Update 79: Electronic Aggression

More player requests, including finally nailing that M-series startup crash bug. Crash bugs are incredibly rare with this game, but it turns out that since the update to unity 6.3, if you used a 5k or double-UHD resolution on macOS, that would cause one. Talk about specific. All fixed now. Similarly, people keep having their international airports blown up, and so certain information brokers will now reluctantly meet you at a different airport. I find this one pretty amusing. 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 79 Changelog

Quality Of Life

• Searchable Settings: You can now fully search the settings window, which also includes searching the descriptions of all the mods. This has been a request for quite some time!

• Searchable Controls: You can now fully search the control bindings window. Here again this makes it far easier to find the keybind you're looking for.

• FixedThe War Is ComingFixed an issue where "The Coming War" was not in International Scrutiny for some reason. I clearly set it up that way on purpose, but that was confusing. It only jumps you forward a few turns in that doom set, but if you meet the criteria for WW4, it now shows that.

Balance

• Softer Unit Cap Reductions From Brownouts: If you have an electrical shortage, and this would cause your unit cap(s) to fall in some way, it now falls proportionately.

• Mental Energy Consequences Of Brownouts: If you have an electrical shortage during a turn, and you would normally have more than 9 mental energy thanks to Coprocessors, then the Coprocessor amounts are lost immediately and can't be regained until the next turn.

• FixedRebels No Longer Get Bored And Target PedestriansFixed issues where nomad snipers, and rebels in general, could take out their aggressions on noncombatants when there were not any better targets around. That was out of character and unintended.

• No Need To Save Scum: When you are purchasing upgrades from the scientific research section of the VR screen, it will now always use a seed that is stable based on the current turn, and which category it is, and how many times you've already unlocked that category. This removes any benefit to saving and loading over and over again to get different results, as they'll now be the same each time. Every time you end turn, the slate does change for now, though.

• FINE, We Can Go Regional: Relaxed the criteria for starting WW4 so that if ANY airport is still standing, you can meet your contact there and kick things off. Otherwise if the international airport happened to get nuked in your timeline, you were just hosed.

Bugfixes

• FixedClassic Camera ClampFixed an issue where if you looked straight up or down in photo mode, it would cause the camera to jitter around. This is a classic case of not clamping angles at 89 degrees, which the game now does.
• AddedPhoto Mode FocusThe photo mode for the game now uses the new custom raycaster system, which was something I had forgotten to add in previously. This was leading to the autofocus and manual focus never detecting any objects, and thus never adjusting the depth of field.
• AddedThe Sky Is No Longer Infinitely Far AwayFixed an issue with photo mode and how it interacted with the sky. It was seeing that as infinitely far away, and adjusting the autofocus as if there was something out there to look at. It now sets autofocus or manual focus to a maximum distance that makes sense, rather than infinity. This is actually not a new issue, but I never had gotten around to this as I had my focal distances way off the defaults.
• FixedElectricity No Longer Pulses (It's DC Now?)Fixed an issue where if you were short on electricity, then your buildings could go into a mode where they were oscillating turning off and on once per quarter second, which was quite confusing in general.
• FixedFixed An Electrical SoftlockFixed an issue where if you were short on electricity, and were in that cycling state described above, then it would not let you end turn until you fixed the electricity issues or scrapped all of your units above your base caps, since you were over cap on units. But it wasn't showing that properly in the task stack because of the oscillation.
• FixedFixed Mouse Momentum On OSXFixed an issue where pinned-mouse-cursor rotation was working in a funky way on macOS due to a quirk of that OS. It now works consistently across all OSes.

• Self-Correcting Network Data: The network membership background thread now runs once per second (it only takes milliseconds, anyway), rather than just purely on-demand. This way if it gets stuck not realizing that anything is in it, it won't cause issues like the inability to calculate your electricity. If you loaded savegames really rapidly, this could happen and it would cause your game to be stuck until you saved and reloaded. It's possible that there were some other rare circumstances that could cause this, but they would be solved by the same fix.

• FixedFixed A Very Niche CashFixed an on-start crash that was happening only on M-series macOS computers that had a resolution that was really high -- in the 5K range, or double-UHD. Regular retina graphics, which is a bit smaller than 4K, was not enough to trigger it. And intel macs didn't have this at all, nor did windows or linux machines. The root of this was that during loading the game, when it tried to load the ocean scene for the end of time, the warmup scripts for that were causing the game to crash when it was done during load. That's now delayed and happens the first time you view the end of time in a session. This can cause a 1-2 second lag (on any OS) the very first time you view the end of time on your computer in a while, but that's shifting some work that was otherwise being done at program start into this (it's the PSO compilation, and your driver and unity cache it after it happens once per machine).
• RemovedBlur Is Back On MacOSThe whole thing with the blur being disabled on metal is now removed, as that was not affecting anything.

• System Menu From The End Of Time: The escape key now works like normal in the end of time again, whereas it had been doing since update 76.

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.