v1.5.3 — Autotrain + Neuron Archiv

v1.5.3 lands two big additions. The first is Autotrain, a one-tap easy-mode pretrain that stops itself at the sweet spot — sitting alongside the classic Manual loop for players who want to squeeze out top quality. The second is Neuron Archiv, a hall of records that captures the best traits of every rare brain you’ve ever sold. Plus progressive hardware unlocking, a light-touch contextual guidance layer, and a couple of quality-of-life fixes on top.

⚡ Autotrain — one-tap training

Autotrain removes the timing puzzle. You launch a pretrain, and the game stops it at the sweet spot on its own — no more “did I stop too early?” second-guessing, no more overshooting the target loss because you looked away for one bad epoch.

• Progress bar 0–100 % with an estimated time to end. Finally you can plan around a pretrain instead of babysitting one.
• Speed Up button — tap to push the run forward. Boosts still stack on top like they always did.
• ⚙ mode toggle. The first time you pretrain, you pick Autotrain or Manual. The game remembers your default after that. Switch modes any time.
• Autotrain is convenience and speed, not peak quality. It’s ideal for everyday brains and for getting back into the loop after a break. When a Government-tier contract asks for something demanding, you’ll still want to fall back to Manual with the full configuration and a stop-at-the-right-moment decision.

The exact quality gap between Autotrain and Manual isn’t published — that’s the kind of thing that’s more fun to feel than to read about. Try a few of each and see where each mode pays off.

🧠 Neuron Archiv — a hall of records

A sold brain used to be gone the moment you closed the sale. Neuron Archiv turns each sale into a legacy entry — “the trace your sold models leave behind,” as the screen puts it.

• Unlocks the first time you train a rare-tier model (Refined and up). No point cluttering the early game with a hall of records you haven’t started filling yet.
• Five categories to chase — Best Teacher, Best Earner, Best Domain Master, Best Survivor, Best Specialist. Each tracks one trait of the brains you’ve sold.
• The archive stores the record, not the brain. Beat your own number and the archive updates itself in place — “96 → 98”, with a small notification so you notice. Every record card shows the brain that set it: model tier, rarity, when it happened.
• You have to earn the trait to have it counted. A stat only counts once you’ve actively unlocked it on that brain — max out a domain, run enough hours, fine-tune the right number of times. Neuron Archiv shows you what’s still locked and what it takes. It’s not a pure roll-and-hope screen; you have to bring the receipts.
• Model Potential detail moved here from the Statistics screen. One home, one purpose — chase the records.

🖥️ Progressive hardware unlocking

The Hardware Shop no longer dumps every tier on the counter from day one. Groups now unlock as you grow.

• New GPU / RAM / Storage / Cooling groups unlock for a small one-time Cu fee. The Starter group is open from the beginning; every step above it is a small deliberate purchase.
• Unlocking a GPU group opens the models that require its capacity. Unlocking a RAM group opens the datasets that fit its size. Larger models and datasets follow the hardware they need — you can’t buy a model you have nothing to run it on.
• Unlock popups tell you what just opened. Skip a group and the popup lists everything you gained in one go, so you know what showed up in the model / dataset selectors and what’s newly reachable.

This is mostly a shape-of-the-shop change — it doesn’t gate progression, it just staggers what’s visible. The endgame options are still there. They arrive when the rest of your rig can actually use them.

👉 Pulse hints — the game nudges you to what’s next

Idle games have a habit of leaving newcomers on a screen with a lot of buttons and no signal about which one matters right now. v1.5.3 fixes that with a light-touch pulse layer.

• The next-step icon gently pulses — the noticeboard when a contract is waiting, the training tile when a brain is ready to pretrain, the domain shop when your corpus needs a refresh, the sale flow when a brain is ready to move. One thing at a time. New operators get walked through the loop without staring at dead-air.
• Rare brains steer you right after training. Pretrain a rare-tier model and the archive unlocks, showing you the records now within reach. If a client posts a special contract that fits your rare brain, you get a direct pointer to the noticeboard.
• Don’t want the nudges? Turn them off in Settings → Pulse hints.

✨ Polish & QoL

• Readable time estimates on long pretrains — endgame models now show something like “17 d” instead of a tangled minutes count that no one wants to do the mental arithmetic on.
• First vendor offers match the beginner setup. The vendor board no longer opens on a contract that asks for gear the player doesn’t have yet. New operators get contracts they can actually deliver.
• Autotrain warns you when it can tell you’re about to waste a run. Missing an accepted contract? It nudges you to accept one first if you were planning to fulfill something. No model or dataset selected? It says so up-front, instead of letting you press train and wonder why nothing’s happening.

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Manual is still the deeper path. Autotrain is the easy one. Neuron Archiv is the long game. Both training paths are legit; the archive rewards whichever one you use to build the brain that ends up in a record slot.

— NeuroVault Research Systems