Click here to see how to join the testing branch.
Please note that the hardware mechanic will not be available in older Alpha 11 saves, since they require changes to the software types, which are embedded in the save file. However, they will still load.
Major changes
This update adds conveyor belts, forcing you to plan out your logistics in more detail than just placing down some printers and some pallets. With conveyor belts comes a lot more options for how boxes travel from printer to courier. They can be routed through walls, floors and even out of a building directly to a parking lot.
Hardware manufacturing seems like a natural offshoot from conveyor belts. Hardware manufacturing currently affects how you have to approach console and phone development. You also unlock new hardware contracts with 2 business stars, and you'll receive hardware manufacturing deals whenever a competitor develops a console or phone operating system.
Employees will sadly no longer partake in majestic flights through empty elevator shafts. Elevators now require queueing and load balancing. 2 new larger elevators have been added and each of them has a display showing current floor, load and direction.
Roadmap changes
The final release of Alpha 11 has been pushed back a couple of times now. It mainly came down to the fact that the convention mechanic hasn't panned out the way I intended, when I brainstormed it. I've decided to make Alpha 11.7 the final update before I release it officially. The convention mechanic has been shelved for now in favor of the new hardware mechanic. The "updates and expansions" update is still planned and I'm still planning on making it a part of Alpha 11.
Patch notes
Alpha 11.7.32 (2021-01-30)
Fixes
- Fixed employees getting stuck eating after loading a save from before alpha 11.7.31, if they were already eating at a table
- Fixed game breaking due to employee missing food while in eating state when loading old save game
- Fixed not being able to rotate a group of furniture if center furniture can't rotate on its own
- Fixed parking spot prioritization for security staff
- Fixed acoustic foam sticking through roof
- Fixed custom height furniture not being placed exactly where mouse is
Alpha 11.7.31 (2021-01-30)
Changes
- Added eating animation and a "fork"
- Added ability for employees to eat in couches, by their PC or just standing around
- Vending machines and mini fridges now output food objects that employees have to eat before their hunger is satiated
- Improved look of conveyor belts at 90 degree angles
- Employees will now pick subway over bus, if it's closer
Fixes
- Fixed modded furniture sometimes combusting on load
- Fixed already broken furniture sometimes causing fire on load
- Fixed noise overlay sometimes not updating in real-time
Alpha 11.7.30 (2021-01-27)
Changes
- Limited which UI sound effects are affected by reverb in a room
- Added new reward
Fixes
- Fixed chance of employee getting stuck when trying to flee outside while already outside
- Fixed game showing error dialog when a code mod fails to compile
- Fixed issues with injection of error handling code into code mods when methods contain yield and control statements
Alpha 11.7.29 (2021-01-26)
Changes
- Added proper code mod error handling
- Added ability to place some wall hung furniture at custom heights
- Added room acoustics with reverb sound effect, which affects noise propagation, and effectiveness of meetings and social interactions
- Added new reward for releasing software
Fixes
- Helicopter now subtracts money instead of adding
- Fixed headphones loading in at the wrong position if worn by an employee
- Fixed having to pay for a subsidiary's patents and frameworks
Alpha 11.7.28 (2021-01-21)
Changes
- Game now caches shadows from in-world lights, making it possible to play with "More shadows" on non-super computers, but moving objects no longer cast shadows inside rooms
- Upgraded the manufacturing panel with scrolling conveyor belt graphic and printer/assembly color indications
- Increased price of helicopters to $6500 per pickup
- Quadrupled market recognition gain
- Component printers can now be limited to specific print jobs
- Project info window now lists active publishing tasks
- Added warning when manufacturing process doesn't end with recycler
- Added 12 month cooldown on the fan loss warning
- Replaced Phone and Console tech lag with hard unlocks, to avoid making it seem like hardware research didn't work
Fixes
- Fixed console history not actually being saved
- Fixed possible save corruption from moving company with furniture in inventory
- Fixed context menu going behind UI in Linux with UI anti-aliasing off
- Fixed toilet censor rendering no matter which floor is being viewed
Alpha 11.7.27 (2021-01-12)
Changes
- Added helipad for transporting boxes quickly
- Added helipad to Hardware Inc starting map
- Added subway to city maps (Requires moving company to spawn one in old saves)
- Added matted windows for toilet privacy
- Ability to select objects from the floor above if they span 2 floors
- Doubled market recognition gain
- Added HDR dithering to remove banding
- Project management will now fast track projects whenever a phase finishes before time, to avoid long beta phases
- Changed how project management prototypes are selected to allow for removing prototypes
- Optimization work on employee position updates and furniture LODing
Fixes
- Product storage count was wrong after undoing destroying pallets
- Fixed post-tasks sticking around in project management panel after selling IP
- Fixed HR not taking role assignment into account when picking specializations for education and new hires
- Fixed wall generation breaking when windows or doors are overlapping
- Cooks will wait for a bit after their shift has begun to start complaining about the availability of stoves
- Employees will no longer walk across the map for toilets, coffee, food, loitering, etc.
