HotM: After The Transformation

Reporting Bugs

• Any bugs or requests should go to our mantis bugtracker
  • If you need to submit log files, those can generally be found under your PlayerData/Logs folder in the folder your game is installed in. The most relevant one is called HeartoftheMachineLog.txt. You can send us the whole thing, or just strip out relevant parts.
  • In rare cases, mainly if your entire game crashes (that almost never happens), we will need your unity player log. That gets overwritten the next time you run the game after a crash, unlike the other log. These can be found here:
    • Windows: C:\Users\username\AppData\LocalLow\Arcen Games, LLC\Heart of the Machine\Player.log
    • macOS: ~/Library/Logs/Arcen Games, LLC/Heart of the Machine/Player.log
    • Linux: ~/.config/unity3d/Arcen Games, LLC/Heart of the Machine/Player.log

0.511

(Not Yet Released)

• Added new autosave options for every turn, and every 3 turns.
  • If you had changed away from the default of 10 turns in a prior version of the game, it will reset that setting to the default, which is still 10 turns.
  • Thanks to Lailah for suggesting.

• Fixed a regression from the prior two builds where if you did not already have a unit selected, and you tried to left-click a unit or structure in the streets view, it would not select them.
  • Thanks to Lailah, Trogg, and ArnaudB for reporting

• The colliders for clicking on units, vehicles, npcs, etc, now are able to be customized with a multiplier in the xml, and I have now adjusted almost all of them.
  • There is not an in-game setting for this to customize this per player, and hopefully there will not need to be.
  • It was too easy to miss clicking on units that are human-sized in particular, and they now have collision areas that are 3x larger than before.
  • If this later needs to adjust by distance from the camera or something, I could also make an adjustment along those lines, but I started with simpler. Seems to handle all of the main uncomfortable cases for me at the moment.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• When a message is blocking your ability to give orders to units, it now states this by the mouse cursor.
  • This in particular makes the flow of hovering over the water plant investigation the first time not an exercise in frustration.

• "Bovine Tissue Per Bovine Tissue" is now "Bovine Tissue Consumed Per New Bovine Tissue"
  • Thanks to Trogg for reporting the confusion.

• When you use the spacebar to go to another one of your units (or click the center of the radial menu), it now closes build mode or command mode.
  • If spacebar is just going to the next turn, looking at NPCs, or opening/closing notifications, it will not mess with your mode.
  • Thanks to Lailah and Trogg for reporting.

• Certain actions-over-time from investigations cannot be canceled anymore, based on a flag on their xml.
  • This applies to the three location investigations in chapter one, as canceling rapidly would give you nonsensical advice about failing, without actually losing a unit.
  • Whether this is used on future investigations of that general style will be based on if it would be confusing or not.

• Fixed a further bug with demanding the weapons from gangs. This time it was actually bricking the project, yikes.
  • Thanks to Lailah for reporting.

• Updated the mouse handling again, so that now if you are hovered over a valid target, and you are in command mode or using an item, then clicking left or right mouse button will now use that action.
  • If you're hovering over no target, then the left mouse button will continue to operate as a select function.
  • Hopefully this handles all of the cases where things were confusing about the new control scheme, but if new ones come up then please either reopen this ticket or start a new one.
  • Thanks to Trogg for reporting.

• The parasitic power techs are now gated until you plant your first territory control flag.
  • These come with a message from your future self about what a terrible idea they are, and how dangerous, and that you should keep an eye out for other power generation methods.
  • Thanks to all of the Saturday testers who build parasitics too early and got really bad constant invasions because of it. It completely colored the impression of how game mechanics are supposed to go for people who took that option early.

• Added a new Smart Pistol piece of equipment.
  • This is now automatically unlocked for research as soon as you get the pulse revolver (and yes, it does back-date that for existing saves. That sort of thing always will.)
  • It's not very powerful, but it provides some interesting new configuration options.
  • Thanks to lordtrogg and Ant for suggesting having more weapons earlier.

