Season #7 is open! The season will last for two months, from September 1st until November 1st.

What is Season World?

How to join the season?

• 5 Access Keys - August 13
• 4 Access Keys - September 1 (season start)
• 3 Access Keys - September 15
• 2 Access Keys - October 1
• 1 Access Key - October 15

What are season rules?

Season #6 is open! Spawning opens January 25th at 18:00 UTC. The game will start on February 1 at 18:00 UTC. This season will last for 2 months, till April 1.

What is Season World?

How to join the season?

• 5 Access Keys - January 19
• 4 Access Keys - February 1 (season start)
• 3 Access Keys - February 15
• 2 Access Keys - March 1
• 1 Access Key - March 15

What are season rules?

Season #5 is open! Join now and place your spawn in the new seasonal event. The game will start on June 1 at 18:00 UTC. This season will last for 2 months, till August 1.

What is Season World?

How to join the season?

• 5 Access Keys - May 26
• 4 Access Keys - June 1 (season start)
• 3 Access Keys - June 15
• 2 Access Keys - July 1
• 1 Access Key - July 15

What are season rules?

We are happy to announce that we're releasing Screeps: Arena to Early Access! After a long period in the Closed Alpha, the game is available now. If you have preordered an activation key before, you should be able to start playing immediately. We have many plans for further development, and need your support to continue with this project. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1137320/view/3192497330287513155

Season #4 is open! Join now and place your spawn in the new seasonal event. The game will start on January 15th at 18:00 UTC. This season will last for 6 weeks, till March 1.

What is Season World?

How to join the season?

• 4 Access Keys - January 15
• 3 Access Keys - February 1
• 2 Access Key - February 15

What are season rules?

Season #3 is officially over! All rewards have been credited, read the full season chronicle: https://screeps.com/season/#!/seasons/chronicle

Hello everyone! We are happy to announce that we migrated our official chat platform from Slack to Discord! This is a quite big change for everyone, both community and us, and we want to explain the reasons behind this. Discord is community-oriented. After all these years with Slack we have clearly seen that communities are not their priority. Slack is a business app for teams, and it severely lacks many features like persistent chat history or moderation tools. Discord, in contrast, is designed from scratch for communities. They even have the Partner Program for best communities, and we hope to achieve this level with your support. Screeps franchise now consists of two games. Arena is under active development right now, and this will be the second game in our franchise. However, we still want to have one community of Screeps players that includes both games. A new player should become a part of this community whatever game they play, and interact with players from the other game. And dedicating just one channel for Arena is not very fair, we love this game very much and want to give more living space to it. Discord has many features to create a complex and powerful structure and navigate users to correct places that would allow to cover both games and not split the community into two parts. Discord has in-game integration features. With the Rich Presence API it is possible to show your in-game status in Discord. It could show what game you are playing and what part of the game is active right now (for example, which arena). It also allows to create interactive features such as share, invite, or observe games. With Arena all these features will be in high demand and seem perfectly logical, and Slack does not support any of it. Here is the invitation link: https://discord.gg/RjSS5fQuFx

Season #3 is open! Join now and place your spawn in the new seasonal event. The game will start on July 1 at 18:00 UTC. This season will last for 2 months, till September 1.

What is Season World?

How to join the season?

• 3 Access Keys - June 28
• 2 Access Keys - July 15
• 1 Access Key - August 1

What are season rules?

Screeps: Arena will present a free publicly available playable demo during the entire Steam Next Fest on June 16 - June 22. On June 19 at 16:00 UTC we are going to conduct an official developers-backed Livestream Event on the Steam Next Fest! Our TOP-1 champion Screeps player Tigga will share his experience with Arena and present some gameplay, and two dev team members will be available in chat to answer any your questions. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1137320/view/3031466372087984067 And now take a look at our new trailer: [previewyoutube=LkXuGcrCZtU;full][/previewyoutube]

Season #2 is open! Join now and place your spawn in the new seasonal event. The game will start on March 1 at 18:00 UTC. This season will last for 2 months, till May 1.

What is Season World?

How to join the season?

• 5 Access Keys - February 15
• 4 Access Keys - March 1 (season start)
• 3 Access Keys - March 15
• 2 Access Keys - April 1
• 1 Access Key - April 15

What are season rules?

The first season has come to its finish. Congratulations to all participants! The competition for score points has taken two months, involved 153 participants and more than two thousand spectators. Check the rewards and read the whole story in our Season Chronicle! https://screeps.com/season/#!/seasons/chronicle

This is to announce that the Season World is now open! All players who have got access to the Season #1 can now spawn in and mark the spot in this brand new empty world. Ticks are paused at the moment until the Season begins on December 1, 2020. This season will last for 2 months, till February 1, 2021.

What is Season World?

How to join the season?

What are season rules?

Can I observe Season World if I don't have access to join?

What are the rewards?

Hi everyone! Today our discount for Access Keys is over. This means that Season #1 is even closer now. This is an exciting period for us; we're moving on full speed to prepare this thrilling new competition. In a few weeks we are going to launch its Chronicle (you will learn about it later). But there is even more news. We're happy to announce that starting from today you can use Access Keys to preorder Screeps Arena and get a Steam activation key immediately! Consider it a crowdfunding campaign. We're asking for your help to support this project. COVID-19 impacted our business too. We are looking forward to implementing this new exciting project very much, but we want to secure its development. It would be unfortunate for both us and the community if we become short on money during this big project.
In this post we will describe Screeps Arena and its main design concepts. If you like it and feel that it is possible to you to help us fund this development, please buy some Access Keys and use this page (or the "Arena" menu inside the game) to preorder. You will gain a Steam activation key immediately and can activate it in your Steam client. The game will be downloaded to you as soon as it is ready. There are two preorder options:

• Release. You can preorder the release version of the game, but with a discount.Technically it well be "Early Access" release on Steam, but since it will be available to public and the price will be the same, we refer to it as "Release".
• Closed Alpha (Includes the Release version). As soon as we have the first working prototype of the game we will share it with the most interested community members. You can join this test stage to help us polish the game before it's released and push some of your own ideas during the early development. This stage will take a few months. Our current ETA for Closed Alpha is Q1 2021.

