v0.1.31 (Early Access)

Servers and switches no longer break for no reason, and a switch failing no longer switches off the servers behind it, so a second switch finally protects what it was bought to protect. Security hardware now costs money to run, and deep inspection now does something for the throughput it takes. The full game is roughly a fifth smaller to download and the demo roughly a third smaller, because both were shipping art nothing ever loaded.

Changed

Running costs

• Security hardware now has a running cost. Firewalls, recorders and the boxes you rack for scrubbing were free to operate: you paid for them once and then ran them forever for nothing. Their monthly cost was written on the shop card the whole time, it was simply never charged. It is charged now, from the entry firewall at about a hundred and twenty a month up to the largest chassis at about nine thousand. On-box licences and the small gateway add-ons bill their monthly too, and unsubscribing from a licence stops the charge. This is a real increase to your outgoings if you own security hardware, so check your books after loading.

Downloads

• The game no longer ships art it never uses. A stack of models had been left in the build after the scenes that used them were replaced or retired, and the packager was told to include everything rather than only what the game reaches. A hammer, a screwdriver, an axe, a rake, an older bicycle superseded by the one actually in your garage, and a set of doors and fittings from rooms that are not in the game were all being downloaded by every player. They are gone. That alone is about a fifth off the download.
• The demo only downloads the garage. The demo has always been a single scenario that starts and finishes in your garage, but it was downloading the entire game: every later site, every room you cannot visit in it, and all their furniture. It now ships the garage and the hardware you can actually buy, which takes roughly a third off the demo download.
• The demo still has every piece of hardware in it. Trimming the demo stopped at rooms and scenery on purpose. Everything the shop offers you in the demo is still there, so nothing you can buy can turn up missing.

Fixed

Hardware failures

• Servers and switches no longer die at random. The game kept a small per-hour chance of simply killing a machine, described in its own settings as something you opt into, while being switched on for everybody by default. That is what was behind hardware dying for no reason you could trace and no warning you could act on. It is off. Wear, heat and the parts inside your machines still fail, because those you can see coming and do something about. Hard mode still asks for random failures on purpose, and still gets them.
• A switch failing no longer switches off the servers behind it. When a switch died the game powered down every server it thought was underneath it, and it worked out "underneath" from the oldest cable on each machine rather than the path the machine was actually using. So a server with two cables, one to each of two switches, was killed whenever the first switch went, even though its traffic had already moved to the second. Buying a second switch and cabling to both bought you nothing. A dead switch now cuts the machines behind it off the network and leaves them running, which is what actually happens when a switch dies.
• Cut-off servers keep their customers' machines instead of dropping them. Powering a server down that way also threw away any customer machine it could not immediately move elsewhere. Machines on a cut-off server are now held and flagged for you to move, the same as when you unplug a server yourself.

Networking

• A high-speed port split into several slower ones no longer reports itself overloaded. Fanning a fast port out into four or eight slower links made the game measure the whole fan against the speed of one leg, so it read as full at an eighth of its real load and raised congestion warnings on the most expensive hardware in the game.
• A port stops showing a fault once you have dealt with the fault. A port left showing an error after its cable was pulled or replaced could stay that way indefinitely, including across a save and load. Ports in that state are now cleared when you load, while a cable that really is still faulty keeps its warning.
• Your network stopped being recalculated several times a second for no reason. Two parts of the game disagreed about whether the socket your internet line lands in was up, and rewrote each other's answer on every tick. On a large site that was a constant, pointless recount of your whole network.

Security hardware

• Deep inspection now does something for what it costs. Turning it on took a bite out of what the box could forward and gave nothing back, so the correct play was to never touch the switch. It now genuinely improves what that box stops, and only for the kinds of attack that need it looked at properly. It still costs throughput, which is the trade it was always meant to be.
• A second firewall no longer makes your connection slower than one. Racking a spare next to an existing one made the game take the smaller of the two as your limit for the whole zone, so adding redundancy cut your internet capacity, sometimes drastically. Boxes side by side now add up.
• A firewall with no power, or one plugged into nothing, no longer throttles your connection. Either state left the box still counted as a limit on everything passing through the site, while it was doing nothing at all. That produced a capped connection and dropped traffic with no visible cause anywhere.
• A recorder with no power no longer counts as running. An unpowered log recorder still satisfied the audit requirement and still slowed intruders down.
• A router in a blacked-out rack now shows as down. When a breaker tripped or a zone went dark, everything else in the rack correctly went grey while the router stayed lit up with its port lights on, in exactly the moment you were trying to work out what had failed.

Cabling

• Cabling a server straight into a router or firewall is now refused, and tells you why. The cable went in, the light at the far end went green, and the server had no network at all, with nothing anywhere saying so. Servers connect through a switch.
• A breakout cable now uses the cable you picked. Splitting a fast port into several slower ones ignored your choice and always used the cheapest, shortest-reach version, so a run you had bought the longer cable for could be refused as too long.
• A breakout cable is measured, not guessed. The length was rounded to one of four rough values instead of the run the game had just measured for you, so the quote, the length check and the amount you were charged could all disagree.
• The cable the game picks for you fits the socket. Left to choose, it could pick a cable with a connector physically too big for the port at the far end.
• Breakout cables are offered when a breakout is what you need. Connecting a fast port to a slower one is always a breakout, but the cable list for that combination hid every direct-attach and active-optical option and left only fibre, so the standard splitter cable could not be bought at all.
• Unclipping a cable actually moves the cable. Taking a clip off changed the tidy-up record and left the cable drawn through the clip you had just removed.

Ops console

• Hardware with two power supplies now shows two sockets. Several routers and firewalls have a redundant pair, and the game worked out how many sockets to draw from the power rating rather than asking the machine, so it drew one. The second inlet did not exist to plug into, which meant the redundant feed those machines exist for could not be wired.
• Racks and consoles use device names instead of internal ids. Appliances showed their model string where their name should be, and the panels that name a neighbouring device printed a number.
• The gateway console no longer says "Failover" while running active and active. A router advertising your address space uses both lines at once, and the console said otherwise.
• The attack absorption figure counts every box that does the work. It only counted dedicated scrubbing appliances, so a firewall carrying a scrubbing licence, which does the same job, was left out of the total and out of the bar.
• Two kinds of congestion warning now come with advice. They were the only ones arriving with nothing under them, and one of them could also be left showing after the hardware it named had been sold.

Notes

Save compatible in both directions. A save from v0.1.30 opens here and a save from here opens on v0.1.30.

Loading an existing save turns off the random hardware failures for you. The setting is stored inside your save, so simply changing what new games start with would have left every game already in progress still rolling. If you deliberately started a hard mode run, that keeps its own failure rates, because you asked for them.

Your bills will go up if you own security hardware, because it now costs what its shop card always said it did. Nothing about the hardware changed and nothing was taken away. If your balance was thin, this is the update to check it on.

Ports stuck showing an error from a cable you have already dealt with are cleared when you load. Cables that really are faulty keep their warning, and nothing is unplugged or moved.

Anyone who racked a second firewall for redundancy should see their internet capacity go up on loading, back to what the hardware was always capable of. Nothing was bought or changed, the limit was being worked out wrongly.

Cable tidiness is not part of this update. It is still reporting neatly routed cables as loose in places, and that is being reworked rather than patched around.

Multiplayer sessions need every player on the same version, as with v0.1.30.