v0.1.19 (Early Access)

Changed

Customers

• Enterprise and regulated customers can now sign and be served (compliance requirements temporarily lifted). The top end of your customer roster (banks, government contracts, the marquee anchor tenant, trading firms, core banking, health and fintech shops) came with contract demands the game does not yet let you actually satisfy: a SOC2, HIPAA or PCI certified facility, a multi zone deployment, audit logging on a live SIEM, an air gapped site, and data residency in a specific region. Because none of those can be earned in game yet, every one of those customers appeared on your roster but was impossible to sign, so the whole Platinum tier was effectively locked out. For now we have lifted those requirements so those customers land and run like any other. They still show up, still pay their premium rates, and now actually onboard. Private network isolation and dedicated hosts are untouched, since those are a billed upgrade rather than a wall in front of signing. This is a temporary measure until the certification and facility mechanics are in, at which point the requirements come back and earning those certs becomes part of chasing the biggest tenants.
• Existing saves with these customers heal on load. If you already had one of these regulated customers on a save (or one was stuck unable to be served because it was pinned to a region you do not operate in), the game clears the now removed requirements the moment the save loads, so the customer starts being served straight away and stops being at risk of walking out during a security event. Nothing to convert and no action needed on your part.

New

World & interaction

• The game pauses when it loses focus, and hands your mouse back. Press the Windows key and the Start menu takes over, or alt-tab (or Cmd-Tab on a Mac) to another window, and the sim now stops instead of ticking on while you're looking away. The mouse is released at the same time, so the Start menu and any other window are clickable straight away instead of the pointer staying locked to the game. The camera also stops turning the instant focus leaves the window, so dragging the mouse across the game while you're working in another app no longer swings your view around behind your back. Everything picks back up the moment you return: the sim resumes, the cursor re-locks, and mouselook comes back. This kicks in for anything that pulls focus off the window, not just the Windows key, so tabbing out to check something no longer costs you time on the clock or fights you for the pointer. If you'd already paused the game yourself, it stays that way when you come back. Co-op sessions are never auto-paused, since the shared world isn't yours alone to stop.
• You can turn focus-loss pausing off. Settings > Gameplay has a new "Pause when the window loses focus" toggle, on by default. Switch it off if you run the game on one screen and want the world to keep ticking while you work on another. The setting sticks between sessions.

The internet edge

• Run two border routers as a redundant pair (BGP high-availability). Your border gateway is the router between the carrier handoff and your fabric, and until now a single one was a single point of failure: if it died, the whole site dropped off the internet. You can now stand up a second border router and have the pair run BGP, so losing one is survived by the other. This is also how you push more internet traffic than one box can route: a single router is capped at its own forwarding limit, so two BGP routers both carry load and add their capacity together. Not every router can do it. Entry and small-office gateways are single-router boxes (they still terminate multiple carrier lines for line redundancy, just not a redundant pair); the bigger, carrier-grade routers are BGP-capable, and the top tier can also front a multi-zone region. The gateway console tells you which a router is, and whether it is live and advertising.
• See at a glance whether your border is backed up. The Connectivity and Network lenses in the ops console now carry a BORDER readout: "Backed up" (in engineering view, HA) when two or more routers are advertising, or "No backup" (SPOF) when a single router, or a non-BGP box, is your only edge. The same status shows on the network map, on the internet nodes themselves. If your whole site hangs off one router, you will now see it called out instead of finding out the hard way.
• A dedicated Internet tab on the gateway console. Walk up to a router, press E, and there is a new tab (Internet in plain view, BGP / Edge in engineering) laying out its edge story in full: whether it can run BGP, whether it is currently serving and advertising the prefix, whether the border is backed up or a risk, how the router shares its lines, and whether it can front a multi-zone region. It reads in both plain and engineering voice like the rest of the console.
• Expanding into a second availability zone brings its own carrier border. When you buy the cage that opens a second zone at a colo, that zone now gets its own uplink rack and carrier handoff automatically, dropped into place the moment the zone comes online, so you can stand up its internet edge without hunting for where the carrier line lands. You still buy and cable the border router yourself.
• Cross-zone database replication is now real traffic. A managed database spread across two zones for resilience actually ships its writes between them now, over a regional backbone that has its own capacity and adds a small latency to those cross-zone writes. Push enough replication and the backbone can saturate, and those multi-zone databases feel it, the same way a saturated internet pipe bites. It is a real cost of spreading a database for safety, not a free lunch.

Fixed

The internet edge

• A dead router no longer counts toward your internet capacity. When a border router went down, from a power cut or a zone outage, the game kept counting its bandwidth as though it were still routing, so your pipe read healthier than it was even as traffic failed. It now drops a dead router's capacity the instant it goes down, so the number matches reality.
• Two backup routers now both carry traffic. With a redundant pair, one carrier line used to sit idle while the map clearly showed traffic going to both routers. The line list and the map now agree: both lines share the load, because a redundant border spreads incoming traffic across every live router, not just the cheapest line.
• The line-usage toggle stopped pretending on a redundant pair. The Failover / Active-Active control only ever governs how one router uses its own multiple carrier lines. On a redundant pair it did nothing, yet still flipped when clicked, which looked broken. On a backup pair it now reads the true state (shared across the pair) instead of offering a dead toggle, and it only shows a live control where there is actually a choice to make.

Performance

• Big operations run smoothly again. Once your customer list grew into the hundreds, the game started to hitch, and the cash counter would stutter along with it. The bigger your monthly revenue, the worse it got. The cause was down in how the sim tracks response times: on every update it re-sorted a full window of latency samples for each customer, and that work stacked up as you signed more of them, so the busiest, most successful saves paid the highest price. It now keeps those percentiles in a running tally that updates as requests come and go, so reading a customer's p99 is nearly free no matter how many customers you serve. On a late-game save with 180 customers, the heaviest part of each simulation step got about six and a half times faster, and it stays fast as you keep growing. Your latency figures read the same as they did before, and existing saves load straight into the faster version with nothing to convert.