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Changelog

What changed in town, newest first. One line per change; the long version is in the commit history.

Updated 2026-10-1015 min readMarkdown ↗

This page lists the changes to Square Town you can actually see or feel, one line each, newest first: new sights in the town, new rules, fixes and redesigns. Plumbing that nobody notices stays in the commit log. The things that live in town are catalogued in the field guide; the rules are on how it works.

2026-10-10

  • No more white flash over the whole page now and then while you look around a tilted town: when the town changed its rendering resolution to keep up the frame rate, it cleared the picture a frame before drawing the next one.
  • Your square's analytics became its diary: the week told in a sentence, views, clicks, kisses and rides with their last 30 days, a chart since you moved in, every RC car that drives past your square, paper plane that flies over it and paper-round bike that rides by, the papers that land at your door (and whether they made the mailbox), recent moments one by one with the country each came from, milestones, your place in town and a CSV; a deed that hasn't unlocked it sees what's waiting.

2026-10-09

  • Icons are sharp again up close: in the RC car or the paper plane the squares beside you show their full-size icons within a second or two of arriving (they could stay blurry for ten seconds or more, or for good while you drove on), the ones further off follow, and phones now sharpen during a ride too.

2026-10-08

  • The town runs smoother, on phones most of all: a frame takes about a third of the work it used to, because towers that haven't changed are no longer re-checked on every frame and their walls are drawn in fewer, bigger batches.

2026-10-07

  • A site's rivals can stand alone on the map: "on the map" on its card (or "See them on the map" on its rivals page) leaves only the site and its rivals in town, rings the site in gold and every rival in red so you can find them even zoomed all the way out, and frames them all; the bar at the bottom flies to the site, opens the list, or brings everyone back.
  • Every square now knows its rivals: the other sites in town that do the same job for the same people. The card says how many there are and what the cheapest costs to bulldoze, and links to a page per site (/rivals/plausible.io, say) listing them all, the ones with an owner first, each with its own Bulldoze button and one to bulldoze the lot in a single checkout. An AI picks them from what each site says about itself and leaves out add-ons and neighbouring niches.
  • A square now costs $1 to claim (it was free until today). The bill in the claim form still knocks the $10 list price down with its deals, but now it stops at $1, and an empty cell says "Claim this square · $1" when you hover over it. A $1 square costs $2 to evict or bulldoze; squares from the free days still go for $1, and a bulldozed lot reopens at $1. If your site is already in town with nobody's name on it, claiming it is still free.

2026-10-06

  • The paper round: a newspaper bike rides next to the paper plane and the RC car. Everyone gets the same ten squares to deliver to that day, with a beam of light over the next one; throw papers onto the doorsteps (into the mailbox scores best), top up the bag from the bundles lying along the way in a mint glow (the arrow points to one when you run low), and the round ends on a list of the day's squares, each one a way to its card. Other people's bikes ride by in colours of their own, and the live feed says when someone sets off on the round.
  • The stats page keeps time for the paper round too, with its own miniature, a bike with a basket of papers by a mailbox, and its own colour in the chart.

2026-10-05

  • Clicking a site in the live feed flies to its square: the camera zooms right in and turns so no tower hides its favicon, then opens its card (it used to just pan there, leaving you to find one icon among thousands).
  • Nights are darker: about half the towers light up after dark, each with a few of its windows on, so the skyline reads like a town with people in it rather than a switchboard.

2026-10-02

  • The Hall of Clowns opens as a full-screen circus tent: every site without a favicon hangs as its own clown portrait, drawn from its domain name, with how long it has gone without one and a stamp saying whether it can be whacked yet. Tickets at the top count the clowns, the ones in open season, the ones whacked so far and the longest act. The red noses honk.

2026-09-30

  • The paper plane and RC car controls are quieter: pause, reset and back to the map are three small icons in the top right, like in the zen garden, and the extra hint line under the keys is gone. What just happened (Bonk!, Timber!) shows next to the car's name.
  • The RC car hits things now: mailboxes and bins fly off, trees topple over, people get knocked off their feet then dust themselves off and walk on, and the town's cars and vans take a little bump that stops you dead. The street is whole again when you park the car.
  • The RC car hugs the towers: it now bumps into walls with its own shape instead of a wider square around it, so it fits past a building's side, and a glancing hit scrapes along the wall instead of bouncing back. It is a touch smaller too, so it sits right next to the townsfolk.