Hi everyone! We have a date that we want to announce: December 1, 2020. On this date we will start our first Season! A whole new empty world will be launched, and everyone can join to compete for the season rewards (will be announced later). Season rules in a nutshell: [quote]Every player has 100 CPU. New resource items appear in all rooms randomly from time to time. Collect and bring them to special structures placed in crossroad rooms to increase your season score. These structures are blocked by huge constructed walls on the season start, so you have to dig your way to them first. Players with the most collected resources win the season rewards.[/quote] We will elaborate on them later, and also show some graphics along with the season rewards. This season will last for 2 months, till February 1, 2021. Also, on November 1, the 50% discount for Access Keys will be over. At the same time we're going to announce some other exciting news as well. Stay tuned!

We're excited to announce that MapVisual API is now live!
It allows you to draw simple graphics on the world map similarly to RoomVisual API. You can use it to display helpful infographics, debug info, multi-room paths visualizations, etc. It is available only in the new alpha version of the world map. Check out the documentation for Game.map.visual.

We are happy to introduce a new big feature: Decorations. This update is going to add a whole new dimension in your in-game activities. You are now able to generate and collect resources that will allow you to decorate your rooms, creeps, structures and other assets, giving them unique look and individuality.

Pixels

• Generate 1 pixel using Game.cpu.generatePixel() method. It will consume 5000 CPU from your bucket.
• Purchase at our official store or Steam Community Market.
• Buy and sell on the in-game market.

Decorations

• Graffiti - you can place this image as a graffiti on walls in your rooms.
• Wall texture - you can place this image as a room-wide wall texture in your rooms.
• Floor texture - you can place this image as a room-wide floor texture in your rooms.
• Creep - you can use this image to decorate your creeps (either all of them or using a name filter).
• Badge - a custom player badge that you can set for your account.

• Rarity 1: None.
• Rarity 2: Adjustable brightness and lighting animation.
• Rarity 3: Visible on the world map.
• Rarity 4: Visible on the world map. Adjustable brightness and lighting animation.
• Rarity 5: Choose your own color. Visible on the world map. Adjustable brightness and lighting animation.

• Rarity 3: None.
• Rarity 4: Adjustable brightness.
• Rarity 5: Choose your own color. Adjustable brightness.

• Rarity 4: None
• Rarity 5: Choose your own color.

• Always rarity 5.

Decoration themes

Other resources

Subscriptions

API Changes

• Introduced new property: Game.cpu.unlocked. It's true when your CPU is unlocked regardless of the unlock method: it may be a recurrent subscription, a lifetime subscription, or using CPU Unlock resource.
• Introduced new property: Game.cpu.unlockedTime. If your CPU is unlocked with 'CPU Unlock' resource, the value of this property is the unlock expiration time.
• Introduced new method: Game.cpu.unlock(). It will consume 1 CPU Unlock resource and extend unlock time by 24 hours.
• Introduced new method: Game.cpu.generatePixel(). It will consume 5000 CPU from your bucket to create 1 Pixel resource.
• All new ephemeral account resources are exposed in the Game.resources object.

We're announcing our new little project: Attack Rank Monthly Video. We automatically recorded all spawn kills during March 2020 and displayed a few of ticks around every event, with total number of kills by players. We hope it will be feasible for us to make such a video every month. [previewyoutube=MdgnsJ4NgP0;full][/previewyoutube]

This is a minor update containing the following features:

• Reverse reactions in labs
• Room status data in game API
• Many various improvements

We've been brainstorming a lot lately. We brainstormed the architecture of a Persistent/Seasonal server separation in our Kubernetes cluster. We brainstormed how decorations system should be themed and organized. We brainstormed the financial aspect of Screeps as a business. We brainstormed what would be the mechanic or our first season on the Seasonal World. We also brainstormed a math model for the player rating in Arena, but it's a whole another story... What is really important here is that eventually, when all the coffee was drunk, we came up with a new streamlined concept of in-game account resources that we want to announce in this post.
The most important announcement to begin with: recurrent subscriptions will be discontinued, and 60-day tokens will be replaced with 24-hour tokens. Yes, there will be no subscriptions in the game anymore. If you have an active subscription, it will remain active indefinitely, but you will not be able to activate a new one. The only method to unlock full CPU in your account will be using a CPU token. This will unlock your CPU for 24 hours. All current 60-day tokens will be converted to 60x 24-hours tokens automatically. Moreover, we will introduce a game API method to activate a CPU token, and a way to check whether your CPU is unlocked or not currently. This way, you can program an auto-renew mechanism on your own based on your preference, using CPU tokens stored in your account. The CPU unlocking system is needed to compensate for the server resources spent on running your script, but the recurrent subscription system turned out to be a suboptimal way to achieve this. Many people are unhappy with recurrent payments nowadays. Using CPU tokens, you can buy bundles of 10, 30, or 90 tokens, and control how your CPU is used according to your in-game circumstances. Along with this, we will introduce two new account resources: Pixels and Access Keys. Pixels are needed to pixelate (create) decorations for your rooms and your creeps. Also, you can convert any decoration back to pixels. Access Keys are used to join a season in the Seasonal World, or a special event in the Persistent World. One season may require, say, 5 Access Keys to enter. And season rewards will also yield Access Keys, Pixels and CPU tokens to those who made it to the top of the season. All these account resources can be obtained in two ways:

• Purchased at our official store, which is currently under development.
• Traded on the in-game market or Steam Community Market.

• We sell CPU Tokens because we allow you to rent real server CPU time in our cluster.
• We sell Pixels because our designer worked hard on the graphics that enable this "hat economy."
• We sell Access Keys because they unlock more game content that we regularly develop, add, and maintain for your fun and benefit.

[previewyoutube=7WUtFWxmWHo;full][/previewyoutube]

Hello everyone! We're happy to introduce one of the biggest content updates in Screeps! We tested it since May on the PTR and private servers with your help, and now we're ready to launch these exciting new features. IMPORTANT: Although we put our best effort to make this update as less breaking as possible, some things in your code may break due to the new improved API. See the API Changes section below for details.

Factory and new resources

NPC Strongholds

Ruins

• InvaderCore ruins will last the same equal time as the remaining EFFECT_COLLAPSE_TIMER on it.
• When a user respawns, all structures are converted to ruins with 500,000 decay time.
• When a novice player initially spawns into the room with another player's structures, all structures are converted to ruins with 100,000 decay time.

