Heart of the Machine news & patch notes

Generalized updates based on player feedback, plus a new mod. Enjoy! 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.

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.

Thanks for reading and for playing.

Update 83 Changelog

Quality Of Life

• Infinite Workers: Added adjustments to all of the worker hubs so that they never stop producing units, whereas possibly they would run out before, eventually, per hub.
• Remaining Target Location: In the slum obsession, if you click "frustration mounts," it will now cycle you through the remaining buildings so that you can see where they are, as the last few can be hard to find, especially if they are way away from your stuff.
• Health Bars Now Never Eat The Screen: Adjusted the default health-per-pip amounts upwards even further on extreme and misery modes to not have such huge health bars, and then also added in a clamp so that no health bar can ever be more than 4 rows tall, no matter how extreme; it will scale its health per pip to make that fit, when you have things like a squad of 200+ inquisitors with 21k+ health (previously that was showing as a bit over 24 health bar rows, which, while impressive, is too large to be functional).
• Early Event Sequence Clarity: Skimming the mines now shows as blocked if you don't yet have intelligence class 2 on the outer contemplation, rather than just being a latent thing once you are into the contemplation.
• Localization Update: Localization has been updated to include all of the changes up through June 15th.
• Options For Ultrawide Screens: Added a new "Pull UI Inward On Wide Screens" slider on the UI Scale section of the settings menu: Raise this to pull the interface inward toward the center on ultrawide screens; at the maximum it keeps the whole UI within a centered 16:9 area. This has no effect on 16:9 or narrower displays, and the game view itself always still fills the entire screen.
• Finding Tents During Investigations: For tents highlighting, there is now extra scaling that happens so that they aren't invisible if there are just a few of them as part of an investigation.

New Mod: Free Timeline Deletion

• Delete At Will: Added a new "Free Timeline Deletion" mod: Makes deleting a timeline free — it no longer costs 1000 Aetagest or 1 Misery. You still need 100 Aetagest on hand to delete one, and you still cannot delete your first timeline.

Bugfixes

• Nullref Hardening: Fixed three more rare sites where there was a brief window to get a stray nullref exception right after a building was destroyed. It didn't harm the game or block gameplay, but it was alarming to players and annoying.
• Accurate Progress On Replay: Fixed an issue where when you were replaying chapter one, the progress towards the reaching intelligence class 3 or 4 would show the wrong percentage in the projects related to those.
• No More Stacked Officials: When calling for magistrates, the next one won't be available to call until the prior one is resolved.
• Missing A Word: Fixed two cases of missing words in some text.
• Not Actually Cruel: Fixed an issue where nonlethal takedowns of mech pilots would still give you cruelty, and of monsters would give you monster pelts. This was an unintended side effect of letting nonlethal takedowns give you scandium and such from attacking transports.
• Destroyed Building Mouse Handling: The collision boxes of destroyed buildings are now adjusted so that they no longer interfere with units attacking other units, and also in general should feel more smooth when moving around, too.
• The First Timeline Is Sacred: Fixed an issue where the first timeline could be deleted, despite the game saying that was not possible.
• Sneaky Backdoor Through Armor: Fixed an issue where "Designate Coordinated Attack" was able to sneak systems damage past armor plating.

Full notes here.

What's New In 1.0

If you missed the retrospective of what changed from the start of Early Access to the 1.0 release, you can read that here:

Connect with the Machine

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.

This one has quite a mix of things, including some cool new upgrade paths for mechs and vehicles, and a new Guide section to help with tricky sections of the game. Plus various other bugfixes and clarity items. Enjoy! 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.

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.

Thanks for reading and for playing.

Update 82 Changelog

Clarity

• Can't Redirect Them To Yourself: Adjusted the SecForce Weapons Shipments pressure point to not be valid until chapter 2 or later, thus avoiding a potential point of confusion in chapter 1.
• Optimize My Equipment: Did an improvement pass on the general equipment suggestions.
• The Wrong Kind Of Citizens: Added extra text to the during-placement logic for cyberocracy hubs that explains why a tile is allowed or not allowed for the first time. You must have enough lower-class citizens, not too many upper-class citizens, and no prisoners, which it now shows in the tooltip at the bottom of the screen.
• In-Game Guidance On Tough Routes: Added a new Guides section to the Victory Path window. This mainly answers popular questions that I get asked again and again on the steam forums and discord. It provides in-game guidance as hints that you can gradually reveal, to spoil yourself as little as possible. This should really help out people who are not native English speakers, or those who just don't want to have to look to secondary sources. Right now there are 11ish guides, but I may add more if there's demand for it. I'm trying to keep each one brief and to the point, while still answering those questions that come up repeatedly. This is only in English for the next few weeks.

Balance

• Mech And Vehicle Armor Upgrades: Added four new categories that all mech and vehicle armor now falls into: Field Hull, Tech Hull, War Hull, or Fortress Hull. This allows you to upgrade them via the Heavy Arms Research category of research, which now has been increased from 3-6 items to pick from each time, given that there are now 9 entries in it instead of 5. In general, this is now competing for your research points in a new way, too, but makes mechs and vehicles able to keep up over a longer period of time if you do.
• Yet Another Science Sink: There is a new Auxiliary Mount Calibration stat that can be upgraded via the Small Arms Research category, and it buffs certain weapon-y augments' physical attack power: Shoulder-Mounted Rockets/Lasers, Infrasonic Loudspeaker, Rage Circuit, High-Density Rounds, Liquid Metal Tentacle. This lets you make the various augments stronger in general, but this competing for other weapons upgrades.
• Saws Are, In Fact, Quite Scary: Saw Arms now count as a Fear Weapon, and so get upgrades from the Fear Effectiveness upgrade.
• Actually Too Many Happy Feelings: The base argument attack power of the ETS Tasp has been reduced to 150 from 200. It's still more powerful overall, since now it is considered a morale weapon and thus gets bonuses from Morale Weapon Effectiveness, which previously it did not.
• Shield Over Time: Riot Shield is now part of Advanced Materials And Armor, which means it gets bonuses from Armor Materials Study.
• Viral Pathways: Viral Bolts now count as an anti-systems weapon, which means that it benefits from both Anti-Systems Effectiveness and Disruption Velocity. Same with the FF-5 Buckler for vehicles and mechs.
• Oh THAT'S Where The Troops Came From: Added a new feature where high-altitude regional transports show up to drop off the troops during Peace After Brutality, and then leave shortly after. This helps prevent a certain type of thematic confusion. They'll only engage with you if you shoot at them, so it has minimal impact on balance.
• Industrial-Scale Killing Now Barred From Pacifist Runs: The game now counts humans that you mulched or otherwise processed for brains as kills against the no-kills timeline goals. Psyche chamber kills were already counted, but these were missed somehow.
• Electrified Fences: Lost War Raptors will no longer chew on your buildings.

Bugfixes

• Placement Brownout: Fixed a regression from update 76 that was causing the cyberocracy hub options to flicker on and off.
• Stealthy Dead-End: Fixed an issue in the stealth startup that could lead to you being blocked from continuing until after you saved and reloaded, if the network updated at just the wrong time.
• Begone, Sticky Keys: In the event that the game loses focus due to alt-tabbing, it now resets the key-key status for the keyboard, mouse, and gamepads. This is apparently a known issue in the new unity input system from 2020 onwards, which they have yet to fix.
• The Staff Of Silence Returns To Form: Fixed a regression from update 78 that broke the ability to use hacker-silencing weapons, since those zero out damage but still apply a status. The game was erroneously lumping those in with "fails to do any damage" attacks.
• Trimmed Hedges Out Of Traffic: Fixed a regression from sometime in the last few weeks where trees were growing in roads and into the sides of buildings. It was related to my improvements to how colliders are handled in a general sense.
• More Accidental Time Travel: Fixed two race conditions when you were starting a new timeline to replay the prologue and/or chapter one, where it would sometimes grant you the things you were meant to have from being in a later chapter, despite you not effectively being in a later chapter.
• Hacking Tutorial Returns: Fixed an issue where the hacking tutorial was not showing up anymore, since some of the refactors in update 76.
• Hacking Resources Visibility: Fixed an issue where the resources text bar was not showing above the hacking controls anymore, again since refactors in update 76.
• Hacking Font: Fixed an issue in the hacking minigame where the text on cells was falling back to a basic font rather than using the proper stylized one.

Full notes here.

What's New In 1.0

If you missed the retrospective of what changed from the start of Early Access to the 1.0 release, you can read that here:

Connect with the Machine

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.

Handful of fixes relating to the Buried Buildings feature from yesterday, along with the updated localization.

1.111 Hotfix 52 Changelog

General

• Language Update: The localization has been updated for all non-English languages to match additions to the game as of June 1st (there is not much text changed since then yet, but there are a few things).
• Don't Nlock ME: Buried Buildings, the feature from update 81, no longer prevent players from moving to them with their regular units if they can.
• Do Block Things I Can't Reach: Buried buildings are now blocked from having streetsense, exploration sites, contemplations, or investigations targeting them. This prevents edge cases where someone would not be able to reach them.
• And Detect More Accurately: Improved the Buried Buildings calculator to not have as many false positives. With the other changes in this build, any false positives are a lot less important now, but still.

Full notes here.

Connect with the Machine

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.

More updates based on player requests, including crystallized emotion adjustments, and worker clarity. Also improvements for certain languages' text entry. Enjoy! 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.

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.

Thanks for reading and for playing.

Update 81 Changelog

Clarity

• The Flow Of Emotions: In the tooltips for the crystallized emotions, it now shows breakdowns of where each amount is coming from, to help with understanding if there are ever any problems (or in general just to understand the budget as it is happening).

Quality Of Life

• What Workers Will do: In the various "hub" buildings that spawn workers, it now shows which kinds of workers they will spawn, and also what the text is for those workers. This was never really shown anywhere before, other than in the command mode workers category, which is not clear enough.
• Equip Workers In Advance: Worker androids now show up in your hardware screens as soon as you CAN build them (based on having available buildings that could spawn them), rather than only after you have already built some of them.
• IME Keyboard Improvements: If you're using an OS keyboard that is a CJK language that uses an IME, then when you first click into a textbox, it will properly set you to the kana mode (or native equivalent) on windows. This will probably also work on linux, although it's not relevant for Steam Deck because the virtual keyboard there already handles things. This also does not matter on OSX, because the IME is an OS-level tool there that functions a bit differently and already worked nicely. With these changes, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese languages should have a much nicer typing experience.

