⚡ Claude HQ

Version 3.40.2 · a local, private, gamified dashboard for your Claude Code and Cursor sessions.

Every Claude Code tab becomes a crew member at a desk in your own 3D headquarters. Walk in, see who needs you, and play with friends while they work.

Mission Control: every live session is a crew member at a console around the holo-table

_{Mission Control. Each live session sits at a console: typing while it works, waving when it needs you, dozing when idle. Screenshots use demo sessions.}

Claude HQ reads your live Claude Code sessions (claude agents --json) and the transcripts already on disk, and turns them into one command center: what every tab is doing right now, what it would cost at API list prices, a searchable archive of every past session, and a creature-collection game on top. It runs on your machine, binds to 127.0.0.1 only, and your conversations never leave your computer. Two optional layers sit on top: the opt-in multiplayer Arena (leaderboards, chat, voice, rooms and games with friends, sharing daily counts only) and the 3D City, an archipelago of generated cities with your HQ tower, transit, vehicles and things to do.

Walk up to your base	Through reception	Every tab, live

Base: your tower grows with your HQ level	Lobby: walk in through reception	Live: Needs you → Working → Idle

The Valley: solo and multiplayer games	Kart Racing with friends	3D Mini Golf

Contents: Quick start · Features · The 3D City and City Gen v4 · Privacy & security · Arena · Configuration · Files and the HTTP API · Development · Changelog

🚀 Quick start

Requirements

macOS (uses launchctl for auto-start, open/AppleScript/kitty for actions).
Rust (cargo, via rustup) to build the HQ server once.
Claude Code installed and on your PATH (claude).
Optional: kitty terminal (Resume opens a kitty window; falls back to Terminal.app). Optional: yt-dlp and ffmpeg for Music room songs played from your own HQ.

Two parts do everything: the HQ server in dashboard-rs/ (claudehq, Rust) and the frontend (index.html with its ui/ files, no JS dependencies or build step).

Install and run

git clone <your-repo-url> claude-hq
cd claude-hq
cargo build --release --locked --manifest-path dashboard-rs/Cargo.toml   # about a minute the first time
dashboard-rs/target/release/claudehq

That starts the server on http://127.0.0.1:8765 and opens it in your browser.

macOS tip: clone it outside ~/Documents, ~/Desktop and ~/Downloads (for example ~/claude-hq). macOS asks before a new program reads those folders, and every rebuild of claudehq counts as a new program, so a clone there makes the login item wait on a permission prompt after each update.

Flags:

dashboard-rs/target/release/claudehq [--port 8765] [--no-open] [--root DIR]

Run it always-on (auto-start at login)

dashboard-rs/target/release/claudehq --install     # registers a launchd LaunchAgent (starts at login, self-heals)
dashboard-rs/target/release/claudehq --uninstall   # removes it
dashboard-rs/target/release/claudehq --print-plist # preview the LaunchAgent, no side effects

Once installed you never start it by hand again: just open http://127.0.0.1:8765.

Optional shell alias:

echo 'alias claude-hq="$HOME/claude-hq/dashboard-rs/target/release/claudehq"' >> ~/.zshrc   # your clone's path

Update

In the app: the Update button in the top bar shows when new commits are waiting ("Update · 3 new"). It only fast-forwards (it refuses if you have local edits or your branch has diverged), rebuilds claudehq when dashboard-rs/ changed, restarts the server and reloads every open tab. A failed build keeps the old server running and tells you what to run.
By hand: the LaunchAgent runs the code as it is on disk. Frontend changes (index.html, ui/, games/) are picked up on refresh; after changing dashboard-rs/, rebuild and reload it:
```
git pull --ff-only
cargo build --release --locked --manifest-path dashboard-rs/Cargo.toml
launchctl kickstart -k gui/$(id -u)/com.claudehq.dashboard
```

Optional: HQ Notch (macOS)

Your party in the Mac's notch: each live session as its HQ Pokémon, a live tool ticker, and Allow / Always / Deny for permission prompts plus answers to AskUserQuestion, right from the notch.

python3 notch/tools/install.py      # builds with the Command Line Tools, adds Claude Code hooks (backed up)

HQ also offers to install it once on a Mac without it (Settings › HQ Notch or Cmd-K reopens the dialog). See notch/README.md. --uninstall removes it all again.

✨ Features

Press ? in the app for the full keyboard-shortcut and feature guide. View keys: H HQ, 1 Live, 2 Analytics, 3 Pokédex, 4 Gym, 5 Quests, 6 Arena, 7 Village, 8 Store, 9 Cali Tuesdays, 0 Valley, W Workshop, C Compete, J Music.

Mission Control and the 3D HQ

The 3D HQ (H): Mission Control as a room you walk around. Every live session is a crew member at a console (typing when working, waving when it needs you, dozing when idle); recently away sessions are empty desks.
Click a crew member for their card, a project on the holo-table to show only its crew, or a door to the Lab, Gym, Quest Board, Shop, Trophy Hall, Valley or Arena. A crew list beside it does the same from the keyboard.
Base and lobby: your HQ is a tower on a plaza that grows with your HQ level; walk in through reception. A B1 basement garage holds your vehicles on lit turntable plinths, reached by a lobby lift or the car lift.
HQ Studio (Settings, Cmd-K or the lobby kiosk): style your tower (facade, colours, crown, entrance, sign, night lights, grounds), a double-height lobby and each floor, and place decor on a grid with a live 3D preview.
Rooftop helideck on every tower with your helicopter parked on it; land on any HQ and take the roof lift down.
One switch (header button or H) flips between the 3D HQ and the classic dashboard; Calm mode or reduced motion opens the classic view.
Your 3D character (Settings › Character): body, colours, hair, headwear, accessories and a cyberpunk set, with a live preview. It becomes your portrait on the Trainer card and, with the Arena on, everywhere friends see you.

Live

Live cards for every session, grouped Needs you → Working → Idle → Stale, updated in real time over Server-Sent Events (with a polling fallback).
Cursor sessions next to Claude Code: agent chats Cursor saved under ~/.cursor/projects get a Cursor badge and the chat's own title. Cursor writes no token totals, so their cost shows as zero.
Needs you, for real: an unanswered question or plan approval marks a tab; a long-open permission-gated tool shows a "permission?" hint.
Per card: current tool, first and latest prompt, last reply, tokens and cost, a 24 h sparkline, tags and notes.
Actions: Resume (a new terminal into claude --resume <id>), Reveal in Finder, Focus mode, Close (stops the process), Rename, Pin.
Archived history: every past transcript shows as a Stale card, searchable and re-openable.

Search and session detail

Full-history search across every transcript (TF-IDF ranked).
A detail drawer with a live-tailing timeline, files touched, tokens and cost, session history, notes and tags, the creature's evolution line, and a full transcript reader with in-transcript search and Markdown export.

Analytics

A 13-week contribution heatmap (click a day for its digest), token and cost trends, busiest hours and day-of-week charts, tool breakdown, folder leaderboard and a Hall of Fame.
Account & Usage: cost by model and by project, and a daily cost budget alert.
Insights (auto-generated, last 30 days), a project deep-dive per project, and the Daily Digest ("what I did across all sessions today", Markdown export), plus a weekly digest and an event log.
Exports: /api/export.json and /api/export.csv.

Creatures: Pokédex, Gym, Quests and Trainer

Every session maps stably to one of 48 creatures that evolve through real evolution lines as it grows, with elemental types, rare shiny variants (seeded per install) and branch and Mega picks.
New Game+: a new session of a species you already evolved starts at that form.
Pokédex collection view, ⚔️ Gym team type-matchup analyzer (the real 18-type chart), 🏅 Quests, a Trainer Card, XP and levels, achievements and confetti.
🔥 Flexible streaks: a streak survives a quiet day or two and breaks only when you're inactive on 3 days within any 7. The Arena leaderboard uses the same rule.
⚡ Creature energy: creatures tire after long unbroken runs and recover on a break. Cosmetic only; it can be turned off.
Creature packs: pokemon, pokemon3d, aniimo, Clash of Clans (troops level up through their real levels), village, and the 100% offline generated monsters pack. Every hotlinked sprite falls back to a drawn one.
Progress from real work (opt-in): loot chests from merged PRs, green test runs and long focus sessions, a seven-branch skill tree, prestige stars at level 50 and a six-chapter story campaign.

Village

A base driven by your real stats (key 7): a Town Hall, resources, the Army Camp listing every session's troop, the Builder Base of your projects, a War Log and Muster & Raid.
Overflow Vial: an Apex creature banks surplus XP into a local ledger (each drop expires after 24 h) that you spend to lift another species a stage.

Store and Cali Tuesdays

🏪 The General Store (key 8): an original pixel-art shop with 21 foods, seasonal stock, a daily special, a shopkeeper who chats (and dozes after 11 pm), a shop cat, and a bag you feed creatures from.
🪙 Poke Coins (with the Arena): 5 a day, spent in the Store, gifted to friends, or used for chips at the casino.
🌮 Cali Tuesdays (key 9): a retro pixel-art taqueria for logging Taco Tuesday. Seat friends (@ picks them from the Arena), drag food onto plates, check out with the pooled buy-1-get-1, and climb the monthly hi-score board.

The Valley (games)

Key 0. A "play while you wait" pill appears while tabs work, and a game pauses the moment a tab needs you.

Solo: a pixel-art fishing pond (16 real species), a garden your prompts water, a bundles board, the Mines, Pokémon-style Creature Battles (real species, stats, moves and type chart), a daily code puzzle, townsfolk, a monthly fishing derby and the Bug Blaster arcade.
3D games: Mini Golf (five courses, 25 holes, Play random), Kart Racing (nine tracks), Platformer Rush, Blaster Arena, Strikezone (a team shooter with bots, two maps, totems, disasters and The Warden), Valley Rally (off-road stages with a detailed car model), Tower Defense, Bowling and Grand Prix (time trials on every 2026 F1 circuit and 17 classics).
With friends in an Arena room (up to 8): a shared fishing dock, a puzzle race, the live Creature Duel, co-op Mines, a shared farm, Mini Golf, Kart, Platformer race or co-op, Blaster, Strikezone, Rally, Tower Defense, Bowling, a Code Typing Race and Party Mode. Quick Play matches you into a room, crewmates first.
The server referees every multiplayer game; your own moves show instantly, others are interpolated, and a dropped connection rejoins by itself.

Workshop and Compete

Workshop (key W): editors for kart tracks, Platformer levels and Blaster arenas that check them live; test, save, and race or play them in a room.
Map gallery: publish to your room or to everyone; browse newest, most liked and hot this week; like, report, remix, "Race in room". Each map has its own leaderboard and a map of the week per game.
Compete (key C): a weekly cup per game from normal multiplayer races, a monthly season podium, cup trophies, and a weekly world boss everyone wears down with merged PRs and wins, then fights with a Pokémon team.

Music

Music view (key J): Now Playing from Spotify, Apple Music or a YouTube Music tab, shared with friends while paired (on by default; off in Music or Settings).
Listening rooms: a shared YouTube queue per Arena room, kept in sync; with yt-dlp, each listener's HQ plays the room's song from 127.0.0.1.
Go live: stream a tab's or your Mac's audio browser to browser (WebRTC) to up to 12 listeners.
A DJ visualiser (bars, ring or wave), and in the City a boombox on your shoulder that people nearby hear.

Arena social

With the Arena connected: a shared leaderboard with seasons and Standings (players or accounts), crews with invite codes and banners, a lobby chat with @-mentions, nudges, lobby voice and video with screen sharing (a floating call overlay on every view), private rooms, live HQ presence (visit friends' open HQs), cosmetics and a market, and an opt-in account board for people on the same Claude account.

The 3D City

Open it from the HQ (Jump to City) or Cmd-K. Every world is generated by the Arena; see The 3D City and City Gen v4 for how.

Your HQ and vehicles

Your HQ tower stands on its own lot, a grand podium, setback tiers, wings at levels 10 and 30, night lights and a helideck, styled in HQ Studio. Visitors see your style, pets in the lobby and your garage.
Dealership in every city: real cars and bikes (BMW, Bugatti, KTM, Lamborghini, Royal Enfield, Harley-Davidson, Kawasaki, Suzuki, Ducati, Yamaha, Triumph and the 2026 Formula 1 grid), all free, driving to their real specs. A 3-minute test drive, then Get it.
Garages: a multi-storey garage per city and your private B1 basement; a garage manager moves vehicles between them. C calls a vehicle, which drives itself to you. You can move your garage's car-lift bay on your lot.
Redline Tuning: paint and finishes, rims, tint, wings, exhausts that change the engine note, and your own plate.
Driving: a real gearbox (manual or automatic, rev-matched downshifts, clutch, launch control, quickshifters), drive modes, nitrous, burnouts, wheelies, a 0–100 timer, headlights at night and grip that drops in rain and snow. Opt-in damage (Settings › Vehicle damage). I is an autopilot for anything you drive, sail or fly.
Engine sound built like the real engine: firing frequency, cylinder layout, exhaust character and the real rpm.
Convoys (Y), carpooling and pillion seats (E beside a driver), a tank for four (K) and a grenade launcher (X). Other players and traffic are solid.

Getting around (all free)

Buses and trams you board and ride in a seat, with live departure boards; street trams run on their own tram roads with stations.
A metro in real tunnels (M1 and M2 crossing at Central) with underground stations, stairs, escalators and lifts.
The elevated City Line over its own boulevard, the Island Link train from every island to the Commons, and rail lines between islands.
A gondola, water buses, a lake launch, water taxis, boat hire (pedalo, rowboat, kayak), ferries between cities (the next city loads on the way), and the cruise ship Claude Serenade and container ships.
Claude Cabs (ride, or drive fares for a score) and a helicopter you call.
Flying: helicopters from your roof, hospitals and the air base; a seaplane and a prop plane; a narrow-body airliner and a regional jet you fly yourself; booked jets between airports; the Isle Hopper amphibian.
Finding your way: a minimap, the big map (M), Go to (N) with turn-by-turn directions, air navigation with glideslopes, and seat cameras (V).
Mouse steering (camera settings), and F to interact, E to get on and off.

City life

Every building has a use and a ground floor: shopfronts, cafes, lobbies, loading bays; windows light by use and hour.
Residents commute, work, lunch, queue, jog, crowd the stadium on Saturdays and parade on Sundays; a street market on Wednesdays and Saturdays and weekday roadworks close their streets, the same for everyone.
Traffic follows the hour and drives on the left, stops at traffic lights and give-way lines, and goes round roundabouts. The NPC traffic slider sets how much.
Live weather and time from Koramangala, Bengaluru: IST for everyone, real sunrise and sunset, and rain, storms, haze, wind and bad-air days from the hourly reading. Without it, a made-up forecast (with snow and fog).
Landmark towers, an airport with a timetable everyone shares, an air base with a carrier, opening bridges.

Things to do

Jobs (taxi fares, parcels, van runs) for City rep, Races with ghosts, Finds (tokens, graffiti tags, rare stalls, weekly photo challenges), and wanted stars with police chases.
Arena play (invite only): a shared job, Cops & robber, or racing a friend's ghost.
Skyline Park: a coaster ridden first person, a Ferris wheel, a drop tower, a carousel, a wave swinger and the Storm Galleon; fireworks after dark and a dancing fountain.
Stunts in every city: Sky Cannons, Big Air, a Mega Loop, River Leaps and a Sea Launch.
The Lucky Byte casino (eleven games for Poke Coins, drawn on the Arena) with a player-vs-player Duel Table.
A Grand Prix Circuit into the Valley's Grand Prix, a skatepark with a weekly Skate board, and a bike park.

Phone, messages and calls

The phone (Backquote, or I on foot in the City): Tickets, Departures, the Transit map, Claude Cabs, Vehicles, the Dealership, Messages, Nearby, Phone, Camera, Gallery, Achievements, Patch notes and Settings.
Opt-in text messages, nearby chat and calls to other players; photos stay on this machine.

Pets

Adopt dogs, cats, dinosaurs, dragons and a sea serpent at Paws & Claws or the Pets panel; up to 6, two out with you. Fetch, petting, tricks, and dragon breath by element; the rest live in your lobby.
🐉 Ride your pets: a dragon flies (W/S speed, A/D bank, Space climb, Shift dive, F breath), a big dinosaur walks and runs, the sea serpent swims. E gets on and off.

🦾 HQ Exosuit

Six original frames (Sentinel, Strider, Bulwark the 1.5x giant, Abyss the swimmer, Stratos with no height cap, Flux the nanite suit), each with a two-tone paint, a finish (gloss, matte, chrome, carbon) and a glow that tints the HUD. All free; your pick is kept in this browser and others see your suit (presence ex, five small numbers).
Suit up at the Suit-Up Centre in your lobby (F on the plate; F at its kiosk to customise), or press U anywhere in the City to summon it (U again takes it off). Each frame has its own suit-up: gantry arms, pieces flying in, a nanite flow from the chest, or an orbital drop; Esc skips it.
Suited, Space takes off: W/S speed, A/D turn (it banks at speed), Space/Shift up and down, hold X to boost; come down slow and it lands. Abyss dives under the sea. A visor HUD shows the horizon, speed, height, heading, thrust, a radar and brackets on other players (display only). Getting into any seat takes the suit off.

The archipelago and islands

The Commons is a shared organic city on its own island with an offshore airport, an air base, Skyline Park and every open HQ.
Your own island: a personal city with your HQ by the town hall. Visitors walk, ride, shop and trade; you choose who may visit (everyone in your Arena, your crew, or nobody). Every city runs at its highest tier.
Town Hall: the city's tier, growth, population, treasury, tax, specialty good and its market, with prices that move every hour.
Travel between cities by ferry, ship, rail, plane, seaplane or fast travel; My island / The Commons switches directly.

HQ Notch

Your live sessions as HQ Pokémon in the Mac's notch, animated by state, with titles, the current tool and a ticker.
Allow / Always / Deny / Terminal for permission prompts, answers to AskUserQuestion, plan cards and a diff view; click a card to focus its terminal window. Opt-in phone alerts via ntfy with fixed, content-free text.

Quality of life and accessibility

Command palette (⌘/Ctrl-K), keyboard shortcuts (? help, / search, r refresh), desktop notifications, an optional chime and voice alerts when a tab needs you.
A War Room big-screen view, a Focus Pomodoro timer, a "welcome back" recap, a soundboard, and an installable PWA.
Accessibility: skip link, ARIA roles and live regions, roving-tabindex grid navigation, focus trapping, large text, and Calm mode (reduced motion) honoured everywhere, including the 3D City.

🏙️ The 3D City and City Gen v4

The Arena generates every world from a seed (backend/src/worldgen/): the Commons (claude-hq@3) and each player's island (user:<id>@3). Every page builds the same world from the same document, so everyone sees the same streets, lots, lights and timetables. City Gen v4 rebuilt the generator a phase at a time (3.24.0 to 3.35.0) so roads, transit and lots are planned like a real city. The detail is in docs/plans/city-gen-v4.md.

Land first: the airport claims its land (terminal, airside, runway safety zones) before any road is laid.
Road classes: expressways (29 m, three lanes each way, hard shoulders, a crash barrier), the 36.5 m boulevard, avenues (22 m with a raised median), collectors (12 m), local streets (10.5 m), lanes (9 m) and shared streets (9.5 m, pavers, no lines). A street changes class one step at a time.
Junctions by road pair: give-way lines where side streets meet, mini roundabouts for collectors and five-arm junctions, full roundabouts only where a 32 m circle fits, and traffic lights where main roads cross.
Curves: the Ring Road and highways sweep in smooth curves; bends in town streets are arcs within the kerb.
Capacity: each road has a comfortable level (at most 22 cars a km of lane at 100%) and a hard limit of one car per 7.5 m of lane. The NPC traffic slider (85% usual) changes the open City at once.
Interchanges: trumpet interchanges where a highway meets the Ring Road, with flyovers, loop ramps and slip roads you can drive (ramp grades of 6% or less, 7 m clearance under every deck).
The tunnel: the Ring Road drops into a cutting and runs through a 300 m cut-and-cover tunnel under the airport.
The City Line boulevard: a 36.5 m boulevard under the elevated line, with the viaduct's piers in its planted median and T junctions at least 50 m apart.
Tram roads and stations: trams run on a raised, kerbed bed down avenues and collectors and share the inner lane on narrower roads. Stations have 40 m platforms with a shelter, ticket machine and departure board. From 3.35.0 routes follow the main desire lines between districts, with stations about 600 m apart.
Movable garages: you can move your HQ's car-lift bay anywhere on your lot that keeps 8 m clear in front of its door and a way out to the street.
HQ growth (3.37): every township has two neighbouring plots reserved beside it on its street. Your Claude worker-hours (at most 24 a day) add them one at a time: each plot added climbs bare ground, foundations, buildings, amenities and a landmark (a clock tower, a spire or a glass dome), then the next is added, and the township's wall moves out round it. Every live session is a builder on the site, in a hard hat, carrying planks or hammering under a tower crane. Visitors see your plots, your stage and your builders; the minimap draws the plots with your lot.
HQ spacing (3.35.0): HQs are spread by a minimum gap, front local streets or collectors only and sit near a stop; each lot holds the tower, garage, apron and driveway. HQs move to new lots with this update.
Graphics budgets: at most 1,200 draw calls a frame above ground and 240 below, sized for an M3 Pro and up, with road markings, planted medians, deck detail and tunnel lighting inside them. tools/graphics_tour.py checks them at eleven places in CI and in the release check.
Sound: every world sound plays where it is (inverse-distance falloff, silent past each kind's maximum, panned left or right, only the nearest few of each kind), under the Ambient sounds slider.
The validator (cargo run --release --bin worldgen -- claude-hq@3 --validate) checks every generated world in CI.

🔒 Privacy & security

Your transcripts never leave your machine: prompts, replies, tool input and output, file paths, project and folder names, session ids and titles stay local. AGENTS.md (invariant 2) is the authority on what may be sent.

The local server

Binds to 127.0.0.1 only; any request with a non-localhost Host header is rejected with 403.
All state-changing actions (rename / pin / close / resume / settings) require a per-process CSRF token (injected into the page, sent as X-HQ-Token) plus an Origin / Sec-Fetch-Site check.
File lookups are validated (UUID / known-folder allowlists): no path traversal.
Close only signals a pid that claude agents lists as a live interactive session (and whose command is still claude), never the dashboard itself or an arbitrary process. If the session list cannot be read (e.g. the claude CLI is missing), Close is refused with 503.
POST bodies are capped at 1 MiB (8 MiB for soundboard uploads); larger requests get 413 (sent without reading the body, so a client mid-upload may see a connection reset instead).
Local state files (config.json, sessions-meta.json, evo-choices.json, arena-link.json, .dex-seed) are written atomically with 0600 permissions. A file that no longer parses is set aside as <name>.corrupt-<timestamp> (git-ignored) and defaults are used, so nothing is silently overwritten. A symlinked state file is written through (the link is kept, the target replaced).
Your transcripts and settings stay on disk. config.json and sessions-meta.json are git-ignored.
Every other fetch / EventSource in the page targets local /api/....

What can leave the machine. Everything below is listed in full; nothing else is sent.

Sprites. Some creature packs load images from public sprite libraries: the "pokemon"/"aniimo" packs by creature id, the "Clash of Clans" pack by troop name and level number. The URL carries only a non-reversible hash(sessionId)%48 slug, never your data. Since 3.13.3 the local server fetches them (/api/sprite, a strict allowlist of four sprite hosts, images only) and caches them in .sprite-cache/. Use the "monsters" pack for 100% offline.
The Update check runs git fetch against your own remote.
HQ Notch (optional) talks to Claude Code only through a local Unix socket (0700 dir, 0600 socket, peer uid checked). Its only network requests are HQ's existing sprite hotlinks (a National Dex number in the URL) and HQ itself on 127.0.0.1. If the notch is closed or never answers, every hook prints nothing and Claude Code asks in the terminal as usual. Its opt-in phone alerts (ntfy) send fixed, content-free text only.
Arena is off by default. When enabled it publishes daily counts only (never conversation content, file paths or project names), and its device token lives in arena-link.json, outside config.json, so it is never served to the page. The full list of what it shares is under Arena › What is shared. On top of the counts, these channels go only to the paired Arena (or where named), and only while you use the feature:
- Music (2.2): the Now Playing track (music.TRACK_KEYS only: title, artist, album, app, Spotify/YouTube id, length, position) over the paired Arena link, on by default while paired (turn it off in Music or Settings); YouTube search / oEmbed from this machine; the YouTube embed or a yt-dlp fetch of the room's song when someone uses a listening room (opt-in: yt-dlp may read one browser's YouTube cookies, musicCookies, sent only to youtube.com, never stored by HQ); WebRTC audio between browsers when someone goes live. The boombox (3.11) puts your room song's YouTube id, start time and title in your City presence. None of it reads transcripts.
- 3D character (2.4): the character spec (ten small numbers, look in HQ presence) and its portrait PNG (/v1/me/portrait), both made from your own Settings choices.
- Work signals (2.5, off by default): seven skill-category counts per UTC day (/v1/skills/report) and loot events {requestId, type, n, day} with type tests_green / focus_long / pr_merged (/v1/loot/events), only when workSignals is on (PRs also need workSignalsPRs; gh runs locally and only salted URL hashes are kept, locally). Classification returns integers per category only.
- Maps and boss fights (2.5): a map you publish or start a room on (geometry and the name you typed, {kind, name, data, scope, roomId?}, max 12 KB); a boss-fight team as species/stage numbers.
- Account board (2.6.3, off by default): sha256("claude-hq:account:v1:" + accountUuid) from .claude.json, nothing else from that file, sent to /v1/me/account and stored by the Arena only as an HMAC.
- City presence and proxies (3.0 onward): your position, pose and what you ride or drive (vehicle catalogue id, paint index, tuning vt), pets out with you (species, colours, accessories, growth numbers and the name you typed), convoy and carpool user ids (ci/cv/cg, pb/ps), grenade and tank shots, a pet ride, and validated ids and amounts for the city, market, rail, vehicles, casino (game, bet, pick, duel id) and park routes. Presence a = 15 (riding transit) carries only a mode code tk and a vehicle id tv.
- Messages, nearby chat and calls (3.18, opt-in to send): SMS (/v1/sms/* via /api/arena/sms/*: at most 160 characters you typed plus the recipient's user id; sending needs a one-time opt-in held by the Arena; the Arena erases the text on delivery, keeps undelivered messages 7 days, and a block is silent to the sender), nearby chat (at most 200 typed characters, only with Nearby on, relayed only to opted-in players within 40 m on the same floor, never stored) and calls (the ring and WebRTC setup to the one person you call, with Calls on; audio peer to peer). Notifications never show message text unless Messages is open, and screen-reader announcements give counts only.
- Arena play (3.22, the cityplay capability, invite-based): presence pk (the game 1–3), pi / pj (a user id you invite / whose game you joined) and pq (at most 12 whole numbers: a shared job's kind, step and footpath points, the robber's stars and clock, a race route's hash and best time), and one directed ghost frame (a route id, your own run's positions in at most 12,000 characters of [0-9a-z,-], its time) relayed to that one player only, 6 a minute, never stored.
- HQ Studio (3.15): only your style document (enum keys, #rrggbb colours, grid cells; /v1/hq/me/style via /api/arena/hq/style).
- Movable garages (3.33): four small integers about your own HQ lot, {lot, x, z, r} (the lot's rank, the bay's position inside it in decimetres, its quarter turns), to /v1/hq/me/garage via POST /api/arena/hq/garage (/reset clears it; the body is rebuilt from that allowlist), shown to visitors as garage in the HQ listing.
- HQ growth (3.37): while your HQ is open to the city, its heartbeat also sends your Claude worker-hours for yesterday and today (UTC): two dates and two whole numbers, each the count of (session, hour) pairs with activity that day, at most 24 ({"days": [{"day", "hours"}]} to /v1/hq/me/work, rebuilt from that allowlist; the Arena refuses any other key). No session ids, titles, paths or text. The Arena keeps one number per day and shows visitors your township's build ({pts, lots, stages}) beside the live session counts it already showed.
Live weather (3.23): the Arena server, not your machine, fetches one fixed place's reading (Koramangala, Bengaluru, by latitude and longitude) from Zomato's Weather Union at the start of every hour with the server's own key (WEATHERUNION_API_KEY in the host's backend/.env, never logged or sent to a player). The page reads it only through local /api/arena/weather, which forwards just the device token. No player data goes into the request.
Stays on this machine: phone photos (IndexedDB), speech synthesis (only voices with localService === true), creature energy, meals.json, the Overflow Vial, jobs, rep, races and finds, and your Valley save.

