percentage, which is the one number you cannot do anything with: it does not say what the hour bought and it cannot be compared against the last one. It now says the development points. Seventy energy for ninety eight points.

Critical hits belong to the weapon and nothing else. They always have in the arithmetic, but four different places in the game told players that Accuracy bought criticals, which stopped being true when crit moved onto the weapon class and was never corrected. Accuracy decides how often you land a hit. How often a hit opens somebody up is the class you are carrying, and no rating in the game moves it.

Anything you do at the Workshop counts as Workshop work. The contract and the First Step both asked you to make things and counted only the making, so somebody who had fitted a mod and tuned a weapon had plainly used the bench and was still being sent off to use the bench. Making, fitting and tuning all count now, and anyone who has been tuning for a fortnight already has the credit for it.

Money can be handed to somebody from their own page. The Report button that sat there is gone, because reporting has its own page on the menu and nobody was pressing it from a profile. What players actually want on somebody else's page is a way to pay them, so that is what is there. It arrives straight away, wherever they are.

Attacks are reported to both sides. Somebody who came for you and lost now hears about it, a draw reads as a draw rather than a win, and losing a fight you started says Lost in combat to rather than Attacked by, which had it exactly backwards. Fights you pick yourself no longer ring your own bell: you chose it, you watched it, and you read the result page.

Founding a gang costs what the city says it costs. Two messages quoted fifty thousand while a hundred thousand came out of the account. There is one number now and every line reads from it.

A profile is who somebody is, not a sheet of numbers. Hit points, run totals, battle totals and the attack shield have come off it and live on Full Statistics, which is the page for that. Your gang is a link to its roster, which was the one gang name in the game you could not click. Nobody else's page names the district they are standing in either.

The bank fills in what you are carrying. Getting mugged costs you the cash in your pocket and never a penny in the bank, so the common move at the counter is all of it, and making somebody type their own balance to do the obvious thing is how they end up walking around with it.

Donators refill happiness half again as fast, 15% every five minutes against 10%. Energy and action points are unchanged at twice the rate.

Staff can put right what the shop cannot. Credits and donator days can be granted by hand, for a refund, a prize, or making somebody whole after something the city broke. Whoever receives it is told in their events, with the reason, because money appearing with no explanation reads as a fault rather than a gift.

The Trades page counts up. Hours studied today, climbing from nought to six, rather than hours left counting down beside a line counting up. Two opposite meanings of the same shape on the same bar.

Staff are visible and cannot be attacked. A staff account reads as Admin for its user class, wears its name in amber with a shield badge beside it wherever a name appears, and is refused as a target: no attack, no mugging, no Rumble. The refusal is on the server, so it holds whatever a browser decides to send, and the profile simply does not offer the link rather than offering one that will be turned down. Somebody who can hand out any item in the game and read every mailbox should not also be somebody you can put in hospital. None of it is tied to a particular name: it follows whichever account the server has been told is staff, so renaming that account changes nothing.

Reply in the mailbox carries the subject over. It used to pass only the name, so every reply started with an empty subject line and a conversation had nothing holding it together. A reply now opens with RE: and whatever the letter was called, and it stays one RE: however long the two of you go back and forth rather than growing a stack of them. The gang noticeboard already worked this way and now the mailbox, and staff writing as a resident, use the same rule.

The staff room says when a player has written to one of the residents. Reading a resident's mailbox and writing back as them was always possible, but nothing told you a letter had arrived, so finding one meant opening fifty nine mailboxes in turn. The resident list now counts the letters from real players that each resident has not answered, puts whoever is waiting at the top, and names them in a line above the table. Every letter that came in carries a Reply button that opens that resident, addresses it back to whoever wrote and carries the subject over.

A rating now says which part of it you trained and which part you are wearing. Accuracy 45 with a pair of gloves carrying three points reads as 45 +3 rather than 48, on the gym cards and everywhere else a rating is shown, so taking a piece off holds no surprises. The attribute table on your profile had a column for this already, called Mod, and it counted implants only: fit anything with points in it and Natural plus Mod did not reach the Rating. It counts implants and gear together now, it is called Added, and the three numbers agree. Both columns also survive on a phone, where they used to be dropped along with the rest of the detail and left you one number and no way to read it.

An element line is welded on for good. Stripping one used to be possible and it took the components with it: pay for a Fire line, change your mind, and the cells were simply gone with nothing to show for them. A choice whose only outcome is losing things is not a choice. The Strip button is gone and so is the action behind it, so which line a weapon carries is a real decision, made once.

Founding a gang costs $100,000, up from $50,000. Level 10 is unchanged.

The player page no longer offers Rumble as a fifth way to go after somebody. Group attacks are switched off while the city is this quiet, so the page was describing a door that is not there.

Tab rows stack into two columns on a phone instead of running off the side of the screen or wrapping into a ragged four and two. The gang pages, the mailbox and the staff room all use the same row, so all three read as a block of choices now.

Anything half-typed into a box stayed there. The page rebuilds itself every fifteen seconds so the clocks and the bars stay true, and it did that by replacing everything on screen, which took whatever you were part way through typing with it. Name a gang, pause to think about the description, and the name was gone when you looked back. The caret was already being put back after a redraw; the words are now put back with it. Anything you have actually sent, a deposit, a message, an announcement, is not handed back to you.

