Update 78: Murderous Intent

Another batch of improvements requested by players, including making it harder to kill people without noticing. There are some long-requested bits in here, along with some more-recent things that folks have brought up.

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.

[expand type=details expanded=false]

Update 78 Changelog

Clarity

• Rapid Fire Isn't For Morale: Updated the Rapid Fire feat to note that it only works with physical attacks.
• The Unusual Case Of Needing To End The Turn: The Remote Unit Controller and mech/android/vehicle extenders all now note "Will not apply until you end the turn with enough Compute Time to power it," since it was quite confusing to folks who built them and then didn't see any change.
• No Pilots Were Harmed... Yet: When you are hacking a mech pilot cradle, it now properly says that you will eject the pilot, since trapping them is no longer how it works (for like half a year now).
• Cap Visibility At Last!: The stats increased by bulk unit controllers, and mech/vehicle/android extenders all now show how much will actually be increased by them, and what the current numbers are. Previously that was not shown anywhere in the interface, so it was hard to tell how much they did.
• Finding Those Last Cybercratic Issues Just Got Easier: The way that the tile-level complaints are drawn in CCA is improved a lot so that they now get 3x larger than they used to, when your zoom is above a certain level. This means that they will look cluttered if you are zoomed too far out and have all the complaints showing, but zooming in just a bit solves that. And when there's only one complaint per tile, or just a few complaints left, things are now far easier to find, which is the key case that was missing before.
• Can't Oath A Cutscene: Updated the oath of pacifism to say "Only affects gameplay; has no effect on infiltrations and other dispatches."
• Invisible Attackers Begone: If an economic transport or military transport would be attacking any of your units, then it is not invisible in any of the filter modes, now. That just gets confusing, otherwise.
• This Is The Murderous Intent I Meant: The first time you murder someone (if it's after the prologue, where it's pretty obvious what you're doing), it now has a "First Murder" message that pops up in the task stack, with a "just thought you should know" bit of text. This is one mouse-click to clear away, and is mainly there for players who are trying to be a pacifist so that they know when they murder someone for the first time, in particular if it was an accident.
• This Is The One That Really Bit Attempted Pacifists In The Past: Similarly, the first time you kill someone in combat, it makes a note of that in the task stack in the same way, but also notes that this is not something to worry about and is hard to avoid in the city. This is there primarily to help players who are in fact trying for a full pacifist run, but wound up killing someone in combat by mistake -- humans are so fragile, after all.

Balance

• Conservation Of Action Points: Rapid Fire no longer overkills enemies, thus wasting your action points. It now caps on however many action points are needed to actually kill the target.
• Conservation Of Nonlethal Intent: If your current form of non-lethal attack would do nothing, then it no longer just switches to lethal attacks. It now says that your current mode of non-lethal attack won't work against the target, and prevents you from accidentally getting a combat kill.
• Pay Me, Subjects!: Fixed an issue where during the cyberocracy, your income from mind farms was being cut off. That was an unintended change on my part when CCA was added.
• We're Gonna Need A Bigger Factory: Added a new VR Cradle Megaplant that is automatically unlocked in non-Tartarus CCA routes. This allows you to build way more VR Cradles very quickly, rather than having to essentially be unable to fill the capacity your arcologies require.
• No More Free Compute-Lunches: Fixed a bug in jobs that was causing shortages of compute time or electricity to not disable their functions. This was making it so that if you were short on compute time, you could still have the benefits of a bulk unit controller or similar. This has been in place for a really long time, so I'm marking it as a balance change.
• Bulk Systems Damage Growth: Bulk units another squads now get multiplied systems damage stats to match their attack power and morale-damage types. It was an oversight on my part that these were not this way previously.

Bugfixes

• Accidental Movement Fix: If you have a mech in movement-locked mode, it no longer can board vehicles.
• Let's Not Slate Our First Units For Instant Death: Fixed an issue where in a new timeline, if you were doing any version other than the full-prologue start, it had a possibility of spawning your starting units in a restricted area by mistake.
• That Murder Was A Technicality!: Fixed an issue where LOX Bunkers blowing up due to being nuked by an enemy could wind up being attributed as you intentionally murdering someone.
• Show Me All Enemy Warnings: Fixed an issue where units disembarking from a vehicle would not give the proper will-be-targeted attack warnings in all cases.
• The Return Of Tooltip Shadows: Fixed a guid mismatch issue that had caused the shadows under tooltips to stop rendering. This affects only tooltips over certain uis, but it makes them a lot easier to visually parse your view, even if it's not something you consciously notice. This was a regression in update 76.
• The Return Of The Level Editor: Fixed four separate bugs with the level editor since the change to the new input system in update 76. That now works again.
• No More Spurious Thread Warnings: Some updates to the threading model to fix something that I had seen in AI War 2 initially, where threads that were killed on purpose could wrongly report that they were overrunning their allocated time.
• Attempted Fix For M-Series Macs: On metal (OSX), it no longer renders the blur effect behind windows that would get that. This is a temporary workaround to try to resolve an issue on M-series silicon macs that does not exist on intel macs. It's possible this will do nothing, but it will give more data, at least. At the moment I've been a bit limited, because I don't have an M-series mac to test with. I've ordered a used one to test with, and it should be here tomorrow, so whether this works or not, I'll be able to get the blur back on macs and get things functioning properly, either way. I've been only testing on an older intel mac, and that one doesn't have any issues that the M-series ones do. [/expand]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.