Release Scaling Laws - 0.6.2 · HuckleR2003/ScalingLaws-AI

Twelve days, three builds, and the short version is this: rival labs become somebody you work with, the support desk you never asked for has a screen, and the tutorial had been hiding the bottom third of every tab since the day it was written.

Save files from 0.5.0 open here and keep everything.

0.6.0 and 0.6.1 were builds for testers and never came here on purpose, because I knew how much was still wrong with them. This is the first release since 0.5.0 and it carries all of that work.

Download: ScalingLaws-0.6.2-Windows.zip, 164 MB zipped and 436 MB on disk.
Unzip the whole folder and run Scaling Laws.exe. Windows 64 bit. No installer and no launcher.

Saves: a 0.5.0 campaign loads and keeps its history. The format moves from v62 to v71 and every step in between is a real migration rather than a reset. Where a migration has to invent a value the old format never stored, it takes the least flattering reading that is still defensible and writes down what it did.

Most of what is fixed below was found by one person playing with a pen and a piece of paper, and by two players who wrote to me. None of it was found by a test.

The big three

Other laboratories become somebody you work with, not a row on a table.
Relations have been in this game since August and every single thing that moved them was something you did to somebody: a smear, a lawsuit, a poached engineer. Seven recorders, all of them negative. So a player who never attacked anybody sat at Neutral with fourteen labs for fourteen years and the whole system was invisible to them.
There are four things you can now put to a lab: publish a finding together, run a joint evaluation, license your model through their distribution, or buy their capacity. You pay to send it, they answer days later, and a refusal does not give the money back. Each card tells you how likely that lab is to agree before you spend anything, which is what makes it a decision instead of a coin toss.
Sign enough and it becomes an alliance, in three levels at ninety, a hundred and eighty and three hundred and sixty five days. The fee is the small part. The levels are days and cannot be bought. Level two opens joint research, where two labs each pay 0.6 of what one would and the room produces 2.2 times the points, so the money goes about 3.7 times as far. The panel prints that comparison rather than the multiplier, because "31 points a day for $25.2k, alone that would be 14 for $42k" is checkable and "3.7x" is a number you would have to trust me on.
An alliance left alone cools and falls a level on its own. A lab you have ever signed anything with stays in your phone forever, at whatever terms you have fallen to.
A contract took $1.2M off you and did nothing for 270 days.
A distribution licence was built end to end. The line that widens your audience had no caller anywhere in the game, and the line that charges the partner their thirty per cent was named only inside its own catalogue. Both are connected now, together, because wiring the reach without the cut would have handed out twenty two per cent more audience for free.
Then it turned out to have a second layer. The card that reads out the term, their commission, who it reaches and what is left for you was finished and tested, and the slot that holds a contract waiting for your signature has two fillers, and only one of them ever knocked. So the licence you agreed sat in your save with no way to read it. Fifteenth time in this project that a finished mechanism has had no working control on top of it, and the first where the control existed and simply was not called. The guard added for it holds the rule rather than the case: nothing may put a contract in front of a player in silence.
The tutorial had been drawing two thirds of every tab and stopping.
Every screen a new player opened during the tour was cut off about two thirds down, with the window's own colour filling the rest. It was reported as a blue sheet lying over the bottom of the game, which is exactly what it looked like.
The clearance that keeps a page out from under the tour strip was written as padding on the scroller instead of on the page inside it, and a scroller lays its viewport out inside its own padding. So the reserve came out of the visible half rather than the scrollable half: measured at 1920x1080, a 943px page kept a 624px window and the missing 319px was not drawn at all, which also meant you could not scroll down to it. It is on the page now, where the same number makes the page longer instead of the window shorter, and a PlayMode test measures the difference.
I had played past it for days and read it as a background.

