Cheap Flights

Aviation has been the most expensive way to move anything since the big air reprice — deliberately, because a plane spends most of its cycle parked. It stays the premium mode, but the whole ladder just got 30% cheaper: every aircraft in the game, from the oldest vanilla biplane to a Cargostrife Mk8, costs less to buy and less to run. And on tropic maps, lumber mills finally earn their keep.

Every aircraft: −30% purchase, −30% running

• Everything with wings, evenly. All 41 vanilla aircraft, every specialist, and every Mk2–Mk8 tier take exactly the same 30% off — so no plane got relatively better or worse, the whole mode just costs less.
• Full-speed flight stays. Planes still fly at 4× classic speed and still pay a premium for the time they spend loading, refuelling and queueing — the premium is just smaller.
• Aviators and helicopter lines benefit most — airports were already the hardest first purchase in the game, and a 30% cheaper fleet leaves more for the runway.

Why: the air reprice existed to price dead time, and it worked — a little too well. This trims the dial without touching the design.

Lumber mills work now

Tropic lumber mills are the one industry in the game that produces nothing by itself — every tonne of wood comes from chopping real trees around the mill, and the mill clears them as it goes. A working mill would eat its own forest and quietly starve to ~45 tonnes a month, and no amount of development could fix it, because development scales production rates and a lumber mill has none.

• The forest gets replanted. Serve a mill and trees are planted around it every month — funded by the company hauling its wood (you cut it, you replant it; the cost is small).
• Development finally matters for mills. Replanting scales with the mill's development: an undeveloped mill sustains about half output, a fully developed one runs at the mill's true ceiling — about 200 tonnes a month — and banks a forest besides.
• Recovery takes a few months — new trees have to grow before the mill can cut them, so a starved mill climbs back rather than snapping back.
• A mill nobody hauls from gets nothing — there is no one to plant for, and no one collecting the wood anyway.

Also live since the last notes

• Inflation is anchored to 1920 — the game's own year zero. Holdings dividends and indexed costs now carry each world's full replayed inflation instead of being normalised to one reference era: a 1950 world pays about 2.4× the old flat rates, a 2020 world about 19× — and its costs scale the same way. Details in the updated v0.932 notes.