*Filed by the Operator's Office. Retain for your records. Do not eat.*
You talked. We listened. Mostly we listened to the part where the population starved to death in ninety seconds and nobody could tell why, which — fair.
1.1.1 is a **tuning patch**. The systems you liked are still here; the ones that were quietly lying to you have been taken out back and explained to. The single biggest change is that happiness is no longer a mysterious number drifting toward a target only the source code knew about. It is now a **rate you can read, predict, and blame someone for.**
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## The big one: happiness by reserve band
Happiness used to ease toward a hidden "satisfaction score" per resource. It was mathematically defensible and completely unplayable. Gone.
Now each consumer resource looks at its **reserve fulfillment** (what's in the warehouse ÷ the stock target) and contributes a flat rate:
| Reserve fulfillment | Contribution |
| --- | --- |
| Below 25% (CRITICAL) | −2 every 4 seconds |
| 25% – under 50% (LOW) | −1 every 3 seconds |
| 50% – under 70% (SHORT) | −0.5 every 3.5 seconds |
| 70% – 90% (ADEQUATE) | Stable |
| Above 90% – 100% (SATISFIED) | +1 every 3 seconds |
| Above 100% (SURPLUS) | +2 every 5 seconds |
Things worth internalising:
- **70–90% holds what you have. Above 90% earns it back.** You do not need abundance. You need a boring, reliable buffer, like a functioning adult.
- **Contributions are averaged.** Translating your eleventh resource no longer makes the happiness bar swing harder. Discovery is no longer a punishment.
- **Rates accumulate continuously.** Sliding between bands can't reset a penalty timer, so no more frame-perfect warehouse micro-management.
- From cycle 10, factions apply **their own resource weights**, normalized — and the tooltips, resource cards and ledger now all read from the *same* normalized weights the simulation uses. Previously some screens used the raw config values and confidently disagreed with each other.
## Essential resources
Five resources are now flagged **ESSENTIAL**: Nutrition Packs, Metal Ore, Liquid Fuel, Industrial Coolant, and Atmospheric Freighters (which arrives around cycle 15 as a mid-game gut-check).
A shortage in an essential **forces overall happiness down**, regardless of how many Holo-Viewers you've stockpiled. You cannot buy your way out of a food shortage with entertainment. We tried. The Orthodoxy sent a permit.
Only the **worst** essential shortage applies, once, after averaging — several simultaneous shortages don't multiply into an instant loss. It also applies when a faction is already at zero, so nobody gets to hide behind a floor. The report attributes the extra loss to the specific essential that caused it, by name, so you know exactly which warehouse to be angry at.
## Pacing
- **Cycle 1 now runs 95 seconds** (up from 75). Phase 0 was the shortest clock in the game during the exact cycles where you understand the least. That was a choice. It has been un-chosen.
- **Automatic demand growth is now zero** (was +4% compounding per cycle). Your demand curve is driven by population and events, not by an invisible tax on continuing to exist. Late game was previously racing a treadmill you couldn't see.
- There is still no pause button. Pacing is a design problem, not a UI problem, so the pacing got fixed instead. (ESC does open the menu now — see below.)
---
## New: MARKET ANALYSIS
Under **FULL LEDGER → MARKET ANALYSIS**. Feedback said the supply/demand picture was scattered across sixteen separate resource pages, which is technically a puzzle but not a fun one.
- A large **price chart** for the selected resource, with axes, gridlines and cycle-boundary markers.
- A **sparkline card per resource** below it — click to chart.
- Live readouts: stock, demand, fulfilment, produced/cycle, consumed/cycle, net supply.
- Prices sample on the drift tick, so the chart **moves while you watch it**, with a visible step where each cycle's reprice lands.
- The chart plots the **effective sell price** — what you actually trade at — so an active price modifier moves the graph instead of contradicting the number printed directly above it.
Saves made in 1.0 never recorded a series, so their graphs start empty and fill from the cycle you load into. Nothing is lost that ever existed.
---
## Quality of life
- **ESC opens the pause menu.** Previously ESC only *closed* it, which required you to already have it open, which required a mouse, which rather defeated the purpose. It also no longer reopens itself on the same keypress that closed it.
- **Audio options say what they do.** "AUDIO BROADCAST" and "SYSTEM ALERTS" are now **MASTER / MUSIC / SFX VOLUME**. The music slider was always there. It was just wearing a disguise.
- **Settings persist.** Volumes, CRT effect and window mode now save to `settings.cfg` and come back on launch. Every previous session cheerfully reset your volume to 80% and switched the CRT back on. Windowed mode is applied at startup too, rather than after you fix it manually. Again.
- **25M quantity row** added to buy/sell popouts, for players whose economies had outgrown clicking "10M" five times.
- **Resource cards show net flow** (`net: +/−X/s`) instead of demand alone, with output, population draw and facility draw broken out in the tooltip.
- **"Estimated empty in X seconds"** on resource cards and detail popups, so a drain is visible before it becomes a eulogy. (The estimate excludes future deliveries, trades, spoilage and demand changes — it's a warning light, not a prophecy.)
- **The happiness trend arrow now shows the actual rate** (`↑ +0.42 /s`) instead of an arrow that flickered back to "steady" every five seconds. Its tooltip lists every resource's band, percentage and per-second contribution, plus any active essential shortage.
- **Resource detail popup** gained Happiness Band, Band Contribution, Event Factor, Stock Reserve / time-to-empty, and an ESSENTIAL notice. "Effective Demand" is now called **Stock Target**, because that's what it is.
- **Cycle report** gained a "Facilities / events / other" line, so net change actually reconciles instead of looking like an accounting error.
- Ledger: "Total Trade Profit" is now **Total Trade Income**, and the history column is **SALES** — it was always gross revenue, never profit, and calling it profit was flattering to everyone involved.
- Rusty's happiness memo has been rewritten to explain the band system in plain language, including the essentials rule and the tax consequences of misery.
---
## Fixes
**Deliveries**
- Delivery batches now run on **simulation time**, not the wall clock. Leaving a cycle report or story popup open used to burn the entire delivery window, so every batch landed at once the moment you dismissed it. Your staged drip is a drip again.
- The **delivery queue is now saved**. It was previously not saved at all, so in-flight cargo evaporated on save/load. Sorry about that.
- Purchased quantities are conserved exactly, and batches can no longer be negative, zero, or more numerous than the units being delivered.
Hope you guys appreciate the changes made after a gruesome 16 hour working day to bring you the experience that we always wanted to share in the first place!
The Baseless Assumption Studio