Added

The support desk has a tab of its own, with its satisfaction in the name of the tab. It was a strip buried under three other panels, on a screen reached by one button on one banner. Support is the only system in this game that starts without being started: the post simply begins arriving once enough people are being served to have a problem, and ignoring it costs a fifth of how your product is experienced. Nothing anywhere said so, so Emil now rings the day the first letter lands.
The queue counts in letters, not only in hours of work owed. How many are waiting, how long the oldest has been there, and how many the desk has answered. The wait is the queue discipline stated in the unit a person thinks in, computed in one place so the screen and the rule cannot disagree.
Clicking something you cannot use yet now answers you. A card at the foot of the screen says what is missing, shows the research node's own picture, and has one button to the board. Press it and the board rings that node and everything still missing on the way to it, until it is done.
A disabled control cannot explain itself, so nothing here is disabled any more. A shut precision card, a shut deduplication pass and the fan button were all built with the control switched off, and a switched-off element in this interface receives no clicks at all. They stay live and refuse out loud. That includes CONTINUE in the creator, which used to go grey over a reason printed in small type beside it that a playtest never read.
A family programme can be given a head start with research points. Up to thirty per cent off the calendar, two points a day. Points and deliberately not money. Money buying time is the one thing this game's design refuses, and the budget slider already sells quality for money. Points are different in kind: they are only ever earned by finishing work, so spending them says the lab already understands part of what it is about to build. It buys calendar and nothing else, so the cluster still owes the same petaflop days.
The most expensive irreversible click in the game asks first. Commissioning a house architecture is a year and a half of calendar and it used to happen on the click. A card now says how long it runs, what leaves the account today and what is left in the bank. The own datacentre button goes through the same card, and under its price it says how much is missing instead of sitting there greyed out.
A window size, which this game has never offered, plus one line saying what it is drawing: the window, the page the interface is laid out on, the scale between them and the ratio. Every report of a page being cut off came from one machine and every proof render showed the page whole, and until now nothing on any screen could tell those two apart.
The tour pulls a highlighted thing into the middle of the window and lets it travel back over a second and a half. It is a rule rather than a list: anything rung whose centre is outside the middle of the window is pulled, anything already under your eye is left alone. Reduce Motion turns it off.
A badge in the top right when somebody is working with you, opposite the effects badges, because an effect is something happening to you and an arrangement is something you agreed to. It hides entirely when nothing is signed rather than drawing an empty plate.
One tap on the phone skips whatever it is playing. One rule, written once, for every call in the game.

Changed

A bought capacity deal says how much compute it is and how much more that is than you rent. Forty petaflops is a great deal or a rounding error depending on what is already running. The other three arrangements keep their sentence, because what they give is not a quantity and putting a number on it would mean inventing one.
An alliance card names the level it is counting down to and what that level opens. It showed the days and never what they were for, so somebody waiting a hundred and thirteen days for joint research had no way to know that is what they were waiting for. It was reported as the research agreement not existing. It does.
The SERVERS readout in the top bar opens the fleet. It is the one number up there that tells you something is wrong and it had nowhere to send you.
The fan is at the head of the cabinet's inventory. Reported three times. The earlier repair made the window three columns so the button stopped falling off the bottom of the screen, which fixed the symptom and left it among the readings on the right, which is where it was being reported from. The head rather than the foot, because the inventory grows: a company holding a dozen generations of card pushes anything underneath them off the bottom.
A walkthrough you have taken comes off the phone's list. Emil walked you through the server room and then went on offering to walk you through the server room, which reads as the game not having noticed.
The partner's share of a licence has its own line in the books, so the trade is visible from both sides.
A notice carrying a button stays up four times as long. Three seconds is right for a sentence that may be ignored and not enough to see a card, decide it matters and reach the button.