Alpha 11.7.26 (2020-12-30)
Changes
- Added panel to view current project management handled support and marketing tasks
Fixes
- Fixed employees not being able to reach computers in some cases
Alpha 11.7.25 (2020-12-28)
Changes
- Updated pallet drop point tutorial animation to show a more optimal setup
- Added automation log to keep track of HR and project management
- Random optimizations
Fixes
- Replacing furniture will now use inventory
- Fixed cases of furniture overlapping after replacement
- Game now correctly considers inventory when calculating price of placing furniture
- Fixed not getting inventory back, and windows and doors sometimes being doubled when undoing placing blueprint
- Fixed floating point precision error in room binary space partitioning causing interaction points to be offset incorrectly sometimes
Alpha 11.7.24 (2020-12-22)
Fixes
- Fixed modded furniture not being reachable when placed up against wall in certain cases
- Fixed cases of furniture not being reachable due to floating point precision errors in the nav mesh
- Fixed error when burglar was caught by police without any stolen goods
- Fixed every active print job acting as a multiplier for each product printer's cost and degradation
- Fixed employees' feet clipping through sidewalk
- Fixed being able to place medium printer through ceiling mounted conveyor belts
Alpha 11.7.23 (2020-12-21)
Changes
- Added furniture inventory
- Police will return 75% of stolen furniture to player's inventory when arresting burglar
- Contents insurance now covers half of building damage
- Secondary roles are now included in consideration of whether a team has adequate specializations for a job
- Merry happy!
Fixes
- Fixed top of walls rendering through doors and windows when walls are lowered
Alpha 11.7.22 (2020-12-18) Fixes modded furniture not being reachable
Alpha 11.7.21 (2020-12-18)
Changes
- Rooms can now be selected by clicking on their walls
- Greatly lowered fans needed for higher market recognition
Fixes
- Fixed total shares for a company overflowing uint32 by rebalancing shares when they get below $25
- Fixed assemblers breaking too fast
- Fixed cases of hardware components not being counted correctly, causing print jobs to not finish
- Added FIX_COMPONENT_COUNT console command to fix previous saves with stalled hardware print jobs (Shouldn't be necessary for jobs started after this version)
- Fixed security staff ignoring room assignment when looking for desks
- The game will now try to move interaction points around a tiny bit to avoid some cases of unreachable furniture
- Fixed warning message position when UI is scaled
- Fixed entire map being counted as an unreachable room with an error message at the map origin
Alpha 11.7.20 (2020-12-10)
Changes
- HR specialization filter now lists all specializations, to avoid having to remove them as new ones become available
Fixes
- Fixed employees not being able to pathfind outside, causing them to get stuck in elevated parking garages
- Fixed another bug in team assignment algorithm causing it to never terminate
Alpha 11.7.19 (2020-12-08)
Changes
- Added yearly fire inspections with fines and insurance validation
- Lowered fans needed for more market recognition
- Added flammability data overlay
- Improved detection of inaccessible rooms based on obstacles and elevated error message
Fixes
- Fixed bug in elevator load balancing
Alpha 11.7.18 (2020-12-05)
Changes
- Increased fan gain chance per sale
- Capped how long a room can be on fire for and increase rate of spread to reduce overall time
- Sprinklers now protect furniture below them from being destroyed during a fire, but will break electronics that are on
- Improved dot, indexing and negation parsing in SIPL
Fixes
- Fixed game breaking on extremely underpowered graphics cards, instead of just being slow
- Fixed bug in team assignment algorithm causing it to never terminate and create stuttering during thread locks
- Various other fixes
Alpha 11.7.17 (2020-11-28) Fixes game breaking when running some feature scripts after loading game
Alpha 11.7.16 (2020-11-28)
Changes
- Added shortcut to filter employees by next class column, to only show employees with education available
- Added type checking to SIPL to avoid loading mods with obvious script errors, instead of them failing mid game
- Added support for indexing into non-variables in SIPL
Fixes
- Fixed team assignment algorithm not correctly allowing teams in rooms that are available due to room pass through
Alpha 11.7.15 (2020-11-27)
Changes
