The Weekend Update

Intro:

Hi everyone, big set of release notes below (one new feature added and a string of more minor polish and an imporant hotfix for a bug introduced last week with the new navigation menu).

Thanks for playing everyone :)

Hotfix – Save load crash

Fixed an bug where loading a save could show “Something went wrong” (React error #185) instead of opening the game.

This could happen after recent navigation update, especially if you had customised your tab layout. The UI could get stuck in a loop when restoring your sidebar on Continue.

If you hit this, update to this new version and try loading again. Sorry for the trouble, and thanks to everyone who reported it.

Section 1 - New Venture, the fragrance house

What this is

Fragrance House is a full luxury parfumerie passion project. You unlock it as a mogul, found your own maison, compose scents blind in the atelier, run production, sell into cities worldwide, fight 18 rival houses, and grow through R&D, finance, and extra sales channels. It lives under Empire → Ventures → Fragrance House in the sidebar.

This is just V1 of Fragrance house, more to come in future updates!

Getting started

1. Unlock the passion project

Path: Sidebar → Empire workspace → Mogul Profile (under Command) → scroll to Passion Projects → Fragrance House

• Costs $8M company cash (tier 1, Luxury maison)

• Needs Mogul rank

• Ongoing run cost: starts at $12k/week

• Once bought, the Fragrance House tab appears under Empire → Ventures

You can also jump there from Mogul Profile cards after purchase (Open Fragrance House).

2. Found your maison

Path: Fragrance House tab → Found maison (or Mogul Profile card if you bought but have not founded yet)

The founding wizard lets you set:

• Maison name, monogram, slogan

• HQ country (France, UK, USA, Italy, Japan, Germany, UAE) with proper country names and flags via the country picker

• HQ city/market within that country

• Logo shape, glyph, and colour palette with live preview

Cost: $8M personal cash You start with: $3.5M maison cash, reputation 32, and 18 rival maisons seeded into the world.

Short on personal cash? The wizard shows a Top up personal cash panel inline. You can also use:

Path: Founder Phone dock (bottom of screen) → Bank app or Path: Mogul Profile → withdraw/transfer panels

The hub (11 tabs)

Once founded, open Fragrance House and use the tab bar:

Header shows your logo, maison cash, reputation, and market count each week.

Atelier: blind accord mixing

Path: Fragrance House → Atelier

This is the creative core. No more raw slider mixing.

1. New fragrance opens the compose wizard:

   • Audience (women / men / unisex)

   • Accord lab: pick 2 to 4 accords from 24 ingredients (bergamot, oud, iris, vetiver, etc.). Locked accords need R&D first.

   • Concentration (eau de parfum / parfum / extrait)

   • Packaging (bottle art, box, label colours)

   • Commit to send the formula to the perfumer

2. The perfumer blends blind. You do not see the final scent profile until reveal.

3. In the line-up panel:

   • Reveal opens the reveal modal (flavour summary, identity tags, projected critic score, bottle preview)

   • Launch pushes the SKU live (max 6 fragrances in the line-up)

R&D unlocks more accords and bottle shapes over time.

Production and pricing

Path: Fragrance House → Production

Each SKU card shows:

• Unit cost with week-on-week COGS change (spikes flagged in amber)

• Recommended retail and live margin

• Retail price slider in real dollars (not a mystery “price index” anymore), with elasticity hints

• Suggested price nudge when raw material costs spike

• Batch presets, Fill week, Smart batch, manual unit input

• Queue production and a visible production queue

• Auto-produce toggle for recurring weekly runs

• Delist SKU for fading or low-margin products

Facility upgrades (no longer instant):

Path: Production → Upgrade facility (modal)

Build progress also shows on Maison tab while upgrading.

Markets: map, intel, and distribution

Path: Fragrance House → Markets

• AddedInteractive world map with heat modesSales or Demand . Click a pin to enter a new city.

