Changes

• Research now provides a 10% development speed boost to applicable features
  
• Added custom tooltip to features in design document detailing market targeting and speed modifiers
  
• Added submarket analysis window to visualize saturation of markets over time
  
• Licenses are now paid per employee per project instead of per company
  
• Added overview of tool licensing to product detail window
  
• If map seed starts with "NOLAKES", no lakes will be generated
  
• Rebalanced employee weighting of waiting to use furniture vs walking longer for it
  
• Added diagonal interior highlights to selected rooms
  
• Better handling of errors in level 3 feature scripts from mods
  
• Increased starting capital of hardware based companies to reduce chances of bankrupting early

Fixes

• Fixed instances of assembly lines not being updated correctly after undo or putting in inventory
  
• Fixed bug causing all rooms to become inaccessible to a team after renaming it, if no room on the map was assigned to any teams
  
• Fixed converting room to pillar deleting valid items on the other side of walls
  
• Meeting rooms no longer need to be assigned to a team
  
• Fixed not being able to manage parking spots above pre-built roads in city and town maps
  
• Employees will now discard reservation of computers as soon as they go to leave, to avoid making them unavailable for employees just arriving
  
• Furniture will now discard employee reservations immediately if they are unable to approach them
  
• Fixed snow on top of pillars in basement
  
• Added shadows to road elements when "More shadows" is enabled
  
• Garage ports can no longer be placed facing fenced areas, as it would break pathfinding

Changes

• Added option to disable diagonal room highlights
  
• Halved license costs for player on easy difficulty

Fixes

• Fixed saves breaking if they already had garageports facing fenced areas before 11.7.55
  
• Fixed burglars sometimes being able to skip past guards at full game speed
  
• Fixed assemblers not correctly assesing recycler access in particularly snakey assembly lines
  
• Fixed cleaning staff refusing to clean the room they are currently idling in, if it gets dirty after they finished cleaning it

Fixes

• Fixed case of burglars getting stuck
  
• Various other fixes

Fixed bug causing performance to degrade slowly every time an object had been highlighted

Changes

• Increased how far employees will travel for canteen to 75 meters from 50
  
• Made impossible difficulty a little easier
  
• Pillars will now say they are pillars in the info panel when selected
  
• Made data overlay list scrollable

Fixes

• Fixed being able to change game speed while save was loading
  
• Fixed grass not refreshing when undoing road changes
  
• Fixed reputation changes from deals not applying correctly with more days per month
  
• Fixed undoing moving furniture sometimes breaking stuff, if what they were moved from was deleted in the interim (Would often give harmless error messages about snap points when save was reloaded)
  
• Fixed overwriting old save file not changing its days per month setting until game was restarted
  
• Fixed blueprint groups re-appearing after deleting them and not being able to delete them again
  
• Fixed snow and grid z-fighting in some instances
  
• Fixed verified bug count when restarting support on a product that already had bugs fixed
  
• Fixed multiple chained conveyor ramps and box elevators not correctly picking which way boxes should go

To continue playing alpha 10, you should switch to the "Legacy" branch in steam, click here for example.
During the development of alpha 11, Lasse, who made the current character model, joined Coredumping and increased the company size to 2 people. He’s already begun improving the art style and creating new art for the game. Here are some of his massive upgrades over the previous programmer art:



I finally caved to the most demanded feature request and added hardware manufacturing to Software Inc.

To be honest, I just decided to add conveyor belts to improve the product printing aspect of the game and hardware was a simple shoe-in at that point. Hardware adds an entirely new layer to console and phone development, and greatly improves the potential of mods.

Software inc. has gotten fairly big in terms of game mechanics over the last couple of…*checks date*… Many years! So, to avoid people only seeing a small part of what the game has to offer, I’ve added a new reward system to guide you through the game’s mechanics. The rewards are not gating any major features, can easily be unlocked and persist through all save games. I’ll definitely be adding more as I come up with ideas for rewards…


Picking the colors and materials of your software mansion has become a lot easier with the style panel. I’m hoping this change will result in a lot less default grey rooms in your screenshots!


You can now stretch walls into circular shapes and smooth over any hard edges.


Building your office in Software Inc. brings forth new challenges for you to plan around and overcome.

The new temperature regulation system means you can build rooftop ACs and distribute cool air throughout your office through inconspicuous floor grills and/or plop down electric radiators in every single room until your electric bill explodes.

Just make sure you don’t watch it all go up in flames due to poor fire safety and lax security systems. Or just get it insured, maybe, I don’t know.

