Release Scaling Laws - 0.7.0 - The last free build · HuckleR2003/ScalingLaws-AI

This is the last free build of Scaling Laws. Everything after this one is on Steam and costs money. The game stays downloadable here until that day, and everyone who has ever sent me a report keeps it for free afterwards.

The game now opens in English on every machine. It used to ask Windows what language you speak, which meant the one build that goes out to the world was a different game depending on whose desk it was on. Polish is the first row on the settings sheet and the choice is remembered.

Download: ScalingLaws_0.7.0_Windows.zip, 165 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 0.6.2 campaign loads and keeps its history. The format is v74 and every step up to it 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.

The game's page, and where Steam will appear: pcworkman.dev/hck-labs/scaling-laws

The big three

You can let the cluster out when nobody is using it.
A research desk opens eight bought levels, from 1% to 3% of the fleet a day at the first up to 15% to 30% at the top.
The whole ladder is 4,320 research points and $2,640,000.

This exists because of a measurement rather than an idea.
The campaign probe reported serving load at 0% for eight straight years while capacity sat at 200 to 3,082 times demand, and a fleet bill of $5.8M a day against 4% utilisation in January 2024, with nothing anywhere on screen showing a player that number.
Three properties keep it from becoming a rebate on overspending, and the first is arithmetic rather than tuning.
Capacity resells at half what it costs, so renting twice what you need and running the finished ladder still leaves you with $139,535,969 against $269,977,787 for renting what you need.
The cap is a share of the whole fleet and never of the surplus, so it is bounded by construction. And what you sell is gone for the day at both readings of the serving slice, because selling capacity and still printing the user count it would have served is a lie the screen tells itself.
Finished, it takes 14.7% off what the company spends, inside the 4% to 20% the brief asked for. The node is optional, and all seven probe operators came back on their previous figures to the dollar, so nothing changes for a player who never buys it.

Not every account is a person, and the game finally says so.
There are two sides to this and they cost completely different things, which is the whole mechanic. A research ladder recognises duplicates and leaves alone the ones that are paying. A hard ban you switch on yourself catches 80% of them and cannot tell a freeloader from a customer, so it turns paying people away and charges your standing every day it is on.
So these are not a weak lever and a strong one.
They are different tools, and the third place in this project that has needed that shape.
The first version of this billed duplicate subscriptions outright and made multi-accounting a bonus: every scripted operator came back 9% to 83% richer than before duplicates existed, because a surplus fleet serves extra subscriptions for nothing. The probe is the only reason that did not ship. Seats are billed from the untouched world now, so a company that has done nothing scores exactly 1.0.
A player paid eighty million dollars and the game never admitted it.
The own-datacenter tier asks for $80,000,000 in the bank and costs exactly $80,000,000 to commission, so paying for it dropped the company under its own gate in the same tick. The ladder went back to demanding the money that had just left, and the compute page, which picks the tier its hardware cards buy into by asking the same question, quietly sold everything into colocation instead.
Colocation stops at 2,500 kW against the datacenter's 40,000, so a player already near that ceiling saw every purchase refused and from their chair the button simply did nothing.
Francisco reported it twice before the second description made the second half findable.
And the research requirement existed only on the screen: TryOrderDatacenter read the catalog straight and never asked the research tree, so the gate the ladder draws was a suggestion to anything calling the simulation directly.

Added

A spare-capacity desk, eight levels, priced against how short of accelerators the world is on the day rather than at a flat rate.
It pays in the 2023 to 2026 shortages and pays almost nothing in a glut, which makes it a timing decision rather than a rebate.
Duplicate-account recognition on its own research ladder, and a hard ban with a two-press arm so it cannot be switched on by a stray click.
Four things that actually happened to this market are on the wire, on their own dates, and the last of the four moves demand the other way rather than piling on.
A policy page reachable from the company name in the top bar. The management desk used to be reachable from one button on one banner and nothing else pointed at it.