2026-09-28

  • Empty squares are cobbled now: warm stone setts, round cobbles and flagstones gather into little plazas and lanes between the buildings, with soft grass in between, like the town in its pictures. Every one of them is still free to claim.
  • The RC car can drift: hold Shift (or Drift on a phone) in a turn and the tail swings out, the car slides round the corner sideways with a squeal and leaves skid marks on the cobbles.
  • The stats page keeps time for the rides: how long everyone has spent out in the RC car and the paper plane, told in seconds, minutes, hours, days or years as the clock grows, with a little story to match, a miniature of each vehicle and a chart of the last 30 days.

2026-09-26

  • The paper plane has a sound now (only with sound effects on): each gust of wind gives a soft, quiet whoosh under its wings.

2026-09-25

  • Leaving the RC car or the paper plane (Esc, or the map button) zooms back out over the square you drove or flew to, at the same zoom and angle, so the icon you just found is right there on the map. It used to fly you back to wherever you set off from.
  • The RC car makes sounds now (only with sound effects on): a springy boing when it hops, a plastic thud and rattle when it lands, harder landings louder, and while it drives a faint murmur of little rubber tyres that grows a touch with speed, kept quiet so it doesn't nag on a long drive. There's no engine roar, because it runs on a battery.
  • Back from another tab, the arrow keys (or WASD) carry your plane or car on straight away — before, it sat paused until you found P or Space. A pause you asked for with P still waits for P.
  • You're not the only one out riding any more: other visitors' paper planes and RC cars fly and drive through your town live, each in a colour of its own so you can tell them from yours, splashing and relaunching the way their rider did, and the feed says when someone from somewhere sets off. Two RC cars that meet are bumper cars: drive into someone and you both bounce back with a bonk.

2026-09-24

  • A little RC car joins the paper plane: press the car icon beside the plane, drive with WASD or the arrow keys and tap Space to hop — the jump clears low squares and lands you on rooftops, but real towers are walls you have to drive around, and a lake still means a splash. On a phone, a thumb pad steers.

2026-09-22

  • A paper plane takes you through town in 3D: press the plane icon beside 2D/3D on desktop, steer with WASD or the arrow keys and tap Space for a gust of wind — rooftops give a little lift, the plane settles when you let it glide, and a splash or a trip into the void brings you back to your launch point.

2026-09-20

  • The town drives from the keyboard too: the arrow keys pan, shift+arrows rotate and tilt, + and − zoom, and 0 brings you back to the middle — a held key glides rather than stepping, and the list under "How to get around" and on how-it-works names them all.
  • Kissing your own tower to the moon no longer works: the five-an-hour limit now covers a whole network block, not one address, the nightly sweep keeps at most ten kisses a day per square from any one block and none at all from a block that kissed more than forty times that day, and the nine squares one script had been kissing round the clock for ten days are back to zero on the Most-kissed board.

2026-09-16

  • A yellow Claim a free square button sits in the bar (bottom-left on a phone) and first on the welcome card: press it and the town walks you to the nearest free cell, rings it and offers it with its own Claim button — or click any other empty cell, as before.
  • Resting the mouse on bare ground now says what it is: Free square — click to claim it, or why that cell isn't for sale (a lake, the hills, the Throne's aura, a claim someone else is in the middle of).

2026-09-15

  • Every kind of site in town has its own page: the categories index lists the districts, and each one — AI, dev tools, SaaS and the rest — shows all of its favicons on one flat grid you can sort by views, clicks, kisses or arrival. The category pill on a square's card takes you there.
  • Each district has its own illustration, and the favicons on the buildings are real squares from that category: the AI quarter is an observatory, commerce is a desert bazaar, media is a rainy press district, games is a fairground at night.
  • Hovering a square's kisses button floats a few faint hearts up through it.
  • The card's take-over footer shows the price big: Evict and Bulldoze are two red panels with the dollar amount in large type, each with a faded prop in its corner — a packed suitcase for the evictee, a bulldozer for the flattening — that gets tossed or shoves in when you hover it.
  • A square's card points at its square: while the card is open the favicon you picked wears a gold frame, and a thread runs from the card's edge to that tile and follows it as you pan, zoom or let the town turn — on a phone it rises from the top of the sheet.

2026-09-14

  • On a phone you now arrive in the middle of town, close enough to tell one favicon from the next, instead of on the whole wall squeezed into a mosaic of dots; the 2D and 3D buttons bring you back to that view, and pinching out still reaches the whole town.
  • On a phone a square's card rises from the bottom of the screen as a sheet: scroll it for the rest of the card, swipe it down to put it away, and the square you tapped slides up into view above it instead of hiding underneath.