You may also notice a slight echo when placing down the first table in your new office. Big empty halls will now be a horrible place for your employees’ ear holes, but luckily, it’s easy to combat with some well-foamed walls or well-furnished spaces.



The development system has been completely revamped to promote creativeness, make research more interesting and make interdependencies clearer. This change will also have a huge impact on the "update"-update, which you can read more about below.

This change adds the notion of tech levels that are researched over the years to unlock better technology for existing features. Target demographics are now simulated in the form of submarkets, which will impact which features you should pick for your software. Frameworks have been added, which allow you to speed up development by reusing old code or licensing it from competitors. Finally, special features have been added to the game, which contain small scripts to alter the simulation in unexpected ways, fully moddable!


Your employees' educational specializations are now split up into 3 stars, which limit which features they can work on, and their base skill in each role now fully controls their effectiveness and how much quality they can add to a product. You can easily send multiple employees out for education and you'll finally be able to queue up several courses at a time.

Your development staff aren't the only ones with fancy degrees anymore, as leaders now have their own specializations, which control which managerial tasks they can perform, and the Support role has been split into Support, Marketing and Legal, each with their own specialization level.

You can now get help with funding, marketing and distribution through the use of publishers, if you're willing to part with a percentage of the profits.

After keeping up with support for this release, I'll start working on the "Update"-update. This update will include the ability to release updates and extra content for already released software and, in extension, the ability to sell your software as a subscription service. My plan is to push this update out as part of Alpha 11. Which is to say it shouldn't break save compatibility, but I can't guarantee anything at this point.

I expect this update will take a while, as it touches a lot of core systems, which was written anywhere between now and 5 years ago, and it will include a lot of new UI work/rework. So there'll likely be the usual major-alpha-testing-release 3-9 months radio silence.

When the "Update"-update is out officially, the game will move into beta, which means no more large mechanical overhauls and more focus on polish and balancing. The first mechanics I want to tackle in beta are research, subsidiaries, project management and digital distribution. The research and digital distribution mechanics still have some work to go before being completely done and the subsidiary and project management mechanics seem like the usual suspects, when it comes to gameplay issues I see raised in the community.

Component printers and assemblers will now automatically be grouped into assembly lines, which should result in less pile ups and I'm hoping it'll make them easier to manage.

Changes

• Component printers and assemblers are now automatically grouped into assembly lines, which can be assigned to active printing tasks
  
• Component printers in an assembly line are now stalled periodically when assigned to tasks that don't need them, avoiding extra component pile ups from other tasks that do
  
• Updated Manufacturing tutorial
  
• Missing recycler message is now only shown for assemblers assembling the final product
  
• Added ability to quickly change room to pillar and vice versa
  
• Added percent input field when selling stocks and changed percentage calculation when adding more shares, so it is equal to the amount of company share lost
  
• Burglars no longer sneak while being arrested
  
• Made furniture culling more aggressive when rendering shadows from the sun to improve shadow rendering performance
  
• Added more variety to contract company names
  
• Added new task filters to filter deals and contracts

Fixes

• Fixed security getting stuck in sitting animation if going from loitering to standing guard
  
• Fixed stock window breaking when player is worth less than $0
  
• Fixed cases of staff being stuck turning around due to floating point precision error
  
• Fixed employees sometimes being teleported to bus on load if bus was driving away when saving
  
• Fixed bug where employees would skip elevator queuing entirely
  
• Game will now display the correct error for snapping furniture when the room placement is invalid
  
• Fixed rent data overlay not displaying unrentable rooms correctly
  
• Fixed first loaded save after launching game generating nav meshes extremely slowly due to the low default minimum thread count in the .NET threadpool
  
• Fixed game freezing for a while on big saves due to the aforementioned nav mesh generation issue
  
• Doors and rooms will no longer have the inaccessible/blocked marker if they are in the process of generating nav meshes
  
• Fixed cooks being stuck trying to get food to a tray with no food in hand
  
• Fixed game freezing when placing furniture in rapid succession in rooms with lots of stuff, due to main thread waiting for navmesh generation to finish
  
• Fixed room meshes not being batched correctly for shadowing, decreasing shadow rendering performance for complex buildings
  
• Fixed rare cases where code that scales furniture to avoid wall clipping could end up scaling something, that was placed near a wall without clipping it, by a high factor

Changes

• Blueprints can now be grouped together
  
• Added search + enter to build in blueprint window

Fixes

• Fixed pillar tool breaking in basement
  
• Fixed manufacturing panels not updating printer and assembler counts if they were hidden when new machines were placed
  
