Update 83: Investigative Goggles

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

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