Devlog & release notes

🔧 The career bank finally buys something

• New in the ⚙ menu: Plant upgrades. Capital works on the station, paid for out of the career bank every profitable shift has been feeding, and installed on the plant you take into every shift from then on.
• Mechanical — an automatic trash-rack rake (debris can never foul your intakes again), an upgraded bearing package (wear accrues far more slowly), and stainless runner replacement (a few more megawatts out of the same water).
• Electrical — a fast-acting digital AVR (the field slews twice as fast, so the bus rides out swells) and upgraded stator cooling (a heat wave stops dictating your output).
• Hydraulic — catchment telemetry & a met station (you are never blind: the wet-front forecast is always up, reaches further ahead, and is worth trusting) and an auxiliary spillway gate (discharge capacity 1,800 → 2,600 m³/s).
• Upgrades unlock on lifetime operating stats, not cash — shifts worked, energy delivered, units synchronised, floods routed. You earn the right to buy them before you earn the money.

🏭 Career or 🎛 Sandbox — pick how you play

• The game now opens by asking how you want to run the plant. CAREER is your station, and it remembers: every shift graded and recorded, profit banking toward upgrades, the Daily Shift feeding your streak. You start on stock iron and earn the rest.
• SANDBOX is the whole plant with no consequences — every upgrade installed from the start, and nothing recorded: no grade, no bank, no streak. A place to learn a scenario, or just to open the big spillway and see what happens.
• Tick “don’t ask again” and it stops asking. Switch any time from the ⚙ menu — a 🎛 SANDBOX badge sits in the top bar so you always know which you’re in.

⚖️ Kept honest

• Every upgrade carries a small grade multiplier below 1, and they stack. A rebuilt station is easier to run, so a record set on one has to be genuinely better to stand beside a record set on stock iron.
• The Daily Shift ignores upgrades entirely — it is dealt on the stock plant, so every operator’s grade still compares.
• Buying never changes the shift you are in. Upgrades are fitted for your next one.

🏷 “Free Play” is now the “Open Shift”

• With CAREER and SANDBOX arriving, a scenario called Free Play sitting inside career mode read like a contradiction. The open-ended 7-day shift is now the Open Shift — same shift, clearer name.
• Your records are untouched. Grades were never stored against the name, so every plant record you have set carries straight over.
• The top bar now always shows which mode you are in — 🏭 CAREER or 🎛 SANDBOX — so “which shift” and “does it count” are never confused again.

🌊 Fast-forward is smooth now

• Fixed a long-standing wobble at 4× and 16× speed. The physics used to advance up to 30 seconds of plant time in a single calculation step — at 16× that let the wicket gates swing further than their full travel in one go, so the governor overshot, the frequency swung back, and generation buzzed up and down on the readout. It looked like the plant hunting; it was arithmetic.
• The simulation now integrates in steps no longer than 2 seconds. Generation, frequency and the gates all settle at high speed the way they always did at 1×, and recovering from a unit trip while fast-forwarding is far calmer.
• 1× play is unchanged — it was already inside the new limit.

📖 Odds and ends

• The tutorial now closes by pointing at the Daily, records, upgrades and the mode choice, and the in-game GUIDE gains three new sections.
• The realism control is now labelled REALISM (it used to say MODE, which clashed with the new career/sandbox choice).
• Fixed: the tutorial overlay was left behind on every scenario restart, quietly stacking up unused copies over a long session.

📅 One shift a day, the same for everyone

• New at the top of the SCENARIO menu: a DAILY SHIFT. A fresh 24-hour shift is generated every midnight UTC and dealt to every operator in the world — same weather, same flood, same failures, same modifiers. The only thing that differs is the hands on the console.
• Seven kinds of day roll into the mix: Storm Watch, Dry Spell, Heat Dome, Market Squeeze, Bad Iron, Cold Iron (the plant starts dark — black-start it) and Steady State.
• The day deals its own modifiers, so some days you get the plant straight and some days you get it with UNIT 2 DOWN and no auto-synchroniser. Everyone gets the same handicaps, and they still multiply your grade.
• The daily always runs at REALISTIC on the stock plant, so a posted grade means the same thing for everybody.

🔥 Keep the streak alive

• Finish a daily and your streak ticks up. Miss a whole day and it resets.
• Retries are welcome: your best grade of the day is the one that stands, and the streak counts the day, not the attempt.
• The operator logbook now opens on a daily board — current streak, best streak, dailies posted, and a strip of your last fortnight of grades.

📋 Post your result

• The end screen adds COPY RESULT — a compact block you can paste anywhere, with your grade, objective squares, energy delivered and water spilled. It shows what you scored and never how the day plays out, so posting it cannot spoil anyone else’s shift.

⚡ Every daily asks you to actually run the plant

• Each one carries an energy target set above what an untouched plant makes on its own, so a good grade means third unit up, gates worked and trips recovered — not a console you started and walked away from.
• Storm Watch sizes its own headroom to the flood it is about to send you: route the crest and you finish just under the line; sit on your hands and the lake goes over it.

