What changed in Gigawatt Valley, newest first. The browser build always has the latest.
Gigawatt Valley
The game has a name of its own: Gigawatt Valley. It was Datacenter Builder, which is what it is, not what it is called. The title screen, the apps, the art and this site all carry the new name, and your company is now Gigawatt Cloud. Saved games made under the old name are copied across the first time you run it.
People are people now. They were a block with four sticks. Now they have knees and elbows, shoes and hands, and walk with a proper stride. Each is their own height and build, with their own skin, hair (short, long, a ponytail, a bun, thinning) and clothes: open jackets, skirts, rucksacks, caps, and in winter scarves, gloves and bobble hats. Zoom right in and they have faces.
A protest looks like one. Someone leads with a megaphone, someone beats a drum, two carry a banner between them, and the rest bring placards in five designs, flags, or a raised fist. In the rain a few bring umbrellas. A police officer stands by the squad car. The marchers no longer walk in perfect single file.
In the villages: people carry shopping, walk a dog on a lead, or have a child trotting beside them.
Cars no longer drive through each other. They hold a gap behind the car in front and slow down for it, give way at junctions so one approach crosses at a time, sweep round corners where they used to jump sideways, and turn round in a loop at a dead end.
Rain and snow stay where they are. They used to slide along with the camera as you panned. Rain is now long streaks that splash where they land, and snow is soft round flakes drifting down, so you can tell them apart; both grow as you zoom out.
Keyboard panning while you scroll. Zooming with the wheel held the view in place and cancelled the WASD and arrow keys until it finished. The keys also ease in and out now.
Site staff wear hi-vis vests with reflective bands and hard hats with a brim.
A person keeps the same skin colour as they walk (it used to change from step to step).
For development: the asset inspector has a People page with every kind of figure lined up.
Forests that look like forests, walls that look like walls, and a lot more to hear
Browser version: the land draws again. For about an hour after this update went up it was missing there.
Buildings are no longer flat colours. Walls show panel joints, weathering, rain streaks and grime toward the ground; roofs have a grain. It fades out with distance, so it costs nothing zoomed out.
A real hydro dam. It was two grey boxes. Now it is a gated barrage with piers, a road deck with railings and lamps, a gantry crane, water sheeting over the sill, a turbine hall with tall windows that light up at night, penstocks, and a transformer yard where the bank has room.
Thirteen new sounds. A storm has rain, wind and thunder; the river runs when you are down beside it; streets have traffic. Loading a game, planting trees, starting and finishing an upgrade, the grid coming back, a fiber cut, an overheating datacenter, a complaint, a market event and bankruptcy each have their own sound, where most were silent or shared the general warning. Back is a soft click, not a boing.
The land itself. Grass shades into sand and rock instead of changing tile by tile, with lighter and lusher patches and a grain you can see up close. Slopes roll. Cliffs too steep for grass are bare rock in beds, the mountains show their strata, snow is blue in its hollows, and the banks are damp where they meet the water.
The river. Shallow and clear at the banks, deep blue in the channel, with ripples running downstream, foam along the shore, and the sun glinting off it. After dark it goes to ink.
The Datacenter Daily looks like a newspaper. Yellowed, grainy newsprint with a fold across the middle, lying a little askew on yesterday's edition; a masthead with the weather and the price in its ears; a byline; columns set flush to both margins; the day's other headlines in brief; and a few classified notices under the photograph.
Panning the map redraws the sun's shadows only now and then, not on every frame, and buildings off the screen are skipped.
A detail pass on everything else. The Diesel Generator is a containerised set with a silencer, a capped exhaust and a fuel tank; the Heat Exchanger has plate packs, a buffer tank and red and blue mains; the Network Hub has a lattice mast with dishes; rival campuses have docks, roof chillers, a fence, a gatehouse and their own sign. Solar panels have frames and cells, chillers and cooling towers have turning fans, the pump's intake reaches the river, the geothermal plant has wellheads and lagged pipes, the nuclear plant a ribbed dome, a vent stack, transformers and a fence. Smoke and steam rise as plumes from where they should.