• Added a new collection of "can use light firearms," which is the same set of units that can also use rifles.

• There is a new TS-11 shotgun variant, which is half the firepower of the TS-29, but has some extra range bonuses, and which can also be used by this wider group of androids.
  • With that in place, you can now actually give your nickelbots shotguns, which is a nice alternative to the Achilles.
  • You get this as soon as you get the regular shotgun.

• As an aside, by doubling up on smart pistols and extra cpus, you can actually make your CombatUnits smart enough to do investigations that previously only technicians could do. This gives a notably different build very early on for CombatUnits, which is great.

• A bunch of new tooltip info during the first turn locked-movement portion of the game is now in there.
  • It lets you know basically all the things that people seemed to be confused about during that period.
  • Thanks to a wide variety of testers for inspiring these changes.

• Fixed a regression from a week or so ago where the job stats were not properly displayed on the actual structures once constructed. It was literally a != rather than an ==.
  • Thanks to Trogg and Ant for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the data on the loadout screen would be completely wrong if you made changes and then canceled out, and opened it back up again to the same unit, on the same turn.
  • Thanks to Trogg for reporting.

• With the equipment screen, if you explicitly click the cancel button, then it cancels whatever you had in progress changes-wise.
  • However, if you switch units, right-click to close, x-key to close, or similar, it will commit any changes you had in progress.
  • There may need to become a toggle about something with this, but on reflection I think this will be the better choice for most people, almost all of the time.
  • Thanks to Trogg for suggesting.

• Hardened the project tooltip writer so that if it has an exception, it will be more isolated and it will tell me exactly where the problem is.
  • Then found and fixed the really stupid error that was invisible in code until then, but which was causing an exception when browsing the project list.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

0.510 Death And Knowledge

(Released May 19th, 2024)

• Both regular androids and bulk androids now interact with territory control flags properly, instead of trying to climb on them.
  • This also makes the ability to click the flags more obvious in more contexts.
  • Thanks to Rhys H for the report.

• Androids and similar can no longer climb up high objects that are not buildings, which included things like POI status indicators.
  • The androids are now just directed to the appropriate ground-level spot.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The Manufacture Armor-Piercing Rounds now tells you all three ways to get into the inventory. It's not super important before then, but it's definitely important then.
  • Thanks to crossbowman5 and CRCGamer for reporting.

• There is now a dedicated button for the inventory in the top right header bar, because so many people were finding this confusing, and it's such a central part of the game.

• Added a new message from your future self, which triggers right before you get into the water purification plant battle, and warns you of your technician's upcoming death.
  • Generally should defuse the surprise and frustration of that moment, or at least help a lot.
  • Big thanks to relmz32 for not only the report of frustration, but also some of the wording.

• In the prior build, there was a regression that prevented you from selecting units on the city map at all, or giving them orders.
  • That is fixed, but also it now works even better than it used to. Even in cases where a unit has no AP or you have no mental energy, for example, it now shows the range rings while the unit is selected, which makes it a lot more clear which unit is selected.
  • Thanks to Ant and lordtrogg for reporting.

0.509 Controls And Visibility

(Released May 19th, 2024)

Mouse Controls

• The entire control scheme for mouse clicks has been adjusted to be more like AI War 2 and other modern RTS games.
  • You now left-click to select things, and right-click to give orders. Sorry about you having to re-learn whatever new muscle memory you have; it's taking me a bit to adjust as well, but it's much more consistent with what I'd expect from this sort of game. Was a complete blind spot for me, but a bunch of testers brought up aspects of this.
  • Command mode mostly now uses the right-click to order your units about, which I think is what you'd expect, and is consistent with the rest of the game.
  • Build mode, however, mostly uses left-click, because that's again consistent with build mode in RTSes.
    • On these last two issues, if there is confusion caused by this, please do bring it up.
  • Thanks to Mac, Lailah, and a few others for bringing this up (I apologize I can't keep track of all the people when it's on discord).