Balance

• Crystallized Emotion Rebalance: Fixed an issue where the crystallized emotion income was not properly being calculated, as the values were cumulative alterations rather than alterations off of the base. This made it so that the outputs did not match the combined tooltip numbers if you had a number of different VR modifications on.

Bugfixes

• Stale Dropdown Fix: Fixed a generalized bug in dropdowns where if the current value was meant to be a null, then it would not visually update to select that value properly, which could lead to stale dropdown visuals compared to what was actually selected under the hood.
• NPCs No Longer Hide In Buried Buildings: There is a new "buried buildings" calculation that finds tents and shacks that are under another building in a way that you can't click on them. The game then prevents any npc units from moving to these spots.
• Settings Nullref Fix: Fixed an issue with the settings menu where if you searched for something, and it had absolutely no matches, then it would give an exception.
• Photo Mode Autofocus: In photo mode, the game has always had autofocus erroneously interact with colliders for buildings that are burned-down. It wasn't possible to make them work differently from that until recently, but now that I've got my own custom colliers and raycasting system, it is able to be adjusted so that it works great now!
• Keybinds During Small-Pane Windows: Fixed an issue where various keybinds were being blocked when non-full-screen windows like "Structures With Complaints" were open.
• IME Keyboard Fix: Fixed an issue from update 76 where converting to unity's new input system broke IME inputs entirely. It turns out their code for the new input system is still literally filled with a "todo" for this even after it coming out in 2020. Crazy! Most unity apps are using the old input manager in order to keep supporting CJK languages. But there's a workraround with the new input system that allows this to be called via reflection, and I've wired that up so that it works. I can now fully use a Japanese IME on my desktop in windows 11, and it should work in other OSes, too, since this is the code that the older input manager used to use. The reason I'm not using the old and new systems together is that the old system leaks gamepad commands into the game in an unhelpful way that bother players in any language.

Full notes here.

What's New In 1.0

If you missed the retrospective of what changed from the start of Early Access to the 1.0 release, you can read that here:

Connect with the Machine

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.

One fix that at the moment affects one user. Not really a hotfix per se, but just something I wanted out quickly.

1.109 Hotfix 51 Changelog

General

• Keep Working Even If Broken: In the event that the game settings or controls are saved in a corrupted fashion, the game now recovers as many of those settings or control bindings as possible on load, but then otherwise moves along without blocking anything. Previously it would show a scary error message that made it seem like you couldn't keep going, when in reality it was actually fine. This removes the confusion, and also retains as much as possible from a torn disk write or other interruption, without bothering the user about something they can't change. In their log, it now quietly notes the parts that were messed up, just so that they can check that if something seems amiss for no reason.

Full notes here.

Connect with the Machine

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.

Re-rolling research results, plus a language fix. Enjoy! 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.

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.

Thanks for reading and for playing.

Update 80 Changelog

Features

• You Feel A Creative Impulse: In the rewards screen for inspiration in a given category, you can now re-roll your options if there are options that are not currently shown. This costs 4 creativity on normal difficulty, 8 on hard, 16 on extreme, and 24 on misery mode. When a re-roll happens, it does not include any of the prior entries that were shown, so with one or two re-rolls you can choose exactly what you want.
• For Those Who Micro: Added a new mod called "Free Re-Rolls," which allows people to re-roll things for free, rather than having to spend creativity.

Bugfixes

• Turn, Windmills, Turn: Fixed a regression from update 76 where windmills stopped rotating. When I baked all the matrices, I forgot about those. The sub-matrices in question are now recalculated per-frame as-needed, rather than being fully baked. This costs a few microseconds in total per frame, which is very nice.
• Achievement Localization: Fixed an issue from Update 76 where the achievements were not properly linking up to their localization entries anymore, meaning that they were showing fully in English even when another language was chosen.

Full notes here.

What's New In 1.0

If you missed the retrospective of what changed from the start of Early Access to the 1.0 release, you can read that here:

Connect with the Machine

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.

More player requests, including finally nailing that M-series startup crash bug. Crash bugs are incredibly rare with this game, but it turns out that since the update to unity 6.3, if you used a 5k or double-UHD resolution on macOS, that would cause one. Talk about specific. All fixed now. Similarly, people keep having their international airports blown up, and so certain information brokers will now reluctantly meet you at a different airport. I find this one pretty amusing. Enjoy! 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.

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.

Thanks for reading and for playing.

Update 79 Changelog

Quality Of Life

• Searchable Settings: You can now fully search the settings window, which also includes searching the descriptions of all the mods. This has been a request for quite some time!
• Searchable Controls: You can now fully search the control bindings window. Here again this makes it far easier to find the keybind you're looking for.
• The War Is Coming: Fixed an issue where "The Coming War" was not in International Scrutiny for some reason. I clearly set it up that way on purpose, but that was confusing. It only jumps you forward a few turns in that doom set, but if you meet the criteria for WW4, it now shows that.

Balance

• Softer Unit Cap Reductions From Brownouts: If you have an electrical shortage, and this would cause your unit cap(s) to fall in some way, it now falls proportionately.
• Mental Energy Consequences Of Brownouts: If you have an electrical shortage during a turn, and you would normally have more than 9 mental energy thanks to Coprocessors, then the Coprocessor amounts are lost immediately and can't be regained until the next turn.
• Rebels No Longer Get Bored And Target Pedestrians: Fixed issues where nomad snipers, and rebels in general, could take out their aggressions on noncombatants when there were not any better targets around. That was out of character and unintended.
• No Need To Save Scum: When you are purchasing upgrades from the scientific research section of the VR screen, it will now always use a seed that is stable based on the current turn, and which category it is, and how many times you've already unlocked that category. This removes any benefit to saving and loading over and over again to get different results, as they'll now be the same each time. Every time you end turn, the slate does change for now, though.
• FINE, We Can Go Regional: Relaxed the criteria for starting WW4 so that if ANY airport is still standing, you can meet your contact there and kick things off. Otherwise if the international airport happened to get nuked in your timeline, you were just hosed.

Bugfixes

• Classic Camera Clamp: Fixed an issue where if you looked straight up or down in photo mode, it would cause the camera to jitter around. This is a classic case of not clamping angles at 89 degrees, which the game now does.
• Photo Mode Focus: The photo mode for the game now uses the new custom raycaster system, which was something I had forgotten to add in previously. This was leading to the autofocus and manual focus never detecting any objects, and thus never adjusting the depth of field.
• The Sky Is No Longer Infinitely Far Away: Fixed an issue with photo mode and how it interacted with the sky. It was seeing that as infinitely far away, and adjusting the autofocus as if there was something out there to look at. It now sets autofocus or manual focus to a maximum distance that makes sense, rather than infinity. This is actually not a new issue, but I never had gotten around to this as I had my focal distances way off the defaults.
• Electricity No Longer Pulses (It's DC Now?): Fixed an issue where if you were short on electricity, then your buildings could go into a mode where they were oscillating turning off and on once per quarter second, which was quite confusing in general.
• Fixed An Electrical Softlock: Fixed an issue where if you were short on electricity, and were in that cycling state described above, then it would not let you end turn until you fixed the electricity issues or scrapped all of your units above your base caps, since you were over cap on units. But it wasn't showing that properly in the task stack because of the oscillation.
• Fixed Mouse Momentum On OSX: Fixed an issue where pinned-mouse-cursor rotation was working in a funky way on macOS due to a quirk of that OS. It now works consistently across all OSes.
• Self-Correcting Network Data: The network membership background thread now runs once per second (it only takes milliseconds, anyway), rather than just purely on-demand. This way if it gets stuck not realizing that anything is in it, it won't cause issues like the inability to calculate your electricity. If you loaded savegames really rapidly, this could happen and it would cause your game to be stuck until you saved and reloaded. It's possible that there were some other rare circumstances that could cause this, but they would be solved by the same fix.
• Fixed A Very Niche Cash: Fixed an on-start crash that was happening only on M-series macOS computers that had a resolution that was really high -- in the 5K range, or double-UHD. Regular retina graphics, which is a bit smaller than 4K, was not enough to trigger it. And intel macs didn't have this at all, nor did windows or linux machines. The root of this was that during loading the game, when it tried to load the ocean scene for the end of time, the warmup scripts for that were causing the game to crash when it was done during load. That's now delayed and happens the first time you view the end of time in a session. This can cause a 1-2 second lag (on any OS) the very first time you view the end of time on your computer in a while, but that's shifting some work that was otherwise being done at program start into this (it's the PSO compilation, and your driver and unity cache it after it happens once per machine).
• Blur Is Back On MacOS: The whole thing with the blur being disabled on metal is now removed, as that was not affecting anything.
• System Menu From The End Of Time: The escape key now works like normal in the end of time again, whereas it had been doing since update 76.

Full notes here.

What's New In 1.0

If you missed the retrospective of what changed from the start of Early Access to the 1.0 release, you can read that here:

Connect with the Machine

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.

Another batch of improvements requested by players, including making it harder to kill people without noticing. There are some long-requested bits in here, along with some more-recent things that folks have brought up. Enjoy! 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.

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.

Thanks for reading and for playing.

Update 78 Changelog

Clarity

• Rapid Fire Isn't For Morale: Updated the Rapid Fire feat to note that it only works with physical attacks.
• The Unusual Case Of Needing To End The Turn: The Remote Unit Controller and mech/android/vehicle extenders all now note "Will not apply until you end the turn with enough Compute Time to power it," since it was quite confusing to folks who built them and then didn't see any change.
• No Pilots Were Harmed... Yet: When you are hacking a mech pilot cradle, it now properly says that you will eject the pilot, since trapping them is no longer how it works (for like half a year now).
• Cap Visibility At Last!: The stats increased by bulk unit controllers, and mech/vehicle/android extenders all now show how much will actually be increased by them, and what the current numbers are. Previously that was not shown anywhere in the interface, so it was hard to tell how much they did.
• Finding Those Last Cybercratic Issues Just Got Easier: The way that the tile-level complaints are drawn in CCA is improved a lot so that they now get 3x larger than they used to, when your zoom is above a certain level. This means that they will look cluttered if you are zoomed too far out and have all the complaints showing, but zooming in just a bit solves that. And when there's only one complaint per tile, or just a few complaints left, things are now far easier to find, which is the key case that was missing before.
• Can't Oath A Cutscene: Updated the oath of pacifism to say "Only affects gameplay; has no effect on infiltrations and other dispatches."
• Invisible Attackers Begone: If an economic transport or military transport would be attacking any of your units, then it is not invisible in any of the filter modes, now. That just gets confusing, otherwise.
• This Is The Murderous Intent I Meant: The first time you murder someone (if it's after the prologue, where it's pretty obvious what you're doing), it now has a "First Murder" message that pops up in the task stack, with a "just thought you should know" bit of text. This is one mouse-click to clear away, and is mainly there for players who are trying to be a pacifist so that they know when they murder someone for the first time, in particular if it was an accident.
• This Is The One That Really Bit Attempted Pacifists In The Past: Similarly, the first time you kill someone in combat, it makes a note of that in the task stack in the same way, but also notes that this is not something to worry about and is hard to avoid in the city. This is there primarily to help players who are in fact trying for a full pacifist run, but wound up killing someone in combat by mistake -- humans are so fragile, after all.

