Rookport — Roadmap

Rookport is a persistent, browser-based crime MMO in active development. This page tracks what's already playable, what's being built now, and what's planned. Checked boxes are live in the game today. It's updated as we ship — so it will change often.

Live now

The core loop is playable end to end:

• ✓Rookport keeps its own clock: day for one real hour, night the next — the clock in the top bar runs twelve times real time and ticks while you watch (a city minute every five real seconds, a city day every two real hours); a shop shows opens in 4 min in real minutes, the map darkens at dusk and lightens at dawn, the police change shift every real hour, and every price a day is a city day's: the starter room $4.58 a day, a clerk's shift $10 — the same money over a real day as before, twelve days of it. Sentences, heat, healing, the pound's days, a loan's term and the round stay real.
• ✓Economy round D — a players' city — your first pockets pay: a pocket that goes wrong tells you when the mark shouts for the police, and a petty call only looks round the block it was given, so walk off and the car loses you (a Wanted man is looked for further off). While you are Cold no patrol pulls your car over. Every arrest still takes every weapon you carry. Every card shows what a place draws as one figure, and the Directory has a For sale list with the asking price of every kind of business, cheapest first. A legendary man turns up in a line-up three times as often.
• ✓The ride to jail can be ambushed — and the walk out is yours to plan — the police car taking you in is a real car on a real road, and it can be stopped. In the back of it, Call all crew sends every man of yours who wasn't taken to where it has to stop — the spot where you wait in cuffs, a road ahead where they leave one of your cars across the lane, or the prison door — and if they beat the officers they cut you loose; if they lose (or run once they've opened fire), everyone is arrested and your time doubles. Your family and friends can cut you loose too, and you can send your crew after the police car taking one of your men. At the wheel you can Chase it and shoot it to a standstill, or Leave it across the road. A rival can find you on the pavement, beat you down and finish you at arm's length — a downed boss is only ever finished at arm's length now, once his health is really gone. Nobody is told you were taken; a broker sells the hour you walk out. And Meet me at the gate: your men and a car of yours waiting when you walk out, set before you are ever caught or by phone from the cell.
• ✓Running your crew from the cell — the jail phone, the men taken with you, the second car chased — your men do as you do at an arrest: the men at your side go quietly, run or fight with you, and they are taken with you (two to a police car) and serve your time. Men following you in another car do what you do: they pull over with you, or drive off and are chased, and if they lose the police they are free but hot. Each man has his own heat, cooling like yours and twice as fast while he lies low in your hideout, and a Wanted man a patrol sees is picked up (if you are set to resist, he tries to run, once). From the cell you reach your crew by the payphone in the prison yard (recorded: lawful orders only) or a smuggled phone, bought from a guard or found inside; you can post bail for a man of yours from his card.
• ✓A new round is a city of players — from the next round on, Rookport has no AI families: your rivals are the other players, the street and the Harbor Syndicate, who still hold every dock nobody owns. The round that's running keeps its four families to its end. The City gangs drawer under Rankings says whether a round has any.
• ✓Your fleet — as many cars as you like, a car for each of your men, and your crew take the fastest way they have — there's no cap on cars any more, and every car you own is somewhere real: at a kerb (free, but a rival can boost it), in a bay at a garage ($10.50–$22.50 a day by district, paid like rent; free in a garage you own, in your family's stronghold and in the private garage at your home), waiting on a dealer's lot, on a tow truck or in the pound. A car only ever moves by being driven or towed — Take the wheel of any car of yours and the one you were driving stays where it stood; Bring it to me sends a man to drive it over; Send to a bay or Sell it has a man drive it to a garage. Give a car to one of your men and he drives it on his trips, the men going his way riding with him; every crew order picks the quickest way each man has — on foot, the car you gave him, the nearest of your spare cars or a seat going his way. Your bodyguards who don't fit your car follow in another of yours; a man sitting with you can drive you. A raid can go in as many cars as you send, the convoy leaving together. Steal a car and you're at its wheel where it stood — your own stays where you left it, trunk and all — and the stolen car is hot: only a garage buys it, at the fence price. Cars can be stolen even from a garage, by a break-in. And a car is worth its value times its condition, for a sale and in the rankings alike.
• ✓Nobody teleports — every character comes from where he is, by the fastest way he has — everybody in Rookport is always somewhere real on the map, and gets anywhere only by walking or driving there. Your crew answer every order from where they stand — come back to you, guard a block, deal, train, spy, go to hospital, go on a raid — on foot or in a car they can use, whichever is quicker, and you watch their dots come; your car seats so many and the rest follow; while you're held your bodyguards wait at your place and your posts keep working. An arrest is a ride: you're booked where you're taken, the nearest free patrol car drives you to the prison (you can post bail from the back seat), and when your time is up you walk out of the gate — and if you're away, you walk home. A police car is one of the fastest cars in the city. The ambulance you call drives out to you, its price held until they treat you. A man who gives himself up to a rival is marched off by his men — stop them on the way and he's free. The officers walk to their cars, SWAT walk in through your door, the paramedics carry you out on a stretcher, the tow driver walks to his truck, the trucks drive home, newcomers come in from the edge of the map or off the boats, the gangs hire their men off the street, and the men waiting to be hired at a bar walk in and out of its door. When the game is updated, the street carries on where it was: the townspeople, the police, the vans, the ambulances and the tow trucks too.
• ✓The street is saved across updates — when the game is updated, nobody is sent back home or to work: the townspeople, the police cars and their officers, the SWAT vans, the ambulances, the tow trucks and the delivery drivers come back exactly where they were and carry on — a walk, a drive, a patrol, a call, a ride to the prison — as if the city had held its breath while it was down. What people carry in their pockets is kept with them, to the cent.
• ✓The bar's line-up is real people — the men waiting to be hired at a bar, a dance club, a casino, a gym or a crack house are townspeople out of work: you watch them walk in through the door, they wait in the front room for a couple of hours, and they walk out again and get on with their day — at once if they find a job or someone else takes them on. The one you hire becomes yours right where he stands and walks over to you, with whatever is in his pockets. When few people in town are looking for work, the line-ups are thin or empty, and the line-up tells you so. The prices, the tiers and the one level-1 man anyone can hire are as before.
• ✓The city's bank — when a district runs short, the bank prints more — the townspeople keep their savings as clean money at the city's bank, and nobody can rob it. When a neighbourhood's people run short of money, the bank prints a little more into their savings at 5 in the morning — only up to about a day's spending, a little each night and only so much a month — so the shops, the rents and your shelf don't dry up late in the round. It doesn't lend and never takes the money back during the round; it all goes at the round's end with everything else. And because the savings can't be touched, a pickpocket takes only what is in his mark's pocket, a corner deal is paid out of the cash the people standing there carry, and a lookout you run off gives up only what he has on him — one busy dealer can't empty a neighbourhood's savings any more.
• ✓The docks are a fight you can win, and a ten in the window more often — the Harbor Syndicate now holds each unowned dock with three hard men instead of four, a notch less hardened and less heavily armed, so a careful boss's crew in its third week — seven men in a big car with a couple of better men — can beat them about half the time (it still costs men). Only the Syndicate's own men stop you buying: a rival's guard or lookout left on the wharf no longer locks it for everybody, killing the dockmaster doesn't open it (his men hold on and the Syndicate sends the next man), and a dock you've cleared no longer gets its crew back early when the server restarts. It takes about eight men to hold a dock once it's yours. The dealer's window: a ten turns up a little more often (about one car in eight), and the car behind the glass costs about 20% more than its book price — a quality-8 saloon about $23,000, a ten $80,000–92,000 — while it's still worth its book price to you afterwards. The hotel and the casino cost a little more — a hotel $22,100–28,800, a casino from about $24,800 — so a careful boss nobody robs reaches the top end as his second week turns into his third: the first top-end buy he can afford comes between days 11 and 14 (most often 12–14), and a downtown tower around days 18–20.
• ✓Backup, SWAT vans and a cop down — a cop in a fight radios for backup: the four nearest patrol cars that can get there in time come with their sirens on and join the fight on the law's side, each officer by name, and the fight runs a little longer while they drive (the fight card counts them in). Resist an arrest and you fight the officers really standing there — the crew of the car that caught you, the patrolman on your block — plus whoever answers the radio. Officers you put down can die: most are only hurt — they lie where they fell, the ambulance takes them to hospital, and they're back at their post within the hour — but a hard enough blow, or bad luck, kills one. Kill a cop and your whole side goes to maximum heat, and every patrol car in the city hunts you, with the officers on foot within six blocks — a MANHUNT banner says so, and it ends when they lose you for ten minutes, after half an hour, or when you're taken. Kill another while they hunt you, or one who came to help, and both SWAT vans come for you. The two SWAT vans live at police headquarters with four SWAT men in each, all shift — no SWAT ever stands on a street — and the raids on a Hunted boss now come in them: you can see a van coming on your map, it drives to wherever you are, and it keeps coming back until it gets you. Attacking a man in blue asks you first, and the Resist switch warns you what's at stake.
• ✓The police are townspeople — fewer of them, on their beats — every officer is one of the city's people now, with a name, a station, twelve hours by day or by night, $100 a shift, a home and a day of his own. By day about 110 officers walk the city on foot — one for every six blocks, each on his own beat around his post — and by night about half that; most of them near the stations, only a few in the Greenbelt and Little Sicily. Ten patrol cars (three out of Downtown, three out of the Row, two out of Ironside, two out of the Docks) each carry two officers by name — hover one to see who is in it; an empty car stays parked. No SWAT stand on the streets (they ride the SWAT vans — above). Off duty an officer goes home and is not the law — his row says off duty, and his card says where he is: on his beat, at the station, in car 3. The police overlay, the stops on the road and the avoid-police route follow where the officers and cars really are right now, and crime draws them: a stirred-up block pulls the nearest beats and the patrol cars toward it until it cools. Whoever stops you on the road is named. A killed officer's place is filled the next morning by the fittest man looking for work.
• ✓The dearest things in week three, measured — the money now climbs on a ladder we've measured with a bot that plays the whole month: a careful boss nobody robs opens his first front around day 4, can afford a hotel or a casino around days 12–14 and a downtown tower around days 19–21. Sal pays sooner — $1,250 for the third contract and $1,500 for the fifth (the book still pays $7,800), and the sixth asks for a business with books: a house doesn't count. Your first man is cheaper: the first common man you take on asks no more than $910. The books wash twice as fast: about $300 a day, and $330 more for each of your staff. A casino costs about $23,500 and a hotel $20,200–26,400 (since raised a little — see above). A house you buy fills up: people move into its empty flats by the next morning, so a downtown tower ($82,600) brings in about $4,100 a day and pays for itself in about 20 days; its safe holds a week of rent, and the tenants keep the rest until you come to collect. The gangs give you time: a place you've just bought can't be taken off you for three days, and a gang that has hit one of your places leaves it alone for half a day — post about eight men on a tower and it stays yours. And a place's cash has its own name everywhere now — a till on a counter, a cash tin at home, a cash box elsewhere — in the crew's raid planner, the Cash inside note and the locks note too.
• ✓Townspeople train at the gym and get promoted — about one in seven of the city's people who live near a gym trains there a couple of afternoons a week ($12 a visit, out of their own spending money), getting better at what their trade needs; at 5 in the morning anyone good enough moves up a grade — Senior ($115 a shift), Lead ($130), the place's one Head ($145) — if the place can afford it out of its takings (the city's own places always can). Their card says so: Senior line cook, Trains at the gym: speed 6.88, the next grade at 7.5. Better-paid people spend more in the shops, so the money still adds up. Your staff who train get better at your trade too — and their wage rises with it; you're told. The shopkeepers, loan sharks, gangsters, the judge and the lawyer stay as they are. People are made fresh at a server restart, so a promotion lasts until then.
• ✓The tow drivers, the ambulance crews, the judge, the lawyer and the delivery drivers are townspeople — the people the city sends are real now: each has a name, a job, an employer, his hours and pay, a home and a day of his own. The tow truck's driver is the garage's (one is called in from home at night), and your notice names him; the ambulance crew are the hospital's paramedics by name; every delivery truck has its driver, who bolts when you hold it up; the judge and your lawyer are named on everything the court does — the fix, your sentence, your bail, the envelope. Click a tow truck, an ambulance or a delivery truck and its card shows who is in it. The loan shark's collectors are the gangs' own men — kill one and he's dead, and the gangs put a new man on his door. A dead one's job is filled the next morning.
• ✓Jobs and rent follow the people — a place employs as many as the city has people to work, not more as it prospers, so the townspeople no longer spread thin across empty jobs; a full shop turns the next boss away (Every place here is taken), and the phone sends bosses looking for work to different doors. Rent is paid by the people who really live in a house: a landlord's rent roll is his tenants, an empty flat pays nothing — the downtown towers are mostly empty, Little Sicily's row houses nearly full. And a woman officer is a Patrolwoman.
• ✓The shopkeepers, the loan sharks and the gangsters are townspeople — everybody you meet in Rookport now has a job, a home and a day of his own, and his card says what he does and who he works for: his job (a Grocer, a Barkeep, a Farmhand, a Warehouse guard, a Dealer), his employer, his hours and his pay. The man who runs a shop walks home at closing and sleeps there — off duty he's just a customer in somebody else's store — and a hotel has a day manager and a night manager. The loan shark is a real man: he lends only in person, while he's in the back room; kill him and nobody lends there until the city puts a new man in the next morning. The gangs keep a man at every warehouse and dock at night, and two at each crack house and bunker, paid out of the takings and living in the poorer parts of town — they keep hours now, twelve on and then home to bed, so they no longer loaf on the streets all day and the Docks have far fewer residents' cars; on duty a gang's man keeps the door from the doorstep, so the gangs' places lock as they always did, and a place you hold keeps no gangsters. Your crew and your lookouts come from somewhere: each lives in a part of town, and their pay goes home there. The list of people on a block leads with each one's job.

• ✓Everyone in Rookport has a name of their own — every person in the city goes by one first name that nobody else carries: the bosses, the townspeople, the police, the shopkeepers, your crew and the men waiting to be hired, your lookouts, the loan sharks and their collectors, even the officers who corner you in a fight. No more numbered strangers. Your boss too: one first name, 2 to 14 letters, his alone — the box on the sign-up page says as you type whether a name is free and offers free names like it to click. A townsperson gives his name up to a new boss and goes by another; Sal is just Sal, and his name, the four Dons', the dockmasters' and the loan sharks' are never anybody else's. A dead boss's name stays his until the round ends. Bosses made before kept their first name; where two shared one, the later boss was given a new name and told.

