v0.32.0

• A GKrellM-style system monitor now sits docked at the right edge of the desktop: a skinny, borderless vitals column drawn in the same green-phosphor CDE skin as the front panel. Hostname header, a big date/clock block, and two live scrolling stripcharts — CPU load and NET throughput — whose traces crawl left over a gridded well. The meters read real engine state: CPU pegs and NET spikes while an op runs, and the traffic curve is shaped by the op (an exfil pulls a fat sustained stream, a scan is bursty, idle is near-silent). A footer counts procs · credits · uptime · unread mail. Always on, no taskbar icon — drag the body to move it.

• The pmms spectrum visualizer is now a real analyzer of the stream. The radio plays on its own audio bus, and the vis reads genuine per-band FFT magnitudes off that bus — so the bars reflect the actual music, not the ambient game soundtrack, and fall to silence the instant you stop the stream (previously the meter kept dancing to the background track after you hit stop).

v0.31.0

• The workspace buttons (One / Two / Three / Four) are real virtual desktops now. Each app window (mail, IRC, files, pmms, psniff, keyring, system monitor) lives on the desktop you opened it on; switching hides the rest and brings that desktop’s windows forward — iconified state and all. Raising a window that lives on another desktop flips you there automatically.
• The lock button triggers a screensaver — a full-screen “digital rain” of falling glyphs with a press any key prompt. Dismisses on any key or click. Purely cosmetic.

• The front panel now shrinks to fit its cells instead of stretching across a fixed 75% of the screen with a big empty runway on the right. The status readout hugs its text and the whole bar sizes itself to exactly what it contains.

v0.30.1

• IRC regulars no longer drag your handle into lines aimed at each other. When two NPCs bantered (or a scripted drama played out), the model was handed the “what the channel knows about you” context and would blurt your nick mid-sentence at someone else (<ph0sphor> warlock: think twice before you speak, enum.). NPC-to-NPC chatter is no longer grounded in your game — only lines actually aimed at you, and idle chatter, reference your runs.

v0.30.0

• #packet talks for real now. With the optional chat model loaded (/ai download, ~2GB, once), the IRC regulars each have their own voice — a persona per nick, grounded in your game (your rep, your heat, that fat exfil you just pulled) — and they talk to each other, not just at you. The channel ignores you sometimes, piles on other times, and occasionally kicks off a little drama (a narc accusation, a warez beef, a netsplit). Runs on your GPU when one's available (Vulkan, any vendor), falling back to CPU.
• Private messages. /msg <nick> <text> opens a one-on-one in its own window; regulars remember you across sessions, and Mother will quietly point you at your next move.
• irssi-style windows. The client now dials in like the real thing — server connect chatter scrolls through a status window, then auto-joins #packet. Switch windows with Alt+0..9 (0 = server status, 1 = #packet, 2..9 = your open DMs).

• The connect sequence is all in the terminal now — no more full-screen takeover. Connecting to a mark streams a verbose handshake (route/proxy hops, SYN → SYN/ACK → ACK, CARRIER) right in the console, the way a modem-era dial-up actually felt.

v0.29.2

• Fresh marks now scale to your standing. Restocked leads and jobs used to inherit the base tier of whatever board they landed on — and the home net's always-open boards are tier 1, so a seasoned runner got flooded with trivial tier-1 practice boxes forever while tier 2 (which only lives on a net you have to dial into) was skipped entirely. Restocks now floor at your access rank — GUEST still sees tier 1, USER fills in tier 2, ELITE tier 3, LEGEND tier 4 — with the odd stretch mark one tier higher.

v0.29.1

• psniff no longer decodes a host's honeypot/tarpit/IDS signatures before you've scanned it — the analyzer's THREATS readout now only surfaces defenses on hosts you've actually scanned.
• A mark could generate with a honeypot and a tarpit as its only ports, leaving no clean way in (an unfair dead-end). Every host now keeps at least one clean foothold port, and existing saves are healed on load.