Balance

• Conservation Of Action Points: Rapid Fire no longer overkills enemies, thus wasting your action points. It now caps on however many action points are needed to actually kill the target.
• Conservation Of Nonlethal Intent: If your current form of non-lethal attack would do nothing, then it no longer just switches to lethal attacks. It now says that your current mode of non-lethal attack won't work against the target, and prevents you from accidentally getting a combat kill.
• Pay Me, Subjects!: Fixed an issue where during the cyberocracy, your income from mind farms was being cut off. That was an unintended change on my part when CCA was added.
• We're Gonna Need A Bigger Factory: Added a new VR Cradle Megaplant that is automatically unlocked in non-Tartarus CCA routes. This allows you to build way more VR Cradles very quickly, rather than having to essentially be unable to fill the capacity your arcologies require.
• No More Free Compute-Lunches: Fixed a bug in jobs that was causing shortages of compute time or electricity to not disable their functions. This was making it so that if you were short on compute time, you could still have the benefits of a bulk unit controller or similar. This has been in place for a really long time, so I'm marking it as a balance change.
• Bulk Systems Damage Growth: Bulk units another squads now get multiplied systems damage stats to match their attack power and morale-damage types. It was an oversight on my part that these were not this way previously.

Bugfixes

• Accidental Movement Fix: If you have a mech in movement-locked mode, it no longer can board vehicles.
• Let's Not Slate Our First Units For Instant Death: Fixed an issue where in a new timeline, if you were doing any version other than the full-prologue start, it had a possibility of spawning your starting units in a restricted area by mistake.
• That Murder Was A Technicality!: Fixed an issue where LOX Bunkers blowing up due to being nuked by an enemy could wind up being attributed as you intentionally murdering someone.
• Show Me All Enemy Warnings: Fixed an issue where units disembarking from a vehicle would not give the proper will-be-targeted attack warnings in all cases.
• The Return Of Tooltip Shadows: Fixed a guid mismatch issue that had caused the shadows under tooltips to stop rendering. This affects only tooltips over certain uis, but it makes them a lot easier to visually parse your view, even if it's not something you consciously notice. This was a regression in update 76.
• The Return Of The Level Editor: Fixed four separate bugs with the level editor since the change to the new input system in update 76. That now works again.
• No More Spurious Thread Warnings: Some updates to the threading model to fix something that I had seen in AI War 2 initially, where threads that were killed on purpose could wrongly report that they were overrunning their allocated time.
• Attempted Fix For M-Series Macs: On metal (OSX), it no longer renders the blur effect behind windows that would get that. This is a temporary workaround to try to resolve an issue on M-series silicon macs that does not exist on intel macs. It's possible this will do nothing, but it will give more data, at least. At the moment I've been a bit limited, because I don't have an M-series mac to test with. I've ordered a used one to test with, and it should be here tomorrow, so whether this works or not, I'll be able to get the blur back on macs and get things functioning properly, either way. I've been only testing on an older intel mac, and that one doesn't have any issues that the M-series ones do.

Full notes here.

What's New In 1.0

If you missed the retrospective of what changed from the start of Early Access to the 1.0 release, you can read that here:

Connect with the Machine

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.

It's been a very busy week! I've released four hotfixes in the wake of the giant update 76. Thanks to everyone for their patience while things were a bit less stable for a few days; thankfully that is all fixed up, and now we just have the performance (and functionality) benefits from that prior update. As part of the hotfixes, I released a number of features or longer-term fixes that may have gotten missed since a lot of folks don't read the hotfix notes. I've reproduced those below so that you don't have to hunt for them. This build of the game also makes it so that the game should work fully with Proton 9 again on linux, and it adds in a custom cursor for the game now, too. Enjoy! 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.

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.

Thanks for reading and for playing.

Update 77 Changelog

Quality Of Life

• A Bit Purple: Added a new mouse cursor that is custom and in the style of the game. It's not all that different from a lot of OS hardware cursors, but it's a bit different in order to give that nice feel to the game.
• Rotational Cursor: When you try to rotate the camera or pan the camera, the way that the cursor works is now entirely different under the hood, although it will feel very similar on the surface. The mouse cursor changes to a rotation icon rather than disappearing, and it sticks where it was on the screen, with your regular cursor style coming back when you finish the rotation or pan. This makes it a bit easier to remember where your cursor is meant to be for anyone doing this, and on Proton 9 versions of linux, this new set of code makes it so that the rotations and pans function again, because I'm not using a cursor lock under the hood, which works differently on some OSes.

Code Improvements

• Initial Startup Speedup: The game now uses foreach semantics rather than DoFor on the xml loading and a few other framework-y places, which helps reduce memory pressure while initially loading the game.
• Debug Log Disruption Reduction: When the game writes to debug logs for any reason, it's now using notably less memory. There were cases where a big cascade of writes could use 400kb in a single set of calls (19 delayed from background threads, for example), and it's now very efficient, instead.
• No-Ops No Longer Cost: If ConcurrentDictionary is already empty when Clear() is called on it, it no longer allocates memory in rebuilding its tables for no reason.

Bugfixes

• The Return Of Health Bars: Fixed a regression from update 76 that had caused all health bars to draws in a squashed fashion horizontally.
• Down In Front!: Fixed a minor issue where the task stack was still showing in photo mode.

Other Non-Regression Updates From Hotfixes Since The Last Update

• Sensible Limits To Theft: You can now only steal neodymium once every 4 turns via StreetSense, rather than it being something that can be repeated a bunch of times per turn.
• MilUnit Hitbox Size: Human-sized units get an exaggeratedly-large hitbox in order to make them easier to click. It's one of those things you likely don't even notice, but it came about during player testing Anyway, MilUnits from ExoCorps were getting a 3x larger hitbox as well, but that was too much since they're roughly twice the size of an average human. I've adjusted their hitbox scale to now be 1.5x. This is a very old issue. Let me know how that feels!
• Remember My Notes!: Fixed a bug where if you changed the notes about a timeline, or its name, then did a dive into it, then it would lose your notes and name change because the values stored in the local timeline would override the core metadata. It now properly keeps the core metadata version.
• Seriously, Remember!: Added logic so that if you examine a timeline in the end of time and then make a save to whatever your changes were (notes about a timeline, or the name of a timeline, etc), it also immediately updates the on-disk copy. Otherwise if you just exited the game, or dove into another timeline, you would often wind up losing those changes.
• POI Preservation: Fixed an issue where if a POI had no workers or residents in it, then it would be marked as destroyed. That was some super old logic, and was not useful now. It was causing certain kinds of minor and automated POIs to register themselves as destroyed when they were fine. This is probably what was blocking most players. If it happens to you, wait for at least 5 seconds and then end the turn, and the contemplation should now appear.
• POI Reanimation: The game now auto-detects "dead but not really dead" pois and brings them back to life.
• POI Memories: Buildings now still consider themselves part of a POI even if the POI is destroyed, as not doing that caused various problems.
• WW4 During T3s: Made it so that even if you're in a T3 goal, you can now start WW4 so long as the other conditions are met.
• Scaling Options For Structures: There is now a pair of "Structure Map Icon Scale" and "Structure Streets Icon Scale" settings under UI scale that allows you to set the desired structure icon sizes in the two screens.
• That Still Counts As One!: If you kill someone via a status effect that will cause them to lose health over time, it now counts as a kill. This helps with "clearing the latter" work via heavy metals injection, but in general will work from many various status effects.
• Mangled Range: Fixed a minor bug where if there was a range that was supposed to show for the stats for a unit type's stats in the sidebar tooltip, then it was instead saying the name of the data field in the first field, rather than the lower bound of what the stat can be.
• Leftover Icon: Fixed an issue that was causing "hide high altitude military transports" and the same for "hide economic transports" to not hide the icons of those units in the forces lens and other lenses. This is not a new regression, but something that has been around since the addition of that feature to hide them, looks like.

Full notes here.

What's New In 1.0

If you missed the retrospective of what changed from the start of Early Access to the 1.0 release, you can read that here:

Connect with the Machine

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.

Fixing the few things that folks reported since the last hotfix. Most of these are not all that serious, or all that common. And a couple are not new things at all. Glad to see this shaking out now.

1.104 Hotfix 50 Changelog

General

• Balance Tweak: You can now only steal neodymium once every 4 turns via StreetSense, rather than it being something that can be repeated a bunch of times per turn.
• One Last End Of Time Bug: Fixed an issue where if your end of time map was rebuilt from an old save, the collider positions would not update with them, meaning that nothing was clickable until you saved and reloaded again.
• Fix To A Very Rare Exception: Added some extra cross-thread protection to null writes on the List class.
• Fixes To An Even More Rare Exception: Hardened several methods against potential nullref exceptions. Mostly around resource reading, but also some things in the header bar.

Full notes here.

Connect with the Machine

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.

Thankfully, this is a lot less chaotic today. Thank you to everyone with their patience with the transition period, and for the bug reports! At this point, I've fixed everything that has been reported since the last big update.