• ✓Jail that fits the crime, and walk-in care at the hospital — the time in jail is the crime's: a lifted wallet or a planted bug 20 minutes, a street deal or a robbed delivery 40, a robbery, a hold-up, a stolen car or a quiet break-in an hour, an assault, a carjacking or a break-in with the alarm going 2 hours, attacking a police officer 4, a killing 6 — resisting doubles it, a SWAT raid holds you 8 hours at least, and the WANTED banner says what this arrest would be for and how long, before it happens. New bosses pay less: at levels 1 and 2, bail is $3 a minute (at least $50) and the judge $2 a minute (at least $40). Something to do in the cell: a laundry shift — 10 actions for 5 minutes off and $10 from the city, every 15 minutes. Breaking out is hard, at any hour, and turns on your stats — Speed to bolt, Intelligence and Stealth to sneak, Strength and Killer to fight — about 15% for a new boss in the county jail, half that in maximum security, a shiv +15%; miss and you're beaten down and your sentence goes on again, every time; make it and your heat is at the maximum and every patrol is looking for you. A pocket picked clean is reported only by somebody else who saw it, and a petty call brings the cars unhurried, with no siren (24 km/h, slower than a patrol, until they have seen you). And a hurt boss on his feet can walk into a hospital — treatment to full now, or a free bed — and send his hurt crew there the same way, from Crew or right beside him in the ward.
• ✓Heat you can feel — stopped and searched when you are Noticed, arrested on sight when you are Wanted — the heat bands now do what they say. From 25 heat, a patrolman or a patrol car's officers who see you stop you, at most once an hour, and you have 20 seconds to answer: let him search (he takes every illegal good, every gun, other weapons too if you're Wanted, and fines you a quarter of what it's worth out of the cash on you — never an arrest), bribe him (a share of what he'd find, out of the cash on you — you keep everything) or run (more heat, the cars come, and inside 25 m they shoot). No answer is the search, and being away doesn't stop it — but never inside your own place, your family's, your home or your hideout. From 50 heat the police who see you arrest you on sight, even doing nothing. Every crime goes on your record, and every arrest names what you're taken in for. On screen: the stop card with its three answers and their costs, the wanted banner showing the hand on your collar, a crime row that tells you the cop right there would arrest you on the spot, and a log that says Stopped, Searched, Arrested and The law. Also: the car dealer's showroom car on its card, with its price and when it goes back; your rackets listed under What you own, with which ones pay; the crew cap shown as two men a level; a painted portrait opens full size; after an arrest the screen follows you to the cell; walking over to do something says how far and how long.
• ✓Rent a newcomer can pay, and the law takes only what's illegal — a boss's own room costs less: a cold-water room in Little Sicily is now $55 a day (it was $80) and in the greenbelt $50 (it was $60), so a clerk's $120 day leaves about $65 over; a bigger place and its deposit come down with it, and a lease you already hold drops to the new rent. Your tenants' rent and what a house sells for don't change. An arrest takes the same things every way the police take you in — a surrender, a lost fight with them, a chase that ends in a wreck, a SWAT raid that jails you: a share of the cash on you, every weapon you carry (in your hands and in your bag) and a share of your illegal goods (contraband and stolen goods). Never a legal good, never the bank, and your armour stays on. Cash you keep off you and out of the bank counts at half in your net worth — a boot, your locker, a stash, a safe (and the safes of a family's buildings). The Hunted heat band tells the truth: SWAT jail you, hurt, and the jail's medical ward patches you up inside. The numbers on screen now come straight from the game — the heat sheet, the wanted banner, the jail and hospital cards, the raid planner, the family screen, the guide, what you own, your money in and out, your stats — so a number you read is the number the game uses. Your job card shows what a shift really pays and what this one has paid so far; a person's card shows your odds of picking his pocket; a man down shows how long until the ambulance reaches him; your log says The law for an arrest by a patrolman instead of calling it a SWAT raid.
• ✓The law on the spot — a patrolman on your block, or a patrol car's officers right there, don't phone anybody when they see you commit a crime: they shout, and two seconds later you're arrested where you stand (your Surrender / Resist answer decides how), and the message says who saw it. Get off the block in those two seconds and it's a chase. A patrol passing your fight joins it: always on the side of a cop in it, on yours against a mugger (self-defence), and against whoever started it otherwise — who is then Wanted; while an officer stands, a surrender is to the police. A loan shark's collectors the law joins take nothing (the debt stands). A fight with a cop in it is the law's own, and plays out. The line that says who would call the police names the law first, and Sal's second contract tells you to look around before you do it.
• ✓Sal's side jobs — every way the city pays — Sal's contract book has a second page: one line for every way to make money in Rookport — your job, a pocket at the right hour, robbing a man, a hold-up, a break-in, a delivery truck, a car driven to the docks, a street deal, a trade run, protection, a front's takings, rent and a dealer on your crew — each saying, in his words, how it works, where and when, before you try it. The first time one actually pays you (money in, not a try), Sal sends you a note with a tip for doing it better and $100 clean — $1,300 for all thirteen. New ways to earn join the list as they're built. (On screen: Boss › Contracts, the Side jobs switch at the top. Sal's note also comes into your Alerts.)
• ✓The top cars are bought, not stolen — and the dearest things land in week three — one man on your crew for every place you protect: you can hold as many places as you have men (they don't have to stand there — they're free for any duty), a boss keeps at most two men a level, and the cut is now 40%; a man short and your newest place stops paying, and is lost a day later. each of the two car dealers keeps one top car in its showroom (usually a quality 8, sometimes a 9, rarely a 10), sold for clean money; the next arrives two days after it's sold, and an unsold one is swapped after three. At a kerb a quality 8 or 9 is now rare (about one car in thirty downtown) and a quality 10 is never parked on a street. The showroom car can't be lifted off the forecourt: it takes a break-in after hours, a dealer's harder lock, Mechanic at its quality and an alarm that calls the law the moment it moves. The dealer's card shows it in its In the showroom row, with Buy; after hours the break-in card has the Drive it out button. A downtown tower costs $82,600 (it was $161,100 — longer to pay back than a round lasts); no house takes more than 20 days of its rent to pay for itself. A recruit costs what a working man makes — about $100 a day and $900 to take on for a common one (was $170 and $1,700), each tier up about 1.6×. Sal's contracts pay $7,800 in clean money (was $5,050). Net worth counts what you own — buildings at their price, cars and gear at half — so buying a tower no longer drops you down the table. Downtown's kerbs park the best cars in the city again — a bug had them parking a poor district's quality 1–5.
• ✓Portraits drawn in high definition, and light to load — a new portrait is drawn at 2K, and the whole picture is kept for a full-size view. Every portrait — yours and the ones already drawn — now loads about a tenth as heavy (a crisp copy sized for the screen, not the 2 MB original), so lists of faces come up fast on a phone. (Seeing it bigger — click a portrait to open it full size — is next.)
• ✓An honest day's pay, near home — a day's wage is one shift: twelve hours on the clock pay the day's wage the job board lists (a clerk's $120 — it used to pay half, so an honest clerk ended every night with nothing). Your first job is near your home: a clerk at a corner shop or a line cook in a diner, whichever has a place free — every newcomer used to be sent to the same corner shop, and with a crowd its till ran dry on the first day. A job is a place on a real payroll: take one, and the place employs one townsperson fewer. Rent you're behind on is paid off out of the next money you have (it used to vanish), you're told each time you fall behind, and rent is charged exactly (it came out 8% high). A hotel concierge works the day shift; a warehouse hand gets in to work (he was locked out, never paid, and let go). Sal's book remembers what you did before a contract opened (a set at the gym on day one counts when chapter three opens), and a walk no longer counts as a drive.
• ✓Shown the door at closing time — when a place shuts, the people still inside walk out through the door onto the pavement, the same as pressing Exit, instead of vanishing from the room and appearing outside in one jump.
• ✓Going to work by himself — and let go after three days away — your job card has a switch, Go to work by himself when I'm away, on when you take a job. When you haven't done anything for 15 minutes, or the game is closed, your boss sets off in time to be at work when it opens, goes in, works the shift, and heads home at closing — a real trip at the usual price in actions, on foot or in his car. He never moves while you're playing, and he doesn't go from jail, hospital or a fight, or without the actions — you're told why. Three days in a row without a minute on the clock and your employer lets you go — a warning after two, and any part of a shift starts the count again (never at your own business). Fixed with it: the You work here line reads your own place's hours now — a barman in his shut bar at 11am is no longer told he's earning.
• ✓Your staff are real townspeople — about one in twenty of the townspeople is out of work and looking, and that's who you hire: Hire the nearest out of work takes the one who lives nearest, and your hiring ad brings them in, the nearest first. The manager you keep with the deed is the man who ran the place. Your staff live in the city: they come in when your place opens, stand behind the counter, go home at closing — and you pay each of them at the end of his shift, into his own pocket. When too few are looking, newcomers arrive off the bridges and the boats at the docks with nothing in their pockets, and take a free flat.
• ✓The townspeople work and shop — every townsperson has a home and a job: he walks (or drives) to work on the city clock, works his shift inside and is paid out of that place's till at the end of it, goes shopping at places open at that hour — paying into their tills, a boss's shop too, at the boss's prices — and goes home with the rest. At night most of them sleep at home: a house with its people home is locked with them in it, and a quiet break-in only while they're at work. Click one and his card says where he works, where he lives and what he's doing. (Fixed with it: every delivery truck in sight is drawn again — a stranger's truck, its load hidden, used to stop the ones after it.)
• ✓Your prices — the owner of a shop sets the price of everything on his shelf, from half to three times the city's, and it's what everybody pays: anyone who walks in, and the townspeople buying off the shelf. The public answers the price — they buy fewer the dearer you go (none at twice the city's), and more if you go cheap — so pricing is a decision, not free money. Your counter's 💲 Your prices list shows how many sell a day at each price.
• ✓The loan shark — the only credit in town — every pawn shop has a shark in its back room who lends cash out of the shop's own till and safe: the city's lend you $1,000, and $500 more for every level you've made, at 20% for a week. Pay him back in person; late, the debt grows every day and his collectors come looking for you — if they beat you down, they take the cash on you. Own a pawn shop and you run its shark: whether he lends, the most to one man, his interest, the term, who may borrow, and which of your crew collect. A debt counts against your net worth, and your Finance tab lists it.
• ✓The docks are the city's only door — money comes into Rookport only through a door (the townspeople's opening money, the head start, the contract book, and what the world outside pays for the cars and freight that ship out of the docks) and leaves it only through one (the ships paid for what the docks sell — two-thirds of every sale). A shop pays for its deliveries when the truck arrives, so a shop with no money gets no truck. The wharf pays for a car out of its own cash box. The old import tariff — money from nowhere — is gone.
• ✓The townspeople's money is real — Rookport's people start each round with a few days' spending at home, and every shop's takings, what sells off your shelf, your tenants' rent and what they pay you in the park or at your dealer's corner come out of it; most of it comes back to them as wages. A neighbourhood that runs short spends less, and a broke park has no buyers. What's in a stranger's pocket came from his household, a fence pays out of a garage's till, and the rival gangs live on what their places take in.
• ✓Every dollar you pay goes to somebody — the tradesmen who fit your camera, lock or new front are a real workshop down the street (never your own); a bribe or seized cash goes into a police station's safe; a building nobody runs, rent on a block nobody owns, a family's lawyers and the help-wanted notice go to the city's coffers at the courthouse; a crew man's pay goes home to his neighbourhood; buying a shop pays its owner, who takes his till and safe home with him. Cash in your car's boot or your home locker is never lost with the car or the lease. And Collect gives a racket's money back as cash — only a legal business's takings go into the bank. The police stop on the road takes only the cash on you.
• ✓Everybody on your block is listed once — a boss standing on your block no longer shows up twice a few seconds after you arrive, a man who has walked off no longer stays in your list, and the cars at the kerb are listed once each.
• ✓Shopkeepers keep their shop's hours — the man behind the counter goes home at closing, so a shut shop really is empty: its door is locked (no walking into a gun shop at 3am), it's a quiet break-in with nobody to phone the police, and there's nobody in it to rob, pick or lean on until he's back in the morning. The bars, clubs and casinos the other way round; a hotel never shuts. Buy a shop and the man who was behind the counter stays on as your first employee.
• ✓One conversation, one block — your private messages are one conversation per boss, whether you write from the chat or from his row under People, and it's kept (it used to vanish at every update). Blocking someone — from his row, the conversation or the chat's 🔇 — is one switch: his messages stop and his lines in the chat disappear, and 🔓 Unblock on his row brings him back.
• ✓A robbed place remembers — what you carry out of a place you're robbing is your haul: its owner is told roughly how much you took, the place does a little worse, and it takes about 45 minutes to fill up again (go back sooner and it's as you left it). Slipping off the block instead of leaving properly doesn't hide it.
• ✓Every action on the map — whatever a man does now shows on him: a hold-up (a red ! and a line to the man he's sticking up, or the truck), a pickpocket (a gold sparkle and a faint line to the mark), a car being taken (an orange !, a line to the car), a door forced or a lock picked, a man at a guarded door, going through a downed man, a boot or a place he's robbing (a gold $), a street deal, a man at work, and getting into or out of his car — for a few seconds after, or for as long as it lasts. Hover him for the words; the lists show an icon beside the name; your own marker does the same. And an ambulance loading somebody glows, a red cross rising off it, until it pulls away.
• ✓The road chase, from where the police car really is — drive off with the law after you and the chase starts the moment you pull away (walk to your car first and it starts when you get in). The police car comes from wherever it really was: parked behind you, it's on your bumper; three blocks away, it has three blocks of road to make up — and one across town never gets close. Their revolvers reach 25 m: further back, nobody's hitting anybody. 🏃 Flee puts your foot down: you take a corner hard and they lose sight of you for a few seconds, longer with a good wheelman — no more coin flip; you get away by opening four blocks of road. Pulled alongside, their aim is a notch sharper — not sharper every turn. Stop with them on your bumper and the officers get out and walk up — stand still for the cuffs, or run and get shot at. And an arrest shows on the map: the cuffs where it happened and the police car's lights going.
• ✓The police get out of the car — a patrol car that pulls up near you lets out two officers, and they walk up to you — two blue dots on the map, running when they need to, on the same legs and breath as everybody. The arrest happens where you're standing: stand still and give yourself up and you're cuffed, nobody fires. Run from them within 25 m and you get one shout — "Police! Stop right there!" — then they open fire, and it's the arrest fight with you already running. Duck into a building they didn't see you go into and you're gone; if they saw you, they follow you in — unless guards hold the door, which is a job for SWAT. Rob the till and stay put, or stay past a burglar's alarm, and they come straight in. Travelling doesn't hide you from a patrol any more. Get in your car and drive off and nobody shoots at it: the officers run back to their own car first — that's your head start. The wanted card tells you how many are on foot, how far, and whether you're inside their 25 m.
• ✓The family's stronghold is any building, and its size is what it holds — the Don makes a building the family can use its stronghold from the building's card (🏰 Make it the stronghold): the family's own, one he owns, or one for sale. It becomes only that, and its size decides the family: a small one quarters 3 men and the Don, a medium one 6, a large one 9 — with an armory, a garage and a back room to match, stronger walls, higher fortifications and more guards the bigger it is. A family with no stronghold counts as small, and a smaller one never drops anyone. Move up by making a bigger building the stronghold — the old one stays the family's. The three fortress bunkers are now large buildings anyone can buy.
• ✓Every building has a size — change the business without knocking it down — every business is small, medium or large, and a building is one business at a time. On a building you run, 🔧 Change the business lists every business of its size — a bar can become a restaurant, a convenience store, a gun shop, a house, a crack house, a moonshine still or a cigarette room — for a small refit fee (a legal business from the bank, a racket in any money). The walls, locks and safe stay; the old trade's staff go; the sign on the map changes. Changing size is a rebuild. The rackets are businesses of their own now — the still, the cigarette room, the drug lab, the chop shop, the new gun works and distillery — each making its good, and every legal business launders.
• ✓Money comes from somewhere — and the cash on you is dirty — your two purses are now the bank (clean, paid by card anywhere, never robbed) and the cash on you (dirty — what a robber takes). The small things take any money, the cash first: rent, the hospital, locks, a tow, goods at any counter, founding a family, a cheap first car. The big things take the bank's: a building, bail, any car above tier 1. Draw cash out at a bank. A legal business launders: put cash in its safe and its books turn it into clean money in your bank, a little a day. And a shop pays for what you sell it out of its own till and safe — it can only buy what it can pay for, in cash — while what you pay at a counter goes into its till, a job's wage comes out of the employer's, and protection money out of the shop's takings.
• ✓The courthouse gets a job — step inside the downtown courthouse while the court sits (by day) and it opens ⚖️ The court: a lawyer can fix a case (a quarter of your heat goes, for dirty cash — the hotter you are, the dearer; once a day; Relation lowers the fee), the court records list every boss in the county jail with his time left and his bail (your family first, then your friends), and you can post bail for anyone on them, in clean money — he walks out and is told who paid. Every dollar paid to the law now goes into the court's coffers instead of vanishing.
• ✓The family panel: the Don decides who may do what — each member's rank is only his starting point now. On the Clan tab the Don has a table of his men with a switch for each thing a member can do for the family: hold the keys to the family's buildings, draw cash (one daily figure for the vault and the family's safes and tills together), take from the stores (goods, gear, cars), run the family's places (camera, traps, locks, staff, repairs), buy for the family, sign property over, invite, cut loose, and deal with other families. Every other member sees what he himself may do. Fixed on the way: a shut family building no longer locks its own family out (it locked out even the Don), somebody can finally run a building held in the family's name, a member can no longer empty a family safe with no limit, a clanmate's guards no longer shoot his own family at the door, and a family's legal front pays its staff out of the vault.
• ✓You only know what you've seen — every building is now one of four things to you, and its card says which. From the street (you're on the block or next door, or a camera or a man of yours covers it) you see what a passer-by sees: what it is and whose, whether it's open, the damage, the front door, a price if it's for sale. Inside — in the room, your own place or your family's, or with eyes in there: a listening device, a crew spy, your informant on that block — you see the till, the safe, the guards, the staff and who's in there. From memory it's what you saw, with how long ago. And a block you've never seen shows only what stood there when the city opened. The card's top section is now 🔎 Inspect building, with the building's structure in it. What's done inside is offered inside: the counter, the shelf, the burner, the job, the gym, the line-up at the bar, a shakedown, a robbery, planting a device — they appear once you walk in (a job has a sign in the window from the street). A block's police heat shows where you can see it, as you last saw it elsewhere, and "?" where you never have. And the game itself only ever sends your browser what you can see.
• ✓The same actions for everyone — every boss's action meter holds 500 and fills in 36 hours, and nothing speeds it up: not a higher level, not a family, not a stronghold. Levels give you points, not a bigger meter. The one extra is the round head start — and it's now shown as the reward it is: the Standings screen lists what each place is worth for a boss and for a family, with your band lit, and when a round ends every boss is told where he finished and exactly what it earned him. The champion's car is a Banker's sedan, the sedan it was always meant to be.
• ✓Whose side it's on — every hostile move now asks it first. Your family is never a target: no attacking a clanmate, marking him an enemy, going through his pockets, taking his car or his lookout, or stopping the wagon carrying him — and none of it is even offered. A building in the family's name, or a clanmate's, isn't for sale to you and isn't shaken down, broken into, bugged or raided; you can still buy from and sell to its counter. The place you work is off-limits the same way. A rival family's places can't be bought or shaken down (a crew capture op takes them); its guards defend them; and its stronghold can only be broken into for half an hour after a crew raid beats its defense — locks and all. A family that's wiped out loses everything in its name, and the Don can move the family out of its stronghold, which puts it back on the market. Friends can be turned on — and the first time you do, the friendship is over and he's told; a friendship is what lets two bosses trade hand to hand. The police, SWAT and gangsters never fold, so there's no holding them up. You don't know what's in a man's pockets until your hand is in them: a pickpocket that works opens his pockets in the loot window and you take what you want. The courthouse can't be broken into.
• ✓The right panel keeps up with what you do — after every action, and the moment a fight you're in is over, the panel redraws itself from what the city now looks like, and what the game says back stays on it. Shake down a restaurant and it says you run protection there, with Drop it — never Extort again, even when the shakedown turned into a fight and you won it. Buy a place and you see your owner's options, not the ones you'd use on a stranger's. A lookout you take out is gone at once; one you hire becomes yours; a body you've emptied says so. What can never apply isn't offered: you don't rob, break into, bug or shake down what's yours or what you protect, you don't buy from or sell to your own counter, fence, gear shelf, phones or car lot, your own staff aren't marks, and a ruin trades and hires nobody. What's only blocked for the moment stays, greyed, with the reason on it — and when you're down, jailed or held, or in a fight, the panel says so plainly.

