Heart of the Machine News

Update 17: Hacking Androids, Draining Morale, and Revising Deals

Update 17 carries a particular weight—not from any single headline, but from how the pieces fit together. Hacked androids, anti-morale weapons, propaganda circuits, sprinting units that cover twenty times their range, and revisions to a variety of the Deals you can make around the city.

The systems are getting denser. More reactive. Deals now carry proper thematic force, not just stat boosts. Android types receive long-overdue recognition in the upgrade matrix. Even minor StreetSense events lead to unusual loadouts and strange discoveries, if you’re paying attention.

You'll also find a rocket launcher designed by the community, sprinting distance upgrades, and multiple deal reworks that tie flavor more closely to function. And scattered throughout: minor tweaks, major augments, and a reminder that the Machine is always learning.

"We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell."
—Oscar Wilde, quoted in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

[h3]Steam Reviews[/h3][hr][/hr]If you've been playing and feel like sharing thoughts, Steam reviews are always appreciated. It's part of how these patches are formed and it also brings more attention to Heart of the Machine on Steam.

[expand][h3]Major Additions[/h3]

Hacking Enemy Androids: Players can now hack enemy androids and convert them to their side. This feature has been frequently requested since before launch.
AS-201 Rebellion Launcher: A new anti-armor rocket launcher, unlocked at Intelligence Class 6. Designed and balanced with input from community member Pingcode.
Sprint Range Expansion: Units can now sprint up to 20x their movement range (increased from 10x). Especially helpful on newer map types.

[h3]New Anti-Morale Weapons and Augments[/h3]

Book of Rhetoric: Gained via the Religious Study minor StreetSense event in Chapter 1. A new fear-based secondary weapon.
Spooky Nonsense Generator: Gained via the Occult Participation minor StreetSense event in Chapter 1. A fear-based secondary weapon that reduces Intelligence.
Propaganda Circuit: Gained via the Political Rally minor StreetSense event in Chapter 1. An augment that boosts both fear and argument attack power.
Morale Weapon Buff: The Oath of Pacifism is now twice as effective.
Morale Weapon Effectiveness Upgrade: Available via the Martial Expansion upgrade group. Affects all morale-based weapons and augments, including the Oath.

[h3]Unit and Classification Updates[/h3]

Souldroid Classification for Technicians: Technicians now qualify as Souldroids, unlocking several upgrades previously limited to Ravens, Mindrunners, and Harbingers.

[h3]Deal Reworks and Thematic Adjustments[/h3]

Greens For The Underclass: Now benefits Souldroids instead of Technicians.
Meat For The Underclass: Now grants a small HP bonus for all combat androids, replacing the former Oxdroid-specific argument bonus.
Canned Protein For The Underclass: Now grants a larger intimidation bonus.
Meals For Fugitives: Now provides triple the attack boost. No longer applies once you're in the post-apocalypse.
Donut Deals: Now provide strength bonuses to Oxdroids, replacing their previous engineering bonuses.

[h3]Other Changes[/h3]

Vorsiber DRM Clarification: Vorsiber’s midsize microbuilder fab now explicitly notes its DRM restrictions, clarifying that it can’t be reverse-engineered or upgraded. Players suggested this thematic explanation, based on observed mechanics, and I thought it was hilarious.

[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]

Firing While Over Android Cap: Fixed a longstanding issue where if you were over android cap, you could still give them attack orders, even though you couldn't otherwise make them move.
Issue During First Hack Of Mech: Fixed a regression added in the recent hotfixes, which was preventing you from progressing through the tutorial hacking session, but only about 50% of the time. And only if you did the full hack, not the quick-hack.

0.656 Hotfix 17

Another dose of tidying-up. Next week will see Update 17 release, and hopefully this is the last Hotfix before then. Overall there have been a lot more hotfixes needed than usual because of the extreme number of shifts to the codebase during Update 15 with the new prologue and ability to replay things on existing profiles. Thank you to everyone for the patience you've shown related to that. I usually avoid having that much carnage.

0.656 Hotfix 17 Background Conflict Remnants Removed: Not a bugfix, this is just a thing that is now complete. There is a new Pressure Points mechanic that fully supplants this concept (also replaces the Rogue Escalations concept I've talked about for a bit, as that did not do super well).
Turns In Older Saves Fix: Fixed a regression introduced in Hotfix 16 where if you loaded older saves of a timeline in the profile you they belong in, they would reverse-merge some central information including the turn you were on and a bunch of other bits that should not have been reverse-merged.
Demo Fixes: Fixed some demo-specific errors that were preventing the demo from working properly.
Grey Goo At Apocalypse Fix: Fixed a bug where if you started chapter 2 by grey goo AFTER having tried to start it a different way, then when you got to the final doom, it would do part of the grey goo situation.
More Structure Replacement Fixes: Fixed an issue where if you had a bunch of broken structures of a higher-priority job using some internal robotics (like repair spiders) and you tried to build more of something else using their same internal robotics type (like contraband jammers), then the job you just tried to build would self-destruct rather than it destroying the older broken thing.
Early Revelation Fix: Fixed an issue where "The Revelation" contemplation was erroneously available during the initial grace period that has been added for new timelines.
Contemplations Too Close Together Fix: "Coupon Program" and "Nicotine Introduction" now have different seeding logic that is not based on your own machine structures. This will naturally cause them to spread out more, rather than being clustered on top of each other.
Contemplations At Same Building Fix: Fixed an edge-case bug that was allowing contemplations to spawn on literally the same building in some cases. This is corrected immediately on loading existing savegames where that problem was extant.
Resource Categorization Fix: Corrected "Human Biodata" to no longer be included in the Metals and Military filter categories. It's now properly in the Economic category.

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

0.655.9 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

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