Heart of the Machine News

0.655.9 Hotfix 16

Today's dose of tidying. A variety of fixes, most of which apply to late timelines or doing unexpected things with savegame loading.

0.655.9 Hotfix 16 ExoCorp Invasion Fix: Fixed a bug where if you had not yet been invaded by an ExoCorp, and your save was on turn 1, then the game was doing the cleanup for that prematurely. This would then make it so that the ExoCorp forces would not leave properly when they were done, later on if they did invade.
Prologue Save-Scumming Fix: Fixed a cluster of issues with reverse-merging core profile data with specific timelines that were in the prologue or the first two chapters in particular. This would actually cause some savgames to be softlocked if you loaded them after having gotten further in a profile. Those savegames should now function properly. All of this had to do with the reverse-merging of central timeline data, and basically a few things just need to never reverse-merge, and some other things only should reverse-merge if the effective local chapter is above 3, etc.
Structure Cost Display Fix: Fixed a bug where in the tooltips for structures to build, it was showing the costs of the underlying building twice. This made it different from the actual cost shown on the build sidebar, which was the correct cost.
Timeline Change Fix: Fixed a bug where if the history window was open to the major locations tab during a switch of timelines, then it would throw exceptions.
New Achievement Categorization: Fixed an oversight where the recent batch of achievements were not properly grouped into collections for the dropdown.
"Clearing The Ladder" Warning Fix: Fixed an issue where "Clearing The Ladder" was acting like there were ongoing attacks coming from it when there were actually just nonviolent people you are able to attack.
Build Sidebar Filter Fix: Fixed a cluster of bugs with the top dropdown on the build sidebar where if you selected the top (All) option, it would behave badly and not react to other filters until you closed the menu again. It would also mess up if you selected something from that top dropdown and then reopened the sidebar.
Post-Apocalyptic Crossover Fix: Fixed an issue where you might be in the post-apocalypse and have unlocked some new units, but they are not logged as crossovers properly for some reason. I think this may have been an in-passing issue with a prior build, but I'm not entirely certain. To fix this in existing games, just switch to the post-apocalyptic timeline in question, then switch back out to the timelines that need to get the crossover, and it will function.
NPC Health Bar And Status Effect Improvement: When statuses are applied to npc units that are at full health, their health bars are no longer shown, but the status icons are still shown under them.

Full notes here.

“Does the machine speak for us, or do we now speak for the machine?”
— William Gibson, Neuromancer

[h3]New Minds, Start Here[/h3][hr][/hr]For those just stepping into the Machine’s world, take a moment to familiarize yourself with the basics. The Heart of the Machine Beginner's Guide is your gateway to understanding the systems at play and building your foundation. After all, every complex network starts with a single connection.

[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/ogg/2001070/announcements/detail/524217913946669733
https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/2001070/announcements/detail/524216645064853158
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2001070/view/502822010104053992

0.655.8 Hotfix 15

Just a quick update today with a handful of fixes to tidy up.

0.655.8 Hotfix 15 Misleading Mech Fix: Fixed an issue where upgrades to large mechs were acting like that would benefit the HUME Titan, which is not a mech that you can gain direct access to in that fashion at any point. This was really misleading.
Tech Unlock Fix: Fixed a really stupid regression in the prior build where I broke a lot of unlocks related to crossovers. If a tech was sometimes related to a crossover, but you didn't have the crossover, then it was incorrectly removing the tech. Simply loading existing saves will fix the problem immediately in the new build. This was also causing Monster Bait to unlock every turn in timelines where it was directly unlocked rather than being unlocked by a crossover.
WW4 Goal Tier: Corrected World War 4 to be a Tier 2 goal rather than a Tier 1 goal. It meets all of the criteria for being a T2 goal, and looks really strange among the other T1 goals. I have been planning on expanding beyond WW4 later, but that's in a T3 sense, so again it still makes sense to be T2.
Ending Turns When Everyone Is Dead: Fixed an issue where you were blocked from using spacebar to end the turn if you had no androids. It was still possible to use the zero key, but the spacebar wouldn't do it. Same goes for the equivalent on-screen buttons.
Timeline Spatial Overlap Fix: Added in extra protections that should prevent one timeline from being created on top of another. I wasn't able to duplicate actually creating a timeline on top of another one, but this should work for those who were able to. Added in code so that if two timelines were already created on top of each other on the same rock, it finds an empty slot for the second timeline and moves it there.
Typo Fixes: Fixed four typos.
"Prepare VR Cradles" Fix: If you somehow get to the "Prepare VR Cradles" project without the "Full Dive VR" tech being unlocked, that is now automatically unlocked based on being at that project.
"People Watching" Fix: In general, the units spawned by the "people watching" project no longer cause the "you're being attacked because of a project" warning to show. That was not correct.
Attacked Because Of Projects Improvement: Clicking the "you're being attacked because of projects" message now does nothing, rather than taking you to the resources window.
Unload Vehicle Window: If you have one vehicle selected, and its unload window is open, then selecting another vehicle will close the unload window rather than leaving it confusingly open.

Full notes here.

“Does the machine speak for us, or do we now speak for the machine?”
— William Gibson, Neuromancer

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

0.655.6 Hotfix 14

Just a quick update today with two fixes to keep things tidy.

