City Never Sleeps: a rebuilt city, six new heroes and the Broker
Eight months after Old Gods, New Blood, Valve ships a massive update: a redrawn map and neutrals, six heroes whose release order you vote on from October 2, a dealer in corrupted items, a new HUD and a flood of options. The full tour, with the official images.
It landed Tuesday at 1:25 pm Pacific. City Never Sleeps is not a balance patch: Valve's note contains almost no numbers. It is an overhaul of what you see, hear and read on screen, presented on a full page styled as a New York tourist guide. We walked through it for you, from the first subway stop to the technical notes at the bottom of the page.
A city rebuilt from the ground up
The Cursed Apple has a new face. Each lane is now a three-stop route, numbered like a subway map. The blue lane (Broadway on Valve's maps) runs through Uptown, Times Square and Downtown, where citizens "have been reporting strange rumblings coming from deep beneath the subway line". The green lane (Greenwich) crosses Umbria University, home to "the nation's finest Bibliomancy program", Central Park and the Brownstones. The yellow lane (York) runs past the Stock Exchange, the Seaport and the Old Fairfax Factories.
Between the lanes, four districts serve as skirmish grounds, back alleys "made for action": the Theater, Chinatown, the Haunted Lot and the Plaza.
Nine new neutral camps
The neutrals you knew are replaced by creatures "with new behaviors", grouped in camps Valve calls Haunts. There are nine: Specimen (a disembodied crawling hand), Past Dues (cursed books), Gutter Ghouls, Barrel Mimics (possessed gunpowder barrels), Stage Hands in the Theater, Festival Spirit and Crabbage Pots in Chinatown, Shrooms in the Haunted Lot and Underhands in the Plaza. The HUD now shows each camp's soul value and difficulty.
What changes in a match
Several places and objects change how the map plays.
Sunken Plaza. Beneath the Plaza district's main square: the deeper you go, the bigger the rewards, but "the sounds of the outside world fade away along with your stamina".
Bell Tower. A highly concentrated soul hotspot at the top of Chinatown's tower, but the bell rings across the whole map while you collect.
Tough Crates. They take a Heavy Melee to break open, and give extra souls.
Buff Containers. The revamped golden statues now also grant Spirit Resist, Bullet Resist, Ability Range and Move Speed as permanent bonuses.
Healing Snacks. Hidden around the map, they heal keen-eyed players in a pinch.
Steam Vents. Standing on one makes you invisible and grants a little regen: a way to move through the streets unseen, as a team.
The Broker, dealer in corrupted items
This is the curiosity of the week. A mysterious merchant, the Broker, sets up shop at the end of a dark alley or in an abandoned storefront, never in the same place twice. In exchange for your high-tier items, he hands you a Corrupted version: stronger, but saddled with random drawbacks from a fixed set. The drawbacks are the same for every player in a given match.
His first shipment arrives around the 30-minute mark, then new Corrupted Items come in every 15 minutes on average. But he will only stay a few days: his goods are banned in New York, and the authorities will be out in force once the first new hero arrives on October 2. In Street Brawl, you get a Corrupted Item after the item draft in Round 5.
Six heroes, and you pick the order
Six new heroes are coming, introduced as "the locals": Solomon, Rat King, Nurse Harrow, Baba, Deadman Danny and Violet. Each poster carries three words: strategist, focused and checkmate for Solomon; scrappy, regal and tenacious for Rat King; strict, terrifying and savior for Nurse Harrow; cackling, beady and hexing for Baba; reckless, high-flying and explosive for Deadman Danny; ambitious, nimble and creative for Violet.
As with previous waves, players vote on the release order. Voting now happens in the new pregame lobby: the winning team's votes count double, and so does your first win of the day. Priority tokens will be earned by playing from the first release on, and campaign posters let you back your favorite.
Two heroes will release each week, on Tuesdays and Fridays at 2 pm Pacific. The first arrives on Friday, October 2; at that pace, the sixth would land on Tuesday, October 20. Voting is live.
A HUD that tells you much more
This is the biggest piece of work by volume. Health bars show health as numbers, stamina, critical status, and whether a Rejuvenator or an ultimate is available; allies stay visible at any distance; stats show your investments, buffs and debuffs in real time. A new event feed breaks down which item or ability landed the killing blow, a target's full bounty and your share of it.
The shop keeps the kill feed, chat and scoreboard in view, adds stat filters and, above all, a Popular Items section: using live player data, it narrows the choice down to the items most often bought on your hero, with how often and at what phase of the game. An idea stats sites, ours included, know well.
Pings are rebuilt: a minimap wheel, ability pings with their cooldowns, item pings in the shop, a typing indicator, and over 15,000 new and updated ping lines. Pre-match conversations between heroes go from over 700 to 1,500, with more than 10,000 new voice lines, and a dialogue player lets you listen to all of them.
Accessibility, training and settings
Accessibility options now have their own section: enemy UI colors, customizable subtitles, auto move, auto mantle and auto fire, reduced camera shake, customizable reticle. The sandbox becomes a proper lab: bot recording, combat log, DPS meter, speed graph, route testing. Settings can be shared with a code, are saved to the cloud and can differ from hero to hero.
On the behavior side, you are notified when action is taken on a player you reported, and a player found abusing comms during a match is muted for the rest of it and gets a 30-day comms ban.
In the technical notes
The bottom of the page hides the changes that touch the game directly.
Responsiveness. Ability and item use is now instant the moment the button is pressed, instead of waiting for the next "window", which could make the button feel unresponsive.
Parry. Successfully parrying objectives no longer resets your Parry cooldown.
Heroes and objectives. Graves can now destroy Venator's traps with her gun. Walkers no longer keep firing their fireballs after dying. Sinner's Sacrifice now has variable timings to get the bonus. Sinclair and Doorman get a round of fixes.
Engine. Updated to the latest version of Source 2, improved anti-cheat, better network prediction, faster rendering and audio, and drop shadows that now fall straight down: cheaper, and easier to follow when tracking an enemy.
Every one of these lines is classified on the patch page.
What the developers' letter says
The Steam announcement is mostly a letter from the team, and it is worth reading. After Old Gods, New Blood, Valve says it wanted to rework the core game before moving on to polish phases, such as updating older hero artwork. This year, several projects moved forward in parallel, some of which are not visible yet.
Progression and customization. Progression and hero and hideout customization are in the works; Valve wants to be able to adjust them significantly based on feedback before the game's full release.
More speculative. Large item redesigns or additions and alternate game modes are being tested, with no guarantee of release, although results so far "have been promising".
Next priorities. The Midboss (its model and, to a degree, its layout), Guardians and Walkers, which the team considers important but has not gotten to yet. Hero remodels will come gradually in upcoming updates.
And our poll?
You called it. Out of 1,094 votes, 938 (86%) bet on Tuesday, 124 on Wednesday. The poll closed by itself when the patch note went live, after bringing in more than 2,000 visitors in a day and a half. Thanks for playing along.
The six heroes will join the site's tier list and stats as soon as they release, from October 2.
Methodology. Content drawn from the official page playdeadlock.com/cityneversleeps and the Steam patch note of September 29, 2026, summarized by us. The six heroes' names and descriptors are those on their artwork on that page. Images: Valve.