Build 26362728

Nodes has always been about one long, calm climb: build the rig, clear the wall, commit the breach. This update gives that climb something to do between breaches, adds a new card for the players who want every last unit out of a wire, and makes the whole game faster, from your first rig to your biggest.

Rig events

Every so often, someone on the other end of the Mailer wants something from your rig. A contract lands on the canvas as its own card, with a banner and a HUD chip so you never miss it: a Cipher Contest that wants a slice of your compute, a Bandwidth Rental, a Hash Dump, a Rival Crew, a Bribed Admin. Sixteen types in all, each with its own sender and its own mail.

Wire resources into the card and it starts to fill. Some events ask for a steady share over a few minutes. Others ask for a lump sum, so a short, big redirect finishes them fast. The ask scales with your rig, at 20 to 40% of what you produce right now, so a small rig can finish one and a big rig still has to think about it.

When the card is full, the clock stops and you claim the reward whenever you like:

• Credits and research points
• A perk for your next breach: payout ×1.5, no Second-wall surge, no countermeasures, a smaller need, and more
• A free node
• A temporary boost to your power plants

Events are a choice, never a chore. One shows up at a time, about every 10 to 30 minutes of play, and only after your first corporate breach, so the opening stays quiet. Dismiss one, ignore one, or let the clock run out: you lose nothing but what you chose to send. Auto-rebalance and Redirect Rig never touch an event. You decide what to give.

The Booster

The Booster is a small card that sits inline on a wire and makes the flow through it bigger. Wire it into a bandwidth, compute, obfuscation or money line, and the first wire you connect sets what it boosts.

• Tier 1: 1.25× up to 40 units/s
• Tier 2: 1.4× up to 150 units/s
• Tier 3: 1.6× up to 500 units/s

Every extra unit costs power and throws off heat, so a Booster is one more trade in your budget, not a free lunch. Starve it of power and it simply passes the flow through at 1.0×. It never blocks a line. Buy it in the Market, and unlock the higher tiers in the Hardware research branch.

Faster on every rig

This update rebuilds how the canvas loads, routes and draws your rig, so every rig loads faster and runs smoother, big or small. The canvas now redraws only what changed, all wire flow draws in a single layer, and the sim sends only what changed each tick. The biggest rigs gain the most. Measured on our test machine:

• A late-game Power Grid rig opens in about 0.45 s, down from 4.7 s
• A Credit Union rig opens in about 0.18 s, down from 1.25 s
• A full NASA rig with 774 cards and 2,046 wires used to freeze the game for half a minute. Now the rig shows in about a second, the wires route in the background, and a second load comes back in about 5 s
• That same NASA rig now runs at about 100 fps, up from about 3
• Dragging a card re-routes only the wires that moved

Thanks for climbing

Every number above is a starting point, and we will keep tuning event rewards and Booster costs as you play. If something feels off, tell us in the discussions. And if you have not yet, add Nodes to your wishlist to follow the climb.