Founding a gang told you: You founded <b>Juvenile Delinquents</b>. Fourteen messages in the game bold a name, and every one of them carefully makes the name itself safe first, which only works if the bold is allowed through. It was not, so the tags were shown to you instead. Bold now survives, and nothing else does: a gang named after a piece of markup is drawn as the letters somebody typed.

Restock the belt is no longer a First Step. Seven steps is enough, and buying a dressing you already have two of is not the thing a new arrival should be sent off to do.

The city has a past. Every resident was made the afternoon Scartown was seeded, so the citizen list showed the entire population signing up on one day and going quiet on the same day, which reads as exactly what it was. They have been given the histories they should have had: the names at the top have been here four to seven months, somebody at level one joined a fortnight ago, and how long an account has been open now follows how far up it has climbed. Most of the city was around in the last week or two, and a few have drifted off for months and are left where they are rather than being quietly woken up to keep the numbers looking busy.

The end of a mission sends you to the Workshop. The result screen used to offer to load your belt, which is a thing you do on the way into a mission, and the next one is three hours off; meanwhile your loot has just landed and the bench is where it turns into something. The Workshop now sits beside All Missions on the result, and since it was already listed further down that page, the button underneath points at Storage, where the loot actually went. A mission you did not walk out of still points at the hospital.

The city has stopped explaining its own arithmetic. Breaking somebody out of a cell said it cost thirty percent of your bar, measured against a bar you are not looking at: the number beside Action Points is the whole pool, so a cost of eight read as nine percent of it and the line was simply wrong. Rather than correct the fraction, it is gone, along with the others like it on the Rumble, Trades and how to play pages. Where something costs a fixed amount you are still told the amount, because that is a fact you need before you press the button. How that amount is arrived at is yours to work out.

The bell would not stop ringing for a mission it had already announced. One announcement per cooldown was decided by two things joined by an or: the cooldown it belonged to, and a note the page kept to itself. Every economy action replaces your character with the server's copy, and a copy saved a moment before that note was written came back without it, which was enough to ring the bell again. Read your events, buy something, and there it was. The cooldown is now the only thing that decides, the marks for what you have already been shown survive a character arriving from the server, and any pile of repeats already sitting in your events is collapsed to one the next time the page loads.

Studying a trade was the cheapest thing in the city and it showed: a rank was an afternoon of clicking rather than something you spent your days on. An hour now costs exactly what an attack costs, and you get six of them a day. The day is counted in UTC, so it turns over at one moment for everybody and cannot be moved by the clock on your own machine. The Trades page says how many hours you have left and greys the button out when they are gone.

A page held in a browser tab for a few days can fall behind the city. When it does, the two disagree about numbers you can see: a crime listed at last week's action point cost looked affordable, and then the city refused it, which reads as the game being broken rather than as an old tab. The game now asks the city what version it is running and tells you plainly to reload if they differ. If the answer ever disagrees anyway, the page pulls a fresh copy of your character on the spot instead of leaving a stale number on the bar for you to press again.

Three buttons that could not work were still being offered. A crime, a gym session and a boost were all refused by the city while a mission was open, but this page did not know it, so the button looked live and the refusal arrived from somewhere you could not see. They now say what they mean where you are standing, and the crimes table greys out while you are on a mission instead of pretending to be open.

The crime skill footer told a new character their payout was "+-50%". It was printing the whole payout multiplier, which carries a flat reduction that has nothing to do with skill. It now shows what your skill and the fence perk are actually adding, which for somebody starting out is nothing, and says so.

Every First Step is a link to the page it is asking for. Run your first mission opens Missions, Train at the gym opens the gym, Open a bank account opens the bank, and so on for all eight. The whole row is the link rather than just the title, because the row is what you aim at. A step you have already done stops being a link, since a tick you can click reads as something still to do.

There is a privacy page, at scartown.com/privacy, linked from the bottom of every page including this one. It says what is actually stored: an email address so a lost password has somewhere to go, your character on the server, a login token and a copy of your character in your own browser. Scartown sets no cookies at all, runs no advertising, and loads nothing from any third party. It also says the two things worth being plain about, which are that staff can read player mail so harassment reports can be looked into, and that asking for your account to be deleted is enough to have it deleted.

The game stopped loading nine typefaces from Google that no rule in it ever used. Every player's browser was announcing itself to a third party on page load, and waiting on the round trip before drawing anything, in exchange for nothing at all. Every typeface the game uses comes from your own device and always did.

Two of the seven perks were quietly getting worse the longer you played. Stamina and Resolve gave a flat one point of energy or action points a level, against pools that grow with your level, so a point was worth 3.3% of an energy bar at level 10 and 0.8% of one at level 60. They are percentages now, +2% of the pool a level, which is the same deal at every level and worth a doubled pool across a finished track. Nimble had a different problem: it subtracted a flat 3% from your bust chance and hit the floor at level 22 of 30, so its last eight levels bought nothing at all. It divides now instead of subtracting, so every level lowers the number and a finished track is about 73% safer. And a perk card tells you what the whole track is worth to you rather than what one more level would add, which is the number anybody actually wanted.