API Changes

We're happy to announce that we've just migrated our production server cluster to the new location. This is so exciting for our team, and here's why. First, the new server cluster is based on brand new Intel Core i9-9900K processors which gives a performance boost to both userland and engine code. Our tests have shown a 15-30% increase in user CPU depending on the load profile. And the tick rate on all shards is now 20% fasterdown to 2.2s/tick on shard3! Second, we've switched our architecture to a containerized pool of applications orchestrated in a Kubernetes cluster. Kubernetes is well known for having a pretty steep learning curve, and this was a serious challenge, but we've managed to find the right guy who joined our team and used his expertise to set up everything properly. Now, this makes our development and deployment process much easier allowing us to test and deploy new features more rapidly. With just one click we can clone the entire production cluster to a temporary instance in private cloud, test everything we need to test, and remove it with one click again afterward to avoid high expenses. This is a thriving technology and we're looking forward to new developments with Screeps World and Screeps Arena that it allows! We already used this platform to carefully test Nodejs 10 and the new game content on the real production world data. Nodejs 10 is shipped now on all game server nodes, and we're pretty confident that we can roll out all new game features (NPC Strongholds, Factories, new resources, Store and Market changes) in the first half of October. Stay tuned! Discuss this news on our official forum

This is it. It's happening. Power Creeps are here. A whole new Power Era in Screeps! It's been a long road indeed. The Power resource was introduced to the game in December 2015. The plans for development of the new Power Creeps concept were announced at the same time. Since then, we've heard numerous opinions, deeply analyzed all comments, suggestions and concerns of our community. The concept was changed, readjusted and reworked several times. This wasn't the only reason of the delay of the release: since 2016 we've been focusing on other areas of the project that have more to do with optimization and reworking of the game engine than the game content itself. This was because the release of the game on Steam in 2016 resulted in the influx of players we weren't ready for. However, a great deal of game content has been developed too: minerals, NPC invaders, market system, nukes, room visuals, world shards, tombstones, tunnels, events log. All these things were developed after we had announced Power Creeps, and we believe we didn't spend time in vain but managed to improve the game in many aspects. But now we are excited to announce the final release of the Power Creeps system in the game! We started its public beta on February 1, 2019 on the Public Test Realm, and after 1.5 months we can say it's polished enough to go live. [quote] What is power? Power is an end-game mechanic opening a whole new trek in the development of your colony: towards increasing its effectiveness rather than the size of colonized territory. This is how its contents look like:

• You mine a special resource called power.
• Mined resource is processed in 8-level rooms and increase your account Global Power Level (GPL).
• GPL allows for creation of Power Creeps — special hero units — and development their levels and skills (so called "powers").

This is a big game update containing many features: * New design * Creep.pull * Controllers attack improvement * Other changes See the full post about these changes in our official blog.

We were all looking forward for shard3 to open. In this post, we are pleased to announce its launch along with some more great news. First, were happy to announce that the free non-subscription CPU limit is raised from 10 to 20. Yay! And now is the most interesting part. Shard3 becomes our first CPU-limited shard. It limits CPU of all players to 20. Even if you have an active subscription and assigned more CPU to this shard, only 20 CPU will be active there. This means this shard is mostly designed for non-subscription players. They can now compete with all their neighbors on equal terms (CPU-wise), whether they are subscribed or not. In all other aspects, shard3 is a regular shard with Novice and Respawn Areas and portals from shard2 (temporary closed for 60 days). You can freely travel there, but your CPU will be capped, so having a subscription will force you to learn how to optimize your creeps in the same way as non-subscribed players do. And the last thing: since you get twice as much CPU now when you buy Screeps on Steam, the free 30-day subscription trial is discontinued. We recommend new players to start on shard3 and buy a subscription if they want to expand to other shards.

This is a big game update containing many features: * Tunnels * Room event log * Unboosting creeps * Other changes See the full post about these changes in our official blog.

The latest issue of our Screeps World Review is out! Read about the game world progress in the past quarter, analysis of leaders' achievements and successes, and video replays of noteworthy events: READ FULL ARTICLE

We have something very special for you! New subscription option is available now: Lifetime Subscription! It grants lifetime indefinite access to full unlocked CPU on our official MMO server. Buy it once and forget about monthly payments!

The turning point of the Power Creeps development is just around the corner. This post will show how this mechanics will look in the game and also update our design document. A lot of things have already been described in the previous post, but the mechanics sparked hot debate, and we took a time-out to polish the idea and switch to other important tasks. This process gave us fresh ideas on what to change, and now we are confident the final concept can be viable. TL;DR Brief summary of the adjustments

• Only one class will be launched initially—Operator.
• Any power creep can use its powers (skills) only in power-enabled rooms. Activation requires that any power creep approach the room controller and run PowerCreep.enableRoom(controller). This action is performed once by any player (not limiting to the room owner) and can be undone only by unclaim.
• The operator will use a new resource called ops that it can either generate itself or buy in NPC terminals.
• See an interactive skills planner below.

The turning point of the Power Creeps development is just around the corner. This post will show how this mechanics will look in the game and also update our design document. A lot of things have already been described in the previous post, but the mechanics sparked hot debate, and we took a time-out to polish the idea and switch to other important tasks. This process gave us fresh ideas on what to change, and now we are confident the final concept can be viable. TL;DR Brief summary of the adjustments

• Only one class will be launched initiallyOperator.
• Any power creep can use its powers (skills) only in power-enabled rooms. Activation requires that any power creep approach the room controller and run PowerCreep.enableRoom(controller). This action is performed once by any player (not limiting to the room owner) and can be undone only by unclaim.
• The operator will use a new resource called ops that it can either generate itself or buy in NPC terminals.
• See an interactive skills planner below.

It’s been a while since you’ve heard from us, but all in good reason. We’ve been working hard on some exciting new features that we’re now happy to announce.

Isolated virtual machine

• You can opt-in for an isolated VM in the new account settings UI called Runtime. This will move the execution of your script to another pool of server nodes with this experimental feature enabled.
  
• The isolated VM takes you to your very own JavaScript environment, including heap memory and garbage collector.
• Since isolated VMs can be transferred between threads within the same Node.js process, it is no longer neccessary to maintain multiple global instances, and you always have one single global. Moreover, your global environment is very stable and can persist for several days without resets (unless you reset it with your own actions).
• You can use the new API method Game.cpu.getHeapStatistics() to know how much heap memory you’re using in runtime. The maximum effective limit is 256 MB for each player. If you exceed this limit, your VM may be reset.

