CityBuilder v3.5 — Beta Readiness

Available in this build

• Three independently versioned features: crises & recovery, local community comparisons, and guided economic experiments.
• Offline JSON saves, version-pinned engine rules and deterministic replay.
• Simple and Advanced interface modes.
• Private feedback and bug reports already provided by the earlier local feedback subsystem.
• Lab labels explaining which data are sourced and which are fictional game assumptions.

Required before an internet-facing beta

1. Put the application behind authenticated HTTPS; restrict administrative contest and feedback interfaces.
2. Review Nginx/firewall exposure, production security headers, cross-origin policy, reverse proxy and upload limits.
3. Deploy monitoring, alerts, per-route quotas, resource limits, a privacy notice and documented retention policy.
4. Run a separate security review, accessibility review, multi-browser checks and adversarial fuzzing of imported saves.
5. Document model limitations, data licenses, contest policies and the manual moderation process.
6. Test restore operations on a disposable copy of the real installation, then roll out to selected testers.

What isn't included

No user registration, identity verification, official signed leaderboards, prize processing, real-time multiplayer, empirically validated disaster forecasts or production security certification. Existing database/cloud features remain opt-in and unchanged.