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:

• ✓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).
• ✓Clean vs. dirty money — two purses; legal fronts launder dirty cash into clean 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 now works like a robbery — an undefended owner pays up, but a defended one (criminal guards, a bank's armed guards) fights back, and you take the racket 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 two ways: you can't recruit anyone above your own level, and better tiers need Respect — a bigger name commands better crew, with Legendary needing a serious reputation. 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.
• ✓Combat, robbery & heat — fight NPCs and rival bosses, rob joints, pickpocket, carjack a street car (odds ride on Driving and Intelligence); 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. Robbing a defended place — one with guards, the owner present, or police on the block — isn't a free grab: you must out-menace the whole force at once, or the stick-up becomes a real-time fight and the loot goes to whoever wins. A live intimidation gauge on the Rob button tells you before you commit whether the block will fold or fight — you need roughly a third more total force than the defenders to make them back down, 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).
• ✓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.
• ✓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.

In progress

• ✓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.
• ✓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 behind the wheel of a fresh sedan. 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, sundries and parts (selling wholesale at the gate), farms grow produce, and the port lands imports off the boats. 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.)

Planned next

• ✓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 contraband and cash 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, made either from a text description or by uploading your own photo to be "gangsterified" into a 1920s mob character.
• [~] Clans & territory — live now: found your own family. Earn enough Respect and the new 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 skims a tariff on every import the docks land — 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 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 wakes up in the hospital. 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 standing on its block can run it off the road: wreck it on the way out and the pickup never happens (the patient lies where they fell and stops healing for a while), wreck it on the way back and you drag them out onto your block, 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. Reach the end of your run still in front and the pursuit peels off.
• ✓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 on the short 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 and for longer; and SWAT never negotiate — kick your door in hot enough and you're taken down by force for the longest stretch (but the law can never permanently kill you). Inside, the bust settles your heat, the jail's own medical ward patches you up, and the prison runs a day/night schedule — at night you're locked in your cell; daytime is when the risky moves open up. 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 (the same fight/sneak/bolt escape play as a captive — but a jailbreak makes you a fugitive), or having allies 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 for clean cash, the only way to heal while 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 housing block with a free unit and take it — 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: a garage — you can own more than one car; buying a new ride parks your old one instead of scrapping it, and at a dealership or garage you swap your active car in and out — or sell a stored car: a dealership model fetches half its sticker, a boosted beater a small scrap value — either way it's cash in hand, dirty; car sales on this market don't come with paperwork. And a parked car is a real object on the block you left it — dismount and walk away and a rival on that tile can boost your ride whole, trunk cargo and all, so park somewhere you hold.)
• ✓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.
• ✓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 — 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.

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.