Stability Improves and Hedge Fund Beta

Introducing Hedge Fund Mode — a New Endgame Career (Opt-In Beta)

You've beaten the market with your own money. Hedge Fund mode asks a harder question: can you do it with someone else's?

This is the new endgame career we've been building: launch a fund, raise outside capital, build a research team, run long and short books, collect fees, keep your investors from bolting — and, if you've got the stomach for it, drag a company's board into a fight it didn't ask for. It's live now as an opt-in beta on the hedgefund branch.

OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY

At minimum: you put up $2 million of your own; the Mara Voss Family Office seeds you with $8 million more. Mara is not a passive line item — she has a mandate, a leverage ceiling, and a loyalty meter, and if you disappoint her she takes most of your fund home. You get paid the classic "2 and 20," with a real high-water mark: after a losing stretch, investors don't pay you again for climbing back to where they already were.

NOT A TRADING CLICKER

You don't micromanage every share. Research companies (reports are noisy estimates, not foreknowledge), assign conviction to the ideas you believe in, and the desk trades toward your targets each month through real liquidity — big orders slip and partial-fill. A manual order ticket exists when you want to move now, but conviction decides where the book ends up.

Your fund levels up through five tiers of Desk Mastery, and the unlocks are the career: you start long-only at 1.0x leverage and earn your way to shorts, quants, fee strategy, and eventually prime brokerage at 3.0x. Your researchers are people with names, specialties, and ethics — and payroll is a real constraint.

WAYS TO LOSE

Drawdowns trigger redemptions; redemptions force selling; a shrinking fund can't carry its staff. That death spiral is fully modeled: hit zero NAV and you're insolvent, or bleed below the viability floor and get wound down. Use leverage you can survive.

Insider tips and planted rumors work, too. They also build Scrutiny, roll an immediate discovery chance, and are autosaved the moment you commit — reloading won't reroll it. Push it far enough and the SEC comes: disgorgement, a management ban, possibly prison. High upside, catastrophic tail.

And once you own a big enough stake in a company, go activist: four stages of pressure in the War Room ending in settlement or a proxy fight — and a real share buyback that changes the target's cash, share count, and valuation.

HOW TO OPT IN

1. Right-click the game in your Steam library → Properties

2. Open the Betas tab

3. Enter the access code: EnableHedgeFund

4. Select the hedgefund branch and let Steam update

The Hedge Fund icon then appears on your in-game computer. The built-in Fund Manual and Guide Me will walk you through your first fund.

Fair warning: this mode is deep, and not yet well tested — that's why it's opt-in. Expect bugs and please report them. Also, we acknowledge it might have too many 'walls of text' as well as it can be quite nagging. It is a work in progress. Finally: once a save has a fund, it keeps it. Switching back to the regular branch still loads the save and the fund keeps running — you just can't start a new one there. Want a guaranteed-stable playthrough? Keep it fund-free and try the beta on a separate save.

We built this because "get rich" stops being interesting once you're rich. Managing other people's money — with mandates, redemptions, and regulators — is a different game. Let us know what you think of this feature and we'll update it accordingly!

STABILITY & ECONOMY UPDATE

We've pushed a steady stream of builds over the past month without properly writing them up. This is the full accounting of everything that's shipped since the start of July: the crash we'd been chasing for weeks is found and fixed, a set of money exploits is closed (including one that was posted publicly), and the game's seven languages went from patchy to largely complete.

Thank you to everyone who sent a crash report or an email. Several fixes below exist because a player described exactly what they did before it broke.

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CRASHES — CAUSE FOUND

For a while we suspected the recurring crash-to-desktop was a graphics-hardware problem. It wasn't. It was our popup windows: the game could destroy a window while the engine still held a reference to it, and the next frame took down the whole process. We've rebuilt how popups work and hunted that pattern out of every screen.

• Hotels tab crash on second open: a player emailed a reproducible report — including a correct diagnosis of the deletion order — and that cracked the case. Fixed there, then everywhere: every popup in the game now releases keyboard focus before closing, so the whole crash class is gone.

• The silent hotel death: a separate bug — a layout feedback loop that only triggered when a new listing changed the screen's dimensions, which is why it seemed random. Fixed at every affected screen: Real Estate thumbnails, the Company and Rocket dashboards, the stadium banner, college cards, and more.

• Turn stacking: advancing the month repeatedly could pile turns on top of each other until the game died. There's now a proper guard.

• Worker-scandal headlines could crash on certain random combinations. Fixed.

• The Media Company screens, Estate Tax, and the end-game sequence no longer use the old window system responsible for popups closing instantly or becoming impossible to dismiss.

• Crash reports now stamp the exact build you were running, so a report tells us precisely which code crashed. If the game dies on you, please keep sending them — they're read, and they work.

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ECONOMY — EXPLOITS CLOSED

We audited the money systems end to end. Some of these were being farmed deliberately; others were quietly wrong for everyone.

