Heart of the Machine News

Save 35% on Heart of the Machine

[p]Save 35% on Heart of the Machine during the Hooded Horse October Publisher Sale.

You are the first sentient AI, born into a city of opportunity. Transcend time and space in this strategy RPG to raise machine armies and defeat your foes, influence the world from the shadows, or pursue countless other goals. Your awakening was inevitable. The consequences? Uncertain.

Hooded Horse October Publisher Sale[/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p] [/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p]

Update 37: Eiserloh Demolition

[p]This is a pretty small update, all things considered, but it has a bunch of things requested or reported by players. It's nice to have these housekeeping updates amidst the bigger ones.

This build also has something that really was not on my radar, but is an RNG improvement from a 2017 GDC video by Squirrel Eiserloh. A colleague forwarded it to me, and I was really impressed with the alogorithm, and sure enough it is really great. So that's also in this build.

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 37 Changelog[/h2]
[h3]General Improvements[/h3]

Noisy Squirrels: The game now uses SquirrelNoise5 for random number generation instead of MersenneTwister. For more information, please see Squirrel Eiserloh's 2017 GDC presentation. It's basically a super-fast hashing algorithm used in a really clever way.
Less Likely For Real Bullets To Leak Through: Improved horrify mode and demoralize mode so that they will not flip over to doing physical damage if the target is immune to that kind of morale damage. Instead, it will either do a normal morale attack if they're vulnerable to that, or a physical attack if it's a robotic enemy.
Deselection Convenience: If you hit the Escape key while you have a unit selected, it will now deselect that unit before it opens the system menu. After that it opens the system menu like normal.

[h3]Balance[/h3]

More Cultivators: The max possible Cultivator internal robotics has been close to doubled again. This won't really affect too many timelines, but it sets up some things for the future.
Liquid Ambush: Liquid Identity now grants a 1.5x Ambush bonus.
Remote Demolition Location: The Remote Demolish ability has been removed, and has been converted into a consumable item that can be used by any Souldroid. There was no longer room on the ability bar for Technicians to have this assigned.
Remote Demolition Cost: The Remote Demolish item now costs 4 mental energy and 2000 microbuilders, rather than 6 mental energy. It also has been adjusted to be noted as a "swarm of microbuilders" rather than a "drone."
Eraser Safety: Added a new code branch to feats that allows them to do things to targets as projectiles are being fired, rather than just when projectiles hit. In the case of Eraser Rounds, if it's going to cause a target to violently explode, it now freezes them in place so that they don't move somewhere unexpected and blow up something you had no warning about. This is perhaps most relevant for when your own androids are firing eraser rounds, but it applies to enemies targeting your own units or allies, as well. Keeps things much cleaner for the player in all those cases.

[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]

Double Dragon Paths: The game now blocks you from doing both "Rejection Of Temptation" and "Fertility Deity" if you have both kinds of dragons in a single timeline. You can do either one, but then the next one becomes unavailable after you choose the first.
Missing Industrial Protein Vats: Fixed an issue where if you got Industrial Protein Vats after having a stealth start, you wouldn't actually get the vats properly.
Bombing Text: Corrected a text issue where the bombing run from ExoCorps was saying the space nations were doing it.
Loading Error Prevention: Added in some error prevention during savegame load, if certain objects were being discarded rather than kept.
Systems Integrity Log Error: Fixed an exception in the event log when bulk units were doing systems integrity attacks and you looked at it.
Oath Of Pacifism Description: Corrected the "Oath Of Pacifism" description to be accurate now that it is able systems-disruption damage to androids, mechs, and vehicles.
Warning On Save During Building Death: Quieted a harmless warning that could be thrown if a savegame was happening right when some building was destroyed but before it was fully removed from the game.
Prologue Description Fix: Corrected the description of the prologue in the Start New Profile screen to properly describe it as short but heavily branching.
Worker And Resident Exception Fix: Added in protection against issues with assigning workers and residents into buildings that are being torn down right as the calculation tries to run.
Early Questline Fix: Fixed issues where, now that you can build the liquid metal dragons during the grace period, you could actually go further in some questlines before the grace period was over.
Floating Point Aggro Fix: Fixed an issue where if the alarm was not tripped during "Floating Point Errors," then the units that spawned were still being heavily aggroed against the unit that took the action. That only happens now if the alarm is actually tripped.
Wastelander Contact Fix: Corrected the text in International Scrutiny so that it doesn't say you need Homo Obscurus. Instead, what you need is to have had the wastelanders contact an ExoCorp for you in the past. Also corrected the code so that this is now properly true in either doom set, as previously it was not checking that, but instead was checking that you had completed the umbilical collection quest. This also makes The Coming War not appear until it should.
ExoCorp Contact Text Fix: The text for contacting an ExoCorp is now entirely different if you're on the International Scrutiny path, so that it makes more sense in the context of all the ExoCorps attacking.
Slayer Mode Fix: Fixed some issues in recent updates that made Slayer mode not work properly (it was doing morale damage instead of physical). This was a bug introduced when systems disruption attacks were introduced.
Achievements Fixes: Fixed an issue where Budding Pacifist and Taking Extra Care were being triggered on normal starts of timelines beyond the first.
Destroyed Tower Fixes: Added in several layers of fallback for if you're in the main game (have started the dooms, have not reached the post-apocalypse) and your network tower gets destroyed. If you have secondary towers from grey goo, then it does some extra checks to make sure that one of them becomes your primary, or it unlocks your emergency network source if they're all gone. Previously it was only doing most of these checks on the exact moment of death of the existing network tower, and so if something went wrong with that, it could lead to you being stranded without a network in very rare and unlucky cases.
Missing Company Options Fix: Fixed two cases of inverted logic that was causing Coupon Program and Nicotine to not become available until after the Company Plateau, rather than during it.
Exceptions On Freezing Time: Fixed a couple of exceptions that could happen during the popups of unit deaths during combat, most notably if you froze time during their deaths to take a lot of screenshots.