1.103 Hotfix 49 Changelog

Bugfixes

• Only Affects M1 Macs: When on any macOS/iOS platform that is using Metal, the game now clamps to 4x MSAA under the hood, even if the user selects 8x. Additionally, the game now starts on 4x rather than 8x prior to the user settings kicking in. In prior versions of unity, this was the behavior already; but in unity 6.3, it looks like I have to handle this on my end. Metal only supports 4X MSAA, and requesting something higher causes it to crash when that request is made, turns out.
• Daring History: As part of my fix to the "daring recovery" logic in Update 76, I accidentally broke historical tracking of the amount of Daring purchases that count towards free unlocks on ziggurats. That is now fixed to read the old data if it still exists and has not been overwritten. If you saved over the end of time and lost the data, then it also will now do a one-time load-and-recovery of that data.
• That's Too Much Hexagonal Blur: Fixed a regression since update 76 where the blurred state could get stale-cached and thus act like it was trying to blur the game behind a window when no window was open, when you swapped between game modes.
• Dogpile!: Two different users had their end of time map collapse in on itself with all of the rocks and ziggurats being at position 0,0,0. The game now detects this sort of corruption, and rebuilds the map. The rebuild ensures that all timelines that were on the first rock still are, and that all timelines that were on a rock of a given shape are on a new rock of the same shape, in the same spot. However, the relative spots of these rocks and ziggurats beyond the first one may be quite different from before, as I have no way to figure out what the old positions where. It chooses the closest rock of an appropriate shape to the first rock in all of the cases.
• Super Shiny Rare: Fixed a nullref exception that could happen on loading games if they were saved at just the wrong time when an unit's action-over-time was completing. This actually was not a new regression, but has always been there. It was just that rare, apparently!
• Quiet While Loading, Task Stack!: While loading into an existing savegame, the task stack could show spurious warnings to you. This was fleeting, but annoying. This also wasn't new, but I was definitely tired of it. It's fixed now.
• MilUnit Collider Scale Sanity: Human-sized units get an exaggeratedly-large hitbox in order to make them easier to click. It's one of those things you likely don't even notice, but it came about during player testing Anyway, MilUnits from ExoCorps were getting a 3x larger hitbox as well, but that was too much since they're roughly twice the size of an average human. I've adjusted their hitbox scale to now be 1.5x. This is a very old issue. Let me know how that feels!
• No Spoilers, Please!: Fixed a bug from Update 76 that was causing your hardware screens to include bulk androids that were not yet unlocked.
• Remember My Notes: Fixed a bug where if you changed the notes about a timeline, or its name, then did a dive into it, then it would lose your notes and name change because the values stored in the local timeline would override the core metadata. It now properly keeps the core metadata version.
• Seriously, Always Remember: Added logic so that if you examine a timeline in the end of time and then make a save to whatever your changes were (notes about a timeline, or the name of a timeline, etc), it also immediately updates the on-disk copy. Otherwise if you just exited the game, or dove into another timeline, you would often wind up losing those changes.
• Unsolved Mystery, But Resolved Problem: Lots of investigation into why the end of time rock/ziggurat positions were getting reset to zero for (now four) people. I can't figure out anything that would actually cause this, but I've put in aggressive countermeasures that would solve any possible case of it. So it won't happen again, but I'm still not super happy because I like to know the reason for things (and I pretty much always do get to the point where I do, so this is an outlier). At any rate, the impact on users will be gone from now on, so that's the most important thing for now.
• I Saw This Briefly, And Now Guard Against It: Added a gate against a very rare race condition that I happened to witness where saving and loading somewhere else could in theory overlap. This is a super edge case, but there's now code that guards against that.
• This Feels Way Nicer: Further improved the end-of-time format loss issue. If it is missing your data, then it actually now goes back to the first save prior to May 23rd, and does a partial load just for the data that it needs. It then restores the exact positions of all your stuff, without having to regenerate the map and potentially have things in a wrong spot. If that doesn't work, then it goes ahead and regenerates the map. Presuming that this is something that only affects some interim savegames from the last few days, and not new stuff, this should happen once for affected people and then we're all good. If this keeps happening in an ongoing way, then there's something else afoot, but I just can't find anything like that in the code, and as noted I've aggressively guarded against anything even vaguely in this area now.

Full notes here.

Connect with the Machine

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.

Whew, rough weekend. I really appreciate all of the patience everyone has been showing. I tested things quite a lot before the big update, but clearly missed a lot of things. It's a big game, and some things slipped in right near the end. There's still a few more things for me to fix, but all of the worst items are gone now, I think. Two of these were really doozies that took hours to solve on their own.

1.102 Hotfix 48 Changelog

Bugfixes

• Invisible Bulks On Equipment Screens: Fixed a regression in update 76 where bulk units were not showing in any of the hardware tabs anymore.
• One Tiny Fence In The Way: Fixed an issue from several months back where one particular kind of fence could not be overbuilt during CCA. Confirmed that was the only kind of fence where this was true. I just missed one xml tag.
• Matrix Relocation: Completely moved the matrix transforms for building/object transforms off of the LOD Calculator thread and back onto the main thread, and am now calculating those only when things change (which is infrequent), rather than every-frame. I think that I was getting some torn cross-thread reads on this, which was causing oversized trees and fences and such, and flickering of buildings temporarily, but only for some players. The new approach should be very stable, and doesn't have any threading race issues, while also making your cpu do less work in general.
• LOD Calculation Scope: Completely reworked some of the logic for the LOD Calculator thread. It now fully calculates everything for every cell, even if it's not in camera view. This prevents issues where you get funky results as you move the camera around, if your background threads are lagging behind your main thread. This was something I saw in a player-submitted video, and now it won't be possible. This pairs with the matrix transforms being moved out of here, so it's still able to run nice and quickly. But it is no longer so critical that it run quickly, since the frustum exclusions no longer cross into here.
• Targeted Busted Keybinds: Fixed a regression where a half-dozen keybinds were no longer working. This was related to how I converted some of the mode-checking logic into the new style, and I just missed it. It didn't have anything to do with the controls binding screen or any changes to the input system.
• Organization For Background Calculations: The game now keeps track of the camera position per game mode, so that it can use those for calculations even when it's in a different game mode.
• Matrix Memory Organization: Rather than pushing matrices around in structs, I'm now pushing around precomputed values of them, including properly precalculating secondary matrices for the few places where that is relevant. This is a bit more efficient in general, but I was thinking also that this would solve some of the pop-past logic that I'm seeing right now and that players have reported. That second bit isn't actually solved by this, so I'm still looking.
• The Actual Bug That Was Leading To Giant Trees And Flickery Ghost Fences: Fixed a one-line bug (repeated in about 10 places) that was an intersection between my old LOD calculator logic sessions a few months back, and the new rendering logic that made one tiny wrong assumption. This was causing a cascade that was making those giant trees and other stale data that was showing up. This was super hard to track down, and I apologize for how disruptive it was to folks. This should all be fixed now, though.
• The Other Giant Bug That Would Break All The Icons: Fixed a very subtle bug in the new render chain logic, where if a camera compositing layer was null in a scene, then in the future after being in that scene, it would no longer be able to draw sprites or certain other kinds of layers in that compositing layer. The VR mode is one example of specifically not having an icon overlay layer, so many kinds of icons would become perma-invisible after going into that screen, making large parts of the game unplayable. Really sorry about this, folks! This one took hours to hunt down.
• More Fluid Camera Rotation Responsiveness: The frustum calculation for which cells are in view has been moved back to the main thread so that it's more responsive now to rapidly-rotating cameras, while the expensive bits about simulation cells and LODs is still on a bg thread.
• The End Of Time Creation And Deletion: Fixed an issue where you could neither create nor delete timelines in the end of time in Update 76. That all works now.
• This Never Worked!?: Fixed the next and previous lens keybinds not working in the end of time. They never worked, apparently, but apparently nobody noticed.
• GOG Achievement Check Regression: Fixed a bug where GOG achievements checking would throw exceptions on game start. This has to do with some of the order of operations being changed around in Update 76, and that store logic not waiting for the right trigger. EGS was already waiting properly, but Steam also was not set up correctly, it turned out; Steam was avoiding the error on a different technicality. Now all three storefronts are properly handled.
• The Actual Bug Blocking People From WW4: Fixed an issue where if a POI had no workers or residents in it, then it would be marked as destroyed. That was some super old logic, and was not useful now. It was causing certain kinds of minor and automated POIs to register themselves as destroyed when they were fine. This is probably what was blocking most players. If it happens to you, wait for at least 5 seconds and then end the turn, and the contemplation should now appear.
• Resurrection: The game now auto-detects "dead but not really dead" pois and brings them back to life.
• POI Membership After Death: Buildings now still consider themselves part of a POI even if the POI is destroyed, as not doing that caused various problems.
• Latent WW4 Edge Case: Made it so that even if you're in a T3 goal, you can now start WW4 so long as the other conditions are met.

Full notes here.

Connect with the Machine

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.

Yeah... a build that large was going to have some issues. I fixed all the ones that folks mentioned quickly, plus five others from the past few weeks.

1.101 Hotfix 47 Changelog

Quality Of Life

• Icons For Ants!?: There is now a pair of "Structure Map Icon Scale" and "Structure Streets Icon Scale" settings under UI scale that allows you to set the desired structure icon sizes in the two screens.
• Killed Over Time Now Recognized As Kill: If you kill someone via a status effect that will cause them to lose health over time, it now counts as a kill. This helps with "clearing the latter" work via heavy metals injection, but in general will work from many various status effects.

Bugfixes

• Bulk Unit Icons Fix: Fixed a bug where the command menu was broken in the prior build due to an issue with the icons for all of the npc units (which includes bulks). This also led to the wrong icons being shown for npcs around the map, too.
• Minor Tooltip Range Error Fix: Fixed a minor bug (not a new regression -- this has been around for weeks at a minimum, and probably longer in reality) where if there was a range that was supposed to show for the stats for a unit type's stats in the sidebar tooltip, then it was instead saying the name of the data field in the first field, rather than the lower bound of what the stat can be.
• Photo Mode Controls: Fixed a regression in the prior build where the photo mode controls were not working. They got missed in the sweep to update to the new input system.
• Icons Not Properly Hidden: Fixed an issue that was causing "hide high altitude military transports" and the same for "hide economic transports" to not hide the icons of those units in the forces lens and other lenses. This is not a new regression, but something that has been around since the addition of that feature to hide them, looks like.
• Goodbye, StreetSense!?: Fixed a regression in the new build where StreetSense icons were not showing in the actual gameplay views, but were still being calculated correctly and shown in the list view.
• Goodbye, Base Perks!?: Fixed a regression in my updated parser code that was causing certain styles of (with an unusual signature) to not load in anymore. This included Shadowdweller, Innately Alarming, Superspeed, and a bunch of others. All work now.
• Error 404, Parachute Not Found: Fixed a bug that could happen when your units were moving in and out of a transport, with it throwing a series of nullref exceptions when you did so.
• Unused Tree-Scaling Retired: Prior to the recent update, there was some scaling on the trees that would make them smaller as you zoomed in and out. That is no longer needed, as it was a performance thing that has been optimized out. In the prior build, there was a regression where this was still doing the logic, but it wasn't working anyway. So it was effectively off. This just removes it from any possible mischief that it could be causing.
• The Really Baffling One, Holy Cow: One user was having random trees that were oversized in the new version. This was very confusing, as it was not a uniform scale and was only a few trees, and was persistent. I've done a huge audit of a bunch of code, and it all looks correct. The one thing that seems like it could be a problem is if the rotation quaternion was non-normalized -- that could lead to this. As some insurance against this sort of thing, I've added a new method that self-heals non-normalized quaternion rotations by first checking a quick magSq check, and which normalizes it only if that fails. This adds a trivial amount of extra load to a background thread, and guarantees correctness for more than just trees. If the tree thing still happens to anyone after this update, then I'll need to look at something else to solve it.

