Update 16: Grey Goo Weapons, Liquid Metal Dragon Upgrades, and Nomad Therapists

A handful of chapter one changes offer alternate builds and early gear if you take the Grey Goo path. Chapter two adds reasons to betray certain characters — new suits and shoulder lasers among them. The post-apocalypse gets a bit busier too, with new achievements and mechanics surfacing after chapter three.

Outside the narrative, there’s new world data in your statistics panel, fog and weather improvements, and another visual pass on health bars — especially useful in Extreme Mode. Some old phrasing has been updated for clarity. And the Monster Bait now lets you steer stray creatures more intentionally, both for strategy and for one of the rarest achievements in the game.

Full details below.

[h3]Steam Reviews: Your Thoughts Matter[/h3][hr][/hr]If you've been playing Heart of the Machine, a review on Steam is a great way to share what’s resonated with you.

Whether it’s a sentence or two or something longer, it helps others get a feel for the game—and helps me keep building in the right directions.

Here's Update 16 in its entirety, with the nitty gritty changes found on the Heart of the Machine wiki.

[expand]New Chapter 1+ Content:

If you take the Grey Goo scenario, you now get two new weapons: "Divert Power To Stun" and "Target Their Weapons", which are unique vehicle-mounted weapons that you can't get in any other path. There are some other android weapons that are pre-existing that you also get early access to in the Grey Goo start, as well.
At the point in chapter one where you get the Wallripper ability, there is also a new structure called Alumina Roach that you gain access to. This provides an alternative way of gathering alumina early on, but also is useful on an ongoing basis, since it does not compete with the normal mining skimmers. This also finally provides a use for Hook Drones that isn't related to Soylent Green.

New Chapter 2+ Content:

If you wind up killing certain vigilantes in one of the questlines, you now gain two new very powerful pieces of equipment: Super Suit and Shoulder-Mounted Lasers. These each allow for very different builds for a lot of your androids, so it's a tempting new reason to crush these vigilantes when heading towards certain later-game content.
A new "Nomad Therapist Office" is now available if you have made a deal with the nomads in the prison break sequence. This finally gives a benefit to allying with the nomads in this questline.
Added a new achievement for going back and doing something in the post-apocalypse after you've reached chapter 3. There were consistently people in the forums and Discord who were excited and surprised that they could do this, and so now there's an achievement to make sure that people who don't use much social media have a more reliable way to discover this on their own.
Added a second special-case path to getting the "You're Really Unlikeable" achievement. There are three overall ways of getting this achievement, but the first two are map-style-specific to an extent. This third one relates to if you started a civil war, and can be done on any map type.
Added three new options to the Martial Expansion upgrade group: Large Mech Power, Large Mech Armor Piercing, and Large Mech Armor Plating. This is primarily useful for the liquid metal dragons, although it does of course benefit your WW4 mechs.
Added a new achievement for accidentally knocking over one of your own buildings with a liquid metal dragon.
Added five new achievements based on completing at least four tier one goals in specific city styles.
If you have released experimental monsters in your current city, or if they are wandering in from a timeline crossover, a new Monster Bait item now allows you to make them show up where you want. This has tactical uses, and also removes the tedium of getting the most-rare achievement currently in the game.

Other Major Items:

New Worldbuilding Statistics: There are now statistics on cohort details, and on the city statistics page, which show things like the number of soldiers in the city, regional and world population, number of cities in the region, unemployment rate, waitlist for citizens to move into your city, worldwide non-soldier staffing for federated corporations, and so on. These provide context for the scale of the major factions you're dealing with, since some players were underestimating the scale of these groups by a couple of orders of magnitude.
New Fog Intensity setting: This has four options for differing levels of fog, with the idea being that if the fog defaults bother you (as they do some people), then you can adjust things. This was a request from a number of players, but I've also updated the defaults to hopefully be more palatable to that same group even without this setting.
Fog And Weather Updates: Four new weather styles have been added to the main rotation of 8 weathers, and all of the existing weather styles have gotten some updates to tune visibility, colors, and so on.
Health Bar Updates: This primarily applies to Extreme Mode, but some of the health bars were confusing in terms of how units of similar health looked relative to one another. This visual confusion has been improved so that it should be clear at all times now.