• ✓Two weapons, and you can see what everybody is doing — you carry a melee weapon and a gun now, one of each: a bat or a trench knife in one slot, a pistol or an SMG in the other. Each hits with its own power — Strength swings the blade, Accuracy aims the gun — and a fight picks the weapon by range, every turn: beyond arm's length you shoot; if your blade hits harder you charge in, firing as you come, and finish it up close; at arm's length a gun only fires every other turn. Everybody runs the same way — residents, other bosses and the police: the same walk off their Speed, the same sprint, and a run that lasts only as long as the breath. And the map shows what everybody is doing: a runner trails streaks, a winded man puffs, a fight puts a red ring on both men with a line between them (gold tracers for a gun, a burst for a blow), and a man down is greyed out with a red cross — with a little icon beside the name in the lists.
• ✓Combat by where everybody really is — a weapon reaches so far now, measured from where you stand to where they stand: fists, a bat or a knife 3 m, a pistol 25 m, an SMG 35 m. A gun reaches across a street; a fist has to cross it first. Press Attack out of reach and you walk in only as far as your weapon needs. A fight holds you where you stand — no walking or driving off — and only Flee gets you out: break away and you really run for it, forty metres down the street (or drive off, if you're sitting in your car), and they can't jump you again for thirty seconds. Every turn counts the distance: out of reach you can't hit, you close in. Cover counts — your car beside you, your own home, the walls of a building you hold. Go down and you lie where you fell until the ambulance lifts you in and carries you to the ward — and once it has you, nobody can finish you… unless they chase the ambulance down in a car and shoot it to a standstill, and then you're dragged out onto the pavement.
• ✓Stop where you are — and every button on the right — changed your mind on the way? Right-click the map, or press ⏹ Stop on the trip card, and you stop right where you are; your next right-click sends you somewhere else. The actions for that trip stay spent. Driving, the car pulls up in its lane with you still in it — get out there and it's a car left in the road, blocking the lane until the tow truck comes. Stopping doesn't shake the police: whoever is after you heads straight for where you stopped, and a road chase ends when your car stops — with them within a block, they box you in. And the screen is tidier: the left panel is only for picking things (the block, the people, the cars), and everything you can see and do is on the right — your trip and its Stop button, the trip to any block you tap, a fight, jail, the hospital, a burglary, your prisoners.

• ✓Cars park off the road — every block has eight parking spaces, two on each side, on the block's own ground beside the building, and the road stays clear. The middle of each side and the corners are left free, and people walk past the parked cars on the edge of the pavement, never through them. A car slides sideways out onto the road and drives off, and slides sideways back in when it parks. When a block is full you can also park across the street, on the block facing it. Car dealerships keep their sides for the cars they sell, so they only have spaces front and back.
• ✓Parking spaces are real, a car left in the road blocks the traffic, and the tow truck takes it — every block has its parking spaces (now eight, two on each side, off the road), and each holds one car. Drive to a full block and you're asked what to do: park on a block nearby and walk, leave it in the street, or don't go — each with its time. Leave a car in the road and it blocks that lane: the traffic queues up behind it, hazard lights on. A minute later a tow truck comes, hooks it and takes it to the pound at the nearest garage, where the owner pays to get it out, and the pound's driver parks it at the nearest free kerb space for him. If your drive runs into a jam you can see, you choose: wait in the queue or take the long way round, both timed. And a car you steal stays exactly where it stood — no more turning on the spot, or jumping to the other side of the block before it drives off.

• ✓Your boss walks straight, and he's at the door before the room opens — going one block along the street used to send him up into the side street between the two blocks and back down again: a little triangle. Now he walks in a straight line wherever nothing's in the way, and goes round a building, or along the river, only where one is. The room view waits for him too: it opens as he reaches the door, not while he's still walking up to it, and closes as he steps back out, not before. Inside, you and everybody else are drawn half the size, so a room reads as a room.

• ✓Walk into a building and see the room — step through a door and the map zooms all the way in and takes the roof off. You see a front room with the counter, and a back room behind it. Everything you can open is standing where it really is: the till, the shelves, the safe, the gun rack, the stash, your own locker at home. Click one to open it. The people in there are drawn where they stand, and so are you. Step back out and your usual zoom comes back.

• ✓Every button takes you where you need to be — press something that needs you somewhere else, and your boss goes there and does it. Work here, train, patch up, shake the place down, grab that car, take a thing off a shelf: he walks over, goes in or out by the door, and gets on with it. He never breaks a locked door or storms a guarded one to get there; he stops and tells you why. This also fixes robbing and looting: moving loot out of a room used to leave you stuck on "walk over first" with nothing happening. Right-click a spot inside a building from the street and he walks in to it too.

• ✓A loot window that stays out of your way — when a robbery or a break-in lets you in, the loot window opens by itself beside the building, not on top of it. Drag it by its bar and it stays where you put it next time; double-click the bar to send it back beside the building.

• ✓One household to a house — a house is one boss's home now. Once somebody lives in a house, nobody else can move in; the card just says it's taken, never by whom. New bosses are given a house nobody lives in, in their own part of town first. The civilian tenants are the landlord's rent money, not people in the hallway. So an empty house really is empty, and you can break into it quietly at any hour, day or night. Round 1 was ended early so the whole city could be re-housed that way, and every new round now starts you clean: on the spawn block, in a house of your own, with nothing half-done carried over — not a jail cell, not a door you were working, not a break-in.

• ✓A clearer building card — 📋 Building info is just the building's numbers. Everything about whose place it is — buying, seizing, protection money, the safe, the hideout — has its own 🔑 Ownership section. Inside, 🚪 Inside building puts 🎒 Move things · 💵 Cash · 💰 Rob side by side. The rob line now says it plainly: "a customer would call the police", "nobody else inside", and "somebody's home" when it's a house. Fixed on the way: several sections were only ever shown to a building's owner, so visitors never saw them. That included moving into a house, a farm's fields, the wharf, a gym's training ground and planting a listening device. Everybody sees them now. Each car on a dealership forecourt now stands in its own space, and Boost it walks you to that car.

• ✓Everything on the map is exactly where it is, and moves the way it should — cars no longer crawl along and then pop up at their destination, drift while driving straight, spin at corners or drive through buildings. Every car now drives the real streets, keeps to its lane, turns 90° at the corners and slides sideways into a parking space. The same goes for everything else you can see: residents walking out of their doors and driving across town, police cruisers, delivery trucks, ambulances (which used to cut across the river) and rival bosses on the move. Each one is drawn exactly where it really is, moment to moment. Trip times are measured on the real route, dirt tracks link every farm to the town, and police cars, trucks and ambulances only show where you can actually see them.

• ✓Right-click to move, and walk up to what you want — right-click a spot on your block, or a room inside a building, and your boss walks there. Right-click another block to travel there, ending on the exact spot you clicked. Everything you can take or hit now has a place: people at their spot on the pavement, cars in their parking spaces, the trunk at the back of the car, the till at the counter, and the safe, gun rack and stash in the back room. You have to be within a few metres to act; if you're not, your boss walks over first while the clock keeps running. Leaving a building is a walk to the door too, and buildings have a simple layout inside: a front room and a back room.

• ✓You can watch your boss cross the block — he's a gold circle on the map now, and a block has places on it: the street, the kerb where the cars are, the door, and inside. Walking between them takes the time it should at your own pace, and it isn't just an animation — while he's crossing the pavement he's outside, where anyone on that block can reach him. He stays out there until you tell him to go in. Travel takes your car when it's parked on the block — he walks over, gets in, and drives, with Walk there next to it when you'd rather go on foot — and arriving parks the car and puts him out of it, standing beside it.

• ✓Two gears: a walk that comes off your Speed, and a sprint for emergencies — everybody used to walk at the same pace and the Speed stat only helped you dodge. Now Speed sets how fast you cross a block or the city on foot, and you have a sprint: about two blocks of running in the legs, 1.8× your walk, a minute and a half to get your wind back, and half a minute of walking-only if you empty it. It fires by itself when it matters — in a fight, in a chase, or with the law on its way to a job you just did — and there are two switches beside your name for it: Auto and a manual Run, with your breath shown between them. Running is for the twenty seconds that decide whether they catch you, never for travelling. Also fixed: the car that stayed drawn on the block you'd just driven away from, and cars facing the wrong way on the road.

• ✓Your car is where you left it, and you get out of it at the door — you can't drive into a building any more: walk inside and your boss leaves the car on that block, where anyone who can see the block can try to take it. And a ride you're sitting in now shows on the map like any other car — arriving somewhere by car used to leave the car invisible until you got out of it. The mark tells you which it is: parked here, or you're in it.

• ✓You can see next door, and arriving is instant — arriving on a new block could leave the side panel stuck on "on the move" until you refreshed the page. It can't any more: one part of the screen failing to draw no longer stops the rest, and if the panel ever isn't showing where you stand, the game puts it back on its own. Your boss now sees his own block and the eight around it, live, like a top-tier informant watching his corner — you can read every neighbouring block's numbers without walking over, though you still have to travel to act there, and who is inside a building stays hidden until you step in. And there's no loading time: those nine blocks arrive together with your arrival, so the panel and every card around you open already filled in. And arriving no longer hangs on "Arriving…" — if your computer's clock ran a little fast, the game used to think you'd arrived before the city did, and asking about it over and over actually held a walking trip up. The countdown now runs on the city's clock, and a trip lands on time however often it's checked.

• ✓A crowded block reads as a crowd, not a rash of dots — a corner where a lot of people were standing could end up buried under identical red marks. Two things were wrong. Bosses who belong to no family were each being treated as their own side, so twenty of them on a corner drew twenty separate discs instead of one reading 20 — they share a mark now, the way the locals and the police always have, while two families still never share one. And the marks had stopped shrinking when you zoomed out, so pulling back to see more of the city made the people layer heavier rather than lighter; a mark is now always the same small fraction of its block at every zoom, and a lone person's dot is half the size it was. On top of that, zoom out far enough and a block's sides merge into a single circle carrying the block's total — past a certain point four separate marks are a smudge, and what a smudge should tell you is how many people are down there. Zoom back in and the sides come apart again; a block that only ever held one side keeps its own colour the whole way out.

• ✓The map marks are doorways, and the left panel is a tree of who owns what — the dots used to ring the middle of a block like a huddle. Now each side on a block is one small, faintly see-through dot scattered about it, carrying how many of them are there and growing with the crowd, so a lone man is a pip and a dozen police are a bigger disc marked 12. Click it and that side's list opens on the left for you to pick from — or goes straight to the man if he's the only one. And the list is now a tree: a boss who brought hirelings, or anyone who left a car at the kerb, gets a ▸ beside his name, and his people and his motor sit right underneath him instead of scattered through three separate folds. Cars follow the same rule — a kerb is one rectangle carrying its count, and clicking it opens those cars in the panel, filed under the people who own them, each with its model, worth, whether the owner is stood beside it, and your exact odds. From across the street you get the whole card and a note to travel there; on your own block you get the Take button.

• ✓Every building card reads the same way — a pass over every menu on every building in the game. The top of the card is now always 📋 Building info (it was called The place itself) — structure, defense, the front door, the safe, what it earns — sitting open, because that is the thing you clicked for; it used to be folded shut inside a second fold that said the same words. Under it, the sections that belong together are now always next to each other: the locks sat five sections away from the traps, and the shelf, the workshop and the counter were scattered across three different parts of the same card. They are grouped now — what the building is, what keeps people out, what's bought and sold, the wheels, and the place you live out of — in the same order on a farm, a gun shop and a tenement, so once you learn the card you know where to look on every building in the city. A group only becomes a folder when it holds three or more sections; below that they simply stand on their own, because one extra click to reach one section is a worse deal than one extra line on the screen. Closed sections still tell you how many things are inside and how many are shut to you.

• ✓Every car on the road has somebody in it — nothing on the map is scenery any more. The traffic used to be a handful of empty rectangles driving in circles; now every car you see is a real thing with a real reason to be there — a police unit on patrol, an ambulance fetching somebody, a delivery truck running goods from a factory to a shop, or a resident driving to work, home, or out on an errand in a car he actually owns. Which means a car that's out driving isn't parked at its owner's kerb — one car, one place, so a ride you were waiting to lift may simply have gone out. Click a passing car and you get the man at the wheel: who he is, what he's driving, what it's worth, where he's headed — and if he's on your block, you can stop it and take it, at the same odds as lifting one off the kerb except he's sat in it watching you do it. Police cruisers can be clicked now too.

• ✓The city has streets again, and every car is on one — a road now runs along every block's edge, so the map reads as a street grid with the buildings set back behind their kerbs. Where there is no road there is no tarmac: fields, parkland and water stay unbroken ground. Traffic drives the roads properly — keeping right, eastbound down one side of a street and westbound down the other — instead of cutting across the middle of the blocks. A parked car sits at the kerb: your ride and a rival's against one side of the block, the street cars belonging to the people who live there against the other. And every car on the map can be clicked now, not just one you could steal — on your own block it opens with everything you can do to it, anywhere else it selects that block and opens its Cars list, so you can size up a car from across the street before deciding to walk over.

• ✓You can see who is on the street, and whose side they're on — everyone standing on the same block on the same side is one dot carrying their number, so twelve police on a corner read as a single blue disc marked 12 instead of twelve marks piled on each other, and two different families never share one. Anyone inside a building is off the map entirely — and off the left panel too, until you walk in yourself; from across the street you can't even see how many are in there, which is exactly what a planted bug or a spy is for. Click a dot and it's the same as picking that person off the panel: the block is selected, their side's list springs open, and everything you can do to them is on the right. That works on any block you can see, not just the one under your feet — you'll be told you're watching from another block, and the actions stay locked until you actually travel. The left panel now groups everyone into foldable, counted sides and remembers which ones you keep shut. And the board is live: people and traffic move on their own every few seconds rather than freezing until your next action — a block that says three people on it now really does have three people on it.

