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Update notes via Steam Community

A month since the last update!? Sorry about that. I got pretty sick for about three and a half weeks, and today is my first day fully back. I'm doing a lot better now.

This update has a variety of player requests that have stacked up while I was out, and I probably will do a second update this week to get the remainder of the things I have my eye on.

Once I finish with these two, then I'm going to resume working on the next big content update, so that may be another bit of a break between builds unless you play on the beta branch. The content updates that are coming up are all beefy ones, so their spacing is going to be a bit further apart (3 weeks on average, probably) compared to what I did earlier in the year.

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.

Details

Update 28 Changelog

Music Adjustments

  • Danger Music Now Plays: Added in some logic so that either the war or danger music can be triggered while you have an investigator or an infiltrator busy with an action over time at a location. This has been applied to a variety of spots, including hacking the airport as part of the recent T2 goal, to give appropriate music in all the various situations.
  • New War Music Settings: In the settings menu under the Audio tab, the Fine Tuning sub-section now includes a trio of new options relating to battle music: Play Battle Music During WW4, Play Battle Music During Exo-Corp Invasions, Play Battle Music During Civil War. Some folks spend a ton of time in WW4 in particular, and having constant battle music isn't always what you want. So these options allow you to tune things to your taste.

Quality Of Life Improvements

  • Debate Tooltips: When you are hovering over upcoming debate actions, they now show up directly to the side of your cursor in a predictable way, rather than varying between being above and below the buttons depending on the size of the tooltip.
  • Tutorial Replay Easing: If you are replaying chapter one, but are already in chapter three or beyond, it no longer will ask you to read a handbook entry. That's a bit of a waste of your time at that point.
  • Memories From Past Timelines: Some rather extensive changes have been made under the hood to "remembering things you did in past timelines." It no longer will double-count choosing the same thing multiple times in a single timeline, and it will no longer include information from the same timeline in your "from other timelines" list even if you choose it repeatedly or you choose it, go back in time and save-scum, and load it forward.
  • Contemplation Appearance Timeliness: When the "Impregnable?" contemplation becomes valid to appear, it should appear immediately now, rather than you having to proceed to the next turn first.
  • Forces Sidebar Numbers: In the forces sidebar, it now shows your capacity numbers first, and then the rest of the header after that. This makes it so that if the text is very long (as in German), you'll be able to see the numbers, still.
  • Cycling Through Project Targets: When doing Down With SecForce or Bitter Medicine, you can now right-click the project to cycle through all of the various targets quickly.
  • StreetSense Item Visibility: In the event that a project streetsense item would need to seed at a building where a unit is standing already, it will now do so if there are no other options. This prevents a variety of edge cases where units would be standing on a building and thus prevent these items from appearing. The current case is for during Bitter Medicine, with a prison not showing as a target because a bulk android was standing on it. But it had other cases it would have affected, too.

Balance

  • Injection Costs: Anti-Aklitoxin Injector Drones now cost 10020 Anti-Aklitoxin rather than merely 1 Anti-Aklitoxin.

Civil War Updates

  • Wandering Humans: While the civil war is ongoing, there are now starving humans wandering all around the map, from all social classes, with notes about their hunger and also their loss of identity. You can rescue them like you would feral cats or dogs.
  • Halted Immigration: Immigration is now completely halted during the civil war. Births still continue.
  • Waitlist Emptying: During the civil war, the waitlist for people moving into the city drops to just about zero.
  • Shipments Halted: Regional and international shipments are now cut off during the civil war and WW4. Local shipments also cut off during WW4, but stay in place during the civil war.

Bugfixes

  • XML Modding Fix: Updated the way that lists are processed from xml so that when partial records are used (typically from mods), lists are inherited properly. The most notable case of this is things like lists of tags not being wiped out when you make a partial record of a game element and then don't specify the tag.
  • Storage During Power Outages: If you are short on electricity, this no longer causes storage failures in buildings such as the robotic motivator factory. This was both confusing and overly punitive.[/*]
  • Dropdowns And Gamepads: Previously, if you had a dropdown open it would take arbitrary gamepad inputs and could therefore automatically close if a connected gamepad was sending a bunch of wrong inputs to it. Normally this is disabled in the game for other parts of the ui, but this specific area was missed. The "cancel" input for dropdowns is also now based on the normal re-bindable in-game control rather than being hard-locked to specific underlying things like the escape key. So if you've re-bound the cancel key, it will now properly honor that.
  • Defender Feats: Fixed a bug where defender feats were not being triggered properly when a unit with such feats was attacked. For now this only applied to mods, but it would have been a problem for future main game content as well.
  • Five Building Mouse Hitboxes: Improved the mouse hitboxes for two science labs and four military buildings. The way that military bases are set up, they are often intentionally overlapping kind of like a termite mound, and with one of the labs in particular, it was possible for it to be overlapping in such a way that a smaller building was not hoverable or clickable under a larger one.
  • Final Doom Finality: It's no longer possible to sneak units past the final doom by having them in an action over time.
  • Piercing Overclock: When a unit has piercing overclock to a degree that would let it hit a target, it is now properly able to attack said target. Previously, it would bar you from attacking the target thinking that you would do zero damage to it.
  • Computing Research: Fixed an issue where sometimes computing optimization would only offer a single option of Better Mainframes, rather than offering the full possible selection.
  • Burned And Irradiated Buildings: Buildings that are both burned and irradiated, typically from nukes, are not valid for most kinds of reconstruction. If you have machine structures in these, they will now properly clear themselves out rather than you having to do it by hand.
  • Shell Company Explosives: Shell company units can no longer set charges on donut shops, as this would blow their cover.
  • Exception Fixed: Fixed a nullref exception that could happen when trying to show information about an npc mission that was at a building that has since been destroyed.
  • Typo Fixes: Three minor typos have been corrected.
  • Achievement Fix: Fixed an issue where I just plain didn't finish implementing the Lunch Lady achievement. Complete oversight on my part.
  • Stealth Storage Bunkers: Low-tech factories, large warehouses, and hotels are now able to have stealth storage bunkers in them. This makes the odds of getting soft-locked during Initial Construction almost zero now, knock on wood.
  • Drone Frame Advice: The drone frame tooltip no longer suggests scrapping aerospace hangars in order to free up internal robotics for them. That was outdated advice.
  • Brain Degradation Replay: If you are replaying chapter one, but you already know that brains degrade, it still goes through the process of having them degrade the first time (allowing you to actually finish the "reach intelligence class 3 route and get the message about it).
  • Codebreaker Fix: Fixed a bug where if there was zero compute time available to Codebreakers, then they would go turbocharged and completely decrypt things in one turn. Also reviewed similar code for similar issues, and didn't see any beyond this one outlier.
  • Ex-Con Apartments: During the Bitter Medicine project, if you don't already have Ex-Con Apartments unlocked, that now unlocks immediately so that you can use them.

Full notes here.

Connect with the Machine


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