Update 82: Seeing-Eye Mech

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

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