• ✓A rebuilt interface — thirteen tabs and a "⋯ More" become six menus (Me · Empire · Crew · City · Underworld · Comms), and picking one changes only the middle of the screen, so you never lose your block or your actions to go and read something. New "Since you were away" page: log in after a day off and it tells you what happened to you while you were gone, newest first, with a button to put the map on it. Raids and other emergencies now appear in a red strip across the top with their buttons inline instead of buried in a column. Every section still folds — and a closed one now tells you how much is inside and how much is locked. The chat, phone and contract book moved off the map into buttons in the top bar. The map has been rebuilt from scratch — the old flat, baked-in board is gone and every block, building, person and car is now its own piece on the board, so it stays sharp at any zoom. It also remembers: a block you've visited shows what you last saw there, dimmed, with how long ago; a block you've never been to shows only the streets and the shape of the building. And that memory follows your boss, not your browser — sign in on a phone, or after clearing your browser data, and the city you've scouted is still the city you've scouted. It gained three views — plain, police heat (where is it safe to work) and turf (whose ground is this) — both shown only for blocks you've actually seen, plus a search box that jumps you to any block. And every crime now says what it costs before you press it: the actions it spends, what it pays, and — this is the big one — who would phone the police. The law never just knows: somebody has to call it in, and gangsters never do. A crime row names the shopkeeper or the bystander who would make that call, or tells you in green that there is nobody to call it in — so an empty street is a real choice, not a lucky break. Where there is a fight or a shakedown, the bar now comes with a sentence (They will pay - your menace 41 against a nerve of 22), and anything you cannot do says why in plain words instead of the button quietly vanishing.

• ✓…and the rest of that rework, finished — the interface rebuild is complete. Every verb in the game now reads the same way, not just the crimes: cost in actions, who could call the law, then the button — and when you can't do something, the reason is printed on the line instead of hiding in a tooltip. Whatever you've selected states its facts first: a block's heat, till, locks, defense, and whether you're seeing it live or remembering it. The character sheet gained your net worth with your net-per-hour beside it (a fat total and a negative hourly is a boss quietly going broke, and those two numbers belong in the same breath) and your line — every boss this account has buried, how each ended, how long he lasted, readable by anyone, because a rival counting your dead is reputation earned the hard way. What you stand to lose is no longer just your deeds: the car you left parked, what's in your pockets, the dirty cash on your body, and any captive you're holding are all listed with them. Chat, the burner phone and the contract book are full screens rather than panels covering the map — and Alerts is finally read-only, since there was never anybody on the other end of it. Operations are planned in seven steps — what · where · how they fight · which route · what you actually know · crew and seats · review — each folding shut with its answer on the header, and lending your car costs a seat, because somebody has to drive it. And in the family: the daily vault draw for each chair is now your Don's figure, not a house rule — tighten it after a betrayal, open it for a war, set a rank to nothing — readable by every member because it's the deal they accepted, changeable only by the Don, and never applied to the Don himself: whoever holds that chair can empty the vault, and that trust is the point of it. The family's jobs in the air now name the men who have answered and how many crew each sent, instead of counting allies — which is how two capos both assume the third has it covered and nobody sends anyone.

• ✓The last three pieces of that rework — a re-read of the design package found three things that had been specified and never built, so they are built now. Staff & hiring is a screen: every business you own on one page, what the whole payroll costs you a day, what it earns, how many applicants are waiting to be read and how many chairs are empty — with each applicant's fit shown, not hidden, because a poor hire has negative efficiency and drags the business down, which means an empty chair sometimes beats a filled one. With a burner you can now run a whole front from anywhere; before, the phone could hire and pass but not advertise or dismiss, which was an accident rather than a rule. Market is the other one: every counter you have actually looked at, nearest first, with what each charges and pays — pick one good and it names the cheapest counter, the best-paying one and the difference a unit, which is the sum the whole trade is made of. It lists only what you have seen, it never claims to know what is on a distant shelf, and it has no till: every row's button is Travel, because the distance between two prices is the game. The Standings screen finally says what a place on the ladder is worth — the head-start bands for next round, with the one you would currently take lit — and a broker who sells exactly one fact at a time: a boss's home address for $4,000 clean, a family's stronghold for $9,000. It is a snapshot with the hour on it and nothing refreshes it, so an old fact is an old fact. And the top bar grew its identity block: your portrait on a plate, your family rank in gold under your name, and where you are, which side of the door you are on and what you are driving as chips. Operations is a screen too — the seven-step raid planner opens as its own page instead of a box at the bottom of the crew roster that the menu scrolled you to.
• ✓Every pair of eyes you own, on one screen — a new Underworld › Eyes on the city: your cameras, your informants, the crew holding your blocks, the spies you've sent out and the listening devices you've planted, each with where it is, whether it's reporting, and how much of Rookport you can actually see. It says what each one gives you, because they're not the same thing: a camera or a lookout opens the street, while a wire tap gives you the inside of one building and nothing else — so you don't plan a raid on vision you haven't got. The two that run out are counted down: a bug's battery (amber under the hour) and a spy's walk home. And it leads with the mistake that quietly wastes every dollar you've spent on vision — no burner in your pocket and all of it is dark, which the burner itself could never tell you, because without a phone the phone screen doesn't open. Building it also deleted a duplicate: the burner's own feed list was assembled separately, which is why it had never once shown you a planted bug.
• ✓The wheel really zooms now, and it zooms the block you picked — the previous fix repaired the wheel handler, and the handler was never the problem: changing the zoom raised a number that nothing on the board read, because the redraw it used to trigger had been emptied out when the map was rebuilt. So the map obediently slid sideways and stayed exactly the same size — which is what "the wheel moves the map instead of zooming" was. The board itself resizes now. And the zoom is anchored on the block you have selected rather than on your mouse pointer: the block you're working stays exactly where it is while the city grows around it, instead of drifting off the edge and having to be chased with a drag. Nothing selected? It anchors on the block you're standing on. Selected something off screen? Zooming brings it back rather than magnifying empty streets a mile away from it.
• ✓The map handles properly — the wheel zooms in and out; click and drag pans. The + In / − Out buttons are gone, because the wheel already did their job and they were sitting on top of the city. ⌖ Follow me is now a lock rather than a one-off jump: press it and the camera stays centred on your character through a whole trip across town, and dragging the map yourself is the only thing that releases it — arriving somewhere no longer yanks your view back. And the search, the follow lock and the map filters have moved onto one horizontal line above the map instead of a floating column that was permanently covering about a sixth of it.
• ✓The top bar and the map, drawn the same way — the interface rebuild had left two art styles fighting each other, and this pass finishes the job. The top bar is rebuilt from the design rather than layered over the old one: the ROOKPORT wordmark is gone (it spent the left end of the bar telling you the name of the game you were already playing), your portrait is half again as big, and your level sits beside your name instead of across your chin. The carrying chip now only appears when you're actually carrying something. On the map, your face no longer rides on your own block — at map scale a portrait is a smudge, so the block you're on is a clean pulsing gold ring and the face lives big in the bar where you can read it. Every vehicle in the city is drawn the same way as everything else on the board now — a small coloured marker rather than a photographic car sprite left over from the old map: grey for traffic, gold for a car you could steal, blue for a police cruiser, white for an ambulance, amber for a freight truck. Stealing one still works exactly as before. And the district name moved into the control row, off the board — it had been sitting on the search box. Two real bugs fell out of it: the design's own car renderer had been wired to something that never existed, so it had never drawn anything and the old sprites were showing through the hole; and the block you were standing on was the one block whose building you couldn't see, because the selection ring was lifting the empty ground above the artwork.
• ✓Run your shop, don't just own it — a business you own is a place you work now, not a deed that pays a trickle. Sell your own production through it: put goods you've made on the shop's shelf (the ordinary loot panel, no special buttons) and they sell themselves to the public over time, the money into the safe — and anyone who buys over the counter pays you too. A shop has one stock, and it's that shelf. (The fast alternative still works: carry the bulk to a business that buys it and cash out today.) Working your own shop grows it instead of paying you — clock in and there's no wage, but the place's prosperity climbs fast, which raises everything it earns. And you can't buy from your own shelf — your stock is already yours. You can stock anything you make, not just what the place normally sells — put your farm's food on your bar's shelf and it shows up on the counter for anyone who walks in. Plus a big clean-up of the block panel: it now arrives folded, as a short list of headings you open when you want them — with related things grouped under one heading (the place & the business, security, your hideout, vehicles) — and it remembers what you left open. And one button moves things: 🎒 Move things at the top of the room opens the transfer panel with every container you can reach in it, 💵 Cash opens it straight on the money, and every other little stow/take/collect button is gone.
• ✓Hand something to another boss — two players on the same block can now trade: goods, gear and cash, both ways, in one exchange. You each put things on the table out of your own pockets or any container you can reach, you both see both halves, and nothing moves until you both accept. Change your offer after he's agreed and his acceptance is cancelled too — so what you agreed to is always what you were looking at. It's all or nothing: if either of you no longer has what you offered, or can't carry what you're handed, the deal is called off and nothing changes hands. Dirty money stays dirty, clean stays clean. And it's a meeting — step inside, walk off or get hospitalised and the table closes, which makes a quiet field at the edge of the map the natural place to do business with someone you don't trust.
• ✓Somewhere to stand and deal — the parks, fields, woods, footpaths and bridges used to say "nothing to do on this tile". Now every one of them is a corner: sell contraband to the people standing there, at a retail price better than any fence pays, limited by how many of them there are, and with the police called only if somebody there would call them. A park is busy, profitable and watched; a wood is quiet, safe and usually empty. That's the choice. And the reason it never could have worked before: nobody lived outdoors — 177 tiles of open ground with not one person on any of them, ever. They're populated now, at densities that say what each kind of ground is.
• ✓Lie low in a field — the other thing you do on open ground. Out where nobody can see you there's a 🌾 Lie low action: spend a few actions to drop off the road and cool your heat on the spot — more the higher your Stealth — and if a patrol is already closing on you, a real chance to slip it. It's the hideout you don't have to own: no property, no trip home, there the moment you're hot in the middle of nowhere. Same rule as dealing decides it — you can't vanish in front of a witness — so the busy park is where you sell and the empty wood is where you hide. It isn't a crime, so it draws nobody and no heat of its own.
• ✓Build on the ruins — a block levelled by a Destroy op is cleared ground you can build on. That already worked if you owned it (put up any of sixteen types); what was wrong was the price of a ruin — it was quoted as if the business were still standing. A cleared lot now sells as land, a few thousand rather than tens of thousands, which makes rubble the cheapest way into property in the city. (Virgin open ground still isn't buildable — a park stays a park.)
• ✓A friendship you can actually rely on — friends and enemies moved into the Intel tab (which now has two panels: Tracking, and People), and friendship became a two-sided thing. 🤝 sends an offer; it means nothing until the other boss accepts. Once he does you're non-hostile — neither of you can attack the other, and neither of you can be caught in the other's ambush. You can still turn on a friend, but you have to break with him first, and he's told — so the knife is always there and it always costs you the surprise. Marking an enemy still needs nobody's permission.
• ✓One number for how big your name is, and everyone wears one — the reputation stat has been removed. Your level is your standing: it sets how intimidating you are, sharpens your prices a percent a level, and decides who you can put on the payroll (never anyone above you). And now every person in the city shows a level — a passer-by is a 1, a shopkeeper a 2, a gangster a 4, a beat cop a 6, a SWAT officer a 9 — so you can size somebody up before you swing instead of finding out afterwards. Founding a family no longer waits on a reputation bar either: it costs $25,000 clean.
• ✓A body on the pavement, and the car he left at the kerb — killing a rival no longer pays out a lump of loot. He lies where he fell, and you go through him yourself: his street cash, everything he was carrying, his stash and the gear he was wearing, all in the ordinary looting panel. Nothing is destroyed — take what you can carry and come back for the rest, because for the next 24 hours that pavement is worth returning to. A rival who's only been beaten down is lootable the same way, right up until the ambulance reaches him — so running the wagon off the road buys you longer. And his car stays parked where he fell: open its boot, or take the whole thing. A downed man's keys are on the body, so boosting his ride needs no skill — just the nerve, the heat, and whoever's watching.
• ✓A farm is fields you work, one at a time — each open field around a farmstead is a plot with two decisions on it: what's sown in it (vegetables or weed, chosen per field) and how well the ground is worked (three levels of tilth, bought with clean cash, on that one field). One farm can run both crops — and three plots of veg around one of weed is a legitimate farm with a secret in it. Crops grow into the barn on a timer while you're away, and food now has a buyer: any corner shop is a grocer.
• ✓A book of jobs to learn the city on — a fixer named Sal hands a new boss seven contracts: an honest wage, a first crime, a first gun, a first car, a first crew, a first building, and out into the wider city. It is not a tutorial — there's no sandbox and no overlay pointing at buttons, just real jobs done in the real city at the real cost. It never blocks you, anything you've already done is already ticked off, each contract pays out, and it finishes by telling you what to do next rather than going quiet.
• ✓Every gun in Rookport came off a boat — gear and weapons are part of the economy now instead of appearing on a shop rack from nowhere. The city makes its own cloth and timber in its factories (caps, jackets, work pants, bats) and imports everything that shoots: pistols, SMGs, armour and knives are landed at the port, sit in the dock yard where they can be robbed, and reach the gun shops by truck. A shop you clean out stays cleaned out until the next crate arrives — so a weapons shortage is something a player can cause. Ammunition and supplements are now made in factories too, and food travels farm → grocer → kitchen rather than appearing in every diner.
• ✓The goods manifest — a public page listing every good, crop and weapon in the game: where it is made, where it sells, what it weighs, and how it gets there. It is generated from the game's own tables every time you open it, so it can never fall out of step with what is actually running.
• ✓Every shop sells off a real shelf, including the car lot — the guns in a gun shop and the cars on a dealership forecourt used to be price lists: infinite stock, nothing there to steal. Both are real objects now. A lot stands eight cars, the card says how many of each, buying takes one away — and so does driving one off it, which is harder than lifting a car from a kerb because a showroom is watched and its stock is mint, and calls the law at once if you fumble it.
• ✓You can see what a building actually is — structure, defense, the Locksmith level of its door and its safe, security, and what it earns a day. On an unowned block it also says how long the asking price takes to pay itself back. It's there before you buy and after you upgrade, because an upgrade that moves three hidden numbers and no visible ones is indistinguishable from an upgrade that does nothing. (Fortifying raises defense and the door — not the structure figure, which is why a fortified place still reads 108/108.)
• ✓Heat tells you what it's doing to you — Cold, Noticed, Wanted, Hunted, with the actual consequence attached to each and the point (70) where the law starts coming to you unprompted. It used to be a bare number out of 100.
• ✓There's a clock on screen, and it decides almost everything — the time in Rookport sits in the top bar, day or night, with how long until it turns. It's there because the hour is the most important number in the game: whether a shop is open to walk into or shut and worth breaking into, whether your wage is running, whether there's anyone in a place to lean on, and whether the jail lets you out of your cell. It used to be readable in one parenthetical on the job line.
• ✓You rob a shop from inside it, like a person would — walking through an open door is not a crime any more. Go into a corner store the way any customer does — free, instant, nobody's business — and then decide, standing in the room, whether to rob it. That's where the staring contest happens and where a fight starts. There is no button on the pavement that robs an open shop. (A shut door is different and always was: picking the lock or taking it off its hinges is the break-in.)
• ✓A shakedown can be refused — extortion is a conversation, so you have it inside, face to face, and only when somebody's actually minding the place. If you plainly out-menace the room they pay; if the room won't fight you but isn't frightened either, they simply say no and you've wasted the afternoon. Nerve rises with what the business is worth and how many people are watching you try it — so a lone unarmed nobody gets laughed at, and the same man with a pistol, a friend, or a reputation does not.
• ✓Your job rings you, and shops throw you out at closing — an hour before your shift, at the bell, and at the end of the working day. Your hours are your workplace's hours: a clerk works days, a bartender works nights (which, until now, meant a bartender could never be paid at all). And a venue warns the room before it shuts, then puts everyone on the pavement — owners, residents and anyone mid-burglary excepted.
• ✓Cars have a real speed, and it changes while you drive — every speed in Rookport is now an actual number instead of a multiplier. A block is 60 metres, you walk at 9–12 km/h (your Speed decides), and cars run from about 25 km/h for a farm flatbed to 105 for the best machine in the city, with your Driving skill worth −15% to +20% on top. The worst car in the game is three times walking pace; the best is ten. And your speed is asked for continuously rather than fixed when you set off — which is the whole reason a chase is worth having: take rounds through the engine block with a patrol car on your bumper and you slow down while they're still behind you, the gap stops opening, and the car you were escaping in becomes the car you're caught in. Lose the engine entirely and you finish on foot, which against a cruiser is not a plan. It works in your favour too — shoot up the car in front. Cars also wear out just from being driven, about a point of condition every seven kilometres, so the garage is somewhere you go rather than somewhere you limp to.
• ✓The cars on a street belong to the people who live there — the kerb used to hold two or three anonymous cars on every block in the city, which made stealing one a vending machine. Now most blocks have none, plenty have one, a rich corner might have two, and each one belongs to a named person on that block. A shopkeeper keeps better iron than a barfly; a made man better than either. And the owner might be standing next to it — if he is, your chance of the law being called goes up, because what a witness does is shout. Wait for him to go inside and the same car is markedly easier. Take it and it's gone from that kerb. When the police pull up on a block and get out, you can see their cruiser parked there too.
• ✓Moving to a better flat costs a deposit, not a fortune — it used to cost $4,000 to take a nicer room in a building somebody else owns, which was more than some whole buildings cost to buy. You're renting either way, so the up-front is now three days of the new rent (about $528 for an apartment in Little Sicily), and the real price of a better address is the rent afterwards.