• Fixed employees complaining about night shifts on the way home from work, if the walk home takes them into night shift hours
  
• Fixed product detail window updating at the end of the day, right before all losses were calculated, thereby showing an incorrect loss value until re-opened

Changes

• SSR is no longer scaled by SSAA, which would cause a large performance drop when both were enabled

Fixes

• Fixed RECOMPILE_DLL_MOD command throwing back the same cached compile result from launch
  
• Fixed being able to place acoustic panels on top of eachother

Changes

• Replaced grass system with something simpler and more performant

Fixes

• Fixed being able to place in-floor objects over stairs and elevators
  
• Fixed selection detection for corner carpets
  
• Made thread safety more robust for pathfinding and navmesh generation, to avoid furniture being marked as unreachable because the navigation mesh was still being generated
  
• Fixed NaN progress in alpha stage, if employee with exactly 0% art or code skill was working both art and code
  
• Fixed cases of data in list columns not being visible immediately

Changes

• Optimized grass shader
  
• Most graphics options now default to lowest setting on intel graphics processors
  
• Fixed some furniture textures causing darker furniture after being copied

Fixes

• Fixed issues with staff randomly not being able to reach certain areas
  
• Fixed grass being rendered through floors if mask is refreshed during early hours, due to fog

Fixes

• Fixed grass index out of bounds error
  
• Build grid is now rendered through grass always
  
• Fixed environment objects, such as lakes and houses, not being accounted for in navigation mesh when loading map, allowing people and animals to walk across them
  
• Fixed pathing along actual paths not always being generated causing unpredictable pathing near paths, like walking too close to walls and going in and out of doors along the path
  
• Fixed elevators randomly becoming unreachable since waiting area was no longer scaled when elevator is squished against walls

Changes

• "Upcoming releases" window has been upgraded to a full calendar view of all upcoming releases and deadlines
  
• Added ability to only apply interior or exterior style to rooms using style panel
  
• Rounded and Inverse corner carpets can now be placed on the same tile
  
• Improved parking space and dead end avoidance for AI cars
  
• Garage port can no longer be built on floors that don't have road access
  
• Textures loaded from furniture mods are now compressed to preserve VRAM, but take a little longer to load
  
• Optimized server wire rendering
  
• Increased how far off pallet pickup and drop points can be from a pallet and still work
  
• Optimized gamma handling

Fixes

• Fixed AI releases being too centered on December
  
• Made "Rooms inside rooms" error even less likely to occur when just free-building up against other rooms
  
• Fixed furniture at edges of room sometimes getting lost when splitting room and undoing
  
• Fixed furniture moving to mouse position when rotating while holding alt
  
• Fixed style panel not working for furniture in Custom Map mode
  
• Fixed people stepping out into the middle of the road if they have nowhere to go and the nearest exit is directly in front of the road
  
• Improved loading order when moving company to empty plot, to avoid ID clashing
  
• Fixed not being able to place multiple copied wall furniture in some cases
  
• Fixed cases of server wires not lining up when server was placed up against a wall
  
• Fixed reloading modded furniture not cleaning up old data from VRAM
  
• Fixed progress panel on marketing work being incorrect when marketing options are not selected in order

Fixes

• Fixed pallet pickup points no longer working
  
• Fixed saves having environment re-generated on load causing doubling of trees, water, plots, etc.
  
• Fixed UI breaking when scrolling horizontally using pad or wheel in lists that are exactly as tall as there are items
  
• Fixed calendar software filters not working when modded software categories contain no descriptions

Changes

• Made it so you can't select features that depend on a chosen tool, which does not support their specialization (Not relevant for vanilla software)
  
• Made burglars more sneaky

Fixes

• The game will now correctly identify if an area outside is enclosed by rooms and not treat doors from that area as accessible from the outside
  
• Fixed burglars not fleeing until they are completely done burglarizing a single large room with no security cameras
  
• Fixed burglars walking back and fourth between most valuable items, instead of prioritizing nearest valuable items
  
• Fixed server wire vertical offset
  
• Fixed employees complaining about benefits getting worse when they are improved, because got older and their priorities changed
  
• Added daily recount of product storage to fix any sync issues

Changes

• Added ability to quickly shift grid by 1/2
  
• Added a bunch of tooltips to design document detail panel, including new "Wasted interest" stat
  
• Added auto balance button to submarket targeting in design document window
  
• Added stat to product detail window showing how much OS sales were boosted by supported products (This has always been simulated)