Tombstones

• New Tombstone global prototype.
• New constants FIND_TOMBSTONES, LOOK_TOMBSTONES, TOMBSTONE_DECAY_PER_PART.

Other changes

Its been a while since youve heard from us, but all in good reason. Weve been working hard on some exciting new features that were now happy to announce.

Isolated virtual machine

• You can opt-in for an isolated VM in the new account settings UI called Runtime. This will move the execution of your script to another pool of server nodes with this experimental feature enabled.
• The isolated VM takes you to your very own JavaScript environment, including heap memory and garbage collector.
• Since isolated VMs can be transferred between threads within the same Node.js process, it is no longer neccessary to maintain multiple global instances, and you always have one single global. Moreover, your global environment is very stable and can persist for several days without resets (unless you reset it with your own actions).
• You can use the new API method Game.cpu.getHeapStatistics() to know how much heap memory youre using in runtime. The maximum effective limit is 256 MB for each player. If you exceed this limit, your VM may be reset.

Tombstones

• New Tombstone global prototype.
• New constants FIND_TOMBSTONES, LOOK_TOMBSTONES, TOMBSTONE_DECAY_PER_PART.

Other changes

We’re glad to announce that Screeps now has user-generated authentication tokens support. You can use these persistent tokens to authenticate to our undocumented Web API endpoints without using the sign-in process. Use your Account / Auth Tokens section to generate such a token. Please note that the usual sign-in process will start using Google Invisible reCAPTCHA effective February 1, 2018. If you have an external tool which uses https://screeps.com/api/auth/signin endpoint automatically, please change it to use Auth Tokens before February 1, 2018! Otherwise it will stop working. Doing this is trivial: you need to drop using auth/signin endpoint and set X-Token header in all your requests to the persistent token generated from your account settings. Learn more about this feature in the documentation.

Were glad to announce that Screeps now has user-generated authentication tokens support. You can use these persistent tokens to authenticate to our undocumented Web API endpoints without using the sign-in process. Use your Account / Auth Tokens section to generate such a token. Please note that the usual sign-in process will start using Google Invisible reCAPTCHA effective February 1, 2018. If you have an external tool which uses https://screeps.com/api/auth/signin endpoint automatically, please change it to use Auth Tokens before February 1, 2018! Otherwise it will stop working. Doing this is trivial: you need to drop using auth/signin endpoint and set X-Token header in all your requests to the persistent token generated from your account settings. Learn more about this feature in the documentation.

• Runtime servers upgraded to Node.js 8.9.3 (LTS). It ships with V8 5.8, a significant update to the JavaScript runtime that includes major improvements in performance. This enables many modern ES6 language features, such as WebAssembly support. Since it’s a major release, it may have different performance profile depending on language features you use.
• Added binary modules support to the in-game IDE and require mechanics. Learn more in the documentation.

We have always put little attention to graphics in Screeps, since this is a rather niche game for programming nerds. In terms of technology, the game engine has been a simple set of SVG objects moving across the web page. It allowed for rapid development without distracting on complex visual components, but it ruled out any appealing visual effects (like lightning). Besides, this approach suffered from subpar performance when a lot of objects were on screen. So it's time to change that! In this update, we are excited to reveal a full-blown graphic engine for Screeps based on WebGL and PixiJS. It will allow you to:

• Leverage your machine's GPU even in the browser to significantly boost performance without any lags when scrolling.
• Save your laptop's battery juice since GPU is much more energy-efficient for this task than CPU.
• Add new visual effects to enrich the game atmosphere and yet retain our usual relaxing, abstract style.

It’s big time! 2 months after its creation, shard1 is available for settlement from outside. The portals leading from shard0 to shard1 and back open their doors for all the settlers, traders, and highway bandits out there. But aside from the evident feature of transferring players’ creeps between worlds, these portals will leverage another interesting game mechanics, NPC Events. We won’t delve deep into all the details but leave it for you to discover, especially since the events content and mechanics will change with time. But one thing is sure: it’s worth keeping your eyes on what comes out of these portals (including with your Observers), it could be something tasty! By the way, a little hint for you: when an NPC creep that took part in an event like this dies, its resources don’t drop on the ground but are placed in a container created automatically so that you can conveniently grab them in time. Good luck hunting!

• All credits amounts now work with 0.001 precision, including order prices, credits balance and transactions history. User credits balance and order prices are stored in the database as thousandths in integer format which prevents rounding errors. In order to update your private server data, an automatic database upgrade will be performed, see this commit .
• Added new StructureSpawn.spawnCreep method. createCreep and canCreateCreep are now considered deprecated, but still will be available for backwards compatibility. See discussion in this pull request for details.
• When you click “Respawn”, all structures now don’t vanish, but change their owner to SYSTEM_USERNAME, so that other players are able to withdraw resources from them.

Shards API

• Added new global property Game.cpu.shardLimits.
• Added new global method Game.cpu.setShardLimits.
• Added UI for assigning CPU to the shards menu.

Controller downgrading changes

• attackController applies 1000 ticks of upgradeBlocked and decreases the ticksToDowngrade by 300 * ticks. The claimer creep will only need 1 tick to do this amount of damage. The creep will not be able to do another attack until upgradeBlocked is back to 0.
• upgradeController restores 100 ticks of ticksToDowngrade rather then resets it immediately.
• While the controller is downgrading, it doesn’t upgrade its level even when it has enough progress (progress is not lost, but accumulated without triggering the level up).
• Safe mode activation is not possible when the controller is downgraded for 5000 or more ticks.

We are excited to announce we just launched the sharding system for the Screeps world! The second plane called shard1 already works with faster tick rate and waits for its first settlers! If you wanted to start playing but disliked long 5-second ticks, now is the time! TL;DR World shards are isolated from each other and run your code separately. Your creeps can travel between them using special portals. The original world becomes shard0. Portals will be closed during 60 days grace period, but you are free to (re)spawn on either shard0 or shard1.

Concept

Timeline

How it works

• Your script is executed on each shard individually and independently.
• Your GCL and CPU limit should be allocated to each shard using the special section in the Overview UI or via API (still in development; currently you have full GCL and CPU in each shard).
• Console contents is broadcasted from every shard with the corresponding note in the console UI.
• Memory is isolated; you have separate 2 MB of Memory and 10 MB of Memory Segments in each shard.
• There is a special memory segment that can be used for passing messages between shards.
• Markets are separate. However, credits balance and history are shared between shards.
• Creeps can use special inter-shard portals in highway crossroad rooms to travel between shards in the same way as inter-room portals. These portals are permanent and may be regenerated only when the world is expanded. The name and ID of the creep remains the same on cross shard travel, but the creep loses time to live:
  • 800 ticks for creeps without CLAIM parts;
  • 150 ticks for creeps with CLAIM parts.
  This rule eliminates the abuse of inter-shard portals for quick travel in the same shard.