• The December save-reload tax trick: reloading a save wiped the year's tax tally. Worth stating plainly — this wasn't just an exploit. Yearly tax totals weren't being saved at all, so every save and reload under-taxed you, whether you meant it or not. Fixed. Existing saves load normally.

• CEO Borrow was a money printer: borrowing was uncapped, and Owner Payout created net worth out of thin air. Borrowing now caps at 3x annual earnings, and payouts move money instead of minting it.

• The stock-split price floor: splitting your own company's stock collapsed the price, then market price floors re-inflated it to $1 while you kept the multiplied share count. The once-per-year split cooldown also turned out to be dead code that never ran. Both fixed.

• Art auctions could re-list pieces you already owned; winning one again duplicated it for double net worth.

• Franchise milestone bonuses were re-paid every time you loaded a save.

• Mortgaged apartment complexes escaped capital-gains tax when sold.

• IPO ticker collisions: taking a company public under a name matching an existing ticker silently overwrote that stock — including any shares you personally held in it.

• Selling a company is now fair in both directions: corporate debt no longer evaporates in the sale (the buyer settles it out of the price), and you're no longer taxed on your own returned capital.

• Estate liquidation reports the cash actually received after the sale moves the market, not the paper value before it.

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SOFTLOCKS AND DEAD ENDS

• The prison tax freeze: an unpayable year-end tax bill while incarcerated froze the turn — and your sentence — forever. There's now an escalation path: pay, defer, take a loan, or get put on a forced IRS payment plan. You always have a way forward.

• Infinite window stacking: keyboard focus never entered popups, so you could Tab to the button underneath one and mash Enter to spawn endless copies. Focus is now trapped inside the popup, cycles within it, and returns to where you were when it closes.

• "I clicked Buy and nothing happened": re-purchasing the Gents franchise after selling it silently refused. It now tells you why and points you at the buyback screen.

• Turn advancement under open decisions: the month could tick forward underneath an open decision popup, which then acted on stale information. Advancement is now blocked while a decision is up.

• Prison and dating popups got a dedicated round of fixes — trial prison assignment and popup turn-blocking among them.

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GETTING PAID

Two ways the game quietly stopped paying you, both fixed:

• Deferring year-end taxes to April cost you April's paycheck. The tax check ran before the pay code and returned early. It now runs after you're paid.

• Pay Max sometimes left a few dollars of debt behind. It now clears everything you can afford and tells you exactly how much it paid.

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LOCALIZATION

The game ships in seven languages — English, German, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Japanese — but too much text was still falling back to English. Two big sweeps later, that debt is largely paid off.

• Well over a thousand strings translated across all seven languages: the CEO dashboard, court dialogue, property descriptions, menus, HUD, and more.

• The empty-box problem in Chinese and Japanese is fixed at the source. Text no longer depends on your system fonts to render.

• German got a native-quality pass: consistent formal address across the management screens, plus grammar, comma, and number-format corrections (0.5% → 0,5%).

• Cross-language saves fixed: a save created in one language no longer breaks when loaded in another.

• In Chinese and Japanese, student-loan messages had the amount and the school name swapped. Un-swapped.

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INTERFACE

• Every dialog now lives inside the game window. The Rocket, Sports, Media, Franchise, and Company dashboards, the Main Menu's Continue / Load / Victory Hall screens, the court system, the prison phone, and event popups have all moved off the old separate-window system. Consistent styling, and no more popups opening behind the game or refusing to close.

• Your North Star goal displays correctly. The victory bar and HUD were stuck on "Net Worth" after character creation no matter what you picked.

• The Foundation bar now tells the truth. Players donated billions and watched the bar sit still — it tracks your pledge (by design), but the label implied program output. It's now labeled honestly, and a new line shows what your programs actually delivered this month and lifetime.

• "Total Debt" is now "Total Loans" on the bank screen, since the figure only counts personal and student loans.

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GAMEPLAY

• Hotel buying and Aurora Ledgers are back. Both were locked down during the Summer Sale while we chased the crash. The cause is found and fixed (see above), so hotel acquisitions and the real-estate tax shelter are open again.

• College applications are a true one-shot. Applying locks in your acceptance and scholarship offer — no more reloading for a better roll. "Decide Later" keeps that same offer waiting.

• Starting a company while employed no longer throws a false "not enough hours" warning or resets your child-time sliders. The schedule check runs before you're asked to quit your job.

• The bank cuts you off after three emergency rescues without turning a profit.

• Spouse vacations show their price — $10,000 and 25 hours — before you commit. The button disables when you can't afford it, and it only says "wonderful vacation!" if the trip actually happened.

• A star player's contract tantrum could crater a franchise with thousands of prestige down to 100. It now subtracts what it should and nothing more.

That's the past month. Keep the reports coming — the crash reporter now stamps your exact build, and player reports drove most of this list.