v0.1.38 (Early Access)

Datacenters run smoother while you walk and after you load, and a frozen control plane recovers on its own. Incidents count every kind of customer now, not only the ones running virtual machines, and several money readouts have been corrected.

Changed

• Rack side holes and roof cutouts hold a limited number of cables. Both took any number through one opening. A full one now refuses and names itself, so run that cable through another.

Fixed

Incidents

• A failed server now names every customer it took down. Customers running storage, CDN, load balancers or functions read as unaffected, so the alert said nobody was hit and no reputation was lost.
• A crowded server with no virtual machines now raises an alert. It throttled everyone on the box silently, and could never raise one again.
• Run-rate at risk counts what an outage could cost you. It counted what stricken customers still earned, so it fell as the outage spread and hit zero at total failure.
• A total outage no longer ranks below a partial one. A fully down customer worth $4,500 an hour was graded the least severe band in the game, because severity keys on that same figure.

Customers

• Kubernetes customers on redundant plans can grow again. Their clusters read as half built forever, so growth requests were refused before they were ever made.
• A storage customer's growth request no longer says virtual machines. The card read "+5 VMs" for a customer running none, while their own message correctly said storage.
• Growth ceilings show on every customer, in their own units. A storage customer read "grows to 12 VMs" while owning none, and prospect cards hid the line entirely.

Money

• A spend cap reads as the amount you set. A ten dollar cap was shown as ten million dollars when a customer hit it.
• Gateway add-ons quote the price you are charged. The console used the wrong month length and ignored difficulty, so on hard it showed half the real cost.
• Hardware stops depreciating once it is written off. A $12,000 server charged $333 a month forever, so it had cost $24,000 on paper by its sixth year.
• CDN quotes match the CDN bill. Compression cut the bill but not the quote, so a CDN customer was quoted about a quarter more than they were charged.
• Kubernetes quotes follow your pod density setting. The quote assumed the default, so a sparse cluster was under-quoted by 39% and a dense one over-quoted by 20%.
• Functions quotes include reserved capacity. Gold and Platinum tiers reserve warm capacity and are billed for it, but were quoted as if they were not, 10% and 20% low.
• Content delivery pays for the bandwidth it uses. Only cache misses were charged upstream transit, so a well cached site looked almost free to run. CDN margins are materially lower.
• Security appliances appear in your running costs. Their monthly fees and licences were charged but missing from the burn rate and runway, by up to $22,000 a month on the largest.
• Unattributed costs can no longer be negative. Upstream bandwidth was counted against customers but left out of the total, so the leftover figure went below zero for anyone moving real traffic.
• Bandwidth is a real line in your running costs. Finance showed egress as a trailing average, so your burn and your customer costs disagreed by exactly that amount.

Performance

• Cables stop being redrawn about once a second while you play. A background refresh was undoing the cable work from the last two releases, so the stutter came back.
• Crossing a room boundary no longer rebuilds every cable. Walking past the point where distant racks load in was enough to redraw the whole room's cabling.
• The engine stops building a copy of the world nobody reads. It did this every second whether or not anything was connected to the local data feed.
• Loading a save no longer misdraws cables for a moment. Removed cables lingered, and a cable waiting on its machine was redrawn a beat late.
• A quiet world stops repainting every machine. Each update redrew the whole fleet instead of nothing, the opposite of what was intended.
• Standing still is quieter again. Server lights, heat glow and rack labels were recalculated four times a second whether or not anything changed.

Services

• An overloaded control plane moves to a machine that can hold it. It stayed on the machine it had outgrown whatever you bought, so provisioning stayed frozen until you cordoned the host.
• The overload message no longer tells you to add replicas. Each replica carries the same load. It now says to rack a bigger machine, and the control plane moves there itself.
• You can move a control plane off a machine. The platform row in a server's Workloads tab had no action, so the only way was to drain the whole machine.

Cabling

• A cable passing straight through a rack stops diving into its manager. It goes in one side panel and out the other, never touching the manager, but a full vertical run was drawn anyway.
• Cables through a rack opening no longer overlap each other. Every cable crossing a side hole or roof cutout ran through the exact same point, so a bundle drew as one tube clipping the panel.
• A full cable finger says when it moves your anchor. Past the per-band limit the anchor slid to the whole strip silently, so the cable ran somewhere you had not put it.

Operations

• Memory and storage capacity weight by machine size. The fleet bars averaged percentages instead of weighting them, so on mixed hardware the figure matched neither the customer panels nor the API.
• Alarms no longer move the page under your cursor. The alarm strip resized the whole console as incidents opened, closed and were dismissed.
• Network map rings and load bars update again. Saturation and load readings froze until you next changed the cabling.
• Renaming a device updates it on the network map. The map kept the old name until you next laid or pulled a cable.
• Charts stop streaming data for pages you are not looking at. Two ran from the moment the game loaded, whether or not you ever opened Operations.
• Board tabs show which one is open. Clicking a second leaderboard left both looking unselected.

Multiplayer

• A machine somebody else is carrying stays in their hands. Everyone saw it in their own, and their pick-up key claimed they were already holding something until the carrier let go.

World

• Loading a save fills the racks. Racks could come back empty and stay empty until you racked, unracked or plugged something, which was the only thing that made the hardware appear.
• An unpowered rack is silent. Dark racks hummed, louder than running ones, with their fans visibly still.
• Powering a rack on changes what you hear. The ambient noise did not react to a rack coming up at all.
• Walking through a door draws the whole room. Only a handful of machines were given their lights and cables, leaving the rest as bare chassis.
• Adding or removing a rack in a row redraws that row's cables. They kept their old paths until you laid or pulled a cable.
• Server lights follow the rack view again. Pinning or unpinning a rack left the lights on the previous brightness profile.
• Heat glow appears on switches and appliances. Devices without indicator lights never showed a heat halo, or cleared one, until you moved.
• Network traffic readings are no longer slightly low. Incoming traffic was rounded down every time it was sampled, understating small workloads by up to a quarter.

Notes

• Saves work in both directions with v0.1.37. Nothing in the save format changed.
• Multiplayer needs everyone on v0.1.38. Moving a control plane off a host is a new instruction a v0.1.37 host does not understand. The world update format itself did not change.
• A stuck control plane frees itself on load. If a machine big enough is already racked, the control plane moves to it the first time you load, and provisioning unfreezes.
• Older hardware stops depreciating on load. Anything already past its write-off period leaves your monthly costs the next time you load, so running costs fall.
• The local API pauses publishing when nothing is reading it. meta.age_ms and uptime_mirror_age_seconds read higher on the first request after an idle minute, then settle to the usual cadence.
• Cost totals in the local API now include upstream transit and appliance fees. total_cost_dollars rises to match, and unattributed_cost_dollars can no longer be negative.
• CostRatesView gained transit_egress_dollars. It defaults to zero for older clients, but total_dollars now includes it, so the monthly burn reads higher. It was under-reporting before.
• revenue_at_risk_per_hour_dollars changed meaning. It reports what an outage could cost you rather than what the stricken customers were still earning, so it no longer falls as one spreads.
• CDN quote lines report compressed kilobytes. The kb_each factor on both CDN egress lines is now the post-compression figure, matching what is billed.