7 September 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
The Block gets its first real balance pass, a tutorial in its own quiet voice, lamplight through the whole building, and text you can actually read.
- Loud jobs are now worth doing. The alarm has more room to run before a loud job is blown, so blowing a vault or driving out past the whistle brings a very large score home — along with a very large amount of heat and some of your crew in the back of a van. Bring a chop shop or a smuggling tunnel and fewer of them go. The greediest possible loud line will still blow the job, and going quiet on a gr
- Which rooms are worth building has changed. The back-room casino, the chop shop and the numbers room make noticeably more heat for their money, the smuggling tunnel is no longer quietly the best room in the game, and the speakeasy bar finally earns its keep. Money comes in at about the same rate as before — but the police turn up roughly twice as often across a run.
- A new opening called THE FIRST NIGHT walks you through the still, your crew, the door, the flat next door and the cellar one step at a time — by asking you to do each thing rather than describing it, and waiting until you have. You can skip it at any point, and turn it off for good in Options.
- The first stranger no longer knocks four seconds into a new game. You get half of day one to look around the block before anybody arrives.
- Answering the door, and defending a raid, now happen on a large card in the middle of the screen instead of a small box in the corner, and all the text in the game is considerably larger at every screen size. You can still drag the building around and tap a room while somebody is waiting on the step.
- Every room now has warm light under its own lamp, the ground floor throws light out onto the road, and the whole picture has been graded with haze, vignette and grain — and every lamp in the building goes out while the police are inside.
- The radio room warns you later than it used to, but when it warns you the raid is genuinely close. Sending someone down to the docks pays a bit less and leaves a few more witnesses behind.
30 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
Heists — plan a job, pick who goes and whether you go loud or quiet, then rob a gasworks, a bank or a diamond exchange out on the street.
- You can now plan and pull a job. Pick one of three places on the city street, pick two to four of your crew, and decide whether you are going in loud or quiet. Then the job plays out where you can see it, in three beats — the way in, the room, the way out — and you answer each one by pointing at something on the pavement before the clock runs out.
- Loud and quiet are two different jobs, not two difficulty settings. Loud parks a car across the pavement with the lamps on and takes more, faster, in front of everybody. Quiet goes round the back in the dark and comes away with less that nobody can describe. The same payroll job costs about seventy heat loud and about six quiet.
- What you built decides what you can do out there. A chop shop puts a getaway car on the table, a smuggling tunnel puts an open manhole on it, a lookout or radio buys you extra seconds on every beat, and a pigeon loft means fewer people remember your faces. Anything you cannot do is still shown to you, greyed out, with the reason.
- A job pays in cash and in swag — hot goods sitting in your building, making heat until somebody comes to buy them. A police raid carries the lot out to a van unless you have a stash room downstairs.
- Five new people now knock on your door: a fixer selling a plan, a caser selling a week of watching a place, a buyer for your goods, a man from the precinct who will lose the file on your last job, and a bail bondsman who will get somebody out of a cell tonight. Leave any of them standing on the step and it costs you — ignore the caser and he sells the week to the people he was watching instead.
- Three new places to look at while you pan the street: a gasworks down at the docks, the Delancey Savings Bank in the market, and the Diamond Exchange uptown. Plus a bell, a safe dial, sacks of coin and iron gates to hear while you work.
- Fixed a bug that made your crew, the room signs and every effect disappear from the screen as soon as you built a set of bunks.
29 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
The block now has a city around it — send your people out into the docks, the market and uptown, and decide what they do out there with your finger on the glass.
- Send a crew member out on a prowl. There is a whole city street either side of the block now — the docks to the west, the market and then uptown to the east — and they walk it while you watch.
- Two or three times on the walk they stop in front of something: a lorry with its tailgate down, a night watchman with a lamp, a lit window over a drainpipe. Point at what they should do before the clock over their head runs out. Standing there is an answer too.
- What they bring home pays in money and reputation. Who saw them do it pays in heat, and if enough people saw it, one of them knocks on your door wanting paying for their silence.
- Five new rooms, twenty in all: a numbers room, a steam laundry, a furnace that burns evidence and money, an athletic club that is the only room that makes a person better at their job, and a pigeon loft that means fewer people remember your prowler’s face.
- Two new kinds of person: Connected, who brings work to the door and keeps badges away from it, and Nimble, who comes back from the street with more and gets caught far less.
- One button now puts every idle hand into the best empty room in the building — cellar and roof included — without ever moving somebody you placed yourself.
28 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
The people of the block finally look like people, the intro plays without the menu on top of it, and the door stops hammering.
- Everyone in the building has been redrawn. Long coats with lapels, a shirt and a tie or a waistcoat, real hands and shoes, a face you can read, a lit cigarette here and there, and a shadow under their feet so nobody floats an inch off the floorboards.
- Seven kinds of hat instead of one — fedora, flat cap, bowler, homburg, newsboy, a copper's peaked cap, or nothing at all — so the crew, the tenants and the people on your step are all recognisably different people.
- You can now tell who is at the door from the silhouette. The beat cop has the tunic and the nightstick, the detective the belted coat and notebook, the fence a bundle over his shoulder, the envoy pinstripes and a carnation. A client with cash in hand looks exactly like a client with cash in hand — which is still the point.
- Starting a new operation no longer leaves the main menu sitting on top of the opening scene, and nothing pops up over the ending either.
- Fewer people knock, and the ones who do wait a lot longer. Visitors arrive roughly half as often and now give you about twenty-six seconds on the step instead of sixteen, so you can actually think about an offer before it walks away.
- Checking who somebody really is still costs you real seconds off their patience, and a lookout post or a radio room still buys you more of them.
28 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
Some of the people knocking are police now — and when the raid finally comes, you get to fight it.
- Recruits at your door can be undercover officers, and a client with cash in hand can be a sting. Nothing on the outside tells them apart.
- New door option: check who they are. A charm hand on the pawn shop counter, or anyone paranoid or cautious in the crew, can screen a stranger — it costs seconds off the clock and it is not a certainty.
- Make one and you can shut the door on them or feed them a false story. Miss one and nobody tells you: your heat starts climbing on its own, they never get unhappy, and sooner or later somebody knocks wanting money for the name.
- New crew trait, Cautious: the best pair of eyes you can have at the door, at the cost of a little earning.
- The raid is no longer something that just happens to you. It is two timed decisions — hold the door or open it, then hide the money, burn the books, run for the roofs or stand in the way — and then the search. Doing nothing cost four times as much as playing it well in our tests.
- Whoever puts their shoulder against the door is the first one they take, and a police plant still on your payroll knows exactly where the stash is.
28 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
The Block grows downwards and upwards — dig out a cellar under the road, clear the roof above the top floor, and start caring about what you build next to what.
- Dig out a cellar under the street. Nobody sees a shovel, so it costs no heat at all, and work down there is 30% less visible than work upstairs.
- Clear the rooftop for a lookout post and a radio room. Everything up there is more exposed, but you get a whistle before a raid arrives and extra seconds every time the law is on your step.
- Eight new rooms to build: a stash room that keeps your money out of police hands, a smuggling tunnel your people can escape through, a chop shop, a speakeasy bar, a back-room casino, an air shaft, a lookout post and a radio room.
- Rooms now react to their neighbours. A press next to an air shaft makes far less heat, a casino next to a bar earns a third more, and nobody sleeps in bunks next to a running press. Green and red badges on the shared wall show it, and the build menu tells you before you spend.
- A raid is no longer a flat robbery: what it takes and who it arrests now depends on your stash, your tunnel and whether anyone was watching the street.