Public release history · Current beta BUILD 56

The damage so far

Hard Block Life started as one breakable city and a bad attitude. This is the readable history: every meaningful player-facing milestone, grouped by the build in which it became real.

Latest releaseWhat comes next
● Current betaBUILD 56What testers can load now
◐ Working nowAuthored models + native betaNot yet a playable-now claim
× SupersededLegacy GitHub buildRetired when the protected beta opened
  1. ● Current beta

    7 August 2026

    BUILD 55

    The city gets a basement. The cars get mass.

    A wide physical-play pass turned several separate experiments into one more coherent world.

    • Fixed-step vehicle contacts carry mass, direction, rotation, PIT force and explosion impulses without replacing the readable arcade controller.
    • The world map now pans and zooms, remembers its view and exposes explored underground depth slices.
    • Neighborhood shops spread beyond downtown; connected caverns, coherent veins and prospecting create an underground exploration loop.
    • Held placement, surface-aware building, quieter construction, doors, windows and itemised storage make lairs faster to shape.
    • First Shift can recover an old home; contextual lessons continue; police gather evidence before surveillance or a rare coordinated lair raid.
    • Turn signals, vehicle-camera pitch, wildlife facing, overlay Escape behavior, equipment motion, brightness and contrast received direct play fixes.
  2. ✓ Shipped

    6 August 2026

    BUILD 54

    Attachments and a silencer that does not silence reality.

    Workshops gained three permanent, removable objects: silencer, extended magazine and vertical grip. Real slots prevent duplication, capacity changes return spare rounds, and saves retain every fitment.

    • First- and third-person models, HUD tags, magazine capacity, recoil, spread and muzzle flash follow the fitted object.
    • Suppressed gunfire travels much less far, but remains loud nearby.
    • An unseen, only-heard crime creates suspicion; a witness who actually sees it still reports the full offence.
  3. ✓ Shipped

    5 August 2026

    BUILD 53

    First Shift, one honest clock and a lair that knows it is home.

    New players received a seven-job, non-blocking opening docket while returning players kept quieter contextual tips.

    • One 24-minute clock now owns the HUD, sky, dawn, dusk, night traffic, patrols and job bonuses.
    • A placed workbench and enough player-built blocks define a movable, persistent lair.
    • Crafting accelerates while held, keeps every recipe visible and explains missing ingredients instead of hiding the row.
    • Pedestrians gained routines, panic, hiding, safe crossings and genuine delayed witness reports.
  4. ✓ Shipped

    5 August 2026

    BUILDS 51–52

    The beta got a front door and the future got a page.

    The game moved from its retired public repository to hardblocklife.com, with a protected beta entrance and public game, support, legal and roadmap pages.

    • The browser and iPhone still use the same canonical game files.
    • Pedestrians commit across zebra crossings instead of reconsidering halfway into traffic.
    • The first public roadmap separated playable systems from ordered ambition.
    • Desktop and native builds gained explicit full and reduced content profiles so distribution-safe violence is selected during packaging, not by hope.
  5. ✓ Shipped

    4–5 August 2026

    BUILDS 48–50

    Crafting becomes a system. Police become a force.

    Core Crafting split materials into parts, ammunition and location-based work while the police response learned stable squad roles and fair information.

    • Steel, casings, powder, barrels, receivers and springs connect mining to weapons and five ammunition families.
    • Hands, placed workbenches and city Workshops form three visible crafting tiers.
    • Police dispatch from real stations, search the last genuinely observed position and use roadblocks, spikes and PIT only under bounded rules.
    • Save migration and renderer-free acceptance made those systems safe for existing cities.
  6. ✓ Shipped

    4 August 2026

    BUILDS 46–47

    Traffic stops behaving like loose shopping trolleys.

    Driving AI learned lanes, junction reservations, queues, crossings, overtaking restraint and emergency yielding.

    • Vehicles look ahead, leave junction exits clear and avoid water, wilderness roads and other drivers.
    • Building controls, footsteps and road markings received a direct phone-and-browser feel pass.
    • Dense traffic became deterministic enough to reproduce instead of merely describe.
  7. ✓ Shipped

    4 August 2026

    BUILDS 43–45

    The police come from somewhere. Your pockets stop lying.

    Police station dispatch and last-sighting pursuit replaced magical proximity, while carried gear became a deliberate two-gun loadout.

    • The landscape-phone title finally fits the actual phone.
    • Locked hotbar slots refuse to equip and explain how the missing item is earned.
    • Natural spawns stream terrain before choosing a height, ending under-map arrivals.
  8. ✓ Shipped

    3–4 August 2026

    BUILDS 36–42

    The prototype learns how to be played.

    Options, rebinding, multiplayer arrival rules, calmer movement, real roads and water, morning starts and cinematic lighting turned the raw sandbox into a usable beta.

    • Every desktop action became rebindable and every prompt reads the live binding.
    • Casual mode, bedroll recovery and contextual action chips made the one-life sandbox easier to learn without weakening the intended run.
    • Natural terrain can be stepped; player walls and dug holes still require a jump; the camera no longer bobs.
    • Road and water queries now ask the generated world instead of trusting an imaginary infinite grid.
    • Sun, moon, voxel light, headlights, coloured emitters, bloom, wet streets and three visual looks established Neon Noir.
  9. ✓ Shipped

    3 August 2026

    BUILDS 27–31

    The city stops being a circle and multiplayer gets stakes.

    Extraction rooms, persistent stashes, larger city identities, pavements, crossings and dynamic night lighting established the game’s shape.

    • Shared rooms gained PvP, hostile status, police memory and hidden stash banking.
    • BLOCKTON, RUSTPORT and PINE HOLLOW gained distinct scale, skyline, buildings and street edges.
    • Pedestrians use pavements and crossings; drivers stop for them; night streets light from real emitters.
  10. ✓ Shipped

    3 August 2026

    BUILDS 24–25

    One life, public consequences and a city that repairs itself.

    Death became the end of a solo run. Pulling a weapon became visible social information, masks could break a description, and construction crews repaired natural city damage after the heat died down.

    • Banked score and hidden stashes gave survival meaning beyond the robbery itself.
    • Scary weapons make witnesses react without treating every mining tool as a crime.
    • Test loadouts cannot submit a ranked score.
  11. ✓ Origin

    2026

    FIRST PLAYABLE

    One city. One life. Several bad decisions.

    The first real version made the central argument: the city is not scenery. Roads, walls, trees and ground are material; crime creates heat; and getting home alive matters more than starting the robbery.

◐ Working now

The next blocks are being authored

Heightened Voxel Noir now has a machine-readable art constitution, asset manifests and review gates. Blender owns portable models; a separate Unreal 5.8 native beta is earning visual and platform parity while Three.js remains the browser-playable game.

Nothing in this section is being smuggled into “playable now.” The procedural versions remain until an authored category passes browser, phone, Unreal, provenance and performance review.

See the active plan
History successfully survived

Go make the next entry happen

Play BUILD 56, find the strange edge case, and give the next release something useful to say.

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Closed beta access

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One shared code unlocks Hard Block Life in this browser for 30 days. It is separate from the five-letter room code used after you enter the game.