API Changes

• Added new global object Game.shard.
• Added new type of StructurePortal.destination object format with shard property.
• Added new RawMemory.interShardSegment.
• Added new Game.map.getWorldSize() method.
• Constants WORLD_WIDTH and WORLD_HEIGHT are now considered deprecated and should not be used.
• Removed obsolete and undocumented Room.mode property. If you used this property to check for simulation mode, please use this one instead: [noparse]Game.shard.name == 'sim'[/noparse]

The Q2 2017 issue of our Screeps World Review is out! Read about the game world progress in the past quarter, analysis of leaders' achievements and successes, and video replays of noteworthy events: READ FULL ARTICLE

• Refactored creep damage and heal apply logic in a more consistent fashion. The main part of its logic can be found here:
  • All incoming damage and heal is counted first, but not applied.
  • Total heal and damage are applied to the creep's hits.
  • hits <= 0 and hits > maxHits checks are made.
  • The creep’s body is recalculated, including CARRY capacity.
• Market order prices now can be set with 0.001 precision. However, all real credits transactions still work with 0.01 precision, i.e. when you execute a deal, the resulting transaction (amount * price) is rounded up. You cannot execute a deal for a total amount less than 0.01 credits, the Game.market.deal method will return ERR_INVALID_ARGS. This means you can sell/buy energy for 0.001 per unit, but with amounts not less than 10 energy units per transaction.

Game performance in all aspects is an important area of our work. It was not left unnoticed by us that game simulation performance (tick rate) noticeably decreased lately due to the increase of the number of objects and growing complexity of players’ scripts. We understand it can lead to negative sentiment on the subscription-based model, and we won’t tolerate this situation. So in this post, we’ll talk about the three directions we plan to move so as to radically optimize performance.

Runtime: new virtual machine

• The heap memory accessible by your script will be only yours and nobody else’s. You can see the exact volume of heap memory your script uses.
• Everything in the heap memory (not just compiled scripts) can be saved between ticks and moved to other physical nodes for resuming in the next tick.
• The possibility of the transfer of serialized states makes it unnecessary to assign players to certain servers. It will seem to players that their scripts are always executed on the same physical server. This will not only improve caching time of newly-commited code, but will also remove the need to periodically calibrate runtime servers (popularly known as “reset storms”) which used to be required to optimally distribute players affinity across servers.
• Garbage collection executed on your account CPU will depend solely on objects in your heap memory rather than objects of other players.

Database: world shards

Client: WebGL renderer

• WebGL uses GPU and is optimized much better than SVG. Your laptop won’t get hot and drain your battery as you’re just watching your room in Screeps.
• Since all game objects will be stored as 2D sprites, we’ll be able to customize graphics and possibly even introduce customizable game themes.
• We’ll obtain tools to create new beautiful animation and special effects. For example, we’ll be able to add lighting effects and create a special API to control glow color of your creeps. This graphics engine will also give us more possibilities in terms of room decoration.

When will all this happen?

Introduced new public memory segments feature. Now you can mark some of your memory segments as public, and other players will have read-only access to them using RawMemory API.

• Added RawMemory.foreignSegment property.
• Added RawMemory.setActiveForeignSegment method.
• Added RawMemory.setPublicSegments method.
• Added RawMemory.setDefaultPublicSegment method.
• Added console warnings to deprecated methods Structure*.transfer, Structure*.transferEnergy, PathFinder.use, and FIND_DROPPED_ENERGY constant. These methods will be removed from the API in one of the next updates.

Going to another technical interview and want to show your Screeps skills as a proof? Fleetster startup uses Screeps as a key part of their recruitment process. Anna Baumeister explains how Screeps is useful for their business: [quote]We started using Screeps as a means of technical evaluation end of last year. Since then, our business has been thriving and our use of Screeps as a test has become more visible. In order to understand why we chose your game as a key part of our recruitment process, it’s important to understand a little bit about fleetster. We are a small startup in Munich, Germany, working with the latest JS tech - Node, Ember, React, React-native, TypeScript etc. Our business is lean and our process is agile which means specifications are changing all the time. Screeps is useful because it throws candidates into an unknown environment where the number of “right” solutions are very numerous. They have to get their bearings and make a pl an of action whilst dealing with unexpected outside interference (other players). We hope you won’t mind our presence in the main game world, but we find the huge scope of the main world helps to further intimidate candidates. We need people who can take on complex challenges head on and realize that most often the solutions are simple and accessible. — Anna Baumeister, Management Assistant at fleetster[/quote]

• Updated official servers runtime Node.js version to 6.10.3 LTS.
• Changed terminal transfer energy cost formula: energy_cost = resources_amount * (1 - Math.exp(-range / 30))
  
• Introduced new StructureTerminal.cooldown feature. It is triggered on both StructureTerminal.send and Game.market.deal methods and is equal to 10 ticks regardless of the transaction size and range. Methods will return ERR_TIRED code if the cooldown is active. New TERMINAL_COOLDOWN constant is added.
  
• Removed non-intuitive behavior of auto-attacking objects on Creep.move. This fixes an exploit of doing attack and heal simultaneously which is prohibited.
• Runtime virtual machine now uses breakOnSigint feature. CPU limit reached error messages have three types now:
  • Script execution timed out - when the soft timeout is fired
  • Script execution has been interrupted - when SIGINT signal received
  • Script execution has been interrupted with a hard reset - when SIGKILL signal received (runtime process restart).
  These differences are mostly for informational purposes and don’t affect anything currently.
• Changed boost effects of UO, UHO2, XUHO2 according to the documentation.

The Screeps Team is looking for an enthusiast who is willing to make our community a better place. Your responsibilities will be: working with the players community representing the Screeps Team and with the Screeps Team representing the players community. This is a remote paid part-time job position on the hourly basis (using time tracking software). We want you to join us if:

• You are an experienced Screeps player and active community member.
• You have excellent communication skills (in English).
• You have good organizational and information structuring skills. You are able to read a lot of discussions, extract the essence from them and explain in 3 sentences.
• You have past experience working as a moderator or community manager in some other project.
• You are more interested in making Screeps a better game rather than making money.

