Changelog

What's new

Last updated: 3 September 2026

Everything that changed in untangle.bio, newest first. Small fixes get one line; anything that changes how you work gets a short explanation.

1–2 September 2026

New Walk your plant. The 3D view now has a first-person mode at 1.70 m eye height, WASD movement and Blender-style orbit, with sky, shadows and translucent building shells you can step through.

Forty-seven equipment families are drawn as the machines they actually are, with their own nozzles, supports, pumps and valves. Pipes route around the plant instead of through it, storage form follows the product phase, and the drawn machines reconcile with the ones the cost model bills, so the layout you look at is the plant you paid for.

Improved The Start Here wizard assumes an extracellular product instead of asking on every product pick, and the fermentation preflight now says why it refused.
Improved Wastewater treatment is inside the cost basis, vessels are sized by one sizer everywhere, and GMP-grade downstream capital is priced as GMP.
Fixed The toolbar stayed reachable only at some interface scales. It no longer scrolls out of view.
Fixed A node with no operation type, or a stream with no pH in pH view, blanked the whole workspace. Both now draw.

31 August 2026

New Export your flowsheet as a 3D plant layout. Every unit operation gets real equipment geometry, a plot plan and drawn nozzles, with an in-app plan editor. Free for everyone while it is in early access.
New Membrane distillation joins the palette.
New The Untangle Universe, a browsable map of how the tool works under the hood, now with a molecule layer. Linked from the docs.
Improved A pass over the whole interface: clearer palette, redrawn icons, tidier dialogs, calmer canvas selection and reworked view settings. Wizard navigation is pinned below the content instead of scrolling away.
Fixed Open Project showed the site owner every user's projects. It now shows only your own.

27–29 August 2026

New Share a flowsheet by link. Anyone with the link gets a read-only view and can clone it into their own account.
New Continue from the canvas. Edit a generated flowsheet, then generate again from what you drew rather than starting over.
New See your streams, not just your boxes. A canvas toggle colours the flowsheet by flow, temperature, pH or enthalpy.
New Reactions are first-class: a multi-reaction table, an enzyme catalogue with every enzyme variable editable, and inhibition and deactivation on the enzyme itself.

Every reaction carries its chemistry provenance, and the atom balance is closed per element through the conversion reactor and the fermenter alike, with CO2, O2 and ammonia in the database and biomass on its real C-mol composition. An enzyme with no price no longer quietly inherits cellulase's.

New pH is a computed duty. Set your setpoints and the titrant demand, and its cost, follow from them.
New Nine more cheap fermentation substrates, molasses, corn steep liquor, bio-oil and pea protein among them.
New Appearance preference with two era skins: Workstation '95 and Terminal '85.
Improved Every capex line now carries the year its cost basis comes from, and consumables scale with the plant instead of sitting flat.
Improved A purification-only run now asks where the product sits in the feed, and which host cell it came from, instead of guessing.
Fixed Applying a generated route left some unit operations unconnected on the canvas, the gravity thickener and the other two-outlet operations in particular.
Fixed Superseded pseudo-components still appeared in the molecule picker. They are hidden now that mixtures replace them.

25–26 August 2026

New Print a dossier. An assumptions register, the full capital ladder, itemised operating costs, a year-by-year cash flow, the warnings that applied and a run id you can cite.
New Save a mixture of molecules once and reuse it, either as the feed you are separating or as the fermentation medium.
New Fourteen unit operations join the palette, taking it from 38 to 52.

Cell disruption, a conversion reactor with kinetic and equilibrium modes, a pasteurizer, wastewater treatment as a terminal sink, membrane chromatography with its own cost path, the continuous solid/liquid filtration cluster (filter press, rotary vacuum drum, belt filter, decanter centrifuge) and six more solids operations, each with the refusal walls that tell you when it does not apply.

Improved The wizard asks for the medium before the product, and you can build a mixture there without leaving the step.
Improved In a multi-product broth every product now has its own yield and its own titer ceiling, instead of the titer being split evenly.
Improved The capital model is defensible at both ends of the scale range, and the cash flow runs on one definition of minimum selling price.
Fixed Cost of goods is divided by the product mass the balance actually delivers, not by what the flowsheet declares.
Fixed Chromatography columns are sized and billed on the load each one sees, buffer volumes are coupled to the bed, and liquid-liquid extraction pays for its solvent.
Fixed Malformed input is refused out loud, with the offending field named, instead of producing a silent number.
Fixed Informational fermentation notes are labelled as such, so a healthy node no longer looks like a warning.

19–24 August 2026

New Thorough mode is public. A rigorous simulation pass that respects the branches you drew, end to end, and feeds the economics.
New Recycle loops are priced into the economics rather than ignored.
New Plans and billing. Free, Academic and Pro, with subscriptions, a pricing page, and usage meters for runs, saved projects and custom molecules on your account page.
New Build your own production host. Set the organism's kinetics yourself, or start from the library's real numbers.