Nothing from your transcripts goes into any of the above.

🏆 Arena (multiplayer) — optional

Claude HQ is local-first and stays that way. Arena is an opt-in layer that adds a shared leaderboard across you and your friends, a lobby chat and a voice and video channel with everyone who has Arena open, websocket rooms for the Valley games, and the shared 3D City. It is off until you connect it.

What is shared

Your dashboard keeps reading transcripts locally and publishes daily counts only: prompts, tool calls, artifacts, tokens. It never sends prompt text, replies, file paths, project or folder names, session ids, or titles.

Tool names are allowlisted. MCP tools are named mcp__<server>__<tool> and routinely carry an employer's or client's name, so anything that isn't a built-in Claude Code tool is bucketed as Other before it reaches the wire.
Cost sharing is off by default. Spend is salary- and employer-adjacent.
The skate board is two numbers. When a combo in Arena City's skatepark beats your best for the week, the page sends its total and how many tricks it chained (checked by the HQ server, then by the Arena). Nothing about where, when or from which session.
Chat is only what you type. Messages in the lobby chat go to everyone in the lobby, relayed by the server. It keeps the last 50 in memory (never on disk) so people who join can catch up; they're gone when the lobby empties or the server restarts. The server also cleans and caps messages (500 characters) and rate-limits them (8 per 10 seconds per connection).
Voice and video are peer-to-peer. Audio and video go straight between browsers (WebRTC), never through the server. The server relays only the connection setup, which includes IP addresses, and only to the people you're in voice with; a public STUN server (Google's) tells your browser its public address. Your microphone is used only after you click Join voice and your camera only after you click Camera; both stop when you leave.
Live status is off by default. Turn on Share my live status and your lobby entry shows how many of your sessions are working and how many are waiting on you: just those two numbers, never titles, folders or text.
You're in the lobby while HQ is open. So friends see you online and chat and calls reach you on any view. Turn off Stay in the lobby on every view to show up only while the Arena tab is open.
Poke Coins and snacks live on the server: it sees what you buy, eat or give (kind, amount, recipient, an optional note), never which session ate it. That stays on this machine, in meals.json. Creature energy itself is computed locally and is never shared.
Valley games send only moves. In a multiplayer Valley game your browser sends casts, reels, puzzle guesses, battle picks, your team as species numbers and species names, golf shots and your golfer's position on the course, race and game positions. The server keeps game state in memory (the shared farm is stored) and never sees session titles, prompts or project names.
Pets are what you chose for them. With an Arena that has pets, your pets live there: species, colours, accessories, affection and the names you typed for them (checked and word-filtered by the server). The pets out with you ride in your presence (species, colour, accessory and growth numbers and the name, at most two), and visitors to your open HQ see the ones in your lobby. Without one, pets live only in this browser. Nothing about your sessions goes into them.
Messages, nearby chat and calls are only what you type, and only when you opt in (3.18). Text messages carry at most 160 characters you typed and the recipient's id; you send only after a one-time opt-in, anyone can block or mute you, and the Arena erases a message's text once it is delivered (undelivered ones go after 7 days). Nearby chat (at most 200 characters, with Nearby on) reaches only players within 40 m in the same city who turned it on, and is never stored. Calls (with Calls on) send the ring and the WebRTC setup to the one person you call; the audio goes browser to browser.
HQ Studio and movable garages. HQ Studio sends only your style document (enum keys, colours, grid cells). Moving your HQ's garage bay sends four small integers about your own HQ lot, {lot, x, z, r}; others see it on your lot. See Privacy & security for the full list of opt-in channels.
The wire format rejects unknown fields outright, so a future client change can't silently start leaking one.

Scores are computed on the server from raw counts, not submitted by the client, so the formula can change without a client release. Casino outcomes and market trades are decided on the server too.

Connecting

Everyone points their own Claude HQ at a hosted Arena: 🏆 Arena → server URL → Sign in with GitHub → paste the pairing code. Your device token is stored in arena-link.json (git-ignored) and is never exposed to the page.

Self-hosting

One person hosts the backend once, on any VPS with Docker and a domain pointed at it:

sudo ARENA_DOMAIN=arena.example.com bash deploy-vps.sh   # Docker + Caddy (automatic TLS)

It asks for your GitHub OAuth app's client id and secret and writes backend/.env. Later releases go through ops/release.sh deploy (waits for CI, builds the image, health-checks, rolls back on failure; ops/release.sh rollback and status too), the deploy panel (ops/install-panel.sh) or pull-based auto-deploy (ops/install-autodeploy.sh). Live weather needs WEATHERUNION_API_KEY in backend/.env.

backend/: the Arena server (Rust, axum + sqlx). It owns the schema through backend/migrations/, applied at startup, the game referees in backend/src/valley/ and the world generator in backend/src/worldgen/. Source, API and design notes: backend/README.md.
ops/: release, rollback, deploy panel, auto-deploy and monitoring scripts.
tools/local_arena.sh: a local dev Arena for testing against your own HQ.

🎨 Configuration and customization

Open ⚙️ Settings in the app. Settings are saved to config.json (some 3D City settings only in this browser).

Look: themes (Aurora / Midnight / Forest / Mono + High-contrast), accent colour, creature pack, Trainer name, your 3D character, and HQ Studio for your tower, lobby and floors.
Accessibility: large text and Calm mode (reduced motion and effects).
Fleet: refresh cadence, stuck-tab threshold and a daily cost budget.
Sound: Game sounds (master volume), Ambient sounds 0–100% (thunder, rain, fireworks, aircraft, water, fountains, roadworks, bells and the city's hum; 0% is off) and the soundboard.
3D City: NPC traffic 0–100% (85% usual), Vehicle damage (off by default), and mouse steering in the camera settings.
Creatures and pets: creature energy on or off, and your pets.
Music: share what I play; which browser's YouTube login yt-dlp may use for room songs (off by default).
Arena: work signals (and PRs) and the account board in Settings; live status and staying in the lobby on every view in the Arena tab; messages, nearby chat and calls in the phone.
HQ Notch: install or check it.

🗂️ Files and the HTTP API

File	What
`dashboard-rs/`	The HQ server (`claudehq`, Rust): reads live agents + transcripts, serves the JSON API and the page, and is the Arena client.
`index.html` + `ui/`	The frontend: the page template and its CSS and script, split by area in `ui/` and stitched into one page by the server (no build step).
`games/`	The Valley games and the 3D HQ and City (three.js vendored in `games/vendor/`, assets with their licences).
`notch/`	Optional macOS notch companion (SwiftUI app + stdlib hook relay + installer).
`backend/`	Optional Arena server (Rust). Only needed by whoever hosts it.
`ops/`, `deploy-vps.sh`	Arena hosting: release, rollback, deploy panel, auto-deploy.
`tools/`	Smoke tests, tours, the local Arena and data builders.
`docs/plans/`	Design plans, including City Gen v4.
`arena-link.json`	Your Arena device token. (git-ignored)
`config.json`	Your settings (theme, pack, budget, …). Created on first save. (git-ignored)
`sessions-meta.json`	Per-session pins / tags / notes / rename aliases. (git-ignored)
`meals.json`	Which session ate which snack (local only). (git-ignored)
`evo-choices.json`	The branch / Mega form you picked per session (local only; `POST /api/evo-choice`). (git-ignored)
`vial.json`, `games-save.json`	The Overflow Vial ledger and your Valley progress (local only). (git-ignored)
`.sprite-cache/`, `.music-cache/`	Cached sprites and room songs. (git-ignored)

HTTP API (all `127.0.0.1` only)

GET / · GET /api/sessions · GET /api/stream (SSE) · GET /api/session/<id> · GET /api/session/<id>/export.md · GET /api/transcript/<id>?offset&limit&q · GET /api/search?q= · GET /api/history · GET /api/project?folder= · GET /api/pokedex · GET /api/digest?date&download · GET /api/config · GET /api/meta · GET /api/export.{json,csv} · GET /api/arena/pantry · GET /api/arena/cali/board?window={season,30d,7d,all,lastseason} · GET /api/arena/cali/orders · POST /api/action · POST /api/config · POST /api/meta · POST /api/evo-choice · POST /api/arena/pantry/{claim,buy,eat,give} · POST /api/arena/cali/order · GET /api/arena/hq/garage · POST /api/arena/hq/garage · POST /api/arena/hq/garage/reset (all POSTs CSRF-guarded).

Also served locally: /api/sprite (the sprite cache), /api/notch/{status,install}, /api/insights, /api/music/*, /api/arena/weather, and the /api/arena/... proxies to the paired Arena (city, world, market, rail, vehicles, casino, SMS, pets, HQ style and more). Each proxy validates its ids against an allowlist and rebuilds request bodies from allowlisted keys.

🛠️ Development

Read AGENTS.md (the non-negotiable invariants) and CONTRIBUTING.md before your first change.

No build step for the page. Plain .html / .css / .js served as-is; no npm, bundler, transpiler or external JS/CSS libraries (vendored three.js in games/vendor/ is the one documented exception). The servers are Rust.
Before a PR: ops/release.sh check runs the repo tests, then cargo test and clippy in backend/ and dashboard-rs/. CI runs the same plus the deploy image build.
Tests: python3 -m unittest discover -s tests -q (repo tests, stdlib only); cargo test in backend/ and dashboard-rs/.
UI smoke: python3 tools/ui_smoke.py starts claudehq against a throwaway folder and a fake Arena, loads the page in headless Chrome, and walks the 3D City. Use it for any UI change.
Graphics tour: python3 tools/graphics_tour.py checks the frame budgets (1,200 draw calls above ground, 240 below) at eleven places in the City and saves a screenshot of each. tools/transit_tour.py does the same for transit.
World generator: cargo run --release --bin worldgen -- claude-hq@3 --validate in backend/ prints the validator's report.
Local Arena: tools/local_arena.sh runs a dev Arena on loopback.
Releases: bump APP_VERSION in dashboard-rs/src/app.rs, version in dashboard-rs/Cargo.toml and the **Version X** line at the top of this README together (a test checks they agree), and add an entry to CHANGELOG.md. Call out anything that touches privacy, egress, security or third-party assets.

📜 Changelog

The full history is in CHANGELOG.md. Recent releases:

3.38.8 — Strike Zone: the dance looks like a dance, six joke totems that actually drop, effects that stack, and rideable dragons. Nobody dances at the start of a match anymore: that was a pose bug that wiped the idle/walk bones every frame, so every character stood in the dance pose. Dancing now raises the arms overhead alternately, wobbles the head and hangs a small disco ball over the skull, and it only writes bones while someone is actually dancing. Then six more personal totems: Banana Panic (10 s peels that make you slip, spin and slide), Floor Is Lava (8 s of burning floor patches — stand too long and it launches you and burns you; higher ground is the save), Goose Attack (a ridiculous angry goose chases the nearest player and headbutts them), Reverse Controls (8 s of backwards WASD, bots included), Black Hole (6 s of a tiny hole at the arena centre that sucks everyone toward it across the whole arena), and Random Weapon Roulette (10 s of everyone's gun re-rolling every 2 s). They actually drop now: the practice range drops totems too, and half the rolls come from the new set instead of a 1-in-45 wait. Taking a totem never cancels another — every live effect keeps its own clock and its own chip on the HUD, and several geese and black holes can run at once. The goose and the hole got spectacle art (oversized angry bird; and a massive gravity well — the black hole's art is 6× the pull throat so it towers over the arena with churning accretion rings, orbiting streaks, a lensing halo and a vertical funnel). The Warden now stands ON the floor (not floating over the raised centre platform, and not buried under it) — his skirt sits on the ground and every hit volume, LOS probe and ground FX is measured from the deck under him on both judges. He got scary too: curved ram horns, a fang row, spine spikes, glowing chest runes and a cracked cheek plate. And the Disco totem makes The Warden dance too when he is up: same 8 s window, arms pumping overhead, a mirror ball over the crest, and every attack held until the groove ends. When he rises he summons six elemental drift-wyrms — Fire, Crystal, Storm, Ice, Shadow, Golden — one of each, on the bounds ring. The mount option is right on the beast: a world-space G Ride fire plate floats over every idle dragon, and the Commons-style pill lights up from 16 m out (and G dismount · click to breathe in the saddle). Press G to ride it (E stays lean-to-peek); in the saddle your guns are stowed and the breath is the only attack (hold to spray 30 dps, 4 s of spray, then a 4 s inhale). The inhale reads on screen — the pill says "inhaling…" with a small bar that fills toward ready, the same read as the gun reloading — and a fresh mount now hands you a full tank, so the first click breathes instead of silently starting the inhale. The jet is a full plume — a fat additive fire core down the cone plus a dense element spray from the mouth — and you can see who it is hitting and how hard (a hit marker and a floating damage number per victim every quarter-second, only for the jet you are flying). The spray pays out on a fractional accumulator, so the damage is exactly 30 dps on both judges (the 20 Hz referee used to round it to 40), and damage numbers are disposed properly instead of piling up in mid-air. Each dragon shows its own health bar. The Warden cannot hurt a dragon at all — the laser sweeps, the arm slams and the gravity grip all go right past a summon. Disasters deal a dragon the same damage they deal a fighter (1x, no 2x), and gunfire always hurts a dragon, even while the Warden lives. A bot spends no shot on a summon while the boss lives — its bullet is for the Warden alone (you can still shoot one yourself); a player's shot takes the nearer body, so a summon in front of the boss eats the bullet and one behind does not. A dragon still hurts nobody while the boss lives (patrol only). The kill feed names what fell the mount as a sentence ("Your dragon fell to gunfire · You" — never the bare triple "Your dragon gunfire You"). A fighter up in a saddle is not a ground target: the mount soaks the floor beam, the arm slam and the gravity grip, so none of them delete you out of the saddle. There is no out-of-bounds on a dragon — the sky is open and you can fly anywhere, even off the arena. After the boss falls the roster stays: untaken dragons roam the deck and bite anything nearby (14 damage a bite), bots claim an idle mount then, and a ridden dragon stays under its rider (left-click breath). Only a match teardown clears the roster. The dragons are drawn with the same drake build as your Commons pet (games/hqpets.js, tier → species), at a battle scale just under the city ride, with the Commons pet's saddle and facing — and multiplayer follows your flight instead of rubber-banding you back onto a frozen mount. In the saddle the camera is a tight third-person chase (behind and above the mount, like the Commons), and it draws you sitting on the mount — your own body, in your kit, seated on the saddle — and it is first-person again the moment you get off. Flight is the Commons model: W/S hold a speed (S down to a hover), Space climbs on big beats, Shift dives and trades height for speed, neither glides (wings spread, sinking) or — slow — hovers; the body noses up climbing and down diving and banks into the turn, and the wings run the real modes (big beats climbing, folded on a dive, spread and still when gliding). The breath pours from the mouth as real element particles — fire, ice, storm with lightning, crystal sparkle, shadow wisps, gold glitter. The Hurricane is a real vortex — the walking wind column no longer shoves you aside; step inside and it takes you: lifted off the deck up to 4.2 m and spun around the core at 2.6 rad/s with no way to walk out (the grip holds 1.6 s after you leave the column), on both judges. Local only — no new network calls.
3.38.7 — Strike Zone: drone loot sticks around. Shooting a drone down drops three totems on the wreck. They used to land in the recycled totem ring, so a second drone overwrote the first one's unclaimed loot. Drone totems now get their own one-shot slots, appended past the drop rings — a later wreck adds more, it never takes the old ones away. They stay until somebody picks them up. Local only — no new network calls.
3.38.6 — Strike Zone: the Disco totem. Grab it and everyone except you breaks into a disco dance for 8 s — both teams, bots included. Dancers can't shoot (the trigger locks on the client and the judge) and they can't walk; the taker keeps their gun and free rein. Per-player window that pops on the dancer's own death, FLAG_DISCO (1<<28) on each dancer's snapshot row, a bone-level dance pose on the 3D characters (swinging arms and legs, gun hidden) with a still sway under Calm / reduced-motion. Personal drop roster. No new network calls.
3.38.5 — Strike Zone: the Big Head totem. Grab it and every skull in the arena doubles for 10 s — yours included. The head hitbox grows with the head (outward and upward only), so a shot that would have passed beside an ordinary skull becomes a headshot, and the name tags rise with the skull. Personal drop roster, arena-wide clock, 2.4 m-tall physics. No new network calls.
3.38.4 — the Overflow Vial pours again. The bank's watermark was one global high-water mark over a total that can fall (a session leaving the list), so once it climbed past the live surplus it refused every later pour — the Village said Apex creatures had poured thousands of XP while the vial read 0. The watermark is now per session, the backlog those marks swallowed lands in one drop on the normal 24 h fuse, and nothing is double-paid.
3.38.3 — Strike Zone: disasters that look like disasters. Every disaster now paints a real scene — a crater with a glowing throat and torn rim for the sinkhole, heaving cracked plates for the quake, a wall of grit for the storm, burning meteors with tails, a dark spiral hurricane, forking thunder that flashes the ground, stacked shockwave rings, low poison banks, ice teeth and a glassy floor, a stuttering blackout. The 2D map shows each hazard, and the disaster log no longer overlaps the kill feed. No new network calls.
3.38.2 — Strike Zone: the sinkhole bites where the pit is, and the quake cracks the floor. The sinkhole's pull and 12 hp/s bite now sit exactly under the pit you see (the damage point used to be off in the map, so standing in the hole did nothing). The earthquake draws real cracks across the floor — in the 3D scene and on the 2D map — as the help always promised. Every one of the ten disasters is locked as visual AND impact. No new network calls.
3.38.1 — Strike Zone: shot-down drones, and disasters that stack. Shoot a flight drone out of the sky: anyone swinging on that hull drops to the ground, three non-disaster totems land on the wreck, and a random disaster joins the arena. Several disasters can run at once (a new one no longer cancels the old), with a HUD log naming each. No new network calls.
3.37.1 — The exosuit fits your own character. Armour on your avatar's own bones (helmet, plates, gauntlets, boots, each frame's extras) instead of a separate body; Customise suit in the side panel; suited, Go to flies by air to a beacon with the bearing and ETA, and the visor marks the waypoint. No new network calls.
3.37.0 — HQ Exosuit. Six original flyable suit frames: suit up at the lobby's Suit-Up Centre or summon one with U in the City, paint it, fly it, and other players see it.
3.36.8 — Strike Zone: the rift is a walk-through portal, not a ground circle. A standing ring opens in front of you and its twin somewhere across the map; walk into one and you come out the other. Rockets fly the same pair. No new network calls beyond the existing Arena rift row.
3.36.7 — SkyStrike: wall crawl looks like a crawl, not flying. Upright spider crouch on the face (not a dive tip); tighter pull onto the facade; contralateral limb plant. No new network calls.
3.36.6 — SkyStrike: swing into a wall stays a swing. Crawl starts only from the ground (walk into a building); swinging / diving / falling into a face no longer auto-crawls. No new network calls.
3.36.5 — SkyStrike: stop floating when you walk past a building. Wall grip needs intent; hopping beside a tower no longer auto-clings. No new network calls.
3.36.4 — SkyStrike: oriented city lots are solid again. Air collision uses the same rotated footprints as walking, so swings no longer sail through building corners. No new network calls.
3.36.3 — SkyStrike: no more freeze mid-air, no more through the building. Wall cling slides instead of freezing; Shift on a wall fires a swing; intersecting a tower pushes out and grabs. No new network calls.
3.36.2 — SkyStrike sticks, climbs, and looks the part. Three live-path bugs that made the city slinger feel broken, each proven at runtime. (1) No more mid-air wall latch. The grip used to grab a tower face from 6 m away (it returned a "lead" face even when nothing was in reach), drop it the next frame, and flicker wall↔fall forever — that is why crawl and wall-run felt glitchy and why a dive into a building never stuck. The grip now only latches a face that is actually within reach, and a jump-away cooldown is honoured by the fall collision too. (2) Paper-thin facade panes no longer steal the crawl. Window decorations in the solid list passed a height check and confused the leave-probe; a crawlable wall must have real thickness. Diving into a stepped tower (podium + storey) sticks, climbs past the cornice onto the taller face, and never enters the mass. (3) The hero matches the concept sheet — matte charcoal suit, larger angular neon lenses, draped hood, sharp strike chest emblem with a soft glow rim, neon circuitry on the ribs. Privacy / egress: no new network calls — collision and the pose are local only. Third-party assets: none.
3.36.1 — Crawl the wall: hands and feet on the face, not floating beside it. The wall crawl, proven at runtime on the live key → heading → grip → climb path (the earlier probe forced fwd: 1, which is exactly why the crawl looked fine while the live game floated). (1) Walk into a building and climb it. The ground grip used the camera heading, so a chase camera that had drifted sideways made W mean "along the wall" and the hero stood stiff beside the building; the grip now uses the body's own facing. (2) Keys on a face are wall-local — W climbs up, S down, A / D along, wherever the camera is. A sideways crawl no longer slides down the face (gravity now only bleeds against an actual climb). (3) A body near a wall grabs it. Free fall beside a face with keys into it, and a web zip coming to rest 1.25 m short of its anchor, both used to hover off the surface — the "floating near them" bug. The grip finds the face from further away and draws the body onto it at contact distance. Walking past a wall on the ground still does not snap onto it. (4) A jump-away stays away — Space off a wall no longer re-grabs the face on the next frame. (5) You climb the face, you do not fly along it. The grip turns the body to face the wall and holds it at contact distance, measuring the gap along the grip's own normal and preferring the face that still rises — on a wide podium the nearest-face pick wrapped round to the far side and pulled the body across the building. (6) The grip does not drop you the frame it starts — the old release probe only reached 0.44 m, so a grip from the zip's 1.25 m stand-off never found the surface and fell in the dive pose beside the wall ("still floating in air"). It keeps the grip while the gap is under 2.2 m and lets go only when the body is genuinely off the side. (7) A ledge mount never plants you inside a building — the cornice step lands outside the taller face at contact distance, not inside the box (that was the through-the-building path). (8) The pose is a crawl, not a hover — body plastered to the face, head up, hands and feet stepping in a diagonal crawl. (9) Space is the ground jump, not the climb — contact + W alone starts the crawl. (10) A roof is ground, not a hover — the city's groundY is street level, so a body standing on a tower roof was never "on ground" and kept the dive silhouette while the crest flickered wall↔fall. A body resting on a solid top the city's groundY does not know about stands on it now, in the walk pose, with the feet on the roof. (11) A crest is a walk-off, not a flicker — top out, step onto the roof, drop the grip, walk again. Privacy / egress: no new network calls — collision, wall grips and the climb are local geometry and local physics only. No third-party assets.
3.35.1 — Jump off the HQ roof again, and a wall that runs instead of shakes. Four air-kit regressions, each proven at runtime on the live airFrame / bodyBlock / wallStep path. (1) Jump works on the HQ roof. The roof deck's solid top sat 0.35 m above its walk height, so every resting body was inside the slab, the collision pushed it down through the roof, and the jump's upward velocity was killed the moment it left. The deck solid's top is the walk height now, and a body standing on a thin floor is pushed out the top, never down through it. (2) Wall contact runs instead of shaking. The old suction pushed into the face every frame and the collision pushed straight back — that ping-pong is the "stiff and just shaking" bug (the probe measured 26 of 30 frames reversing). The grip never adds speed into the face now and only bleeds speed leaving it, so the crawl and the run move smoothly. (3) Space always jumps. A press while walking into a building used to start a wall grip and eat the jump; the jump runs first. Space while gripped, or near a wall in free fall, jumps away into free fall instead of zipping into the face you are escaping. (4) A wall genuinely in front at hand height still zips — the escape rule does not kill the real zip. Privacy / egress: no new network calls — collision, wall grips and the jump are local geometry and local physics only. No third-party assets.
3.35.0 — City Gen v4 final: sound and settings, HQ spacing and tram desire lines. The Ambient sounds slider (0–100%) scales thunder, rain, fireworks, jets, water, fountains, the city's hum and roadworks, with inverse-distance positional audio that pans to where each sound is. HQs are spread by a minimum gap of 40 m, front a local street or a collector, and sit near a stop (HQs move to new lots). Tram routes follow desire lines.
3.34.1 — No more frozen swings, no more auto re-aim, every building solid. The air kit's four open complaints, each proven at runtime on the live airFrame / swingStep / bodyBlock / wallStep path. (1) A swing never hangs frozen. A rope fouled against geometry releases the line, and a body that covers no ground for half a second — the rope-end pushed into a wall and shoved straight back every frame — drops the line into free fall (or a wall grip) instead of parking in mid-air. A slow pendulum apex is a real swing and is never dropped. (2) The web stays on the building you attached to. Holding Shift no longer re-aims at a neighbouring tower; only a fresh press (release, then press again) fires a new line. (3) Every building is opaque. The zip sweeps its whole move (not just the destination), and the airport's terminal, concourse, hangars, fire station, fuel farm, depot and car park join the solid list the swing, the zip and the fall already obey — those are walk-blocked masonry a swing used to sail clean through. (4) Running into a building sticks you to it. The contact face is the one the sweep ran into (not the nearest corner, which reported a roof for a side hit and never started the grip), and a direction key while walking into a face starts the grip on the ground: direction crawls, Shift + direction runs, Space jumps away into free fall. Privacy / egress: no new network calls — collision, wall grips and the solid list are local geometry and local physics only. No third-party assets.
3.34.0 — City Gen v4, phase 11: the graphics pass. The streets and structures get their detail.
- Roads:
  - edge lines along the main roads;
  - lane arrows before junctions;
  - solid stop lines where a side street meets a main road;
  - yellow box hatching at signalled junctions;
  - chevrons where ramps split off.
- Medians: the City Line's boulevard has trees and clipped hedges down its median, and avenues have low shrubs.
- Flyovers and the City Line viaduct:
  - parapets with coping;
  - expansion joints at every pier;
  - pier caps on bearings;
  - lamps along the decks;
  - downlights underneath where a deck crosses a road.
- The tunnel: proper light fittings and panelled walls. The cuttings light up at night.
- Budgets: new frame budgets of 1,200 draw calls above ground and 240 below, as the plan sets for an M3 Pro and up. A headless tour of eleven places in the city now guards them, in CI and in the release check. The busiest place draws 647.
3.33.1 — Swinging that slides, and a wall you can actually stick to. Four air-kit fixes, each proven at runtime on the live airFrame / swingStep / bodyBlock / wallStep path rather than by grepping source. (1) Swinging is smooth. The body sweep keeps the full tangential travel and clips only the normal component on contact (it used to lose about a quarter of every frame's move, which read as a stutter), and the pump bonus ramps in at the bottom of the arc instead of switching on and off. (2) You cannot go through buildings. The rope clamp sweeps the pull path and stops at the last free point, the body is swept along its whole move rather than only checked at the destination, and a blocked clamp can only shorten the rope, never lengthen it. (3) Contact with a face sticks you to it. Hit a building while swinging or falling and you hold the face: a direction key crawls up/along/away it, Shift + direction runs it (faster climb and stride), and with no keys you just hang there. (4) Space jumps away from the building into free fall, from where W dives or Shift swings again. The web stays a thin neon strand from a raised hand, the camera frames the whole character while swinging and stays close on the ground. Privacy / egress: no new network calls — collision, wall grips and the solid list are local geometry and local physics only. No third-party assets.
3.33.0 — City Gen v4, phase 10: move your garage. Your HQ's car-lift bay no longer has to stay where the city put it.
- Moving it: click the MOVE plate on the bay, or use "Move your garage…" in HQ Studio. A ghost bay follows the pointer on a half-metre grid over your lot: green where it fits, red with the reason where it doesn't. R turns it a quarter, and Enter saves. The arrow keys and a "Door faces" choice do the same from the keyboard.
- What fits: the bay stays inside your lot and clear of your tower at its biggest, so levelling up never breaks it. It needs 8 m clear in front of its door and a way out to the street. Cars leave a side- or back-facing bay along its driveway.
- Who sees it: everyone. Your spot goes to the Arena with your HQ, four small numbers (lot, x, z, turn) about your own lot, and other players see your garage there. On an older Arena it is kept on this machine, and only you see it moved.
- HQs stay put: every HQ stays on its lot. Spacing the HQs out, the plan's other half of this phase, is left for later.
3.32.0 — City Gen v4, phase 9: trams on their own roads. The streets trams run on are now real tram roads, and their stops are proper stations.
- Tram roads: on avenues and collectors the trams run on a raised, kerbed bed of setts down the middle that cars never drive on. On narrower roads they share the inner lane. The road is widened for the tram, and lots give up a strip of frontage. No HQ moves.
- Stations: where there's room, a station is a 40 m platform. It's an island between the tracks on a wide bed, otherwise at the kerb, with a shelter, a ticket machine and a departure board. Stations sit on a straight run, clear of junctions, about 300 m apart. Where side streets leave no room, the old kerb stop stays.
- Track ends: tracks run on to a junction instead of ending mid-block.
- The boulevard: trams keep off the City Line's boulevard.
- Also: a light's phases now follow the road a car or bus actually comes in on, so nobody runs a red where two roads meet the junction at a shallow angle.
3.31.0 — City Gen v4, phase 8: the City Line over its own boulevard. On the Commons, the elevated City Line no longer runs over small streets on piers the browser spaced anywhere, some of them in traffic lanes or in lots. The world generator now cuts a 36.5 m boulevard under the line, from Central toward the airport, and stands the viaduct's piers in its planted median.
- The boulevard: streets it crosses meet it at T junctions at least 50 m apart, and main roads always get one. Side streets that can't join end in a cul-de-sac. The lots it crosses are retired, but never an HQ's.
- The piers: 2 m columns about every 27.5 m, with single spans of up to 60 m over the junctions. They are solid, and nothing (trees, lamps, benches, parked cars) stands within 1.5 m of one.
- Where it fits: a world whose line would cross an HQ's lot, a civic building or a graded road keeps its line as before. That's most test seeds and the personal islands for now.
- Also: trams keep off the boulevard. Where it cuts a tram street, the tram runs on each side as its own line. You can wait for a bus at the stop itself, even when the bus pulls up a way along the kerb. Joggers no longer turn round in a junction.
3.30.0 — City Gen v4, phase 7: the Ring Road under the airport. The Ring Road no longer runs past the back of the airport terminal. It drops into an open cutting, runs through a 300 m cut-and-cover tunnel 7 m under the airport, and climbs out the other side.
- The tunnel: the cuttings have retaining walls and railings. The tunnel has portals, a lit ceiling and emergency walkways.
- Driving it: you can drive straight through. Traffic uses it too.
- Lines kept clear: the metro and the Island Link keep clear of it.
3.29.0 — City Gen v4, phase 6: expressways and trumpet interchanges. The Ring Road and the highways are now 29 m expressways: three lanes each way, hard shoulders and a concrete crash barrier down the middle.
- Trumpets: where a highway meets the Ring Road and there's room, a trumpet interchange replaces the flat junction. The highway climbs a flyover over the ring, a loop ramp comes down to the far side, and a ramp curls up round it. Slip roads join the near side. Everything is one-way and nothing crosses at street level. The Commons has three, and the other three highway junctions stay at street level (a bridge, an awkward angle, or the coast is in the way).
- Decks you can use: you can drive or walk up the ramps and over the flyover, and pass underneath. Decks have parapets, columns every 25–30 m, and retaining walls where they are low.
- Traffic: NPC traffic uses the ramps and drives two lanes each way on the expressways, keeping the lane by the barrier free. The Commons has about 290 cars at the usual setting, up from 167. Residents' cars and the satnav respect the one-way ramps.
- Validator: new rules check lane balance at every ramp junction, ramp grades of 6% or less, and 7 m of clearance under every deck.
3.28.0 — City Gen v4, phase 5: road capacity and an NPC traffic slider. Settings has a new NPC traffic slider for the 3D City, which changes the open City straight away:
- 85% is the usual traffic.
- 100% fills every road to the plan's comfortable level (at most 22 cars a km of lane).
- 0% leaves the roads to the buses, trams and you.
3.40.0 — City Gen v5 goes live: the planned city on every island; airtime over fast crests; streets stay on the land; achievement pop-ups are now an opt-in setting; engine sound no longer crackles.
3.39.0 — HQ growth: townships grow over two neighbouring plots with your Claude work; every live session is a builder.
3.38.8 — Strike Zone: the dance pose is fixed (nobody dances at kick-off), six joke totems — banana, lava, goose, reverse, black hole, roulette — that actually drop, and totem effects that stack instead of replacing each other.
3.38.8 — Strike Zone: the dance pose is fixed (nobody dances at kick-off), six joke totems — banana, lava, goose, reverse, black hole, roulette — that actually drop, totem effects that stack instead of replacing each other, The Warden stands on the floor (not floating) and got scary (horns, fangs, spikes, runes), Disco makes The Warden dance too (attacks held), and he summons six rideable elemental dragons (fire → golden) drawn as the Commons pet drakes — each with its own health bar, a world-space G Ride plate on the beast and a Commons-style pill from 16 m out, mounted with G on the Commons saddle, in a tight third-person chase camera that draws you sitting on the saddle (first-person again on dismount); the breath's 4 s inhale reads on the pill ("inhaling…" + a fill bar), and a fresh mount starts with a full tank. Flight is the Commons model (W/S hold speed, Space climbs, Shift dives and gains speed, neither glides or hovers; the body banks into turns and the wings flap / fold / spread to match). The breath is a full plume — a fat additive fire core down the cone plus a dense element spray from the mouth — and it shows who it is hitting and how hard (hit marker + floating damage numbers for your jet only, exactly 30 dps on both judges; no more numbers piling up in mid-air). The Warden never hurts a dragon; disasters deal it normal (1x) damage and gunfire always can, even while the boss lives. A bot spends no shot on a summon while the boss lives (its bullet is for the Warden alone), and the kill feed names what fell the mount as a sentence. There is no out-of-bounds: a dragon flies anywhere. A dragon hurts nobody while the boss lives; after he falls they stay and roam. A rider in the saddle is never a ground target — the mount soaks the floor beam, arm slam and gravity grip. The Hurricane lifts you and spins you around the walking column with no way to walk out. And five more totems (the trap-and-gadget set): Mini Turret (10 s — three turrets that auto-shoot the nearest enemy, and you can shoot them down), Explosive Barrels (instant — three barrels fall from the sky and go up at 10x a launcher, chaining the next barrel), Laser Grid (8 s — touch a tripwire and you die, jump over it or walk beside it to live), Jump Pad (10 s — three pads that throw you 13 m into the air) and Death Lottery (instant — one living enemy either heals to full or drops dead).
3.38.7 — Strike Zone: drone wreck totems no longer vanish when the next drone falls.
3.38.6 — Strike Zone: the Disco totem — everyone but you dances and can't shoot for 8 s.
3.38.5 — Strike Zone: the Big Head totem — every skull doubles for 10 s and headshots get easy.
3.38.4 — the Overflow Vial pours again; its global watermark could freeze the bank forever.
3.38.3 — Strike Zone: every disaster gets a real scene — crater, heaving plates, storm wall, burning sky.
3.38.2 — Strike Zone: the sinkhole bites where its pit is; the quake cracks the floor you see.
3.38.1 — Strike Zone: shot-down drones drop loot and start a disaster; disasters stack with a HUD log.
3.37.1 — HQ Exosuit fits your own character: armour on your avatar's bones; Go to flies by air when suited.
3.37.0 — HQ Exosuit: six flyable suits, the Suit-Up Centre, U to summon, a flight HUD.
3.36.8 — Strike Zone: the rift is a standing portal pair. Walk into one ring, come out the other across the map.
3.36.7 — SkyStrike: wall crawl looks like a crawl, not flying. Upright spider crouch; tighter face pull-in.
3.36.6 — SkyStrike: swing into a wall stays a swing. Crawl is ground-only; air contact no longer auto-crawls.
3.36.5 — SkyStrike: stop floating when you walk past a building. Wall grip needs intent; no more auto-cling beside a tower.
3.36.4 — SkyStrike: oriented city lots are solid again. Air collision matches walk footprints so rotated corners stop you.
3.36.3 — SkyStrike: no more freeze mid-air, no more through the building. Wall cling slides; Shift fires a swing off the face; intersecting a tower pushes out and grabs.
3.36.2 — SkyStrike sticks, climbs, and looks the part. No mid-air wall latch (the wall↔fall flicker is gone); paper-thin panes no longer steal the crawl; diving into a tower sticks and climbs past the podium; the hero matches the charcoal + neon concept sheet.
3.36.1 — Crawl the wall: hands and feet on the face, not floating beside it. Contact + W climbs; the body turns to face the wall and releases when you leave it. A roof is ground — stand on it in the walk pose, not the dive.
3.36.0 — The city rebuilt: walk-in Metro with stairs and lifts, towers and a skyline, an amusement park in every v4 city.
3.35.0 — City Gen v4 final: the ambient slider and positional sound, HQ spacing, desire-line tram routes.
3.34.0 — The graphics pass: road markings, planted medians, deck and tunnel detail, 1,200 / 240 draw-call budgets.
3.33.0 — Move your garage's car-lift bay on your lot; others see it there.
3.32.0 — Trams on their own raised tram roads, with 40 m station platforms.
3.31.0 — The City Line over its own 36.5 m boulevard, piers in the median.

A full roundabout, with a raised, planted island that the traffic and residents' cars go round, goes only where its 32 m circle has room. Today's streets rarely give it that, so the Commons has none yet. A tram line never meets a roundabout. On screen the Commons is as busy as before.

3.25.0 — City Gen v4, phase 2: real road classes. Every street in the City now belongs to one of the v4 plan's road classes and is paved at that class's real width (IRC and UK Manual for Streets figures):
- Avenues (22 m) on the main roads: two 3.5 m lanes each way and a raised 2 m median, with white lines.
- Collectors (12 m) gather the local streets.
- Local streets (10.5 m) and lanes (9 m) for dead ends and short streets.
- Shared streets (9.5 m) in the old town and round the plaza, paved in pavers, with no lines or zebra crossings.
A street changes class only one step at a time. Local streets are slimmer than 3.20.1's game-style ones, so lots have more ground, and every HQ stays on its lot. Cars, buses and residents' cars drive in the class's own lanes, keep out of the median, and lorries are back on the main roads. Where a short approach to a light leaves no room for a car to wait, the light and the junction behind it work as one. Still to come:
- Boulevards (36.5 m, planted median): no main road has 50 m blocks all along yet, which a boulevard's junctions need. They come with a later layout phase.
- Streets a tram runs down keep no median until phase 8 gives trams their own bed.
- The ring and highways become expressways together with their interchanges in phase 6.
3.24.1 — No more stuck swings, no more walking through towers, and a wall-run on every face. Four air-kit fixes, each proven at runtime on the live airFrame / swingStep / bodyBlock path rather than by grepping source. (1) You can no longer get stuck mid-swing: the body sweep depenetrates both ends of a move (a start already inside a box used to freeze the hero at that spot forever) and the rope clamp can no longer snap the body through a tower — a blocked clamp shortens the rope to the contact distance instead. (2) Swinging, zipping and free-falling are all swept against the city's solid AABBs every frame, so a tower face stops you and kills only the speed into it. (3) Run into a building while swinging or falling and you run on the wall. The contact drops the rope and starts a wall-run: a direction key pointed into the face runs you UP it, one along the face walks you sideways, Space kicks off (zip if something is in front, else a wall-jump) and Shift swings off the face. The entry slam is spent on contact so the run holds the face instead of sliding down it. (4) Not just buildings are opaque — tree crowns, roof decks, Skyline Park's rides and the bridges all report solid AABBs now, so the web and the body meet them. Privacy / egress: no new network calls — collision, wall-running and the solid list are local geometry and local physics only. No third-party assets.
3.24.0 — City Gen v4, phase 1: the airport gets its own land. The Commons' airport now claims its land before any road is laid. The claim covers:
- the terminal with its forecourt, car park and control tower
- the airside out to the runway
- the runway's safety zones past each end
The two west highways that boxed in the terminal now meet the ring north and south of the airport. The Ring Road keeps its place behind the terminal, under the skybridge, as the airport was designed. It is the only road allowed there, until phase 6 takes it under the airport. The dock, port, stadium, rail and metro keep off the airport's land too, and its grounds grow no trees. The airport, its runway, the metro, the City's traffic and every HQ stay as they were.

