Civilization 7's Atomic Age Update Is Free, but the Earthrise Expansion Is Paid

Firaxis has put a year on Civilization 7's missing fourth Age. The Atomic Age arrives in 2027 through a free update called Arc of Tomorrow, and a separate paid expansion, Earthrise, lands the same year. Both were revealed at a PAX West panel marking 35 years of Sid Meier strategy games, alongside a much nearer patch: Update 1.5.0, due later this month.

That is three different things with three different price tags, and the announcement blurred them together. Here is what is actually free, what costs money, and what you can play before the year is out.

What the Civilization 7 Atomic Age update adds

Arc of Tomorrow extends the game's timeline past the Modern Age into roughly the 1950s to the 2050s. It is a full Age in the structural sense the series uses now, not a scenario: new civilizations, new leaders, new buildings and units, its own architecture set, and its own extensions to the tech and civic trees.

The headline mechanics are Cold War ones. Nuclear weapons get new units and what Firaxis describes as a twist on mutually assured destruction. You can grant a settlement independence and turn it into a City State, then fight proxy wars through it instead of declaring on a rival empire directly. Multilateral agreements let several players respond to a threat as a bloc rather than one at a time.

Two economic systems come with it. Manufactured Goods lets you combine raw commodities — enriched uranium among them — into finished products via recipes. Film Crews produce Great Works of Film in specific genres. Gandhi is named among the returning leaders, which will surprise nobody who has played a Civilization game with nuclear weapons in it.

Is Arc of Tomorrow free?

Yes. Firaxis has confirmed Arc of Tomorrow costs nothing if you own the base game, the same way Test of Time was handled last year. The studio's own framing is that this one is bigger in scope than that update was. There is no release date beyond 2027 and no month attached to it yet.

What Earthrise costs you instead

Earthrise is the paid half, and it is the game's first proper expansion. 2K has not announced a price. The theme is space and the environment, and unusually for an expansion it reaches backwards through the whole campaign rather than bolting content onto the end.

• Antiquity and Exploration Ages: chart the night sky and name celestial bodies.
• Modern Age: launch orbital missions around Earth and the Moon.
• Atomic Age: found a national space agency and run missions across the solar system, discovering planetary features and resources.

Earthrise also adds terrain alteration, natural disaster mitigation and climate reversal mechanics. Because its late-game content sits inside the Atomic Age, the free update and the paid expansion are designed to be played together — but 2K has not said whether Earthrise requires Arc of Tomorrow to be installed.

Update 1.5.0 is the one you get this month

Ignore 2027 for a second. Update 1.5.0 is free and arrives later in September 2026, and it carries the single most requested map in the game.

• True Start Location: Earth — a real-world map with civilizations placed in their historical starting positions.
• The Voronoi generation algorithm applied to Terra Incognita and Shuffle maps, plus better resource distribution.
• Faster map loading and generation.
• Influence-based alliances, so you are no longer dragged into an ally's war by default.
• Interface work: better tooltips, reworked settlement banners, and a tile ruler for city planning.

The alliance change is the quiet one. Being pulled into a war you did not pick has been a standing complaint since launch, and 1.5.0 turns it into a decision rather than an obligation.

Which platforms get it

Civilization 7 is sold on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, Steam, the Epic Games Store, Mac and Linux. The roadmap announcement did not carve out any platform or stagger any release, but 2K has also not published per-platform dates or download sizes for either update. If you are playing on Switch 2, note the console has already seen a confirmed price rise in the UK, which affects the hardware rather than the software.

Linux support here is worth flagging, because native Linux builds are getting rarer rather than more common — For Honor, by contrast, cut off Steam Deck and Linux players for its latest ranked season. If you would rather turn-based strategy on something that fits in a pocket, our round-up of the best strategy games on Android covers the offline ones worth the storage. And for anyone weighing another paid expansion against a subscription, September's Game Pass wave is the cheaper comparison.