Full notes here.

Connect with the Machine

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.

It's been a hot minute! That shows in the size of this update. There's also a companion update by the same name for AI War 2. Both games basically got some deep-dive technical glow-ups. This isn't a content-focused build for either one of them. The one for this game is the larger of the two, by quite a margin. What's all this about, in a few words? Housekeeping for new guests. And by guests, I mean modders, once the Workshop Support update comes out in the next month or so.

The Details

A few more fixes, and then various bits I was working on.

Hotfix 46 Changelog

More Mod And Code Framework Updates

• Math Automation: Converted a bunch of layout math to be driven by xml instead of C#, thus allowing for tuning of the parameters from pure xml.
• Table Logic-Drivers: Converted the data tables to have more centralized logic for partial-reloads, during-game data-payload clears, and similar. This is something that cleans up some of my own code, but also makes it so that mods with custom data tables get immediate parity with the official data tables.
• Data Tables For Modders: Updated the ExternalTables feature so that it now works properly with mods, and also works with the localization framework. To see an example of how this works, see the new Descriptive Vehicle Prefixes mod.

New Mod: Descriptive Vehicle Prefixes

• Alternative Vehicle Naming Scheme: Added a new mod called "Descriptive Vehicle Prefixes" that now ships with the game. This replaces the random three-letter prefix on machine vehicle names (MOS, PYS, TYS, etc.) with a fixed prefix chosen per vehicle type. The second part of the name (Teso, Advenna, Geno, etc.) is unchanged. I can't remember who asked for this! Originally I told them no, but now I've made a mod for it. I prefer the default behavior, but others may feel differently.

Bugfixes

• The Very FIRST Link, Of Course: Fixed an issue where some non-English versions of the, the first link on the new profile page was not working.
• Evaporative... Buildings?: Fixed a regression from update 75 where if you built exactly to the internal robotics cap for certain kinds of buildings, then one of them would scrap themselves right as you finished it. This was due to my attempted fix to prevent over-provisioning by fast-clicking. I now have optimistic and pessimistic versions of the math for this, and the pessimistic one only runs right at the moment of click -- preventing the one problematic case. Everything else is back to using the optimistic math, which is how things were up until update 75.

Full notes here.

Connect with the Machine

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.

Two more fixes. I changed close to 15 thousand lines of code in update 75, so a bit of this was expected (even though I tested it heavily, I'm just one person). Still, thank you for your patience!

Hotfix 45 Changelog

Bugfixes

• Loadout Option Errors: Update 75 had two errors in the new UI-controlling xml for editing a single equipment slot from the loadout screen, and for using the "copy loadouts from other timeline" screen. These are both now fixed.
• Extra Protection Just In Case: Added in some similar defensive code for the visibility-checking code on loading a savegame, as what I added in the prior hotfix. I've never hit a problem here, but this would keep people from accidentally having it run for 10 seconds on load and then hit the latch-breaker code. This is one possible race condition that was left that I saw from code review, so it's fixed.

Full notes here.

Connect with the Machine

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.

Fix to a loading bug in the prior update. There may be a few more things I still need to resolve, but I wanted to get this out very fast.

Hotfix 44 Changelog

Bugfixes

• Let Me In!: Added a backstop for long "Final Calculations" that could get stuck in update 75. If that finalization runs for 10 seconds, then it will just proceed with the game and log a warning into the log, rather than blocking you permanently. This is the safety feature to keep anyone from getting softlocked on loading from one savegame to a different one, even if something goes wrong (and to provide information about what went wrong if it does happen).
• Don't Forget To Count: Fixed an issue where during the "Final Calculations" phase from update 75, where the buildings portion of it could legitimately refuse to start because of some internal cross-thread timing that it had negotiated, but then it wouldn't actually start after that. Now it restarts properly and quickly, within about a quarter of a second in most cases. This is the first example (and possibly only, but I'm not taking chances) of "one of the things that went wrong.

Full notes here.

Connect with the Machine

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.

Whew this is a big build. There's certainly a lot of line-items down below, but even beyond that this touches tens of thousands of lines of code. There's an ongoing consolidation and simplification of the UI logic that I've been working on, both for my own purposes and to make things easier for modders in the future. Steam Workshop support is coming soon, and I've been tidying up a number of things in advance of that, is one way to look at it. But even aside from that, this update has some long-requested items in here. You can now build buildings in the curves of roads, for example. Also, mimics are no longer part of your shell company, and now have a ton of agility plus movement speed buffs. (Arguably, the mimics might now make Keanu kind of useless by comparison, but if that happens, he'll need some unique equipment to help him still stand out. But first I want to see how that goes). The loading speed of the game has been improved, and some minor visual hitches from the UI have been fixed. Plus a long list of other stuff. Enjoy! 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.

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.

Thanks for reading and for playing.

Update 75 Changelog

Clarity

• Advance Warning Of Branch Split: Fixed an oversight that was making it so that the two "Prison Observation" contemplations did not properly note that they will end the goal "Is It Justice." They already noted what they would start, but they didn't make it clear they would end this other one.
• Animals Are Not People... Until They Are: Added a new "Combat Kills - Animals" section of the stats window. If you're killing any wildlife, they now log as this rather than logging potentially as killing a human, which was confusing. That said, for purposes of getting "pacifist" achievements, if you're killing raptors or parkour bears or whatever, they still count against you. So while the label is fixed, the behavior for pacifism purposes was already correct.
• Opening Crawl: Rather than showing alien text in the lower right corner during load, it now uses a stylized digital font that shows words in english. This helps to diagnose problems if someone get stuck on loading, thanks to them being able to at least screenshot the text, regardless of whether they speak english or not.
• Reticulating Splines: There are now some extra stages of loading the game that will be logged, in particular if you're being stuck loading prefabs or something unusual like that. Previously those could hang very slowly (in theory) in rare cases where you had a bunch of shaders caching or something, making it look non-responsive. Now it is always definitely responsive.
• Motivation Not Required: In the three projects that talk about your need to build robotic motivator factories, it now notes " (unless in Simplified Economy)" to avoid confusion in those cases. Robotic motivators are not used at all in the simplified economy -- they are not produced, and workers don't include them as part of their costs. So they were not needed, but it could lead people to think they were missing something.
• Metrics You Can Actually Hit: Completely rewrote how the "highest deterrence" and "highest protection" possible calculations are done. These look at actual combinations of real equipment, and take their merits and demerits into consideration, now. This gives you actual numbers to work with in the analysis screen, rather than way-too-optimistic targets.
• What Would You Say You Do Here?: Notably expanded the text on the contemplation partway through Cybercratic ambitions to make it clear why that contemplation is the way forward at a glance, and how that improves your situation given what Vorsiber is doing at the time. The previous text read a bit as a nonsequitur, and not it is clearly a strategic choice in the face of impossible odds.

Quality Of Life

• Longer Save Filenames: The maximum length of savegame names has been increased from 30 to 50 characters.
• Building Near The Corners Of Roads: Improved the collision bounds on roads so that you can now build your own buildings inside the elbows of curves, among other things. Previously, the outer bounding box of the entire road segment was blocked off. I actually put the data for this in place years ago, but never wired up the math until now.
• Can You See Me?: If you have a unit that is cloaked, or which has turned into liquid metal, then the "active border" now shows around the button on the ability bar for these.
• Farsight, Fixed: When you are targeting buildings via far zoom, for things like the slum deconstruction drones or similar, the highlights are now a lot more visbile when you are very far away from them.

Balance

• Capture-To-Rescue: Implemented a long-running user request relating to being able to rescue feral animals with the animal capture drones. That now works, instead of always making you do it via androids.
• Neuraxial Priorities: Changed Neuraxial Subverters to be unable to attack your poor defenseless shell company units. Your shell company units can't respond, so they're now ignored.
• Mimic Reclassification: Mimics are no longer classed as shell company units. It was confusing that they were in the shell company submenu, as they never do anything from there that would be useful specifically for the shell company. This was kind of an old way of thinking for me, before the Armored Executives existed.
• Mimic Stat Buffs: To help mimics stand out a bit more, especially since they are now part of the normal set of units that you can use as part of your defenses or offense, they now have 300 more agility than before, and 200 more argument attack power than before. They also now have a move range of 100, rather than 60. This makes them the most-mobile units you have.
• Consumables Usable When A Unit Is Exhausted: Adjusted the balance of the game so that units that are out of AP can now still use consumables (which themselves don't cost AP).
• Corpos No Longer Hate Feral Animals To An Unnatural Degree: Fixed a hilarious bug that was causing military, Secforce, Corpo, ExoCorp, Space Nation, Syndicate, and Corrupted units to get a bunch of extra aggro on feral wildlife and noncombatants in general. The logic that had a bug was intended for them to prioritize each other as well as homunculi, but it was wrongly also elevating "very low priority targets."
• Reliable Item And Ability Targeting Ranges: The way that items and abilities target units and buildings is now completely different. It now checks the nearest edge of their overall radius, which is how attacks already were set to work. Previously, these were inconsistent with mostly being valid/invalid based on where your mouse was, or where the center of the building/unit was, both of which were very strange when targeting large mechs or buildings.
• Where Is That Stupid Spy!?: If there is something wrong with your international airport, certain international spies will simply meet you somewhere else now, instead.
• Meeting The Spy After The Final Boss: If you have already started or completed a T3 goal, you're now still allowed to meet certain international spies via contemplations.

