Big Ambitions Early Access vs 1.0: Every Change Tracked

Updated 2026-09-08 · Last verified 2026-09-08 · Steam Big Ambitions

Big Ambitions left Early Access on 28 August 2026, and the four releases that closed out that period, EA 0.9, EA 0.10, EA 0.11 and 1.0, each rewrote a system that older guides still describe as current. This page lays those generations side by side from the 100 official update posts Hovgaard Games published between 10 March 2023 and 1 September 2026, and gives you concrete tells for dating any page you land on.

The reader's real question is rarely "what is new". It is "can I trust the guide open in my other tab". So that comes first.

Ten-second test: dating a guide by what it says

Every row below is anchored to a dated official update post. If a page contains the phrase in column one, it was written before the release in column two, whatever date sits in its byline.

If the page says this	It predates	What actually changed
New York has five neighbourhoods	EA 0.9, 30 Sep 2025	Industry City opened across the bridge, making six
Six neighbourhoods, or no Hamptons	1.0, 28 Aug 2026	The Hamptons is the seventh neighbourhood
Business list with no Cinema or Theater	EA 0.10, 11 Mar 2026	Both added, described officially as the largest businesses in the game
Only three office types (law, web, graphic design)	EA 0.11, 18 Jun 2026	Travel Agency and Event Planning Agency added
Gyms sell nothing	EA 0.11	Gyms sell soda and energy drinks with no extra employee
HQ staff list with no Pricing Manager	1.0	Pricing Manager added, reprices a whole neighbourhood at once
Negative interest on your bank balance	1.0	Removed outright. The official wording is "Bye!"
Mods need a third-party loader	EA 0.11	Official Steam Workshop support, with an in-game uploader
Deliveries arrive in boxes, with a minimum order amount	EA 0.9	Suppliers deliver in units, and the minimum order was removed
A retail layout with no bathroom	EA 0.9	Bathrooms became a customer service requirement, and offices stop earning without them
You can be making millions in your first week	EA 0.9	The release is literally named The Struggle and exists to slow that down

Two of these tells also catch professional coverage. A 2023 beginner guide still in Google's index quotes a flat per-delivery fee the developers had already cut before that year was out, and PC Gamer's 2023 piece quotes a starting loan figure from a banking system 1.0 has since rewritten. Neither outlet did anything wrong. The numbers belong to a build that no longer exists.

The generation ladder

Eleven numbered Early Access generations shipped, plus 1.0. Optimisation releases are included because they moved systems too, and because their dates are what let you place an undated guide.

Version	Released	Official name	Why it matters when dating a guide
EA 0.1	10 Mar 2023	Early Access launch	Everything below is later than this
EA 0.2	29 May 2023	(build 1856)	Per-delivery costs cut from the launch value
EA 0.3	30 Aug 2023	The Blueprint Update	Blueprints enter the game
EA 0.4	13 Dec 2023	Optimization #1	Warehouse patch notes shipped alongside
EA 0.5	18 Apr 2024	The Rivalry Begins	Rivals system arrives
EA 0.6	17 Oct 2024	Assemble The Line	Factories arrive. The community wiki's version history stops here
EA 0.7	17 Dec 2024	Optimization #2
EA 0.8	12 May 2025	Optimization #3	Box consolidation, new character creator, auto-scheduler rewrite
EA 0.9	30 Sep 2025	The Struggle	Industry City, new tutorial, supply and progression rebalance
EA 0.10	11 Mar 2026	No Business Like Show Business	Cinemas, Theaters, full factory overhaul
EA 0.11	18 Jun 2026	The Workshop Awakens	Steam Workshop mods, two new office types, gym boost
1.0	28 Aug 2026	Full release	The Hamptons, private driver, banking and tax rewrite

Each generation also ran a public preview branch first, typically four to eight weeks ahead. EA 0.9's preview opened on 12 August 2025 and the release landed on 30 September. That gap is why some guides carry a date sitting between a preview and its release, describing a build most players never ran.

What EA 0.9 broke, and why it breaks the most guides

EA 0.9 is the release that invalidates the largest volume of writing, because it changed the shape of the early game rather than adding to the end of it.