- Changed how fans are summed in UI so it no longer looks stuck
- Improved market recognition dropdown
- Increased traffic density based on environment type and time of day
- Added talent pool, plot, utilities and ISP cost modifiers to environment type
- Enabling "pass through" on a room now allows any traffic and is disabled by default
- Removed green team labels for when game inferred team assignment from surrounding rooms
- Reduced debuff from incompatible co-workers a tiny bit
Fixes
- Fixed some instances of game incorrectly complaining about rooms in or around other rooms while building
Alpha 11.7.14 (2020-11-23) Fixes not being able to load saves with printers or assemblers
Alpha 11.7.13 (2020-11-23)
Changes
- Improved chart highlighting
Fixes
- Auto-complete room has been mapped to a button, to avoid clash with pillar creation
- Fixed inconsequential bugs from room team assignment algorithm
- Undoing destroying printers or assemblers didn't refresh their output sticker
Alpha 11.7.12 (2020-11-22)
Changes
- Overhauled market recognition to be more consistent
- Added back simulation of fan loss over time
- Made it easier to gain market recognition intially, depending on profitability of software
- Put keyboard shortcuts on screen when building
- The game will now infer actual room assigment and warn player if there are issues, leading to less lag from pathfinding
- Added meeting status to team window
- Added ability to create pillars by holding Ctrl. Basically rooms without interiors
- Added option to change medium speed multiplier
- Added Teams data overlay to visualize which teams are allowed where
- Added LOAD_FROM_LOCALIZOR console command to download unfinished translations from Localizor.com
- Improved grass and cloud shaders
- The "More shadows" graphics option is now disabled by default in all quality settings
Alpha 11.7.11 (2020-11-12)
Changes
- Component assemblers will now stop accepting input when they are outputting finished assemblies, to clear out after a conveyor back up
- Server electricity use now depends on actual usage
- Adjusted server wattage to balance out watt per MB between servers
- Added ability to bind key to move furniture, default M
- Improved table group prioritization for meetings
- Improved data overlay
Fixes
- Fixed employee data overlays not working when zoomed out
- Fixed game breaking when undoing replacing furniture with furniture that had multiple layers of snapped furniture
- Fixed bottom most tasks sometimes not updating if task panel was full
- Fixed roof dissapearing when room had stairs and wasn't fully covered by room above
Alpha 11.7.10 (2020-11-04)
Changes
- Improved data overlay
- Disabled publisher printing deals for hardware products
Fixes
- Fixed deadlock that had chance to crash game when a print job finished
- Fixed conveyor splitters not updating routing when changing assembler output
- Fixed couriers not prioritizing garage ports in rooms player actually owns or has rented
- Fixed invisible room floors when using garage ports and opaque windows
Alpha 11.7.9 (2020-10-29)
Changes
- Conveyor Splitters will now auto-route components to the right assemblers
- Added conveyor belt flow visualization when placing conveyor objects
- Updated Unity version
Fixes
- Fixed game crashing when loading a game with texture resolution set to low using DirectX
- Fixed floating point bug in sub-market comparison that could tank market recognition, among other issues
- Fixed hardware component icons not showing up on boxes after last patch
- Fixed issue where product boxes would get stuck at garage port because they were empty
- Various other fixes
Alpha 11.7.8 (2020-10-25)
Changes
- Added randomization to staff parking prioritization so they don't always park at the same building
- Made couriers prefer garage ports over pallets when choosing parking spots
- Made manufacturing limits work like product printing limits, by not taking current stock into account
- Added extra check to assembler to make sure old manufacturing jobs didn't get locked up by new jobs
- Made assemblers clear out any lingering components from cancelled jobs
Fixes
- Fixed bug where manufacturing process could get stuck because components were assembled in an order where they wouldn't fit together
- Fixed bug where headphones worn by founder would stick around after quitting game and starting a new one
- Fixed freezing bug from potential deadlock in component machine code when turning on and off
Alpha 11.7.7 (2020-10-24)
Changes
- Sped up conveyor belts by 25%, and improved assembler logic and effectiveness calculation