Crimes got harder again and cost more to attempt. The ceiling is 85% rather than 90%, so no crime is ever a sure thing however far past its requirement you train, and every crime costs half again as many action points: the cheapest is 3 instead of 2 and the Ponzi Scheme is 81 instead of 54. Action points regenerate at the same rate, so that is about a third fewer crimes a day at every level. Crime was quietly out-earning the work it asks for.

Buying a safehouse works. Moving house was the last thing left in the game that spent money purely in the browser: the new address lived in your tab until the next save went up, and anything that fetched your character first, a socket message, another tab, a page that refreshes, replaced it with the server's older copy and put you back in a cardboard box. The agent settles it on the server now, the way every other purchase already did, and the address it hands back is the one you keep. It also refuses to leave your bank in the red, which the old client-side version would happily do.

Every safehouse costs twice what it used to, from the $2,000 Squatter Hovel up to the $160m Spire Mansion. Property is the main money sink in the game and the ladder was being climbed faster than anything else could keep up with. The happiness each address gives is unchanged, so every rung is now worth half as much per dollar. The Spire Mansion has crossed the $100m line where daily upkeep starts, so the best address in the city now costs $32,000 a day to keep.

Every mission you walk out of now hands over at least one Scrap Steel. It was already paying about one a run on average in the Old Quarter, but a third of runs paid none at all, and a third is often enough to make the base material of every Workshop recipe feel like a lottery. The floor is topped up at the door rather than in the drop table, so the table still decides how much more you get, the deeper sites are untouched, and a Pawn Row run now pays one about two thirds of the time and two to five the rest.

A mug takes about a twentieth of what somebody is carrying, not the 40% to 80% it used to. Losing most of your pocket money to one unlucky walk home was the single meanest thing in the game, and it made carrying anything at all feel stupid. It is a shakedown now: annoying, repeatable, and worth doing for the experience as much as the cash. Money in the bank has never been reachable and still is not, so banking is still the answer to living somewhere rough.

Boss health bars no longer quote a percentage. The bar is the percentage.

The Mark is gone and the city is open. Player-versus-player used to need both people to switch it on, which meant that in practice almost nobody did, the citizen register was a list of people you could not touch, and the fights the game is built around never happened. Anybody standing in your district and outside your gang can now be attacked, and can attack you, from the moment their first three days are up. Those three days are the only shelter there is and they are one-sided on purpose: a new character cannot be attacked, but can attack anybody. Hospital, a cell and the hour after a Rumble still put somebody out of reach, and a Rumble cannot be called on anybody inside their first three days either. The ten percent loot bonus that came with the Mark has gone with it.

Scartown has a front door. scartown.com is now a page about the game, with a guide, the rules, a FAQ and this same update log on it, and the game itself has moved to scartown.com/play. Your character, your login and anything saved in this browser are untouched: the address changed, nothing else did. Old links still land you in the right place.

Crimes are a real check again. Meeting the rating printed beside a crime used to hand you the 95% ceiling, so a crime you had unlocked was a crime you simply won and the number beside it was decoration. Meeting it now buys 72%, the ceiling has come down to 90%, and you reach it about a quarter above the requirement. Crime skill still adds ten points on top, happiness still matters, and overlevelling a crime still helps. What has gone is the free money.

Keycards come off whatever is running the floor and nothing else. There are six keyed sites in the whole game, and elites were handing one over every tenth kill, which worked out at three keys a day for something you need six of ever. Trophies are down from one boss kill in five to one in twenty, because there are six of those too and a trophy should mean something.

The attribute mods go up one point a district: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. They were 2, 6, 15, 26, 40 and 55, which meant a full set of four was a fifth of everything a character had and turned a mission into a formality once you were kitted out. They are a plain, readable ladder now, and with four sockets to fill they still add up.

Sockets take one kind of thing now: attributes. The twenty trade-off mods and the six boss mods are gone, and the thirty attribute mods are the whole list. A mod is points, nothing else, which is why a socket is worth exactly the same to every build and every weapon and you never have to work out whether Hollow Rounds beats Overpressure Cell on a shotgun. The signature weapons keep a built-in mod, and it is an attribute one now: Hale's Sidearm comes with +55 Accuracy welded in.

Only the weapon you are actually fighting with counts for attributes. Carrying a spare knife you never swing used to hand you its socket for free, which was not a decision, only something you had to know about. The gun in your hands counts; the one on your back does not.

The attributes mean what they say now, whatever you are carrying. Accuracy is how often you land it and how well; Strength is how hard; Dexterity is how hard you are to land one on; Resistance is armor and health; Endurance is health. They used to be weapon-specific, so accuracy was the damage stat for a gun and did nothing at all for an axe, which meant a gun player trained strength they could never use and switching weapons threw away everything you had built. Nothing is dead any more: a hundred points of accuracy is worth 43% more damage whether you are holding a rifle or an axe.