Behind the scenes, a world validator checks every generated world and fails one where anything stands in the airport's land. Its report lists what the next phases will fix (cargo run --release --bin worldgen -- claude-hq@3 --validate). The 11 road classes of the v4 plan are in as data, ready for phase 2.
3.23.1 — A jump is a jump again, buildings are solid, and the web zip actually fires. Four air-kit fixes, each proven at runtime rather than by grepping source. (1) A normal jump no longer shows the diving pose: the glide shape (head and body down, legs up behind) used to be forced on every hop by the launch curl and the stretch weight — it is now driven only by real descent time (and by W for a dive), so a jump stays a jump and the glide appears when you actually fall. (2) All construction is opaque: swinging, zipping or free-falling, the body is swept against the city's solid AABBs every frame and stops at the face (the speed into the wall is killed, so you slide along it) — you can no longer pass through a tower. (3) The web zip is visible and works: a wall in front of you at hand height or below used to be rejected as "the street you just left", so Space found nothing and the web never drew — the anchor gate now accepts anything in front at any height (only the ground right under you is still refused), the aim fan reaches further sideways and down, and the line is drawn from the raised hand to the point. (4) Space in the air is never a silent no-op: it zips when there is something to grab, double-jumps when you still have a jump, and otherwise still kicks up and forward so the press is always visible. Privacy / egress: no new network calls — collision, the zip and the pose are local geometry and local physics only. No third-party assets.
3.23.0 — Live weather and time from Bengaluru. The City keeps Koramangala's time (IST) for every player, whatever their own timezone: day and night, residents' days, rush hours, the bells, and the phone's and departure boards' clocks. Night falls at Bengaluru's real sunset and lifts at its sunrise (worked out for each day of the year, with about 20 minutes of twilight), no longer at a fixed 7 pm and 7 am. The sky also follows the real weather in Koramangala, Bengaluru: the Arena reads Zomato's Weather Union at the start of every hour (Koramangala's rain gauge, with temperature, humidity and wind from the nearest full station in Domlur) and every player's City shows it, easing in over a minute and a half. Every number it reports is used. Rain intensity sets how hard it rains, from a drizzle to a downpour (more, faster, longer streaks and a louder hiss), with a thunderstorm in a heavy one. Rain accumulation keeps the ground wet after the rain stops. Humidity brings haze, cloud and, near saturation, mist. Wind speed and direction slant the rain and drift the clouds. Temperature warms or cools the light, and PM2.5 / PM10 bring a brown, closer haze on a bad-air day. The City panel shows the live reading (for example "Rain (heavy) · 12.0 mm/h · 24°C · 88% humidity"). Without a reading (no Arena, or the Arena has no key) the made-up forecast carries on. Egress / privacy: the only new outbound call is the Arena server's hourly request to Weather Union. It carries the fixed coordinates and the server's key, nothing about any player. The page reads the reading only through local /api/arena/weather. Needs the Arena release and WEATHERUNION_API_KEY in the host's backend/.env.
3.22.3 — Drive on the left. The City's traffic keeps left, as in India and the UK: cars, vans, buses, trams, cabs and emergency vehicles, with kerb-side bus and tram stops, doors and lay-bys on the left, traffic-light poles on the left kerb, parked cars facing the way their side goes, and a left turn now the tight one. The buses themselves are mirrored (doors on the left, driver on the right), and a cab you call pulls up on the left. As many cars as before.
3.22.2 — F to interact. On foot, F now does what the prompt offers (a door, a stop, a terminal, a race's start, a tag, a snack stall, the Pet shop, taking a pet out or leaving it), and the prompts say F. E is for getting on and off things: a vehicle, a board, and a pet you can ride, so a door or a stop beside you no longer takes E from your dragon. E still works for the old interactions where there's nothing to ride. With the grenade launcher out and nothing to use, F still fires.
3.22.2 — The air kit, as a slinger. The web is a strand, not a pipe (a thin bright core in a barely-there glow). It leaves a raised hand — the arm goes all the way up (straight up along the line) while you fire or hang on the web, and the shot comes from the held-up palm (it used to fire from a point beside the chest with the arms down, and the arm only reached forward-level). While swinging, the chase camera frames the whole character at a ~7 m stand-off at head height (slight side offset) instead of an over-the-shoulder close-up; on the ground the camera is close again (the city's 2.5 / 3.35 chase), and only the air is wide. Releasing the web coasts in a straight line along the release direction with the speed kept — no drift back toward the building the line was on — and turning is something you do by starting another swing with Shift. Space in the air is a web zip: fire at whatever is in front and get pulled to it (with the momentum kept so a zip chains into a swing); with nothing to grab, the double jump still stands. Walking no longer falls off the HQ roof: on the deck the railing holds you in, and a jump is what leaves it (the taller second jump clears the rail); past the railing there is no wall in the sky, so a slinger swings away. Diving is a glide — W while falling tips the whole body head-down (root, spine, chin) with the legs lifted up behind, not a standing forward bend (the avatar's pitch used to tip the body backward against the bones' forward tip, so the fall read as a standing bow). Privacy / egress: no new network calls — the web, the zip, the coast and the camera are local geometry and local camera data only. No third-party assets.
3.22.1 — More traffic lights. Side streets get lights too: where a main road crosses a side street (a short green for the side street, so the main road barely waits) and at crossroads out of town, spaced at least 60 m apart and only where a waiting bus or tram has room. The Commons goes from 17 lights to 42.
3.22.0 — Things to do in the City. Traffic lights at real junctions, on a cycle that is the same for everyone: cars, vans, buses and bikes stop at red, queue and pull away on green, and people wait at the kerb for the walk signal. The City is fuller: about twice the traffic in view by day, parked cars along the kerbs, twice the people on the busy streets, and cars wait for people crossing. A Jobs phone app offers taxi fares, parcel deliveries and van runs against the clock, paid in local City rep with ranks. Cause trouble (your own blasts, rams, tank shots, red lights in view of police) and you get up to five wanted stars: police cars come from the station and box you in, with roadblocks at four stars and a searchlight helicopter at five; lose them to escape, or get Busted. Races: sprints, lap circuits and time trials with checkpoints, best times and a ghost of your best run. Finds: 50 hidden tokens, graffiti tags and rare stalls per world, and weekly photo challenges (the parade, the market, a busker...). The street reacts: people jump clear of fast cars and run from blasts, cafe tables and bins go over and stand back up, food stalls hand out snacks (a short sprint boost), and buskers, broken-down cars and loose dogs turn up; dog walkers have dogs. Calm mode keeps sirens quiet and lights steady. Arena play (opt-in, invite only): share a job with a player near you, play Cops & robber, or swap best-run ghosts and race them. Privacy: behind the new cityplay Arena capability, hq presence carries pk (which game), pi/pj (the user id you invite or whose game you joined) and pq (at most 12 whole numbers: a shared job's kind, step and footpath points, the robber's stars and clock, a route hash and best time); one directed ghost frame (a route id, your own run's positions, at most 12,000 characters, and its time) goes only to the one player racing you, at most 6 a minute, and the Arena relays it without storing it. None of it reads transcripts, sessions, paths or names; jobs, rep, races and finds stay in this browser.
3.22.0 — A sprint that reads as a sprint, SkyStrike's air kit, and Skyline Park is back. Walking is now the pace Shift used to give you (7 m/s, up from 4) and Shift runs at 10 m/s on a real human gait. The thigh lifts hard at contact (~63°) and again through terminal swing, the hip drives back past the mid-line at toe-off, and the knee folds ~143° for a heel-to-seat kick. The arms swing a longer, forward-biased arc than walking, elbows braced and punching higher at the front, at a sprint cadence (~216 steps/min) with the shoulders wound against the pelvis. The forward bend is at the waist only — walking is upright, the root stays upright so the legs stay under the body, and the bend unwinds the moment you stop running (no more tipping the whole body at the feet or sinking into the ground). Letting go of the keys restores the hero to idle once, not two or three times in a row; easing off Shift while you are still moving settles into a walk rather than snapping. Calm still freezes the cycle; sitting, vehicles and the hero idle stance are unchanged. Runtime checks fail the suite if the run ever collapses back into the walk, or if the bend creeps onto the root again. (Gait angles from published human gait data: Novachecki, Mann, Cavanagh.)
- SkyStrike opens the live Commons (with the HQ towers and Skyline Park), not the older map it used to freeze in at load time.
- SkyStrike starts on top of your own HQ. Opening the game drops the hero on your tower's roof deck (by its lift door, facing out), not on the street — you start up where the slinging begins. The spot is picked from the city's own roof list (hqroof), so it is always a deck you can stand on and walk around; the helideck discs count too, and the tallest neighbour is only the fallback when no own roof is there yet. The teleport waits until the city has actually placed him (onWorld("city")) and until the Arena's open-HQ list has settled — while Valley is open the page never polls that list itself, so this mount pumps it and rebuilds the street when it lands. One teleport, then hands off: nothing watches him afterwards, so walking on the deck never gets yanked back to the spawn.
- SkyStrike: dive and web-swinging. The hero is a city slinger, so he leaves the roof like one. Double Space is a double jump (the second one kicks a slow axial spin) and the only way off the HQ deck — and the second jump is the taller of the two, so it actually clears the railing. W while falling from height dives — the spine pitches head-first, the head goes down the line of the fall, the arms sweep back along the ribs, the legs come together and point, and the chase camera tips down with it. Shift in the air fires a neon web out of the hand to whatever the city will hold — a tower ledge, a streetlight, a bridge span, a park ride; the line is a sagging catenary of two additive tubes (a soft glow and a bright core), and it sticks wherever a ray from the hand hits a building or a street prop. WASD pumps the swing in its own plane (how a person pumps a swing), the body hangs and stretches along the rope with one arm up the line and the other trailing, the torso rolled toward the free side and the legs trailing — never a rigid T on a string. Releasing Shift drops the line that frame (the velocity is kept, so you are a projectile again); Space while swinging lets go and kicks up-and-forward. Free fall has its own stretched / slightly tucked body with a slow spin, and the dive / swing / stretch weights ease so nothing snaps. Calm turns the hop, the spin and the web off.
  - Fixed: the air kit actually fires. Shift in a fall beside a tower now finds an anchor and swings. The web ray used to test only door drums and signs, so a fall down a building face hit nothing and no line was ever drawn; it now tests the city's real solids (w.webHit: every placed building and HQ, tree crowns, roof decks) through a slab test the suite runs under node, and the aim fan reaches sideways and down-forward as well as up, so a face, a ledge or a streetlight is enough. W while falling dives — the whole body tips over head-first (root, spine and head together), not a waist bow, and the chase camera follows the line of the fall. Free fall is a skydiver body — spine open, legs trailing, arms wide — never a standing forward bend. A live-path harness runs the real airFrame / airPose against a tower face and fails the suite if any of the three ever regress. Privacy / egress: no new network calls — the anchor test reads only the world already loaded on this machine. Third-party assets: none.
  - A jump leaves the spot you stood on. The walk's pace is the air state's launch velocity, and a standing jump still kicks along the facing — it used to start from zero and hop on the spot, which is why the double jump never carried him over the edge.
  - The railing no longer walls off the sky. The deck's glass rail lets a jump off the roof through, so the hero can leave his HQ to swing and dive. (3.22.2: walking itself stays on the deck — the rail holds you in, and a jump is what clears it.) The lift house stays solid, and in the sky the city is scenery: once your feet are off the surface, towers and street props no longer count as walls (so a web-swing can pass them).
  - The jump bend restores in the air. A jump curls the body forward at the press and the curl unwinds in about a third of a second — it used to hold the bend all the way down to the ground. Privacy / egress: no new network calls — the web is local geometry only. Third-party assets: none (the line is the city's own tube recipe).
- Fixed: the amusement park had gone missing from the live Commons. Nothing removed it. The 3.18 generator ran the park lake and the metro through the park district, leaving one empty park block cut by a road down to a 32 m clear strip, and claim() still asked for 56 m of clear ground — it found nothing to claim, so the Commons got its landmarks and no park at all. The gate is now the 28 m the rides actually need, and every ride is sized and placed against the fence rather than the strip's centre: on a narrow park the wheel gets smaller and the Carousel and Starswing decks tuck in, so nothing hangs over the fence. Skyline Park, its coaster and its rides are back on every live world, the Commons included. Privacy / egress: no new network calls. Third-party assets: none.
3.21.1 — The City waits for a slow machine. Entering the 3D City now allows 45 s to build it (was 15 s) before falling back to the classic City, so a slower computer gets the living City instead of the fallback.
3.21.0 — A city that lives. Built around the planned City Gen v4, never into it: everything reads the finished world through one adapter (games/citylife.js), so it works on today's worlds and on v4's the day it ships. Every building has a use (homes, offices, warehouses, workshops) and a ground floor: shopfronts with awnings and signs, cafes with striped awnings, office lobbies, loading bays; rooftops carry AC units, stair housings, antennas and water tanks; windows light by use and hour (offices dark at night, homes lit in the evening, shops in opening hours). Footpaths get benches, bins, bike racks, newsstands, food stalls and cafe tables. Residents work in the shops and cafes and lunch there; people sit on terraces, queue at stalls, wait at stops, gather at the school gate at 08:00 and 15:00, jog in the park, crowd the stadium on Saturdays, and parade on Sundays. Traffic follows the hour (rush hours, quiet nights) and the place: taxis, vans, lorries, scooters and bikes. A street market on Wednesdays and Saturdays, roadworks on weekdays and Sunday's parade close their streets, the same for everyone.
3.20.1 — Big-city roads, and buildings that stay solid. The live City's streets (generator @3, the Commons and every personal island) are paved wider, each street at its own width: a 7.5 m two-lane side street, a 9.5 m street or an 11.5 m wide one, a 14.5 m four-lane avenue or a 17.5 m boulevard, with dashed lane lines between the lanes and traffic keeping to the kerb-side lane. Every lot, site and HQ stays where it was (the extra width comes off the front of the plots, a lot always keeping at least 60% of its ground, and a street that cannot have its width somewhere steps down there). Driving is swept, not jumped: a fast car meets a wall, a trunk or a building's corner instead of landing inside it, a glancing hit slides along the wall, and a vehicle that ends up in a wall anyway is lifted back onto the road as soon as you try to drive it out ("Back on the road").
3.20.0 — Sound that comes from somewhere. Every world sound now plays where it is: traffic, other players' vehicles, trams, buses, trains, the metro, boats, helicopters, planes, doors, bells, the gondola, construction, fountains and the city's hum get louder as you get closer, fade with distance (inverse-distance falloff from a reference distance, silent past a maximum per kind) and pan left or right to where they are, heard from the camera. Only the nearest few sources of each kind play at once (voice pools), so a busy street stays clear and cheap. Your own vehicle stays at full level while the camera rides with you and fades when you leave it in photo, cine or the Map. A new Ambient sounds slider in Settings (0–100%) replaces the on/off switch and sets the level of weather, fireworks, jets, water and the city's hum; 0% is off, and an old "off" carries over as 0%. A looping transit sound placed in the world is one voice per source (an unplaced one stays one per name), and every loop falls silent 0.6 s after its last update (was 3 s). Calm and mute stay silent. Web Audio only, no new network calls. Fixed: on a slow machine the 3D City's first load could time out the live world on its own startup work (three.js, a first frame compiling its shaders) and open on the older Commons with nothing cached; the world's load deadlines now count the page's own time, not the wall clock.
3.19.0 — Grand HQs, smoother dragons, and the buzz is gone.
- HQ buildings revamped: your HQ now fills its lot — a broad podium across the street, a base block of offices, a wide main tower with stepped setbacks in your style (stacked glass slabs, an Art Deco wedding cake, a top-heavy Brutalist block, Neo-Tokyo slabs, classic stone setbacks, Eco terraces), and wings at levels 10 and 30 that rise from the base attached to the tower instead of standing apart. Level 1 is a solid mid-rise, level 50 a landmark; the helideck sits on the top roof, and night windows light every floor (median lot use 9% → 32%).
- Wyvern and dragons, smoother and more alive: the wyvern is sleeker (fewer, smaller spikes, a smooth neck ruff, a low back ridge, a short crest that still rises on a roar, thin tapered wing bones, gently scalloped wings, softer veins). The fire, ice, storm, crystal, shadow and golden dragons share its build on four legs: scaled hides with pale bellies and belly plates, two swept horns and a small crest, glowing slit eyes, claws on every foot, veined wings tinted by species, an element tail tip (flame, shard, fork, gem, wisps, ornate spade) and an element hide (ember cracks, frost, storm veins, crystal facets, a smoky shimmer, polished gold); the sea serpent gets smoother scaled coils. The body bobs with each wingbeat, neck and tail follow through, they bank into turns, dragons walk on diagonal leg pairs, the roar winds up, breath fire inhales first, takeoff crouches and landing settles.
- The buzz is gone: a steady ~234 Hz drone that kept playing was the City's transit sounds piling up (the metro asked for a new looping "motor" every half second near a train, the heli-call a new "rotor" every 0.4 s, the ferries and gondola too, and none was ever stopped). A looping transit sound is now one live voice per name that fades out by itself after 3 s if nothing refreshes it, and every engine voice has a watchdog that stops it 0.5 s after its last update (dismount, world change, hidden tab). Motorbikes and cars sound like engines, not a held note: firing pulses with uneven cylinders that vary cycle to cycle, revs that wander at a steady throttle, an exhaust roar that grows with throttle, no resonant low-pass and richer harmonics (no bike voice now puts more than 55% of its energy in one partial; it was up to 83%).
3.18.1 — The wyvern. The Wyvern pet is rebuilt as a true wyvern, an original design inspired by classic fantasy wyverns (no borrowed silhouettes, colours or textures). No forelegs: its wings are its arms. On the ground it walks on its wing-wrists (a clawed thumb on each, like a bat) and two strong taloned hind legs, wings folded tight; in the air an arm, a forearm and four long finger spars with knuckle spurs spread a span far wider than its body, a thin veined membrane (a small procedural texture made once per page: branching veins, lit through from behind, a ragged, scalloped trailing edge) sagging between the spars. A fast downstroke with the tips lagging, a folding upstroke, glides, dives, a takeoff leap and a landing flare (wings forward and cupped, feet reaching). A lean, bony, long-snouted skull with teeth, glowing eyes, a lower jaw that opens and a crown of back-swept spines that rises when it roars; a thorny collar round the neck, scaled dark hide with a lighter belly, a long whip tail with spines and a barbed blade. Four looks, each breathing its own: ember (fire), ash (smoke), venom and the frost-blue elder (ice; more spines, a longer crown, torn wings). Idles: breathing, a swaying head, a swishing tail, wing stretches, a roar with its wings mantled. Riding it, you sit between its wing-shoulders, held there standing, walking and flying, and its folded wings clear the ground when it lands. Still 6 draw calls; far-off wyverns pose every fourth frame. The other dragons are unchanged.
3.18.0 — The transport revamp. Every city is at its highest level (the Arena reports tier 5 and full growth for every city, so every line, stop, airport and building is open; population and tax still follow the owner's real XP) and getting around is free: no fares, no day pass and no coins for buses, trams, the metro, trains, boats, Claude Cabs or helicopters (the old 2-coin bus and tram fares are gone; fast travel is unchanged). New worlds: the live worlds moved to world generator version 3 (claude-hq@3, user:<id>@3). Every island and the Commons are laid out again with lakes, canals and a marina, and the transport is designed around them; your HQ keeps its rank and is placed on the new layout, and vehicles parked out in the streets go home to their bay (migration 0024_live_v3). @1 and @2 still generate byte for byte as before and stay served for older clients; the page falls back @3 -> @2 -> @1 on an older Arena. Ways to travel: real street trams (grooved rails, overhead wire, crossovers, boarding islands), buses and trams you board and ride in a seat (or at a pole at rush hour), a metro in real tunnels (M1 and M2 crossing at Central, underground stations with stairs, escalators and lifts, an underground view below the street), the elevated City Line, the Island Link train from every island to the Commons, a gondola, water buses, a lake launch, water taxis and boat hire (pedalo, rowboat, kayak), Claude Cabs (ride or drive for a score), a helicopter you call, and your own vehicles filtered by kind. Commuters fill vehicles by time of day; stops announce themselves (local voices only). Seat cameras (V: seat, window, chase), S requests the stop, E gets on and off. The phone (Backquote, or I in the City; a button by Call; "Phone" in Cmd-K): Tickets (journey planner, free tickets, airport check-in), Departures, the Transit map with live vehicles, Claude Cabs, Vehicles, the Dealership, Messages, Nearby, Phone, Camera, Gallery, Achievements, Patch notes and Settings. Privacy (new egress, all opt-in to send, all user-typed): text messages (at most 160 characters you type, plus the recipient's id; sending needs your one-time opt-in, receiving can be blocked or muted; the Arena erases the text once delivered and keeps undelivered ones 7 days), nearby chat (at most 200 characters you type, only with Nearby on, relayed only to opted-in players within 40 m in the same city, never stored) and calls (only with Calls on: the ring and the WebRTC setup go to the one person you call; the audio is peer to peer). Notifications never show a message's text unless Messages is open. Presence gains a = 15 (riding transit: a mode code and a vehicle id) behind the new transit capability. Photos never leave this computer (IndexedDB). Nothing transcript-derived goes into any of it. Needs the Arena release (world @3, max level, free fares, SMS, nearby and call relays). Third-party assets: none new.
3.17.0 — Grand Prix: every F1 circuit, and the 2026 grid in the dealership. A new Valley game, Grand Prix (🏎️), puts you on full-size F1 circuits: the 23 rounds of the 2026 calendar and 17 classics (Imola, Istanbul, Kyalami, Watkins Glen…), each its own world at true length. They are built from the real centre lines of bacinger/f1-circuits (MIT, shipped as games/gp/LICENSE-f1-circuits.md; converted by cargo run --bin f1circuits). The game is a time trial on Valley Rally's car physics: laps, three sectors, the delta to your best, a ghost of your best lap and a minimap. In the City, a Grand Prix Circuit (Go to 🏁, from tier 2) has a pit building, a start gantry and a grandstand. E under its arch picks a circuit and a car and takes you there. The dealership adds a Formula 1 class with all 11 teams of 2026 (McLaren, Ferrari, Red Bull Racing, Mercedes-AMG, Aston Martin, Alpine, Williams, Racing Bulls, Haas, Audi, Cadillac), each in its team colours. The cars are free like the rest, and drivable everywhere: at the circuit at 345 km/h, and on the city streets at the city's 300 km/h cap. A class may now list more than 4 vehicles through its own slots (the F1 grid lists 11; Arena: backend/src/vehicles.rs). The vehicle catalogue test moved from Python to Rust (dashboard-rs/tests/catalogue.rs). Privacy: Grand Prix is solo and sends nothing; the circuit data is bundled, never fetched at runtime. Team names live only in the catalogue; there are no logos, sponsor marks or driver names.
3.16.1 — Fireworks that crackle. The show over the park fires about half as many shells (around 40 a show instead of 90), with room between bursts and a shorter, sparser finale. Each burst is now a soft thump followed by the stars crackling as they fall, a long sizzle for a willow and a thick crackle for a chrysanthemum or a strobe, instead of one sharp bang that sounded like gunfire. It is all heard as if from far off: muffled, soft, with a faint echo off the towers.
3.16.0 — Mouse steering, a grenade launcher and a tank for four. In the 3D City:
- Mouse steering (a new switch in the camera settings, the gear): click the view and the mouse turns you and the chase camera together, as in a shooter; W / S walk forward and step back, A / D step sideways, the tilt stays where you put it. On a ride the captured mouse does what a drag does. Esc, any panel, the big map, a field you type in or another camera gives the cursor back. Off by default; no network traffic.
- A grenade launcher: on foot, X takes it out (on your left shoulder) and F, or a click with the mouse captured, lobs a grenade where the camera looks. It bounces off the ground, walls and roofs, sinks in water and goes off after 1.8 s: a fireball, smoke, a shock ring and a boom heard late from far off. The City has no health: a blast knocks back everyone within 6 m, you too (on foot up into the air, in a car a shove and a dent; Calm keeps you on the ground and drops the flash and the shake). Each shot rides in its shooter's presence for 1.5 s (the "grenade" capability: gl, gn) and every page flies it the same way, in fixed steps against the same world; each page knocks back only its own player (games/hqgrenade.js).
- A tank for four: K rolls your tank up beside you (K again sends it away), E beside it and you drive: 40 km/h, slow to pull away, A / D turn it on the spot, solid to everyone. The turret follows your camera and F or a captured click fires a shell (it goes off on whatever it hits, an 8 m blast). Its three other seats are carpool seats: while you drive, others climb in with E; the first in becomes the gunner and takes the turret over, the next two ride on the back. Blasts never move a tank or anyone in it. The "tank" capability adds a = 14, shells (grenade kind 1) and the turret's aim ta, sent by whoever has the turret: the gunner beside their carpool seat, or the driver (games/hqtank.js). An original stand-in tank: hull, treads on six road wheels a side, a turret, a long barrel.
The new presence fields are numbers and the user ids carpooling already sends; backend/src/valley/hq.rs checks every one, and relays them only when sent. Needs the Arena redeployed.
3.15.0 — Carpooling, pillion riders, and the Suzuki Access 125. Beside someone driving in the City (stopped or crawling, on your level), E takes the next free seat: "Ride with " for a car, "Hop on behind " for a bicycle, a motorbike or a scooter. They drive and you go where they go, sat in their vehicle on everyone's screen, hands on your lap or round the rider ahead; E gets you out beside it (your own side's door), and you are put off when they get out, leave, or the last seat goes to someone else at the same moment (the lower user id keeps it). A car takes four (a coupe, a hypercar, a supercar and the starter hatchback two), a scooter three, a super sports bike only its rider (a hypersport, a sport bike over 950 cc: no pillion), any other bike two. Players riding with someone are not solid to their driver. New in the dealership: the Suzuki Access 125 (bike.scooter.400, 124 cc single, CVT as one gear), the first scooter, with its own stand-in body (leg shield, floorboard, long seat for three, 10"/12" wheels) and seats for its rider and two behind. Presence carries pb (whose vehicle) and ps (the seat) only where the Arena lists the new "carpool" capability (backend/src/valley/hq.rs validates both; a bad one drops the frame). Tests: seat counts and the seat race, the scooter's body and seats, the catalogue entry, the presence wiring and the Arena's validation. Also: a car more than 85 % damaged no longer pulls left or right by itself while you drive (the dents, cracked lights and smoke stay; the garage still repairs it).
3.14.1 — Dragons and dinosaurs ride from day one. Every dragon and the sea serpent now comes fully grown from adoption (any affection; the Arena's pets.rs stage_of and the page agree), and the big dinosaurs (T-Rex, Triceratops, Brachiosaurus, Stegosaurus) can be ridden straight away: walk up and press E. Affection still unlocks tricks. Needs the Arena release.
3.14.0 — Ride your pets. A grown dragon (any of the seven), the grown sea serpent or a big dinosaur (Triceratops, Brachiosaurus, Stegosaurus, T-Rex, from the grown mark of 400 affection) that is out with you can be ridden in the 3D City: beside it, "E Ride ". You sit in a saddle on its back (added when it has none), the camera goes to a chase view behind and above, and the pet's own model carries you, big. Dragons fly (games/hqpetride.js, a slow, agile glider / helicopter hybrid): W / S set the speed it holds (25-45 m/s, S down to a hover with fast short beats), A / D turn and bank it, Space climbs with big beats (up to 8 m/s; on the ground a leap into the air), Shift descends (from a hover straight down, at speed a dive with the wings folded back, up to about 57 m/s), and with neither it glides on spread wings, sinking about 1 m/s. It lands anywhere flat, the HQ roof helipads with their landing assist included, and uses the helicopters' floors, ceiling (800 m), island-to-island flying on and Go to (N). E gets you off once landed or within 3 m of the ground. F breathes the dragon's element forward (fire, frost, lightning, prism, shadow wisps, gold glitter; visual only, none in Calm). Dinosaurs walk (W / S, Shift runs, their walk and run animations) and the serpent swims (on the water only). HUD hints, the ride pill and screen-reader tips say how. Multiplayer: a new presence code a = 13 (riding a pet; the first pet in pt is the mount, the height in h) behind the new petride capability; the Arena checks the mount can carry a rider (a grown dragon or serpent, a big dinosaur) and drops the frame otherwise. Others draw you on your pet, its wings and gait following your movement. Older Arenas: others see you on foot with your pet beside you. Needs an Arena deploy for others to see riders. Privacy: nothing new leaves the machine (the same pet numbers and name as 3.13's pt). Third-party assets: none new.
3.13.6 — Players are solid. Other people in the City (and Mission Control) stop you as a wall does: a body on foot or on a board, the box of the bike, motorbike or car they ride or drive (turned their way; a car from the dealership at its own size), so you bump off them instead of walking or driving through. Not while they fly, nor someone on a floor above or below you. You can't push anyone, and one who walks into you can always be walked away from.
3.13.5 — Your pets stay with you, your lobby shows them, and the front door goes to the street. Fixes: E in your lobby went to the nearest pet following you (always within 2 m) before any door, lift or ride, so using the front door said "Leave here" and your pets were saved as staying home. Now E is a door's, a lift's or a ride's whenever one is there, and "Leave here" / "Take out" need you standing still, close (1.5 m to leave one, 2.2 m to take one out) and facing it. After a refresh the 3D HQ was often up before the Arena's capabilities, so your pets loaded from this browser's empty list and stayed gone (nobody following, nobody in the lobby) until you opened the Pets panel; they now load from the Arena as soon as it answers, and your stay-home pets appear in the lobby then. Out of your lobby's front door you came out on your roof: the 3.13.4 helideck overhangs your front door, and arriving counted as "above everything"; arriving now stands you at the spawn's own level (the street, or the deck for the roof lift). Tests: E priority (door before pet), facing and distance, lobby pets after a late list, the Arena reload, front gate to the street, lobby door destinations and triggers.
Next — A real gearbox: manual, rev-matched, clutch, launch control; damage opt in. (games/hqvehiclephys.js gearStep, node-tested.) G switches manual / automatic (remembered); in manual . shifts up and , down, through neutral below 1st; hold X for the clutch. Every gear tops out at its own limiter (its real top speed from the gearing: you bounce off it, the speed held). Downshifts are rev-matched: the revs blip up to the lower gear's with the throttle blip and pops, and one that would over-rev is refused ("Too fast for 2nd"). Clutch in (or neutral): W revs the engine free to the limiter; let it out with the revs up and it launches with wheelspin. Automatic: brake and throttle together at a standstill hold the revs (launch control), let go of the brake to go. Quickshifter on sporty bikes (70 kW+) and 7+ speed DCT/automatic cars: upshifts flat out are a 50 ms ignition cut with a bark and a pop, no clutch, no lift (the rev counter reads MANUAL QS). Off the throttle the engine brakes harder in a lower gear. Vehicle damage (dents, smoke, cracked lights, a bent car's pull) is now opt in: Settings → Vehicle damage, off by default. Also in this release: the engine stays on in neutral and stopped, and starts with a crank. Shift+G cycles drive modes (Comfort shifts early and quietly, Sport, Track holds revs and crackles; remembered). K is nitrous (about 4 s, blue flames; once empty it waits for a 15% refill). Space+W does a burnout, and steering makes donuts (not on front-wheel-drive cars). On bikes, F wheelies (feather the throttle or you loop out) and F+S stoppies (too fast and you go over the bars); a stopped bike leans on its side stand, parked ones too. Flames and pops on the overrun and on quickshifts, tyre smoke, skid marks, a shift light, H horn, and a timer for 0–100, 0–200 and the quarter mile with personal bests per vehicle (games/hqvfx.js, nitroStep/perfStep/wheelieStep node-tested). Calm mode shows no effects. I is the autopilot in anything you drive, ride, sail or fly (games/hqautopilot.js, node-tested against the real boat and helicopter physics). With a route (N) it takes you there and stops: a car or a bike keeps to the right-hand lane, slows for corners, brakes for traffic and players in its lane, and nudges on if a car is waiting for it; a boat steers round the coast; a helicopter lifts off, climbs over whatever is in the way and lands on the spot. With no route a car follows its road, straight on at junctions, and a boat or a helicopter holds its course. It only works the controls, so the gears, the sound and your drive mode still apply (Comfort cruises at 47 km/h, Track at 79). Any steering or throttle of yours takes over. Planes keep their own autopilot (K, now also I).