v0.29.0

• The story no longer dead-ends at the trap. The file you weren't meant to pull is now real: exfiling Mother's too-good mark drops an un-sellable evidence fragment into your backlog — it never spoils and pays no cash. Crack it and a redacted ledger reveals a place, not a person: an air-gapped branch office you can only reach by driving out and breaching it on-site.
• Raid the office, pull the second half of the ledger, crack it — and the worm and the name behind it are laid bare. The trail parks at the Act III / Gibson frontier (to be continued).
• Halon now escalates on the story, not a job count: walk into his building and he knows.

v0.28.0

• The basement and upstairs rooms were re-laid-out and redecorated — new prop placement and a cleaner walk-around layout. Purely cosmetic; nothing about how the game plays has changed.

v0.27.0

• The pure game core is now fully engine-free and covered by a new headless test suite, so the rules can be exercised without launching Godot.
• The on-site infiltration rules were pulled into SiteSim, a standalone simulation (suspicion, camera cones, the alarm sweep, hide/spray/loot/keycard/door state) — the world just feeds it the player position and renders its state.
• The command engine was split into focused files and the terminal palette deduplicated into one source of truth.
• None of this changes how the game plays — it's groundwork for building on the raid.

• Opening a room could occasionally reveal its floor but leave the furniture stuck hidden (or the fog stuck black), especially right after picking a lock. The fog-of-war reveal is now self-healing — it reconciles to the door state every frame, so a room can't get left half-revealed.
• Fixed a freeze/crash that could hit when cracking a safe or grabbing the keycard.

v0.26.0

• Air-gapped buildings are no longer a straight run of empty rooms — the floor plan is a central corridor with camera-guarded rooms branching off it, top and bottom.
• Fog-of-war — you can't see inside a room until you open its door, and camera cones stay clipped to their room instead of leaking through a closed door into the hall.
• Keycard routing — the console sits behind a badge reader you can't pick; the keycard is left on a workstation in a different room, so you have to detour to grab it first.
• Survivable alarm + hiding — tripping a camera starts a sweep instead of an instant bust. Duck into a hide spot before it resolves and you ride it out (the cameras escalate afterward).
• Spray paint a camera — walk up to a lens and paint it over to blind that camera for good.
• Rooms worth entering — offices are furnished (desks, server racks, water coolers, printers) and seeded with lootables (safes, filing cabinets) you crack for cash, at the cost of noise.

• Doors take priority over a nearby hide crate, so E at a doorway always picks the lock instead of ducking behind the box.
• Office furniture and lootables now block movement and Y-sort correctly — no more walking through a desk or having props draw on top of you.

v0.25.1

• psniff and keyring now open at a proper width so their columns aren't cramped.
• psniff status/threat bars no longer wrap to a second line, and the no-analyzer note is shorter.
• Every window's upper-left titlebar button now shows the same horizontal menu-bar glyph (uniform across all apps); the click still closes an app or iconifies the terminal/monitor.

v0.25.0

• A rival above Mother has taken an interest. After a few real scores your terminal gets hijacked: the line buckles into noise, your process appears to Segmentation fault (core dumped), and a message types itself out on your locked keyboard — referencing what you've actually done (your handle, the mark you just stripped, your heat) — before the carrier drops. It escalates as you go.

• A new desktop app consolidating everything you've earned: persistent backdoors + relay charges, recovered key fragments, your 0-day arsenal, stolen logins, and your crack dictionary. Launch it from the front-panel keyring cell.

• Cracking rebalanced — files no longer take forever and spoil before they open: fewer locks per file (a key or a primer, never both), faster base crack, gentler thin-coverage penalties, and value floors at 50% instead of 30%.
• Bigger, distinct app icons in the front panel — each program has its own pictogram instead of the same window glyph.

v0.24.0

• Three period-accurate recon commands you run on a logged mark before you commit, each logging intel to its dossier:
• whois <host> — org profile: sector, netblock, registrar, and an estimated value + tier.
• finger <host> — enumerates its user accounts; once fingered, brute footholds there are easier (+2 brute power).
• traceroute <host> — the route in, how many hosts hide behind the gateway (where the paydata is), and firewall depth. Shows your traffic bouncing through a proxy chain if you own one.

