Update 77: Proton Pack

It's been a very busy week! I've released four hotfixes in the wake of the giant update 76. Thanks to everyone for their patience while things were a bit less stable for a few days; thankfully that is all fixed up, and now we just have the performance (and functionality) benefits from that prior update.

As part of the hotfixes, I released a number of features or longer-term fixes that may have gotten missed since a lot of folks don't read the hotfix notes. I've reproduced those below so that you don't have to hunt for them.

This build of the game also makes it so that the game should work fully with Proton 9 again on linux, and it adds in a custom cursor for the game now, too.

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.

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Update 77 Changelog

Quality Of Life

• A Bit Purple: Added a new mouse cursor that is custom and in the style of the game. It's not all that different from a lot of OS hardware cursors, but it's a bit different in order to give that nice feel to the game.
• Rotational Cursor: When you try to rotate the camera or pan the camera, the way that the cursor works is now entirely different under the hood, although it will feel very similar on the surface. The mouse cursor changes to a rotation icon rather than disappearing, and it sticks where it was on the screen, with your regular cursor style coming back when you finish the rotation or pan. This makes it a bit easier to remember where your cursor is meant to be for anyone doing this, and on Proton 9 versions of linux, this new set of code makes it so that the rotations and pans function again, because I'm not using a cursor lock under the hood, which works differently on some OSes.

Code Improvements

• Initial Startup Speedup: The game now uses foreach semantics rather than DoFor on the xml loading and a few other framework-y places, which helps reduce memory pressure while initially loading the game.
• Debug Log Disruption Reduction: When the game writes to debug logs for any reason, it's now using notably less memory. There were cases where a big cascade of writes could use 400kb in a single set of calls (19 delayed from background threads, for example), and it's now very efficient, instead.
• No-Ops No Longer Cost: If ConcurrentDictionary is already empty when Clear() is called on it, it no longer allocates memory in rebuilding its tables for no reason.

Bugfixes

• The Return Of Health Bars: Fixed a regression from update 76 that had caused all health bars to draws in a squashed fashion horizontally.
• Down In Front!: Fixed a minor issue where the task stack was still showing in photo mode.

Other Non-Regression Updates From Hotfixes Since The Last Update

• Sensible Limits To Theft: You can now only steal neodymium once every 4 turns via StreetSense, rather than it being something that can be repeated a bunch of times per turn.
• MilUnit Hitbox Size: Human-sized units get an exaggeratedly-large hitbox in order to make them easier to click. It's one of those things you likely don't even notice, but it came about during player testing Anyway, MilUnits from ExoCorps were getting a 3x larger hitbox as well, but that was too much since they're roughly twice the size of an average human. I've adjusted their hitbox scale to now be 1.5x. This is a very old issue. Let me know how that feels!
• Remember My Notes!: Fixed a bug where if you changed the notes about a timeline, or its name, then did a dive into it, then it would lose your notes and name change because the values stored in the local timeline would override the core metadata. It now properly keeps the core metadata version.
• Seriously, Remember!: Added logic so that if you examine a timeline in the end of time and then make a save to whatever your changes were (notes about a timeline, or the name of a timeline, etc), it also immediately updates the on-disk copy. Otherwise if you just exited the game, or dove into another timeline, you would often wind up losing those changes.
• POI Preservation: Fixed an issue where if a POI had no workers or residents in it, then it would be marked as destroyed. That was some super old logic, and was not useful now. It was causing certain kinds of minor and automated POIs to register themselves as destroyed when they were fine. This is probably what was blocking most players. If it happens to you, wait for at least 5 seconds and then end the turn, and the contemplation should now appear.
• POI Reanimation: The game now auto-detects "dead but not really dead" pois and brings them back to life.
• POI Memories: Buildings now still consider themselves part of a POI even if the POI is destroyed, as not doing that caused various problems.
• WW4 During T3s: Made it so that even if you're in a T3 goal, you can now start WW4 so long as the other conditions are met.
• Scaling Options For Structures: There is now a pair of "Structure Map Icon Scale" and "Structure Streets Icon Scale" settings under UI scale that allows you to set the desired structure icon sizes in the two screens.
• That Still Counts As One!: If you kill someone via a status effect that will cause them to lose health over time, it now counts as a kill. This helps with "clearing the latter" work via heavy metals injection, but in general will work from many various status effects.
• Mangled Range: Fixed a minor bug where if there was a range that was supposed to show for the stats for a unit type's stats in the sidebar tooltip, then it was instead saying the name of the data field in the first field, rather than the lower bound of what the stat can be.
• Leftover Icon: Fixed an issue that was causing "hide high altitude military transports" and the same for "hide economic transports" to not hide the icons of those units in the forces lens and other lenses. This is not a new regression, but something that has been around since the addition of that feature to hide them, looks like. [/expand]Full notes here.

What's New In 1.0

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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

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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.