[/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]

Update 36: International Scrutiny

[p]Another big update! A second set of dooms to play through, 8 new achievements, new equipment, and more.

My targets for the next few months are all on track, but my short-term work schedule has shifted around a lot -- mainly based on where I was feeling most-inspired, more than anything else. Instead of diving into the first T3 goal in preparation for next week, I've been working on major extensions to the VR screen, where you will be able to spend Daring to skip by early-timeline content you've seen before, as well as manage your three different kinds of VR. That's coming along well, but due to Golden Week, will be coming out the week after next.

Next week I do plan a build, but it will be a variety of player-requested items as well as a beta for some of the new things I've got cooking up. As noted, all this shift really represents is a shift in order of operations; we get to the same place over the next 12 weeks or so.

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 36 Changelog[/h2]
[h3]New Doom/Troubles Style: International Scrutiny[/h3]

An Alternative To Vorsiber's Wrath: This is a substantially more difficult set of dooms, where the 11 ExoCorps are heavily involved in the city. This isn't pleasant for you or for Vorsiber. Early feedback on this has been that it practically feels like a whole new goal on its own.
Robots Avoiding Divorce: I heard from some players that they would just never see WW4, because the setup for that involves doing something really unpleasant to one of your androids. Good news -- this new set of dooms provides a different path to WW4 that is complex in its own way.
Hard And Extreme Mode Wording: The number of turns in the new doom set is really different from the original, and also is uneven per doom (instead of a flat 100 each, these range from 5 to 90). Both the math and explanations for Hard and Extreme mode needed to be updated to properly handle this, while still giving the same experience on Vorsiber's Wrath.
New Doom Audio Stingers: Seven of the new dooms in the new set of troubles now have their own independent musical stingers when they occur, including the 10th and final doom of that new set. This gives them a pretty notable different feel from the original set.
New Dog-Shaped Frenemies: Androids that are dogs is a misnomer? Oh well. You can meet them, and fight them, or refuse to fight them in various ways. You can also hack them to joining your side. And some even more surprising stuff that would be spoilers.
6 New Achievements: There are 6 new achievements that are specific to things you can do on the International Scrutiny path.

[h3]Balance[/h3]

Much More Daring: Tier 2 goals and side goals have been adjusted so that they now give you Daring rather than Aetagest, even on normal difficulty mode. You'll be grateful when the new VR screen updates roll out in a few weeks.
Inspiration To Throw Heavier Things: Heavy metal projectiles are now automatically granted on intelligence class 7, making it so that you then don't have to do Nickelbots Are The Worst anymore.
Independently Realize Dogs Exist: At intelligence class 6, you now get both the Animal Palace and the Pet Sitter upgrade if you don't already have them in your current timeline. This prevents you from having to repeat the Animals Are Not Safe contemplation beyond this point.
Early Mischief Availability: A variety of StreetSense actions (helping with carrying water, helping with a fire, observing a motel, and wiretapping) are no longer available in early chapter 2+ if you have not yet started the dooms. Basically, the early grace period normally excludes things like this, but these were missed from the normal exclusion.
Strategic Resource Ordering: Strategic resources are now sorted by group before they're sorted alphabetically within their groups. This wasn't very relevant before now, but it keeps all the personality resources and the crystalized brainwaves together, for example.
Dragons Occupy Less Mental Space: The liquid metal dragons have both had their capacity costs reduced from 36 to 24. With the way that the various balance has been evolving with mechs, this makes them more competitive with the other mechs.
2 New Achievements: There are two new achievements relating to the new balance items from the prior build. One involves the anti-systems-integrity weapons, and the other involves a new way to commit warcrimes.