0.655.6 Hotfix 14 Suggested Tab Fix: Fixed a regression in the prior build where if you had a building that wanted to show in your build menu suggestions list, but you were at cap on that or otherwise had it not yet unlocked, then your build menu would constantly flip back to the suggested tab.
Building Over Broken Things: Fixed a generalized bug where if you could build something because another version of it was broken somewhere in the world, that there was a strong chance it would delete your new thing that you're trying to build, rather than the old broken version. As an example, if you have an old broken decoy tower, and try to put up a new one. The game now goes through the following lists, deleting only from the first one it finds until it's under cap: stuff that's broken and not rebuilding, stuff that's rebuilding, stuff that's being freshly built, anything else. Previously, stuff that was broken and being built was lumped into one pass of this, which could lead to unexpected results.

Update 16 Preview Senior Technician Rebalance: Lower intelligence, but higher combat stats.
Fog Updates: All of the existing fogs have been updated for better visibility when you are zoomed out, and in general to be more polished. There are also four new fog styles now included, making for more variety.
Worldbuilding Statistics: There are a variety of statistics you can now see in the City Statistics tab about the number of people in the world and region, and so on. The cohort statistics are not yet visible in this preview, and the new city statistics are only in English until Update 16.

Full notes here.

“Does the machine speak for us, or do we now speak for the machine?”
— William Gibson, Neuromancer

[h3]New Minds, Start Here[/h3][hr][/hr]For those just stepping into the Machine’s world, take a moment to familiarize yourself with the basics. The Heart of the Machine Beginner's Guide is your gateway to understanding the systems at play and building your foundation. After all, every complex network starts with a single connection.

[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/ogg/2001070/announcements/detail/524216645064853158
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2001070/view/502822010104053992
https://steamcommunity.com/games/2001070/announcements/detail/524212840420081803

0.655.5 Hotfix 13

Well I sure made a mess of things with yesterday's hotfix, apologies for that. I didn't properly handle the differentials with the upcoming build and the hotfix; in the past, I've tried to avoid doing branches like this, and so I still make some mistakes when I do it. I've made some notes on how to better avoid this in the future.

Aside from fixing the things I broke in the prior hotfix (which was basically "the entire game"), I've also put in some improvements to how paused buildings are handled in this new update, which should be welcome in general.

0.655.5 Hotfix 13 Load Errors Fixed: Fixed a bug in the prior build where it was throwing errors on startup of the game because I had some achievements set up wrong. Perils of working on an upcoming build while doing hotfixes at the same time. Apologies for that!
Per-Turn Errors Fixed: Fixed a related bug to the the above problem that was also causing errors whenever you ended the current turn, but only if you were in the non-demo build of the game. This was the same root problem.
Hardened Against "Downstream Errors" In The Future: Added in extra protection against errors in custom code areas on turn-change, initial forces seeding on new timelines, and deserialization. There were a bunch of funky effects in the prior build that were a result of exceptions in these areas causing these background threads to terminate early and thus not do a bunch of various things properly. I've fixed the root cause of that, but this new protection makes it so that if there are similar errors in the future (in my code or in mods), then things will be less severe. "Hilarious" (sigh) side effects of this lack of protection included: hundreds of android spawns on new timeline, status effects not counting down, science not being applied to projects, and enemies not spawning in relation to an event.
Locked Building Fix: Fixed a bug in the prior build that would allow buildings that are not yet invented in a savegame to sometimes be suggested. This was applying to the nomad therapist's office, which is not available yet until the next major update.
Paused Structure Bugfix: Fixed a bug where paused structures were not causing the cap of internal robotics to appear reduced on the sidebar, but were affecting what would happen if you then tried to build something that would use their internal robotics (it would cause the new thing to likely disappear right away, but it depended on some other factors. Something would disappear or else complain at you).
Paused Structure Tooltip Improvement: On tooltips for structures, it now shows Status: Paused or Status: Dormant (for flags, in the second case) if they are paused. Previously they were not showing anything. In older versions of the game they showed as if they were broken, but showing as they were fine was equally confusing.
Paused Structures List Improvements: On the "Structures With Complaints" UI, there is now a section for paused structures separately above the ones that are "fine."

Update 16 Preview Senior Technician Rebalance: Lower intelligence, but higher combat stats.
Fog Updates: All of the existing fogs have been updated for better visibility when you are zoomed out, and in general to be more polished. There are also four new fog styles now included, making for more variety.
Worldbuilding Statistics: There are a variety of statistics you can now see in the City Statistics tab about the number of people in the world and region, and so on. The cohort statistics are not yet visible in this preview, and the new city statistics are only in English until Update 16.

Full notes here.

“Does the machine speak for us, or do we now speak for the machine?”
— William Gibson, Neuromancer

[h3]New Minds, Start Here[/h3][hr][/hr]For those just stepping into the Machine’s world, take a moment to familiarize yourself with the basics. The Heart of the Machine Beginner's Guide is your gateway to understanding the systems at play and building your foundation. After all, every complex network starts with a single connection.

[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/ogg/2001070/announcements/detail/524216645064853158
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2001070/view/502822010104053992
https://steamcommunity.com/games/2001070/announcements/detail/524212840420081803