• The left mouse button is now used for rotations, instead of the right mouse button.
  • You can also use the R key or middle mouse button. But this is the keybind that is called out in the controls tooltip.
  • The idea here is that since left mouse clicks are now selection, there is no longer a risk of accidentally giving orders by doing short-rotations with the right-mouse-button. If someone makes very rapid mouse flicks while using the mouse button in this way, it will register as a proper click rather than a click and hold. We're talking about well under a half a second here, and I haven't had it happen to me by accident, but I'm sure it would at some point. Losing an AP and mental energy over that mistake is a lot worst than just selecting the wrong thing, hence the change.
  • This is a freely bindable key in the interface, unlike the other functions of the left and right mouse buttons, so if this is not to taste, it can be rebound.

• When in the city map, left clicking anywhere idle now immediately moves your mouse view into the streets view.
  • Previously you had to hold the inspect modifier, which was needlessly confusing.
  • Thanks to several people for mentioning this.

• The forces sidebar selection now works differently in general.
  • No matter the rest of the context, left-clicking selects the unit but does not move the camera.
  • Again no matter the rest of the context, right-clicking focuses the camera on the unit, but does not alter your selection.
  • The tooltip there now informs you of that, as well.
  • This solves several disparate use cases people had for this window.
  • Thanks to Mac and Lailah for related reports.

• When cycling through things like the list of NPCs who want to speak with you, if you had a unit of your own selected, it now keeps that unit selected (bulk androids aside).
  • It still focuses on the speakers, but does not select them unless you had nothing or not-a-unit-of-yours selected.
  • Thanks to Lailah for suggesting.

• Mode exit improvements:
  • When you are in command mode and select a unit that is not related to the specific kind of action you're doing (like load or unload, or set stance, etc), then it now selects those units takes you out of command mode.
  • When you're in build mode, and you select any unit at all, then that takes you out of build mode.
  • In both of these modes, selecting structures does not take you out of the mode.
  • Also in both of these modes, if you select a unit (not just move the camera to them!) using the forces sidebar, it now takes you out of the mode.
  • Thanks to Lailah for the detailed suggestions, and Mac for backing her up.

• Units can once again directly board vehicles, just by hovering over them and now right-clicking.
  • I removed this on May 1st because I was improving how unit selection worked in general.
  • Now that we have the whole revised mouse handling scheme, this sort of loading is once again possible without losing any flexibility.
  • Big thanks to LilLillyFox in particular for requesting.

Everything Else

• Fixed a bug with trying to start actions over time throwing an exception if you were out of AP on that actor.
  • I believe that it was legitimately a case where it was saying that you should not be able to do that. There's a slight chance that if you have only 1 AP on a unit and try to investigate a spot that it will think you don't have enough AP or something. If people see that, please let me know. From the code I don't think that's what is going on, though.
  • Thanks to Lilly and Rhys H for the report.

• Fixed a further bug where if you were on your last AP and tried to start an investigation at a spot, it would fail. Before it was giving an exception, but in the next build it was set to just do nothing. Now it actually works.
  • Thanks to Rhys H for the additional save for testing this out.

• Fixed a bug where asking for the Gang's weapon would not properly count towards your progression if you were successful.
  • Thanks to Lailah for reporting.

• The effectiveness of structural engineering at whatever your current level of engineering skill is for a unit is now 4X stronger.
  • Let me know if this still seems to do too little with the really large structures.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• The Flying Factories text is now way more explicit about where to build the foundry.
  • Thanks to ptarth and LilLillyFox for reporting.

• Both the mental energy and AP tooltips now explain that the default cost is 1 AP and 1 Mental Energy for unit actions, and that divergences will be explicitly noted.
  • Thanks to Evil Bistro for suggesting.

