First, I doing small rewrites of web portal to make it load faster. You should notice changes already, but I think we can squeeze a few more 100s of KB of extra weight:

KGNet and mobile app will finally go through CICD pipelines, instead of me doing all the steps manually. All the mobile builds will be automatically available to beta users on Google Play (iOS users, as usual, will have to wait a bit more).

Current plan is to make builds on monthly or semi-monthly basis to pick up translation updates and minor tweaks. We'll see how it'll go.

QOL

You can now change save labels (currently only on web). You can also archive old saves and they will be grayed out in your save list.

Mobile will now support an option to change font size:

Pressing and holding pollution tooltip will now display detailed stats:

More cool stuff is coming on beta builds, so stay tuned!

The are a lot of small issues related to it that were too annoying to ignore, but too small to warrant the full rewrite. There is no proper multi-language support, user management is non-existent and web crawler bots keep hitting the all wrong links triggering the complete wipeout of pages.

A long dream of mine was to do go with new version of wiki engine integrated with the KGNet, but lack of time and complexity of the task seemed to be a challenging problem. Following our motto to not invent wheels and use existing solutions, WikiJS is a closest realisation of this idea and starting this month we will slowly transition to the new engine.

You will be able to find the new wiki page at wiki.kittensgame.com

KG integration is not supported yet but planned. (This is currently a very low priority task). As a substitute, we will use KG discord accounts. If you did not have a time to sign in for our discord server, now it's a good time! (Regular sign in works too, but will require manual verification)

Last summer KG moved to kittensgame.com and we introduced an automatic deployment system.

This process has been improved to save us time. For example KG enforces uniform code style, something that was a topic of argument before. There are some basic sanity code checks.

After the last pollution update we check the basic balance to make sure no regression was introduced. The pace of improvements is glacial as is everything we do, but steady.

I've been using https://newrelic.com/ for a couple of months to monitor the KGNet server. They proved to be invaluable and I slowly adopting it for the web version.

Starting from this June we began collecting general UI metrics. It might or might not be blocked by your browser, you can also opt out of it in the game settings.

Currently we collect memory usage, average rendering time, page load times and error messages. This is A LOT of data and it uncovered a whole lot of information - like people using tons of broken scripts, performance issues or subtle errors nobody noticed.

Some common sense stuff is not collected.

Your email is generally not exposed to newrelic or google analytics. Your kgnet credentials are obviously not stored anywhere, including server logs, to the best of my knowledge.

Pollution is a looming impenetrable wall that every civilization is facing at some point. Unlike AI apocalypse or energy challenges it can not be easily circumvented or stopped. Pollution is generated by certain buildings, weak at the start of the game and stronger by the mid-game.

Just like the real life pollution, it's effect are subtle at first, but snowball over the time. Your crops die, population grows stagnate and the magic effects your faith had on catnip and wood production wither away. Unlike AI apocalypse, however, the pollution penalties are almost exclusively limited to food and wood.

Starting with Chemistry you will see what buildings do generate pollution and starting with Ecology you will see the exact number of pollution in the game toolbar. Pollution is measured in ppm, and increments in lg blocks. 1ppm is where problem starts and gets progressively worse at 10, 100 and 1k ppm.

You can see detailed pollution breakdown on a science page by setting `game.detailedPollutionInfo = true`

The ways to mitigate pollution is to usually use more farmers, pollute less, follow eco-friendly policies and in general convert your industry to sustainable energy sources. While none of the options are perfect, there are plentitude of them and penalties are designed to be albeit painful yet relatively niche and manageable.

FAQ:

Q: PPM notation is inaccurate/makes no sense, should be defaulted to 255, etc
A: Those are different ppm

Q: This feature does not bring anything positive
A: Making your numbers go up was never the design goal, enjoy your new bls!

In another news, I've have updated web version to use Cloudflare CDN. This will reduce a lot of load on KGNET and will make UI load much faster (fractions of seconds vs 5-10 sec) on consequent page visit.

When: This happens when you upload new save file and KGNet have not indexed it yet. On web such saves will be marked with "Loading..." indicator.

How to fix this: Wait a 20-30 min when the next indexing cycle will catch up. Hotfix is coming to the app shortly. To rub some salt into the wound, the indexing was down for a while and a lot of users have been affected by this. This is also fixed \o/