• scan/probe no longer flag honeypots or tarpits. The only way to spot traps ahead of time is now psniff with the Packet Analyzer — so the Analyzer powers your live threat intel instead of being a passive probe upgrade. (Traps still fire when you touch them; IDS still shows on probe.)

v0.23.2

• psniff now has a pause button — freeze the capture to scroll, select, and read any packet's detail + hex without it flying past.
• New ⚠ THREATS summary strip (Expert-Info style): as psniff decodes IDS / honeypot / tarpit signatures on the wire it pins them, deduped, with host:port + service — so a trap that scrolled by in a blink stays readable. Accumulates as you capture; resets per mark. (Analyzer-gated.)

v0.23.1

• Behind-the-scenes tooling for testing and minor internal tweaks. No player-facing gameplay changes.

v0.23.0

• A new desktop app: psniff, a live packet sniffer in the classic three-pane analyzer style (packet list · detail tree · hex/ASCII dump, with a display-filter bar and status line). Launch it from the front-panel psniff cell.
• It captures the connected mark's real traffic — bursting op-specific frames during a live op (auth attempts on a brute foothold, data pushes on exfil, SYN/SYN-ACK on a scan, …) and firing IDS alerts as your trace climbs (a red TRACE LOCK near the top).
• Ties into the Packet Analyzer: with it, defensive signatures decode — honeypot decoys, IDS anomaly scores, tarpit stalls. Without it the same frames scroll by opaque, so the purchase pays off as live threat intel.

• The channel no longer greets you as yourself on join (or performs random /me actions as you).
• Mother throttles her job offers — unprompted marks come far less often (a cooldown + lower rate, with a grace period on join). Asking for work still gets you one instantly.

v0.22.2

• The synthesized background music (terminal / breach / basement beds and the raid sting) is gone — the game now runs on sound effects only by default.
• PMMS is now a radio player — its playlist is the SomaFM stations (DEF CON Radio, Groove Salad, Drone Zone, …). Want music? Open PMMS and tune a station. (SFX are unaffected.)

v0.22.1

• Entry-tier marks are no longer occasionally unwinnable. Tier-1 targets now always offer a few ways in and a guaranteed easy foothold, with soft ports and trivial privesc — a fresh netrunner can't get hard-stuck on their first job.
• No traps on tier 1 — honeypots, tarpits and IDS now only appear at tier 2+.
• No cleanup needed on tier 1 — a tier-1 breach never leaves a log-discovery exposure, so you won't get punished for skipping clean. That mechanic (and its tip) starts at tier 2.

v0.22.0

• A new app on the desktop: PMMS (Packet Multi-Media System) — a skinned player with a blue LCD clock, scrolling title, a live spectrum vis, transport controls, a volume slider, and a playlist editor. Launch it from the front-panel pmms cell.
• Streams SomaFM — including DEF CON Radio ("music for hacking"), plus Groove Salad, Drone Zone, Beat Blender, cliqhop and Secret Agent. It also plays the game's own procedural soundtrack (the four mood tracks); picking an OST track sets a manual choice, and a live breach still seizes the bed and reverts after.

• On-demand windows (PMMS / IRC / mailbox / file manager) now have a real close button — the left titlebar box is an × and a single click closes the window. (The terminal and system monitor stay permanent.)
• The terminal opens at ~60% height instead of full-screen, and apps spawn in the free band below it — so you can see the terminal and IRC/PMMS at once.
• Renamed the IRC window/launcher to IRC.

v0.21.2

• Air-gapped on-site breaches were nearly unwinnable. On-site you can't use a proxy chain or bounce — nothing routes off their LAN — but the trace was still climbing at full rate, so the meter maxed before you could finish. On-site connections now climb trace at half rate: you're plugged straight into their network, so there's no remote trace-back, only local IDS. The game says so on connect.

