Update 63: Care Of Workers And Equipment
[p]This one has a bunch of improvements that players have been asking for over roughly the last month. There's some more on the near horizon with equipment management (that being the biggest player request of all on timelines beyond the first).
I expect to have another exciting release tomorrow, but I wanted to get these improvements out sooner.
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.
[/p]
[expand]
[h2]Update 63 Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Workers And Bulks[/h3]
[/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]
I expect to have another exciting release tomorrow, but I wanted to get these improvements out sooner.
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.
[/p]
[expand]
[h2]Update 63 Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Workers And Bulks[/h3]
- Drastically More Control: Players now have a drastic amount more control in the Workers tab of command mode. Rather than simply disabling or enabling specific unit types, it now allows you to disable or enable each specific type of worker activity for those unit types. These only appear contextually as-needed to not have a bunch of clutter, and it also imports your prior settings in to the new version.
- Accurate Ranges: When you are deploying bulk units, it now shows the predicted attack range radius based on their default stance. For deter and defend, which is the default for most, this means the attack range is double what it would otherwise have previously shown.
- Relaxed Cooldowns: When you are editing equipment, the cooldown no longer kicks in until you expend an action point for the unit, or until the turn changes. This allows for you to make and commit some changes, then go back and revise them.
- Realtime Change Visibility: Deterrence and protection are now recalculated immediately when you are messing with loadout changes, rather than not being reflected until you commit your changes.
- Full Game Completion Percentage: A new "Completion percentage section is now available in the victory path window. This allows you to see your progress in seeing everything in the game on normal difficulty at a single glance directly from the sidebar.
- How Much More Of Chapter One?: During chapter one, you can now see what percentage you are through it if you go to this same submenu. It accounts for the split in paths, and does not count side ventures. It's just for how far along the path to chapter two you are, as many people often wonder this.
- Gimme The Details!: On this subscreen you can see a breakdowns for the percentages of projects completed, normal achievements vs all, normal goals, hard goals, extreme goals, and even misery goals.
- 1.0 Is Getting Close!: The early access message on the main menu has been removed, in preparation for the upcoming launch to 1.0.
- No More Targeting For Ants: On the map view and far zoom view, highlighted buildings that an item can be used against are now drawn notably more visibly.
- Ours Goes To A Billion: Added a bit more spacing in the inputs/outputs columns so that numbers above a billion fit comfortably.
- Conserve Ammo, Fools!: Normally an NPC unit (including your bulks and workers) will fire on a target that is already slated to die if it has absolutely nothing else to shoot. Now if there is any resource cost to that unit firing (for example if it has a giant railgun that uses prismatic tungsten), it will hold fire in cases that would be overkill.
- Worker Nerf On Extreme And Misery Modes: Previously, squads of worker androids belonging to the player were getting the same squad-size buffs as enemy squads. This was intentional, but several players have pointed out that it felt bad, as it made the workers dominant in an un-fun way. Bulks and such don't get this sort of benefit. These units still get some buff, but basically they get the buff to the level of Hard difficulty, and don't get further buffed to Extreme or Misery. So, in effect, this increases the difficulty for worker units on both extreme and misery modes, but has no other effect.
- No Nuking Your Friends: You can no longer launch ICBMs after winning or losing a timeline. In particular after winning, you'd be glassing allies...
- Okay, Gas Attack Your Friends: When you are in targeting mode for chemical weapons against a civilian populace, that now explicitly kills your own sheltered humans and refugees, and also explicitly marks them as a target.
- Get In The Box: Fixed a minor visual issue with percentages on healths between 1000 and 9999 extending out of their box.
- Investigations From A Distance: Fixed an issue with far zoom mode where it was not showing investigations fully properly at longer distances from the camera's position. It now functions the same as map mode.
- Ruin Math: Fixed a couple of issues with how the ruins were drawing around the edge of the map in narrow maps. Certain ruins were missing or too sparse.
- Items From A Distance: Fixed an issue where in far zoom view, highlighted buildings that an item can be used against were being only drawn if fairly close to the camera.
- Don't Forget To Torment The Traumatized: Traumatized ex-cons are no longer overlooked by the Improved Torment Processor if you are throwing everyone in the torment nexus
- Data-Mining After Uncovering A Secret: Fixed an issue where Decrypted Stolen Vericorp Data was never being datamined. It now will be, once you have decrypted enough to discover the message hidden in the encrypted version.
- Infinite Science!: Fixed an issue where Decrypted Espia Spy Data was never being datamined. It now will be, once you have finished the "Find Those Branch Managers" project.
- Liquid Air No Longer Confuses The TPS Report: Fixed an issue with the Fractional Distillery where it had the same work priority as Hampson–Linde Cyclers, so they would often complain on TPS reports if you had equal inputs and outputs due to this. It was based on what order you constructed the buildings in, and not in a helpful way. Spent far too long on this, sigh.
- Corrected Accidental Lobotomy When You Tormented More Than 21 Million People At Once: Fixed a bug where if you were tormenting more than about 21 million humans, it would roll over the math and give you a lobotomy. It now uses 64bit math properly.
- Scary Deserialization Bug Fixed: Fixed a very specific bug in the custom serializer I wrote back in 2022. If the absolute value of a saved number was greater than 2.14 billion, but less than 4.29 billion, it would not deserialize properly. It's amazing that this survived all my unit tests, let alone a further four years in active use. At any rate, if you had 3 billion units of water on hand, then when you saved you would have zero left.
- Modern Jobs For Big Numbers: Converted a bunch of code about jobs and resources to be fully 64bit, to avoid any overflow errors. I didn't see any actual problems come out of this, because I think the intermediate change to a number would have to be larger than 2.1 billion and that's very unlikely. That said, I prefer to be safe rather than sorry with this.
- Remember To Forget Those You Kill: Fixed an issue where a unit was being targeted by one of your NPCs and died and got thrown in the recycler, your unit's tooltip would act like it still had an objective but would say "[null unit type]."
- Fixed Big Red Button Sometimes Being Absent: When you open the regional map while having command mode open, it no longer suppresses the ability bar for launching rockets at sites outside the city.
- Better Census For Living Tenants: Adjusted quite a bit of logic with how "the number of people living at this building" is calculated. It was previously erroneously saying how many people CAN live there, which is not the same thing as the number of people who do live there. This is primarily for purposes of things like when a building gets blown up, or hit by a chemical weapons attack, or when the people demand more entertainment or culture or whatever.
[/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]