The supply system was restructured wholesale. From EA 0.9 every wholesaler stocks the same items and covers fast food, coffee shops, fruit and vegetable stores, supermarkets, florists, hairdressers and cheap gifts. Each importer stocks paper bags, sodas and a unique selection, covering bookstores, liquor stores, nightclubs, cheap jewellery, headphones and earbuds, and cheap clothing. The most profitable goods, named officially as expensive jewellery, expensive clothing, smartphones and smartwatches, now require a factory. Any supplier guide that routes you to a specific wholesaler for a specific item was written for a system that no longer exists.

Alongside that, deliveries moved to units rather than boxes, the minimum order amount was removed, Smart Delivery became a manual toggle, a per-location weekly ordering limit appeared, and urgent orders became a paid next-day option. Rent rose and utility costs were added, warehouses especially. The starter delivery van was replaced by a more expensive one, and the original survives only in the delivery side job.

EA 0.9 also added the delivery driver starter job, rebuilt the tutorial, and recast Uncle Fred after the death of the original voice actor Mike McKay, with Jeff Pillars taking the role. Bathrooms became mandatory in practice: retail customers complain and your customer service score falls without them, and offices require them by building size or stop earning.

What 1.0 changed, system by system

System	Early Access state	1.0 state	Evidence
Neighbourhoods	Six after EA 0.9	Seven, The Hamptons added	Official changelog, plus PCGamesN 30 Aug 2026 word for word
Bank interest	Negative interest existed	Removed	Official changelog
Loans	Lower bar to qualify	More income required, higher interest, higher minimum daily payments, larger maximum, partial repayment allowed	Official changelog, echoed by NoobFeed's review
Investments	Manual, all-or-nothing withdrawal	Daily auto-investing, partial withdrawal, detailed growth info	Official changelog
Tax	Separate, no stated late fee	Rebalanced with more deductions, 10 per cent late fee, partial payment, folded into EconoView	Official changelog
Transport	Drive, subway, taxi, scooter	Adds a contracted private driver via Onyx Luxury Chauffeurs, any vehicle, plus an Onyx-exclusive limo	Official changelog
Food	Cook or walk to it	Speedy Bites delivers, and you can run its deliveries for cash	Official changelog, NoobFeed
Pricing	Per business	Pricing Manager reprices an entire neighbourhood at once, and suggests daily prices at higher skill	Official changelog, community wiki HQ page
Export	No stated feedback loop	Exporting too much drops that item's import and export price for the rest of the week	Official changelog
Inventory	Filled per device in order	Split evenly across devices	Official changelog
Achievements	Pre-1.0 total never published	126, with 27 added in 1.0 and Aging and Casino Winnings retuned	Changelog, plus two Steam endpoints both returning 126

The three minigames are worth calling out because two of them are gated. Brick Breaker runs on your home computer. Halcyon Fairway, the golf driving range, and A Racket of Love, the tennis court, both require that you have bought a home in The Hamptons first. Guides that list all three as generally available have copied the feature names without reading the conditions.

Why so much downstream writing is stale

The community Fandom wiki carries the page most people would use to answer this question, and that page is dead. Its Development entry, the version history, ends at EA 0.6 from October 2024. Six releases are missing from it: EA 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 0.10, 0.11 and 1.0, covering 22 months. One of the wiki's own editors left the note "no edit since 8 month" on it in September 2026.

That single stale page is upstream of a lot of secondary writing. Its Neighborhoods page, last edited 21 February 2025, still opens by stating the city is separated into five neighbourhoods, which is wrong by two in 1.0. Its Employees category predates six staff roles. Its apartment table is from October 2024, covers four neighbourhoods rather than seven, and contains at least one row whose rent and deposit have clearly been copied from a much larger unit.

There is a genuine repair effort under way. Two editors, working through early September 2026, are tagging pages by era in their edit summaries: "not in 1.0 anymore" on Delivery Driver, "only in EA" on Factory and its input and output stations, and a note on Rivals that poaching "didnt happen in 1.0". That is unusually good practice, and it means the wiki's reliability is now page by page rather than site-wide. Check the last-edited date before trusting any figure. Pages touched in September 2026 are broadly 1.0 current; pages last touched in 2024 are fossils.

One more trap. A second site republishes the Fandom Hamptons house price range and labels its own source as Fandom wikitext. Two sites carrying the same range is not two sources. It is one source quoted twice, and it stays unconfirmed by the developers, who said only that a Hamptons home costs a few million dollars.

What this page deliberately does not do

It does not restate prices from either era, and that is a decision rather than a gap.

