Devlog · 10 October 2026

Touch controls, city staff and quieter streets

This is a bigger update than usual, and the headline is that Blockline now plays properly on phones and tablets. It also adds a way to hand day-to-day running of the city's special sites over to staff you hire, and fixes the way road noise affected homes.

Playing on a touch screen

Blockline was designed around a mouse and keyboard, and on a phone it showed. Touch screens now get their own controls. They only switch on for a real touch screen, so playing on a desktop with a mouse is exactly as it was.

• Pinch to zoom, two fingers to pan. This works whatever tool you are holding. Putting a second finger down ends a painting stroke, and nothing is built while you pinch, so you will not lay a road by accident while moving the camera.
• Tap to preview, tap again to build. With a build tool, the first tap shows the building's footprint and price on the map, and a second tap on the same tile builds it. This replaces hovering, which a finger cannot do. Touch players start with the inspect tool, so a first tap never spends money.
• A touch tool bar shows what you are holding, with Done, Put back and Rotate buttons in place of the Esc and R keys.
• Phones held sideways fit the screen. The mini map and view controls used to be pushed off the bottom of a landscape phone. The top bar is slimmer and now shows your treasury, keyboard hints are hidden, and text boxes no longer make iPhones zoom in when you tap them.

The 3D venues use the same pinch-and-drag gestures. The tutorial and tips now say tap and pinch on a touch screen rather than click and scroll. The getting started guide is a good place to begin on any device.

Hire staff to run things

As a city grows, the four walk-in venues and the city's ageing infrastructure all want attention every day. A new Staff app on the Mayor's Computer lets you hire people to share the load. There are five posts:

• a city maintenance team, which slows the wear on roads, mains, cables, track and civic buildings;
• and a police chief, music venue manager, prison warden and head of hospital operations, who each run their site's daily decisions.

Each post has three candidates: a cheap one, a steady one and a star. Better people cost more and make better decisions. Salaries appear as a daily line in the budget, and firing someone costs 3 days' pay in severance.

Managers work through exactly the same controls you do, so the venue's rules apply to them just as they apply to you. The City Prison's warden sets the regime and sits on the parole board; the Music Venue's manager auditions bands and books the nights. You always have the final say. If you make a decision at a managed site yourself, the manager steps back for 7 days, or until you hand control back.

"What's new" cards

When something new arrives, signed-in players now see a short card about it the next time they load the game, shown over the start or pause menu, where the city is already paused. Press "Got it" and it will not appear again on any of your devices, and the WHAT'S NEW button on the menu brings them all back. New players are not shown news about features that already existed when they joined. The same announcements are posted to the Blockline Discord.

Auto-pause after an hour away

A city left running on an unattended screen can quietly run itself into trouble. Now, if there has been no input for an hour while the clock is running, the game pauses and asks "Still there, Mayor?". Any mouse movement, key press, scroll or touch in any of the game's tabs counts as activity, so playing in one tab keeps another from pausing. Press resume and carry on.

Road noise is about traffic, not tarmac

Homes used to lose value simply for being next to a street, however quiet it was, and corner plots were penalised twice for having two streets. Now road noise comes from congestion. A quiet residential street costs nearby homes nothing, a plot only hears its single loudest street rather than the total of all of them, and the largest possible noise penalty has been reduced. Highways are still always somewhat noisy. The footfall shops get from a busy street is unchanged.

If you have been avoiding putting homes on through roads, this is a good time to look again. The desirability guide explains what else raises and lowers a home's appeal.