Unique weapons and armor are gone. Every weapon and every piece of armor in the city is ordinary and takes one mod, and what goes in that socket is the thing worth hunting. Thirty attribute mods, one for every battle stat in every district, from the Quarter Sight at +1 Accuracy up to the Spire Actuator at +6 Strength. They fit any socket, weapon or armor, and the points count everywhere a rating does. The fitting bench is open again.

Critical hits belong to the weapon and to nothing else. An axe opens people up 44% of the time and a sub-machine gun 15%, in anybody's hands, and no attribute you train will ever change either number. Crit was quietly a stat before, which meant two people carrying the same axe were carrying different axes. Pick the weapon whose crit you want and it behaves the same for everyone.

The weapon classes were quietly unbalanced and nobody had measured it: at level 55 a blunt weapon was worth 31% more per swing than a shotgun, because the class table was tuned against an unarmored target and the item table was not. Retuned against what a fight actually looks like, they now sit inside 4% of each other through the middle of the game and 10% at the edges. The Sub-Basement Records has been eased off to match.

Seven more unique pieces, so there is now one for every weapon class and every armor slot: the Pawnbroker's Snub, the Foundry Persuader, the Orchard Sweeper, the Doorman's Compliment, the Floodgate Breaker, the Archivist's Edge and the Vantar Storm Door. Thirteen in all, at least two in every district, each welded to a mod nothing else in the city carries. A gun player no longer waits until level 55 for something worth hunting.

The unique pieces carry hard numbers now. Every one adds flat points to two attributes, scaled to the district it comes out of, from +2 Resistance on the Coldstore Thermal Coat up to +40 Accuracy and +24 Dexterity on the Level 9 Carbine. Those points count everywhere a rating does: in a mission, in a street fight, against what an item asks of you, and in what you can carry. A unique used to be worth having because of the mod welded into it, which is an argument you had to take on faith. Now it is worth having because you can read the number.

Travel has its own place on the menu, under Explore.

Elites pay for your gear, bosses are where the gear comes from. Every elite now gives up a component, the good ones only in the deeper districts, so the room in the middle of a floor is worth the health it costs. In exchange the treasure is the boss's: an elite no longer rolls for mods or boosters at all.

Everything you find on a mission now comes out with you. There used to be a cap of four things at the door, counted by the piece rather than by the item, so a pile of five Scrap Steel ate the whole allowance and the rest of your bag stayed on the floor without telling you. The limit is now on the interesting drops only, it is spent as you descend, and once it is gone the site simply stops turning up rares instead of showing you one and taking it away. Salvage and parts are never capped, a lieutenant still always pays, and the district boss on the last floor is never held back by anything you picked up on the way down. Everything is rarer at the source to go with it. A mission now hands over about four things rather than a bagful, and a lieutenant is a chance at a rare consumable rather than a guarantee, so about half of all missions end with no rare at all. That is the point: a rare should be a thing that happened, not a thing that happens.

You can only attack somebody standing in your district. Travel is cheap, so this is not a wall; it is what makes a district a place rather than a shop list. The citizen register already says where everyone is, and a name in another district carries no Attack link.

The fitting bench is closed while the mods are reworked. Sockets, mod drops and anything already fitted are untouched, so hold on to what you find. Tuning is open as normal.

Boss health bars are taller, red, and slide rather than jump, so a hit reads as the bar moving. From the third district up a boss can patch itself up once it is properly hurt, a few times a fight at most, which is the moment a fight you thought was won turns out not to be.

The whole mission transcript is now reachable from every room, not only while a fight is on screen, and element damage in a street fight reads the way it does on a mission: 87 damage (+5 fire).

The climb to 60 slowed down. Each level asks more than it did and each ten-level band costs more than the band before it, and experience from a fight is worth half what it was. Attacks were quietly carrying the game: their cost rises with your pool, so the number you get in a day never changes, and at that rate level 60 arrived in months. It now takes about two years at twenty hours a day. The first ten levels are untouched and still go by in an afternoon; all of the weight is in the back half.

A mission costs nothing now. Instead you get one every three hours, the clock starting the moment you go in, so each Run is worth preparing for. Boosters refill against the whole pool. At most three things come out of a Run, the best of what you found.

Home leads with the mission. The first thing on the page is the next site for where you are, with your belt and energy against it and a button that goes in; for a new player it is Pawn Row Lockup with a few lines on how a mission goes. First Steps now start with that mission and no longer ask anyone to take a job or pick a fight. New characters start with two Field Dressings and a Stim-Pack on the belt, Pawn Row is tuned so a fresh level 1 clears it about nine times in ten with that belt, and losing a mission under level 4 costs three minutes in hospital, not the evening. Dunn's board has ten new contracts tied to missions and the Market: lieutenants, reads, belt use, fitting mods, the Coldstore, selling and buying. The Unemployment Office, the School and the War Room have closed; the estate agent sells safehouses.

Boosters are loot now. Nothing in any pharmacy refills energy or action points; the six boosters only come out of a Run, rarely, from elites, lieutenants and bosses, and trade on the Market. The Home card shows your latest mission with a button to run it again. Missions build the work attributes: Endurance for every floor, Intelligence for every check passed, Reputation for every boss, and contracts build Work Experience and pay more for it. Trades are on the main menu: Gunwork, Bladework, Footwork (harder to hit) and Grit (hits hurt less). The Hall of Notoriety is closed for now.

