Update 84: War And Danger

Lots of updates in this one! The big ones are higher performance during war, and proper music during danger. That said, there's a lot of good stuff in here.

It's been a hot minute since the last update, but I've been working steadily on a variety of things. You're seeing some of that here, but other pieces are not quite ready to announce yet.

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 84 Changelog

Balance

• Sneaky Humanses: A new Elusive perk is on a variety of rare rebels, parkour bears, citizen advocates, and Vorsiber soldiers. This keeps them from being pinned down by suppressing fire.
• TODO_PREFIX: You can now do multiple investigations/infiltrations at once, but simply not multiple of the same type. So you can't do two of the prison break at once, but you can do the prison break and something else, now.

Quality Of Life

• Parallel Thinking: The game now makes it far more obvious when feral animals are being targeted within your view. This makes it much easier to rescue them, or to realize that someone is being a huge jerk and needs to get removed.
• Searching In French: The game now supports text-folding for ligatures and diacritic marks in latin-style alphabets, so that if you're searching for things in german or french, you'll get better results if you are missing or have added an extra mark compared to what you were trying to find.
• Faster Bullets At High Distances: Shots that are fired at distances above a certain range now move more quickly, making it so that when you have snipers firing at background attackers that are far away every turn, it no longer slows down the turn change waiting on those shots to hit. They now tend to arrive 2.5x faster, roughly, depending on exactly what your upgrades, etc, are.
• Rotation During Placement: You can now rotate vehicles and mechs with the Z and C keys like you would rotate bulk units.

Performance

• War Popup Performance: Damage popups and similar are drawn in a completely new way using icons-only and some numbers based on icon-style kerning instead of a full TextMeshPro set of text. The efficiency gains are gigantic in large battles, or when a lot of your stuff is being revealed, etc. This was one of the chief things that was slowing down between-turn framerates, and now it's drawn in a more efficient way while still looking very close to what it was before (a few more things became iconic rather than textual, but that actually helps visual clutter anyhow).

Bugfixes

• Trees No Longer Hide From Dragons: Fixed a confusing issue where liquid metal dragons would cause trees to cower in fear and disappear under them just from them flying over.
• Residents Of Buildings Now Only Die Once: Fixed a bug where residents of buildings would die twice, or move-out twice. This is likely to affect balance all over the place, from tearing down the slums to grabbing people from tents. On average, it was somewhere between 1-2x overblown, but not in a deterministic or constant way. This has been the case since the game ever existed, so it affects essentially everything ever done.
• Danger Music Now Plays When It Should: Fixed an issue where there were various places that were supposed to play "danger" music rather than "war" music during investigations or infiltrations, but it was playing "war" instead. This should provide more musical variety in general.
• Flesh Wounds No Longer Escalate To Combat Kills When Enemies Flee: Fixed several kinds of issues where if you shot people a little bit, but didn't kill anyone, any then caused them to run away by draining their morale, they would count as kills. In practice this was a really narrow thing, since usually you're facing a squad and somebody dies when "shot a little bit," but in the rare cases where that was not the case, it no longer penalizes you for mixing physical and morale attacks.
• Shots Are No Longer Able To Circle Targets At Low Framerates: During long frames (from a background hitch or otherwise), some shots have always been able to go further than they were supposed to, especially homing shots. That was mitigated in the past by making it so that they just go to their final destination after a few seconds, but that could still lead to long turn-change animations sometimes. This was most notable at low framerates. The game now accounts for this properly, and these behave the same at any framerate.
• Units Are No Longer Wary Of Dragons: Fixed a longstanding issue where if you were trying to deploy androids under dragons, it would block them from being placed there.
• Dragons No Longer Have Mole-People Friends: Fixed a less-longstanding issue with the attacks against and from dragons coming from the ground rather than their center of mass, and their health bars and such also being incorrectly offset downwards.

New Mod: Uncapped Health Bars

• If You Like Your Screen Covered In Health Bars: Added a new "Uncapped Health Bars" mod: Removes the cap on how many stacked rows a health bar may use, and restores the older, smaller health-per-pip values on Extreme and Misery difficulty. Health bars again show their full detail (one pip per smaller chunk of health, with as many rows as needed) instead of being compressed to fit a few rows. [/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/games/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.