Fixed

A card put into a server cabinet could never be taken out. Clicking a slot is how you take a part back out and it has been the design since the room existed. Whether a slot accepts the mouse was decided by reading the handler, and the window assigned that handler after drawing the cabinet, so every slot in the game had been inert for three builds and the tooltips explaining them had never appeared either. Two lines, in the wrong order. The class owns its own invariant now rather than the caller remembering an order.
Typing the founder's name did not un-refuse the page. The gate was read once when the page was drawn and nothing on that page is rebuilt by typing, so the only way through was to leave and come back.
An unnamed founder could walk three pages forward and then be stopped. The name was asked for on the last page of the creator, which does not have the field on it, so the only sentence the refusal could offer was "go back a page". The founder page refuses its own button now and marks the empty field, and the mark comes down the moment there is a name in it.
There was no way back to the main menu from the creator. The back button on the first page went to the cold open, which is typed text with CONTINUE under it, so the only way out of a campaign you had not started was to start it.
The tour's progress bar never moved. It was built with the strip, and the strip is rebuilt only when the step changes, so the one thing that is meant to be evidence that a wait is a wait sat at the same few per cent for the whole of a family programme.
A family programme reported nothing anywhere. Commissioning one charged the money, closed the page, and left a year and a half of work with no sign of itself on any screen. It has a card in the corner beside the research node, with both marks: what is really done, and how far the calendar alone has run.
The news screen was in English in a Polish campaign, and so were forty five event messages. A catalogue that stores a display string keeps whatever language it was built in. The nineteenth catalogue in this game to be caught doing it.
The glasses sat inside the head. Only the arms cleared the cheekbones. There is now a tool that renders every pair on three faces, because the packs are built at different scales and the placement is a fraction of head height.
The self-audit ladder had two names for every rung, and in Polish one of them was half English. Same rung, two names, nothing connecting them, and a tester read the tile changing as something new appearing.
The precision cards say what this run would take at each setting. Lower precision really does finish sooner, and on a run short enough that every answer rounds to the same whole number of days the screen said nothing at all, so it was reported as the control not working.
PRZEGRZANIE stopped breaking in half. A one word heading in a row takes whatever width is left unless you tell it not to. English never showed it, because OVERHEATING is shorter.
The way out of the opening walked down the screen. The skip button was laid out inside a column that is centred and grows a line at a time, so it moved every time a line landed.
A tester was credited differently in each language. The English line said the website, the Polish line said domains, and the Polish sentence mixed genders inside itself.

Under the hood

1,541 EditMode tests across 176 fixtures and 83 PlayMode across 16, measured from the result files rather than from memory, both green. No EditMode test loads a scene, which is why the suite runs in milliseconds and also why it is blind to every one of the layout faults above.

Save format v71. A 0.5.0 file is nine migrations away and every one of them is a real step.

Three guards were added because of specific holes, and one hole is named rather than quietly patched. A sweep of event types found nine that were raised correctly and read by nothing, so a player signed an alliance, had an offer refused and lost a research programme and the game said none of it. That sweep has a hole of its own: it counts a name appearing anywhere under Scripts/, and the line that raises an event is under Scripts/. Measured, 27 event types are read nowhere but their own raise site. Several of those systems announce themselves through their own state instead, so the honest next step is a review rather than wiring twenty seven cases in an afternoon. It is written down in the changelog so it stays a decision somebody made rather than a guard nobody re-read.

The economy was deliberately not touched. Nothing in these three builds is a balance change, and the two fixtures that exist to catch one are green: PlayabilityTests plays a scripted multi-year campaign and fails the build if a reasonable player could not survive it, and SoakTests replays a saved campaign to prove that loading it does not change its future.

The Steam fund is closed

It was covered on 30 September 2026 at half past six in the morning, by one person, in a single payment, eleven days after it opened. I had written it off after four days and was ready to pay the hundred dollars myself out of taxi money in October.

The card in the game no longer asks for anything, and the two tiers and the button to this page are gone from it.
A closed fund with a live call to action asks for something it cannot accept.

What was promised to whoever paid under those terms still stands: a name in the credits and in the SUPPORTERS section of the menu, and a Steam key on launch day.

The game is free to download until it is on Steam. PC Workman has always been free and stays that way.

If you download it, break it. Tell me what confused you rather than only what crashed, in any language you like. The report button is in the main menu and in the pause menu, and it sends the build number and how far into your campaign you got, and nothing else.

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Scaling Laws - 0.6.2

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