• Enter market wizard picks distribution mode:

  • Department store (broad reach)

  • Duty free (travel hubs)

  • Maison boutique (prestige, higher cost, up to 12 boutiques total)

• Best performers and Needs attention cards (stockouts, slowing trends)

• Region rollup by country

• Full market presence table: mode, strength, units/wk, projected demand, trend arrow, revenue

• Market intelligence panel:

  • Filter: Prospects / Researched / All

  • $20k market research for demand fit scores

  • $40k for a 4-week pop-up test counter

  • Shows demand band (Low / Medium / High), profile fit %, audience fit %

Cities pull from the global city catalog plus gym market overlap, so there is a large pool of real-world style destinations.

Marketing

Path: Fragrance House → Marketing → Launch campaign

Three campaign types:

• Brand awareness (regional maison lift)

• Launch push (tied to a specific SKU)

• Seasonal push (bonus when season aligns)

See Regional brand strength bars per region, active campaigns with ROI-style cards, and weekly spend totals.

Behind the scenes, influencer gifts and word-of-mouth boosts feed into demand (sim layer, not a separate UI tab yet).

R&D

Path: Fragrance House → R&D

Three research tracks:

• Flacon design (unlock bottle shapes beyond the starter classic column)

• Scent accords (unlock rare ingredients like oud, ambergris, tobacco)

• Production (COGS reduction, +10% capacity, raw material hedge)

You run one active project at a time with cost, duration, progress bar, and a detail modal explaining what you unlock. Starter kit: bergamot, cedar, rose absolute + classic column bottle.

Finance

Path: Fragrance House → Finance

• Maison cash, weekly revenue/profit, gross margin, runway (weeks of cash at current burn)

• Cost breakdown bars (production, carrying, marketing, facility, distribution, web hosting, clearance disposal)

• Profit history chart

• SKU margin table (revenue, COGS, margin % per fragrance)

• Regional revenue top 8

• Raw material market with category movers (citrus oils, florals, woods, etc.) and margin pressure warnings

Overview tab also surfaces the blended raw materials index on the KPI grid.

Channels (new sales routes)

Path: Fragrance House → Channels

Three sub-sections:

1. Clearance Manual outlet dumps or auto-clearance rule (min stock, fading weeks, recovery %)

2. DTC Web Store Launch for $180k, tiered upgrades, weekly hosting, toggle SKUs on/off

3. Retail Partners 8 fictional partner chains (Luxe Counter Co., Travel Essentials Group, Metro Beauty Collective, etc.) with slot fees, demand multipliers, and fit hints

Rivals and the prestige board

Path: Fragrance House → Rivals

• Global prestige · Top 5 leaderboard at the top (your rank shown even if you are outside top 5)

• 18 competing maisons with archetypes (heritage, niche, masstige, oriental, celebrity), procedural logos, strength, market count, latest launch

• Click a rival for a profile modal: CEO, founding story, signature scents, aggression stat

Rival sim stuff that can hit you:

• Price wars on your shelves

• Hostile acquisition offers for your boutiques (fight for $150k or accept cash on Overview)

• Award season events

History

Path: Fragrance House → History

Filter chips: All, Founded, Launches, Production, Markets, Marketing, Rivals, Events

Everything logs to a week-stamped timeline.

Maison identity

Path: Fragrance House → Maison

• Large logo hero with HQ flag and city

• Reputation meter

• Brand positioning sliders: Niche ↔ Mass, Classic ↔ Bold, Accessible ↔ Prestige

• Facility tier, capacity, weekly overhead, pending upgrade timer

Empire CEO autopilot

Path: Sidebar → Empire → CEOs → assign/configure Fragrance House sector CEO

When a CEO is running the sector hands-on, Fragrance House shows a hands-off notice at the top (they handle launches and markets). You can still open the screen to watch, but direct control is limited per empire CEO rules.

Fragrance House also appears on the business portfolio / empire command surfaces with markets and SKU KPIs.

Political layer hook

If you play politics, maison visibility (reputation, home-country market strength, word of mouth) feeds into the political electorate luxury resonance bridge. Strong luxury presence in your home country can nudge cohort approval over time.