The Q1 2017 issue of our Screeps World Review is out! Read about the game world progress in the past quarter, analysis of leaders' achievements and successes, and video replays of noteworthy events: READ FULL ARTICLE

Great news: we've launched a new documentation site! Quality documentation and API reference are crucial for the success of any program platform, and Screeps can well be considered a program platform. That's why we spent so much time to thoroughly document all available game objects and methods which was not very convenient on top of Zendesk Help Center. Now we are excited to announce the launch of our new documentation site that you can start using right now! Here is the link: http://docs.screeps.com Besides revamped looks and improved desktop and mobile navigation, the new site boasts another feature: it is fully open-source and GitHub-based. This means you can always offer a fix or suggestion. And that's not all! We understand that Screeps is a game with a steep learning curve, and good documentation helps make it flatter. If you want to help us document the game well, we are ready to thank you in return.

Contribute to documentation and earn money

Introduced new kind of world map zones: Respawn Areas.

• Respawn Areas are highlighted with blue color on the world map.
• They are isolated from the rest of the world with a wall. The wall has a timer similar to Novice Areas. Any player can place the first spawn in this area, but nobody can come here from the outside world while the timer is up.
• The only restriction in Respawn Area is nukes usage - a nuke cannot be launched from or to a room in a Respawn Area.
• Players with GCL 4 or higher are no longer able to start playing in Novice Areas. They have to either respawn in a regular room or in a room within a Respawn Area that will keep them safe for a while and allow to claim as many rooms as their GCL allows.

Other changes

• When a Novice or Respawn Area is being planned in an inner sector, all free rooms in this sector will be signed by the game with the following message:
  
• Added new constants SYSTEM_USERNAME, SIGN_NOVICE_AREA, SIGN_RESPAWN_AREA. You can use them to programmatically check the signs in the rooms that are important to you and reserve them if such a message detected.

Memory segments

• You can have up to 10 MB of additional memory by activating asynchronous memory segments.
• Each memory segment is a string with an ID from 0 to 99.
• Maximum segment data length is 100 KB.
• Segments are asynchronous, you should request them using RawMemory.setActiveSegments. The data will be available on the next tick.
• You cannot have more than 10 segments active at the same time.
• Active segments are available in RawMemory.segments object and are saved automatically.
• Activating and saving segments have no added CPU cost.

Other changes

• You can now create a RoomVisual object using the constructor without a roomName parameter and post visuals to all rooms simultaneously: new RoomVisual().circle(30,30, {fill: 'red'}); new RoomVisual('W1N1').rect(10,10,40,40); This code will display both the circle and the rectangle in the room W1N1, and only the circle in any another room.
• Changed RoomVisual.text method style options:
  • Renamed size option to font. It can be either a number or a string in one of the following forms:
    • 0.7
    • 0.7 serif
    • bold italic 1.5 Times New Roman
    • 20px sans-serif - absolute size in pixels
  • Added new stroke and strokeWidth options.
  • Added new backgroundColor and backgroundPadding options. Example: new RoomVisual().text('Text 123', 10, 10, { font: 'bold italic .7 serif', color: 'white', backgroundColor: '#88ff88', backgroundPadding: .3, stroke: '#005500', strokeWidth: .15 });
    

The January issue of our Screeps World Review is out! Read about the game world progress in the past month, analysis of leaders' achievements and successes, and video replays of noteworthy events: READ FULL ARTICLE

We introduced an exciting new major feature - RoomVisual API. Now you can draw simple shapes (lines, circles, rectangles, polygons, text labels) right at the game field in any room to debug your code and/or display arbitrary info. For example, you can visualize your creep path (using the new visualizePathStyle move option), plan your future structures placement, display debugging text messages including Unicode emoji, and many more. These visuals are visible only to you, and all API calls have no added CPU cost.

API Changelog

• Added new RoomVisual global prototype.
• Added new Room.visual property.
• Added new visualizePathStyle option to the Creep.moveTo method.

The January issue of our Screeps World Review is out! Read about the game world progress in the past month, analysis of leaders' achievements and successes, and video replays of noteworthy events: READ FULL ARTICLE

Private server package updated to v2.2.2. See changelog here.

The December issue of our Screeps World Review is out! Read about the game world progress in the past month, analysis of leaders' achievements and successes, and video replays of noteworthy events: READ FULL ARTICLE

Private server updated to v2.2.1. See changelog here.

Introduced controller signing mechanics. It allows to sign any (owned, unowned or hostile) room with a random text message visible to all players (up to 100 characters). This message will appear in the room UI and in the world map:
   
API changes:

• Added new Creep.signController method.
• Added new StructureController.sign property.

The November issue of our Screeps World Review is out! Read about the game world progress in the past month, analysis of leaders' achievements and successes, and video replays of noteworthy events: READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Screeps was launched on Steam in June. Though the game was fully ready, we marked it as Early Access since it lacked the main feature of the Steam release: dedicated servers. Now, after several months, we have a packaged product: well-working official MMO world plus fully functional dedicated servers allowing to play either locally or online without subscription. So we are happy to announce the end of the Early Access stage and the full release of Screeps on Steam! This doesn't mean though that the development is halted. We have plenty of plans (check our Roadmap), and we continue to add more features, improve existing ones, improve our documentation, and fix rare bugs. But it is only now that we've reached the minimal feature set we envisioned long ago. The further development will focus on gradual improvement of the game. We hope you'll like it! And on the occasion, we announce a special 10% launch discount that will last only one week, until November 23!

We have enabled Steam Workshop integration in the 2.1.0 server build. Now you can submit your mods and bot AI scripts to the Workshop, and manage them using the Steam client server launcher:
Steam Workshop is linked to the npm repository. It means that you need to publish your package to npm first, and submit it to the Steam Workshop after:
This way we can have the best of both worlds: all mods are still available via npm, and you can browse them using the convenient and friendly Workshop UI. All mods will be automatically updated to the latest version on server launch. Now, it is time to write some mods!