Gear now has sockets, one on ordinary pieces and two on the unique ones, and mods fill them. Six unique mods, one per district boss, do things only a Run notices. The Workshop tunes a weapon up to five levels for damage and five for hit, a percent a level, and fits one element line, Fire, Electric or Venom, from components made there. At the very top, six relics: fragments drop from district bosses, ten forge the relic, and a relic in its own slot changes how a Run goes. The Market, under Explore, trades anything between players for a five percent cut.

Missions. Every district now has three sites, each worse than the last: two run by a lieutenant, the third by the district's boss. Clear one and the next opens; the third takes a keycard. The belt is what you carry in: four slots to start, one item each, loaded on the Mission Board, and bigger belts made at the Workshop up to eight. Nothing in the bag can be reached from inside a Run, and no shop will serve anyone on one. Every consumable now says what it does. Five rare consumables and six unique pieces of gear only ever come out of a Run: lieutenants always drop one of the rares, and bosses sometimes drop the district's unique. The Bench is the Workshop, and Shops are on the main menu.

Scartown is a player-versus-monster city now. Every district has a site nobody should go into and a Fixer who pays you to go in anyway: Coldstore 9 in the Quarter, the Foundry, the Agrodome, Tower 12, the Floodworks, the Vantar Sub-Basement, and the Deep Tunnels under everything, which do not end. A Run costs a full energy bar, your health carries from floor to floor, every floor ends with a choice, and every site ends with a boss that has a rhythm you can read. Extract after any floor with what you have looted, or press on for the boss and the clear bonus. Get carried out and you keep the experience and lose the bag.

Fighting other people is now a choice. Nobody can attack you, and you can attack nobody, unless both of you have taken the Mark on Preferences. Marked players get a tenth more loot in every Run for carrying the risk. Residents are fair game for everyone.

Loot. Salvage sells or feeds the Workshop under the pharmacy, which makes consumables, keycards and higher grades of scrap. Mods change how a weapon behaves, never how hard it hits on average. Implants come out of bosses and go in at the Chop Doc, one point of humanity each, six at most. Every boss has a signature weapon of its own, and it is rare.

The twelve Skills that did nothing are gone. Four Trades replace them, and every rank does something inside the sites. The ten crime groups are four, each with a different shape. Nine careers are four, each with a Run bonus. The offline practice population, the slot machine and the property ladder above the Spire Mansion are gone.

Hit chance no longer runs away with a dexterity lead, health scales with level so top-end fights last more than two rounds, and the level curve is flatter because Runs are the levelling path. Nothing bought with credits changes a fight.

Creating an account asks for one name, not two. Your username is the name you go by in the city.

Play Offline is off the front page. A character that never touches the server is a different game from the one everybody else is playing, and offering it at the door made the real thing look optional.

Nobody gets finished off. You cannot attack somebody who is under half health, the same rule that already applied to you. Standing over a person who is already hurt was the cheapest fight in the game, and it turned one bad afternoon into being farmed until you gave up.

The citizen list was reporting most of the city as Critical. Hit points were being read straight out of the database, and the database holds whatever you were last left on, so anybody who had been hospitalized sat at one hit point until they next opened the game. Health is now worked out as of now, whether you are logged in or not, and fights use the same figure.

Hit points come back faster, and the 'full in' line under each meter is gone. It was counting to the top of the pool, three and a half bars, not to a full bar, so it read like an hour when a bar actually fills in twenty minutes on donator status and forty-five without.

Breaking somebody out is harder the longer they have left to serve. Ten minutes from the door is a reasonable gamble; an hour in is not. Every cell used to be the same cell, which meant bail was never worth paying.

The gym is shut to you while you are in a cell. The prison yard used to let you keep training at a third of normal gains, which made a sentence an inconvenience rather than the thing that stops your day.

The residents have been around for varying amounts of time. Offline used to mean somewhere in the last three days, so the whole population read as having been here this week. Some of them have not been seen in months.

The game is called Scartown, and so is the city. It was a town before the money arrived, built an arcology over the top of it and never got round to changing the name, and everybody still calls it what they always called it. Everything that carried the old name carries this one: the hospital, the bank, the library, the airport, the gym. The district that shared the city's name is now simply the Heights, because saying it twice helped nobody.

The login page says what the game is, in one paragraph above the form. Everything under the form is gone, and so is the prototype notice in the footer.

Dev Mode is staff only. It hands out money, levels and full bars, which is the economy gone on the first day somebody finds the menu, so it is now hidden from ordinary accounts and refuses to open for them however it is reached. Offline play keeps it, because the only person it affects there is whoever is doing it.

New characters were being handed nothing. The starter pistol and armor were listed by their old ids, which stopped existing when the gear was renamed, so every character created since then began bare-handed and the tutorial's first fight was close to unwinnable. Anyone still carrying nothing gets the kit on their next load.

