AQI 999 is back, and this time you run Delhi's air

Wait, what happened to the drone?

The first AQI 999 gave you one drone and a very big vacuum cleaner. It was fun for about three days, which is roughly how long one drone would last over real Delhi in November.

So we kept the name and threw out everything else. The new game puts you in the city's air command centre at ITO, with the whole of Delhi spread out below you like a strategy map. You can't suck the smog out of the sky any more. You have to deal with where it comes from.

Play AQI 999 and come back here when the first garbage fire has been put out.

The city is Delhi. Properly Delhi.

Zoom in anywhere and it should feel familiar:

• India Gate, with crowds on the lawns and the traffic going round the C-Hexagon.
• Rashtrapati Bhavan, with Kartavya Path running between North and South Block.
• Both Parliaments: the round old one with its ring of columns and the triangular new one, side by side.
• Connaught Place inside Connaught Circus, white colonnades and the giant tricolour in Central Park.
• The Red Fort and Chandni Chowk, with the shopfronts, the signboards and the wires.
• Jantar Mantar, Purana Qila, Humayun's Tomb, Qutub Minar and the Lotus Temple.
• The Yamuna, foamy near Okhla. We drew the foam because leaving it out would be lying.
• The garbage mountains of Ghazipur, Bhalswa and Okhla, with black kites circling them, as is tradition.

The streets are full of balconies, shop shutters, AC boxes on every wall and a black water tank on almost every roof. The traffic is autos, scooters, e-rickshaws, red, green and orange buses, painted trucks at night and an amount of cars that only grows.

What pollutes, and what you do about it

Smog doesn't come from nowhere, and in the game you can see it being made. Every few seconds something goes wrong somewhere:

• A guard lights a pile of trash to keep warm. 🔥
• A factory in Wazirpur starts pouring out black smoke. 🏭
• A building site leaves its sand uncovered. 🏗️
• ITO turns into a car park. 🚦
• Ghazipur catches fire again. 🌋
• A queue of old diesel trucks shows up at the border. 🚚

Tap the marker and it's handled. Each one pays a little money and some clean air points. Meanwhile the wind is moving all that smoke around the map, so a fire upwind fills the next ward with smoke too. In early November the wind blows in from the fields of Punjab and Haryana, and you'll see exactly what that does to the AQI.

Build stuff. Lots of stuff.

Every ward has free plots, and more open up as you level up. You can build:

• AQI monitors, so you see a ward's real number instead of a guess.
• Anti-smog guns and mist poles. Like the real ones, they mostly settle the dust right around them. They still look great.
• Urban forests, which start small and get stronger every day.
• Smog towers, forty fans and all.
• E-bus depots and EV charging hubs, which take cars off the road across the city.
• Biomining at the landfills. Watch the garbage mountain actually shrink.
• Border check posts, a bio-decomposer hub for the farms and a cloud seeding base, for when you need to make it rain.

Every build earns money into a Clean Air Fund: gold ₹ bubbles float over your buildings. When you have a lot of them, hit Collect all and watch every bubble pop and pour its coins into your wallet. It's very satisfying. We checked. Many times.

Your own fleet

Buy fire tenders, traffic police, enforcement teams, water sprinklers, road sweepers, smog gun trucks, spotter drones and Happy Seeder tractors. They drive the actual roads to the problem and fix it without you. Your job slowly turns from putting out fires to deciding where the money goes, which is also what a real air command centre does.

The control room

Tap the AQI number or the 🖥️ button and you're in the command centre. Live CCTV feeds from the hotspots, a heatmap of the whole city, the wind, a three-day forecast, every open alert and the policy switchboard.

The switches are real measures from Delhi's own plans: No PUC No Fuel, the Zero Burning campaign, staggered office hours, 50% work from home, the BS-VI entry rule, a construction ban and, yes, Odd-Even. Every switch helps the air. Most of them annoy people. Watch the mood meter, because an annoyed city gives you a smaller budget in the morning.

Research now takes time

The research lab works on one project at a time, and each one takes a few game days. If you can't wait (fair), pay to finish it now. The price drops as the project gets closer to done.

How long does a game last?

The winter runs from 1 October to 28 February, one minute a game day. Stubble smoke peaks in early November. December and January bring cold, still air that traps everything. When February ends you get a season report, and the next winter starts with a little more traffic than the last. Your city stays, so you keep building on what you made.

Frequently asked questions

Is AQI 999 free?

Yes. It runs in your browser on computers and phones (hold your phone sideways), with nothing to install.

Is any of this real?

The places are real, and so are the measures: No PUC No Fuel, the BS-VI entry rule, the AI command centre, more monitoring stations, smog guns, e-buses and biomining all come from the Delhi government's 2026 plans. The numbers, the people and the newspapers are made up.

I played the old version. Is my progress still there?

No. The old drone game and the new city game are too different to carry anything over, so everyone starts fresh in the command centre. Fresh air, fresh start.

What's the music?

"Delhi" by soulprodmusic. It plays on the menus and, a little quieter, while you work.

Can I get the AQI under 100?

Yes, but it takes a while and a lot of smog towers. Tell us when you do. We'd like to see it too.