Update 85: Armor And Wallripping

Lots of updates in here! Additional balance upgrade options for armor, and new ways to steal neodymium, among other items. The wallrip stuff is basically a place where people could get confused in chapter one if they took a really specific sequence, and it allows for multiple ways for them to solve the problem, rather than it expecting a different sequence. Other pieces are still in progress behind the scenes, and will be announced later in September. 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 85 Changelog

Quality Of Life

• Pinboard And String: Added a tooltip for the "all investigations" option when multiple investigations are happening at once above the radial menu.
• Quick Jump: For all projects that are related to an investigation, clicking the project now either cycles you through sites if you are not currently having a unit investigate over time, or it cycles you through units that are currently doing that kind of investigation if you are.

General Balance

• Better Memory: When doing the memories of exploration contemplation, it now properly grants any of the entries that you had previously, rather than skipping ones that would be auto-unlocked at intelligence class 7. If you are lower than IC7, that was non-ideal.
• No More False Memories: Fixed a bug where with 7 of the exploration sites, you could get them auto-granted from memories of exploration even if you had never done them in any timeline.
• Generous Memory: Adjusted it so that if you're in a timeline where you previously did memories of exploration, and there is now something new that would be valid to unlock via that, but which wasn't at the time of actual unlock, it belatedly unlocks thosee for you. This includes things like leaving a timeline, unlocking something somewhere else, and then coming back and having that unlock granted.
• Okay, One More False Memory, But This One Is Intentional: Adjusted things so that if the executive tomb got destroyed prior to your "revisiting the tomb" project, it will now quietly just move that to another location as if it didn't get destroyed. Otherwise it would stall that project in a confusing way.
• Sledge Smash: Added a new ability to wallrip neodymium for sledge once you're into the point where you would need it for Exponential Power Growth. It's possible you could get here without Thortvetite skimmers, which could make it seem like you were stuck. It's nice to have multiple ways to do these things, regardless.
• The Files Are IN The Computer: Updated the "how to acquire" for neodymium to now mention that you can get it from the flying transports as well as the other sources it previously mentioned.

Armor Balance

• Note: BIS refers to Best in Slot, which in this case means for its primary purpose at maximum upgrade. Other armor is still very useful at various other levels of intermediate upgrade, or for secondary purposes.
• New Armor Upgrade: There is a new Armor Deflection Analysis science upgrade which upgrades certain new kinds of armor by +60 per upgrade, for a maximum of 4 times, to +240 max.
• A Much More Super Suit: Super Suit has changed so that it is now in both Armor Materials Study and Armory Deflection Analysis, so its hp ceiling is now 820 rather than 380. Also, it has been adjusted so that any android that can fit human clothes can use it, instead of only those who can wear heavy human clothes. This makes it the BIS for Technician, Senior Technician, and both mimics; their secondary is the Active Graphene Mesh. Previously, none of these could even wear the Super Suit.
• I Do Like Tungsten: Tungsten Plate has joined Armory Deflection Analysis, bringing its ceiling from 1100 to 1340, making it now much more useful even if it's not BIS anywhere.
• Heavy Got Heavier: 35mm Halfplate has joined Armory Deflection Analysis, bringing its ceiling from 700 to 940, making it now BIS for Predator and both CombatUnits. Super Suit is aa second for all three.
• This Is Expensive Though: Active Graphene Mesh has joined Armory Deflection Analysis, bringing its ceiling from 280 to 520, making it now BIS for Sledge, Peacekeeper, LiquidMetal, PMCImpostor, Keanu, Carver, Exator, Nickelbot, Harbinger, Mindrunner, Raven. The Wurtzite armor is second on all of these, and still first for the bulks of all of these.
• I Always Wanted Extra Arms: Exoskeleton Arms has been drastically reworked to make it so that it's now BIS for a secondary slot for Sledges IF you are configuring your Sledge for offense rather than maximum tankiness. It now provides Area of Attack +2 (previously +0), Agility +60 (was -60), Move Range to zero (was -6).

Bugfixes

• NPCs No Longer Allowed To Wander Away While You Talk To Them: Fixed an issue where an NPC unit you were talking to could despawn in the background. It now holds any despawn requests for them until they're no longer the conversation target.
• More Nullref Hunting: Fixed 20 remaining spots in the codebase where it was possible to have a very rare nullref exception as an action-over-time ended. Nobody actually reported these, but just in case.
• Consistent Investigation Tooltip: Fixed an issue where if you only had one investigation happening in the investigation lens, it would not show the tooltip for it when you hovered that dropdown menu, unless you expanded the dropdown menu.
• Timeline Rollback Improvements: Fixed an issue with several pieces of data, but most notably neural expansion, that were updating the central record that other timelines read from too early. If you went back in time and said you didn't want to update the central record, then it was still overwriting a few things until you went in and actually did a fresh load or dive from something that was more current. So that would make your neural expansion too high or low for a while, for example.
• Fixed Schrodinger's Shell Company: If you used the shortcut to unlock a shell company, then reloaded an older save and continued onward, you'd be in this kind of half-state where you both had and did not have the shell company unlocked. It now remains fully unlocked.
• POI Sabotage Fix: Fixed an exception that could be spammed at you if a POI was in an invalid state. It no longer has those exceptions, and it fixes the invalid state as well.
• Workers No Longer Block Each Other: When your units want to do some work on buildings, mostly during Great and Terrible Protector, but also during Budding Cybercrat, it was possible for units to be really close to the building, but multiple units actually blocking themselves from even getting to it. Most cases of this were fixed long ago, but there was still one remaining case where it could happen. Now they just do their work from a slight distance when the building is blocked, rather than standing around uselessly.
• Killing People Too Fast No Longer Breaks Reality: Fixed a possible overflow if you were killing more than 7 million citizens in a turn in Peace After Brutality.
• Homeless Tent Exception Fix: Fixed an exception that could happen when clearing out homeless tents.
• POI Death Fix: Fixed an exception that could happen when a POI was destroyed in certain circumstances.
• Slow Settings Save No Longer Says Scary Message: Saving settings to disk no longer has any risk of telling the player there is a memory leak in the case of a long disk write stall. This is typically when antivirus decides it wants to lock a file for longer than 10 seconds for some reason.

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:

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