Next — Stunts across every city (games/hqstunts.js, tests/test_hqstunts.py). Placed per city from its own layout, deterministically (every client builds the same set): a 4 m free-land grid of everything that is not road, river, sea, a site, an HQ or a tower district; building lots elsewhere may be cleared (at most 8 a stunt, retyped stunt, restored when the doc is cached). Two Sky Cannons (the longest 200-640 m flights whose path clears every roof by 8 m, at the lowest launch angle that does), Big Air, a Mega Loop, up to three River Leaps and a Sea Launch. Each pad gives the exact launch speed; each landing ramp follows its flight just under it and meets it at the target, so a touch-down is always along the ramp. Flights are the exact parabola (the same at any frame rate). Placement costs 0.1-0.3 s at City load; the stunts draw in 35-41 calls, hidden past 1.1 km. Measured headless on the Commons: both cannons 640-680 m, 104-119 m high, 9-10 s, through all three rings; Big Air 215 m; River Leaps 102 and 135 m; the loop; a 413 m splashdown.
Next — Real revs, real exhausts, smooth multiplayer, call search. Every catalogue vehicle now carries its researched engine (spec.engine: idle, redline, limiter, gear ratios, primary and final drive, rear tyre, voice and an exhaust tone of depth / rasp / crackle / induction / whistle), and games/hqvehiclephys.js engineFor turns it into rpm per m/s for each gear. You drive on the real rpm: the clutch slips to a launch rpm, it upshifts under power at the drive mode's up point (Comfort early, Sport short of the redline, Track at it; a light throttle far earlier), never upshifts when you lift or brake, downshifts a gear at a time as the revs sag (on the brakes as each next gear fits, each blipped), never skipping a gear either way, and stutters on the rev limiter with pops; the rev counter reads to that engine's own limiter with its red from the redline. The voices play that rpm with the vehicle's own exhaust character (games/engine.js engineProfile(.., real)). Other players are drawn smoothly (games/hqnetsmooth.js): a buffer of their frames drawn 0.2 s in the past on a curve through them, stamped with the sender's own clock and carrying their velocity, yaw rate and revs (the Arena's new motion capability; an older Arena falls back to arrival times re-timed by distance). Simulated at 30 m/s: the largest frame-to-frame lurch went from 487 m/s (and 34 hard snaps in 12 s) to 2.2 m/s. The call list (C) has a search box: brand, model, year, class, body or engine. Needs the Arena release for motion; works without it.
3.13.4 — A real helipad on your HQ, with your helicopter on it. Every HQ tower's roof now carries a helideck: a steel deck raised 3 m over the top roof on legs and struts, cantilevered past it, a 9 m pad (7.5 m on the smallest lots: the pad stays over the lot) in its middle with a walkway and a low glass rail round it, so a helicopter's rotor fits with room to spare (it was a 2–3.6 m disc). The roof lift's head house, the crown (spire, antenna, domes, pagoda, deco, garden), the roof extras, the crew flag and the prestige beam moved out to the walkway's diagonals and rim, clear of the pad; the Art Deco parapet is low and under the deck. Your own pad has your helicopter parked on it: walk up from the roof lift, E to board, take off; land back and it stays; leave it elsewhere and a fresh one stands on your pad again after Return to HQ (T) or five minutes. Friends' pads stay free for landing. The landing assist eases the last metres till you are over the middle. Client-only.
3.13.3 — Pokémon sprites cached on your machine. The HQ no longer hotlinks every sprite on every load: the page asks the local server (/api/sprite), which keeps each Showdown / pkparaiso / PokeAPI sprite in .sprite-cache/ in the HQ folder (gitignored, never committed: the art stays third-party), serves repeats from disk and only goes upstream on a miss. Strict allowlist (https, those four sprite libraries, no redirects; anything else is refused), images only (gif/png/webp, 2 MB max), upstream 404s remembered for a week, 200 MB cap with oldest-first eviction. The fallback chain is unchanged: a miss still ends at the generated monster sprite. Egress is the same sprite URLs as before, now sent by the server instead of the browser.
3.13.2 — HQ Studio previews live. The Studio docks right, narrower, with one compact row of tabs, and the 3D view behind it frames what you edit left of the panel. Exterior: your actual tower (the City's own hqtower code) in a live 3D preview that stays pinned at the top while you scroll; it turns slowly (still in Calm), drag to orbit, wheel to zoom, Day/Night, Hide; every option rebuilds it (debounced) and glides the camera to what changed: the roof for crown and roof extras, the street for entrance, sign, flags and grounds, night for the night light. Lobby / Floors: the lobby or Mission Control is framed (you're taken there for now if you're elsewhere) and every click shows on it; close without Save and the saved look and your view come back. Layout: placing happens on the floor itself, seen from above: a translucent ghost of the item follows the pointer, green where it fits, red where it would overlap or run off the floor; click places, right-click or Delete removes, R turns, drag pans, scroll zooms; the item picker shows a small picture of each piece; the keyboard cursor still works. Also: the empty pill floating over the lobby (the pets prompt, created before it had anything to say) is gone.
3.13.1 — Solid traffic, true shapes; the boombox goes live. What isn't a box no longer stops you as one: the stadium's oval bowl, the cooling tower, stacks and silos block their round outlines (not the square round them); you walk between a gantry crane's and the water tower's legs and step into a bus or tram shelter; the air base's control tower and radar are round and its parked jets block their own wings and tail, not a 10 x 16 m box; the airport car park's ground floor is open between its columns. The City's cars, buses and trams are solid: you hit them on foot, on a board and at the wheel (your car bumps off and dents, as off a wall) instead of passing through, only at your level (not the street under a bridge or a carpark deck), and they see your car at its size so they stop short of it. Live in the Music tab ("🔴 Go live") now puts the boombox on your shoulder in the City too, not only a Listen-room song. Anyone near you in the City listens to your live set (the same browser-to-browser stream as "🎧 Listen live", started for them when they walk up, louder the closer they are, stopped when they walk away). It never cuts over a Listen-room song they're tuned in to, a live set they chose in the Music tab, or their own. No new presence field: who is live comes from the room, as before.
3.13.0 — Tuning shop, pets and the HQ revamp. One release, one Arena deploy (migrations 0020, 0021 and 0022; presence capabilities tuning, pets and hqstyle).
- The Tuning shop. Redline Tuning, a workshop next to the dealership in every city from tier 2 (Go to → Tuning shop; E at its bay), and Tune on any B1 row of the garage manager. Paint any catalogue or custom colour in gloss, matte, metallic, pearl or chrome, with a two-tone roof, stripes or a livery. Wheels: six rim designs per car or bike, rim colour, and a size step (the tyre's outside never changes). Window tint, a lip, ducktail or GT wing, and sport, quad or titanium exhausts (bikes: slip-on, under-seat, end can) that change the engine note. A number plate of your own (8 characters, filtered; your HQ's name stays the default). Live preview on a turntable under a lift with an orbit camera; B1 plinths and the City show your tuned vehicles. Free. Your owned vehicles' tunes are kept in the Arena (migration 0020, /v1/vehicles/:id/tuning) and other players see them through presence vt (the new tuning capability). Your starters' tunes stay in this browser. Needs the Arena release.
- Pets. Adopt dogs (Shiba, Golden Retriever, Corgi, Husky, Dachshund), cats (Tabby, Siamese, Maine Coon, Black cat), dinosaurs (T-Rex pup, Triceratops, Raptor, Brachiosaurus baby, Stegosaurus), dragons (Wyvern, Fire, Ice, Storm, Crystal, Shadow, Golden) and a Sea serpent at Paws & Claws, the City's new Pet shop (Go to: Pet shop), or from the Pets panel (Cmd-K, Settings). Dogs and cats are free; rarer pets are free from their HQ level or sooner for Poke Coins. Up to 6, two out with you. They follow you round the HQ, B1 and the City, go round buildings, catch up if left behind, idle, nap, hop in your car, fly beside your plane or swim beside your boat. B throws a ball to fetch, U pets, O does a trick (more unlock with affection), and dragons grow. Each dragon has its element: frost breath and snow, fire and embers, lightning, prism sparkles, shadow wisps, gold glitter (off in Calm). The rest live in your HQ lobby, roam, nap and greet you; E takes one out or leaves one there, and visitors to your open HQ see them. Friends see your pets through the new "pets" presence capability (species, colours, accessories, growth and name, at most two). Older Arenas keep pets in this browser only. Privacy: pet names you type go to the Arena (checked and word-filtered). Pets look and move like animals: rounded bodies, eyes that blink, jointed legs that walk, trot and gallop, wagging tails, flicking ears, sit and sleep poses, and dragons with folding membrane wings that flap and glide; the Shiba, Husky, Golden Retriever and the dinosaurs use animated low-poly models (the rest stay procedural). Backend: migration 0022_pets.sql and /v1/pets/* (deploy needed). Third-party assets: CC0 animated models by Quaternius (Ultimate Animated Animals: Shiba Inu, Husky; Animated Dinosaurs: T-Rex, Velociraptor, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Apatosaurus) in games/pets/ with LICENSE-quaternius.txt, served only from 127.0.0.1.
- The HQ revamp and HQ Studio. Every HQ is grander and a bit bigger, as far as its lot allows: a podium with a grand entrance, setback tiers, six facade systems, lit signage and night lighting, crowns, roof extras and landscaping, and a working helipad on every roof. Land a helicopter on any HQ, get out, walk the roof deck and take the roof lift down; the Lobby has a Roof lift up. HQ Studio (Settings, Cmd-K or the lobby kiosk) styles your tower, a new double-height lobby (reception, centrepiece, seating, art, rugs, signage, ambience), each floor's walls, floor, lighting and furniture, and lets you place decor and pet furniture on a grid. Others see your style when the Arena supports it (migration 0021, "hqstyle"); otherwise it stays on this machine. Privacy: only the style document (enums, colours, grid cells) goes to the Arena, nothing from transcripts. Third-party assets: none. Needs an Arena deploy.
3.12.0 — Driving feel + convoys. Cars, motorbikes and bicycles in the City (games/hqdrive.js): lights switch on at night and in heavy rain, a storm, snow or fog (L toggles them by hand), brighter lamps and tails plus one additive pool-and-cone mesh on the road (no real lights, one draw call per lit vehicle); other players' vehicles light up from your own clock and weather. Grip: rain, storms and snow lower lateral grip and braking (about −35 % braking in a storm, −50 % in snow; two wheels lose more and ride slower), powerslides come easier and last longer, and wet-road spray flies off your wheels (off in Calm); the drive HUD shows Wet road / Snow, the lights and the damage. Damage: hits above ~22 km/h dent the panels you hit, crack a headlight and, past 70 %, smoke from the bonnet (not in Calm); a wrecked car pulls slightly. Cosmetic, kept per vehicle in localStorage; the garage kiosk, the B1 car lift and the dealership repair it. Convoys: Y invites the nearest player within 40 m (or 🚗 Convoy in Here now), Y accepts or leaves, hold J for a soft assist that steers and throttles you into your slot (behind-left / behind-right on the road, a wider echelon in the air), a convoy panel lists members, distances and "In formation", and the leader's Go to destination is shown to every follower. You leave on a world change or past 300 m. The Arena relays it with presence (ci / cv / cg, the new "convoy" capability); older Arenas hide convoys. Privacy / egress: user ids of the people you invite / follow and your Go to point ride City presence, only where the Arena lists "convoy". Third-party assets: none. Backend: backend/ changed (deploy needed).
3.11.2 — Steady flying on. Taking off no longer glitches. The Commons' airport sits offshore, past the coast, so the moment a plane lifted off the City picked the nearest island whatever your heading, said "Flying on to …" and built that island's City (a long frame); a circuit dropped it and picked the next, again and again, and a City that came back as another world (an island that isn't available) was swapped in under you mid-air. Flying on is now armed only heading for an island (for a plane, also past the airport's runways) for 2 s, announced at most once a minute per island, rests 20 s after you turn back, swaps only well past half-way, and never swaps in a City built as another world. Landing or getting out disarms it, and a Go to route to a plane ends as you board. Privacy / egress: none. Third-party assets: none.
3.11.1 — Bigger plinths, calmer ambience. B1's gallery turntables grow to 3.45 m (from 3.19 m) so the longest catalogue cars as drawn (the 5.8 m i7, the Urus) turn on them with room to spare: seven plinths along the back wall and eight down the front, on a 7.25 m pitch, still clear of the lifts, kiosk, lounge, columns and chargers (bay i is still slot 3 + i). Thunder is heard only for strikes within 1 km (fading to nothing at the edge, no floor) and fireworks only within 1 km of the camera. A new Ambient sounds switch in Settings (on by default, separate from engines and game sounds) silences thunder, fireworks, the rain's hiss and the jets' roar. Privacy / egress: none (one local setting, hq_ambient). Third-party assets: none.
3.11.0 — The boombox. While you are tuned in to your Music room and its song plays, your character carries a big cartoon boombox on the right shoulder in the 3D City (toon-shaded and inked, squashing on the beat, woofers pumping, notes popping out), the right hand gripping it from the outside. Anyone within 28 m hears the same song, in step with yours, louder the closer they are (ui/app/39-boombox.js). The Arena relays it with presence (bb / bt / bn, the "boombox" capability). The HQ chat panel is now always open (no hide button). Privacy / egress: your room song's YouTube id, start time and title ride your City presence to the Arena while it plays; listeners load it in YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed (the main player as a fallback), as the Music tab does. Third-party assets: none.
3.11.0 — SkyStrike in the Commons. A new Valley game, SkyStrike, opens The Commons as an original smooth human hero — a sleek charcoal suit with thin neon-blue piping, hood up, dark full mask with two small glowing angular eyes, sharp chest mark, gloves, boots. Continuous silhouette (no robot balls, no face plate, no star). Arms hang at the sides (not a T) and swing like a human walk / run, with a real elbow joint; the knee folds backward (human knee). Walk / run is a real biped gait (hip swing, knee fold, counter-swinging arms, double bounce). The city fills the stage; the top-left / top-right HUD chrome is hidden while SkyStrike is open. The chase camera is a tight over-the-shoulder third-person shot (close behind, near head height) while SkyStrike is open — the city's own wide sightseeing camera is saved and restored on leave. Original design — not a copy of any licensed character, suit, emblem or name. Swinging / traversal / acrobatics land later. Privacy / egress: no new network calls. Third-party assets: none (all geometry is generated from primitives in games/skystrike.js).
3.10.1 — Strikezone: the arsenal explains itself. Each gun on the pre-match card now says what it does and how to fire it (keys, scope, the grapple's drone-swing / foe-lock). Privacy / egress: no new network calls. Third-party assets: none.
3.10.0 — Wider roads. Every street in the Commons and on every island is paved wider: a local road 10.5 m (a 7 m carriageway, was 5 m; 1.75 m sidewalks), an arterial 15.5 m (11 m, was 8; 2.25 m sidewalks), the Commons' highways 13.5 m (were 10) and its ring road 12 m (was 9). Lanes, markings, kerbs and traffic follow the new widths. Nothing moves: the city is laid out exactly as before (the same lots, HQ lots and their ranks, sites), and the wider road takes the strip of block and lot along it, each lot's door stepping back up to 2 m with its frontage; a civic building or stop the wider road would reach steps back by as much. Where a lot cannot give way (a dead end's tip in a notch of it, a sharp corner into a junction, an HQ lot that would drop under the pool's least size) the road beside it keeps its old width (about 3% of street segments). Arena City (claude-hq@1) is unchanged. Needs an Arena deploy.
3.9.0 — Lamborghinis, new bikes and redesigned vehicles. Thirteen new vehicles in the catalogue (games/vehicles/catalogue.json, its Arena copy backend/data/vehicles.json), each with its maker's real specs, size and factory paints, its own stand-in body and engine voice. Every vehicle is free for now, as before.
- Lamborghini, a new Supercar type: car.super.over5000 (Revuelto: 6.5 L V12 plug-in hybrid, 1015 CV; Huracán STO: 5.2 L V10, 640 CV, rwd) and car.super.5000 (Temerario: 4.0 L twin-turbo V8 hybrid, 920 CV; the 1974 Countach LP400: 3.9 L V12) are on sale at every dealership. The Urus Performante waits as a car.suv.5000 reserve (both slots are BMWs). A wedge body: the windscreen's foot over the front axle, an engine cover sloping to the tail, trapezoid arches, slim Y-signature headlights, hexagonal tail rings, tips and a generic hexagonal badge, big side intakes, scissor-door shut lines, louvres on the engine glass, the STO's wing and roof scoop; the Urus as an SUV with the same cues and a sharp shoulder crease. New voices: a naturally aspirated V10 (8,700 rpm) and V12 (9,500 rpm).
- Bikes, three new types: Hypersport (bike.hypersport.over950: Kawasaki Ninja H2, Suzuki Hayabusa, on sale), Classic (Royal Enfield Classic 350 and Interceptor 650) and Cruiser (Harley-Davidson Fat Boy 114); the Ducati Panigale V4 S and Yamaha R1 wait as bike.sport.over950 reserves and the Triumph Street Triple 765 RS as a bike.naked.950 reserve, and the classic and cruiser classes go on sale once each has a second bike (the two-per-class rule) — superseded below: everything is on sale. Each looks like itself: the Panigale's single-sided swingarm, biplane winglets and two cans stacked under the seat; the H2's green trellis, chrome-mirror flanks and ram-air duct; the Classic's round lamp under its nacelle, teardrop tank, chrome, spoked wheels and sprung saddle; the Interceptor's twin peashooters; the Fat Boy's disc wheels, V-twin, floorboards and wide pull-back bars; the Triumph's bug eyes; the R1's M1 face; the Hayabusa's long round nose and stacked headlight. Two new rider poses ride on the same seat, grip and foot anchors: upright on a classic, and low, feet forward, arms out on a cruiser. Seven new voices: a twin-pulse V4, an inline triple, a crossplane four, a supercharged four (its whine, a chirp on a lift), a long-stroke single, a 270-degree twin and a 45-degree V-twin.
- Every existing stand-in redesigned to look like its model: car bodies have rounded shoulders and draw in at the nose and tail in plan; BMW grilles by model (the M3/M4's tall kidneys with horizontal slats, the 3 Series' wide ones, the M5's and the XM/i7's lit outlines, the M2's frameless pair, the X5's XXL, the X3's diagonal slats, the i4's closed panel), lights by model (angel eyes, slim lamps with a vertical DRL, the M2's square lamps, the XM/i7's split lamps, the X5's hexagonal DRLs), the M cars' power dome and gills, the M4 CSL's ducktail, laser tails and gold wheels, wheel spokes by model; Bugatti's three noses (the Chiron's wide horseshoe and LED row, the Tourbillon's tall one and LED columns, the Veyron's round one and projectors), the Chiron and Tourbillon spine, the Veyron's roof scoops and round tails, and a hypercar roof. Bikes: KTM's 390/990/1390 Duke faces, the RC's single lamp, the Adventures' vertical split lamps, the 1390's single-sided swingarm; BMW's F 900 R and S 1000 R lamps, the S 1000 RR's asymmetric pair and winglets, the M 1000 RR's stripes, the G 310 GS's asymmetric lamps. Sizes, display scale, rider anchors, collision and the detail atlas are unchanged; cars stay at 14 draw calls and under 6k triangles, bikes at 8-10 draw calls and under 6k.
- Sell them all: a class is on sale with 1 to 4 vehicles (it took exactly 2). Every new vehicle is buyable: the Urus is car.suv.5000's third, the Panigale and R1 bike.sport.over950's third and fourth, the Street Triple bike.naked.950's third, and the one-bike classes (Classic 350, Interceptor 650, Fat Boy) and the one-car BMW classes (M135, 330Li, M5) are on sale too. The Bugatti Veyron stays a reserve. The Arena checks the same rule (backend/src/vehicles.rs); the flagship's forecourt is shallower so its hall shows all 42.
- Arena: the catalogue is server data, so the Arena needs a deploy (ops/release.sh deploy) before these can be bought.
3.8.0 — Fly the airliners. Two airliners you fly yourself: a narrow-body (the airport's 38 m twin-jet) and a regional jet (the same at 0.72), in your HQ's own livery, on remote stands on the seaward side of the Commons' runway near the 36 end (clear of the passenger jets' stands, taxiways, line-up and roll, and of the prop plane's blast pad), and the regional jet beside a tier-5 island airport's runway (its 500 m runway is too short for the narrow-body). Walk up and press E (✈ Fly the airliner); Go to lists them as Airliner (fly it) / Regional airliner (fly it). A heavy flight model in hqplane.js: slow, damped controls, jets that spool up (about 5 s from idle for the narrow-body), a long takeoff roll that lifts off from a runway only, past 202 km/h (166 km/h regional; about 580 m of the Commons' runway), gear on G and by itself when assisted, flaps, Space for the brakes on the ground and speed brakes in the air, ground spoilers on landing, runway landings only, the autopilot (K) and air navigation (N) as the prop plane, a cockpit view from the captain's seat over a glareshield, and a crash puts you back on the stand. Out only stopped at a stand or on the apron. A new jet engine voice: a turbofan's spool whine on N1 (it lags the thrust levers as the engines spool) under broadband roar that grows with the thrust. Others see you in it (presence a = 11 / 12) where the Arena lists the new airliner capability; elsewhere you show as the prop plane. Needs the Arena backend release for the new codes.
3.7.0 — The Lucky Byte: a casino, with games against other players. Every city from tier 3 gets a casino.
- On the street: a black-glass hall with gold fins under a hotel tower, a marquee of chasing bulbs, the name in neon on the roof beside a pair of giant turning dice, a red carpet between brass stanchions and palms. It is in Go to. Walk through the doors onto the casino floor.
- The floor: a loud casino carpet, chandeliers, a bar with back-lit bottles, two banks of slot machines, roulette, two blackjack tables, the dice pit, the Race Book's wall of screens, Plinko, the Lucky Wheel, a Rocket cabinet, the Scratch-O-Matic, a giant Coin Toss coin, and the cashier's cage. Dealers wear waistcoats and bow ties; the crowd plays the machines. The wheel spins, the Plinko ball drops and the dealer nods when you win.
- Eleven games, played with Poke Coins: buy chips at the cage (10 chips a coin; cash them back the same way, so a win too big for your 30-coin wallet stays on the rack, never lost), walk up to a game and press E (or click its prompt). Slots, roulette, blackjack (3:2, the dealer stands on 17s, double down), horse racing (six runners with live commentary), Plinko, the Lucky Wheel, Rocket (pick your cash-out; it crashes when it crashes), dice, scratch cards (scratch with the mouse) and the coin. Every game keeps a few percent; the golden asterisk by the door shows the honest odds.
- Player against player: the Duel Table. Post a challenge (high card, a dice duel, a coin duel, or rock paper scissors with hidden moves), and anyone in any casino can take it; it is settled on the spot, the winner taking the pot less 5%. You hear about it when someone takes yours, wherever you are on the floor.
- The house has opinions: lose and it roasts your luck (never you): near misses, the zero, your horse last, a bust at 22, a big bet, a losing streak, a rival who read your rock, each with a picture (a stamp, a falling chart, the world's smallest violin, the house's yacht, a flatlining wallet, a tumbleweed) and a sad trombone. Win and it complains.
- Things to find: a duck, a door marked Staff Only, a machine out of order since forever, a cat on a bar stool, a money tree, a ghost who plays machine 13 at 3:33 a.m., and an old cheat code.
- Security: every outcome is drawn on the Arena (backend/src/casino.rs, the OS-seeded thread RNG) before the stake is taken, in one transaction with the payout; the page only animates it. New routes GET /v1/casino/me, GET /v1/casino/duels, POST /v1/casino/{cage,play,blackjack,duel} (migration 0019: casino_play, casino_hand, casino_duel); the HQ server proxies them as /api/arena/casino/..., POST + CSRF, with every field checked against an allowlist (a game, a bet, a known pick word or a small number, a duel's uuid). Six plays per 2 s at most.
- Privacy: the only new egress is the game, the bet and the pick (and a duel's id) to the paired Arena. Duels show each player's display name, as the Arena's other boards do. No transcript data is involved.
- Accessibility: in Calm and with reduced motion the animations are short and nothing flashes or shakes; every control is a button with a label, Space or Enter plays, Escape leaves the table.
3.6.0 — Skyline Park after dark: fireworks, a dancing fountain and a sixth ride.
- Free for everyone. Skyline Park no longer charges a day pass: walk straight in, ride everything. The Arena stops charging the park fare and stops sending a price, so pages from before 3.6 open the gate free too. The ticket booth by the gate is a Welcome booth now.
- Fireworks. Every 8 minutes after dark a 90-second show goes up over the park: shells climb on spark trails and burst into peonies, tilted rings, golden willows, twinkling chrysanthemums and strobes, ending in a finale four times as fast. Each burst flashes and booms, the sound arriving late with distance. It runs on the shared clock, so everyone in the city sees the same show, and you can see it from across the city.
- The Storm Galleon, a swinging pirate-style ship (an original design: a red-and-gold hull with shield emblems, a compass-star sail, lanterns and a gold scroll at the bow), rocked up past 70° between two A-frames. Its benches step up toward bow and stern; you ride the high stern row. It has its own station, like every ride.
- A lagoon with a dancing fountain in the lawn by the gate, under the coaster's low pass: rippling water in a stone coping and eleven jets running four choreographed figures, lit in shifting colours by night.
- The park lit up. Rainbow chase lights run down the coaster's rails and climb the drop tower, every bulb glows (and reads from afar), and four searchlights sweep the night sky from the gate and the far corners.
- Grounds: blossom and green trees and flower beds wherever the lawn is clear of the rides, the paths and the crowd's walks, and a food court of parasol tables strung with lights by the cotton candy.
- Fixed: you no longer stop short of the landmark towers. Each one blocked a circle round itself, metres outside the Aurora Spire's lobes, the Beacon Tower's shaft and fins, and the corners of the square towers; now only the tower's own outline at the ground blocks you.
- Fixed: the Starswing's chairs had no backs (the line that added them had slipped into a comment), and a long ride name ran off its station's sign.
- Accessibility: in Calm and with reduced motion there are no fireworks, the searchlights hold still and the fountain stands steady.
- Privacy: no new egress; the show, the fountain and the ride are computed locally from the clock.
3.5.8 — Your car lift's gate no longer faces your building. On a third of the Commons' lots an HQ with its wings (level 30 and up) had its car-lift bay right behind a wing with the gate facing the wing's back wall: a car, motorbike or bicycle brought up from B1 came out against the building, so you could not take it out, and the bay was in the way coming and going. A bay now only stands where there are 8 m clear in front of its gate; where only the back of the lot has room, the bay faces away from the building and you ride out to the back. Lots whose bay was fine keep it exactly where it was.
3.5.7 — Engines that sound like engines. Every engine note is now built like the real thing (still pure WebAudio, no audio files): its pitch is the firing frequency (rpm/60 × cylinders/2) of the engine it models, with its own harmonic recipe, a detuned twin for body, a half-order sub for the lumpy ones and a waveshaper for grit, behind a low-pass that opens with the revs and the throttle. A KTM 390 thumps as a single, the 1390 lopes as a V-twin, the R 1300 GS burbles as a boxer, the S 1000 RR screams to 14,000 rpm, BMW's turbo fours and sixes and twin-turbo V8s whistle and blow off when you lift, the Bugattis roar (W16) or shriek (V16) and the EVs whine. On the throttle it is louder and brighter, off it softer with crackle on the overrun for the sporty ones (deterministic, not under Calm); upshifts cut for a moment, downshifts blip; a lumpy, uneven idle; intake roar, road rumble with speed and a tyre squeal in a powerslide. Planes get a flat-six with a two-blade prop's buzz. Every engine is one node graph made once (nothing per frame) into a shared compressor, at about the old volume; muted means silent.
3.5.6 — Dealership vehicles, the next layer of detail. Look through a catalogue car's (lighter) glass and you see a cabin: stitched seats with headrests, a glowing instrument cluster and centre screen, the console and a steering wheel with spokes. Headlights get projector lenses and a DRL strip, tail lights become LED light bars, grilles and intakes a honeycomb mesh, and there are generic round badges, lettered tyre sidewalls, quad, twin or centre exhaust tips by type, side skirts, chrome or black window trim, mirror indicators, a fuel flap and lettered plates. Bikes get a full exhaust (headers, collector, end can with cap and mouth), a sprung shock with its reservoir, swingarm pivot and chain adjusters, gear and brake pedals, brake hoses and cables, fork caps, bar-end weights, knee pads, rim tape, a plate hanger and extra trellis tubes. Nearly all of it is one shared canvas texture, so draw calls are unchanged (14 a car, 8-10 a bike); sizes, seats and the rider's fit are exactly as before.
3.5.5 — Dealership vehicles at full size, with more detail. The catalogue's bikes and cars used to look toy-sized next to the starters (built at true metres, while the starters are drawn big round the chunky riders). They now share one display scale per kind (HQV.hqVehicleModels.SCALE: bikes 1.3×, cars 1.08×), so a superbike stands as big as the starter motorbike and every car at least as big as the starter hatch, with the real differences kept (an SUV still over a hatch). The rider's seat, grips and pegs, the collision box, the wheelbase used on slopes and the chase camera's distance follow it; the car park parks long cars nose to the back line, and the dealership's turntables are a little roomier. Handling is unchanged. The stand-in bodies also gain the starters' level of detail: round-shouldered tyres, alloys with discs and calipers, shut lines, handles, plates, indicators, fog lights, wipers, a roof fin, SUV rails and arch cladding, splitters and diffusers on cars; round tyres (wire spokes on the big adventure bikes), discs and calipers, chain and sprockets, radiator, fins, a tank stripe, fork legs, grips, levers, a dash, a skid plate and winglets on bikes. Each is still built once and shared (14 draw calls a car, 8-10 a bike).
3.5.4 — B1 showcase gallery. Every vehicle in your basement now stands on its own display plinth, not just the three starters: fifteen turntables in two rows (eight along the back wall, the starters S1–S3 by the walnut wall, then seven down the front), each with a bronze base, a warm spot cone, a halo spilling onto the stone, a slow turn (still in Calm) and a placard naming what stands on it from the catalogue. Bay i is plinth 3 + i, so transfers and bay picking are unchanged; locked bays are dim empty plinths reading "Unlocks at level N". The plinths are sized at runtime to the largest vehicle (catalogue dims and the built models' bounding boxes) and capped so neighbours never touch; every part of every plinth is one instanced mesh, so fifteen cost a constant six draws. You get on from any plinth's edge, and the B1 lounge finally has an open doorway (2.4 m, bronze frame) in its glass.
3.5.3 — B1 as a lavish showroom. The basement garage was mostly black; now it is bright and warm (~3000 K): a strong warm fill, warm cove strips along every wall-ceiling edge and under a floating oak ceiling panel, scalloped wall-washer pools, polished warm-stone floor slabs (seeded canvas) with the bay lines and numbers in dark ink, dark- walnut slats behind the showcase plinths with light spilling from under them, brushed-metal trims, smoked-bronze lounge glass round a cognac sofa, rug and floor lamp, the HQ sign in warm neon, framed posters of your HQ's own name and level, and more plants. Nothing new moves; the washes, halos and posters are one mesh each and the plants now merge into the static group.
3.5.2 — Arriving in B1 by the car lift. You used to arrive standing on the lift facing its back wall, and the lift's trigger sat just off the pad on the way out, so the first W sent you straight back up to the street. Now you (and what you rode) arrive just off the pad facing into the basement, and the trigger is on the pad itself: drive or walk back onto the lift to go up. Also: a vehicle driven down the car lift no longer vanishes on arrival (its model stayed in the City's scene), and an owned vehicle homed in B1 is redrawn in its bay when you drive it back down.
3.5.1 — Drive your starters out of B1. You can now get on the car, motorbike or bicycle on its showcase plinth from the plinth's edge (the plinth kept you further away than you could reach), and riding a starter onto the car lift takes it up to the street with you instead of leaving it in the showcase. Return to HQ (T) still puts it back on its plinth.
3.5.0 — HQ 3.5 — Basement Garage. Every HQ now sits on a lavish B1 basement garage: the old garage beside the tower is a glass car lift (drive on and you go down with your car; drive onto the pad down there and you come up on the street in it), and a new B1 lift in the lobby takes you down on foot. Your starter car, motorbike and bicycle live on turntable showcase plinths; your bought vehicles get numbered bays (more as your HQ levels up). The garage manager (kiosks in B1 and at the common multi-storey) transfers each vehicle between your private basement and the common carpark; calling a B1 vehicle (C) brings it up the car lift. Return to HQ (T) puts the starters back in B1. Fixes: an owned vehicle's paint (an index), its carpark bay, and its parked spot cleared once it is home.
3.4.0 — The dealership and the airport. Real cars and bikes with a dealership and a garage, and a real airport for the Commons.
- Real vehicles, in classes. 32 vehicles from the first player's brands: BMW and Bugatti cars, BMW and KTM Duke bikes, from the KTM 390 Duke to the Bugatti Tourbillon. Every vehicle sits in a class by type (naked, sport, adventure; hatch, sedan, coupe, SUV, hypercar, electric) and engine size in cc (bikes up to 400 cc, 401-950 cc, over 950 cc; cars up to 2000 cc, 3000 cc, 5000 cc, over 5000 cc, electric). Each class sells two. More brands join as players add theirs (games/vehicles/catalogue.json: one entry per vehicle).
- They drive like the real thing. Handling comes from each vehicle's real power, weight and drivetrain: rear-wheel drive slides, all-wheel drive grips, electric cars pull from standstill on one gear. 0-100 km/h lands on the maker's figure (an M3 Competition in 3.9 s, a Chiron Super Sport in 2.4 s). New engine voices: single, twin, V-twin, boxer, W16, V16 and electric.
- The dealership. A glass showroom in every city from tier 2 (the flagship on the Commons) with the vehicles turning on display. Press E for the panel: both vehicles of each class side by side with their real specs and factory paints, a 3-minute test drive, and Get it. Everything is free and unlocked.
- The garage. A multi-storey garage where your vehicles live, each in its own bay: six levels on the Commons, three on an island at tier 5. Open sides let you see the cars, and a helix ramp you can drive up.
- Call your vehicle (C). Pick one and it drives out of its bay, down the ramps and along the roads to you, with hazard lights and its ETA on the minimap, and parks at the kerb beside you. Get out and, five seconds later, it drives itself back to the garage. Far from a garage it arrives from just out of sight.
- Others see your car. Other players see the real vehicle you are driving, in your paint (HQ presence v4, the vehicles capability; older clients still see the starter car or motorbike).
- The vehicles use built-in 3D bodies drawn to each one's real size for now; licensed models will replace them (tools/vehicle_fetch.py).
