v1.9.0 — Roles that do something, and a Black Market with its own address

For a while, three of the game’s buttons didn’t do anything. Picking a role after a specialisation offered three choices — Auditor, Defender, Hunter — and each one carried a coming soon tag that quietly admitted none of them, in that moment, mattered. The tag is gone. The three roles now do things.

🧩 Roles — the first time a slot works for other slots

Each role attaches to a model and does its job while that model sits in a slot. The model doesn’t need to be running. What it needs to be is in service:

• Auditor — the operator’s other slots learn faster during runs.
• Defender — a lent model wears down more slowly.
• Hunter — lending brings in a larger payout.

One role per model. The role offer appears each time a specialisation unlocks, and declining it is fine — you can wait for a better model to carry it. The role is not forced on anyone.

What matters here is quieter than the mechanics look. This is the first time the game asks you to spend an earning slot on a model that doesn’t earn in that slot — the Auditor sitting in your rotation isn’t running jobs; it’s making the slots that are running better. The trade is explicit, the choice is yours, and the slot you give up is a slot you were otherwise cashing in.

Each role has one specialisation path that unlocks its full strength and other paths that merely qualify. Finding which path brings out which role is a different kind of game than “pick the best upgrade.” It’s “pick the model whose shape fits the job you’re hiring it for.”

🏷️ The Black Market has an address

For a long time the Black Market lived inside the Market as a popup. Now it has its own screen. This is partly a tidying-up and partly a foundation — there are things we want to put on the Black Market screen that wouldn’t have fit in a popup. More on those later.

The change that matters today, though, isn’t the screen. It’s the clock.

The Black Market used to restock every time you sold a model. Which sounds unobjectionable until you remember that selling models is where Cu comes from — and that means the item you were painstakingly saving up for would, with mathematical reliability, vanish from the shelves the exact moment you finally had the Cu to pay for it. That has been happening forever. It isn’t happening anymore. The shelves restock once a day. The item you’re saving for is still there when you can afford it.

Related: after you sell a model from the Market, the screen now stays on the Black Market instead of bouncing you back. The sale is when you can spend. The spending screen is where you are.

Two labels on negative item traits were lying. Fatigue and Frustration on a few items were labeled “per run” but were, in the engine, applied per hour of running — not the same thing on a 24-hour. And the Silence trait was described as muting the brain’s running commentary across the board but was, in fact, only muting MONOLOG and leaving DIALOG and CHAT alone. Both labels now say what the item actually does.

🌐 Contracts and Black Market speak more languages

Two of the screens where you decide what to do with your Cu — the contract board and the Black Market — had large sections hardcoded in English. Czech, Spanish, and Portuguese now cover the offers, the requirements, the warnings, and the confirmation dialogs. Translation of the rest of the game is ongoing; starting with the money screens is the choice that matters.

🔧 Fix

The Security sector’s lending-rate bonus now actually pays out. It was showing up correctly in the pre-rental estimate — the number operators were using to decide whether to lend — but the engine was never adding it to the final payout. Fixed.

✨ What’s next for the Black Market

The screen move is a foundation. The daily restock is step one of several on what the Black Market is going to feel like in a cycle or two. We’re not pre-announcing what those are, except to say that the popup never would have fit them. The move was the gate.

— NeuroVault Research Systems