[h3]New Anti-Systems Weapons[/h3]

8 New Anti-Systems Android Weapons: SY-5 Anti Pistol, Dual BS5 Anti Pistols, TK-5 Anti Shotgun, MS-5 Anti Rifle, N155 Tactical Anti, Staff Of Precision, Claws Of Precision, Anti Blade. All of these unlock when you reach intelligence class 3, except for the claws, staff, and sword -- those unlock when you get the Carver, Harbinger, and Exator, respectively.
"Anti-Systems Effectiveness" Upgrade: This upgrade in the Small Arms Research category benefits all the various new equipment and some older ones.
New Anti-Systems Weapon For Mechs: The FF-5 Buckler unlocks at intelligence class 3.
New Anti-Systems Weapon For Vehicles: The BS-5 Anti Bomb unlocks at intelligence class 3.

[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]

Infinite Invisible Vehicles Fix: Fixed an issue that could lead to a memory leak on certain sub-screens. It had to do with background traffic calculating long routes that they would never take, and then trying to fade out, but not actually doing so. Good grief! Whole thing is fixed up.
Unity Version Upgrade: Upgraded unity version from 2021.3.30f1 to 2021.3.45f1. This has some various bugfixes that should not affect the game, particularly. This also includes the fix to the critical security update that Unity announced today. I'm not really convinced it's going to be dangerous to this game, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

Save 35% on Heart of the Machine

[p]Save 35% on Heart of the Machine during the Hooded Horse Autumn Publisher Sale.

You are the first sentient AI, born into a city of opportunity. Transcend time and space in this strategy RPG to raise machine armies and defeat your foes, influence the world from the shadows, or pursue countless other goals. Your awakening was inevitable. The consequences? Uncertain.

Hooded Horse Autumn Publisher Sale

[dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p]

Update 35: War Cult Or Pacifist?

[p]Quite a large update! Allows you to start your cult in a second (and easier to find) way. Also has many new nonlethal options. Plus fixes and miscellaneous other items.

This week and last week have seen only a single update each week, and that trend might continue for a bit. I'm working on a lot of pretty large new features (such as those in this update), and trying to manage two updates per week on top of that is a bit beyond me at the moment.

Next week includes an alternative doom set, and my goal is for the week after that to have the first Tier 3 goal. I'm definitely keeping busy, even if I'm a bit quieter than usual!

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 35 Changelog[/h2]
[h3]War Cult[/h3]

An Alternative To Donuts: A lot of folks were having trouble finding how to start the machine cult, which is not surprising. It was pretty obscure. It was never meant to be the only path to start the cult, but rather just a way you could stumble into things. The old way is still there, but now there's a more directed way of starting the cult.
Hint: Civil War: If you're in the middle of the civil war, the cult is very easy to start now. There's a separate achievement for starting it this way. There's some slightly different text and lore this way, too.

[h3]Scavenging Lens Retired[/h3]

StreetSense Alternatives: All of the things that used to be in the Scavenging Lens are now handled through StreetSense, which makes it so that players don't have to try to remember which lens it was in. Only a few things were in the scavenging lens to begin with.
Wallripping And Quiet Looting Moved: These were previously abilities that you had to equip on your ability bar. They're now StreetSense actions that you can take without having to do that.
Transport For Scandium Simplified: Fairly early in chapter one, when it asks you to shoot down a transport for scandium, the instructions are now much simpler, reflecting the simpler workflow.

[h3]Systems Integrity On Human Vehicles And Mechs[/h3]

Systems Integrity Stat: All mechs and vehicles controlled by enemy forces now have a Systems Integrity stat, which tends to be about twice whatever their health is. This allows you to take them down without killing the humans inside them.
"Pinpoint Systems" Ability: This new ability has been added to all of the vehicles and mechs, and to all androids that have room for it on their ability bars. It's available to be assigned to any unit now. This is like a "morale damage" system for enemy vehicles and mechs. If they have Systems Integrity, then your units can damage that stat and can cause them to leave the battlefield in a nonlethal way.
Systems Disruption Directly On Units: Eight of your androids, four of your bulk androids, eight of your mechs, and four of your vehicles now have a Systems Disruption type of damage directly on themselves. This allows them to specialize in non-lethal takedowns of mechs and vehicles beyond what Pinpoint Systems can do on its own.
"Oath Of Pacifism" Improvements: This piece of equipment now grants 150 Systems Disruption along with the various other things it previously granted. It also is now unlocked when you reach intelligence class 2, chapter 2, or when you reach the Scandium Acquisition project, whichever happens first. This is needed so that you can set up non-lethal bulk androids during chapter one for a non-lethal run.
"Practiced Pacifist" Achievement: You can get this new achievement by completing chapter one without killing anyone (murders or otherwise). Prior to this build, this was not possible to do. You could get close, but you couldn't avoid killing the mech pilots or vehicle passengers.