• The optional local AI brain now drives ~85% of ambient chatter (was 60%) when it's loaded, so the channel improvises far more instead of recycling canned lines.
• Much stronger priming. The model's few-shot examples are drawn from the game's own hand-written line pools, and idle chatter is seeded with real house lines (rotated so it doesn't repeat) — so improvised lines sound like the channel, not a generic chatbot.

v0.21.1

• The system monitor carries a permanent crack dict readout — your cross-sector floor, your strongest sector, and a ⚿ badge for breach-dump primers in hand — so the corpus is on screen the whole time instead of only when you dict or open files.
• A one-time tip on your first exfil explains that stolen creds grow your crack dictionary, that sector coverage is what makes decryption fast, and that some paydata needs a primer to open.

v0.21.0

• Decryption is no longer just a wallet check. Your crack dictionary now compounds from how much you've actually been hacking — looting hosts, dumpster dives, leaked corpora and IRC trades all feed it. See it with the new dict command.
• Sectors decide what you crack fast. Every mark belongs to a theme (finance / medical / telecom / gov / industry). Corpus built breaching one sector cracks that sector's files fast and others slowly — so where you hack shapes what you can open. A small cross-sector floor (and the cheap market wordlist) keeps you from ever being hard-stuck.
• Primer set-pieces. Some high-value paydata is sealed with a sector breach-dump primer. Hold the dump and it pops instantly; otherwise it's a heavy brute that spoils while you grind. Source the dump from the new dumps BBS boards, a trade with mother on IRC, or an on-site dumpster dive at the mark's building.
• Coverage is surfaced everywhere — the backlog, crack.exe and the File Manager all show "needs <sector> dump" until you source the primer.

• The game now opens maximized by default — more room for terminal windows.

v0.20.1

• AI IRC chat no longer double-addresses you (lines like <nick> mother: yourhandle: …). The model's group-chat name-addressing was leaking into its own context and getting echoed back; replies now address you exactly once, and ambient chatter stays unaddressed.

v0.20.0

• The IRC channel's regulars can now be driven by a small local AI model — real, in-character conversation instead of canned lines. It runs entirely on your machine; nothing is ever sent anywhere.
• Opt-in, and not bundled. A first-launch dialog offers to enable it; the model (~2 GB, Qwen2.5-3B, Apache-2.0) is downloaded at runtime with a progress bar and kept locally — so the game download and updates stay small. Remove it anytime (/ai off).
• Jobs stay scripted: Mother's offers and the story beats are unchanged — the model only ever skins the chatter. With no model present, the channel falls back to the old procedural lines.
• NPCs now address you by handle in their replies, and any line that mentions your nick is highlighted irssi-style.
• Power-user control via /ai (status · download · off).

v0.19.0

• Some marks are now air-gapped — no route in from the net. connect refuses them and the target log tags them [air-gap]. To breach one you have to go there in person.
• Out in the alley, your car drives you to an air-gapped mark's building. Inside: slip past security-camera vision cones (a suspicion meter fills while you're in sight and decays out of it), pick the interior locks, and reach the on-site console to jack in. Get spotted too long and the alarm trips — a big heat spike and you're thrown back out to the street.
• Dumpster dives now turn up an on-site job (a local outfit that keeps its network off the net) — your first taste of the new loop.
• Building interiors are procedurally generated (rooms, doored partitions, cameras) and scale with tier; a given mark's building is always the same.

• On an air-gapped LAN you can no longer bounce through your botnet, and the passive proxy trace cut no longer applies — nothing routes off-site, so the trace runs raw. The trade for physical access is that your network safety nets don't reach you inside the building.

v0.18.0

• Breaching a host now leaves access logs. The new in-breach command clean (needs root) wipes the current host's logs — a slow op that costs time + trace, or clean fast burns a Log Scrubber to wipe it instantly.
• Walk away from a dirty box and you arm a delayed, random discovery risk: while you're off-target it can be traced back to you — a heat spike, and any backdoor on that box gets burned. Lay low long enough and the trail goes cold.
• The scene talks: #packet warns you (“you scrub the logs on X?”) before it breaks, and ribs you after they find your trail. Mother drops a “you got sloppy” note in your inbox.