• Fixed a remaining issue with the Improved Apartments where the percentage was calculating as if it needed more than it did on the first option.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Unit visibility is dramatically better for player units, which were the only ones easy to lose.
  • Several people mentioned this, and in truth I was also having this trouble, but ignoring the feeling and just playing past it. Always a bad idea as a designer, but it happens to all of us at times.
  • At any rate, there's an icon that shows if the unit is ready to act, or out of AP, and the color of the selected-unit gimbal above their head also now reflects the same thing.
  • Also, the bulk android stances now always show on both the map and the streets view. No idea what I was thinking with making them not. I was losing those guys even more.
  • Thanks to ptarth, Tiberiumkyle, and a variety of others for mentioning this.

• The forces sidebar now shows how much AP each unit has, and does colorization based on if there is any remaining or not.
  • Thanks to ZeusAlmighty for suggesting.

0.508 No More Spoilage

(Released May 19th, 2024)

• Hardened SeedAtLogic_CalculateDoesBuildingPassLogic against exceptions that could apparently happen, and also added in more instrumentation to narrow it down if it happens again.
  • Thanks to That one Weeb for reporting.

• Fixed some exceptions that could happen in calculating certain data after buildings were destroyed.
  • Also made it so that these will now be more confined if similar bugs happen again, rather than spilling out and causing more problems.
  • Thanks to ZeusAlmighty for reporting.

• In general I have hardened some of the paths that exceptions on the main thread can come from so that you don't get the game not-drawing most of the map when certain error spams happen.
  • This should hopefully also make it more obvious there is an error spam happening at all.

• The spoilage mechanic has been removed entirely. It was way too harsh, and would bite people out of the blue, and in general was a case of stick rather than carrot.
  • The "excess resource" mechanic in general is still there, but you can leave things improperly stored for an indefinite amount of time now.
  • It still warns you about stuff that is improperly stored, but the only consequence of it being that way is that you can in no way use it. It's just basically in boxes sitting around waiting to be put away, which makes sense to me.
  • Thanks to ptarth and Mac and AC for thoughts on this.

• Jobs that are installing SHOULD now cost power, but I have not tested this properly.
  • I also am not sure about structures that are being rebuilt after being destroyed.
  • If anyone has some spare time to test these cases, that would be very useful.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting the unexpected brownouts.

0.507 Balance And Fixes

(Released May 18th, 2024)

• The daily necessities territory control site now provides 18k rather than 12k.
  • This should prevent any possible cases where people get bricked by this.
  • Thanks to ptarth and Crazykid080 for reporting.

• The furniture is now gathered 4x faster than before.
  • This should make it more reasonable when you have so much more housing than I had expected you to have.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• There is now a multiplier to make the contemplation icons much larger than they were before.
  • It's currently set at 3x, which seems to solve a lot of the issue from what I can tell.
  • Thanks to ptarth and CRCGamer for reporting.

• Ability slots without a default ability can now be set to blank abilities properly.
  • If an ability was already there, you can set it to a different ability, but not no ability at all.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The overdrive mechanic (auto-win a skill check in exchange for some mental energy) has been removed.
  • To be honest, I forgot that was in there at all, and the way it worked was really counter to the way the game flows now.
  • It was specifically only coming in when you failed even a partial success, and rewarded a certain kind of high-mental-energy-hoarding style of play.
  • It was really unbalanced, and did not add anything of worth.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reminding me this even existed.

• The header tooltip related to units now shows how many units of each type you have out of the current cap for that type, rather than just how many you have of that type.
  • The caps for unit types were not very visible before this unless you knew where to look.
  • Thanks to Mac for reporting.

• When an upgrade would lead to the same value on a given stat, then it now shows the increase from the same stat to itself.
  • This mainly applies to edge cases like the Achilles with muzzle velocity.
  • I have not tested this, so hopefully it looks right in-game.
  • Thanks to Mac for reporting.