Every crime in Computer Crimes was resolving as a different crime. The group reused the ids belonging to Con Games and Fraud, so clicking Corporate Root Access ran a Ponzi Scheme and the whole tier below it paid the wrong money for the wrong action points. All six now do what they say.

The bank pays interest. It always said it did, and the figure on the page was right, but the payment only ever happened inside a developer-only time skip, so in ordinary play a balance sat there earning nothing however long you left it. It accrues from elapsed time now, like everything else, and lands on the account log.

Mugging somebody actually takes their money. The residents' wallets never went down, so the same one could be emptied every ten minutes forever. What you take now leaves their pocket and they earn it back over about two days.

The slots are gone. Three of a kind paid too often and too well: the machine returned about $1.55 for every dollar put in, which made it the best paying activity in the game and the opposite of the money sink it was there to be.

Starting money is $5,000, down from $50,000. Fifty thousand bought most of what a new player wanted before they had done anything to want it.

Credits buy far less endurance than they did. Work attributes are not battle stats and never decided a fight, but the rate meant they could be bought in bulk, so the ladder is much shallower until there are enough players for it to matter.

Group attacks are switched off for now. A Rumble wants two to five people online at the same moment, which the city cannot supply yet, so it reads as broken rather than unused. Nothing has been deleted and the tests still run against it: it comes back when there are enough of you to fill a squad. One on one attacks are unaffected.

The server was fighting with different numbers again in three places. Cyberware was a four-entry stub with the wrong stat against three of the four and a flat bonus regardless of what was installed. The action point formula had two constants hardcoded that the game file had since changed. And every fighter started at full health whatever they were actually carrying, so the damage from winning a fight cost nothing in the next one. All three are generated from the game file now, and the generator itself is safe to run twice, which it was not.

Brutalize hits harder against a real account, as it always has against the practice residents. It cost four times the energy of an ordinary attack and bought nothing but a longer hospital stay.

Attacking during a gang war works. Two things were wrong: the game was fighting with a stale copy of your character, so the server refused you over energy you were actually holding, and the rival list said nothing about who was already in a bed. A gang of residents is in hospital most of the time, so most clicks were never going to land. The list now shows their state and only offers the button when there is somebody to hit.

Bail and Bust sit under Action on the jail board. Clicking one asks in the same row what it will cost and what will happen, and nothing is spent until you say yes. No trip to another page to get somebody out.

Shops list a name, a price and what you need to carry it. Damage, defense and healing figures are off the shelves: what your gear does is your business.

Career is in the main menu.

Winning a fight now costs you the damage you took getting there. The result was never written back, so the winner walked away on full health and a second attack was free. Losers were already flat on their backs; winners now limp.

You can get somebody else out of a cell. Post their bail, which always works and is priced on what is left to serve and who they are, or walk in after them, which costs action points, pays experience, and can leave you in a cell of your own. Both reach the person you did it for.

Health reads Critical below half, Fair up to 85%, and Healthy above that, with the actual numbers beside it. A stim-pack now puts you back on your feet at half health rather than turning you out of hospital on one hit point for the next passer-by to collect.

The counter on Events is for things done to you: attacked, mailed, awarded, war declared, bailed out or broken out. Losing a fight you picked and getting caught on a break-in you chose to try are your own business, and are logged without ringing the bell.

The citizen list sorts. Click any heading for name, gang, level, location, last seen or status, and click it again to turn it around.

Shops moved into the main menu. The Gazette moved out of it, into Explore under City Hall.

The contracts page is called Contracts rather than Marek Dunn, and the link on the home page reads View Contracts so it looks like the link it always was.

The gym ladder says what it is for. Every gym you open makes all training permanently faster at every stat, and the page now tells you what you are on and what the next one is worth instead of showing twenty padlocks and leaving you to guess.

Whoever put you in hospital is a link. The ward board named them in red and left you to go looking.

Reopening the game was quietly robbing you. Energy, action points and happiness fill to a pool worth three and a half bars, but the load-time tidy-up was cutting them back to a single bar, every time. Bank thirty energy overnight, open the game in the morning, keep twelve. That is fixed: the pool survives a reload, which is what it was there for.

A new character starts on a full pool. Starting on one bar meant three of the four meters read about a third full on the very first screen, which looked like damage rather than a fresh start.

Signing back in shows a splash instead of the login form. It used to draw the whole form with every button dead while it waited on the server, so on a sleeping instance the first thing you saw was a login screen that would not respond for the best part of a minute, and then flipped into the game on its own. It also asks the server both of its questions at once now rather than one after the other.

Refill in Dev Mode fills to the top. It was filling one bar out of the pool and leaving everything at 29%, which read as a button that did not work.

Shops stock their own district. Each area sells two tiers of gear and nothing else, so the Old Quarter carries what a newcomer needs and the Undercity carries what a level thirty does. Twenty-two pieces per district instead of one list of a hundred and fifty-four, and the only way to buy something is to travel to where it is sold. Food, medicine and boosters are on sale everywhere, because being unable to buy a stim-pack in the wrong part of town helps nobody.

The library lists every weapon and every piece of armor with the district that sells it, so there is always somewhere to look up what you are traveling for.