Performance

• Faster Startup: The startup speed of the game has been improved on a bunch of cpu-side areas. On a machine that is not disk-bound in any way (aka, is already on an NVME SSD that is super-fast and has prefetched the data), this brings the startup time from about 6 seconds down to about 4.3 seconds. On super-fast SSDs that are on a cold start, this brings it down from more like 14 seconds to closer to 11.5 or 12 seconds. For anyone on a slower SSD or an HDD, your primary bottleneck is disk speed and not cpu -- so you will see 1-3 seconds shaved off of your total load time, but your total load time is still going to be 20 seconds on an SSD, etc.
• Lower GC Pressure: The game now uses about 150 MB less "heap memory" in a permanent way, because it's no longer caching xml DOMs in memory anymore. This is a very small amount of memory compared to the overall memory signature of the game, but it's part of the "core managed memory" that the garbage collector has to iterate, and so it cuts that down by about 20%, thus making a number of background activities a bit snappier, especially on slower ram or older cpus.
• Smoother Landing: Adjusted the logic for coming out of the "loading progress" window so that it comes out a lot more smoothly now, rather than jolting in while things are still half preparing to draw. This makes the load experience a lot smoother, visually.
• Fine, I'll Do It Myself: A new ArcenXmlReader has been set up. It's roughly twice as fast as the Microsoft counterpart, largely because it's coded from scratch to do a much more minimal feature set. It also doesn't wrongly eat my newlines.
• Another Small Speed Boost: The internal "reference levels" are now read using the new arcen xml reader, which speeds up their parsing slightly (they were already fast), but in general makes everything more consistent. These have used a custom arcen xml writer for years anyway, so now there's a matching pair.

Mod Readiness / Developer Tools

• A UI Backend Other Programmers Can Actually Read: The game now fully uses a reflection-based UI-emission backend that allows more things to be defined in xml rather than C# when it comes to UIs, and it also makes the code dramatically smaller, and single-scope per window, so that it's easier to read. The UIs were very powerful and something that I was able to edit without much trouble, but for anyone else coming in, they were very alien indeed. This also will make for a faster workflow for me in the future for this or other games.
• Code Suggestions: The game now has a "tell me what code stubs I need, even if the result would be polymorphic" set of code that runs when someone has created new UI xml but has not created the appropriate backing for it, yet. This allows people to quickly hook into the UI system without having to memorize anything or look anything up. Again a productivity-booster that will mainly benefit me, and mainly on future games, but I wanted to have it in place for modders in this game, and also just for generally having a shared back-end shape to stuff.
• Self-Checking For Self-Destructive Habits: Due to the improved parallelism on game load, some of the data tables now have extra rules about how certain shared collections can be written. If a modder or developer messes up with that, it can cause unexpected results. The game now checks for this on a background thread, and lets the modder or developer know what the problem is in a popup, rather than just silently failing. This will even work with large mods that are compiled C#, where I haven't seen the code.

Bugfixes

• One Icon Is Enough, Thanks: The game no longer accidentally puts two "you cannot afford the mental energy" notices next to one another in sprint-based actions.
• Okay, Two Icons In This Case: In cases where it was previously showing that you don't have enough action points in a tooltip, it now shows the number of mental energy required as well, just in case there might be confusion. Two years ago it was literally showing the wrong icon, but that was fixed long ago, and now it shows both icons just for added clarity.
• I Can't Believe Nobody Clicked That Until Recently: Fixed an issue where the goal text being clicked in contemplations would throw an exception. Now it just makes the grumbly "blocked" sound effect, instead.
• Protection From Stalls: Added in some stall protection on the "Making Connections" part of initializing the game. If there is a problem in that -- which there usually should not be, anyway -- it now won't just hang indefinitely. It will instead at least let you know there was an error if there was one, and it will move on after 60 seconds if it absolutely can't progress (this normally takes part of one second, or a couple of seconds at once).
• The One Forbidden Button No Longer Lies: The never-available "Nobody Else Is Suitable" button in one quest no longer claims to end a different goal path if you choose it (because you can never choose it).
• Cybercratic Race Condition: Fixed a longstanding bug where if you clicked fairly rapidly, you could build cyberocracy hubs on the same tile as each other, even though that was not supposed to be possible.
• Biological Mainframes No Longer Phase Through Matter: When calculating if a spot for a new building is valid, it now properly accounts for offcenter pivot-points. This makes it so that you no longer have issues with things like the biological mainframe, hangar, and residential megatowers able to clip into each other if you build them at a certain angle and ratio to one another.
• Further Grammar Pass: Fixed a few minor grammar issues that regular spellcheck could not find, but that a new grammar checker I'm using as part of my custom xml editor was able to locate.
• Erased That First-Show Tooltip Flicker: Finally fixed a longstanding flicker that was happening on the first two frames of when a tooltip was appearing (making it flicker in the upper left). This was made worse in the new ui framework rework I've been doing, and that helped me finally catch and kill it.
• Regular Building Race Condition: Fixed a longstanding issue where if you were clicking really fast with placing buildings, you could put buildings intersecting into one another.
• Buildings Now Realize That They Should Not Clip Through Distant Neighbors: Fixed an issue where if one of your buildings overlapped two map cells, other buildings of yours could be placed to intersect into the half that overlapped outside of the "home" cell of the pre-existing building.
• Rapid Eye Flicker Fix: Fixed another issue where some tooltips would appear at the wrong location for a frame or so before snapping to the correct position.
• Blackmail Proceeds Now Properly In The Ledger: Fixed an issue where when your wealth income was derived from blackmail, it was not properly reflected in the ledger and so it looked like you were losing money.
• Dead Researchers No Longer Ask Questions: Fixed an oversight that could lead to dead AGI researchers asking you to build a cyberocracy. If you don't have at least 2 surviving researchers, then that contemplation no longer shows up.
• Famine Prevention No Longer Requires Enemy Mechs Around: Added in a protection to where the famine-prevention logic was not allowed to happen unless there was an active prisoner drive. In almost all cases, there's always a prisoner drive while there is a famine, but in the event that the prisoner drive was canceled by other means, the famine can still also be canceled independently of that.
• Obscure Way To Crash: Fixed a longstanding bug where if you hammered the F10 button a bunch, and then kept clicking "save and exit," you could actually crash the main menu. It now works as you would expect.
• That Sound! Stop That Sound!: Added another fix for a very rare bug where when you exited the game or loaded a different save from the one you were in, it could play the "intelligence class is falling" sound effect incorrectly.
• Disposed Of Lying Accountant: Fixed a subtle bug in the building-cap math that was determining if you could build more of it or not. One of the methods was essentially using bad math, and it's now consistent with the other methods that are around.
• Improved Speed Of Accountant: Fixed an issue where your internal robotics cap usage was not updated quite as quickly as is ideal, so that fast-clicking should be less likely to let you go over internal robotics cap (and thus immediately have to delete or scrap the thing that you built over cap).
• Format Fix: Fixed an issue where the ledger tooltip footers were not properly inserting the "Left click to" instruction text for their "click to ignore" message.
• Prior Plans Are Now Properly Canceled By Apocalypses: At the moment you trip to the post-final-doom, the game now cancels any outstanding countdown timers that may have been going on. So things like the civil war's resolution, or Vorsiber thinking about something or another, all get canceled rather than happening wrongly belatedly.
• Separated Rare Conjoined Twins In StreetSense: Fixed a rare issue where two separate StreetSense actions could calculate as being on the same building, and thus give differing displays in the list compared to what shows up in the tooltip. This mostly happens in one specific edge case involving military bases, but now splits these apart.
• Removed An Unintentional Mental Energy Trap: If you are above the allowed capacity for captured units, it no longer allows you to try to move them until you resolve that. Previously, it was allowing you to try, but not actually moving (and yet taking your mental energy and also triggering attacks of opportunity). The same fix is now in place for regular mech and vehicle movement. Androids and bulk androids were already correct.

Full notes here.

What's New In 1.0

If you missed the retrospective of what changed from the start of Early Access to the 1.0 release, you can read that here:

Connect with the Machine

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.

Mostly fixes, but also laying the groundwork for upcoming steam workshop support. Also a big speed boost for intel-based macs loading the game. 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.

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.

Thanks for reading and for playing.

Update 74 Changelog

Loading Screen Improvements

• Goodbye Darkness, My Old Confusion: Previously only macOS -- most notably on older intel-based macs -- there was a point at which a bunch of Metal shader compilation was having to happen, and it was just a black screen. It now continues showing the proper loading screen, with updates on it to let you know it's still alive. In general, macOS has to compile PSOs (pipeline state objects) in a way that windows and linux don't, but only on the first time that the driver sees each shader. These changes don't make that any faster, but they do keep the ui responsive during that time, and also keep the ui up rather than it being a black screen.
• Red Is The Bad Color: If your load has some sort of error while the game is still on the initial loading screen, it will now change all the text to red rather than the normal white, to help it be clear something is going on. This almost never happens to anyone, but it's a nice safety feature.
• Intel Macs Have Gone Plaid: The priority of background loading threads have been increased, and the timing of synchronous loads during initial startup have been made tighter as well. This overall does not change things on windows or linux much, but on macOS it cuts the initial loading time to about 33% of what it previously was. The windows and linux builds are in general still 4x faster than macOS, but they're no longer 12x faster than macOS. That's a nice gap to close, while having windows and linux still as fast as they ever were. Please note that this is for intel macs -- the apple silicon macs are already blazing fast like windows and linux.

Steamworks Integration

• Steamworks Log Verbosity: When the steam API fails to initialize, it now gives an actual meaningful error back, rather than just noting generically that it failed.
• Steam Deck Hooks Restored: As of two hotfixes ago, the steamworks integration was revised in order to have better support for things I want to handle, like the upcoming workshop integration. However, on steam deck only, there was a complication with how UTF8 is read, and this made it so that steam was not able to log in properly on steam deck anymore. This is now fixed, and returns the steam deck functionality that was disabled due to it not realizing it was on the deck.
• Selective APIs Not Running Is Okay, Actually: After moving to a new Steamworks api to better support workshop, there was a general problem with certain APIs that seem to be intentionally disabled on the steam deck were blocking the rest of steamworks integration. Those are now fixed, and simply logged as informational, as the game doesn't use those apis, and all of the other ones that are used do function perfectly fine. These seem to be intentionally disabled by Valve on the deck, as they're not relevant in that context ever.