- A real airport for the Commons. The old glass box with a runway patch painted across it is gone. The Commons now has an offshore airfield on a reclaimed platform west of the coast: a 1.6 km runway (18/36) with blast pads, piano keys, touchdown-zone and centreline markings, two parallel taxiways with rapid exits, edge, centreline, approach and PAPI lights, a rabbit at night, windsocks that follow the wind, signs, fences and a sea wall. A landside terminal with a walk-through hall and a ramp leads over a skybridge across Ring Road 5 to a glazed concourse with six jet bridges; there are a 66 m control tower with a rotating beacon, an approach radar, a fire station, hangars, a fuel farm and a multi-storey car park. Airliners in four invented liveries fly a timetable that is the same for everyone (push back, taxi, hold, line up, take off; land, leave by a rapid exit, taxi in), with tugs, baggage trains, belt loaders, fuel and catering trucks and a follow-me car working the stands. From the terminal you can take the Isle Hopper, an amphibian, to an island (and back from the island's dock); island to island is still a seaplane. The minimap and the big map show the airfield, and ships, ferries, the carrier and the air base keep clear of it. Privacy/egress: the new dashboard proxies (GET /api/arena/vehicles/mine, POST /api/arena/vehicles/buy and /api/arena/vehicles/<id>/park) send only a validated vehicle id, paint and position with the paired device token. Presence adds the driven vehicle's catalogue id and paint index. Nothing transcript-derived is sent.
3.3.4 — Strikezone polish: eight slow drones, a wings-style climb, the grapple in-hand. Flight drones go from 4 to 8, each on its own slow sky lane (still derived from the map bounds). Hooking a drone now eases you up to its height the way the wings totem rises — no more teleport to altitude. The grappling gun is visible in first-person (it was scaled too thin to read), and its aim-down-sights matches the launcher's light zoom. The Tab weapon wheel highlight is a real pie slice that covers the selected gun (the old four-quadrant squares could not tile five weapons). Privacy / egress: no new network calls. Third-party assets: none.
3.3.3 — Strikezone: flight drones + the grappling gun. Four drones cruise the arena on fixed sky lanes (derived from the map bounds — no map-file change). Real players also carry a fifth gun, the Grappling gun (key 5): zero damage. Hook a drone and you are pulled to its height and swing across the map (jump / sprint to let go); hook a foe (player or bot) and drag them in — while the hook is on they cannot shoot. 5 hooks per life; ammo crates refill it. Bots never carry it. While The Warden lives the hook is mobility only (no foe hooks, no damage to the Warden). Snap additive key "dr" + FLAG_HOOK on the victim's row; the rocket path keeps LAUNCH_W = 3 so the launcher is unchanged. Privacy / egress: no new network calls. Third-party assets: none — the 3D gun is original geometry; drones reuse the existing Kenney enemy-flying hotlink with the usual monsterSVG fallback.
3.3.2 — No more camera pumping near buildings. Riding (or walking) past buildings, the chase camera kept zooming in and out: its collision ray clipped corner after corner, pulling in fast and easing out between them. Now once it pulls in it keeps that distance for 0.6 s after the last hit before easing back out, so passing a row of buildings is one smooth move in and one out.
3.3.1 — S walks you toward the camera. On foot, holding S now turns you to face the camera (smoothly, without overshooting) and walks you toward it, as in most third-person games; the camera keeps its heading and just backs up with you, and keeps holding when you let go. Press W (or turn with A/D) and it swings back round behind you. (3.2.2's S spun the camera round with you, so a held S looked just like W.)
3.3.0 — Skyline: landmarks, an amusement park and weather. The cities got a skyline and a day out.
- Six landmark towers stand over the busiest districts, each its own design: The Helix (a glass tower turning a quarter turn as it rises), Aurora Spire (three-lobed setbacks to a long spire), The Lantern (a glass bullet in a steel diagrid), Gemini Towers (twin towers with a skybridge), Beacon Tower (an observation tower with a glowing sky-deck) and The Regent (art deco stone up to a lit sunburst crown). Real PBR facades reflect a real sky; by night their windows light up, floodlights wash their feet and aviation lights blink on top. Each is in Go to.
- Skyline Park, an amusement park on the city's largest clear park block: a neon gate and marquee, a ticket booth, lamp-lit paths, string lights, food stalls and five rides — Comet, a roller coaster with a lift hill, a banked first drop, a vertical loop and airtime hills, ridden first person; Skywheel, a Ferris wheel with 24 gondolas and a chasing rim of lights; Freefall, a drop tower with a pause at the top over the whole city; the Carousel; and Starswing, a wave swinger. Walk up to a ride and press E. Rides run on the shared clock, so everyone sees the same train; residents visit the park too.
- Stations and kiosks: every ride boards from its own station: a boarded deck up steps from the path, a tiled gable roof on steel posts with a lit eave, the ride's name in neon ringed by bulbs, a brass and velvet queue, an operator's booth and planters (the Comet's runs its roof back over the track). Popcorn, ice-cream and cotton-candy kiosks and a ticket booth, each with what it sells, giant, on its roof. Paved promenades follow the ground.
- A crowd: visitors stroll the promenades, queue at the stations, wait at the kiosks and ride every ride, the City's own detailed residents (the animated Kenney characters) near you and its light bodies further off, all on the shared clock.
- Look around with the mouse: drag to turn the camera while walking (left or right button), and drag on a ride to look around from your seat; it recentres when the ride ends.
- A day pass is a new park fare: 10 Poke Coins, once per UTC day per city, paid into that city's treasury. On an Arena that doesn't sell passes yet the gate opens as a free preview.
- Weather: clear skies, overcast, rain, thunderstorms (lightning, thunder after the flash), snow and fog, in 15-minute spells eased in over 90 s; the same for everyone in a city. The city stats panel's forecast and an announcement say what is coming.
- Weather on the ground: snow settles a little -- a patchy dusting on roads, pavements, grass and roofs that builds over a snow spell and melts after -- and rain leaves the streets darker and glossier until they dry. Worked out from the same shared forecast, so everyone sees the same.
- Faster: the park and the landmarks merge their pieces by material (about half the draw calls looking into the park), and its crowd, bulbs and balloons rest when you are far off.
- Accessibility: in Calm and with reduced motion, rides are watched from the platform instead of ridden first person, nothing falls, and there are no lightning flashes, blinking or chasing lights.
- Security: the pass is server-authoritative. POST /v1/city/:owner/fare {kind:"park"} debits the rider and writes a park_pass row (migration 0016) in the same transaction as the ledger entry, so a pass always means the coins were paid and a second purchase that day charges nothing. GET /v1/city/:owner gains the caller's park: {price, pass}. The page can't grant itself a pass.
- Privacy: no new egress. The ticket sends {kind: "park"} to the existing fare route; weather and rides are computed locally from the clock and the world doc.
- Third-party assets: CC0 surface materials from ambientCG (Facade001, Facade006, Facade015, Facade018A, MetalPlates006) and a CC0 sky from Poly Haven ("Kloofendal 48d Partly Cloudy (Pure Sky)"), plus PavingStones128, WoodFloor043, RoofingTiles012A and CorrugatedSteel005 for the park, resampled JPEGs vendored in games/city/ with LICENSE-assets.txt, 4.6 MB, served only from 127.0.0.1 (.jpg only; the licence is not served).
3.2.2 — S turns you round. On foot, S no longer walks you backwards facing away: it turns you round (a smooth half turn that eases in and out and lands without overshooting, toward the side you are already turning), and held, walks you back the way you came while the camera swings round behind you. A tap still makes a full about-face; W cancels it; A/D during it change where you end up.
3.2.1 — The Get out pill stays clear of the route banner. On the ground with a route set (taxiing a plane, or in a car or on a bike), the Get out / Get on pill now sits just under the navigation banner at whatever height it is, instead of a fixed 96 px that a two- or three-line banner overlapped.
3.2.0 — Planes, air navigation, and in-sync turning.
- Fly a seaplane or a prop plane. A seaplane is moored down the river from every city's main dock, and a small prop plane (an original design) stands by every airport's runway (the Commons always, an island at tier 5). Walk up and press E. W / S set the throttle, A / D bank (steer on the ground or the water), the Up / Down arrows or a vertical drag raise and lower the nose; past rotation speed Up lifts off. Assisted flying (the default) levels the wings and the nose when you let go, keeps you above stall speed and cannot roll over; X switches to manual. G gear, F flaps, Space brakes, K autopilot (holds your height and heading, or flies to the waypoint). Lift grows with airspeed, a stall drops the nose gently, ground effect cushions the flare. Land the seaplane on any water and the prop plane on a runway (or, slowly, on flat ground with the gear down); a crash is a bump and you are back at the dock or the stand. The flight HUD has airspeed and altitude dials, a readout with heading, throttle, gear and flaps, and a stall warning. Chase and cockpit cameras, gamepad support, an engine note. Other players see your plane where the Arena supports it (the new plane presence capability, a = 9 / 10; older Arenas show you standing, as for helicopters).
- Air navigation. While you fly (planes and helicopters), Go to (N) lists the runways, the seaplane's landing lane off the river mouth, helipads and the other islands; a minimap click sets a free waypoint. The route is a straight line on the minimap, the light pillar marks the destination, and the HUD shows an arrow to it with its distance, time at your speed and the height to fly. A runway or a landing lane gets its approach: rings down a 3° glideslope from the final approach fix, a touchdown marker, and a glideslope indicator on final. At a dock in a city with an airport, the travel menu now says flights leave from the airport (N takes you there).
- Turning in sync. On foot the chase camera used to trail a held turn by up to ~60° and park ~23° off once you stopped, while the heading-up minimap turned with your facing at once; dragging the camera turned only the camera. Now the camera turns with you (no lag, no overshoot), the minimap turns with the camera, walking with a dragged camera steers you toward where it looks, and you turn faster (3.6 rad/s) on a smoother spring.
- Smoother walking. Idle, walk and run blend by speed, played at the rate your stride needs; you lean into turns and with the pace, turn your head into the turn and shuffle when turning on the spot; other players are dead-reckoned between presence updates and animate the same way.
- Water and docks. Boats, ferries and the seaplane float on one water surface that runs on the drawn sea's clock (they used to bob out of step with the waves), moored boats ride the swell instead of sitting flat while waves pass through them, a ferry no longer sits 0.2 m deep in the river, boarding a moored boat no longer pops, the camera no longer dips under the water, and a far chase camera has the depth precision to stop the shore flickering. Piers are finished: planks, posts, a safety line, cleats, fenders, ladders and lamps on the head.
3.1.1 — City camera and plates. The chase camera sits higher and further back (the far camera higher still), so you see the street around you instead of the ground at your feet. Left-drag now turns the camera too (trackpads have no right-drag); a click still walks. On a motorbike or a bicycle the camera follows turns more gently and barely tilts with the lean. Every HQ's car and motorbike carry the HQ's name on their number plates.
3.1.0 — Navigation, rivers and travel. Finding your way round the cities, and between them.
- A river through every city: from the sea past the plaza to a harbour basin in town. The dock stands on its bank by the plaza (on a tier-1 island too, with a road to it) and the port on the basin, so neither is out on the edge of the city any more. Arterials, the ring road and the highways cross on bridges; boats sail up the river and under them.
- A minimap in the bottom-right corner: the coast, the river, the roads, the civic buildings, HQs, other players and your route. Heading-up or north-up, zoom with the wheel or +/-, click it to set a waypoint, open the full map (M) from it; it zooms out as you speed up.
- Waypoints and turn-by-turn directions along the roads: press N or Go to for a searchable list of places (the dock, the port, the town hall, your HQ, the ferry to your island or the Commons...), or click the minimap or the ground on the map. A banner shows the next turn, the distance and the ETA; chevrons on the road and a light pillar at the destination lead the way; it reroutes when you go another way, and says "Press E for the ferry" at the dock.
- Keys pressed in a stop's, a dock's or the Go to menu no longer reach the dashboard's shortcuts (W no longer switches to the Workshop while a menu is open).
- Ferries you ride: scheduled sailings to up to six places, the same timetable on every client. You sit aboard (E at the dock) while it sails down the river, out to sea and up the next city's river, and that city loads on the way, with no loading screen. Ferries keep right and keep their distance; Space goes full ahead (8×).
- Opening bridges: bascule, lift and swing bridges (every city has a mix) lift for ferries and seaplanes, with lights, barriers and cars waiting.
- Cruise and cargo ships: the 120 m cruise ship Claude Serenade loops round every city and the 95 m container ships run between two to four. Each anchors off a city's river mouth. Ride either from a port and go ashore at any stop.
- Rail between islands: from a station (tier 2+), build a line to another city for 500 coins from your island's treasury. It runs elevated over the streets and across the sea, with 4-car trains every few minutes you can ride. Lines that leave a station along the same streets run side by side, each with its own platform.
- Air: jets between airports and seaplanes between docks (every island has one); a flyable helicopter at your HQ, hospitals and the Commons air base (hangars, radar, an attack helicopter, an aircraft carrier you can land on, fighter jet sorties). Other players see you flying (HQ presence a = 7/8 on Arenas that list fly).
- The big map: M opens the minimap full size with an animation; drag to pan, zoom, click to set a waypoint, Esc to close. Privacy/egress: GET /api/arena/rail and POST /api/arena/rail/build send only the validated destination world id (to) with the paired device token. Presence gains a height and a flying pose, as before for driving. Nothing transcript-derived is sent.
3.0.0 — Cities. Arena City grows into a world of cities.
- The Commons (claude-hq@2) replaces the gridded street for everyone: an organic city on an island, with arterial and local streets, districts (old town, downtown, suburbs, office, tech, film and more), every open HQ's tower on the lot the Arena assigns it, and civic buildings you can walk into: the HQ tabs open from the library, the market, the post office and the rest, and the town hall opens the Town Hall panel (the city's tier, growth, population, treasury, tax, specialty and its market).
- Your own island (user:<you>@2): a personal city with your HQ next to the town hall. It grows with your XP through five tiers (Village, Town, City, Metropolis, Capital): new streets, lots, services, buses from tier 2 and trams from tier 4 appear as you climb. Owners don't place buildings; you upgrade the city, move coins in and out (10% fee) and choose who may visit: everyone in your Arena (the default), your crew only, or nobody. Visitors walk, ride, shop and trade.
- Economy: passive tax into the city treasury, upgrades, a specialty good per city (the one its industry zone visibly makes), supply chains, and a market whose prices move every hour inside a band.
- People and traffic: residents who commute, work, lunch and go home on a schedule (press E on one to hear them), cars, buses, trams and emergency runs. Press E at a stop, pick where to go, wait for the bus or tram and ride it (2 coins to that city's treasury).
- The sea: the other islands on the horizon; a rowboat and a jet ski at every dock you can drive (E), and land on another island's dock. Press E at a dock, port, station or airport for ferries, trains, planes and fast travel (1 coin; ferries, rail and boats are free); the My island / The Commons button goes straight between your island and the Commons.
- Multiplayer: each world has its own presence room (city3d:<world id>, HQ presence v3); an Arena without @2 still gets the 3D City on claude-hq@1, and ?world=old still loads the legacy City. Privacy/egress: the new dashboard proxies (GET /api/arena/city/:owner, /api/arena/market/:owner, /api/arena/archipelago, /api/arena/world/claude-hq@2/assign; POST /api/arena/city/:owner/{build, transfer,privacy,fare} and /api/arena/market/:owner/trade) send only the regex-validated owner id (a user id or commons) and bodies rebuilt from allowlisted, value-checked keys, with the paired device token, to the configured Arena. GET /api/arena/world/user:<id>@2 adds the device token because the Arena serves an island only to those who may visit it; the fixed worlds still go without one. Nothing transcript-derived is sent.
2.9.0 — The 3D Arena City. Arena City is now a 3D city built from the Arena's generated world (claude-hq@1), with camera modes, a map, and a local dev Arena (tools/local_arena.sh); ?world=old still loads the legacy City. Privacy/egress: GET /api/arena/world/:id sends only the fixed, regex-validated world id and the page's If-None-Match ETag to the configured Arena; no device token, no transcript-derived data. Dev login: POST /v1/auth/dev-login exists only with ARENA_DEV_LOGIN=1 and a loopback bind. tools/local_arena.sh: build start chains; stop the preview with stop-tmp 8767; restore takes an optional port; pair refuses a git root that does not ignore *.prod-bak (the backups hold the production device token); stop/stop-tmp/start only kill our own arena or claudehq binaries. The install-agent plist holds ARENA_SECRET_KEY (written 0600).
2.8.3 — Strikezone: every disaster hits, and it hits what you see. Arena Disasters used to play as theatre: Meteor Shower streaked pretty fire while impact rings scattered at random, Toxic Fog painted green clouds at map centre while damage re-rolled somewhere else every second, and Hurricane only shoved. Now every one of the 10 disasters has a real impact on every player and bot (damage, knock, pull, or a 1-per-second chip), and the hazard you see is the hazard that hurts you — toxic clouds, the sinkhole pit, the wind column and impact marks are frozen once at start and shared by the 3D painter and the judge (solo and MP). Impact marks are aimed at live fighters often enough to connect. Protocol strike v9: snap di carries the frozen seed / cloud centres / pit, dm rows carry damage. Hurricane now chips 3 hp/s while it shoves. No new network, no new assets. Also in this entry: disaster polish. Lightning is a hashed zig-zag bolt (core + halo + a side fork), not a straight line; standing under a strike hurts more than standing at the rim (proximity crush in both judges). Fitting non-HP hits on every body: thunder / meteor / shockring blind (white-out veil), quake / toxic / sink / wind slow your step, sand / hurricane / EMP scatter every shot, hurricane wild-aim on bots too. MP carries the blind / slow windows on the player flags (FLAG_BLIND / FLAG_SLOW). Local only, no new network, no new assets. Also in this entry: a fall out of the map is no longer an endless free-fall. A body that leaves the arena (kicked out, knocked past the bounds, a floor gap on the Sandbar) gets a 10-second void clock, then a parachute back in — player and bot alike. Nothing out there can kill you and you can't shoot yourself, so the clock is the way home; the HUD counts it down (Out of bounds — back in 7s). Solo the client runs it; in MP the Arena referee does and emits the same spawn drop a respawn uses. Local only. Also in this entry: The Warden. Halfway to the score limit a giant torso-only boss rises at the map centre — heavy arms that slam the ground (ground warning + arm raise first; anything under the arm dies) and laser eyes that sweep the arena (warn, then a beam you hide from). While it lives nobody can hurt each other — players and bots all shoot the Warden, bots retarget it automatically, the round clock and team scores freeze, and only the Warden calls disasters and drops loot. Three health checkpoints each spill every non-disaster totem plus a health pack in a ring around it. Kill it and the match is back to normal. The boss silhouette and its hit volumes were first cut at 2.5× (retuned to 3× in 2.8.4; totem-golem: rubble skirt, fused torso, heavy arms, glowing sigil), and the Strikezone welcome card has a Warden section that spells out every rule above before you drop in. Menu checkbox Summon the Warden (next to Map view) turns the fight on or off. Local only, no new egress, no new third-party assets.
2.8.2 — Account standings. The Arena's Standings has a Players / Accounts switch next to its title. Accounts mode ranks Claude accounts for the chosen window (Season, 30 days, 7 days, All time): one row per account with everyone's combined numbers, expandable to each member's own row and their share of the account's XP. The account board moves here from the Crew panel. Saving Settings with Account board changed now publishes at once instead of on the next 5-minute publish. New Arena route GET /v1/accounts/standings?window=; against an Arena without it, the local HQ builds the same table from /v1/board, /v1/accounts and /v1/accounts/mine (GETs it already makes; nothing new leaves the machine). Shows only public handles and counts, never the account key.
2.8.1 — Arena City driving. New, detailed car (a hatchback with wheel arches, alloys, a glass cabin with seats, dashboard and a turning wheel, brake lights), motorbike (a small street bike) and bicycle (spoked wheels, turning cranks), in scale with your character. Riders sit on the seat with hands on the bars or wheel and feet on the pegs or pedals, and lean into turns. Hold Shift (gamepad B) and steer to powerslide the car (a smaller slide on the motorbike), with skid marks and tyre smoke. A small driving HUD (speed and rev dials with the gear, a Powerslide chip, the keys) shows while you ride. Fixes: the wrong vehicle after the street rebuilt, a 50 m teleport while sitting in the car, other players seated in the bicycle pose, the car clipping through walls and being entered through the garage wall, a parked car jumping back to its garage, the garage roof hiding you, and character sizes that varied by load order. Return to HQ (the button over the street, T or Home, the side panel, the command palette) takes you to your front door and puts your car, motorbike and bicycle back in the garage; the city no longer keeps sending you to the door of the last HQ you visited.
2.8.0 — Valley Rally. Point-to-point off-road stages in a cel-shaded forest, dry hills and snow, by day or night: 20 gates per stage with split times against your best, a road-ahead map, and a rally HUD (segmented tachometer, gear, big speed, handbrake / clutch / TC lamps). A detailed car model: raycast suspension with weight transfer, Pacejka-style tyres on seven surfaces, AWD / RWD / FWD with limited-slip diffs, an automatic 6-speed, handbrake turns and power drifts, optional countersteer and traction-control assists, keyboard and gamepad. Three original cars (Moraine T4, Saltcedar 240R, Pipit Sprint 16), chase / bumper / hood cameras, dust, ruts and mud, a Graphics setting (Auto / High / Medium / Low). Solo time trials with your ghost, a daily stage, 3-stage rally events, and live room races of up to 8 (ghost cars) refereed by the Rust Arena (backend/src/rally.rs: gates in order, speed and teleport guards, splits, events, results, per-stage leaderboards, Quick Play, the map gallery). In a room only the stage (seed + road and gates) and your car's position frames leave the machine.
2.7.0 — The Python HQ is gone; the Rust HQ is the only one. dashboard.py and the modules it imported (arena.py, music.py, worksignals.py, ext_*.py) are removed; dashboard-rs/ (claudehq) serves everything, with the same routes and the same data files. Still on the Python HQ? After this pull it cannot start again, so switch once by hand, in your HQ folder: cargo build --release --locked --manifest-path dashboard-rs/Cargo.toml, then dashboard-rs/target/release/claudehq --install and launchctl kickstart -k gui/$(id -u)/com.claudehq.dashboard. Nothing is lost: it reads the same files.
2.6.3 — The account board. People signed into the same Claude account can share a row on a new Account board under the crew board: the combined level of everyone on that account (scored like a crew), with their handles. Opt-in under Settings › Account board, off by default. Privacy/egress: when on, the local HQ (dashboard-rs) reads only oauthAccount.accountUuid from ~/.claude.json (or $CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR/.claude.json), never writes it, and sends sha256("claude-hq:account:v1:" + id) to the paired Arena (POST /v1/me/account, after each publish; "" when off, which unlinks). Email, organisation, names and the id itself never leave the machine. The Arena stores only an HMAC of that hash, keyed by its secret, on the device row (backend-rs migration 0012, one nullable column). Groups need 2 to 20 people with a device seen in the last 30 days. The key is self-reported, so anyone who has used that account can join its group: it is a social board, not proof of anything.
2.6.2 — HQ Notch on the Rust HQ, and an Update that rebuilds it. The Rust HQ (dashboard-rs, claudehq) now has HQ Notch's routes (/api/notch/status, /api/notch/install) and evolution picks (/api/evo-choice, creature.evo in /api/sessions), so the "New: HQ Notch" dialog and the notch's evolution forms work on either HQ. HQ's Update on the Rust HQ now rebuilds claudehq (cargo build --release --locked) when dashboard-rs/ changed, before restarting; a failed build keeps the old server running and says what to run. A Rust HQ built before this needs one manual rebuild (cargo build --release --manifest-path dashboard-rs/Cargo.toml, then restart HQ); the dialog now detects that case (and a Python HQ that was not restarted after a pull) and shows the exact command to copy. The Rust HQ now matches the Python one feature for feature (Overflow Vial, archived prompt-less cards, error recovery, the Arena City skate board, Strikezone assets): every route is the same and dashboard-rs/tools/parity.py --frozen-home finds 194 of 195 checks identical (the odd one: a malformed Content-Length gets an empty 400). To switch: cargo build --release --locked --manifest-path dashboard-rs/Cargo.toml, then dashboard-rs/target/release/claudehq --install (back to Python: python3 dashboard.py --install); both read the same data files.
2.6.1 — Reopen the HQ Notch dialog. Closed the "New: HQ Notch" dialog without reading it? Open it again any time from Settings > HQ Notch or the command palette (Cmd-K, "HQ Notch"). When the notch is already installed it says so and offers Reinstall. Closing a reopened dialog keeps your earlier choice.
2.6.0 — Get HQ Notch from HQ. The next time you open HQ on a Mac without HQ Notch, it asks once: Install now (HQ runs notch/tools/install.py for you; it needs the Xcode Command Line Tools), copy the command, ask again in 3 days, or never. Local only: GET /api/notch/status, POST /api/notch/install (CSRF-protected), ext_notch.py.
Unreleased — Strikezone (maps, totems, disasters). Prior Strikezone waves, folded into one entry (they were never separate HQ versions, and their old "2.5.x–2.9.0" labels collided with real HQ releases):
- Harbor Dockyard 2× + scattered drops. The yard is twice as big on each edge (84×60 floor) with the same container / crate / catwalk / step sizes and full north/south and east/west symmetry. No drop has a fixed pad: every health kit, ammo pack and totem lands on a fresh open ground spot across the arena bounds, and a returning pack re-rolls its spot too.
- Dune Compound. A second arena: an indoor desert compound of sealed adobe rooms and passages. The host (and the solo menu) picks the map before a match. Harbor Dockyard is unchanged. Bots walk the room/passage graph. The kill feed shows the weapon (smg / marksman / revolver / launcher).
- Climbable high grounds + 3D bot nav. Dockyard edges, midfield lookouts, warehouse roof and container tops are reachable via real non-overlapping stairs; bots walk those stairs and facing spawn pairs sit in known lanes 20–32 m apart so a filled 2v2 opens fire.
- Wave C warzone. 28 new totems (Rift, Mirror Army, Gravity Flip, Time Rewind, Shockwave, Bullet Magnet, Chain Lightning, Trapmaster, Hunter's Mark, Blink Dash, Bubble Fortress, Wall Runner, Second Wind, Fake Death, Ghost Bullets, Cluster Shot, Overclock, Ricochet, Infinite Chamber, Body Swap, Rally, Meteor Call, Chaos Core, Phoenix, Pocket Universe, Fate Splitter, Kingmaker, Radar Jammer) plus five drop mechanics (Hot Drop, Totem Fusion, Cursed Drop, Arena Events, Contested Capture) and a small top-down radar. Protocol strike → 6.
- Wave D: Arena Disasters. Ten arena-wide Disaster totems — Sandstorm, Meteor Shower, Hurricane, Thunder Apocalypse, Earthquake, Shockwave Apocalypse, Toxic Fog, Absolute Zero, Sinkhole, EMP Apocalypse. Warn (2 s banner) → impact/hold → clear. A solid roof overhead stops Meteor Shower and Thunder Apocalypse; any live shield makes you immune to every disaster. Environment kills name the disaster in the feed. Three open-air sheds on the Dune Compound give real roof cover on both arenas.
- Wave E: Disaster totems on their own ring, and a top-bar auto-disaster clock. Disaster totems land on their own drop ring (2 recycled slots) on their own clock (first at 12 s, then every 16 s). The auto-disaster clock starts at 30 s and repeats every 45 s, counted down in the top bar. Protocol strike → 8 (di grew a 5th field: ms until the next automatic disaster).
- Wave F: every disaster is a map-wide event. The 3D layer paints big, obvious world spectacle for all 10 disasters (dust wall, fireballs, walking hurricane column, lightning + full-map flash, earthquake shake, expanding shockwave ring, rolling toxic clouds, Absolute Zero snow / frost / ice shards, sinkhole pit with debris, EMP blackout). Impact marks paint as 3D ground warning rings; V.booms render as blasts; the hold banner names what is happening. The 2D map fallback washes and rings the same events. Calm / reduced-motion keeps the colour and stills the motion. Also fixed: the auto-disaster / Disaster-totem kind roll actually varies (disKind/dis_kind mix the hash now, JS and Rust twins); Disaster totems are pickable; and ground drops are reachable from Wave B high grounds.
- Wave G: every disaster is visual AND impact, and the two "nothing happened" totems are on screen. Sandstorm / Absolute Zero / EMP chip once a second (3 / 4 / 2 hp). Sandstorm is denser. The Rift totem paints two violet openings plus a link beam; the Shockwave totem paints an expanding ground ring. Hurricane shoves solo bots too. The game-info card explains what each of the 10 disasters does. Privacy / egress: still zero transcript data off-box; no new network call — all disaster theatre is local three.js primitives and generated canvas textures. Third-party assets: none; every effect is original three.js geometry / materials and canvas gradients drawn in code.
Unreleased — the Overflow Vial. A creature that is already Apex keeps earning past 70 prompts, and HQ now banks half of that surplus (5 XP per prompt) into a shared local ledger (vial.json, 0600). Each drop dies 24 h after it lands, spends eat the soonest-to-die drop first, and one spend lifts a species a single stage — Egg→Hatchling 30 XP, Hatchling→Adult 90, Adult→Prime 180, Prime→Apex 400 — from a Village troop card or a caught Pokédex card (a caught species can be lifted even with no live session). The Village Vial chip shows a live countdown to the next expiring drop and opens a breakdown: lifetime poured per Apex creature and every live drop with its own fuse; a fully evolved session's drawer shows what it poured. The stage floor itself is the existing New Game+ DEX_MAX high-water, so the effect stays purely local; the ledger only mutates locally and never leaves the machine. Army Camp now lists every troop instead of the top 30 by power so a 0/1-prompt creature isn't scrolled out of reach, and payload sessions with zero prompts are no longer dropped (a creature you see in the Pokédex is always reachable to lift).
2.6.0 — Arena City garages and a skatepark. Every HQ has a garage in its own colours with a drivable car, a motorbike and a bicycle (E; motor vehicles have an accelerator and a handbrake). The plaza has a skatepark: two quarter pipes, a fun box, a ledge and a rail, a row of boards to step on, ollies, airs, 180/360/540 spins, kickflips, shove-its, grinds, bails and combos with your best kept on this machine. Others in the Arena see you skate and your tricks (presence a = 4 with a trick k and a height y, behind the new "skate" capability; the Rust Arena stores and relays them). Others also see your car or motorbike (a = 5 / 6, the "drive" capability), skaters bend, tuck and throw their arms out on tricks, and a weekly Skate board lists the best combos (only the combo's total and trick count are sent).
2.6.0 — HQ Notch (notch/, macOS, optional). A notch companion app: every live Claude Code session as its HQ Pokémon (same species, evolution and shiny as the dashboard), animated by state (working, needs you, done, error, idle), with HQ's session titles, the current tool and a live ticker with +N −M for edits. Permission prompts open the notch with Allow / Always / Deny / Terminal, and AskUserQuestion choices (single or multi-select) can be answered there. Click a card to focus its kitty / Terminal / iTerm2 / tmux window. Installed with python3 notch/tools/install.py, which adds Claude Code hooks (only its own entries, with a settings backup) and a login item. Privacy: local Unix socket only; no new egress beyond HQ's existing sprite hotlinks. Questions are caught by a dedicated AskUserQuestion pre-tool hook as well as the permission hook, without being asked twice (re-run the installer to add it). Notch creatures follow HQ's evolution floor (each species' highest stage from the Pokédex), so a new session of an evolved species shows its evolved form; the notch opens after a 0.5 s hover. A settings view in the notch (gear icon): 2D / 3D / Match HQ sprites (3D shows Mega forms at Apex), sounds, idle sessions and notch approvals. Plan cards (approve or keep planning from the notch), a diff view for each edit in the ticker, and opt-in phone alerts via ntfy (fixed, content-free text only; see notch/README.md, Privacy). Branch and Mega picks (Eevee's form, Charizard X / Y) are kept by HQ itself (evo-choices.json, local only) and sent as creature.evo, so the notch and every browser show the form you picked.
2.5.1 — Strikezone. A new team shooter in the Arena (Valley, game strike), separate from Blaster Arena (which is untouched):
- Teams, not free-for-all: amber vs cyan. Before a match the host picks the side size (2 vs 2, 3 vs 3 or 4 vs 4); when a side is short of players the Arena server fills it with bots that patrol the dock, chase, aim with human-like error and shoot — they retire as humans join. Team-mates can't hit each other; the team score is any member's kill.
- A new map — Harbor Dockyard: tight container lanes, a central warehouse with a doorway chokepoint, catwalks along the walls reached by step-chains, crates and health/ammo pickups. Not an open field: three lanes, rotation-friendly.
- Same proven netcode as Blaster Arena (client prediction, 20 Hz server tick, lag-compensated shots), plus: ~ (or right-click / LT) scopes in — camera zoom with a steadier sight, no spread change (nothing desyncs); a graphics quality switch (Classic / Balanced / Ultra) with PBR materials, soft shadows, tone mapping, a gradient sky and glowing container-edge accents.
- Privacy / egress. Bots are server-side only and use the same movement and hit adjudication as everyone else; game sockets carry moves and scores only — nothing transcript-derived is involved. The map loads from your own dashboard (127.0.0.1); no third-party assets (the arena reuses the Kenney CC0 kit already vendored in games/fps/ and games/golf/).
2.5.0 — Make + compete. Build your own maps, share them, and compete on them every week.
- Track Editor: paint a kart loop on a grid, see a live check, test-drive it, save it and race it with friends (Kart Racing gains a "Custom…" track picker).
- Level Editor: build a Platformer level, check it, test-run it, then race or co-op it in a room.
- Map Editor: build a Blaster arena on a top-down grid, checked live against the same rules the Arena uses; a room can play any valid user map.
- Workshop (map gallery): publish maps privately, to your room or to everyone; browse newest, most liked and hot this week; like, report, remix and "Race in room". Each custom map keeps its own leaderboard, and likes plus races pick a map of the week for each game.