• ✓Accounts & sign-in — sign up with your email, get a link, set a username and password, and your boss is tied to your account (so you can log back in from anywhere). Lost the password? A one-time reset link, good for an hour, puts you back in — and setting a new one signs out every other device. Your boss is yours alone: every action is checked against your signed-in account, so nobody else can move, spend or fight with your character.

• ✓The city map — a zoned 30×33 port city: a downtown core, a commercial strip, residential home turf, an industrial west bank, a rural greenbelt, and a contested waterfront — laced with a river you cross at bridges, the bay, farmland, parks and forest with footpaths. Real-time travel along the streets, fog of war, and roaming police patrols. The layout reads like a real city: one courthouse in the downtown core with the banks beside it, a police station covering each quarter, two hospitals, a lone remote prison, and venues spread out the way they would be in life — no two gyms on adjacent corners, casinos and burlesque dance clubs only on the Row, crack houses off the main streets.
• ✓Action economy — every move and crime costs actions, which regenerate over time; plan your turns.
• ✓Character growth — four primary stats (Strength, Accuracy, Speed, Intelligence), levels and XP, points to spend, and derived secondary stats (max HP, melee/ranged power, defense, dodge, intimidation, trade edge). Level 10 is the ceiling, for you and for every crew member — so a boss who survived three rounds can't be untouchable to someone who started this morning.
• ✓Clean vs. dirty money — two purses: the bank (clean) and the cash on you (dirty); a legal business's books launder cash into the bank over time.
• ✓Property & rackets — buy a block, collect its safe, install cameras, run protection rackets and extortion, and staff legal fronts with employees. Kill a rival boss for the round and you can seize their buildings at a discount — once you've cleared the garrison they left holding the block. Shaking a business down happens inside, face to face, and can end three ways: they pay, they refuse you outright, or a defended owner (criminal guards, a bank's armed guards) fights back and the racket is yours only if you win.
• ✓The contraband economy — buy, produce, store, move, and sell goods; convert a building into the racket that fits it — a bar into a speakeasy still, a garage into a chop shop, a warehouse into a drug lab, gun bench or bootleg-cigarette room, a gym into a juice lab — then put crew on dealing duty to move the product. The docks and warehouses are wholesale hubs — deep, always-in-stock contraband you can buy cheap by the crate, the reliable way to keep a dealer supplied.
• ✓Crew — hire named individuals with their own rolled stats; assign duties (bodyguard, guard, worker, dealer); promote them manually; pay their daily wages or they walk.
• ✓Recruit tiers & portraits — every recruit and crew member has a quality tier (Common, Rare, Epic, Legendary) that scales their stats, how rare they are, and their price, plus a hand-drawn portrait that evolves across ten levels and advances when you promote them. Classier venues turn up rarer crew (just one or two on offer at a block at a time), and hiring is gated one way: you can't recruit anyone above your own level. (The old second gate, a reputation bar per tier, was removed on 2026-09-03 — the tiers already gate themselves on price.) Every recruit carries the same four primary stats you do (shown on their card, next to your own level), plus their own combat skills. Better recruits arrive already carrying gear and pocket cash — priced into the fee, so buying-and-stripping is never free.
• ✓Gear & equipment — five slots (head, chest, vest, legs, weapon); buy at the relevant shop right on the block panel, loot it off marks, equip it, hand it to crew, or take it back and re-slot it across your crew.
• ✓Thirty cars, ten quality tiers, and a skill for stealing them — every car carries a quality 1–10: what it's worth, how good it is, and how hard it is to take. Tier 1 is a slow $250 rustbucket; tier 10 is fast, tough and five figures, and the showroom won't sell you one — the only way into the top three tiers is to steal it. Three cars per tier, and they're real alternatives: a runner is quick and cramped, a hauler slow and cavernous. Theft runs on the new Mechanic skill against the car's quality: level with it and you take it clean 85% of the time, and every level short costs 10 points of that — with a third of whatever's left being the police getting called. You see all three numbers before you spend the action. Mechanic also knocks up to 60% off garage bills, and Driving now means purely travel speed and your getaway.
• ✓Combat, robbery & heat — fight NPCs and rival bosses, rob joints, pickpocket, boost a car off the kerb; build heat that draws the police; get wounded and recover. Heat cools on its own over about a day, faster the more Stealth you've trained. Heat is shared across your gang — a crew member's crimes (a street dealer, a raid) heat you and them, and a hot dealer is easier for the law to catch, so pull them off the corner to cool down. Taking a building is one job at any hour — get inside, lift things one at a time, get out before the law arrives. There's no button that turns a shop into money. When it's shut you pick the lock (or force it, loudly); when it's open you just walk in — but then everyone in the room sees you, the police are called at once, and anyone who can fight, does. Walking in on a defended place — guards, the owner present, or police on the block — means out-menacing the whole room at once or it becomes a real-time fight, and winning that buys you the room, not the money: you still have to search it with the law on the way. A live intimidation gauge tells you before you commit whether they'll stand aside or fight — you need roughly a third more total force than they have, and your intimidation stat helps tip it (police never fold). And every person you select now offers three ways to take from them: attack goes straight to a real-time fight, rob is the shakedown — out-menace them and they hand over everything they're carrying, refuse and it's a brawl — and pickpocket slips out one chosen thing from their pockets: their wallet, their phone, or something they're carrying.
• ✓Wheels that matter — a car cuts travel time and action cost drastically (a dealership ride is 2.5–4× walking pace, even a stolen beater nearly halves a trip), the HUD always shows whether you're driving or on foot with your real trip multiplier, and the Assets tab lists your ride's full stats and every building you hold with jump-to-map buttons. Your car is also cover in a street fight — fighting on the block with your ride beside you gives a defense bonus scaled to the car's size (a box truck is real cover). And your ride is now a troop carrier: send it on a crew op and the detachment cap becomes the vehicle's seats — a box truck moves the whole gang (eight) on one raid, a sedan carries five, a two-seat roadster is a lean strike car; on foot an op is still capped at five. It has a cargo trunk too — the car's own goods hold, separate from the pockets you carry on your person: load stock into it on the Assets screen, and a Rob raid overflows its haul into the trunk (a box truck hauls back far more than crew on foot can carry). The trunk rides with the car, and its contraband comes with you when you boost a new one. And when your crew hit a building with the car sent, they fight from behind its armor — the defenders' return fire is blunted, scaled to the car's size (a box truck is real cover), though never quite as strong as fighting from inside a fortified building. Your ride is a selectable object now — pick it from the left panel to get in or out or open its trunk, and you only get the speed and the cover while you're actually in it. And a parked car really stays where you left it: step out and walk away and it sits on that block until you come back for it — visible to everyone, and a rival can try to boost it (a harder crack than a street beater, but the whole car — trunk cargo included — is gone if they pull it off, and you get a report naming the thief). Cars parked in a garage stay safe; it's the one on the street that's at risk. And cars now take damage and get repaired: a ride has a condition — raids fought from behind it and theft wear it down, a damaged car is slower and thinner cover, and a wreck won't drive — fixed for cash at a garage or dealership. Gear wears out the same way: fights chip your weapons and armor, loot stripped off a beaten mark comes damaged, and worn pieces hit softer — a workshop repairs everything you and your crew own in one go.
• ✓Get hurt, not killed — lose a fight to an NPC or botch a pickpocket and you're taken to the hospital, not killed: heal to 50% to check yourself out, or all the way to full over about two hours, or pay for private treatment to patch up and leave right now. (Get caught by the law and it's jail, not the hospital — see "Jail & doing time".) Only another player can permanently kill you — and only by landing a finishing blow while you're already down.
• ✓Death, the graveyard & the next boss — a permanent kill really is the end of that character: their story closes with an obituary in the graveyard (name, title, level, killer, where and when). The account then waits out a respawn window (~24 hours) — the creation screen shows the obituary and a live countdown — while the dead boss's empire sits exposed: rivals can loot the body and seize the fallen tiles at a discount. When the window passes, a new character enters the world — and whatever property nobody seized passes to them, the one thread of continuity between your old boss and the new one.
• ✓Vision & intel — cameras, informants, and burner phones give you eyes on blocks. And what you know is now only as fresh as the last time you looked: a block you aren't watching shows you your last-known picture of it — defense, guards, till, stock, traps — stamped with how old it is ("last seen 40 min ago"), or "never scouted" if you've never had eyes there. Live blocks say so, and say why. That's what makes intel worth buying — and there's a new way to buy it: plant a listening device on any building that isn't yours for a live feed of that block for about a day with nobody exposed on the ground. It's a roll of your Spying against their security, and getting made hands the owner your name; owners sweep for devices with Security technician, finding only the bugs they out-level. Informants are real lookouts on the map now: catch a rival's lookout on your block and you can take them out to blind their eyes there. Your phone is an item you equip in the Inventory tab — own one by buying a burner or lifting it, then equip it to switch on the feeds and the 📞 handset (unequip to put it away). And the Intel tab now keeps a roster of every boss you've crossed — anyone who's stood on a block with you, messaged you, or come to blows — remembering your last dealings with each and, when you have eyes on him, what he's doing right now. From that list you track him, mark him friend or enemy, add him to your phone, or jump the map to where he was last seen.
• ✓Kill & loot a rival — land the finishing blow on a downed rival and you strip their body: street cash, carried contraband (as much as you can carry), their gear, and the car they were in. Clean/banked money and whatever's inside their buildings aren't on the body.
• ✓Contest it — first grab wins in Rookport, but if a rival takes money off a block while you're standing on it — collects a safe, cleans out a till — a ✊ Contest it? card offers you the obvious answer: call them out. It's a real fight on the spot, with the money riding on it — win and it comes out of their pocket into yours, lose and they keep it. The window is short and dies if either of you leaves the block, and your own family and treaty allies never shake you down.
• ✓Rankings & the graveyard — a net-worth leaderboard, and an obituary record for the fallen.
• ✓Your own face — and nobody else's. Every boss in Rookport is drawn in the same hand-inked 1930s style, and every one of them was drawn for one player: there are no stock faces to be handed. You start in an empty inked frame with your initials on it — a picture of nobody — and there are three ways out of it. 📷 Upload a photo and the artist gangsterifies it: same person, redrawn in ink as a 1930s boss (your photo is deleted the moment the drawing is done — we keep the picture we drew, never the photograph). ✍️ Describe him in your own words — fat, pig nose, curly hair, wearing a crown gets you exactly that, drawn like everyone else in the city; the house style isn't yours to pick, but the person is. Or 🎲 let the city deal you one — a description rolled for you out of more than a trillion combinations, so nobody else has your face, and rolling is free, so keep pulling until one of them sounds like you. Your first portrait is free, and nothing is spent unless a picture actually comes back — a refusal or an outage hands it straight back. Your face then follows you everywhere: your sheet, the rankings, and the graveyard if it comes to that. (Paid re-rolls arrive with payments.)
• ✓Accounts, and knowing what you're agreeing to — sign up with your email, verify it, pick a username and password, and you're in; you can reset a forgotten password from the same screen. Before the account exists you're shown the three things that actually matter — one account per person (running more can get every account involved banned), no bots or scripts, and this is an alpha whose world can be reset — plus a plain-language Terms of Service and Privacy Notice you can read in full. Nobody gets banned by surprise, and nothing about what we collect is hidden: the privacy notice says exactly what's stored, who else touches it, and how to have it all deleted.
• ✓The boards — a forum built into the game, on its own Boards tab beside the map, with three places to talk: 🐞 Bug reports, 💡 Feedback & ideas and 💬 General discussion. Report a bug and the game attaches the details for you — who your character is, where they were standing, the round, and your last dozen actions — so "it broke" is still something we can actually chase down; you can see exactly what's being sent before you post, and afterwards only you and the operator can read it. Your posts belong to your account, not your character, so they survive your boss getting killed and the round wiping — you can still answer your own bug report from beyond the grave. Bugs get marked open / known / fixed / won't fix so you can see what's been picked up. The boards are also readable by anyone at /forum, without an account.
• ✓The game keeps a record of itself — and it's how the numbers get fixed. Every action your boss takes writes one line to a log on our own server: what you tried, whether the game allowed it, and the game's own reason if it said no. That last part is the valuable one — a hundred players being told "you can't afford that" is a price problem, and a feature nobody ever reaches is a signposting problem, and neither is visible any other way. It never leaves the server, no third party sees any of it, it rolls over on its own, and deleting your account deletes the character it was keyed to. The full detail is in the Privacy Notice under Gameplay log. It's also read side by side with what the house-run bosses do — they know where everything is and never get lost in the menus, so when real players do much worse on the same action, that's the interface's fault and it gets fixed.
• ✓Looting: see everything, take what you want. Robbing a place used to be a button you pressed, after which the game told you what you had apparently decided to steal. Now 🎒 Search this block opens a proper looting panel: two lists side by side, with everything within arm's reach on one side — the block's stock, its till, its safe, and the boot of the car you arrived in — and your own pockets on the other. You see the whole inventory of each, with the weight, bulk and value of every line, so you can decide what's actually worth the space you have. Things move both ways between any two containers you're allowed to touch: one, ten, or as much as will fit — ask for more than you can carry and it takes what fits and tells you exactly what it left behind. And seeing isn't taking: a shop's stock stays behind the counter unless you're really robbing the place, and a safe shows you it exists and nothing more until you've cracked it.
• ✓Getting around is quick now. Travel used to crawl — ten blocks was a ten-minute walk, and still seven minutes in a cheap car, which is a difference nobody can feel. Ten blocks is now about three minutes on foot and a minute in the worst banger on the road — every car is roughly 2.8× walking pace before the Driving skill takes another 40% off, and a car saves you actions as well as time. Trips also follow the streets properly: you walk down out of the door onto the road in front, along the lanes, and straight up into the door at the other end.
• ✓Doors only cost you when someone's holding them. Walking into a shop, a shut venue or a stranger's building is instant. The five-second wait — the one where you can't shoot back — is for storming a place a rival has guards posted in, which is the only time there's anyone on the other side to make you pay for it.
• ✓Look inside anything — the looting panel was built but you could only reach it from one button on the Inventory tab, so standing inside a shop there was no way to look at the shop. 🎒 Look inside now sits on the block itself, and the same panel opens from your car (📦 Open the boot) and from your home. Your home locker is part of it at last — goods kept off your body, safe from a street death — which it wasn't before, so a boss standing in his own front room couldn't reach his own storage. (There was a real bug underneath: a block nobody had ever interacted with had no shop record yet, so the panel showed an empty room. It builds the block when you look now.)
• ✓Cars on the map — every kerb in Rookport has a car or two standing at it, and the map now shows the best one on each block: gold if your Mechanic can lift it cleanly, grey if it's out of your depth, with the model and your odds on hover. Only the best one per block — with two or three on every corner, drawing them all would be wallpaper rather than information.
• ✓Two ways to fix a car — at a garage you pay a mechanic (your Mechanic skill discounts the bill); anywhere else you do it yourself for nothing, provided your Mechanic is at least the car's quality tier. Doing it yourself costs actions rather than money — it's work. And when you can't, the button is greyed and says which level you'd need and to take it to a garage, instead of quoting you a price it was never going to let you pay.
• ✓The map keeps up with you — the fog of war now lifts as you travel, not only when you arrive. Blocks open ahead of you as you drive past them and close behind you, so you can see what you're heading into while you're still on the road instead of finding out on the doorstep. (The vision window had always been written to follow your marker; a stale cache meant it never actually ran. Fixing it turned up something worse: switch to another tab once and the whole map — fog, traffic, patrols — used to freeze for the rest of the session, with no way back short of a reload. It restarts itself now.)
• ✓Everything you own says where it is — every line on the Assets tab now carries its block and district and the same two buttons: Show on map jumps the board to it, Travel takes you there. Your home, your hideout, your ride and every holding you own, in the same shape, so "where did I leave the truck" is answered by the screen that lists the truck. (A car in your garage is the honest exception, and says so: a stored car isn't parked anywhere — you collect it at any garage or dealership.) The ride card also used to claim your car was "with you" even when it was six blocks away; it tells the truth now.
• ✓You can tell what you are on the map — the marker travelling down the street used to be the same anonymous disc whether you were walking or driving, and it wore a stock sketch rather than the face you commissioned. Now it's your own portrait in a gold ring on foot, and a car pointing the way you're going behind the wheel — so a glance tells you which kind of trip this is and which direction you're headed. Your real portrait now shows everywhere "you" appear on the map, not just on your character sheet. And parked cars are on the map at last: a ride left standing on a block shows as a small car at the kerb — green if it's yours, red if it's somebody else's and you fancy your chances. A car that can be stolen ought to be a car you can see. Yours stays visible through fog of war, because nobody forgets where they parked; anyone else's only appears on blocks you can actually see.
• ✓The books — a Finance tab that answers the one question nothing on screen used to: if I do nothing, what happens? Every standing income and every standing bill, side by side, with the balance and — as the headline — what you gain or lose per hour while the tab is shut. One-off money never appears; a robbery is something you did, not something that keeps happening. Two things it makes obvious, both of which used to catch people out: where the money lands (rackets pile up in each building's own safe and you have to go and collect them, while wages leave your pocket whether you're logged in or not), and that profitable isn't the same as solvent — the runway figure counts only the cash in your hand, so a boss with forty thousand in safes across town and twelve dollars on him can see, days early, that he's about to lose his whole crew.
• ✓Everything you own, and the buttons for it — the Assets tab now opens on where you live: your address, your grade, what you're paying, whether you're behind, how big your locker is, and who your landlord is — with the move up a floor button right there. Under it, your hideout with its whole upgrade tree and prices. And the important part: you can buy all of it from wherever you're standing. Fortifying a building you own, or taking a better unit in a building you already live in, is a telephone call to a contractor, not a trip across town — the tab used to be able to show you the work and then refuse to do it. (Moving into a new place still means going there. That one really is an arrival.)
• ✓Property costs what property should cost — a house used to be cheaper than a second-hand car, and every business in Rookport paid for itself in four days of a thirty-day round, which made buying one a formality rather than a decision. A block's price is now its payback period, and the period depends on the kind of money: vice pays back fastest (a crack house or a casino in under a fortnight — fast money, dangerous money), trade sits in the middle, and quiet earners like a warehouse or an office cost the most per dollar, because nobody comes looking for them. Where it stands matters too — the same bar is roughly half the price in the Greenbelt as downtown. And housing is priced on its rent roll, which finally makes the difference the city always described: a Greenbelt farmhouse is the cheapest roof in town, a Little Sicily row house costs about as much as a decent car, and a sixty-tenant downtown tower is the most expensive thing you can buy — and the biggest passive earner in the game.
• ✓Room to work — there used to be a policeman on very nearly every block, which is neither realistic nor much of a game. Police presence now radiates from the buildings the law actually works out of — the four station houses, the courthouse, the prison — and thins with every street you put between yourself and them. A station's own block is a wall; three or four streets out, the street is yours. Around two thirds of the city's built blocks now have no officer on them at all — and knowing which two thirds is something you can read off the map before you pick a job instead of finding out afterwards. Downtown is still the most watched quarter in Rookport, because it holds a station and the courthouse, not because every office block has its own patrolman.
• ✓Your account, in one place — the 👤 button in the top-right corner is your account menu: change your password, move the account to a different email address (nothing changes until you open the link at the new one, and the old one is warned), sign out every other device, delete the whole account, and log out. Deleting takes your boss and his history with it — his buildings go back to the city rather than being destroyed, and anything you posted on the boards stays with your name taken off it, so a bug report doesn't lose its answer.
• ✓The selector · display · viewer interface — the screen is three panels around the action: the left panel lists everything you can interact with on your block (a tappable row for the building itself and for every person present — locals, rivals, recruits, lookouts); the right panel is a viewer that opens whatever you select — the full hand-drawn portrait, stats, and every action you can take on them (or, for the building, a block card holding its art, owner and every action you take on the block — buy, extort, collect, hideout, storage, staff, rob, market, gear, train — with a Travel button when it's away); and a thin menu over the map swaps the middle display between the Map, your Character sheet, Inventory, Crew management, the City registry, Rankings and more. The City screen is a navigation table: every block in Rookport grouped by district, searchable, with trip costs — travel there, jump the map to it, or stage a crew op on it straight from the list. On the map itself, everyone shows as a small colour-coded dot (yellow neutral · blue police, flashing when they're after you · red rivals · dark red hostiles · green your own people · orange recruits and informants), NPCs walk the streets at a realistic pace, and street cars roll the lanes as small rectangles whose real look opens in the viewer. The whole city — streets, grounds and buildings — is drawn on one baked layer so the map stays smooth (zooming in and out included), the zoom and ⌖ Center on me controls are proper labelled buttons, and everything explains itself on hover — every button and meter carries a tooltip. Your own block is unmistakable: it carries a pulsing gold ring with your avatar pinned on it at every zoom, and the moment a trip's countdown lands you're on the block and ready to act — the game opens your new block's actions instantly, no waiting, no extra click. And the Character sheet is now a proper profile, in the shape crime games use: your portrait and identity up top, your condition (health, actions, XP, heat) grouped right under it, then your money, your attributes and skills, and your gear — instead of one long list.