• CARRY parts now don’t have weight penalty when boosted. One CARRY part always generates fatigue as one body part, even if it contains more than 50 energy units.
• Increased the following boost effects:
  • UO: from +100% to +200% harvest
  • UHO2: from +200% to +400% harvest
  • XUHO2: from +300% to +600% harvest
  • LH: from +30% to +50% repair and build
  • LH2O: from +65% to +80% repair and build
  • GH: from +30% to +50% upgradeController
  • GH2O: from +65% to +80% upgradeController

We are glad to announce that after two weeks of closed testing, the Screeps standalone server is live for public testing, and the entire code is posted to our GitHub and available to all! Now you can either run the server via Steam or install it on any machine from the NPM repository with a couple of commands. Please see instructions in our README. Within a couple of days, we plan to set up integration with the Steam Workshop to let you upload your mods for the community. Besides, after negotiating all the details with the Steam marketing team, we have agreed on the date of making Screeps available on Steam as "Full Release." If everything goes as intended, the release will happen in a week, on November 16! The game will exit the Early Access status and be published in the main catalog of Steam games.

The October issue of our Screeps World Review is out! Read about the game world progress in the past month, analysis of leaders' achievements and successes, and video replays of noteworthy events: READ THE FULL ARTICLE

• Invaders in Source Keeper rooms are now always spawned in groups of 2-5 creeps and may be boosted with tier-3 boosts including XGHO2.
• The world map is now continuous on borders when doing StructureTerminal.send and trade operations. The corresponding option added to the Game.map.getRoomLinearDistance method: Game.map.getRoomLinearDistance('E65S55','W65S55', false) // 131 Game.map.getRoomLinearDistance('E65S55','W65S55', true) // 11

• Mineral regeneration mechanics are changed. Mineral regeneration amount is no longer random, but rather depends on a new property called Mineral.density:
  • DENSITY_LOW: 15K amount (10% probability)
  • DENSITY_MODERATE: 35K amount (40% probability)
  • DENSITY_HIGH: 70K amount (40% probability)
  • DENSITY_ULTRA: 100K amount (10% probability).
  It gives the same average value as before this change, but now it is predictable and creates some variety between rooms.
• In most cases, density is not changed between regenerations. However, there is a 5% chance that it will be changed to a random new density on the next regeneration cycle. For DENSITY_LOW and DENSITY_ULTRA deposits this chance is always 100%.
• Mineral deposits density is visually observable on the world map using the corresponding display option.
• Flags count is now limited to 10,000 per player. 
• When created via the API, flag names are limited to 60 characters (creating via UI is already limited, there was the lack of filtration in the API). Old flags names will be truncated to 60 characters.
• When remainingAmount property of a market order becomes equal to 0, the order now does not get deleted, but becomes inactive instead. You can call extendOrder and reactivate it keeping the same persistent ID. You must call cancelOrder explicitly in order to remove this order from your list.

We have enabled Subscription Tokens integration with the Steam Community Market. Now you can not only buy tokens via Steam, but also sell them there for real currency! If you own Screeps in your Steam account, having tokens in your profile will allow you to exchange and trade them on Steam in the same way as with any other items on it. In fact, this means that you can earn real money into your Steam Wallet by mining resources in Screeps. Or, more exactly, by one-time programming the mining and production of these resources!

• Increased nukers and observers range to 10 rooms.
• Increased nuke energy cost to 300K.
• Changed nuke landing damage to structures:
  • 10M damage to the landing position;
  • 5M damage to all structures in 5x5 area.
• Added new nuke landing effect:
  • If the room is in safe mode, it is cancelled immediately, and the safe mode cooldown is reset to 0.
  • The room controller is hit by triggering upgradeBlocked period, which means it is unavailable to activate safe mode again within the next 200 ticks.
• When safe mode is active, all hostile creeps become visually transparent and passable - your creeps can move through them freely (but not vice versa).
• Source Keeper lairs now start a new keeper spawning period immediately as the old one is injured, rather than when it is dead. If the old keeper is still alive in 300 ticks, it disappears and gets removed by the new one.
• Reduced labs reaction speed from 10 units per 10 ticks to 5 units per 10 ticks.
• Reduced energy sources capacity in source keepers rooms from 4500 to 4000.
• Introduced new StructureExtractor.cooldown property. It is triggered on each harvest action, your harvesters have to wait for 5 ticks until the next harvest call is possible (it will return ERR_TIRED result code).
• Reduced mineral deposit regeneration amounts from 70-140K to 35-70K. Now all minerals (including hydrogen and oxygen) have the same amounts.
• New NPC market order prices. VIEW ORIGINAL ARTICLE
  
  [ 2016-09-26 05:22:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

The September issue of our Screeps World Review is out! Read about the game world progress in the past month, analysis of leaders' achievements and successes, and video replays of noteworthy events: READ THE FULL ARTICLE

• Added new method Game.market.getOrderById.
• Updated all script servers to Node.js 6.6.0 (V8 5.1.281.75).

Introduced new room safe mode mechanics. It will replace room novice walls protection, and allow to arbitrarily safeguard your rooms while you are offline.
Safe mode is enabled on the room controller when a new player spawns in the world initially. It also can be triggered by any player manually using either the StructureController.activateSafeMode() method, or the button in the controller UI. When activated, it blocks attack, rangedAttack, rangedMassAttack, dismantle, heal, rangedHeal, attackController and withdraw methods of all hostile creeps in the room. Only one room can be in safe mode at the same time. Safe mode period lasts for 20,000 ticks. It cannot be activated again during the 50,000 ticks cooldown period. But in Novice Areas, there is no cooldown at all. In order to activate safe mode you spend available activations (StructureController.safeModeAvailable property). You obtain one activation on each controller level upgrade, and also can generate it by Creep.generateSafeMode() method using 1000 ghodium resource. If the controller is downgraded, it loses all its available safe mode activations, and triggers the cooldown period.

Changelog

• Introduced new properties StructureController.safeMode, StructureController.safeModeAvailable, StructureController.safeModeCooldown.
• Introduced new method StructureController.activateSafeMode.
• Introduced new method Creep.generateSafeMode.
• The room owner can create up to 5 invader creeps using the Invasion UI in order to test room defences. These invaders will not drop resources when they die and can be removed using their UI. If another player’s creeps appear in the room, they suicide immediately.
• Renamed Game.map.isRoomProtected property to Game.map.isRoomAvailable (with the opposite meaning). The old name is still available, but deprecated and will be removed in the future. Rooms in safe mode are considered available.
• Added StructureContainer.ticksToDecay property.