Early Access prices are not current: EA 0.9 raised rents and added utilities, EA 0.10 reworked the import piers and factory throughput, and 1.0 rebalanced tax and added an export feedback loop on import prices. Current prices are not something this site measures, because another fansite has been measuring per-item prices in-game since 2023 and has already updated its tables for the seven-neighbourhood 1.0 map. A second-hand copy would be worse on day one and would rot silently afterwards.

What we do instead is exactly this page: dated mechanism, dated provenance, and an explicit statement of which build a claim belongs to. See the 1.0 change list for the release itself, what is still coming for the post-1.0 plan, and the myths page for claims that circulate with no version attached at all.

The logistics limits are the clearest case for that approach. Three community pages give three different answers for how many destinations one warehouse can serve, quoting four, eight and sixteen, and two more disagree on what time deliveries actually run. Nothing official settles it. So the mechanism is all we will state: a bigger truck and a higher-skilled Logistics Manager both raise the number of destinations you can serve, and a run needs a vehicle in the warehouse, a delivery driver on it, and at least one storage shelf at the receiving store. See logistics for the full conflict.

How much of 1.0 has anyone actually seen

Global Steam achievement rates, pulled 8 September 2026, put a floor under how thoroughly 1.0 content has been documented anywhere.

1.0 or late-EA content	Achievement	Global unlock rate
Golf at Halcyon Fairway	Just Tap It In, all three tiers	0.1%
Tennis at A Racket of Love	A Game of Love, all three tiers	0.1%
Beating any special rival	Arch-nemesis, Bronze	0.1%
Using the private driver 10 times	They See Me Rollin', Bronze	1.4%
Five event planners hired (EA 0.11 role)	Party Planning Committee, Bronze	1.5%
Five travel agents hired (EA 0.11 role)	Oh, the Places You'll Go, Bronze	1.3%
Running one retail business	Product Pusher, Bronze	75.9%

Three quarters of all owners have opened a shop. Roughly one in a thousand has hit a golf ball or won a tennis match. Any guide claiming to cover the Hamptons minigames in depth is either very recent, very thorough, or inventing. The same caution applies to us: these rates move, so the date above them is part of the fact.

Businesses and staff carry the current roster, including the roles EA 0.10 and EA 0.11 added.

Frequently asked questions

How long was Big Ambitions in Early Access?

It launched into Steam Early Access on 10 March 2023 and released as 1.0 on 28 August 2026, so three years and roughly five and a half months. Hovgaard Games published eleven numbered generations in that time, from EA 0.1 through EA 0.11, plus the 1.0 release itself. The last four of those, EA 0.9 through 1.0, are the ones that break older guides.

Is my Big Ambitions guide out of date?

Check three things. If it says New York has five neighbourhoods it predates EA 0.9 from September 2025, if it has no Cinema or Theater it predates EA 0.10 from March 2026, and if it lists only three office business types or has no Pricing Manager it predates EA 0.11 and 1.0 respectively. Any guide mentioning negative interest on your bank balance was written before 1.0 removed it.

What is the biggest change between Early Access and 1.0?

By reach, the banking and tax rewrite, because it touches every save at every stage. Negative interest is gone, loans need more income and carry higher interest and higher minimum daily payments but allow a larger maximum and partial repayment, and tax moved into the EconoView panel with a stated 10 per cent late fee. By visible content, The Hamptons is the headline, since it is the seventh neighbourhood and gates the golf and tennis minigames behind owning a home there.

How many neighbourhoods does Big Ambitions have in 1.0?

Seven. Five shipped originally, Industry City was added across the bridge in EA 0.9 in September 2025, and The Hamptons arrived with 1.0 as what the official notes call our seventh neighborhood. The community Fandom wiki still states five on its Neighborhoods page, which was last edited in February 2025, so that page is wrong by two.

Do Early Access prices still apply in 1.0?

Treat them as void until re-measured. EA 0.9 raised rents and added utility costs, EA 0.9 also restructured which supplier stocks which goods, and 1.0 rebalanced tax and made exporting push down the import and export price of that item for the rest of the week. This site does not republish per-item price tables from either era, because a second-hand copy rots silently.

Will there be more updates after 1.0?

Yes. The 1.0 changelog closes by saying more updates are coming over the next several months followed by a first DLC, and the 1.0 announcement repeats the plan for patches, content updates and DLC. The first post-release patch, builds 3672 and 3674 on 1 September 2026, already shipped and stated that further achievement fixes were still to come, so achievement wording itself is not final.