Balance:

Working with a criminal syndicate with the proper permits during the prologue no longer causes accidental deaths via nanotech.
The prison heists have all been made a bit easier, since they were a bit on the long and challenging side for where they are situated in the game.
When you have a crossover from WW4 to other timelines, there are now confused soldiers properly wandering into other timelines on that same rock. The more WW4s you have crossing over, the more intense this gets.
If you have ever unlocked automated personnel management, then it is immediately available on all future timelines once you are to chapter 2+ in that timeline.
For all of the human mech designs (there are four), if you ever have unlocked them in a given timeline, then in all future timelines (even on other rocks), you'll know how to make them as long as the other timeline is at chapter 2+.
All of the small mechs have gotten moderate buffs in terms of their action points and reduced capacity costs. Except liquid metal tiger, which was already fine.
Running low on compute time when you have a bunch of codebreakers operating now prioritizing keeping your other computing clients up and running and just does codebreaking slower. This prevents things like sudden drops in unit capacity.

Minor Tweaks:

The term "Critical Path" has been replaced with "Core Route". Critical Paths are a project-management term that have been a natural part of my life for decades, but to people who are not into that specific kind of project management, it sounds really misleading. The new term will hopefully help with that.
Senior Technician has been rebalanced to be a bit less smart and worse at engineering, but a bit better at combat. This makes them more suited to the jobs they are designed for.
Added further clarity to the Deal With The Rebels project, to hopefully help more folks think for out-of-the-box solutions when facing a foe where maybe force isn't the answer.
When a project StreetSense action will give a reward that is for the unit class currently doing the action, that is now a lot more clear. The prior method of display for this type of action (which is the rarest kind) was confusing.
The term antigrav has been replaced with the term grav-lev, as that's more accurate and more descriptive.
In the UI Scale section of the settings menu, there are now two new options that allow you to scale streets-view icons for actions (StreetSense and otherwise), and map-view versions of the same, independently.
When you're looking at a streetsense item related to a project, and that gives you a buff to the unit type taking the action, that is now actually clear. Before it was ambiguous in a way that could imply it applied to all unit types, or to some unknown unit type.

Bugfixes:

Fixed a bug where if you built a decoy tower and selected it before building your real network source, then the game would throw endless errors until you stopped selecting it.
Fixed an issue where if you took certain paths through chapter one, or if you skipped beyond chapter one, the game would not properly show you vat-grown meat, hydroponic grens, groundwater, or filtered water in the resources bar or resources view.
Fixed a bug where all of the tooltips were showing that buildings had a status of being dormant if they were not paused, because of how I had it set up to handle territory control flags.
Fixed a bug where NPC cohort discovery status and custom names (if relevant) were not being cleared between loading one savegame and another.
Corrected a bug where Corprocessors would not apply their actual value until the turn after they existed. So if you had a falling amount of compute time, the coprocessor would be a turn late showing it. If you just completed building a coprocessor and everything was fine, it would be one turn late in giving you the new amount.
Fixed an issue where if you were over-drafting compute time on a turn, the actual amounts shown as a net on the central compute time resource would not reflect this.
Fixed up a whole bunch of things so that Compute Time now shows properly in the ledger in terms of what the net value is when things are negative, and so that codebreakers are properly shown in the TPS Reports and Input/Output screens, and also contribute properly to the ledger entry for compute time.
Corrected some logic that was blatantly wrong with calculating deterrence over the last few weeks. In particular, ENEMIES were also providing deterrence, and so when they moved away from your building or you killed them, it could cause your deterrence to dip if you didn't realize what was going on. This is a real facepalm moment, but was a regression in the last few weeks, and could be confusing to put it mildly.

[/expand]

[h3]Connect with the Machine[/h3][hr][/hr]Want to stay in the loop or share your thoughts? Join the conversation across these platforms:

💬 Discord – Best place to share feedback, get direct responses, and to talk about Heart of the Machine.
📜 Reddit – Discuss strategies, share ideas, and exchange tips with the community.

Here is a link to prior recent patches in case you missed them.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/2001070/announcements/detail/524216645064853158
https://steamcommunity.com/games/2001070/announcements/detail/502822010104053993
https://steamcommunity.com/games/2001070/announcements/detail/524212840420081803