The canvas took over

On 5 September the factories stopped being a list of buttons. They became buildings on a canvas, a big open space where you build. You connect buildings with wires, and each wire carries one thing, like power or cooling. Buying, wiring and selling all moved onto the map. The old list just shows numbers now.

The picture is from the next day. The canvas is the strip across the top. It has server racks, a server room, a data hall and the mint. Everything under it is still the token game. For about a day, the map was just a side panel. Then it was clear that the map was the part I wanted to play. So on 7 September I made it the whole screen, and the old panels went away. Old saves can’t load anymore, so the game tells you and starts fresh.

The setting changed with it. If the buildings are server racks and data halls, then you’re an AI company, and the bubble is the AI bubble. On 8 September, what your buildings make became AI answers, and they only count when somebody pays for them. The bubble can pop, and when it does, you keep everything you built.

On 9 September I took the money system out. No printing, no prices running away, no trust and no tokens. It worked well, but it was about the wrong thing. It made you fight inflation. The real problem for an AI company is different. Computers get cheaper to run every year, but the power bill comes every second.

So now computing power is what you sell, and the more you sell, the less it’s worth. Power, cooling, internet and chips go in, and somebody rents the computing power. Its price falls, and that’s your fault, because you’re the one flooding the market. The way out is to make better things. First you rent out computers, then you run your own AI, train your own models, and sell what they can do. The game ends when you build AGI.

The game is still called Cutting Three Zeros, and you can’t cut any zeros in it anymore. I’ll fix that later.