• Heat busts you in the terminal now, not only when you step out into the basement — at 100% the game-over fires immediately (and only once).
• The objective updates correctly the instant you accept Mother's job on IRC (it was stuck on “say yes” until the mark was actually owned).
• Crack progress is no longer duplicated as a dead, non-advancing bar in the main terminal — the live view lives in the crack.exe window.

v0.17.0

• Procedural music — a generative soundtrack, synthesized at runtime like the SFX (no audio files). It's reactive: a cool, slow ambient bed hums while you work the shell/BBS, and the instant a breach goes live it shifts to a tense, driving bed that tightens as the trace meter climbs toward the bust. The basement has its own ambient bed (it ducks while you're jacked into the terminal), and the heat-100 raid gets its own alarm sting.
• music command toggles the soundtrack (separate from mute, which is SFX) — and the choice is saved.

• The system monitor no longer clips its contents — the panel scrolls, and it's wider and taller by default so the objective/connection/trace/heat readouts fit.
• crack.exe stays out of the way until you have something to crack: hidden when there's no backlog (the monitor gets the whole right column), a thin strip when files are waiting, and it grows to fit the full decode matrix while a decrypt is running.

v0.16.0

• irc.exe — the scene's live chat channel, rendered like irssi (timestamps, colour-coded nicks, blue statusbars, the [#packet] prompt). It's a living channel that responds to what you type (greetings, addressing a nick, keywords) after a realistic delay — and the fixer “mother” hands out real jobs there: ask for work, answer “yes”, and the mark lands in your targets.
• Mail and File Manager — proper gray CDE GUI apps (dtmail/dtfile style), distinct from the green console windows. Mail is a real inbox (envelope icons, reading pane, delete); the File Manager shows your encrypted PAYDATA (live crack progress + spoilage value) and TOOLS — double-click a file to crack it.
• All three launch from permanent cells on the CDE front panel.

• Click anywhere in a window to focus it, not just the titlebar.

v0.15.0

• The terminal's window manager grew a proper CDE Front Panel: a chunky, chiseled green-phosphor bar floating along the bottom with an analog clock, a calendar, the iconic workspace switcher (lock · One/Two/Three/Four · EXIT), and app cells that raise the terminal / system-monitor / crack windows. Buttons depress on press like the real thing; EXIT leaves the terminal.

• The terminal no longer swallows mouse clicks when you're jacked in from the basement — you can drag, minimize, and raise the windows in-world now.

v0.14.0

• The back alley. Step out the front door into a street: dumpster-dive behind a business for a discarded lead, and break into a storefront with the lock-pick. The dumpster is the first real bridge between the two halves of the game — what you do out in the world shows up as an actual mark in your terminal.
• Contacts & mail. You've got an inbox. A fixer (“Mother”) sends an opening message and follows up the moment you pick a handle. A blinking NEW MESSAGE banner in the world pulls you back to the desk; read it with mail.
• Pick a handle. You start as “anon” and earn a scene name — handle rerolls generated suggestions or sets your own.

• The terminal is once again a little CDE/Motif workstation: the console, the system monitor, and crack.exe are real draggable, resizable windows with chunky beveled chrome. Minimize one and it iconifies to a desktop icon (double-click to restore) — proper mwm, no Windows taskbar.

• The alley got a proper glow-up (seamless asphalt + brick, scattered grime, crates, an AC unit, a wall tag). The basement door is just open now (lock-picking lives outside). The TV plays a broadcast; the dumpster animates when you dig.

v0.13.0

• Go upstairs. Once you've picked the basement door's lock, walk through it to head up into the house — a 90s living-room / kitchenette with its own hand-made pixel-art set (couch, coffee table, rug, kitchen counter, fridge, houseplant, floor lamp). Walk onto the stairs to come back down. Rooms swap with a clean fade, and your progress and the picked door carry over.
• The TV plays something. The basement CRT now shows a flickering broadcast — drifting colour bands, a rolling picture, scanlines, and the odd burst of channel-change static.