Along the roads: stop lines and stop signs at junctions, the odd lamp on a country road, lit pillars at the ends of a bridge, bus shelters in the villages, and a small park with a fountain where a village has built round a gap.
In town: awnings and lit signs on the shops downtown; water tanks, aerials and vents on the rooftops.
In the woods: ferns under the trees, flowers at the edges, birds circling by day, and mist at dawn.
Wind turbines each face their own way and carry a red band near the blade tips. Foundation pads suit what stands on them (gravel, sealed yard, worn concrete) and have drains, a painted safety line and the odd stain.
The Regional Grid Tie's gravel pad no longer flickers.
The Satellite Uplink's pedestal reaches its dish, through a ball mount and a hub.
Trees are no longer two models repeated. Each forest tile now grows its own stand of pines, spruces, broadleaf trees and birches, in different heights and shades, with bushes, boulders, stumps and fallen trunks underneath. Conifer woods drift into mixed and broadleaf woods, the edges thin out, and there are small clearings.
For development: ./dev-sounds.sh opens a sound board that plays every sound and lists the moments that have none, share one, or could sound better; ./dev-assets.sh shows any building or piece of the world alone on a stage, in every state, hour, season and weather, with its own sounds beside it: click one to hear it, and flipping a state plays what the game would play.
Seasons in the trees: broadleaf trees turn red, orange and gold in autumn and stand bare and frosted in winter, while the pines carry snow on their boughs.
Protests that mean it, and a pass over every mode
Sun shadows. Buildings, trees and turbines cast soft shadows that swing round with the time of day, and roads are lit like everything else (they used to stay bright at night). Options has a Shadows switch for older graphics.
More to look at up close. Datacenters have panelled walls, a glazed lobby, loading docks, roof gear, a beacon mast, a fence, marked parking with the day shift's cars, and staff walking the site. Roads have edge lines and zebra crossings in town. Protesters are little people with arms, legs and placards.
Night comes alive. Office windows and wall lights come on, cars drive with headlights, homes light their porches, and stacks, towers and turbines blink red.
A proper night. It gets dark, and streetlights, porches, floodlit yards and headlights throw real pools of light on the ground.
Weather you can see. Rain and lightning in a storm, snow on the ground and in the air in winter and cold snaps, yellowing grass and turning trees in autumn, parched land and a low river in a drought.
Homes come alive. After dark the real windows of occupied homes light up, wall by wall, most in the evening and a few in the small hours. Homes have gardens: hedges, a path to the door, flower beds, sheds and little trees (and the odd snowman in winter).
Move the goals box. Drag the Goals or scenario box by its header to put it anywhere; click the header to fold it away or bring it back. It stays where you left it.
People in the villages. Residents walk the main street: more as a village grows, few after dark, none in a storm.
The Storm Season no longer throws fiber cuts on top of its grid outages, and its hint is straight about batteries.
A fixed protest stays fixed: blockaded power plants are judged at full output (reopened, they may sell all they can make), and nobody builds a home beside a plant that is only idling.
Every building got the same treatment: pipe racks and transformer yards at gas plants, banded cooling towers and a lit control room at the nuclear plant, louvres, fan rings and handrails on cooling towers, doors and status lights on battery containers, and more.
Protests last until you fix the cause. A blockade used to shut the polluting building, the smog stopped because it was shut, and the protesters went home, only to return the next day. Now a blockaded building is judged by what it would emit if it reopened: fit scrubbers or sound walls, plant trees, or demolish it.
The blockaded building's panel says what's wrong. It names smog or noise as the reason the village is still out, or tells you it's fixed and how far the village has calmed down.
Villages don't build beside a blockaded plant. They were moving in next to it while it was silent, then protesting again the day it reopened.
"Power is tight" warning. A network asked for more than it can supply goes dark as a whole. You now get a warning at 92% of supply, while there's still time to add power.