Bugfixes

• Nintendo Does Their Own Thing: Fixed an issue with dropdowns where they could be erroneously closed by Nintendo switch pro controllers that were plugged in. That particular kind of gamepad handles its output in a pretty funky way, and now that doesn't impact the game anymore.
• No More Babyproofing For Adults: Fixed an issue where on the first turn on timelines beyond the first, it was not letting you scrap androids via the scrap button (but was via the scrap hotkey).
• WW4 Coming To A Rock Near You: Fixed a longstanding issue where WW4 crossovers were not properly applying from the timelines they were in. Other timelines were reading them properly, but I made a mistake in how they were supposed to propagate outward.
• Lone Monsters No Longer Afraid To Cross Dimensions: Fixed an issue with the experimental monsters crossover where it would disappear if your count of monsters in the current timeline was less than 500. I did that on purpose originally, but it was very confusing. I've shifted it now so that the crossover will only disappear once there are no more loose monsters at all in your current timeline.
• Wait, You're Not Bob: Fixed an issue where, under very rare circumstances, your icon for a unit could be wrong after scrapping one unit in a transport, and then creating a new unit and loading it into the exact same slot. The bug was related to if the new unit used the same internally-pooled object, so this was fascinatingly rare.
• Two UIs Walk Into A Bar: Fixed an issue where the ability bar for units was still drawing when the command mode bar was opened.

From Hotfixes Since The Last Main Update

• Fix To Evaporating Citizens: Fixed an issue with sheltered humans where humans could evaporate when there were even temporary housing shortages. Basically, if some folks needed to move to refugee housing for any reason, then the correct number would do so (let's say you were over cap by 2000 people, 2000 refugees would appear), but then an additional double that number would evaporate without a trace (so in that example, there would be a further 2000 people who just disappear entirely). In cases where people temporarily move to refugee housing and then right back in, this could lead to large numbers of people just vanishing without a trace.
• Fix To Evaporating Citizens: Fixed an issue where if you had a budding cyberocracy on the same city tile as some of your own housing, your own sheltered humans would be mistakenly killed, invisibly and without warning. It would actually set up kind of a periodic drain on your own buildings, so more and more humans would get "disappeared" over time. This was a compound bug with some changes over time in the codebase that led to this unexpectedly.
• Fix To Undocumented Deaths In Mysterious Circumstances: Fixed several cases where when sheltered humans or similar in your housing died, the reason wouldn't be stated in the recent sheltered humans list. It now notes if they were stepped on by a giant robot, or hit by chemical weapons, or the various other things that can happen.
• Fix To Make Sure Residents Clear The Building Before It Blows: If you're destroying one of your own buildings that houses people, then it is very careful to give your own people time to move out and become abandoned humans, rather than them potentially getting caught and killed as the building comes down. I'm not positive this was happening before, but now I'm positive that it won't. Better safe than sorry!

Full notes here.

What's New In 1.0

If you missed the retrospective of what changed from the start of Early Access to the 1.0 release, you can read that here:

Connect with the Machine

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.

Fix to one rather horrible bug that slipped through in the last hotfix. I've been working behind the scenes on some updates to make the UI code easier to maintain and extend -- for myself, for future games, for modders, and in general. I thought I had checked all the UIs, but one item slipped through.

Hotfix 43 Changelog

Bugfixes

• Wait, You Use Dropdowns?: Fixed an issue where various windows -- and most notably tooltips -- were causing dropdowns to close. This was because of a regex/grep mistake in some of my work that had caused early termination of some code I was converting from C# to xml. Overall I'm working on updates to the game that allow for fewer lines of code when making UIs, and more component-based reuse of code, and more parameters set in xml rather than C#. This is good for maintainability, and for modders, and for future games being developed faster. But in this case it did cause a regression. Sorry about that!

Full notes here.

Connect with the Machine

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.

Citizens have been disappearing under mysterious circumstances. One hard-boiled hotfix is on the case.

Hotfix 42 Changelog

General Updates

• Unlikely Duo: Fixed two very rare nullref exceptions that could happen on the background LOD Calculator thread right after buildings were destroyed.
• The Very FIRST Text!?: Fixed an exception that would happen if you moused-over the top link in the "start new profile" window.
• Preparing For Future Total Conversions: The framework for total conversion mods (which was inherited from AI War 2, where there is the "Classic Fusion" TC mod) has been extended to match the upgraded framework that is used for normal mods in HotM.
• Preparing For Future Steam Workshop: Reworked how the game initially sets up its working folders and such on launch so that it is now able to hook into steam workshop extremely early if need be. This allows the mod framework to be extended to work with steam workshop, while retaining its existing functionality as well.
• Fix To Evaporating Citizens: Fixed an issue with sheltered humans where humans could evaporate when there were even temporary housing shortages. Basically, if some folks needed to move to refugee housing for any reason, then the correct number would do so (let's say you were over cap by 2000 people, 2000 refugees would appear), but then an additional double that number would evaporate without a trace (so in that example, there would be a further 2000 people who just disappear entirely). In cases where people temporarily move to refugee housing and then right back in, this could lead to large numbers of people just vanishing without a trace.
• Fix To Your Own Cyberocracy Murdering Your Own Residents: Fixed an issue where if you had a budding cyberocracy on the same city tile as some of your own housing, your own sheltered humans would be mistakenly killed, invisibly and without warning. It would actually set up kind of a periodic drain on your own buildings, so more and more humans would get "disappeared" over time. This was a compound bug with some changes over time in the codebase that led to this unexpectedly.
• Fix To Undocumented Deaths In Mysterious Circumstances: Fixed several cases where when sheltered humans or similar in your housing died, the reason wouldn't be stated in the recent sheltered humans list. It now notes if they were stepped on by a giant robot, or hit by chemical weapons, or the various other things that can happen.
• Fix To Make Sure Residents Clear The Building Before It Blows: If you're destroying one of your own buildings that houses people, then it is very careful to give your own people time to move out and become abandoned humans, rather than them potentially getting caught and killed as the building comes down. I'm not positive this was happening before, but now I'm positive that it won't. Better safe than sorry!

Full notes here.

Connect with the Machine

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.

One fix to a regression in the prior build.

Hotfix 41 Changelog

Bugfixes

• Me Fail Deploy? That's Unpossible: Fixed an issue in the prior build that was causing people to be unable to deploy units. A piece of code that was new interacted with existing logic in a way that I didn't think to test.

Full notes here.

Connect with the Machine

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.

This one is a big batch of updates based on feedback from players, including hidden buildings regenerating their hidden status slowly. There's also a lot of other quality of life improvements that should make a lot of folks very happy, and a few key bugfixes -- the one for having your morale-based units using sane targeting that doesn't dogpile specific targets should be particularly welcome! 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.

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.

Thanks for reading and for playing.

Update 73 Changelog

Quality Of Life

• Don't Forget To Sleep: The game now has options under the game setting tab, in the thematic behavior section, for turning on either a 12 hour clock in the radial menu, or a 24 hour clock, for those who want to see what the current time is.
• Capacity Use Reminder: When you are considering an upgrade to internal robotics, it now says how many unused you have for those internal robotics.
• Ledger Clarity When Storage Full: In the ledger, when a resources is at cap and thus production is throttled down, the target trend column will now show the ideal flow, and the lost column will show the amount being throttled by the cap. Both appear in grey so that they don't get confused with red problem states. In other words, now if you see these things, you can know "okay, that's a place where I'm at cap, and it's okay." An empty row still means true equilibrium, aka that you're not at cap but that you're producing what you also consume.
• I Need To Talk To You About Your TPS Report: In the TPS Reports, the output effectiveness percentage will color grey instead of red if the shortfall is purely because of downstream storage being full. So that lets you know that the building in question is idling by design, not having a problem.
• Delete Option Permanence: The All tab on the build sidebar now always shows the delete buildings and pause buildings buttons, even if nothing else does. This is only really relevant when you're in a post-apocalyptic scenario and you haven't built anything yet.
• Deletion After Doom: The suggestions tab now always shows the delete buildings and pause buildings buttons if you are past the final doom. It is kind of a failsafe.
• Self-Regenerating Hidden Status: Every turn, any structures that are hidden have a 2% regen to their hidden status. Contraband scanners from enemies will far outpace this, so it doesn't protect you from active searchers. But it does mean that you don't need contraband jammers to fix up a remote building that got a bit scanned one time -- it will gradually fix itself.
• Transports On The Map, But Not Streets: Under the Thematic section of the game settings tab, there is a new "Always Show Transports On City Map" option: When on, economic and high-altitude military transports are always shown on the city map regardless of the active lens's Hide Transport filters. Does not affect street view.

Performance

• Randomization Efficiency: Updates to make array randomization more efficient. It doesn't hit that many parts of the game, but it does affect the time it takes to randomize music tracks, for example.
• General Math Efficiency: Lots of math improvements. These affect rendering in a few places, LOD calculations elsewhere, and mapgen timings in a few other places. The biggest improvements are in "box math" logic that is underlying some off-axis bounding-box calculations that are used for things like building placement during mapgen. In general a lot of the non-circle/cylinder-based (aka box on an axis-aligned or off-axis fashion) intersection checks are dramatically faster and also nicer to RAM.