🏆 Every shift now earns a grade

• Finish any shift and you get a letter grade, S to F — objectives are the backbone, profit vs par fine-tunes it, and load shed, licence fines, flood damage and blackouts drag it down.
• Your best grade per scenario and mode is saved as the plant record; beat it and the end screen celebrates with a 🏆.
• S rank is earned, not given: it takes a flawless board — every objective met, no blackout — plus enough multiplier from handicaps or EXPERT mode to push past 100%.

🎛 Modifiers — handicaps that multiply your grade

• The SCENARIO menu has four optional modifiers, each multiplying your final grade (they stack): NO AUTO-SYNC (every breaker close by hand, on the synchroscope), UNIT 2 DOWN (run the plant on two machines), STORM FRONT (a standing inflow surge all shift) and VOLATILE GRID (twice the faults, disturbances and price swings).
• REPLAY SHIFT keeps your handicaps — same challenge, beat the grade.

⛈ Free Play keeps you honest

• The open-ended shift now rolls surprise events: storm cells over the catchment, heat snaps that swell demand and fight your cooling, debris fouling the trash racks, regional shortages and two-grid export rushes. Watch the ticker — and the forecast.

📒 Operator logbook & 📸 shareable report card

• New in the ⚙ menu: your career record — lifetime energy delivered, shifts worked, units synchronised, blackouts recovered, floods routed, and a plant-records table for every scenario and mode. A career bank accrues from profitable shifts; plant upgrades will spend it in a coming update.
• The end screen's SHARE REPORT CARD button renders your shift to a PNG — grade, stats, and the full frequency + reservoir traces.

⌨️ Run the whole plant from the keyboard

• Every part of the console now has a keyboard shortcut. Press ? any time (or ⚙ menu → Keyboard shortcuts) for the full list.
• Views: 1 all-in-one · 2 operate · 3 data · 4 switchyard.
• Simulation: Space pause/resume · +/− speed · M sound · G guide · Esc close a dialog.
• Units: Q/W/E select unit 1/2/3 (the active unit is highlighted), then S start · A auto-sync · Y synchronise · C close breaker · B energise dead bus · X stop · R reset lockout.
• Shortcuts are ignored while you're typing or dragging a slider, so they never get in the way.

💾 Your shift is saved

• The sim now autosaves your shift every 30 seconds and whenever you close or switch away from the tab — a small green "● SAVED" tick in the top bar confirms each save.
• Come back later and you'll be offered to RESUME SHIFT right where you left off: reservoir level, running units, cash, faults, market, time of day — everything. Or start fresh if you'd rather.
• Finishing a shift or picking a scenario starts clean — the save is only for shifts in progress.
• Save game from the new ⚙ menu downloads a save file you can keep or move between machines — the only copy that survives clearing your browser's cookies / site data. Load it back from the ? GUIDE, which also shows when you last backed up.
• After a good stretch of unbacked-up play, a small, dismissable reminder offers to grab a backup file in one click (turn it off any time).

⚙️ Tidier top bar

• Guide, Legal and Support now live under a single ⚙ menu (alongside Save game), so the top bar is less cluttered.

🔌 Multi-grid switchyard (Realistic & Expert)

• Export power to two neighbouring grids — Coastal Intertie and Rural Co-op — each with its own live price and its own price spikes.
• Exports are surplus-only: the town is always served first, and whatever you generate beyond its needs flows out automatically, highest price first, up to the "sell up to" limit you set. Exporting can never rob the town or sag your frequency — to sell more, make more.
• Real switchyard procedure: synchronise the tie, close its breaker, set your limit. ⭐ marks the top buyer; ⚡ spikes are the cue to push power their way. Lives on the new SWITCHYARD screen, with prices in the MARKET tab.

⚖️ Balance

• Town demand eased ~12% across the day. Two units now carry a normal day and the third covers the peak — leaving real surplus headroom to sell over the interties, instead of running flat-out from the opening bell.

🖥️ Pages view & 🎓 rebuilt tutorial

• ▤ PAGES splits the console into larger SCADA-style screens — OPERATE, DATA and SWITCHYARD — with alarms and unit controls on every page. ALL-IN-ONE remains the default.
• A rebuilt 24-step tutorial walks you from cold start to two-unit operation, the dispatch market, the river licence and a clean shutdown, with highlighted "▸ DO THIS" action steps.
• Readability fixes (the console no longer renders smaller than intended in some layouts), live rotor rpm% on every start, and Guide coverage of the interties.

The first public release, on hydroelectricsim.com and itch.io.

• Full control-room sim: 3 turbine units (start / sync / load / stop), spillway, line breaker, GSU tap, AVR/excitation, cooling and maintenance.
• Island-grid frequency game: match generation to the town's demand and hold 60 Hz, with under-frequency load shedding, blackouts and black-start recovery.
• Grid dispatch & market loop: dispatch orders with compliance pay, spot-price surges, industrial load blocks and system frequency events.
• Water management: weather and inflows, floods and droughts, downstream licence (minimum flow, ramp rate, headpond band) and river flood routing.
• Ancillary-services market, water value / economic dispatch, five scenarios, three difficulty modes, an interactive tutorial and a fully synthesised soundscape.