• New cities start with a quick guide: drag a box to zone homes, and the streets come with it. • Goals for your first hour show what to build next, with a tip when your town stops growing. • Zoning over a road grid you drew now fills your blocks instead of adding a second set of streets. • The zone tools are up front on the toolbar, and a new town's first homes no longer empty out.

• Buck City now speaks French. It follows your device language, and you can switch any time in the Menu. • On a French keyboard, ZQSD now moves the map and drives, just like WASD.

• Buck City now speaks German. It follows your device language, and you can switch any time in the Menu. • Fires look the way they really are: burning buildings show flames, and burned ones stay as ruins until you rebuild. • The crime and power map layers are no longer hidden under the buildings. • The fire alarm only goes off for fires you can see, not every 25 seconds.

• Smoother play on iPhone and iPad, and your device stays cooler. • The App Store page is now in German, French and Spanish. The game itself is still in English.

• Today's City is always free: one shared map for everyone, new every day, whether or not you've unlocked the full game. • The free version now shows what's waiting past it — the next eras, buildings and policies, in the game's own numbers. • Under-the-hood improvements.

Buck City is now free to play. Start a city, lay out the streets, watch it come alive — and decide for yourself before paying anything. The free version is the whole game: every region, every architectural style, the whole simulation underneath. When you want to keep going, one purchase unlocks it for good — no population cap, no clock, and the "Every culture" style that puts all eight architectural packs in a single city. One payment. No subscription, no ads, nothing else to buy.

Founding a city is a moment now. Shape the land the way you want it, give the place a name, and watch it begin. Zone a block that no road can reach and the streets come with it. Land you've zoned actually builds, instead of sitting there quietly doing nothing forever. The frame rate is capped, so the game asks a lot less of your phone — noticeably less heat and battery on newer iPhones. And the landscape designer offers the terrain tools and nothing else, so the land you shape is the land you found your city on.