For example, if you arrange a meeting with a character, offer them a perfume!

Achievements (Trophy Room)

Eight fragrance achievements to hunt:

Random weekly events (Overview)

Watch Active events on Overview for things like ingredient shortage, counterfeit scandal, award season, allergen recall, collaboration offers, luxury downturn, travel boom, and markdown pressure.

Quick reference: key numbers for Fragrance House Venture:

Section 2 - World Tech console popups and console market realism

Click a console on World → Tech for a full breakdown

You can open a read-only popup for any console straight from the global tech view.

How to get there

1. Open Industry & World in the sidebar (the World screen).

2. Switch to the Tech tab.

3. Click either:

   • A card under Top platforms now, or

   • A console chip on the Tech timeline (green = launched, orange = upcoming).

What the popup shows

• Console image, name, and maker

• Status (Active, Retired, Your console, or Coming [year] for unreleased hardware)

• Lifetime installed (total units out in the world, all time)

• Active share (this week) (share of current weekly sales)

• Lifetime share (share of all hardware ever sold, for context)

• MSRP by region

• Lifetime sales by region (NA, EU, Asia) with visual bars

• Hardware specs, 52-week install trend, top games where they exist

Already on the market: use Open in Hardware at the bottom to jump to the full record.

Upcoming on the timeline: specs and launch year only, no sales yet.

Close: Close, click outside, or Escape.

Engine chips on the timeline are not clickable.

Top platforms now (not biggest all-time sales)

World → Tech → Top platforms now used to rank by total install base ever, so ancient machines could stay #1 forever even in 2009.

It now ranks by what is actually selling this week in the current generation:

• Each card shows sold/wk and active share %

• Old era consoles drop off the list

• Empty state if nothing in the current gen sold this week

Market share means "this week", not "since 1991"

Share across World popups and Hardware records now uses active weekly sales among current-gen platforms, not lifetime install base.

You will see both:

• Active share (wk) — this week's slice of the market

• Lifetime share — old cumulative share for context

• Lifetime installed — total units sold all time

Your legacy console can still show a huge lifetime number, but it will not look like it owns 95% of the market in 2009 unless it is genuinely outselling everything right now.

Where to check: World → Tech (click a console) or Hardware → pick a console.

Old hardware fades in demand (you still choose when to retire)

Player consoles are not force-retired. Demand is what changed:

• Older eras sell much less as the industry moves on

• After ~ 12 years, player consoles only move token weekly volume

• Very old NPC consoles effectively stop selling

• New launches from the same maker hurt older boxes from that maker

To retire when ready: Hardware → your console → retire on the record page.

Other fixes

• Contract manufacturing without factories capped at 2,500 units/week (was effectively unlimited)

• Region sales repaired on load when they were far below install base, so bars and numbers match better on long saves

UI polish on World → Tech (look, feel, and clarity)

Clickable platform cards and timeline chips

• Top platforms now cards are proper buttons with hover/focus feedback (lift + accent border).

• Tech timeline console chips work the same (green = launched, orange = upcoming). Engine chips stay non-clickable.

• Path: Industry & World → World → Tech

New console detail popup

• Wide panel in the same style as country profiles, not a raw jump to Hardware.

• Hero: console art, maker logo, name, status badges on a gradient header.

• Stat strip: five labeled boxes (lifetime installed, active share, lifetime share, revenue, launch).

• MSRP: region price pills.

• Regional sales: meter bars (same style as other World briefings).

• Specs block, 52-week install chart, ranked top games list.

• Footer: Close + Open in Hardware.

• Close via X, backdrop click, or Escape.

Hardware record labels aligned

• Active share (wk), Lifetime share, Lifetime installed, Lifetime sales by region so wording matches the popup.

Top platforms section refresh

• Renamed from "Top platforms by install base" to Top platforms now.

• Cards show sold/wk + active share % badges instead of one lifetime number.

• Proper empty state when nothing current-gen sold this week.

Quick reference