This is my update focused on player feedback for the week. Lots of great reports came in, and I couldn't quite get to all of them yet, but this is a big set of the most notable ones.
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 33 Changelog
Quality Of Life
- Quieting Worker Log Spam: Worker units belonging to the player no longer pop up on the right-hand side of the screen when they die. It still goes into the log (M key, or on the header), but it really doesn't need to be telling you about these deaths, as it distracts from actually-important deaths like bulks that you might need to replace.
- Distance From Machines Improvements: Completely reworked how the "Distance From Machines" logic is calculated. This was implemented before shell companies were a thing, and it didn't properly differentiate between shell company and regular machine buildings. I wound up going through and adding some new rollups with revised logic to calculate distances in general to make this possible.
- New "Distance From Shell Company" Analysis View: Added a new Analysis Lens filter called "Distance From Shell Company," which now shows how far away things are from your shell company buildings (that aren't hidden).
- Hacker Resource Visibility: When a Raven, Mindrunner, Habinger, or Armored Excutive is selected, the three hacking-related strategic resources now automatically display in the resource bar.
- Next Turn Button Clarity: If you can't skip to the next turn at the moment, because things are still calculating, then the icon on the button next to the radial menu that lets you skip to the next turn is now greyed out. This helps make it obvious when you can get to the next turn right after loading a savegame, for example
Clarity
- Beta Blocking Clarity: Added more gating for things like the doom types and contemplations, so that in-work ones won't appear in the beta for people who aren't looking for that. It was way too easy to be on the beta branch and to simply stumble into either Civil Spycraft (which is not remotely ready for testing yet), or the new dooms set (same note).
- Robotic Motivator Descriptions: Updated the description of the robotic motivator factory to note that motivators are used for both Bulk and Worker androids, rather than just saying Bulk, and to have a bit of commentary on what both types are like. Also updated the description of the Robotic Motivators themselves to say they are used by both Bulk and Worker styles.
- Attacks Of Opportunity Extra Notes: Added a new part to the Attacks of Opportunity handbook entry: If you are trespassing, and the guards are targeting you but the alarm is not active, then you can move laterally without triggering an attack of opportunity. To do so, move out of the restricted area, but still within the range of the units targeting you. At that point, since the non-alarmed guards won't target you anymore, you can freely move away without being attacked.
Balance
- Meal Distribution Volume: The number of internal robotics needed by Meal Distribution Storefronts has been cut in half. This allows you to build twice as many as before, which in turn means you can distribute everything that you produce, or even more than you can produce, as-needed. In particular, this makes it so that larger city populations are not inherently destined to starve due to food distribution logistics.
- Industrial Protein Upgrades: Industrial Protein Vats now benefit from the Better Meats optimization. This is a major buff to the civil war situation, but that feels appropriate if that's where you're investing your resources.
- Citizen Fear After Violence: After citizens die at a building (whether they work or live there), there's now a gap in how long it will be before other citizens move in or start working there. Depending on how severe the dieoff is, the delay is longer or shorter, on average. If you do something really horrifying like decrowning a bunch of people at a building, then it will take 20-30 turns for them to repopulate, which is even longer than usual.
- Sniper Range Cap Removed: Removed and invisible cap where all NPC units (including your own bulk units and workers) were being limited to 70 attack range. Their stats could be configured so they were in the 100s, but it was not actually set to do things that far. This may make bulk nickelbots with sniper rifles need a nerf (since this constitutes a major buff), but we'll see how it goes. As long as they aren't outcompeting all other bulk androids, I don't mind them being powerful.
- Rebel Coordination: Added some new logic to make certain rebel groups and gang groups put aside their differences if they are in the middle of an operation against either you, or The Man (SecForce, corporations, etc). This keeps them from devolving into shooting at each other when there aren't any better targets around, and they wind up hunting SecForce cruisers or your units or whatever is interesting if they've exhausted other targets that are closer to them.
- Cotton Production Chain: Octupled the cotton precursor storage amounts, and quadrupled the cotton fiber sheets storage amounts. When they all had the same storage volumes, this could lead to places where it would get "pinched" in production during high-capacity production chains, leading to diminished outputs that would cascade along the production chain.
- More Captured Units: Doubled the available Captured Unit Capacity, and the rate at which it increases from Remote Unit Controllers. This gives substantially more room for things you've captured, without you having to scrap them as quickly.
Bugfixes
- Suggested Bovines: Fixed a bad recommendation for bovine replicators in the Securing Food project in chapter one. It was recommending 9, but you only needed 3. This dates back to before I condensed building counts down (before launch into Early Access, but after the NextFest demo), and I simply missed this one.
- The Coming War Returns: Fixed a boolean inversion that was causing The Coming War to not properly appear in the prior build.
- Spawn Race Condition: Fixed two subtle issues that could lead to some enemies spawning in and immediately taking an action against your units on the same turn if you were really unlucky.
- Bad Number Format Fix: Fixed an issue where numbers that were abbreviated and which had a decimal component very close to 1 could round up to showing x.100 rather than saying x.99 like they should have.
- Rusty Windmill Fixes: Fixed an issue that was causing two bugs. Firstly, the windmills were not spreading rust to other structures near them properly before you have the cure. And secondly, they were still applying rust to themselves (wrongly) after the cure was developed, which I attempted to fix twice before. This is actually gone for sure now.
- Prison Project Ending Fix: Fixed an oversight where if you got a certain amount along For The Sake Of Those Bound, it was not ending the Prison Heist or Post-Heist projects. It now ends those properly in all cases, including retroactively, once you start the Covert Inoculation project.
- StreetSense Transition Fix: Fixed an issue starting in update 32 where non-beta english players were being given instructions to use some streetsense items that were not available to them. Those are now available.
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.
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