Scenarios are one problem at a time. No stray fiber cuts while a scenario is being judged (the Storm Season keeps its own).
A new game starts with a clean news ticker. Headlines queued in the last game could show up in the next.
Scenario fixes: The Old Fleet's briefing gives the right day, Overnight Success asks for "three and a half times" (it said three), Angry Neighbours no longer claims fines that a shut plant doesn't earn, and the "Scenario failed" popup fits its longest goals.
District heating goodwill no longer lifts a blockade whose cause still stands.
Goals & Milestones: the end screens read "Time played: 12 min". Notices no longer hide behind the Reputation window.
Saves are format 2 (older saves still load).
Releases ship the music
A cooling tower short of water, and its overheating datacenter, point at the nearest pump with water to spare.
Release builds stop if any music or sound file is missing, so a release can't go out silent.
Sharp text everywhere
Retina and high-density screens: the browser and Mac versions draw at the screen's full resolution.
Windows follows the display scale (125%, 150%...).
Map tags are shown whole or not at all, and the top bar copes with narrow windows.
The same seed now plays out the same way every time.
The tutorial followed by Menu no longer turns your next scenario or Goals game into an open world.
Saving at an interface size other than 100% no longer changes the interface size.
Build cards that don't fit show their whole description on hover (tap on touch).
A controls card during the tutorial, and starting land that is always one connected campus.
"Serve N tokens/sec" scenario goals must be held for 6 hours.
Version 1.1.0: twelve scenarios, Options, made-up rivals
Eight more scenarios, twelve in all: Bleeding Money, The Storm Season, Price War, The Old Fleet, Dry Season, The Bottleneck, Homegrown and Overnight Success. Every one was play-tested by a scripted player that clicks like a person, and rebalanced where a shortcut won it.
Options: fullscreen, interface size from 90% to 130%, music and sound volumes.
Rival clouds and model makers are now made-up companies with their own logos: Rainforest, Cerulean, Gaggle and Soothsayer Cloud.
Bandwidth really caps traffic: "Network 77%" means 77% gets through.
Safer saves: written whole or not at all, and older saves keep loading.
Windows keeps saves and settings in AppData. Steam store art, trailer and upload scripts.
Goals & Milestones, Scenarios, saved games, Windows and Mac apps
Goals & Milestones: climb from Garage Lab to Hyperscaler through five tiers, each with four targets, a grant and new buildings. A week in the red is bankruptcy.
Scenarios: take over a broken campus and fix it before the deadline, for up to three stars. The first four: Nobody Shows Up, The Brownout, Hot Summer and Angry Neighbours.
Saved games: every game is its own save, with a picture, in a browser with tabs per mode.
Windows build and a signed, notarized Mac app.
Pause freezes the whole world. Outages no longer flap: rebooting datacenters wait for power to spare.
Upgrades, new buildings, land and a tutorial
Twelve building upgrades, fitted by construction crews: liquid cooling, expansion wings, UPS rooms, a second fiber path, carbon capture and more.
New buildings: Hydro Dam, Geothermal Plant, Training Cluster, Water Reservoir, and a Headquarters that runs eight research projects.
Land: the valley is cut into plots. You start with two and buy more as you grow. Bigger maps.
Tutorial: fifteen steps to your first working datacenter.
Fiber cuts from storms and backhoes. New 3D art for towns, vehicles and plants.
An iPad build with touch controls: tap, drag, pinch and twist.
The first day
An open-world isometric datacenter builder: terrain with rivers, mountains and forests; power, water and fiber networks you drag across the map; grid outages and backup power; cooling; and a token market for AI models.
Model releases, an AI news ticker, and The Datacenter Daily: click a headline for the front page.
Villages that grow, complain about smog and noise, fine you, and protest.
Roads and staff, save and load, selling surplus power to the grid.
Train your own models, GPU generations, seasons and weather, waste heat sold to the villages, rival clouds.
Satellite uplinks, a Reputation & Community window, Level Ground, a map picker, and sound.