Blackstart

The city is dark. You have one substation, one diesel set, and 60 credits.

Blackstart is an incremental game about restoring a collapsed power grid — and about the fact that restoring it is what breaks it. Every district you switch on serves people and earns credits, and adds its power draw to your grid permanently. Build generation faster than you expand and the lights stay on. Get it wrong and supply falls behind demand, the grid browns out, and eight seconds later it cascades and takes districts with it.

Your number can go down. That's the game.

What you're managing

Headroom — supply minus load. It's the only number that matters, and it gets thinner every time you succeed.

Generation with personalities, not tiers. Six kinds to start and three more you earn. Diesel spins up instantly and is a terrible deal — the panic button. Coal is the best value on the board and takes 25 seconds to reach full output, so you commit before you need it. Wind is better value still, but its output wanders, and your headroom stops being a promise and becomes a forecast. Battery banks generate nothing at all — they absorb a deficit before the alarm even sounds. Flywheel banks generate nothing either: twelve tonnes of iron in a vacuum, buying you seconds instead of megawatts.

A city that argues with you. Mill District draws 9 MW to serve 240 people, and it's the only road to St. Alma Hospital and its 980. The Data Centre is 260 MW for two thousand people — a monument to bad value that nothing but completionism can justify. The traps are the interesting part of the map.

Shedding is a decision. When the alarm sounds you can build your way out, or you can click a lit district twice and take it offline yourself. Choosing who goes dark is cheaper than letting the grid choose for you.

Seven jobs — seven different grids to hold

Restore enough of the city and you can black-start into a job: a situation that changes the rules for a whole run, and usually makes it harder. Finish one and you permanently keep the system it taught you.

Cold Start is the plain grid, no twist — the baseline you measure the rest against. Night Shift runs demand on a daily curve, ±40%, peaking as the sun goes — and hands you solar arrays, which are enormous by day and absent by night. Cold Snap sends fronts through on a timer. Fuel Convoy puts your thermal plant on a depot that trucks refill, so the cheapest grid you can build is also a supply chain. The Auction lets you sell surplus into a moving wholesale price — every megawatt you contract lands on your grid as load, so you are selling your own safety margin. Critical Load makes two districts priority. Frequency Event ties your grace period to spinning mass, so the cheapest power on the board quietly costs you reaction time.

Three more are on the way.

19 districts · 129,930 people · 934 MW of demand · 9 generator types · 7 jobs · 11 upgrades · 20 achievements · six permanent Grid Code picks · offline progress

Away time earns at half rate for up to 8 hours, and sheds load rather than cascading — you will never come back to lost districts.

Free, no ads, no accounts, nothing to buy. Runs in the browser, saves locally. Under 90 KB of JavaScript, no engine, and not a single art asset — everything you see is CSS and a canvas.

Made with a control room in mind. Sound is worth turning on: switching, breakers, the brownout alarm, and a tick under the cursor. There's no continuous drone by default — if you want room tone, one more click on the sound button adds the transformer hum, which tracks how hard the grid is working.