Update 23: Better Vehicles, Easier Repairs, And Faster Furniture

[p]This build makes vehicles far more useful, adds key clarity and quality of life improvements, improves balance, and has a raft of bugfixes.

It shocks me that it's been 15 days since the last update, but I've been very busy working on the game. This new build has a lot of improvements, there will be another smaller build with yet more improvements later this week, and there's a big new content update that will be arriving next week. I also needed to take some time to plan out some of the remainder of the year in more detail internally. Still working on that, but there's a lot of exciting pieces.

If you’ve spent time with Heart of the Machine and want to leave a review, that’d be appreciated. No need to say more than you mean, but if you’ve been meaning to write one, I’d be grateful. Steam reviews carry weight. For a project like this — developed by a single person over many years, every review makes a difference.[/p][p]Honest thoughts are what matter. Whatever your experience has been, sharing it helps. It’s a powerful way to have your voice heard and contributes to how future patches are prioritized and addressed.[/p][p]Thanks for reading and for playing.
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[h2]Update 23 Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Clarity[/h3]

• Chapter Updates: Updated the descriptions of the chapters, and have made it show all five planned chapters rather than just the 4 that exist at the moment. This gives players a bit of a roadmap of what to expect as they play, while at the same time not hitting anyone with unwanted spoilers.
• VR Research Categories: The wording on several of the VR research categories now mention what sort of internal robotics they contain.
• Handbook Update: The existing "Building Caps" handbook entry has been updated to reference the new format that internal robotics are shown in.
• UI Tour Ease Of Use: If you are in the UI tour, all movement and such is locked. If you try to click on the screen now, it pops up a message saying "To Progress: Must Click The UI Tour Popup." This way there is some immediate feedback and the game does not seem locked up, if the player doesn't realize they're still in the ui tour. It also allows you to click where the tour panel arrow is pointing, rather than on the tour panel itself.
  

[h3]Quality Of Life Improvements[/h3]

• Timeline Repair: If a timeline file is missing, and you try to dive into it, it now gives you a message explaining what is going on. If you would like to then delete the timeline, you can do so.
• Flexible "Mode Shift" Abilities: Having a unit in a "mode shift" (slayer mode, horrify mode, or demoralize mode are the only three right now), and then using a targeted ability (items, for the most part, but also demolish mode or hacking), no longer takes you out of the "mode shift" types.
• No Unwanted Friendly Fire: If you are not in slayer mode, and you do an attack that would harm or kill a noncombatant via AOE splash damage, it now will not hit those targets.
• Suppressing Fire Indicators: When suppressing fire will be applied to enemies, by an attack you will make, it now puts an icon above their heads to indicate this.
• Structural Engineering Ease Of Use: If you're already in range of a building that you're going to have an android do structural engineering on, then the android no longer moves from its current spot.

[h3]Balance[/h3]

• Easier Access To AG-31 Relumine: Unlocking the AG-31 Relumine is now a crossover, which makes it so that this weapon is available on timelines beyond the one you unlocked it at.
• Small Apartment Viability: Human Apartments and Refugee Towers both now cost only 1 Steward rather than 4 and 2, respectively. This helps make the Human Apartments not obscenely outclassed by the Residential Megastructures, while still being outclassed by about 2.5x. Before they were outclassed by over 10x.
• Spectre Buff: The Spectre vehicle now has a default area of effect attack range of 12. This makes it the only cloaking vehicle to have AOE attacks implicit in itself.
• VS-102 Albatross Buff: The VS-102 Albatross now grants 50 attack power in addition to its other functions.
• Drone Quality Rework: Iris, Troopship, Mech Carrier, and Bastion have been pretty heavily nerfed on this front. Spectre has been incredibly buffed. The selection of vehicles with high drone quality now makes them more unique.
• Wraith vs Spectre Rebalance: One of the weapon hardpoints has been removed from the Wraith and added to the Spectre. The innate firepower of the Wraith is still higher, so before you get any weapons equipment, this makes absolutely no difference.
• Cutter Buffs: Slightly more attack range, slightly lower capacity cost, and dramatically more movement range.
• More Spectre Buffs: Slightly more attack range and slightly lower capacity cost.
• Iris Buff: Very slightly lower capacity cost.
• More Stewards At Maximum: The final maximum cap of Steward internal robotics has been increased from 500 to 1460.
• Protesters: Added in logic to keep your units, and rebel units, from firing on protesters. Corporate and military units will still target protesters, as they are huge jerks.
• Furniture Gathering Overhaul: Completely rebalanced how citizens gather furniture at your territory control flags. They now work dramatically faster, put furniture in your central inventory, gather when your central inventory has less than 15k furniture stockpiled, show how much each unit gathers as it does so, and show what is gathered in the ledger and other related locations.

[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]

• Explosive Building Fixes: Fixed a bug with explosive buildings where if you had multiple of them, it was not calculating their explosion radius properly. Also fixed an issue with area explosions where they were not factoring the radius of the buildings they were striking, but only their center point. This was mostly notable with very small explosions.
• Chapter 3 Notification: Fixed an issue where, when it became possible to move to chapter 3, the game was not pointing to the button that would take you there. You had to happen to notice it on your own.
• Suppressing Fire Range: Fixed an issue where suppressing fire was being applied beyond the actual attack range of the unit doing the attack. This made it way more powerful than intended, mainly because it was hitting so many more units.
• Negative Resource Correction: If a given resource goes negative for any reason, it now corrects that to be zero instead.
• Too Rich To Repair: Fixed several math overflow issues that could happen if you were super wealthy in a certain resource. This could cause you to be unable to produce certain resources, or unable to have contraband jammers heal your structures, or unable for your repair spiders to repair structures, and things of that nature.
• "Improved Apartments" Project Math: Fixed an issue with Improved Apartments where that project was incorrectly calculating your income per turn -- it was looking at your net income, not your gross income, which meant the project could stall out under various conditions. It now properly looks at your gross income. It will also now never ask for more than 40k gross income, which is how much you get from a single territory control flag.
• Production Chain Order: Fixed an issue with the order of production chains for some things branching off yams, cotton, and zinnia so that they now always happen in a proper order that won't result in random kinks in the production system. If you were running a "just in time" situation before, where you barely had enough per turn, then these wrong priorities could result in excess on one turn and a shortage the next.
• Deals And Filth: Fixed an order-of-operations issue that was making it so that deal costs and income were not showing up properly in the ledger, and so that filth was not being canceled in apartments at the appropriate time. This was leading to the ledger being misleading and not warning you about a lack of toilet paper, and it was also causing there to be a large visible surplus of toilet paper that was seemingly unused, which was incredibly confusing.
• Vehicle And Mech Movement: Fixed a bug from a recent build with the reworking of vehicle and mech movement that made it so that they could keep moving after they were out of action points or even after you were out of mental energy.
• Many Other Small Fixes: A half dozen or so methods have been hardened against minor exceptions that could cause unwanted popups. Also fixed a number of small text issues.

[/expand][p]Full notes here.

[/p][h3]Connect with the Machine[/h3][hr][/hr][p]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.[/p]