Power Network Tycoon has officially reached V1.0!

After more than four years of development, this update marks the final release of Power Network Tycoon. Alongside the full release, Patch v1.0 includes a range of new features, quality-of-life improvements, balancing changes, performance improvements and bug fixes.

• Added pedestrians to the city. Pedestrians also interact with events such as rain and electrical faults.

• Added the ability to buy an emergency oil drop if you don't have enough money, provided you aren't playing in hard mode.

• Added shortcut key (usually the CTRL button) plus clicking a substation with a tripped circuit breaker (e.g. overcurrent protection) to close the circuit breaker.

• Boost Points, which speed up new games' starting progress, now have an additional $10,000 and 1 Science Point to choose from (a duplicate of each).

• Allowed the placement of up to 3 power sources (e.g. power generators or Energy Hub Substations) if the Energy Hub Substation is researched. Previously, for each rank of power generator researched, an additional power source could be placed. This meant players wanting to move more heavily into renewables in the early game may have needed to research power generator ranks simply to place more power sources.

• Simplified starting up of nuclear reactors.

• Reduced frequency of copper theft events.

• Removed the 'look at fault occurring' mechanic for camera movement from endgame gameplay.

• Fix to ground fault calculations and modelling.

• Added a dotted line visual for all valid conductor connection points when in the process of building a new conductor.

• Inverters now show their connections (to other inverters or EHS) when moused over, to more clearly show how they are linked.

• Mouseover of the connection application button or build asset buttons, e.g. Pole, will highlight all existing poles as a visual display of the grid.

• Mouseover or gamepad selection of the Upgrade button now highlights all assets that are upgradable.

• Fixed bug where holding Ctrl to do the shortcut repair on a substation that failed because its supplying power source failed allowed it to be repaired. The shortcut should only repair the substation if the substation itself has failed.

• Added an "Are you sure?" UI popup when deleting a save game in the main menu or in-game menu.

• Screen edge panning checkbox status in settings is now saved between play sessions.

• Added some spacing between some tutorial popups to avoid overloading the player.

• Tutorial videos are now stored locally rather than just the initial videos being stored locally and the others streamed from the server.

• Fixed 'Hide UI' toggle in the settings menu sometimes allowing some UI to remain visible.

• Many UI tweaks.

• Ultra graphics setting can now see twice as far before details of meshes/textures are culled.

• Performance improvements, particularly around road building/checking algorithms.

• Fixed some plant LODs showing a combination of lower and higher quality LOD meshes at the same time.

• Fixed the maximum distance the camera can travel from the island.

• Fixed bug where buildings/loads on cliffsides stopped being built with concrete support floors.

• Rebalanced audio levels in settings.

• Music volume turned down as it seemed to be too loud in the in-game player.

• Fixed a very rare circumstance where 32+ sounds playing at the same time resulted in some sounds being paused, most noticeably when music briefly paused.

• Fixed bug where gamepad vibration could last longer than intended.

• Fix to capacitor banks not loading correctly from saved games.

• Fix to game loading with inverters, to better store the path between inverter to inverter back to the EHS.

• Fixed the Forced Green-Hour mission potentially failing for very large cities.

• Fixed bug where, if the "View Faults" setting was set to false, the camera correctly didn't view the fault but incorrectly slowed down the game speed for a cinematic effect that wasn't needed.

Thank you to everyone who has played Power Network Tycoon during development, reported bugs, suggested features, left feedback or simply followed the project.

Power Network Tycoon is now officially V1.0.

Launch Trailer

Gameplay Deep Dive

Power Network Tycoon will officially leave Early Access and launch into V1.0 on September 30 after more than four years of development.

I’ve been working on the final update for quite a while and I’m looking forward to finally showing you the final product.

V1.0 brings a range of new features, improvements and fixes including pedestrians that react to events such as rain and electrical faults, clearer visuals when building and inspecting grid connections, improved inverter behaviour and save-game reliability, new shortcut controls for substations and circuit breakers, better graphics and performance and plenty of smaller UI/tutorial/quality-of-life improvements throughout the game.

If you haven’t played yet, you can also try the browser edition demo here: https://davidmadethis.itch.io/pnt-web-edition-demo

Thanks to everyone who has played the game, reported bugs, suggested features and supported the project throughout Early Access!