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5 days until release - 5 things to look forward to

Neongarten · published 17 Apr 2025, 10:51 UTC

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On April 22nd, Neongarten will be released! I know a lot of players have been looking forward to the new buildings and factions and seeing what crazy combos can be pulled off. Here's my top five things to look forward to in the new version.

1) New factions. The Cult of Volt and the Government factions have their own unique mechanics (or mechanical themes) that really set them apart from normal, illegal, and corporate buildings. The Cult of Volt buildings should be placed in a "chain", or orthogonally connected to another Volt building. (So it's like "neighboring" but without any diagonals allowed.) The longer the chain, the more powerful they get! They also have several buildings that power up other buildings based on lighting levels. A Government build is harder to get going - governance is rare in the dystopian future, haha - but they can provide powerful bonuses to other government buildings. One of my favorites is the Nanoeconomics lab, a 2x1 industrial building that provides a _negative_ x2 multiplier bonus to everything in the same stack. (Think on that one.)

2) New powerhouse buildings. The Hacker Shack gets all the love in the demo, but there are many more 'keystone' buildings in the full version that are worth building a strategy around. The Underground Rave, the Organ Harvester, the Corporate Incubator, and the Ministry of Profit have all powered multi-million dollar games for me.

3) New maps! The standard game has a 4 x 4 layer. 3 x 3 and 5 x 5 layers are also ready to explore. It doesn't seem like it'd be a whole lot, but it really seems to change the feel of the game - and the relative value of different buildings and powers.

4) Saving and Loading. The full version has an autosave. No longer are you forced to commit 45 minutes to a playthrough! After a game is over (win or lose), you can save your city and take a look at it later. You could even send the file for a high-scoring city to a friend for them to gawk over, and they can see exactly how you broke a billion.

5) Photo Mode. You can take screenshots of your city from a free-floating camera, watch a timelapse of your city grow from Day 1 to Day 64, and change day to night as desired.

There's going to be a lot to dig into! Stay tuned here for more updates!

Cheers,
Josh

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