Goods wear out, birthdays, and long runs stop lagging

Build 0.5.0109. The biggest demo update so far, and most of it comes from watching people play the last one.

One thing first. Someone reported that the game got slower and slower over a long run while memory stayed flat. That was real. Every store window you had ever opened was being rebuilt behind the scenes on every money change of the month tick, the journal re-sorted its whole list for each new entry, and saving and the event roll did work that grew with the length of the run. All of that is gone. A five-year run ends its month as fast as a five-month one.

Now the new things.

• Goods wear out. A phone bought in month one used to behave exactly like one bought in month sixty. Now every equipped good ages. Nothing happens for the first two years, then the odds of a break climb month by month, and by four and a half years it is certain. A break arrives as an event: repair it for 70 % of what you paid and the clock resets, or let it go and take a happiness hit. Clothes and accessories can break now too, not only phones, computers and cars. In exchange, electronics no longer bill monthly upkeep. A phone charging you 300 a month never made sense. Only vehicles still cost money to keep.
• Birthdays. Your character has a real birth date now, shown under Age on the character sheet, and the yearly age tick lands in that month. Every round-number birthday is an event: a splurge whose price and joy grow with age, from 380 at 20 to 2 550 at 90, or a quiet evening for free.
• The commerce chain. Six 12-month courses on the additional education board that change how you scout the boards instead of what you pay. Bargain Hunting 101 and Market Watch each cut the research cooldown by two months, The Classifieds Grapevine and Showroom Scouting add two cards to every board roll, The Ten-Second Rule halves research hours, and The Insider Circle takes the cooldown to zero, so you research every month. Each rung drips Cunning.
• Education rungs tell you what they are for. Hover any rung on the ladder and you get the jobs this rung unlocks, its permanent perks and the attribute it drips. The same list sits in the course's details. Until now a rung was a name and a price.
• One education application per board at a time. Two applications on one board could both be accepted, and the second came back as a rejection you never earned. Now the other cards say why they are disabled while one is pending, and the pending one keeps its Withdraw.
• Event prices follow inflation. Every event cost, reward and cash requirement scales with your run's inflation. Late in a run, paying to make a problem go away costs real money, and a late reward is not pocket change.
• New gigs gated on Creativity, Cunning and Intellect, so a design or hustle run has gigs of its own tier instead of the same errands for life.
• The event sting, the notifications and the month chime vary slightly in pitch and volume from play to play. They used to be bit-identical, and you hear them a lot.
• The condo, the cozy studio and the large house stills were re-exposed. They read milky next to the crashpad.

The fixes:

• The Pending applications block scrolls inside the rail now instead of pushing its last rows and the Collapse control past the bottom of the window.
• Detail panes got a slim scrollbar and a fade where more sits below the fold, so a pane that happens to end at a section break no longer hides its Terms.
• Values in the detail tables read in the normal font. A course's Field and Requirement shouted in ALL CAPS next to a Time value that did not.
• The housing and job offer pickers clipped the last line of a three-line offer against the row's border.

Balance changes. This is a long list because the lifetime pass measured one lever at a time, and every number is here so you can tell whether your strategy still works:

• Age drift is gentler. Health and happiness still start drifting at +1 a month at 18, but the -4 floor now lands at 48 instead of 35.
• Housing wellbeing per month, happiness / health: Condo +1/+1 → +2/+2, Small Townhouse +2/+2 → +3/+3, Sunlit Townhouse +3/+2 → +4/+3, Large House +3/+4 → +7/+8, Country Mansion +4/+5 → +12/+14, Private Island +5/+6 → +20/+24. The Crashpad and the studios are unchanged.
• T3 to T5 jobs burn less happiness: -11 / -13 / -19 → -7 / -8 / -12 a month.
• Master programmes are part-time: 40 → 25 hours a week, so a master fits next to a job.
• Free time pays again: 4 hours a day +0.5 → +1, 5 hours a day +1 → +2 happiness a month. The penalty side is unchanged.
• Retail goods give more happiness at every tier. Clothing 0.2 / 0.75 / 1.25 / 1.75 / 2.5 / 3.5 / 4.5 → 0.3 / 1 / 1.5 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5, phones and computers 0.25 / 1 / 1.5 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 → 0.5 / 1.5 / 2 / 2.5 / 3.5 / 4.5 / 5.5, accessories lifted the same way.
• Electronics upkeep is gone: phones, computers and accessories no longer bill 125 to 2 000 a month. Vehicles still do.
• Broken-down car: the repair drops from 70 % → 20 % of what you paid, and the walk-away is Sell it for a pittance: the car is gone, -3 happiness stays, and you get 30 % back.
• Leisure is priced higher: bookings are priced against a wellbeing target of 1.0 instead of 0.8, with a floor of 50, so a booking costs more per point than an entertainment subscription.

If something looks wrong, the Report a bug button in the menu goes straight to me. The lag fix at the top of this post started as one of those reports.

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