In progress

• [~] Cars turn round where they are. A car that has to go back the other way now turns round on the spot instead of driving to the end of the street and back — a drive to the next block is about half what it was. Every car does it: yours, your crew's, residents', the police.
• [~] The building card sorts what you can do by what it costs you. Under the card's header, everything you can do on a place is in at most three groups, always in this order: Honest · no heat, Crime · raises heat, Violent · can start a fight — each with one plain line saying what it means. What you can only read about the place sits at the bottom under About this place. Something you can't do yet (the bank at night, the court out of session) is still there, greyed, with the reason. Open ground reads the same way: lying low is honest, dealing on the corner is a crime.

• ✓Somebody has to call the police. The law no longer appears because a crime happened — it appears because someone who would pick up a phone saw it: a patrolman already on the block, a shopkeeper, a bystander, or an alarm going off. Gangsters never call the police, so a fight on a crowded street brings a squad car and the same fight on an empty dock brings nobody, and where you start something is a real decision. Your sheet says who gave you away. Alongside it: a wrecked car finally puts you out on the pavement instead of ghosting around the city with you, the map follows you while you travel and Center-on-me aims at where you actually are rather than where you set off, cars on the map are selectable like people are, everything you hold — the job you work, the rackets paying you, the lookouts you station — is listed with a Travel button, and a block that fails to load now says so and offers to try again instead of sitting on "Sizing up…" forever.
• ✓Every action on one screen — and it fits your screen now. The selector/viewer split puts every person's actions one tap away, and the layout finally reads both dimensions of your window: three columns on a big screen, two when it's narrower (the details panel drops under the block list), and a single pane with a Here / Map / Details switcher on a phone — or on any window that's simply too short, which used to crush three full-height columns into a sliver. Tap something on a phone and it shows you the thing you tapped. The nine screen tabs carry icons so they still fit when the words don't. A collapsible Key & layers card holds the map key and real switches: turn the heat wash, the people dots or the traffic off to read the city underneath. And the trip line now prices a journey both ways — on foot and in your car — and tells you which one applies right now.
• ✓Real streets — the roads have been rebuilt as a proper connected street network: two-lane roads with real junctions and bridges that reach every building in the city. Delivery trucks, street cars and police cruisers all drive the lanes — keep-right, turning at corners, never cutting across country — and the ground beneath them is smooth now too: grass, water, forest and farmland merge into continuous shapes instead of flat squares, with a real shoreline on the river.
• ✓A full first evening, and every crime teaches you something — a new boss starts with half a full action meter (250), not a tenth: enough for a whole first evening instead of a walk across town and a few crimes (so does everyone at a new round, and the top ten's head start moved up with it — 100%, 90%, 75%). Every crime that comes off now earns XP by its risk — a pickpocket 4, a man who folds 6, a truck 6, protection 8, a hold-up 10, a break-in by its door — and each of Sal's contracts pays 20 XP: level 2 on your first day, about level 5 in a week of steady play. Sal now tells you when the pockets are full: from about 8 till 2:30 the townspeople are at work — go into the shops and diners, or catch them walking home with the day's pay.
• ✓Rounds & fresh starts — Rookport is played in fixed-length rounds, and the full cycle now runs itself. The HUD shows the current round and its live countdown, and when it hits zero the reset fires automatically: all material wealth wipes (cash, gear, vehicles, crew, property, territory) and everyone starts the next round even — but a character who survives to the reset keeps their level, stats and skills (die, and that veteran progress is gone). Each ended round's final standings go on permanent record, and the top 10 finishers start the next round with a head start: a fuller action meter, a clean-cash seed, and starter gear — the champion even rolls into the new round with a Banker's sedan parked by his door. It's a fast start, not a locked-in lead: everything awarded can be stolen like anything else.
• [~] A living economy — live now: the city's supply chain physically runs. Every shop sells real stock off real shelves (the counter shows exactly what's there; buying draws it down for everyone, selling restocks it, robbers can clean a place out). Those goods come from somewhere real: factories turn out cigarettes, household goods, parts, ammunition and supplements (selling wholesale at the gate), farms grow food, and the port lands imports off the boats — including every gun in the city. When a shop runs low, a delivery truck loads at the nearest producer and drives the streets to restock it — watch the amber freight rigs roll on the map, and hold one up on your own block: the load is yours, the run never arrives, and the shop it fed stays dry. Shortages bite: bare shelves charge more, pay over the odds for stock hauled in, and earn their owner less — so cutting a rival's supply line is a real squeeze. Legal consumer goods trade in clean cash, opening honest buy-low/sell-high routes alongside the black market. Hotels, casinos and offices sit at the top of the price ladder — the dearest demand shelves in town. (Trucks now drive proper road lanes, following the streets and turning at corners. The docks now anchor the top of the chain — hold a port and you skim a cut of every import it lands. Taking a dock is a real campaign now — every unowned port is held by the Harbor Syndicate, and you have to beat them off the waterfront before the deed is even for sale. Deep dock storage and bulk auto-selling are live too — a port's hold takes ten times what an ordinary back room does, and a standing export order ships stock out around the clock at wholesale while you do something else.)

• ✓Breaking and entering — Rookport now has two property crimes, and the building decides which one is on offer, because a building is locked when nobody's inside it. A grocer keeps day hours, so his shop is a hold-up at noon and a burglary at three in the morning. A barman keeps night hours, so the bar is the other way round. A house is shut whenever nobody's home — the tenants on its rent roll are money, not people in the hall. You never pick a mode — you pick an hour, and the city answers. Locksmith is the new skill and the gate: your level is the highest lock you can pick, from a shed at 1 to a bank at 7 to another boss's own home at 10. Break in quietly (the only crime that summons nobody), then lift what's there one thing at a time while a clock runs — about a minute later the alarm goes up and the nearest patrols are sent at your block, so get out with the haul before they arrive. Stealth buys you more quiet. Most places hide a safe that needs a higher level than the door did, and a bank's vault needs the maximum. What's worth taking fits the place you broke into — silverware out of a diner, a fur and a pocket watch out of a hotel room, chips off a casino floor, a ledger and a typewriter out of an office — and stolen valuables sell nowhere but a fence, who knows exactly what you are and prices accordingly.

• ✓A beaten car is a slower car — every car now has a condition, and it works like hit points: raids you send it on, boosting it, and road chases all chip it down. Every point of condition you lose costs half a point of top speed, with no free band — so a sedan that runs 60% faster than walking when it's mint runs 43% at 40% condition, and barely 21% on its last legs, which is hardly worth the petrol. At zero it's a wreck that won't move at all. The game tells you, everywhere: the ride line at the top of the screen reads 🐢 −16 speed (42% condition) the moment it starts biting, and every trip estimate on the map already accounts for it. A damaged car is also worth less when you sell it — the price slides down to a quarter at a total wreck — so repairing before a sale usually pays for itself. There's a mechanic's garage in every district now (they used to cluster in the industrial east, which meant driving a limping car clear across town to fix it), and you can repair any spare in your garage where it stands, without taking it out first. Every car also shows you its full sheet when you select it: top speed with the damage struck through, carry capacity in kilos and litres, boot size, crew seats, street cover, condition, sticker price and what it fetches right now. The dealership, your garage, a rival's parked car and the cars rolling past all list the same numbers — including which street models your Driving currently puts within reach.

• ✓What you can carry, and where to sell it — a haul is now a matter of room, not a count. Everything worth stealing has a weight and a size, and you have two limits that both have to fit: on your own two feet you can move about 25kg and 40 litres — a duffel bag — and that's it. This is the whole decision of a burglary. Jewellery is the dream: a fortune that weighs nothing. A typewriter is the trap: twelve kilos and a fifth of your bag for pocket change — leave it. A fur coat is light as air and eats half your space. Bring a car and the job changes shape — a car's hold is added on top of what you can carry yourself, and every model carries a different amount, so which car you drive to a job matters. A roadster adds almost nothing (it's a fast car with no room in it), a sedan adds a useful load, a box truck adds a great deal of space — which is exactly what a fur or a radio set needs — and among the cars you can hotwire off the kerb, a lifted delivery wagon is the poor man's truck. The boot is a separate hold again on top of that. When something won't come with you the game tells you which limit stopped you — too heavy, or simply won't fit. And there's now somewhere proper to unload: the pawn shop, a new business you'll find in Little Sicily, Ironside, the Docks and the Row — never downtown, so a haul always has to travel. It buys and never sells, pays dirty cash, and pays the best rate of any fence in the city — which still isn't a good one. He knows what you are.

• ✓Locks you buy — the other side of breaking and entering: your door is somebody else's job, so locks are now property you pay for on your home and on every building you own. The block card carries a 🔐 Locks panel showing the front door and the safe as pips, and every upgrade available with its price and what it actually buys you ("a burglar needs Locksmith 6 to get through instead of 5") — with what you can't afford yet greyed rather than hidden, so you can see the whole ladder from the bottom of it. You start almost wide open, deliberately: a new place has a level-1 door and no safe at all, which makes a new boss's home the softest target in Rookport and the first few hundred dollars you spend on that door worth more than a gun. A safe has to be bought before it can be hardened — it goes in for a flat fee and arrives on a level-1 lock, a box rather than a vault — and from there the door and the safe climb independently, so nothing forces the safe to stay ahead of the door and it's entirely possible to leave a vault behind a cheap door. It gets expensive fast (roughly $400 for the second level and $19,000 for the last), and it's clean money only — legitimate cash is what makes you hard to rob. A place nobody has paid to secure keeps the old defaults, so the city is never trivially open, and a maxed Locksmith still opens anything in it: a good lock buys you the rest of the field, not immunity.

