Update 81: Crystallized Workers

More updates based on player requests, including crystallized emotion adjustments, and worker clarity. Also improvements for certain languages' text entry. 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 81 Changelog

Clarity

• The Flow Of Emotions: In the tooltips for the crystallized emotions, it now shows breakdowns of where each amount is coming from, to help with understanding if there are ever any problems (or in general just to understand the budget as it is happening).

Quality Of Life

• What Workers Will do: In the various "hub" buildings that spawn workers, it now shows which kinds of workers they will spawn, and also what the text is for those workers. This was never really shown anywhere before, other than in the command mode workers category, which is not clear enough.

• AddedEquip Workers In AdvanceWorker androids now show up in your hardware screens as soon as you CAN build them (based on having available buildings that could spawn them), rather than only after you have already built some of them.

• IME Keyboard Improvements: If you're using an OS keyboard that is a CJK language that uses an IME, then when you first click into a textbox, it will properly set you to the kana mode (or native equivalent) on windows. This will probably also work on linux, although it's not relevant for Steam Deck because the virtual keyboard there already handles things. This also does not matter on OSX, because the IME is an OS-level tool there that functions a bit differently and already worked nicely. With these changes, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese languages should have a much nicer typing experience.

Balance

• FixedCrystallized Emotion RebalanceFixed an issue where the crystallized emotion income was not properly being calculated, as the values were cumulative alterations rather than alterations off of the base. This made it so that the outputs did not match the combined tooltip numbers if you had a number of different VR modifications on.

Bugfixes

• FixedStale Dropdown FixFixed a generalized bug in dropdowns where if the current value was meant to be a null, then it would not visually update to select that value properly, which could lead to stale dropdown visuals compared to what was actually selected under the hood.
• AddedNPCs No Longer Hide In Buried BuildingsThere is a new "buried buildings" calculation that finds tents and shacks that are under another building in a way that you can't click on them. The game then prevents any npc units from moving to these spots.
• FixedSettings Nullref FixFixed an issue with the settings menu where if you searched for something, and it had absolutely no matches, then it would give an exception.
• AdjustedPhoto Mode AutofocusIn photo mode, the game has always had autofocus erroneously interact with colliders for buildings that are burned-down. It wasn't possible to make them work differently from that until recently, but now that I've got my own custom colliers and raycasting system, it is able to be adjusted so that it works great now!
• FixedKeybinds During Small-Pane WindowsFixed an issue where various keybinds were being blocked when non-full-screen windows like "Structures With Complaints" were open.
• AddedIME Keyboard FixFixed an issue from update 76 where converting to unity's new input system broke IME inputs entirely. It turns out their code for the new input system is still literally filled with a "todo" for this even after it coming out in 2020. Crazy! Most unity apps are using the old input manager in order to keep supporting CJK languages. But there's a workraround with the new input system that allows this to be called via reflection, and I've wired that up so that it works. I can now fully use a Japanese IME on my desktop in windows 11, and it should work in other OSes, too, since this is the code that the older input manager used to use. The reason I'm not using the old and new systems together is that the old system leaks gamepad commands into the game in an unhelpful way that bother players in any language.

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.