Update 73: Self-Regeneration

This one is a big batch of updates based on feedback from players, including hidden buildings regenerating their hidden status slowly. There's also a lot of other quality of life improvements that should make a lot of folks very happy, and a few key bugfixes -- the one for having your morale-based units using sane targeting that doesn't dogpile specific targets should be particularly welcome! 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.

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Update 73 Changelog

Quality Of Life

• Don't Forget To Sleep: The game now has options under the game setting tab, in the thematic behavior section, for turning on either a 12 hour clock in the radial menu, or a 24 hour clock, for those who want to see what the current time is.

• Capacity Use Reminder: When you are considering an upgrade to internal robotics, it now says how many unused you have for those internal robotics.

• Ledger Clarity When Storage Full: In the ledger, when a resources is at cap and thus production is throttled down, the target trend column will now show the ideal flow, and the lost column will show the amount being throttled by the cap. Both appear in grey so that they don't get confused with red problem states. In other words, now if you see these things, you can know "okay, that's a place where I'm at cap, and it's okay." An empty row still means true equilibrium, aka that you're not at cap but that you're producing what you also consume.

• I Need To Talk To You About Your TPS Report: In the TPS Reports, the output effectiveness percentage will color grey instead of red if the shortfall is purely because of downstream storage being full. So that lets you know that the building in question is idling by design, not having a problem.

• Delete Option Permanence: The All tab on the build sidebar now always shows the delete buildings and pause buildings buttons, even if nothing else does. This is only really relevant when you're in a post-apocalyptic scenario and you haven't built anything yet.

• Deletion After Doom: The suggestions tab now always shows the delete buildings and pause buildings buttons if you are past the final doom. It is kind of a failsafe.

• Self-Regenerating Hidden Status: Every turn, any structures that are hidden have a 2% regen to their hidden status. Contraband scanners from enemies will far outpace this, so it doesn't protect you from active searchers. But it does mean that you don't need contraband jammers to fix up a remote building that got a bit scanned one time -- it will gradually fix itself.

• AddedTransports On The Map, But Not StreetsUnder the Thematic section of the game settings tab, there is a new "Always Show Transports On City Map" option: When on, economic and high-altitude military transports are always shown on the city map regardless of the active lens's Hide Transport filters. Does not affect street view.

Performance

• Randomization Efficiency: Updates to make array randomization more efficient. It doesn't hit that many parts of the game, but it does affect the time it takes to randomize music tracks, for example.

• General Math Efficiency: Lots of math improvements. These affect rendering in a few places, LOD calculations elsewhere, and mapgen timings in a few other places. The biggest improvements are in "box math" logic that is underlying some off-axis bounding-box calculations that are used for things like building placement during mapgen. In general a lot of the non-circle/cylinder-based (aka box on an axis-aligned or off-axis fashion) intersection checks are dramatically faster and also nicer to RAM.

Bugfixes

• AddedEarly Project BegoneAdded in some protection against the Flying Factories and Flexible Airspace projects starting too soon in new timelines beyond the first if you're replaying the prologue and/or chapter one, and there's a certain kind of race condition on your machine.
• FixedStop It, He's Already Dead!Fixed several bugs in the code for how systems-damage and morale-based damage from units targeting other units was tracked. This applies to your bulks and workers, as well as to third party npcs, but does not apply to your main vehicles or androids that you directly control. Essentially, due to three typos, they were not properly considering these things and were greatly overkilling targets (stacking on them to a ludicrous degree).
• FixedThat's No RectangleFixed a bug in rectangle initialization math that was affecting the correctness of the LOD bounding boxes. I don't think this actually affected the player-facing side of the game, but it came up in code review.
• FixedAccidental Trick EnemiesFixed a bug where when you moved around larger entities like mechs or vehicles, the threat lines were not accounting for the radius of your entity properly. So it could tell you that a place was safe to move, but then you'd wind up getting shot anyway once you got to the destination.
• FixedClean ProseFixed a typo in the prologue text when you work with a criminal syndicate.
• FixedAnother Pass At A Rare Error SpamFixed ten different instances where some nullref exceptions could sneak through on unlucky user machines during rendering of the city.
• FixedFixed Sneaky Systems Damage Against Bulkhead ArmorFixed a bug where systems damage was able to sneak past bulkhead armor, which let folks take down some enemies that were meant to be immune under the circumstances.
• FixedI'm Still Busy!Fixed a very minor issue where the game would let you scrap units that had an action over time that was almost complete.
• FixedWeapon CategoriesFixed one mech weapon and one android weapon having the wrong categories when viewed on the unlocks history tab.
• FixedTransport Hiding More EffectiveFixed an issue where if you use the hide economic transports filter on StreetSense, then it wasn't actually hiding those in that particular view.
• FixedInvisible Transports And Your MouseFixed an issue where in any lens view where transports (of whichever kind) were hidden, they would still block the mouse and show their tooltips.
• AdjustedDelivery Drone DramaFixed an issue where vehicles with no equipment slots were acting as if their equipment was changed in their stats in the individual unit-type loadout page.
• FixedRebels No Longer So PickyFixed an issue with the Rebel Anthroneuroweave project where if you were at cap on the resource, it was not progressing properly. It now handles that case properly, as it was already doing in other similar projects.

• What Did You Name Your BrainPal?: Additional fix to the possibility of BrainPals filling up in inventory and blocking their related project. In practice, the cap is high enough that this was probably never going to be hit, and no players reported this, but it's worth doing just in case.

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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:

https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/2001070/announcements/detail/538879349212841215

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.