Changed

The model creator gives its bottom band back to the page. The segmented bar under the stage drew its unlit half as solid blocks the width of the screen, which read as a slab of furniture; it is a faint ghost of a track now and sits on the page edge.
The back and forward buttons came down from 50px to 40px.
The fleet page opens on the decision instead of a photograph. The two tier doors take the space a stock picture of server racks was using, and they sit above the bill they explain.
The other way round you read a figure before knowing which arrangement produced it.
The model hub is drawn rather than photographed. It is the door into the creator and nothing else, so it sits on the same blueprint the creator does. You open a hub laid out on graph paper and arrive on graph paper.
Silicon for the cellar no longer asks for a shipped model. A player handed the server room at the end of the tutorial had every BUY in the parts shop refused with a sentence about releasing a model, which is a different subject from buying four accelerators. Two testers tripped on it in a week. The five million dollars stays and is now the whole of the gate.
Settings have categories down the left instead of one long sheet.
A research notification scrolls the board to the node it is talking about, rather than naming it and leaving you to find it.

Fixed

A model's revenue chart is that model's revenue. The lead banner was handed the company's daily net, which sums every cash line in the ledger, so a grant, a loan drawdown, the payroll and a tax demand were all drawn as columns of one model's month inside a card with that model's name on it. A company that took state money on a Tuesday showed its model having an extraordinary Tuesday. Reported by Francisco, and it was the third correction of that one card: each of the first two fixed the part somebody had looked at, and nothing ever measured which series a banner was handed.
The creator no longer declares you the winner of a race nobody has entered. With no rival release on the board the bar drew full and green for a company that had shipped nothing.
A cabinet slot could never be clicked, in any build, ever. The code decided whether a slot accepts a click before anything assigned it a handler, so the answer was always no: a card put into a cabinet could not be taken out again, and the tooltips explaining the slots never appeared either. Reported by Samanta.
The fan button was dead. It disabled itself when the cabinet had no room, and cabinets refill themselves, so there was never room again. It held the single most useful sentence in the server room: take a card out and the fan goes in the slot it leaves. A disabled control in this toolkit dispatches no pointer events, so it could not explain itself. Third time that has shipped here.
The tutorial strip covered the bottom of every page. The space reserved for it was a constant nobody had ever measured, and the strip is taller than that. It measures itself now. Reported by Samanta.
Two models showed the same user count to the decimal place. The market was asked about interest in a whole kind of model and the answer was handed in full to each product separately, so two general models held twice everybody between them. Reported by Natalia.
Things vanished while you were reading them. The research card closed on every day rollover, which at normal speed is every second and a half, so a four month programme could not be read to the end of a sentence. The same for the insight cards and the page position. Reported by Natalia.
The topicality bar says which of its two halves is holding it down, instead of only that it is down.
The cabinet shop refused in silence, and a commissioned datacenter no longer closes when its own price leaves the bank.

Under the hood

1,619 EditMode tests across 186 fixtures, 87 PlayMode across 17. Measured in TestResults.xml rather than remembered, both suites green, no inconclusive cases.
The economy is untouched and that was measured rather than assumed. The deep campaign probe comes back on its previous peak cash to the dollar on every operator. The two fixtures that exist to catch a balance change 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 loading it does not change its future.
Parts of the city map are not in this build and say so on a yellow badge rather than being quietly hidden. I would rather ship a visible gap than a tidy lie.

What happens now

The game stays here, free, until it is on Steam. When the page goes up, the button to it will be on pcworkman.dev/hck-labs/scaling-laws, which is the one address worth bookmarking: it always points at wherever the current build lives.

PC Workman has always been free and stays that way.

If you download it, break it.

Most of what is fixed above was found by five people who wrote to me for nothing. One of them found twelve finished systems no player could reach. One found a graph that was reporting my bank account. One found a button that had been dead since the day it was written.

So the one thing worth telling me is where you stopped playing and what you were trying to do at the time, not whether you liked it. That is the only thing I cannot measure from here.

The report button is in the main menu and in the pause menu, in any language you like. It sends the build number and how far into your campaign you got, and nothing else.

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Scaling Laws - 0.7.0 - The last free build

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