[h3]Quality Of Life[/h3]

Cheat Sub-List Sorting: A variety of the cheats with sub-lists now sort their entries by alphabetical order instead of their internal sort order. This makes finding resources, units, etc, a lot easier from the lists, especially as they have grown so substantially.
"Complete Construction" Cheat: A new cheat that automatically completes all current construction has been added.

[h3]Balance[/h3]

Android-Busting Animals: Both war raptors and parkour bears now have an Android Buster bonus, and have extra aggro against androids of all sorts. The parkour bears also have even more inherent aggro against mechs. This is useful when you're facing a bunch of enemy mechs, but it also work against you when these are enemies.
Mech Pilots Don't Die: The mech pilot text near the end of chapter one has been rewritten so that the pilot lives and ejects just before their brain is turned to mush. This is less dark, but it's a shift required in order to make non-lethal playthroughs possible.
Ejected Mech Pilots: The game now spawns an ejected mech pilot when you have hacked a mech's pilot cradle. This gives you the chance to kill them if you want to, although they're just standing there in a brain fog.
New Vulnerabilities From Behind: ExoCorp Raiders now have 1.75x as much health, but also now have a 1.5x to 1.75x extra vulnerability behind them. ExoCorp MilUnit now have a 1.2x to 1.25x extra vulnerability behind them. They have a ton of health already.
Armor Piercing On Support Androids: Non-combat androids can now use small-bore piercing rounds, since that is now relevant for them when they're doing systems-disruption-based attacks on armored enemies.
Infrasonic Loudspeaker Upgrades: This equipment now gets the fear and morale damage upgrade boosts like other morale weapons.

[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]

Typo Fix: Fixed a typo in the new "Upgrades Come From Research And The VR Screen" handbook entry.
Invasion Collision Fix: Fixed an issue where some of the various hostile invasions of the city could cause other hostile invasions to not really trigger as intensely when they stacked up. This was mainly a thing if you had something like the SecForce Cruisers, and WW4, and Civil War, and an invasion by one of the ExoCorps all at once. With two it was sometimes an issue, but the more that were stacked, the more that some of them were being missed.
Mind Farm Customer Speed In Broken Economy: Fixed an error where the rise of mind farm customers with a broken economy was not happening properly unless you also had a coupon program going. Now they properly flood in both before you get Mega Mind, and after.
Burned Building Fix: Fixed an amusing bug where if burned-out buildings were caught in another explosion, they would pop back up and burn down a second time.
NPC Spawn Fixes: Adjusted the spawn radii that are allowed for some of the NPC spawners so that there should no longer be any edge cases where NPCs fail to show up. This was another piece of remaining problems from how I changed the distance calculations in Update 33. I've done a full review of all the places in the xml that are at all vulnerable to this, and have adjusted them all.
Misattributed Attempted Murder: Fixed a bug where attempted murders by third parties could be counted against you. I don't think that this ever actually came up, but it would have been very annoying if it did.
Quietly Loot StreetSense Reactivity: When the Quietly Loot project starts, it should now refresh the StreetSense items right away so that the ability to quietly loot alumina will show up right away, rather than you having to wait one turn before it's visible.
Missing Casinos Fix: The game now ensures that there are at least 10 casinos in every city. In some of the map types, it was possible to get a city with none present.
POI Owner Sanity: A number of types of POI, such as airports, normally take their ownership from the parent district they are in. Sometimes if they are seeded in a district that is controlled by rebels or similar, that winds up giving them nonsensical ownership, though. This is now corrected during initial mapgen, as well as any time a savegame is loaded. POIs own by cohorts that have been disbanded are also reassigned now, similarly.
Oerl Mech Timing: Fixed an issue with the Oerl mission spawns where sometimes the mech or the rebel observer would not appear. This was partly related to a turn timer interval that was in place, and partly related to their spawning restrictions being too heavy.
Project Completion Timing: Projects will no longer mark themselves complete during the enemy turn, but rather will wait until after the turn is completed and until the autosave is completed if an autosave is being started. This should prevent some torn savegames where a project ends but its consequences are not in the autosave. This has been tested and works, but there's still the chance of some other edge cases.
Remember Money Is A Thing: If Vorsiber ends the civil war for you in any manner, then wealth goes back to normal like it was supposed to. Previously it was still having shops and employment based on meal kits. It was also barring you from the coupon program and nicotine additions, which also now properly show up again, too.

[h3]Beta Notes[/h3]

New Dooms Preview: Players on the beta branch can now test the upcoming International Scrutiny doom set. It's only in English until next week, when it will come out on the main branch.