Update 86: Of Ashes And Animals

Lots of small things, with a focus on balance and bugfixes. There's some nice quality of life bits in here, too. 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 86 Changelog

Quality Of Life

• Sprinting Past Skyscrapers: Mechs and vehicles were previously unable to sprint, which was always the intent, but which is frankly annoying. They now work like androids do.
• Come Back, Spiders!: If you were in build mode and building repair crabs, it would not show you repair spider coverage. Fixed. The inverse case already worked.
• Did I Remember To Burn It Down?: One new achievement has been added to the game, called Ashes On Ashes, for completing chapter one using fire rather than kindness. And yep, it's retroactive. For someone trying to 100% the game, they could get stuck at 98% project completion, not realizing they had not done this yet, with no other indication of where that last tiny percentage was at. This is not on storefronts yet, but will be next week or the week after.

Animal Balance

• Note: Animals have had their code reworked a fair bit, so that various things now make more sense.
• A Bit Too Clever: You can no longer bribe velociraptors.
• That's Not In There: You can't salvage neuroweave from dead cats.
• Animals Are No Longer Lumped Under "Other": Animal kills now show up as a separate category in the stats screen (you monster).
• You Know, Biological Stuff: Animals can now be shocked, tasered, experience hallucinations, and undergo anaphylaxis, which they were previously accidentally immune to.
• But Those Were My Friends!: Killing sapient animals is now considered murder (again, you monster).

Balance

• Crime Syndicates No Longer Hold Some Airports Hostage: Adjusted the Airport Warehouse Worker to no longer care if a criminal syndicate is working in that hangar or not, so that it can't accidentally be blocked by universal criminal activity if that happens.
• Housing Agents No Longer Spend All Their Time At Lunch: Housing agencies previously only ever recruited homeless people, which is not what their text claimed to do. This has been a point of confusion for some time. They now recruit from the lower classes like the text already said they would.
• Blocking Accidental Pointless Overbuilding: For various kinds of buildings that spawn worker units, they now have caps that prevent you from overbuilding them beyond what would actually be useful. Nothing in the interface was showing that there was an effective cap, but there was, which was confusing.
• Double The Torment: If you have torment processing hubs and improved torment processing hubs, they are now able to each spawn their full complement rather than being capped to half.
• Liquid Metal Can Now Eat People: Once you reach intelligence class 10, if you have the liquid metal android, he gains the ability to engulf and eat enemies on foot.

Bugfixes

• Enemies Never Play Indecisive Disco Lines: The way that enemies target each other and you has been updated so that when there is a lot of AOE happening, it remains stable and doesn't have a risk of units becoming indecisive every second and swapping what they are threatening.
• High-Difficulty Completion Tracking Accuracy: Fixed a pair of bugs where the percentages for extreme and misery modes were not being calculated properly on the completion percentage screen of the victory path screen. The underlying data was fine, so in the new build it will simply shift to being correct.
• Take Down The Building Only: Fixed an issue where some buildings being destroyed could result in exceptions if the timing was just wrong.
• Long Runners Now Allowed: Fixed issues where if you were trying to make androids sprint beyond 20 mental energy cost, it wouldn't let you do that.
• Go Away, Crabs!: If you were in build mode and also the analysis lens and had repair crab coverage filtered out, then the build mode would override that and keep showing them. Fixed.
• Why So Critical?: If you're in the post apocalypse and have the ability to make more androids, it won't do a critical save anymore if you lose all your androids.
• Avoiding Cross-Project Completion Accuracy Issues: Fixed an issue that was confusing where some projects that were essentially equivalents of one another were counting separately in the completion percentage screen, making the projects look like they were incomplete when they essentially had been completed.

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

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.