The bioreactor gained selectable growth kinetics (Monod, Haldane-Andrews, Contois), chemostat mode measured in residence times, exponential feeding, a model-decided harvest, a thermodynamic yield ceiling, heating and cooling duty that is charged correctly, and a per-batch scale-up report. The panel and the mass balance run one fermentation, so the chart and the cost agree.

New Filter your generated routes and the charts rescale onto the subset. You can also keep specific unit operations out of the search before you generate.
Improved The properties panel collapses to a strip on the right edge and opens itself when you select something.
Improved The docs now cover Thorough mode, recycle loops, fermentation, Optimize and the export formats.
Improved Per-operation capex lands within 50% of published values, and the membrane, chromatography, crystallisation and drying equations were corrected.
Improved Generating routes simulates the pinned fermentation once instead of once per candidate, so runs finish faster.
Fixed Process water was billed as a $5/kg raw material.
Fixed Repeated copies of the same unit operation claimed each other's costs.
Fixed Saved results survive a reload, and going back to results no longer lands you on a stale canvas.
Fixed A PubChem rate limit is now told apart from a compound that genuinely has no record.

16–18 August 2026

New Every generated route now comes with a cost-of-goods estimate: dollars per kg of pure product, next to yield and purity.

The route charts plot it too. COGS sits on a log axis so a $5/kg route and a $500/kg route both stay readable, and dot size ranks routes by cost while results stream in, so the cheap ones stand out at a glance.

New Add molecules straight from PubChem. Search by name in the molecule picker and its properties are pulled in automatically.
New Choose your own units and currency on your account page. The app displays results the way you work.
Improved The bioreactor now simulates fermentation over time: growth, oxygen transfer and product inhibition together decide the titer you get, instead of a fixed number you type in.

You watch the fermentation run as it happens, kLa is derived from your agitation and aeration settings rather than asked for directly, and the Start New Process wizard runs a fermentation preflight so route generation starts from a broth that is actually achievable.

Fixed Undo and redo on the canvas now work reliably.
Fixed Going back to your generated results after opening a route restores the list cleanly, and the canvas survives navigating between pages.
Fixed Dark mode: dropdowns, checkboxes and the file picker now follow the theme instead of staying bright white.
Improved The toolbar file buttons (new, open, save, export) got clearer icons that show the action.

15 August 2026

Improved Number fields accept a decimal comma. Typing 1,5 now means 1.5.
Fixed Numeric inputs across the app could not be cleared, and lost the decimal point while you were still typing.
Fixed A feed stream with molecules in it looked identical to an empty one on the canvas.
Fixed Molecule search in the feed stream dialog only looked inside the open tab, so molecules in other families never showed up.
Fixed The wash water inlet icon on filtration units had no matching connection point.
New Techno-economic snapshots on 20 molecule pages in the resource library.
New Expert rules now flag capacity walls that buying more equipment does not remove.

Some limits are physical, not budgetary: an osmotic pressure ceiling or a packing limit does not go away when you add a second membrane skid. Routes that hit one are now called out instead of being silently scaled up.

13–14 August 2026

New Export a run as CSV or a printable report, straight from the toolbar.
New Goal seek: set a target cost per kg and let the tool find the route, or tell you what would have to be true to get there.

If no combination of the parameters you allowed reaches your target, you get the gap and the binding constraint rather than a failure message.

New Tornado charts for operating levers and assumption risk, so you can see which input actually moves the cost.
New Accounts and cloud projects. Projects are saved to your account instead of only living in the browser, and there is a dedicated account page.
Fixed Selectivity is now calculated on a mass basis, and dense-membrane rejection follows the right physics.
Fixed Products made in a bioreactor kept a generic identity instead of picking up their real properties from the molecule database.

1–4 August 2026

New The Optimize button replaces Recalculate: pick an objective (yield, purity, cost of goods, CAPEX and five more) and search the parameters of your flowsheet against it.

The search only moves parameters you would actually change in a plant. Calibration constants stay fixed, and capital is capped on non-economic objectives so you do not get a 99% yield route that costs twenty million to build.

New Bioreactor lets you choose the substrate and set the titer directly, instead of inferring both.
New The MCP server returns mermaid flowsheets, deep links into the canvas, and PNG charts, so assistants can hand you something you can open.
Improved Filtration concentration limits are physics-based, and filtration cost now follows the flow through the unit rather than a fixed size.
Improved The optimizer says when it is finished and what it changed, instead of stopping quietly.
Fixed Water solubility for several molecules was stored in mg/L and read as g/L, a factor of 1000. Seven n-alcohols added while fixing it.
Fixed Bioreactors appeared in purification-only route searches.
Fixed Five silent failures in the canvas where an action did nothing and said nothing.
Fixed Unreadable white text on the lime buttons.

27–31 July 2026

New Public pricing: $75 per month or $600 per year, both billing periods shown side by side.
Fixed Several unit-operation design rules never fired, or measured the wrong quantity when they did.

Older changes are not listed. Something broken or missing? Get in touch.