Gangs have a description. Whoever runs the gang writes it, everybody sees it, and it shows on the public gang page where somebody deciding whether to apply will read it. Separate from the announcement, which is this week's notice rather than who you are.

The gang noticeboard is called Gang Mail, and you can reply to a message. A reply goes back to the whole gang as RE: the original, and counts as unread for everyone else, so a conversation actually happens instead of a wall of notices.

Clicking Gang always opens your own gang. Looking at a rival used to leave you on their page, so the next visit to Gang showed them and not you. Other gangs are their own page now.

The forum is gone. Mail and Gang Mail are how people reach each other.

The hospital and jail boards were reading the offline practice population and nothing else, so a real player put in a bed by a real attack never appeared on either and the menu counters stayed at nothing. Both boards now merge the shared register, the counters count everybody, and being attacked while you are logged in says so on the spot instead of turning up silently.

A Rumble you called follows you around. A bar sits above every page while it waits, with who is in, who is still to answer and how long is left, and Gang carries an amber count in the menu. Leaving the page no longer means hunting for it.

Everyone you bring on a Rumble has to be in your gang, staff included. Targets are unchanged: you can go after anybody.

A profile offers Attack, Send Mail and Report. Rumble moved under Attack, where the rest of the options live.

The register is called the User List under Explore and stays Citizens in the menu.

New-player protection is gone entirely. There is no grace period for anybody: you can attack and be attacked from the day you sign up. The only thing that puts somebody out of reach is the hour after they have already been Rumbled, and a hospital bed.

Attack from a profile opens the usual four choices, and Rumble sits under them as a fifth. One page, five ways to go about it, instead of two different routes to a fight.

Donators read in green with a star rather than blue with a boxed D. Every new character still gets a free week of donator status, so a first login now comes with the star on.

Report a Player has its own icon, a flag, instead of sharing the bar chart with Full Statistics.

You can attack another account one on one now, not just as part of a Rumble. The same four choices as always: leave them, mug them, hospitalize them, or brutalize them for a full energy bar. The fight is settled on the server, so the loser really is in a bed that everybody else can see, and the ward board names who put them there.

Residents have no new-player grace period. They were all created on the same afternoon, so the fortnight of protection was putting the entire city out of reach at once. Real accounts still get their fourteen days.

Residents carry pocket money and no more, nought to five thousand, whatever they earn. Anything above that is treated as banked between visits, which is where mugging one gets you a believable amount rather than a level's worth of somebody else's savings.

The city no longer lives entirely in the Old Quarter. Residents are spread across the districts by what they could afford to move to, so traveling changes who is in front of you.

The citizen list shows where somebody is, but only if they are in your district. Anywhere else and it says Unknown, because the city is too big to keep track of everyone in it.

Gang tags on the citizen list are links. Click one to open that gang and see who is in it.

Picking targets for a Rumble is no longer a scroll through the whole population. There is a search box that filters as you type and a row of gang buttons, and anyone you have already ticked stays visible whatever the filter says.

A gang noticeboard. One message to the whole gang instead of sixty separate letters, with an unread mark against Gang in the menu until you have read it. A war shows red there and the noticeboard shows blue, so both at once still tell you which is which.

Every username in the game is now a link to that person's profile, and profiles exist for real accounts rather than only for the offline residents. Gang rosters, the citizen list, the ward and jail boards, mail, war rooms and Rumble screens all go through one name renderer, so a name looks and behaves the same wherever you meet it.

Donator names read in blue with a small D beside them, everywhere a name appears. Everyone else is white.

Friends and enemies. Any profile can be added to either list, the Citizens page filters by All, Friends and Enemies, and the mark is private: one-sided, never announced, and it changes nothing either of you can do. It is a note to yourself about who to keep an eye on.

You cannot attack somebody in your own gang. Their profile says so, and everything else on it, mail included, works as normal. Rumble Them on anyone else's profile opens the Rumble screen with them already picked.

About one resident in six carries donator status, so the blue names in the city are not all staff.

Group attacks rebuilt. Calling a Rumble now sends invites that wait in the invitee's events instead of expiring in ninety seconds, so you can bring people who are not online. Whoever called it watches a live count of who is in, and goes when they like: early with four of five, or after the last answer lands. The launch is refused, by name, if anybody who accepted is short of energy.

A Rumble now lapses after thirty minutes rather than ninety seconds, and can be called off by whoever started it without anybody paying for it.

Staff can bring residents on a Rumble whatever gang they are in and whether or not they are awake. Residents answer an invite the moment it lands.

The Skills page is a card grid now, grouped into Combat, Defense and Knowledge, with the grade, the hours and both costs on the card rather than in a table.

The Gang page is about your gang and nothing else, in five sections: summary, events, members, vault and battles. Other gangs moved to Explore, which is also where wars are declared from.

Gang vault. Members donate cash, credits and items into it; whoever holds the vault permission hands them back out. Everything that goes in or out is on the gang log with a name against it.

The leader can hand out permissions one at a time: accepting applications, declaring war, handing out the vault, and writing the announcement. The leader holds all four implicitly.

A war puts a (1) beside Gang and the War Room until one of the hideouts is broken open.