- Increased fridge capacity and added warning when all are empty
- Made it so conveyor belts don't have to line up exactly to connect
Fixes
- Possible fix for some DirectX + GeForce related crashes
- Fixed not being able to do alpha reviews for hardware products
- Fixed marketing and price warnings being disabled at some point in the past
Alpha 11.7.6 (2020-10-18)
Changes
- Manufacturing contracts now pay out on delivery rather than at end of day
- Halved penalty on manufacturing contracts
- Improved component assembler logic for a tiny speed boost
- Capped complaint demands to 25% of current salary
Fixes
- Fixed employees complaining about having to pee while going to meetings
- Put software category tech lag in tooltips, so Console and Phone won't have wrong unlock year for 3D and Network in UI
- Various other fixes
Alpha 11.7.5 (2020-10-16)
Changes
- Added effectiveness stat to printers and assemblers, which is reflected in the manufacturing overlay
Fixes
- Fixed not being able to change screen resolution on some computers
- Fixed game breaking when starting press release without any selected teams with employees
- Fixed reward count being stuck with unclaimed rewards and permanent unlocks enabled
Alpha 11.7.4 (2020-10-15)
Changes
- Made specialization panel in new game screen scale with screen width
- Added progress bars to press releases and warning for missing specialization levels
- Added manufacturing contract warning
- You can now cancel manufacturing contracts with no penalties if you haven't started printing yet
- Removed screen refresh rate options, as they aren't used in windowed fullscreen mode
- The penalty from raising the price of a product now slowly decays over a year
Fixes
- Fixed couriers not prioritizing garage ports correctly
- Fixed box elevator not being valid in basement
- Fixed employees getting stuck in other teams' bathrooms and complaining about a lack of seating after the sink was added
- Fixed bugged human color mapping, causing all-blue staff members
- Fixed publishing deal not resetting when changing software type or category
- Fixed Employees tutorial
- Fixed employees getting stuck in parking structures after panicking over burglars
- Various other fixes
Alpha 11.7.3 (2020-10-12)
Fixed boxes and printers not being simulated when skipping time
Alpha 11.7.2 (2020-10-12)
Fixes
- Fixed contracts not refreshing on pre-alpha 11.7 saves
- Fixed game breaking when trying to pick component outputs on pre-alpha 11.7 saves
- Fixed game breaking due to AI changes in couriers being incompatble with pre-alpha 11.7 saves
- Fixed instances of boxes getting stuck
Alpha 11.7.1 (2020-10-12)
Changes
- Added hardware toggle for software categories, making them physical distribution only and altering their sales simulation
- Added hardware manufacturing, allowing players to print products from components using a series of printers and assemblers
- Added hardware contracts and made contract generation algorithm pick more varied contracts
- Boxes now have to be transported using conveyor belts
- Elevators are now simulated with limited capacity and load balancing
- Added security desk to micro manage security staff locations
- Employees' work timer no longer starts until they have walked into the office, and they offset their arrival time by how long their commute takes
- Default room style has changed to drywall and concrete floors to encourage player customization
- Overhauled look of UI
- Heavily increased payout from bigger contracts
- Updated default rent buildings and added a new building for hardware manufacturing
- Added TOGGLE_SPEC_CAP console command
Fixes
- Fixed bug causing software with categories overriden in mods to always be priced at 0, making the AI bankrupt constantly
- Fixed not being able to override name generator when modding existing software with no categories
- Fixed bug where bus could get stuck waiting all day for employee that didn't plan on using it
- Fixed bug in path calculation causing employees to lose several meters every day when playing at max speed
- Fixed snapped furniture not always getting corrected to avoid wall clipping, causing PCs to not line up with chairs
- Fixed being able to pick software features unsupported by any OS, as long as OSs had already been selected
- Fixed subsidiary price adding player stock worth twice, making it almost twice as expensive as intended
- Various other fixes
Graphics
- Old Computer
- 90s Computer
- Laptop
- Modern Computer
- Elevators
- Product printers