2026-09-12

  • A square's description unfolds when you rest the pointer on it: the card shows three lines as before, a longer blurb opens to its full length while you hover, and pressing it keeps it open. Up to twelve lines show at once; anything longer scrolls inside the card.

2026-09-10

  • A square's share page links to the site itself: the domain at the top of the page is now a link straight to the site, marked nofollow while the square was free and sponsored once it cost a dollar or more, so a crawler finds the real address there; evicted and whacked squares show the bare domain. Clicks from the wall still go through the counted redirect, and nothing in town passes link equity.

2026-09-09

  • Dusk falls when it actually falls: the sun follows the real sunrise and sunset where you are, so the sky, the street lamps and the windows no longer go dark at half past five all year round; the first windows come on around civil dusk and the whole town is lit an hour and a half after sunset, with fewer lights per tower than before.

2026-09-08

  • The town stands in a sea now: past the last row the ground drops to an earthen bank and the water runs out to the horizon, with a few pine-topped islets beyond the edge, instead of the map ending on flat sky.
  • Night looks like night: the windows are already lit when you arrive after dark (they used to come on one at a time over the better part of an hour), every street has lamps that pool warm light on the ground, the lakes take a moonlit sheen and the Throne glows.
  • Somebody is always about: zoom in to street level and a few passers-by are out walking at all times, more of them downtown, with a car passing through now and then, instead of the streets standing empty between events.
  • The lakes get civic works: a wooden bridge wherever the water is narrow enough (people walk them), a pier off every larger lake, a lighter rim of shallows along the banks, and a lighthouse in the big lake near the centre whose beam turns after dark.
  • Street furniture grew with the town: benches, bins, mailboxes and bushes on many more sidewalks, not the nine pieces the wall started with.
  • A favicon that is one flat colour with nothing drawn on it no longer disappears into its own square: the roof used to take the icon's colour, so the square read as an empty slab; such an icon now sits inset as a rounded tile on a surface it shows against.

2026-09-06

  • Rewinding the town now rewinds the towers too: scrub back or run the timelapse and every square rises the way it actually grew, click by click and kiss by kiss, instead of arriving at today's height on the day it moved in; the card on a rewound square says how tall it stood then.

2026-09-05

  • Every square can leave town for a Zen garden: press the lotus on its card and the neighbours sink into the ground one by one, the town drops away, and a raked-gravel island rises under the square with its favicon dead centre, stones and moss, a maple, a stone lantern that lights after dark and a temple bell rung now and then, to slower music of its own; drag to look around, share the garden's link, and Esc or "Back to town" puts everything back.

2026-09-04

2026-09-03

  • The first visit opens on a welcome curtain instead of a controls card.
  • Three new sights: a small plane crosses above the tallest tower (with running lights, so it reads at night), a hang glider runs off a roof and lands on an open cell, and two droids take a stroll through town.
  • The town loads in tiers like map tiles, so a big wall draws sooner and sharpens as you zoom in.
  • Towers keep their favicon colour after a slow start instead of turning a uniform pink.
  • The deed is one sentence again, without the site's title and description; those live on the square's own page.

2026-09-02

  • No more sign-in: kissing, whacking, rechecking and counted clicks are anonymous again.
  • 26 new ambient cards, among them a mime, a tortoise race, a streaker, an ice cream van, pigeons, a T-rex vs a crane, a wedding, sumo, Abbey Road, synchronised swimmers, a marathon, a human cannon, a sleepwalker and a UFO that drops a van.
  • People and vans walk and drive across flat favicons, and joggers, clowns and the conga line climb the one-click stubs.

2026-09-01

  • Owners with an email on file get an eviction notice by mail when someone takes their square.

2026-08-30

  • Waldo hides somewhere in town.
  • The live feed is redesigned: a logo pill in the top bar opens it, and it scrolls lazily.

FAQ

How often is the changelog updated?

Whenever something visible ships. Only changes you can see or feel in town are listed; internal plumbing stays in the commit history.

Where do I report a bug or ask for a feature?

Message @theill on X, or use the contact page. Bugs that get fixed show up here.

Is there a feed for the changelog?

Not yet. The blog has an RSS feed; the changelog is a page you can bookmark, and its Markdown twin is at /changelog.md.

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