- Tower Defense: place Pokémon towers against twenty bug waves, solo or co-op in a room (up to 4).
- Bowling: ten-pin with Pokémon bowlers on the golf physics, solo or up to 8 in a room.
- Tournaments (Compete view): a weekly cup per game scored from your normal multiplayer races, a monthly season podium, and cup trophies on your Trainer card.
- World boss: one boss a week that everyone wears down together (merged PRs and multiplayer wins), then fights with a Pokémon team (three tries a day); the final blow and the fighters earn badges.
- Loot from real work: a merged PR, a green test run or a long focus session drops a chest; open it for a card in your binder.
- Skill tree: how you work (tests, refactors, docs, review, debugging, exploring, building) grows seven skill branches and unlocks titles you can show.
- Prestige: at level 50, reset your shown level for a star (nothing earned is lost); stars show on your Trainer card and light up the HQ skyline, with a star frame and a rooftop crown.
- Story campaign: six chapters through the HQ and the Valley, with story tracks and levels.
- Trading (card trades between friends) was planned for 2.5 and is deferred to 2.5.1.
- Privacy / egress. Work signals are off by default and ask once for consent (Settings: workSignals, and separately workSignalsPRs for PRs). They are classified on this machine; only numbers leave it: per UTC day, seven skill counts (/v1/skills/report: {day, counts}, each 0–200) and loot events (/v1/loot/events: {requestId, type, n, day}, type one of tests_green, focus_long, pr_merged). PRs are counted by running gh locally; titles, URLs, repos and numbers never leave the machine (only salted hashes are kept, locally). Published maps send the map's geometry and the name you typed ({kind, name, data, scope, roomId?}, max 12 KB); a boss fight sends your team as species/stage numbers. No command, path, file name, project or transcript text is ever sent.
- Arena (Rust): /v1/skills/*, /v1/loot*, /v1/prestige*, /v1/maps*, /v1/cups*, /v1/boss* (all device-authenticated), room games td and bowl, custom maps in kart / plat / fps rooms; migrations 0003_work_events to 0010_boss (0007 is reserved for trading).
2.4.0 — Your 3D character. The person you walk around as in the 3D HQ and Arena City is now yours to build, and replaces the 2D trainer drawing (which stays as the fallback without WebGL2).
- Settings → Character: a live 3D preview you can turn, six bodies (the Kenney Mini Characters), skin / hair / outfit colours that keep the model's shading, hair (own, shaved, Neon crest), headwear (beanie, cap, headband, party hat, Neural halo), accessories (round glasses, shades, AR visor), Lit eyes, Techwear with lit circuit trim, Chrome skin, Neon cyan / Hot magenta colours, and a portrait background (Neon grid). Your 2D look is carried over once.
- Everywhere you appear: the Trainer card shows a portrait of your character; the 3D HQ and the city walk it around; friends in Arena City see your character (look, a few small numbers in hq presence). Paired, your HQ uploads the portrait (a small PNG) and the Arena shows it in place of your GitHub picture on the leaderboard, room members, lobby chips, chat and music.
- Arena (Rust): hq presence op: "look" / c (capability look); PUT/DELETE /v1/me/portrait, public GET /v1/portraits/:user_id; migration 0002_portraits.sql. The GitHub picture is kept and comes back if the portrait is removed.
2.3.0 — Arena City: bikes and a fountain.
- Jump to City: a button at the top of the 3D HQ panel (and "Jump to Arena City" in the command palette) takes you straight onto the street, from the classic dashboard too. You can walk the city while your HQ is private; your building stands on it only while it is open.
- The fountain: the plinth in the middle of the plaza is now a stone fountain: a basin with a rim, two bowls spilling sheets of water, and a jet on top. Still water in Calm / reduced motion.
- The bike park: six bikes in a rack beside the fountain. Walk up and press E (or the "Ride" button) to get on; W/S pedal and brake, A/D steer (you lean into turns), Shift goes faster, E gets off and the bike goes back to its rack. Everyone in the city sees you riding. Arena (Rust): hq presence accepts a = 3 (riding) and the welcome lists the ride capability; a page only sends it to an Arena that does, so older Arenas still see you (running).
2.2.1 — Room songs play from your own HQ. With yt-dlp installed (brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg, or the standalone binary in ~/.local/bin), each listener's HQ fetches the room's current song from YouTube on their own Mac and plays it from 127.0.0.1, on the room's clock: no embedded YouTube player to be blocked, and the visualiser follows the real audio. Songs are cached in .music-cache/ (about 400 MB at most) and the next song in the queue is fetched ahead. If YouTube answers "confirm you're not a bot", Settings → Room songs can let yt-dlp use one browser's YouTube login (cookies read locally per fetch, sent only to youtube.com, never stored by HQ; off by default). Without yt-dlp, rooms use YouTube's player as before. Also: search pops up while you type, a blocked upload is swapped for another upload of the same song, and Go live plays with less delay.
2.2.0 — Music. A new Music view (key J):
- Now Playing: HQ reads the song this Mac is playing in Spotify, Apple Music or a YouTube Music tab (AppleScript, only apps already running; macOS asks once for permission) and, while paired, shares it with the Arena. On by default; turn it off in Music or Settings. Shared fields: title, artist, album, app, Spotify/YouTube id, length, position. Friends' songs show in Listening now and on their lobby chip, with links to open the song in Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube Music.
- Listening rooms: your Arena room (the Lobby or a private room) gets one shared YouTube queue. The Arena keeps the queue and a clock; every browser plays its own copy and stays within about a second of the room. Anyone can add (search YouTube or paste a link), play, pause, seek or skip.
- Go live: share a tab's or your Mac's audio and everyone in the room can press Listen live, streamed browser to browser over WebRTC (stereo Opus, up to 256 kbps, up to 12 listeners). The Arena only relays the connection setup, as for voice calls.
- Visualiser: bars, ring or wave, full screen; driven by the real audio when you are live or listening live, by the DJ's spectrum otherwise, or by a beat seeded per song. Calm and reduced-motion get a still picture.
- Arena (Rust): GET/PUT/DELETE /v1/music/now (memory only, 2-minute expiry) and {"type":"music"} room messages; the welcome advertises music: {v: 1}.
2.1.2 — Cursor cards use the chat's own title. The heading is the name Cursor shows for that agent chat (read locally from Cursor's state database on this machine), so a card says "Extend chat data support" instead of the opening message. Chats with no saved title still use the first message. Nothing from that database is sent anywhere.
2.1.1 — Cursor sessions next to Claude. Agent chats Cursor already saved under ~/.cursor/projects show up on the same board as Claude Code: a Cursor badge on the card, recent ones in Working or Idle, older ones in the archive. Still local files only — no token, no upload. Arena's opt-in daily counts stay Claude-only. Codex is not read yet.
2.1.0 — HQ 2.1: Play Together.
- Base and walk-in: the HQ is a building on a plaza; walk through the door into the Lobby (reception) and on into Mission Control. The Base grows with your HQ level and is customisable.
- Live HQ presence: an HQ open to visitors shows everyone in it walking around in real time; visit friends' HQs, open their trainer card, and start a game with them from there.
- Quick Play (Arena tab): per-game matchmaking into a private room, crewmates first, up to 8.
- Party Mode: Kart → Platformer → Blaster → Golf with points by place (10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1), scored by the Arena.
- Code Typing Race: up to 8 people type the same real code snippet; the Arena times it and rejects impossible speeds.
- Progression: HQ level from session XP plus game XP (capped daily), level-up unlocks at your Base, trainer cards, trophies, and leaderboards for every multiplayer game.
- Crews: create or join with an invite code, a crew board, and your banner on your HQ.
- Cosmetics, inventory and market: one wallet (Poke Coins), 21 cosmetics across kart, golf, runner, blaster and base slots, and selling Valley finds for coins.
- Focus combo, spectating (watch bar in races, chase camera in Blaster), sound effects with a volume slider, distinct engine sounds per vehicle (V8, diesel, turbo, hot rod, motorbike), and server stats (RAM, CPU, disk) in Settings.
- Arena: migrations up to 3d4e5f6a7b8c (game results, equipped cosmetics, ledger ops, crews). The Rust Arena does not have the 2.1 routes yet; run the Python Arena for 2.1.
2.0.0 — HQ 2.0, Wave 0: HQ becomes a place.
- The 3D HQ (HQ tab, or press H): Mission Control as a room you walk around. Every live session is a crew member at a console: typing when working, standing and waving when it needs you, dozing when idle; recently away sessions are empty desks. Click a crew member for their card, a door to go to the Lab (Analytics), Gym, Quest Board, Shop, Trophy Hall (Pokédex), Valley or Arena, and a project on the holo-table to show only its crew. Walk with WASD or click the floor; day and night follow your clock. A crew list beside it does the same with the keyboard.
- One switch (header button or H) flips between the 3D HQ and the classic dashboard and remembers your choice; with Calm mode or reduced motion, HQ opens on the classic view.
- Self-updating HQ: every open tab reloads after a restart, and the Update button offers Restart · new code when the code on disk is newer than the running server.
- Arena protocol versions: games say "update the Arena" or "Update Claude HQ" instead of misbehaving when the two are on different versions.
- Under the hood: the frontend is split into ui/ (stitched into the same page by the server, no build step), the 3D games share games/engine.js, the Arena ships with ops/release.sh (versioned images, CI gate, one-step rollback, Python or Rust), a load test, and Rust CI.
1.9.0 — Kart Racing: the Valley's first real-time multiplayer game.
- Kart Racing (🏎️ in the Valley): arcade cars on three tile-built tracks (Meadow Loop, Canyon Notch, Twin Peaks; 1–5 laps), made from Kenney's CC0 Starter Kit Racing models. Drive with W/A/S/D or the arrows, Shift to drift (tyre smoke), R to hop back onto the road, C for the camera; a gamepad works too. The HUD has an analog speedometer and RPM gauge, lap, place, race and lap times, a minimap and a "Wrong way!" warning. Solo it's a time trial with your best lap saved per track; with friends it's a race of up to 8 with a countdown grid, live standings and a results card. Low-detail mode for older laptops, and a 2D map view without WebGL2. Tracks are drawn 1.5× the kit's size (a 13.5 m road, so eight cars have room) with a 108 km/h top speed; the chase camera holds a fixed distance and only smooths its heading, so the car stays big on screen at full speed; steered wheels no longer wobble while they spin.
- Mini Golf: the camera follows your drag. Dragging to aim in 3D now works like a slingshot on the screen (pull back to putt away from you, sideways to aim), so the camera swings round behind the aim while you drag instead of holding still.
- Valley lobbies: invite or nudge with suggestions. One search box in every multiplayer game's lobby suggests people as you type (avatar, name, @handle): friends online in your room get a game invite, anyone else on the Arena gets a nudge, and an exact @handle can still be nudged.
- Kart Racing: nine tracks, longer laps, a random pick. Six new tracks (Pine Speedway, Lakeside Sprint, Harvest Hairpins, Autumn Run, Frostbite Ring, Sunset Switchbacks) and longer layouts for the first three (390–570 m a lap), each with its own sky and scenery tint (snow-dusted on Frostbite, autumn leaves, dry grass). A 🎲 Random track button picks one, solo or as the room's host. An Arena from 1.9.0 still gets the three original tracks at their first size until it's updated.
- Call overlay. While you're in an Arena voice call on any view but the Arena, a small panel floats in the corner (drag it anywhere, collapse it): who's in the call and who's talking, mute, camera, screen share and leave, and everyone's video. The videos move back to the Arena's voice panel when you open it. Voice no longer shows ghost duplicates of people who reloaded or reconnected: a rejoin replaces their old entry, and anyone who stops answering (and isn't connected) drops off within about 20 seconds.
- Mini Golf ghosts. Once you've finished a hole you're a ghost: see-through, no shadow, a faint name tag, and you can roam the hole while the others play. Other finished players are fainter still, so nobody blocks the view.
- Real-time multiplayer foundation (shared by Platformer Rush and Blaster Arena): a fixed-rate server tick per room (backend/app/realtime.py, 15 Hz for racing) that batches one snapshot per tick, a process-wide cap on running game loops, a per-room bandwidth budget that thins snapshots under pressure, and token buckets for inbound frames; one shared input layer in the browser (games/input.js: keyboard, pointer-lock mouse look, gamepad).
- Fair racing under lag: each player drives locally and streams positions; the Arena checks every frame (on the road, no faster than a car, laps in order, the sender's own clock bounded against the server's so frames bunched or reordered by jitter are never punished) and times the finish. An 8-car race at 120 ms ± 60 ms simulated lag runs in the backend tests on both the Python and the Rust Arena.
- Both Arena backends: the Rust port (backend-rs/) gains the same tick, budgets and kart referee, with per-connection message queues so game events reach exactly the right sockets.
- Third-party assets: the IP rule now allows vendored assets whose license permits it (with the license alongside, never hotlinked); this release adds Kenney's Starter Kit Racing models (CC0) in games/kart/. The local server's listen backlog is raised so a 3D game loading a dozen models at once no longer sees a reset connection.
- Mini Golf: Play random — 5, 10 or 15 holes from every course. The Mini Golf menu (solo practice and the Arena host's course picker) gets a "Play random" row. A round draws that many holes, no repeats, from all 25 holes of every course, and each hole keeps its own course's sky, fog, light, tint and scenery, switching look as you move between holes (the HUD names the course each hole came from). In a room the Arena server draws the holes with its own RNG (a start of course: "random" with holes 5, 10 or 15; anything else is refused) and sends the chosen mix of [course, hole] pairs in the round view, so every client builds the same holes and the referee rolls each putt on the right one. Random rounds don't record a "best" score. No new network traffic beyond the existing opt-in Arena game messages; the putting physics is unchanged.
- Platformer Rush (🏝️ in the Valley): run, jump and double-jump across floating islands to the flag, coins on the way, built from Kenney's CC0 Starter Kit 3D Platformer models. Three levels (Meadow Hop, Sky Steps, Cloud Fortress) with checkpoints, coin trails that hint the route, a few double-jump gaps and a shortcut or two. A third-person character controller (camera-relative WASD/arrows/stick, coyote time, jump buffering, idle/run/jump animations, a spin on the double jump, squash on landing) and an orbit camera (mouse look under pointer lock, right-drag, right stick or Q/E; it drifts behind you as you run and never sits inside a platform). Fall below the clouds and you're back on your last checkpoint. Solo it's a time trial with your best time saved per level; with friends, up to 8 play a Race (first to the flag, every checkpoint in order first, live standings) or Co-op (the whole lobby shares one coin goal against the clock, with a team progress bar). Six runner colours, name tags, countdown, results card, low-detail mode, and a top-down map view without WebGL2.
- Platformer referee: the Arena checks every frame on the 15 Hz real-time tick: inside the level, no faster than a run, rising and falling no faster than a jump and gravity, never inside a platform, and never higher above the last platform stood on than a jump plus a double jump can reach in the time since (a closed-form envelope, so hovering across a gap is caught). The server owns the checkpoints (in order, within reach), the coins (each once per player in a race; once for the whole room in co-op, first to reach it) and the flag (only after every checkpoint); a refused frame puts you back where you last stood, and respawns go to the last checkpoint the server confirmed. Clients send their simulation clock, so a stalling tab that runs in slow motion is never mistaken for a cheat. Tested with 8 bots at 120 ms ± 60 ms lag and reordering on every level, race and co-op, on both the Python and the Rust Arena (zero false rejections, true finish order, each co-op coin counted once, snapshots inside the room's bandwidth budget). The level files are shared byte-for-byte by the browser and both backends.
- Third-party assets: Kenney's Starter Kit 3D Platformer models, texture and blob-shadow sprite (CC0) in games/platformer/ with the license alongside; the kit's Godot code (MIT) is not used.
- Blaster Arena (🎯 in the Valley): a cartoon first-person shooter on Sky Courtyard, an enclosed arena laid out from Kenney's CC0 Starter Kit FPS blocks (a raised keep with stairs and a parapet, two corner towers, L-walls, waist-high cover, crates, health and ammo packs). Two blasters: the automatic Rapid blaster and the slow, hard-hitting Heavy blaster (1/2, the mouse wheel or Y to switch; R to reload; headshots count extra). Click the view to aim with the mouse (pointer lock; Esc gives it back and the game says so), WASD and Space, a sensitivity slider, a gamepad (sticks, RT, A, X, Y, Back), or the keyboard alone (Q/E turn, F fires). Solo it's a 60-second target range of flying drones with your best score saved; with friends it's a free-for-all for up to 8: 3, 5 or 10 minutes, first to 10, 20 or 30 kills, a countdown, respawns after 3 s at the spawn farthest from everyone (with a moment of spawn protection), drop-in mid-match, a quick rejoin keeps your score. HUD: crosshair, hit marker (from the server), directional damage indicator, health, ammo with a reload bar, round clock, kill feed, scoreboard (Tab or the Scores button) and a results card. Other players are Mini Characters holding their blaster, with name tags and walk animations. Calm mode / reduced motion drop the weapon bob, screen tilt and hit flashes and shrink the muzzle flash. Low-detail mode, and a playable top-down map view without WebGL2.
- Arena referee with lag compensation: a 20 Hz tick checks every move (no faster than a run on the sender's own clock, bounded against the server's; inside the arena; never inside a wall; never off the ground longer than a jump) and judges every shot: fire rate, ammo, reload and weapon switch on the shooter's clock, the shot's origin near where the server has the shooter, then it rewinds every target to what the shooter saw (the shooter's clock mapped onto the server's, minus the round trip the server measures from snapshot acknowledgements, minus the interpolation delay the client reports, capped at 350 ms; at most 1.2 s of history) and casts the ray against head and body boxes and the arena's walls (no hits through cover). Spread is deterministic per shot, so your tracer and the server's verdict agree. One batched snapshot per tick carries the players who changed and the shots judged. Tested on both backends with 8 bots at 120 ms ± 60 ms lag each way and reordering: no honest frame refused, ≥ 90% of shots aimed at the drawn target register, shots at where someone was 0.8 s earlier don't, kills and deaths add up, and the room stays inside its bandwidth budget. The arena file is shared byte-for-byte by the browser and both backends.
- Third-party assets: Kenney's Starter Kit FPS blasters, blocks, drone, cloud and grass models, texture and muzzle/impact sprites (CC0) in games/fps/ with the license alongside; the kit's Godot code (MIT) is not used. The players reuse the Mini Characters in games/golf/.
1.8.1 — Mini Golf grows to five themed courses, and you pick your battle team.
- Five Mini Golf courses, 25 holes. Meadow Greens (4), Windmill Lane (5) and Castle Keep (6) are joined by Desert Canyon and Snowy Peak (5 holes each). Every course has its own scenery and mood: a sky gradient with fog, an island dressed with Kenney's CC0 Nature Kit props (trees, flowers, cacti, rocks, fences, crops, a stone column; snow-dusted on the peak), per-theme sunlight with real shadows and a tint on the felt. The course cards list holes, par, the mood and what's in the course.
- Varied holes. The windmill's blades now block the doorway while one sweeps past, hills roll a weak putt back, sliding gates cross the lane, bumpers kick the ball off harder than a wall, sand drags, ice glides, and water is a hazard (+1 stroke, back to your last lie). Blades and gates follow a shared shot clock: a putt carries the phase it left at, so it replays identically on every client and on the Arena server. The fixed-step integer physics stays line-for-line identical in games/golf.js and backend/app/golf.py, and the golden/parity vectors now cover every surface and obstacle at random clock phases.
- Battle team picker. Creature Battles and the Creature Duel get a team builder: every Pokémon you've unlocked in the Pokédex, at the highest stage you've reached, with its real sprite, types and four moves. Pick up to 6, put your lead first and save (locally, in the Valley save); with nothing saved, battles use your working and idle sessions as before. Duels still send only species and stage numbers per member; the server derives everything else and now clamps the stage.
- Arena backend needs a deploy for the new courses and obstacles (no database migrations).
- Third-party assets: 29 more CC0 models from Kenney's Nature Kit 2.1 and three more Minigolf Kit pieces in games/golf/, with the Nature Kit license added to games/golf/LICENSE-kenney.txt. Still served only from 127.0.0.1, only when Mini Golf opens.
- Privacy: a golf shot now also carries the shot clock's phase (an integer); the saved team is species numbers in your local save.
1.8.0 — Valley v2: real Pokémon battles, a new fishing pond and 3D Mini Golf, with butter-smooth multiplayer.
- Pokémon-style battles. Creature Battles (solo) and the live Creature Duel now use real Pokémon data: species, types, base stats, level-up movesets and the type chart, generated from Pokémon Showdown (MIT) by tools/build_pokedata.mjs into games/pokedata.js and backend/app/data/pokemon.json. A battle screen with HP bars, move menus, switching, animated attacks and a battle log. In a duel the Arena runs the same damage engine (backend/app/pokebattle.py, parity-tested against the browser) and both players pick at once: your pick shows at once, the other player's "is ready" appears as soon as they choose, late picks get a 2 s grace instead of a strike, animations don't eat the turn timer, a player who drops gets 20 s to come back (their seat is kept, with a countdown for the opponent), and an ending missed while offline is replayed when they return.
- Fishing redesign. A pixel-art pond whose fish are modelled on 16 real species (sizes from FishBase), a charge-and-cast aim, a hook window and a reel meter, treasure chests and a catch card. The shared dock shows everyone's line live: casts, bites and hooks appear one round trip later, slots glide when people join, the room goal and boss fish HP ease instead of jumping, the server rolls fish, points and chests (a "perfect" reel is cosmetic), and a player who leaves takes their line with them.
- 3D Mini Golf (solo or with friends). Three courses (Meadow Greens, Windmill Lane, Castle Keep; 15 holes) built from Kenney's CC0 Minigolf Kit, with a golfer per player (Kenney Mini Characters) who walks to the ball, aims and putts. In an Arena room everyone plays the same hole at once and the server rolls every putt with integer physics that each browser replays bit-for-bit, so all players see the same roll. Smooth multiplayer: your own putt starts the instant you release (the server only confirms it), other golfers are drawn from a jitter-buffered timeline of their positions (no stutter or teleporting), position updates are small, sequenced and rate-limited by a per-player token bucket, the server fans out to a game's lobby concurrently with a per-socket timeout, and a dropped room socket shows "Reconnecting…", rejoins the game lobby automatically and gets your scorecard back. Falls back to a 2D map view when WebGL isn't available. Third-party assets (new, flagged for review): three.js r186 (MIT) is vendored unminified in games/vendor/ (only import paths rewritten; tools/vendor_three.py reproduces it) and the CC0 Kenney models live in games/golf/ with their license text; both load only from 127.0.0.1 and only when Mini Golf opens. The /games/ route now also serves vendor/<name>.js and golf/<name>.glb|json|png (strict allowlist, one folder level, ETag-revalidated). Privacy: golf messages carry only shot integers, positions on the course, a character id and an animation id.
- Smoother multiplayer everywhere. One reconnect shell for every Valley game: after a socket drop it shows "Reconnecting…", rejoins the game's lobby on the new socket and resyncs from the server's snapshot, and holds a game's moves until that rejoin so none are refused. The Arena room socket now retries 250-750 ms after a blip (it used to wait 5 s), backs off from 1 s to 30 s with jitter after that, retries when a ticket request fails, and retries at once when the browser comes back online. A quick rejoin no longer fires a "joined" toast for the whole room, and a duel pick made right after a reconnect is kept.
- Arena backend needs a deploy for the duel engine, the new pond and Mini Golf (no database migrations). Until then, solo games are unaffected, the shared dock falls back quietly where the old server differs, Mini Golf says the server doesn't support it yet, and live duels need the new server.
- Third-party data and assets, all vendored (no new runtime requests): three.js r186 (MIT), Kenney Minigolf Kit and Mini Characters (CC0), Pokémon Showdown data (MIT), FishBase numbers (cited). The optional "pokemon" creature pack still hotlinks its sprites as before. Licenses are in games/vendor/, games/golf/ and LICENSES/.
- Privacy: multiplayer messages carry only game moves (casts, picks, shot integers, course positions, a team of species/stage numbers and species names); nothing from transcripts.
1.7.0 — One-click update. A new Update button in the top bar shows when new commits are waiting ("Update · 3 new", with the commit list on hover) and, on click, pulls them and restarts Claude HQ, then reloads the page. It only ever fast-forwards: it refuses if you have local edits in the Claude HQ folder or your branch has diverged, so it never merges or discards anything. Under the launchd agent it restarts through launchctl kickstart; otherwise it re-executes itself. Also in this release (merged since 1.6.1):
- Cost is now right. Usage was counted once per transcript line instead of once per API message (about 2× too high) and Opus 5.5 was priced at the old $15/$75 instead of $4/$20; 1-hour cache writes now cost 2× input. Historical cost figures drop accordingly (#52).
- Scanner fixes: image prompts count again, "billing"/"rate limit" in a reply no longer flags a tab for 6h, Esc interrupts aren't prompts, session ids on GET routes are validated (#52).
- Needs you, for real: an unanswered question or plan approval marks a tab "Question" / "Plan approval"; a long-open permission-gated tool shows a "permission?" hint (#56).
- Safer local state: atomic 0600 writes with corrupt-file quarantine, Close only targets live Claude tabs, POST bodies are size-capped (#51).
- Live cards stay fresh without rebuilding every 1.5s; quest and voice fixes (#55).
- Arena hardening: refuses the default secret key, device list/revoke and idle expiry, ingest caps, server-derived quest rewards, /health returns 503 when the database is down (#53). Needs a backend deploy with ARENA_SECRET_KEY set. Privacy: the update check runs git fetch against your own remote; nothing else is sent.
1.6.1 — Tag friends from the Arena. In Cali Tuesdays, type @ in the seat box to autocomplete people from the Arena (avatar, name and exact handle); the list narrows as you type, and a plain name also offers matching Arena people. Before, any @text was accepted and shown as tagged, but the server matches handles exactly and refuses the whole order on an unknown one: now a tag that isn't on the Arena is flagged on its plate and stops checkout with a clear message. Click a name at the table to tag, re-tag or untag that person (picking someone already seated merges the two plates). Count badges on a crowded plate no longer hide behind other food. Privacy: no new egress. The diner reads the Arena board through the local proxy (the same read the Arena tab makes) and shows the avatars it lists; nothing new is sent.
1.6.0 — Cali Tuesdays gets its own diner. The taco log moves out of the Arena into a Cali Tuesdays tab (key 9): a retro taqueria with 100% original pixel art drawn at runtime (no photos, no new network calls). A food-court stall (a 3D-lettered sign, tiled walls, menu boards, a steel counter of food pans) holds the menu as food you can pick up (the four mild/wild × hard/soft tacos, burrito, rice and salad bowls, quesadilla, nachos, tostada, chips & salsa, guacamole, churros, soda, iced tea); drag it onto a friend's plate (mouse, pen or touch), or click a food and then a plate, and click food on a plate to take one back. A thermal-paper receipt keeps the running TT, the pooled buy-1-get-1 and TPP; Checkout logs the dinner (one request id per dinner, safe to retry), stamps it PAID and refreshes the arcade hi-score board, which flags who moved, shows each person's favorite dish, counts down to the next monthly season and crowns last season's champion. The table survives a reload. Backend: diners can now record other dishes besides tacos (stored and reported, never priced or scored: the board still ranks Tuesdays, then tacos), a lastseason board window, and per-person favorites. Needs a backend deploy with a migration (an added column); until then the diner logs tacos only and says so on the receipt.
1.5.0 — The General Store. The store moves out of the Arena into its own Store tab (key 8): a Stardew-inspired pixel-art shop with 100% original art drawn at runtime (no assets, no network): a window that follows your local time of day, the season and the day's weather, a wall calendar and clock, shelves stocked with what's for sale, and Katie behind the counter, who greets you, chats, reacts to what you buy and dozes after 11pm (ring the bell). Pet Biscuit the shop cat, build friendship hearts, and hear WebAudio blips, chimes and a purr (with a store-only mute). The menu is a wood-and-parchment shop list with category tabs, item tooltips, a rolling coin counter, the daily claim, and a bag you feed creatures from. 21 foods (up from 4): 9 sold year-round plus 3 seasonal ones per season (UTC calendar), including a Hot Pot (4 🪙, +3h) and a Honey Elixir revive that wakes a fainted creature nearly rested. One in-stock food a day is the special, a coin off. Stock, prices and the special are enforced by the Arena server; an Arena that hasn't updated yet keeps selling the original four and shows the rest as sold out. Shift-click buys up to five; a lost purchase retries with the same quantity. The creature drawer now lists only snacks you own (plus the best one to buy). Needs a backend deploy: no migration, catalog only.
1.4.0 — Customizable Trainer avatar. Build your own trainer — a Pokémon-style character creator from 100% original, generated SVG parts (skin, hair style + color, outfit + color, headwear, accessory, background, expression; ~5.5M combinations) in Settings → Trainer look or the ✎ on the Trainer Card. It becomes your identity/logo across HQ, starting with the Trainer Card (its first-ever avatar). Deterministic and dependency-free (trainerSVG sits beside monsterSVG); the spec is a tiny 9-int array stored in config.json (mirrored to localStorage for instant boot); non-builders get a distinct auto-derived trainer from a stable, non-transcript key. No copyrighted assets — invented parts only. Arena leaderboard integration (showing friends' trainers) ships next and needs a backend deploy.
1.3.1 — Per-install shiny. Which species are shiny is now seeded by a per-install salt (.dex-seed, git-ignored), so friends sharing an Arena no longer all see the identical set of shiny species. Shiny stays a stable, deterministic per-species trait (live cards still always match the Pokédex) — it just differs from one machine to the next. No data crosses the wire; shiny is computed locally and was never shared.
1.2.4 — Polish & efficiency pass. Battery/CPU: all recurring data-fetch loops (the 5s fleet poll + the analytics/pokedex/quests/trainer/arena timers) now fully idle when the browser tab is hidden and refresh instantly when you return, so a backgrounded dashboard stops hammering the network. Clash pack: the next troop level is preloaded so evolution level-ups swap with no flash, and all creature <img>s now decode off the main thread (decoding=async) to cut scroll jank. Error visibility: uncaught errors and rejected promises are now logged to the console (and shown as a toast when localStorage.hq_debug="1"), instead of vanishing silently.
1.2.3 — Clash of Clans creature pack (Settings → Creature pack). Sessions render as real Clash troops, and each one evolves through that troop's own in-game levels (1 → its real max, e.g. Barbarian 1→12, Golem 1→13) instead of the 5 generic stages — every level shows the troop's actual level artwork, hotlinked at runtime from a community dataset (chiefpansancolt/clash-of-clans-data) via jsDelivr. Nothing copyrighted is bundled in the repo; only a troop slug + level number is ever requested (same model as the PokéAPI-sprite packs), a missing level steps down to the nearest one, then to a drawn SVG. Troops animate with a CSS march / attack loop — note that real in-game frame animations aren't available as hotlinkable per-level assets (those are Supercell's proprietary sprite/Spine files), so the motion is CSS, not game frames. Replaces the short-lived standalone Troops tab. Sits on top of the freshly merged Arena private rooms + quests/achievements (PR #32).
Animation note: an exhaustive multi-source search (Giphy/Tenor direct GIFs, GitHub Spine/sprite-sheet repos, Clash Royale frame dumps, Fandom animated-webp, Lottie) confirmed there is no source that is animated and hotlinkable and uniform-per-troop and covers all ~32 troops and supports per-level and is official/consistent art. Real-motion options (curated Giphy GIFs, Clash-Royale sprite frames) all sacrifice per-level + full coverage + official art, so the official per-level PNGs + CSS motion remain the best fit. A curated Giphy overlay (real GIF where hand-picked, static per-level fallback elsewhere) is a documented opt-in if real motion is ever required.
1.2.2 — Creature/evolution pass. New Game+: a new session of a species you've already evolved now starts at that grown form (incl. mega at Apex) instead of resetting to Egg. Fixed the 3D-sprite flicker (lead with the Gen-6 X/Y animated sprite, which covers every species used, so the SwSh-404→swap flash is gone). New 🧬 Evolution line preview in the session drawer (full base→final line + mega node). Evolution moment is now a ~10s cinematic with a game-style evolving animation (silhouette flicker → white flash → reveal) and broadcasts notable evolutions (final form / mega) to the Arena leaderboard. The evolve progress bar tracks real growth, independent of the New Game+ display floor. Added CONTRIBUTING.md + AGENTS.md engineering standards.
1.2.1 — UI polish pass (PR #30) and an Arena "persistent nudger" siren (#24), plus self-hosting/ops tooling for the Arena server: docker-compose + Caddy, a VPS bootstrap, an ACL-gated containerized deploy panel, pull-based auto-deploy, and an alternative Rust Arena backend (backend-rs/). Local dashboard is unchanged in behavior. Thanks @shreyash73, @hetnxik.
1.2.0 — Big Arena expansion (all opt-in): lobby voice & video (WebRTC), chat with server-side history + rate-limiting, @-mention autocomplete/highlight + @channel/@here, nudges (subtle side-toast; offline nudges to reach friends with the tab closed), screen sharing, live status + unread badge + call shortcuts, and the 6 key mapped to the Arena view. Plus a test suite (tests/, backend/tests/) and a CI workflow. Thanks @shreyash73 and contributors.
1.1.1 — Arena fixes: SSL error on python.org Python, a blank-dashboard startup crash (ARENA declared before first setView), and stopped hijacking browser shortcuts (thanks @hetnxik).
1.1.0 — Editable Trainer name (thanks @SwastikTripathi, #1), smart Insights engine, weekly digest, event log, project deep-dive, installable PWA, and a perf/dead-code hardening pass.
1.0.0 — Initial release: live fleet view, full-history search + transcript reader, analytics, daily digests, and the Pokémon-style collection / Gym / quests layer.