• Added new method Game.market.changeOrderPrice.
• Added new method Game.market.extendOrder.
• Increased maximum orders limit per player from 20 to 50.

The market system has been deployed.

• Introduced new properties: Market.credits, Market.orders.
• Introduced new methods: Market.createOrder, Market.cancelOrder, Market.getAllOrders, Market.deal.
• Generated NPC terminals in “crossroad” neutral rooms.
• Added new global Game.resources property.
• Added new maxCost option to the PathFinder.search method.
• Added new properties in the result object returned from the PathFinder.search method: cost, incomplete.

September has begun, and we start getting natural questions like: “When will the open-source server go live that was promised in August?” So in this post we’d like to explain the situation that’s going on now. Currently we have actually three parallel development pipelines for Screeps:

• Features of the game itself and its gameplay
• Optimizing the official server
• Development of the standalone hosted server

• Zero dependencies.The official world works on a traditional server stack of many applications: nginx + nodejs + mongodb + redis. And it won’t work for the standalone server. The user should be able to just download an executable file via Steam, launch it, and get a working server at his IP address without any extra programs to install. We use Electron packaging to achieve this, but it also requires a separate database layer based on the in-memory database inside the application itself.
• NPM-based application. Though many users will opt for the easy downloading and running the server as a simple desktop application, we have to support a more advanced installation as an NPM module as well. Being a JavaScript application, the Screeps server organically fits into the npm packets ecosystem, but the current game server architecture (which was initially developed as a set of layers with loose coupling) should be divided into multiple modules to publish them in the npm separately. This will allow, for example, replacing the database layer module with your own one to use the desired server-side stack.
• Fully moddable architecture. To change the majority of server behavior aspects should require simple redefining of needed fragments through a system of external hooks and extensions rather than modifying the server code. We also need a possibility to add custom game entities even with their own visuals.
• Single-player bot players. The single-player mode (which makes some people long for the standalone server) will be pretty boring unless there is somebody else but the player in the game world. But the development of a full-fledged AI that can start from scratch in the game world and seriously challenge the human player is a very interesting and complicated task. We want the players themselves to find the solution to it, since that’s exactly the main fun of Screeps. Any player could write a script for his or her standalone AI and submit it into the common repository where other players of the single-player mode can install it. When provided with its own room in the worls, such a standalone AI has to be able to analyze the situation, develop its colony, and bring some life to the game world where it exists. The repository will introduce a ranking system for AI performance, user comments to them, new version updates, etc.
• Steam Workshop support. The two aforementioned options are perfect in terms of excellent mechanics of Steam Workshop. The system of downloading and installing any custom files provided by the Workshop can be utilized to automatically install and update custom mods, game object types, bot players, and entire complete worlds. This is a huge task, but it’s vital for the Screeps ecosystem.

The August issue of our Screeps World Review is out! Read about the game world progress in the past month, analysis of leaders' achievements and successes, and video replays of noteworthy events: READ THE FULL ARTICLE

• Changed terminal send cost to the following non-linear formula: Math.ceil( amount * (Math.log(0.1*linearDistanceBetweenRooms + 0.9) + 0.1) )
• Introduced new method Game.market.calcTransactionCost that allows to estimate the energy cost of transactions via Terminals or market orders.

After the Steam launch, many people got to know about Screeps and supported it financially. We thank all of you who contribute to the project’s development! It was very important for us to have an audience though not big, but such advanced and smart as you all are! The successful Steam launch increased financial capabilities of the project. As before, our team consists of three people: Artem, Sergey, and Anton, but Artem now works on Screeps exclusively full-time, while Sergey and Anton help with important tasks on an ongoing basis. Now we are completely confident in our abilities to implement the majority of our plans that once seemed to us colossal and unfeasible, but now we have a clear vision of what to do next on the project. So we’d like to share some of our thoughts with you. Below are some major features and areas that we either work now or will work on within the coming months. The order is not always chronological, but it gives a glimpse on our priorities. 

Market system

Open source server 

Better simulation 

Power Creeps 

Arena 

Pixels & decoration 

API versioning 

Achievements 

World events 

Quests 

Native languages support 

The July issue of our Screeps World Review is out! Read about the game world progress in the past month, analysis of leaders' achievements and successes, and video replays of noteworthy events: READ THE FULL ARTICLE

• Added new public option to Creep.say method. You can set it to true to allow other players to see the message.
• CPU cost of Creep.say method is set to NONE.
• Added new Creep.saying property that can be used to read the message at the last tick, even by other players.
• Moving onto exit tiles now doesn’t generate any fatigue regardless of creep movement capabilities.
• It is now possible to build spawns and extensions near energy sources.

• Changed downgrade timers for different Room Controller levels (CONTROLLER_DOWNGRADE constant):
  • RCL1: 20,000 ticks
  • RCL2: 5,000 ticks
  • RCL3: 10,000 ticks
  • RCL4: 20,000 ticks
  • RCL5: 40,000 ticks
  • RCL6: 60,000 ticks
  • RCL7: 100,000 ticks
  • RCL8: 150,000 ticks
  This affects only controllers downgraded after the patch. The current timers are not changed.
• Fixed a bug in PathFinder module related to incorrect pathfinding near room borders in rare cases.
• RoomPosition.lookFor(LOOK_TERRAIN) now returns an array with a single element as documented.
• Fixed an issue in the simulation that caused ticks slow down over time. Please report if you still experience this issue.

• Introduced Creep.withdraw method. It replaces all structures’ transfer methods which are now considered deprecated.
• Executing StructureSpawn.createCreep now inserts a new dummy Creep object into Game.creeps hash immediately. The id property of such object is undefined until the next tick.
• Executing Room.createFlag now inserts a new Flag object into Game.flags hash immediately.

The June issue of our Screeps World Review is out! Read about the game world progress in the past month, analysis of leaders' achievements and successes, and video replays of noteworthy events: READ THE FULL ARTICLE

We have just launched Screeps on Steam! The game is available on exclusive terms: buying Screeps through the Steam Store, you get lifetime MMO access with the 10 CPU limit. This resource is sufficient to maintain a small bunch of optimized rooms – play as much time as you like without ever paying for subscription! The CPU subscription will be available for order at the Steam store page in the next few days. Please take note that the local hosted mode is not available yet, it is planned for July-August. We are looking forward to hear your feedback! Please don't forget to write a review if you like the game. Have fun scripting!