• ✓The crowbar — a lock you haven't got the skill for is no longer the end of the conversation: you can force the door instead. But you pay for it the moment you swing. The police are called immediately — no quiet minute, and Stealth buys you nothing — and the owner is told at once, wherever they are. Forcing takes actions in proportion to the lock (and a strong boss does it faster, because this is muscle work rather than skill work), so a flimsy door is quick while a bank's is a long, loud job you may well still be inside when the cars pull up. That's the point: a good lock doesn't stop a crowbar, it costs you the time you needed — every dollar you spent on it is still buying you something. And a forced door stays broken, standing wide open to anyone until somebody hangs a new one: an unclaimed place gets one on its own after a few hours, but yours waits for you to pay — there's a Hang a new door button right on the Locks panel, priced well under what the lock cost you. A safe, though, cannot be forced at all. Not by a crowbar, not by a boot, not by the strongest boss in Rookport — a container is Locksmith or nothing, always. So a smash-in gets you what's lying loose and not one thing more, while the till and the stash stay exactly where they are. The crowbar makes a burglar of anybody; only the skill makes a good one.

Planned next

• The police coming for a Hunted man of yours — a call and a car sent for one of your men at Hunted heat, and your men stopped and searched at Noticed, as you are (each one only if the players want it).
• A car shot to a standstill stops in the road — in a chase, your car and your men's car both, when the shots take it down.
• "If I'm jailed" on the crew board — the crew command board's zone for who comes to the gate, in which car, and who goes to stop the police car (the pickup and the rescue, set by drag and drop).
• AI players and the convoy — the AI players (the Grok accounts and their like) using the rescue, the chase and the pickup the way a player does.
• The crew command board — your men, your cars, your gear and your own boss on one board, moved by drag and drop, with teams you name yourself.
• The living city — the people out of work are the men you hire, and some of them already work the street: they deal in the bars and the park, lift pockets, and are the robbers who stop you at night; every townsperson starts the round at level 1 unless his job asks for more, and the ones out of work train at the gym to get on.
• Held up on the street — a robber at night in the rough districts, a dirty cop after a share of your cash, the loan shark's collectors: each time you can hand it over, fight (with your chance to win shown) or run (they can shoot or chase you).
• Errands — short jobs Sal sends you on, and a crew's raid on a place on his side-jobs page.
• A layout for every kind of building — the inside of a building is drawn now (see Walk into a building and see the room, above), but every building shares one plan: a front room with the counter, till and shelves, and a back room with the safe, the gun rack and the stash. Next is giving each kind of building a layout of its own — a bank that looks like a bank, a house that looks like a home.
• Taxis — call a city cab from your phone: a real car with a driver comes to your kerb and drives you where you pick, for 1 action plus the fare. Your crew can take one too, when it's their quickest way.
• The launderer — a man in the pawn shop's back room turns dirty money clean for a big cut, so street money can buy a first building.
• Gambling — tables at the casino and dice in the bars' back rooms; the house wins on average, and the casino's owner keeps the edge.
• Cars stolen to order — a garage names the model it wants this week and pays double for it.
• More for your fleet — carjacking a rival's man at the wheel, a man posted on a block who really guards the cars on it, and new plates for a hot car.
• Bootleg liquor — a still in your house or on your farm turns grain and sugar into liquor the bars pay more for.
• The numbers — run a daily lottery in a district: the townspeople bet, your crew collect, you pay the winners and keep the house's share.
• The airport — fly abroad, buy goods cheaper there and sell them at home; four blocks at the city's edge with their own car park (its design isn't settled yet).
• The families, rebuilt — the AI families come back redesigned, a second version built on what this round taught us; until then a new round has none.
• Heists — a ladder from a corner shop or diner up to the bank; anyone can try any of them, but the bank needs a full, skilled, well-armed crew.
• ✓Employees are people — staffing a business stopped being a number. Every employee is a real, named person standing in your building (they can even be robbed past or killed — you lose the worker). Buy a shop and its former owner stays on as your first employee — they know the trade, and their stats show it. Need more hands? Hire whoever's on the block (unvetted — their fit is a gamble), or post a hiring ad and locals who visit the venue apply for the job, each application showing a stat sheet you judge against what the trade wants — and posting an ad now always turns up at least one good prospect, with each applicant colour-coded green (good fit) or red (poor) so the right hire is obvious. Everyone has a work efficiency per trade driven by their stats — good hires grow your business's prosperity faster, and a bad hire has negative efficiency and actively damages it until you let them go. (And applications now land on your phone — review stat sheets and hire from anywhere via the burner's hiring inbox.)
• [~] Recruits as full characters — the tier system and can't-hire-above-your-level are live, and crew now take real wounds and deaths in combat carrying their own gear (below). New: their four primary stats now actually drive how they fight — a crew member's attack, defense and health are derived from their own Strength / Accuracy / Speed / Intelligence (plus gear and skills), exactly the way yours are, so a high-Strength goon really does hit harder and a high-Speed one really does soak more. A tier is a share of your own stat budget at their level — a Common is built to ~70% of a player, a Rare ~85%, Epic ~100%, Legendary ~120% — and every recruit gets a sensible fighter's spread, never all-in-one-useless-stat. **Hire a crew member at level 1 and you raise them yourself: each promotion hands you the stat point to spend (a +STR/+ACC/+SPD/+INT picker on their card), while a pre-leveled veteran comes with their build set. The AI gangs' muscle works on the same scale. Crew are also fighters in their own right — many come with their own combat skills (Killer, Tough-as-nails, Heavy weapon) — and you now spend the skill points they earn on a growing set of crew-usable skills: the combat trio, Dealer/Relation (a dealer's take), plus Stealth (their crimes make less heat, and a street dealer with it is harder to catch), Driving (the best driver aboard sets your car's speed — for your own trips and their ops), Leadership (the best leader on a tile hardens everyone else's defense) and Spying (send them onto enemy turf for 22h of real-time intel — undetectable unless the target out-levels their Spying), Security-tech (rig traps on turf you hold — damage / alarm / snare, absolute level-gate — and disarm the enemy's), Arsonist (bring one on an Attack or Rob op and they torch the building — structural damage that drops its income and defense until the owner repairs it, and guts it at zero), and — the last piece — you can now park crew at a gym to train: they gain XP and auto-level over time (points still bank for you to assign), the slow hands-off way to raise a recruit, but they're exposed there — a rival can send an Attack op to jump your trainees, and the trainee plus your other crew training at that gym fight back as a group**. Every crew skill and the training path are now live.
• [~] Deeper skills — the full skill tree is now trainable and most already bite: Killer, Tough-as-nails, Dealer, Heavy weapon and Spying (combat power, HP, prices, and sending a crew spy onto enemy turf for real-time intel — undetectable unless out-levelled — and your crew now use most of these too: their own Killer/Tough/Heavy-weapon, a dealer's Dealer/Relation take, plus Stealth, Driving and Leadership working for crew as well as you), Leadership (crew command — cheaper crew hiring, promotions & daily wages, and now a defensive aura hardening your whole group on a tile), Driving (faster, cheaper vehicle trips — the best driver aboard sets the car's speed) and Stealth (less heat from every crime, harder to be caught pickpocketing, faster heat cool-down). Relation now pulls better buy/sell prices through wholesaler connections (stacks with Dealer) ✅; Security technician (rig/spot/disarm traps, absolute level-gate) ✅ and Arsonist (torch a building on a raid — structural damage, a full building-HP model that seeds demolition) ✅ have both switched on; and Driving is now complete ✅ — after any crime there's a getaway delay before you can drive off (you can always walk), and every Driving point cuts it, while a higher Driving also opens better cars to steal off the street — a coupe or a delivery wagon instead of the rustbucket at the kerb.
• ✓A living map — every NPC on a block is drawn on the map, and clicking a person on your own block opens them in the viewer so you act on the ones you see: pickpocket or attack a street NPC, jump a rival, or take out a rival's lookout — right from their dot. You can also click a car rolling past your block to boost it — a quick, risky carjack. And you can now click a recruit venue from anywhere on the map to preview its line-up in the viewer and route straight over to hire. Clicking a faraway block focuses it with a Travel button, so the whole map is click-to-reach.
• ✓Crew fight, bleed, and die — your bodyguards take hits for you and must be cut down before an enemy can reach you; a beaten crew member is hospitalized and heals over time, and a hard enough blow kills them for good and loses the gear they carried. (Looting a beaten target and XP-by-difficulty are already live.)
• [~] Combat depth — live now: every fight — rival bosses, street NPCs, recruit brawls — plays out as a multi-round engagement with a blow-by-blow log: both sides trade hits (so jumping someone can put you in the hospital too), attacks can miss based on melee vs ranged accuracy, and a hurt loser can flee — street marks bolt when bloodied. Your weapon decides your style: guns fight ranged, bats and blades (new buyables) fight melee. New — EVERY fight now plays out in REAL TIME: jump a rival player, a street NPC, or a recruit and it opens a live ⚔️ Fight panel that advances a turn every ~5 seconds, streaming the action, with a 🏃 Flee button you can hit on any turn to try to break off (crew raids resolve as real-time fights too — see Raids). Badly hurt street marks and recruits now bolt mid-fight on their own — corner them before they slip away. Engagement modes are in too — ambush and siege postures on a crew Attack (see Raids & operations). Still to come: the AI-generated "action story" replay.

On the horizon

• [~] Raids & operations — live now: you can dispatch a detachment of your crew (up to five) to hit any tile as a timed operation that marches there and, on arrival, plays out as a real-time fight over several turns rather than resolving in an instant — Redeploy them to garrison a block (auto-defense), Scout a building to quietly bring back its defenses, guard count, till cash, goods and production before you strike, Attack whoever holds it (beat a present rival into the hospital — never a kill, that still needs you there in person — or rout the owner's guards), Rob a building for one resource (cash or goods, hauled home), or Capture it outright: beat the defenders and your crew seize and hold the place. A live tracker counts each op down and reports the outcome. You can send your car along — the crew drive, so the run arrives faster and a Rob hauls more (one car, one op). Crew who run an op now walk back home afterward — a trip as long as the way out — during which they can't escort you, hold a block, or be sent out again (the tracker shows how many are heading home), so a long raid leaves you thinner for a while. New: two more op types — Destroy (wreck a rival's building — see "Blow up their operation" below) and Massacre (kill everyone on the block). **And an Attack now asks how, not just where: storm it head-on, 🌒 ambush — lie in wait on the block for ~45 minutes and jump the first enemy who walks in, with surprise behind you and no heat at all until it springs — or ⛓ siege — ring the block for an hour so nothing gets in or out** (anyone entering or trying to leave is fought at the line) and the place earns its owner nothing while you hold. You can also send them the back way: ~40% longer, ~70% less heat. The launcher shows what you actually know about the target (live, last-seen-with-age, or never scouted), and if you're in a family it lists your clan's jobs in flight so you can send your own men to reinforce one — joining the fight mid-raid if they get there in time.
• ✓Auto-defense & police pressure — automated SWAT raids on high-heat bosses are live (run hot and the law raids you over time, even offline — seizing illegal goods and the cash on you — never a legal good — and cooling your heat). And your garrison now auto-defends: when a rival sends a crew op at a building you hold, the guards you stationed there fight back on their own — landing hits on the raiders (and taking their own wounds) — and you get a defense report telling you what happened, even if you were offline. New: when you're online, an inbound raid warns you with a live countdown and a one-tap Send guards button that rushes your free crew to the block to reinforce the garrison before it lands — or 🚨 Call ALL units, an emergency rally that phones every reachable crew member (guards off other blocks, dealers, trainees, your escort) and rushes them all to the block at once, each from their own post, so the nearest may beat the raid and garrison it while farther ones straggle in behind — and the AI gangs now run their own raids on your turf too. And that groundwork paid off: reinforcements now arrive mid-fight — crew you rush to a block while the raid is already raging join the defenders' line in the middle of the live fight and can turn the tide.
• ✓Evolving portraits (crew) — recruits and crew carry hand-drawn tier portraits that grow more menacing across their ten levels and change when you promote them, now cut out to clean transparent figures. (Street NPCs now have the same treatment too — a full illustrated crowd and per-venue staff; boss avatars are still to come — see below.)
• [~] AI-generated avatars — a unique portrait for every boss in the game's comic-noir house style. Describing your boss in your own words is live: heavy black inking, cross-hatching and a rain-slick street behind, with your build, age, face and clothes drawn to match. Still to come: paid re-rolls. (Uploading your own photo to be gangsterified is live — see Your own face, above.)
• [~] Clans & territory — live now: found your own family. Put $25,000 on the table (any money) and the Clan tab lets you found a clan as its Don — a name, a [TAG], and up to ten made members. Invite bosses by name (they accept or decline the invitation on their own Clan tab), and run the classic family hierarchy: Don, one right hand, consiglieri, capos, and men of honor — the Don hands out the chairs, and rank decides who can extend invitations. Joining is a real commitment: membership binds until the round ends — no clan-hopping — and the only way out mid-round is being cut loose after going dark for 36+ hours. And the family can now hold ground: three fortress bunkers stand on the rough edges of town, and the Don can buy one as the clan's stronghold — it opens the family vault (below) and puts a spring in every member's step (faster action regen clan-wide). The bunker is real territory: garrison it, fortify it, and expect rivals to come for it. Clan chat is live too (see Chat below). And the family now fights together: you can send your own men to reinforce a clanmate's operation — they travel from where you stand and join the fight mid-raid if they arrive in time. Peace treaties and the family scoreboard are in too — see "Clan common bank" below. And the family now survives the turn of the round. When a round ends the material goes the way of everyone else's — vault, armory, garage, stronghold and treaties all wiped — but the family keeps its name, its tag and its Don, and the roster is re-formed rather than rolled over: every other member gets a standing re-invitation that puts them straight back into the chair they held, and nobody is bound to a family they'd rather leave. The top ten families collect a head start: a clean seed in the vault, a cheaper stronghold to buy (half price for the champions, walls already up), and for the top three a fuller action meter for everyone who was on the roster.
• ✓Alerts that reach you while you're away — the game now tells you what happened when you weren't looking. A 🔔 Alerts channel in the chat panel logs everything aimed at you — most importantly a raid inbound at a block you hold, announced the moment the crew sets off, with the time you have left, so you can rally guards or move what matters before it lands (the 💬 button pulses for those). Also: raids that landed and how your garrison did, capture and every step of a ransom negotiation, being jailed, a clan invitation, your parked car getting boosted, and private messages. Tap 📍 to jump the map to where it happened, and ⚙ to pick which types reach you — each one can show in the feed and, for the serious ones, email you so an attack finds you with the tab closed.