Fixes

• Fixed pillars in basement
  
• Fixed line rendering for path building, wall rounding and roof editing not working since last patch
  
• Fixed putting furniture in inventory not retaining atlas index, e.g. for painting and carpets

Changes

• Added option to use solid ground instead of void as world background
  
• Adjusted fog distance based on camera zoom level

Fixes

• Added fail safe to avoid components suddenly not printing
  
• Fixed being able to place furniture inside each other up against walls using scaled grids
  
• Fixed deleting wrong style in style panel if selected object had unsaved style
  
• Fixed couriers giving up completely if trying to fetch boxes from a blocked garage port
  
• Fixed top floor being unreachable in Hardware Inc map

Changes

• Added ability to place and rotate furniture, rooms, doors and windows with no grid by holding Alt
  
• Added red outline to intersecting furniture when placing new furniture

Fixes

• Fixed some list content not being visible at first until interacting with it
  
• Fixed furniture silently becoming unreachable if moved in a specific order under certain conditions
  
• Fixed cost not displaying correctly when dragging conveyor belts or just moving furniture
  
• Fixed server dropdowns not updating instantly when server configuration changes
  
• Fixed specialization panels not updating instantly when new specializations unlock
  
• Fixed game sometimes breaking when deleting a room outside of build mode in the same instant an employee decides to use a furniture in it

Fixes

• Fixed corner and inverse corner carpet boundaries being reversed, making impossible to place properly in room corners
  
• Partly fixed bug where rooms could be marked as inaccessible if the room leading up it is divided into multiple areas using furniture and each area has multiple separate entrances
  
• Fixed not being able to freely place furniture from inventory if you can't afford full price
  
• Fixed corner fence posts missing from outdoor areas in some cases
  
• Made "Rooms inside rooms" error less likely to occur when just free-building up against other rooms
  
• Fixed game suggesting room auto-completion when it would create invalid rooms with very low angles

Changes

• Made it easier to create and save styles on the fly using the style panel
  
• Ability to filter selection directly in style panel
  
• Added RGB PC in 2015 and moved Holo PC to 2030
  
• You can now enable code mods from the Mod window in the main menu
  
• Improved position of computers and computer peripherals

Fixes

• Fixed build mode shortcuts being obscured by style panel
  
• Fixed specialization 2 and 3 project management settings being reset when leader quits or changes to leader with lower specializations
  
• Fixed framework option being reset when starting new project management task
  
• You can no longer drag a column to be completely invisible, never to be seen again
  
• Fixed replacing furniture not resetting color
  
• Fixed bug where very bright lights could end up becoming black holes instead
  
• Added self correcting code to save system ID assignment

Graphics

• New subway model
  
• New helicopter model
  
• New Holo Computer
  
• New RGB Computer
  
• New Mini fridge
  
• New Fridge

Fixes

• Fixed game breaking with modded furniture that inherits from furniture with look points, with none defined
  
• Fixed shortcuts not sticking around when switching between furniture to build
  
• Fixed style panel showing black furniture after replacement
  
• Further save game stability fixes (No fix for corrupted saves from Alpha 11.7.36, sorry)
  
• Fixed issue where non rounded number window sizes and positions would cause Unity to recalculate layouts every frame resulting in low FPS
  
• Optimized performance of lists by disabling elements that are not visible horizontally

Changes

• Added a style panel to quickly pick colors and texture designs for rooms, roofs, paths and furniture, before and after placing them
  
• The fire report now has a button to select offending rooms
  
• Made fire inspector more lenient towards fire alarms in small rooms if there are alarms in adjacent rooms
  
• Updated furniture material (Atlas and Masked) and furniture variable (AltStyles, CustomHeight, etc.) sections on modding wiki

Fixes

• Walls are now accounted for when deciding which room to apply reverb to in build mode
  
• Fixed placement of custom wall height furniture slowly breaking the higher up you are
  
• Fixed unlocking the 800 square meter reward in custom map mode
  
• Main menu no longer loads entire patch note list at once, to avoid lag
  
• Fixed modded lamp furniture not having light range set correctly since shadow update
  
• Fixed cases of furniture not being fixed when broken while state is above zero percent

Alpha 11.7.34 Fixes style panel breaking because Unity puts "(Clone)" in instantiated objects' names

Fixes

• Fixed modded furniture not inheriting from existing furniture and not defining alternative colors breaking style panel
  
• Fixed style panel breaking when trying to load building textures in a save file from mods that haven't been loaded