Bugfixes

• Early Project Begone: Added in some protection against the Flying Factories and Flexible Airspace projects starting too soon in new timelines beyond the first if you're replaying the prologue and/or chapter one, and there's a certain kind of race condition on your machine.
• Stop It, He's Already Dead!: Fixed several bugs in the code for how systems-damage and morale-based damage from units targeting other units was tracked. This applies to your bulks and workers, as well as to third party npcs, but does not apply to your main vehicles or androids that you directly control. Essentially, due to three typos, they were not properly considering these things and were greatly overkilling targets (stacking on them to a ludicrous degree).
• That's No Rectangle: Fixed a bug in rectangle initialization math that was affecting the correctness of the LOD bounding boxes. I don't think this actually affected the player-facing side of the game, but it came up in code review.
• Accidental Trick Enemies: Fixed a bug where when you moved around larger entities like mechs or vehicles, the threat lines were not accounting for the radius of your entity properly. So it could tell you that a place was safe to move, but then you'd wind up getting shot anyway once you got to the destination.
• Clean Prose: Fixed a typo in the prologue text when you work with a criminal syndicate.
• Another Pass At A Rare Error Spam: Fixed ten different instances where some nullref exceptions could sneak through on unlucky user machines during rendering of the city.
• Fixed Sneaky Systems Damage Against Bulkhead Armor: Fixed a bug where systems damage was able to sneak past bulkhead armor, which let folks take down some enemies that were meant to be immune under the circumstances.
• I'm Still Busy!: Fixed a very minor issue where the game would let you scrap units that had an action over time that was almost complete.
• Weapon Categories: Fixed one mech weapon and one android weapon having the wrong categories when viewed on the unlocks history tab.
• Transport Hiding More Effective: Fixed an issue where if you use the hide economic transports filter on StreetSense, then it wasn't actually hiding those in that particular view.
• Invisible Transports And Your Mouse: Fixed an issue where in any lens view where transports (of whichever kind) were hidden, they would still block the mouse and show their tooltips.
• Delivery Drone Drama: Fixed an issue where vehicles with no equipment slots were acting as if their equipment was changed in their stats in the individual unit-type loadout page.
• Rebels No Longer So Picky: Fixed an issue with the Rebel Anthroneuroweave project where if you were at cap on the resource, it was not progressing properly. It now handles that case properly, as it was already doing in other similar projects.
• What Did You Name Your BrainPal?: Additional fix to the possibility of BrainPals filling up in inventory and blocking their related project. In practice, the cap is high enough that this was probably never going to be hit, and no players reported this, but it's worth doing just in case.

Full notes here.

What's New In 1.0

If you missed the retrospective of what changed from the start of Early Access to the 1.0 release, you can read that here:

Connect with the Machine

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.

Heart of the Machine Roundup

• Added new instructions on lenses that allow players to view units.
• Easier equipment changing, allowing players to right-click a single slot to remove it, and Ctrl + right-click to clear absolutely everything off of all units. These changes make auto equip much easier to use.
• Clarification that Mindports are vehicles and that Slum Rescue Drones are a consumable item on the Mindport.
• Melee units no longer take overwatch fire from making melee attacks.
• The stop DDOS attack contemplation is more stable, staying in one area for 12-16 turns now.
• Feeble humans can now escape the nanotech tide in the prologue, allowing pacifist players to be more pacifistic.
• Meal distribution storefront provides more meals and consumes more meal kits per turn now.

• Update 69 made it easier to find humans who actually want to talk to you, find the medical pavilion by word search, and Spindletroopers are now drawn fully in color.
• Update 70 prevented people from needing double food, added the ability to, on normal or hard mode, complete all exploration sites you have previously done, and allowed the prevention of accidental murderbots.
• Update 71 added the ability for players to favorite units for quick selection, as well as a similar system for camera positions, and optimized load and save speed.
• Update 72 added some fun new stuff. A new piece of equipment called Viral Bolts allows some good system disruption power a bit earlier upon unlock. There is also a new rapid-destruction option that allows players to quickly delete destroyed or disconnected buildings.

Save 50% on Heart of the Machine. 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.

This build includes quite a wide range of updates, based on the cumulative feedback of late. It's hard to really pin down any one specific area more than others, because it's just kind of wide-ranging responses to things that folks have requested, although hacking and upgrades both come up a fair bit. Please see the full list below for details! 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.

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.

Thanks for reading and for playing.

Update 72 Changelog

New Things

• System Takedown: Added a new piece of equipment called Viral Bolts for androids. These give +30 physical attack power, and +60 system disruption power. They're automatically unlocked when you reach intelligence class 6. This makes them the first equipment to increase systems disruption power other than the Oath Of Pacifism.
• Rapid Deletion: In the "Structures With Complaints" screen, you can now right-click structures that are destroyed or disconnected from the network to quickly delete them. There's not a quick way to rebuild them, as that's a job for either engineers, repair crabs, or similar, and would have balance implications.
• New Mod For Extreme-Mode Hacking: Added a new mod called "Hack Be Gone" that is now distributed with the game. If you enable that mod, then it will let you use Ultra-Simplified Hacking even on misery and extreme modes. That's not a change I wanted to make to the base game, but I did feel like having that as a mod (which I created for those who want it) was nice.

Quality Of Life

• Focus On Selected: When you are hovering over the portrait of a unit or building in the lower left corner, you can now right-click to center your view on the thing that you have selected. It also says that in the tooltip above that you can do this.
• Pause Hotkey: There's a new hotkey in the Unit Shortcuts section, with no default binding, that allows you to toggle if the selected structure is paused or not.
• Focus Hotkey: There's a new hotkey in the Unit Shortcuts section, with no default binding, that allows you to center the camera on whatever unit or building you have selected at the moment.
• Awareness Of Capture Capacity: When hovering over an enemy or neutral npc unit that can be hacked, it now says how much captured unit capacity that unit would take, out of whatever your remaining captured unit capacity is. This is part of the list of general stats, and shows in hacking green if you have capacity, or dim red if you don't have capacity.
• Upgrade Odds Visibility: In the Inspiration section of the VR screen, you can now see how many upgrades are in each category, and what percentage chance you have of getting any specific upgrade any time you cash in that inspiration (the chance is the same percentage for each item, but not for each category).
• Upgrades List Per Category: Also in that same Inspiration section tooltip, you can now hold shift to expand those tooltips and see a full list of all of the available upgrades in that category. That way you don't have to remember or guess at which kinds of upgrades come from which categories.

Clarity

• Remembrance Of Difficulty Dropdowns: The text that is talking about starting a new timeline with a higher difficulty no longer mentions hard or extreme mode by name, and no longer mentions sabotaging the spaceport since it's easier to just do that from the dropdown that now exists and which is very obvious when starting a new timeline.
• Combat Lines Are Easier To See: Adjusted the logic for combat threat lines to draw the arrowhead directly under and slightly behind the center of the target it is firing from. This makes it not overlap with any incoming threat lines, and also keeps the arrowhead from being practically-invisible under buildings or roads when that happens. It's now very obvious when a unit is scheduled to be attacking versus when it's not.
• Peace After Brutality Rocks Out: The "war music" now kicks in during the "Continue To Not Die" project of Peace After Brutality, but stops after you win or lose the timeline.

Balance

• Recoil Brace Now Actually Useful: Adjusted Recoil Brace so that it now gives +6 to attack range, making it so that this isn't just an inferior version of Hydraulic Musculature. Also reduced its cooldown turns to 3 from 4.
• Accelerated Mainframe Setup: During the setup phase, if you have built at least one computronium refinery, then the game will constantly make sure that you have at least 500k computronium cubes. This makes setting up a bunch of tower mainframes faster in timelines beyond the first.
• Accelerated Brain Harvesting: During the setup phase, if you have built at least one brain harvester, then the game will constantly make sure that you have at least 2.5k preserved brains. This makes setting up a bunch of biological mainframes faster in timelines beyond the first.
• Scavenging Disabled Vehicles: Disabling enemies by systems damage (with pinpoint systems or otherwise) now grants you the resources that they would drop if destroyed.
• Cybercratic Ambitions Build Speed: Once the "Vorsiber Deliberations" start in the Cybercratic Ambitions path, all of your buildings start to build instantly, which matches how the cyberocracy-specific buildings function.
• Early Composting For Non-Landlords: If you take the "fire / no-landlord" route through chapter one, it was possible to get the Phytoecdysteroid Chamber without knowing the "Unspeakable Composting" to run it. Now it gives you that kind of composting if you were missing it. For people who take the landlord route, they would already have it at this point.
• Earlier Awareness Of Missing Equipment In New Timelines: In timelines where you will go through setup mode, it now show the "missing equipment" notice during setup mode. Previously it was holding that back until after setup mode was complete, which was non-ideal for actually setting yourself up properly.
• Proper Reduced Costs For Ultra-Simplified Hacking: Fixed a balance oversight when using "ultra simplified hacking" (the complexity option). Not only do the costs of the hacks no longer scale when hacking more-resistant targets (so your cost doesn't go from 20 to 40 if your hacker skill is only 50%), but it also gives the full discounted amount that you would pay for hacking via the minigame (so, 16 rather than 20). Things would have already worked this way if I hadn't forgotten about that discount from the minigame.

Performance

• CPU Math Optimizations: Improved the per-frame improvement of a number of cpu-side math operations, most notably with drawing lines but also in some other locations. Useful primarily for older cpus drawing a lot of things at once.
• GPU Fog Optimizations: Made five key performance improvements to the per-screen-pixel and per-fragment-on-object code for the fog used in the game. This improvement reduces the number of calculations by a nontrivial amount on large screens, and on views of the city that contain a lot of objects. This primarily benefits older or weaker gpus, but it also causes newer gpus to run their fans a bit less.

Bugfixes

• Interstellar Incident Is No Longer Shy: Fixed an issue where the Interstellar Incident was not showing up properly in the list of goals unless you were on the beta version of the game.
• Fixed Impostor Clone Unit: Fixed a bug that was causing Disconnected Part Peacekeepers to visually look like Liquid Metal.
• Fix To Demo-Only Gang Arsonist Bug: Fixed a bug that was only in the demo version of the game that would cause your gang arsonists to trigger an exception when they did their work, rather than having a security response force.
• Fix To Background Building Destruction Rare Bug: Fixed a rare exception that could happen in LODCalculator.RecalculateLODForMapItem right after buildings were destroyed.
• Smart Reuse Of District Names During Shortages: Adjusted the game logic so that if it runs out of names for a certain kind of district, it will now use one of the names from the pool with a random number between 100 and 999 added after it. This keeps edge cases from happening where there are few too names in a given pool.
• You Can Properly Practice The Dark Arts Now: Fixed a bug where the "Dark Arts" achievement was not properly triggering anymore. If you have pinpoint systems on and target a robot or mech, then it will now work properly.
• Smarter Squids: Fixed an issue where squid arcologies were not ever having anyone in VR Day-Use Seats due to an xml misconfiguration for them.
• Friendlier Grenades: Fixed an issue where non-combatants were being struck by grenades and other AOE attacks from your androids, vehicles, and mechs. I don't think this applied to bulk androids or workers, but it was applying to hug grenades with sledges you directly control. If you put the attacker into slayer mode, then you can have them hit noncombatants in this way, but noncombatants are no longer accidentally-hit.
• Full Carrier Upgrades: Fixed an oversight where the third "Carrier Hull Strength" upgrade was only giving a bonus of 40 rather than 100.

Full notes here.

What's New In 1.0

If you missed the retrospective of what changed from the start of Early Access to the 1.0 release, you can read that here:

Connect with the Machine

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.