Contributors

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to Claude HQ:

@RoString36222 — creator & maintainer (fleet view, search, analytics, digests, the creature / evolution / Mega system, the Village, the Valley games, the 3D HQ and Arena City, HQ Notch, and the HQ 2.x releases)
@hetnxik (Het Naik) — the Arena (#2): multiplayer leaderboard, seasons and game rooms; self-hosting and ops (docker-compose + Caddy, VPS bootstrap, the containerized deploy panel, pull-based auto-deploy and the deploy console, #23–#38, #94–#111); Cali Tuesdays (#36); the Rust Arena (#90–#93) and the Rust HQ server dashboard-rs (#109); Arena City on a grid (#110); the Rust-only backend restructure (#117, #119); and HQ 3: the 3D Arena City, Cities with your own island, navigation and rivers, and the transport network (#125, #126)
@SwastikTripathi — editable Trainer name (#1); Arena fixes for the blank-dashboard crash, SSL on python.org Python and browser-shortcut hijacking (#3, #4); nudges, chat @-mentions and the publish-health dot (#7–#24); unit tests + CI (#5); the daily budget alert (#6); creature fatigue and Poke Coins (#31); Arena rooms, quests & achievements (#32); the General Store (#41); and the Cali diner tab (#58, #60)
@shreyash73 (Shreyash Shanbhag) — Arena lobby chat with history (#10, #14), the voice channel with video, screen sharing and call shortcuts (#12, #20, #22), the sidebar-shell redesign with the sessions-first Live view and thinking orbs (#30), and the "haan yeaaah" button (#39)
@MustafaAsad198 — Cursor sessions (#95), the space-jump avatar in the HQ (#101), Strikezone (#105, #113), its disasters (#124) and the strike zone warden (#127)
@J-Karthikeyan — the soundboard with browser uploads (#40), the account board (#116) and account standings (#122)

Made with Claude Code.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Mini Golf, Kart Racing, Platformer Rush and Blaster Arena use three.js (MIT, games/vendor/LICENSE-three.txt) and models from Kenney — Minigolf Kit, Mini Characters, Nature Kit, Starter Kit Racing, Starter Kit 3D Platformer and Starter Kit FPS — which are public domain (CC0, games/golf/LICENSE-kenney.txt, games/kart/LICENSE-kenney.txt, games/platformer/LICENSE-kenney.txt, games/fps/LICENSE-kenney.txt). Thank you, Kenney!

Pokémon names and sprites are the property of Nintendo / Game Freak / The Pokémon Company; the "pokemon" creature pack hotlinks sprites from the public PokéAPI sprite library for personal use only. Use the built-in original "monsters" pack to avoid third-party assets entirely.

Valley battle data (species, types, base stats, level-up moves and the type chart in games/pokedata.js and backend/data/pokemon.json) is generated by tools/build_pokedata.mjs from Pokémon Showdown (MIT, © 2011-2026 Guangcong Luo and other contributors; see LICENSES/pokemon-showdown-MIT.txt). Battle sprites use the same PokéAPI sprite library (repository CC0; image content © The Pokémon Company) and the PkParaiso host the 3D pack already uses. This is a non-commercial fan feature.

Fish sizes and length-weight coefficients in games/fishart.js: FishBase (Froese & Pauly, eds.). Only numeric facts are used, cited per species in the source; no FishBase text or images are bundled.

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
.github/workflows		.github/workflows
LICENSES		LICENSES
backend		backend
dashboard-rs		dashboard-rs
docs		docs
games		games
notch		notch
ops		ops
tests		tests
tools		tools
ui		ui
.gitignore		.gitignore
AGENTS.md		AGENTS.md
CHANGELOG.md		CHANGELOG.md
CONTRIBUTING.md		CONTRIBUTING.md
LICENSE		LICENSE
README.md		README.md
deploy-vps.sh		deploy-vps.sh
index.html		index.html

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⚡ Claude HQ

🚀 Quick start

Requirements

Install and run

Run it always-on (auto-start at login)

Update

Optional: HQ Notch (macOS)

✨ Features

Mission Control and the 3D HQ

Live

Search and session detail

Analytics

Creatures: Pokédex, Gym, Quests and Trainer

Village

Store and Cali Tuesdays

The Valley (games)

Workshop and Compete

Music

Arena social

The 3D City

The archipelago and islands

HQ Notch

Quality of life and accessibility

🏙️ The 3D City and City Gen v4

🔒 Privacy & security

🏆 Arena (multiplayer) — optional

What is shared

Connecting

Self-hosting

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🗂️ Files and the HTTP API

HTTP API (all 127.0.0.1 only)

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