The Donator House lists what donator status is worth and everything credits buy: donator days, work-attribute training, cash, out of jail, and energy or happiness refills. Nothing sold there decides a fight.

Referrals. Everyone has a link. Whoever uses it gets 25 credits on arrival and you get 50 once they reach level 5, so inviting yourself ten times is ten characters and no credits. When card payments arrive, referrers also take 5% of what their referrals buy.

The residents keep more believable hours: ten to fifteen of them are online or away at any one time rather than the whole city at once.

The city has residents. Fifty-nine of them, levels 1 to 30 and weighted to the low end the way a real population is, carrying gear that suits their level and spread across the four gangs. They keep their own hours, commit crimes, get themselves jailed and pick fights with each other. They will never attack a real player unless a staff member switches it on for one of them.

The citizen list is a real register now. Everybody with an account is on it, real or resident, most recently active first, and there is nothing to refresh. Online is the last ten minutes, away is up to thirty, offline is anything older.

Staff can open any resident's mailbox and write from it, so the city can answer back. Real accounts are not reachable that way.

The server was fighting with the wrong numbers. Its copy of the combat maths had drifted: the old stat scale, no weapon classes, and item ids that never matched the game, which meant every Rumble was resolved bare-handed whatever anyone was carrying. It is now generated from the game file, and a parity check compares the two across 623 inputs.

Bust odds are no longer published, and the hospital shortcut has left the desktop toolbar.

Gang wars. Declare war on a rival gang, raid their hideout with action points, and beat their members in the street. Both pay gang points, and points taken off a member come out of their gang's own pile rather than out of nowhere: 1 for someone outmatched, 3 for an even fight, 5 if they had the edge, 10 if they were well above your weight. Break the hideout open and the war is over.

Gang points buy hideout upgrades: Reinforced Walls, Lookouts, an Armory, Fixers and Quarters, plus repairs at 25 hit points a point.

Joining a gang is an application now. Whoever runs the gang accepts or declines it, and a gang nobody runs adopts its longest-standing member so applications always have somebody to answer them.

Every gang has a public page. Click one in the list to see its roster, respect, points and hideout before you apply to it or declare war on it.

Seven colorways replace the themed skins. Same layout, same typefaces, different accent: Signal, Emerald, Ice, Ember, Amber, Orchid and Bone. Each works in light mode as well as dark.

Weapon damage figures are no longer quoted. What a weapon is worth depends on its class, your stats and who you are hitting, and a bare number invited people to compare things that are not comparable.

The legality flag is gone, the nagging bar under item requirements is gone, and the Total rows under the attribute sheets are gone.

A notification counter sits beside the mailbox on a phone. It counts the things worth interrupting you for, being attacked, an award, a war declared, and clears when you open Events.

Character names are now unique, one to a customer. Two players sharing a name made impersonation trivial, and since staff are identified by name it also meant anyone could have signed up as staff. The staff check now confirms against the account record rather than trusting the login token.

Everything borrowed has been renamed. Districts, gyms, gear manufacturers, shops, the bank, the estate agent, the loan shark and the citizen list are all original, and the real-world trademarks that were sitting in the item list are gone.

The city has a name: the Old Quarter, Ferrous Row, the Greenbelt, the Heights, the Undercity and Vantar Spire.

An email address is now required to create an account, one address per account, so a lost password has somewhere to go.

Staff Room added: the reports queue, a searchable archive of all player mail, and suspensions. Staff are named in the server environment and the role cannot be granted through the API.

Accounts can be suspended, permanently or for a set number of days. A suspension takes effect on the next request rather than the next login, and the reason is shown to the player.

The hospital ward board now names who put you there: attacked by, hospitalized by, or ambushed by a gang when it was a Rumble.

Light mode added under Preferences, along with an option to follow whatever your device is set to. It composes with all seven looks rather than replacing them.

Levelling stretched roughly fourfold. At sixteen hours a day, level 60 now sits at about five years with donator status and eleven without, and each ten-level band costs about twice the one before it.

Fighting overtook crime as the way to level. Experience from a fight is worth 35 + 18 per level of the person you beat, so combat leads and crime pays.

Critical chance saturates instead of stopping dead at 55%. Weapons built around criticals keep improving at every rating rather than hitting a wall in the first month.

The axe reworked: it lands 58% of the time rather than 48%, carries the highest critical chance in the city and the widest damage spread, and gives up base damage for it. Every class is now within three percent of every other for expected damage per swing at any rating.

Damage stats grow sub-linearly past rating 120, so gym time no longer outruns levelling by an order of magnitude.

Property now does something. Every term in the gym formula used to be proportional to the happiness cap, so an eighty million dollar mansion trained at the rate of a cardboard box. An address now carries its own training bonus, the ladder runs to $1.75 billion, and anything above $100m charges daily upkeep.

The gym trains everything you are holding by default, and no longer quotes development points at you. What it shows is how far you are from the next rating.

Player mail added: a real inbox, sent items, replies and per-side deletion, with an unread count in the sidebar.

Player Report is now somewhere to report a player for harassment, scamming, scripting, multiple accounts or working a bug. The old statistics sheet moved to Full Statistics.