• [~] Chat — live now: the city talks. A 💬 chat panel with three kinds of channel: Global (the whole city — trash talk, market chatter, finding a clan), your Clan channel (made members only — the place to plan ops and run the vault), and private messages with any boss by name (diplomacy, threats, ransom talk). Flood-limited so nobody can drown the room, with mute (hide a boss's lines everywhere and block their DMs to you) and report on every message, and a red dot on the 💬 button when something new lands. The system alert feed is now the panel's fourth channel (see "Alerts that reach you while you're away" above). And there's a local room now: a 📍 channel for the district you're standing in — the Docks talking about the Docks — which changes as you move across town. Ransom deals are negotiated in the DM thread itself: when someone is holding you (or you're holding them), the demand arrives in your conversation as a deal card carrying the figure and whose move it is, with Accept · Counter · Refuse right on it. Counter and the card updates in place; the old offers stay in the thread as history so you can read the haggle back.
• [~] Clan common bank — live now: the family vault. A shared clan treasury at the stronghold: members pay in by hand or set a daily tribute (charged automatically, crime money first), and draw out under rank-set daily caps — the Don draws freely; a fresh man of honor only a little. What you've deposited survives your death — the one hedge against losing everything. But the vault is a real room in a real bunker: robbers can crack it, a wrecking crew can empty it, and losing the bunker loses the war-chest — so the family guards its money. And the family now holds more than money: an armory and a garage at the stronghold (pool your gear and cars — anyone can pay in, and how much you can draw out per day depends on your chair), and property deeded into the family's name, whose takings run straight into the vault, which every member's guards defend, and which no single death can lose. The Don can also rename the ranks to whatever his family sounds like. Plus real diplomacy: two Dons can sign a peace treaty — while it holds neither family's ambushes, sieges or crew ops can touch the other, and money moves between the vaults — though it's deliberately not a merger, and tearing it up warns both sides at once. And the Rankings screen now carries a family table: each clan scored on its members' combined worth plus the vault and everything held in its name.
• [~] The docks, contested — the waterfront becomes the game's marquee prize. Live now: the docks are the toughest ground in the game, a port owner keeps a third of everything the docks sell (the ships that landed it take the rest) — and taking one is now a real campaign: every unowned port is held by the Harbor Syndicate, an elite armed crew standing on the waterfront. You can't buy the deed while they stand — beat them off first (send an Attack op at the docks, or fight them in person), then pay the steepest property price in Rookport. Dawdle after clearing them and the syndicate re-crews the docks in about a day. And a port you hold is now a real business. Its deep hold takes ten times what an ordinary back room does — the city's warehouse, and half the reason to own one. Set a standing export order and the longshoremen ship that stock out around the clock at wholesale while you do something else. And the stolen-car export racket is running: drive any car onto a wharf and it joins the export lot for the next boat. Bring one to your own dock and you're paid nothing up front — you take the full shipping margin when it sails; sell into someone else's and you're paid on the spot, out of the wharf's own cash box (a wharf that can't cover the price turns you away until the next boat sails), while the wharf's owner takes the bigger cut. Owners can bar a rival by name from unloading at all. A family can also buy a dock straight out of the clan vault, in the family's name — which is how anyone affords the steepest deed in Rookport.
• [~] Chases on the streets — pursuits play out on the roads, and the car-to-car fight is live. Drive off a block with the law hunting you and it's a real road chase on the fight panel: the pursuit cruiser and its officers trade gunfire with your car as you run — the driver just drives; your passengers shoot back — and your ride soaks their fire first, genuinely slowing as it's shot up until it's a wreck that won't drive. Hit Flee to gun it for the break-away — a faster car and a better driver slip free far more often — or ride the fight out: lose everyone and the law drags you from the wreck straight to jail; shoot the pursuit off the road and you're free, but marked. Every patrol car and street car now drives the road lanes properly — keep-right, turning at corners, no cutting across country. And it isn't only the law any more. Rival mobsters run you down: drive off a block where a hostile boss is standing while you're hurt or badly wanted, and the keenest armed rival there pulls out behind you — the same road chase, except nobody's taking you to jail. Both cars come out of it battered, and the loser goes down where his car stops. A boss in good shape and out of the spotlight usually drives off unbothered — and your family and treaty allies never chase you. Ambulances are on the streets too. Get beaten down and the city sends a wagon from the nearest hospital to collect you — you can watch it drive out and drive back. Anyone it passes right by can run it off the road, and anyone at the wheel of a car within a block can chase it down and shoot it to a standstill: stop it on the way out and the pickup never happens (the patient lies where they fell and stops healing for a while), stop it on the way back and the patient is dragged out onto the pavement, still down — which is exactly the opening a finishing blow needs. It's loud: it costs actions, spikes your heat, and brings the law fast. And the chase is on the streets now, not just on the card. Every pursuit carries a real street route, with your car and theirs drawn on the map as they drive it. Each turn both cars move at their own speed — a roadster genuinely pulls away, a rusted beater genuinely gets run down — and a bar at the bottom of the screen shows the live gap in blocks. Open four blocks of clear road and they lose you at the corner, no roll required; let it close to nothing and they're alongside, shooting into your windows at point-blank. Flee is no longer a coin flip but a burst of real distance — put your foot down and see if it's enough. When your car stops — you got there, or you pulled up — how close they are decides it: within a block they box you in.
• ✓Blow up their operation — the two heaviest plays in the game are live as crew ops. Destroy: beat a building's defenders and wreck the place — your crew steal the cash on the premises (cash is stolen, never burned), burn the stock, and do heavy structural damage (an Arsonist on the crew multiplies it). Drive the structure to zero and the place is RAZED — a smoking ruin: it earns nothing, produces nothing, and every upgrade is lost. NPC businesses rebuild on their own in about a day (city services faster) — but a razed player building never comes back by itself: the owner has to pay to rebuild it and buy back every upgrade, a lasting blow. Massacre: people over property — your crew fight everyone on the block (the garrison, the staff, the street) and finish the ones who go down: rival crew are killed outright, not wounded, and the staff die with them. A boss caught in it is only ever hospitalised — crews can never permanently kill a player. Both are the loudest moves in the game: double heat, double police presence.
• [~] The law responds — live now: police patrol the city in cars, and every crime alerts the nearest cars to drive to your block from wherever they are — no countdown; how long you've got depends on where the law actually is. Flee and a patrol that sees you gives chase; break their line of sight and lie low inside a building for about a minute to lose them, or get run down and stripped of what you're carrying. And you can now travel around the law: an "avoid police" toggle on any trip routes you around the patrols — a longer, costlier detour that keeps you out of their sight, skips the wanted-heat surcharge, and won't get you stopped on arrival (turn it off when you're in a hurry). A patrol that runs you down now makes a real arrest → jail (see "Jail & doing time" below). And the car-to-car fight itself is live — see "Chases on the streets".
• ✓Take prisoners & ransom them — a fight against another boss no longer has to end in the hospital. Beaten and cornered, you can 🏳️ surrender on the live fight card — you're taken alive as a prisoner instead of risking a beating or a finishing blow. Your captor holds you at a holding installation (or their own hideout as a weaker back room) and can demand a ransom — a proper back-and-forth deal (demand → accept, counter, or refuse), and paying it (out of your dirty cash) sets you free. Or break out yourself: spend actions to fight, sneak, or bolt your way past the guards — better odds with the right skills, a weaker installation, and the captor not watching — and scavenge a shiv first to improve your chances. Your allies can spring you by raiding the block you're held on. No capture holds forever — there's a hard max hold after which you're let go. (This is the shared "confinement" system the jail below is built on.)
• ✓Jail & doing time — getting caught now means jail, not a quick rough-up. When the law corners you, your stance decides how it goes (set it right on the WANTED banner): surrender and you're booked in uninjured for the crime's own sentence; resist and the arrest becomes a real street fight against the responding officers — beat them and you're a marked fugitive with a harder wave coming, lose and you go in hurt, for double; and SWAT never negotiate — kick your door in hot enough and you're taken down by force for 8 hours at least (but the law can never permanently kill you). Inside, the bust settles your heat, the jail's own medical ward patches you up, and you can work laundry shifts for time off. Get out by serving your time, posting bail (clean cash, priced by what's left), bribing a judge through your lawyer (once per stay — good connections make the envelope smaller and the cut deeper), breaking out (fight, sneak or bolt, at any hour — hard, and a miss costs you a beating and the sentence again; a jailbreak puts your heat at the maximum), or having your family or a friend raid the prison to spring you.
• ✓Your hideout — designate a place you own as your hideout and lying low inside it cools your heat twice as fast (stacks with Stealth). Fully upgradable with clean cash: Fortifications (three tiers — each adds defense and security so raids bounce off), a Medical ward (patch to full HP at home for a fraction of hospital rates, no ambulance fee), a Personal doctor (heal slowly over time even while active), and an Armory (store spare gear off your body). Plus a stash — keep your dirty cash at the hideout so a street death can't strip it off you (a rival can still crack it by robbing the place).
• ✓The phone — your eyes when you're not there. The burner now opens on FEEDS: every camera you've installed, every informant on a corner, every crew member out spying and every block your garrison holds — each one saying where it is, what it can see right now, and whether it's live or dark, with a tap to jump the map there. That's what a phone is for in Rookport; everything else folds up behind it. Also live: the hiring inbox shows every job application across all your businesses — review stat sheets and hire or pass from anywhere, no trip back to the shop; call an ambulance when you're hurt — paramedics patch you to full on the spot, even while you're still on your feet; browse the legal job openings you qualify for across the city and apply without standing in the venue; manage your crew from anywhere — see what every crew member is doing (guarding, working, dealing, on an op, heading home, in hospital), recall any one of them, or hit Recall all to pull your whole crew back to your side in one tap when trouble's coming; and a searchable contacts list of everyone you know — crew, lookouts, and the managers running your businesses — with a one-tap Locate to find any of them on the map. The phone is complete.
• [~] Live a straight life — you can skip crime and just be a citizen. Live now: you start in a starter apartment and pay rent (scaled by district — cheap in the poor blocks where you spawn, dear downtown) from your clean cash, and you can hold a legal job — clock in by parking inside your workplace and earn a clean salary over the working day (the city runs a 12-hour day/night on New York time — you're paid 6am–6pm NY); switch jobs freely — or find work by phone: your burner lists the openings you qualify for city-wide and you apply on the spot, no trip to the venue — and some jobs need a minimum stat (brains for a bank, muscle for labour, and so on). Your first job more than covers your first apartment, so an honest life pays its own way. And a brand-new player can't be attacked by anyone until they commit their first crime — a grace period to get set up, which ends for good the moment you step into the underworld. And your home is now a real place on the map. Stand on any house nobody else lives in and move in (a house is one household) — a cold-water room, a proper apartment, or a top-floor place, each dearer than the last, and dearer again downtown. A better place holds more in your home locker (goods kept off your body, where a street death can't strip them) and gives you real cover if somebody jumps you indoors at home. Move up a grade whenever you can afford it. But the rent is no longer a formality: what you can't cover now piles up as arrears, you get one warning, and three days behind and the landlord throws you out — the unit goes to somebody else and whatever was in your locker is his. The city's housing is full of people: every block has civilian tenants, from a few families in a Little Sicily row house to crowds in the new downtown skyscraper towers — and every one of them pays rent to whoever owns the building. Buy a tower and you're a landlord: the quietest money in Rookport, no shelves, no staff, no heat. And the jobs ring you back now: applying by phone puts an application in rather than hiring you on the spot, the employer calls back after a wait scaled to the pay (minutes for a dish pit, most of an hour for a bank), and the offer then sits on your phone with Take it or Pass until it goes cold. (Later: you'll even be able to play as a police officer.)
• [~] Deeper movement & more crime — richer on-foot and vehicle movement, looting parked cars, and even playing as a cop. (Live now: your fleet — see Your fleet above: as many cars as you like, each one somewhere real, and a parked car is a real object on the block you left it — a rival on that block can boost it whole, trunk cargo and all, and a car in a garage's bay can be broken into.)
• ✓A full-screen, no-scroll interface — the game fills the whole window and never scrolls the page; the map is a big, zoomable, pannable board that recenters on you as you move, with the panels tucked into a side rail.
• ✓Your account is actually yours — on the Character tab you can change your password, move the account to a different email (nothing changes until you open the link sent to the new address — your email is your login, so it is never switched on trust, and your old address is told it was asked for), sign out every other device, and delete the account outright, yourself, in about ten seconds. Deleting takes your boss and his history, your portrait and any photo you uploaded — while his buildings go back to the city instead of being destroyed, and your board posts stay with your name taken off them, because deleting a bug report takes its answer away from everyone still reading it. And if an account is ever suspended, the player is told why, which rule, when it lifts and how to appeal — nobody is locked out in silence.
• ✓The Greenbelt is worth something now — the farmland north of town has stopped being scenery. Every farmstead up there is worked by farmhands and can be bought like any other building, and a farm is the only place you can put in a weed field — at $900, the cheapest racket in the game. Which farm you buy is the decision: a crop's yield and its storage both scale with the open fields around the farmstead (+25% each), so a farm sitting in the open grows two and a half times what one backed against the woods does, and the panel tells you the number before you spend a penny. Then you have to move it — a bale of weed weighs nothing and takes nine litres, so a man on foot carries four and a truck carries forty, and the farm gate pays a third of what a crack house does. The money was never in the growing. It's in the drive.
• ✓The door costs you something — walking into a building that isn't yours is no longer a click. Any door that isn't yours, your clan's, your home, or a shop inside its opening hours takes five seconds in the doorway, and you cannot shoot back for any of them. Guards posted inside get one free volley as you come through — it doesn't miss, your bodyguards take it before you do, and if you go down you're dumped back on the street with nothing. And nobody shoots through a wall: gun range is your tile and your side of the door, so stepping inside genuinely breaks contact. Between them, those two rules are what make a defended building worth defending — and what makes bringing crew the answer.
• ✓Tiles you can see into — every city tile is drawn as three zones — the street, the grounds, and the building — and everyone standing on a tile you can see shows up as their own small colour-coded dot right where they are, people inside drawn up in the building and people outside down at the street/door edge; street NPCs stroll the city at a real walking pace and cars roll the roads, so the city feels alive without cluttering the board. (The hand-drawn character art lives in the side panels — tap anyone to see their full portrait in the viewer; clicking a person you see to act on them is live on your own block.)
• ✓Rival gangs that play for real (in the round that ends on 25 October; from the next round on there are none until the families are rebuilt) — four AI-run outfits (the mafia, bikers, punks and a street gang) working the same city with the same tools you have. They claim and expand territory, show on the Rankings, and send their own crews out to raid — hitting nearby buildings you or a rival gang own with the same attack/rob/capture ops you can run (your stationed guards defend automatically; the newbie-safe spawn blocks are left alone). They run their holdings like players do: collecting the takings, staffing their bars and shops with real employees, converting captured buildings into stills and drug labs you can rob — and now their rackets actually sell: a street dealer stands on each gang production site moving the product for their war chest. Their soldiers come armed off the real gear tables with their own combat skills. And they hold grudges: raid a gang and expect a revenge crew at your nearest holding — gangs avenge each other too, so gang wars flare up on their own.
• ✓The city reads like a city. The map was redrawn against the design: police heat is painted once, as a soft bloom, instead of tinting every parcel and washing it again — the built-up blocks stopped reading as a muddy grid. Roads grade in three tiers — a full street between two city blocks, a narrower lane where the town meets open country, and nothing at all between two pieces of countryside, which is what used to chop the fields and parks into squares. Junctions are as wide as the widest road meeting them, and a lane opens out into a street over its last stretch instead of stepping. A block fronting the water is a quay — full width, not a sliver. The river stays in its channel instead of flooding the embankment street, and the crossings are road bridges: piers in the water, asphalt carriageway, concrete parapets, expansion joints, and the centre line carried straight over. Fog is a soft veil punched open around what you can see, vacant lots read as cleared ground, and each district's name sits on its own streets. Every vehicle is its real painted self now — sedans, roadsters, beaters, hatchbacks, clunkers and box trucks, facing the way they're actually driving, with police running a blue-and-red beacon and ambulances marked with a red cross. And traffic only drives where there's a road: the map and the cars finally agree on where the streets are.

• [~] A fully illustrated world — every tile, vehicle, item and rival crew drawn in Rookport's house style, so the whole city looks the part. Live now: the whole map is painted — every building tile shows its own hand-drawn sprite sitting on the street, and rivers, parks, fields, forests, bridges and roads are drawn in instead of flat colour. Every inventory item and gear piece has a hand-drawn icon, and a 140-strong cast of hand-drawn characters — men and women, cops, informants, street kids, fixers and every venue's own staff — puts a face on everyone you meet: tap any person and their full portrait opens in the viewer, with vehicles showing their painted art the same way. The crew and recruit portraits are cut out to clean transparent figures to match. And the ground itself is no longer a grid. Grass, water, forest and farmland used to be painted one flat square per block, so the countryside looked like graph paper and the river came down the map in steps. They're now drawn as continuous ground: same-terrain blocks merge into one shape with no seam at all, and only real boundaries — a riverbank, the edge of a wood, where a field meets the road — get an irregular hand-drawn line. The river runs as one channel with a proper shoreline and swells on it, crossed by bridge decks, and the water now runs off the edge of the board instead of stopping at a ruled rectangle. Still to come: hand-drawn portraits for the rival gang crews in the same style.
• [~] The balance pass — tuning every number for feel once the systems are in place. (In progress, and now driven by evidence: the house-run bosses that keep the city from feeling empty while it fills up play the whole game — they hold jobs, shop, buy cars, take deeds, work fields, raise crews and walk Sal's contract book from the first page — and a full day of them is recorded and read back. Two numbers have already moved because of it. Travel dropped from 5 action points a block to 3: at the old price a single walk across a few streets cost most of what a new boss owns, and 38% of everything the population tried was refused for want of action points. And the XP ladder dropped from 100 a level to 40 × your level: at the old curve reaching level 10 took longer than an entire round, so most of the levels existed on paper only. Two real bugs fell out of the same day — wages that quietly failed to pay, and tenants being told to break into their own homes.)

How this list works

This roadmap is a living document maintained alongside the game itself — as features ship, their boxes get checked and they move up the list. Nothing here is a promise of dates; it's the current direction of travel. For how the live systems actually work, read the Wiki.