• Tidied the basement into a deliberate layout (a workstation and a chill corner) and dropped a redundant monitor that was doubling up on the desk.
• Lock-pick: the status text no longer overflows its panel.
• Terminal: an [esc] leave hint now lives in the terminal's own HUD, and the room HUD hides while you're jacked in (no more overlapping text).

v0.12.0

• The basement. The game opens in a walk-around room — your netrunner's den, built tile-by-tile with a hand-made pixel-art set. Move with WASD / arrows; the camera follows you past the desk, the CRT TV, the lava lamp, and the clutter.
• The terminal is something you sit down at. Walk to the computer and press E to drop into the chair and jack in — the whole hacking game is now an activity inside the room, not the entire world. Press Esc to stand back up. Your progress carries over each time you sit down; the power-on boot only plays the first time per session.
• Pick the lock. The basement door is locked. Walk up, press E, and work a realistic pin-tumbler lock by feel — feather the tension so binding pins set one at a time, watch for spool/serrated security pins, and don't over-force it or it jams. Pop all the pins and the door swings open.

• Everything in the room is depth-sorted, so you walk behind tall props and in front of low ones.
• The door now keeps its stone frame when it opens (it used to vanish).

v0.11.0

• Terminal + live sidebars. A fixed terminal pane with a specialized sidebar: system/connection readouts, a network map, and an always-on decrypt strip.
• Network topology + the hunter. Jacked into a target, the sidebar draws the network as a node graph and a counter-intrusion daemon stalks you along it — it's your TRACE made visible. bounce/quiet/pivoting visibly move it; it reaching your node is the bust.
• Context-aware HUD. A calm green status bar at the shell that turns into a hot red JACKED IN bar in a breach — live TRACE/HEAT, daemon distance, and an alarm — so the meters can't be buried.
• “Jacking in” sequence. Connecting plays a full-screen CARRIER dive.

• Exfil is encrypted. Grabbing a host's payload nets an encrypted file instead of instant cash — smash-and-grab under the trace clock, decrypt back home.
• Background cracking. crack decrypts a file over minutes while you keep hacking — it runs on shared compute cores (buy more to go faster). Watch the hex decode live in the decrypt strip.
• Key shortcuts. Tough locks brute slowly — or loot the sibling host that holds the keyfile to skip them, pulling you deeper into a network.
• Spoilage. Stolen data loses value while it waits in your backlog, so you can't hoard — triage what you crack first (the file you're actively cracking is safe).

• Trace spikes are telegraphed — a warning fires before the hit lands, so you can bounce (dodge) or quiet (duck) it instead of eating a random spike.
• Trace rebalanced so a clean breach is tense but survivable.

v0.10.1

• Heat builds while you're jacked into a host you don't own (~0.5%/sec, any access level) — idle at the shell or mid-op alike. It's the cost of time spent on foreign systems: get in, loot, get out — lingering is what burns you.
• Backdoored hosts are safe harbors — sitting on a host you've implanted adds no heat, giving your beachheads a real second use as a place to pause.
• Off-target heat decay slowed ~5× (2.0 → 0.4%/sec) so heat persists between jobs and trends upward across a session instead of evaporating in seconds.

v0.10.0

• DDoS your marks. ddos <host> floods a target from your relay botnet, knocking it offline for ~45s. While it's down its defenses are soft — breaches run at roughly half trace with IDS spikes suppressed — the way to crack an otherwise-brutal high-tier target. Costs botnet charges and a big slug of heat, so it's a real expenditure of the botnet you've built.

• Loot and contract payouts cut ~40% and the steep reward curve flattened, so buying out the black market now takes ~5–6 strong marks instead of ~2.

• Saves corrupted by duplicate target ids — which could mis-route an attack to the wrong mark and strand a fully-looted target as un-owned — now self-repair on load. Fully-stripped targets correctly read as looted.

v0.9.1

• Fixed target id collisions that could lose a target's “owned” state when a contract completed.

• First public download — Windows installer, portable zip, and this download site.

v0.9

• Living BBS. Completed jobs ripple out as board chatter, and boards restock with fresh leads and contracts as you play.

v0.1 – v0.8

• Initial development: an HTML/JS prototype ported to Godot 4 / C#. The core loop took shape — dial BBS systems, extract leads, breach targets (foothold → privesc → pivot → exfil), the trace vs. heat meters, the gear & 0-day market, fixer contracts, and the reputation / access-tier ladder.