v1.2 update: chat lives everywhere, search finds anything, and a long polish pass

It's been a busy month. While a lot of the recent work was admin-side plumbing for the staff team, plenty of it landed on your side of the screen too — and the chat relay alone is a big enough shift that we wanted to walk through it properly. Here's everything that shipped in v1.2.

🧪 Most of this is in beta. If something looks broken, says the wrong thing, double-posts a chat message, or just behaves weird, please file it on the bug tracker. We pay a small QA bounty in TinyTokens for verified reports — see the last update for context. Knowingly abusing a bug to mint tokens, spam the relay, or anything similar will result in a ban and a clawback. Report it; don't farm it.

Chat is one conversation now

The biggest user-facing change in this update: in-game chat, the Discord #game-chat channel, and a new persistent chat widget on the website are all the same room. Type in the game, it shows up on the site and in Discord. Type in Discord, it shows up in-game. The widget on the site sits bottom-right and stays open across navigation, so a conversation comes along with you while you check freight or read a TNN article.

Messages display the speaker's name and color from whichever side they came from, so it's clear at a glance who's in the game right now versus who's typing from a phone. There's no separate "web users go here, in-game users go there" — it's one feed.

Search bar that actually finds the thing

There's a new universal search at the top of the site. Type the first few letters of a name, a site, or an article — citizens, companies, freight sites, wiki entries, TNN articles, dispatch calls, and bug reports all surface from the same dropdown. No more guessing whether something lives under /wiki or /companies or /cad.

The inbox makes a sound

Two upgrades to notifications:

• New notifications now play a short chime when they arrive in your browser. Toggle it off from the bell popover if you don't want it.
• The popover and the full /notifications page got a refresh — cleaner grouping, faster mark-as-read, and the bell counter clears immediately instead of waiting for the next poll.

Kudos got real

You can now leave a reason when giving someone kudos ("helped me with a load near Jeju Airport") and comment on kudos you've received. The kudos tab on a profile reads like a small public testimonial wall instead of a counter, which is what it should have been from the start.

Bug tracker is first-class now

• Large screenshots upload reliably. The old ~5 MB ceiling was caused by Cloudflare blocking large multipart POSTs at the edge — the client now resizes images before upload, so 4K-monitor grabs go through.
• The admin side of the tracker moved out of the experimental /pxt sandbox and lives at the top level (/admin/bugs) so staff can triage faster.
• Card view, kanban controls, and admin-actions UI all got cleaned up.

TinyBot got noticeably sharper

Our in-house Q&A assistant — the one you can talk to at /assistant or via /ask in Discord — was reorganized internally. Its toolset is now split by domain (content, dispatch, economy, inventory, location), which means when you ask "what's the nearest gas station to Cargo Town?" or "who has the most kudos this week?" it picks the right tool and answers more reliably. The world-snapshot it grounds itself on was refreshed at the same time.

A proper referral system

If you missed the tokens update: every account has a personal invite link on /account. Bringing a friend pays both of you 500 + 500 TinyTokens. This release wires the rest of it together — a landing page at /r/{code} that auto-applies the referral on Steam sign-in, a staff dashboard to review borderline claims, and clearer copy on your account page so it's obvious what the link does.

Front-end polish

• A persistent sign-in banner for guests, so anonymous visitors know what they're missing.
• The bottom action bar and mobile nav got a tidier layout and steadier behavior on iOS Safari.
• Notification bell + popover redesigned (see above).
• The TNN article renderer cleans up nested formatting a little better, and breaking-news posts pin more obviously.
• Freight keeps the Low Stock tab front-and-center — and yes, that's still the one that pays +10 TT per delivery to a starved factory.

For the staff team

Skip this section if you're not on staff — but it's how moderation, applications, and announcements actually happen day-to-day.

• Announcements admin — schedule in-game broadcasts and Discord posts ahead of time, and build playlists of recurring messages.
• Applications tracker rebuilt as a kanban — drag candidates between Pending / Under Review / Decided lanes, with a cleaner per-application page and review-action shortcuts.
• Analytics gained five new dashboards: dispatch, fires, moderation, players, and tokens. A new date-range popover and day-of-week × hour heatmap component show up across them.
• Per-citizen analytics tab on every player's admin profile — playtime, dispatch activity, deliveries, kudos in/out, infractions, all in one place.
• Referrals dashboard for reviewing borderline claims.
• Moderation consolidated — the old flagged-content page folded into /admin/moderation/content, and there's a new rule-picker so issuing a strike attaches the right rule number automatically.

Under the hood

• Fourteen new database migrations layered on the May baseline (announcements, chat relay, kudos reasons & comments, applications tracker, analytics indexes, and a court-system experiment that was rolled back — more below).
• Game-chat relay listener on the Discord bot, with echo prevention so messages don't loop.
• Token-update flow in the poller — when reward parameters change, the announcement pipeline updates the TNN article, posts in #announcements, and broadcasts in-game from one place.
• Atlas Garbage truck driver detection (the truck that was crashing the server) tightened up with a better ban reason embed.

One thing we shelved

The player-run court system shipped early in the month and was pulled back out. The shape of it (judge + jury for contested infractions) is still the right idea, but the rollout exposed enough rough edges in the surrounding red-flag system that we're going back to the drawing board on both. Expect a redesigned version in a future update.

Where to find everything

• Chat widget → bottom-right of every page on the site, or just play and watch the relay
• Universal search → the top bar of the site
• Your tokens & ledger → /account/tokens
• Invite link → /account
• Low-stock receivers → /freight/low-stock
• Bug tracker → /bugs
• Last update → tokens update

As always — see something off? Tell us, don't farm it.