• Repair spiders should no longer affect structures under construction, although I haven't tested that yet.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed an error with the buildings construction tooltips saying left-click to cycle through them, when really it's right-click.
  • Thanks to crazykid080 for reporting.

• Fixed a harmless but alarming error with some background mobs throwing an exception in some rare circumstances.
  • Thanks to Rhys H for reporting.

• The rebel watchdog in the initial combat now will always start vastly closer to the player, thus making it not so confusing to find them.
  • Thanks to Mac and others for reporting.

• Bumped down the display of tooltips relative to the mouse cursor a bit, so that in general you can see things next to them a bit better, and in particular if they get shoved to the side because of hitting the side of the screen, they no longer overlap what you're looking at in the same way.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• When mousing over sliders in the settings menu, it now bumps the tooltips lower so that you can see the actual value of the setting you are adjusting.
  • I forget who reported this, thank you though.

• Fixed an issue where certain kinds of "clamp to the right of a thing" could wind up pushing tooltips off the right side of the screen on certain screen resolutions.
  • It now makes sure never to do that.
  • Thanks to Mac for reporting.

• The amount of elemental slurry generated, and the amount of microbuilders generated, have been close to doubled.
  • Hopefully this seems more appropriate, balance-wise. I was being too stingy with these for sure.
  • Thanks to ptarth and Mac for reporting.

• During the prologue initial fight when your movement is locked, it now tells you that free movement is locked for tutorial purposes, since this was confusing everyone.
  • This should make it really clear what is going on, so that then also when that disappears, you realize you now have full movement.
  • Thanks to crazykid080 , crossbowman5, CRCGamer, and others for reporting the intense confusion.

0.506 More Fixes

(Released May 18th, 2024)

• Added a new flag on npc unit stances that prevents the player from having to watch them even if the "Watch Low-Priority NPC Actions" setting is turned on.
  • This is used solely for the transports and haulers of various sorts, and then some of the gathering actions, because those are just way too much clicking-through that is not relevant for the player.
  • The other various stances, military and otherwise, should still work as expected when "Watch Low-Priority NPC Actions" is on.
  • And without that setting on, this should have no effect whatsoever.
  • I didn't test this at all, but the code is extremely simple. So let me know if it doesn't work.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed a gnarly bug where if a unit had an amount of an ActorData only from a status (like AP for player units), then saving and loading while that was true would double the amount on load, and then leave that amount as the new default for that unit until the game was then loaded again.
  • Basically I had two-line mistakes with initializing the data to the status value, making it think that was its underlying maximum. This just never came up in my testing.
  • This is automatically correct in existing savegames, since it wasn't actually bad data, it was bad application of good data, on load of saves in that specific context.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Improved the info on the scan range tooltip to mention about interacting with things out of range.

• Corrected the attack range tooltip to actually have info about the attack range, rather than being a duplicate of the scan range.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Added in a ton more hardening of the code around investigations and abilities. I can't duplicate the current exception being reported, but based on the provided stack traces, this should hopefully solve it.
  • Thanks to That one Weeb for reporting.

• Fixed a regression from last week where I changed how the furniture goal is calculated in the Improved Apartments project, making it so it showed in both options instead of just the second one.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The Zodiac and The End of Time now have to actually be unlocked first, or you have to be in sandbox mode, for the game to allow you to toggle into them.
  • I kept meaning to make this the case and forgot, and then remembered and wondered if anyone would run into it.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

0.505 Investigation Exceptions

(Released May 18th, 2024)

• Added a bunch of extra hardening to the investigations so that they don't cause nullref exceptions after completing in certain fashions. This was kind of a threading issue, sort of.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting the cluster of these that existed.

0.504 Playtest App

(Released May 18th, 2024)

• Updated the game so that it can properly log into steam on the playtest app or demo app.
  • Since changing to Heathen Engineering's version of the steamworks wrapper, away from Facepunch, there were some differences that I didn't appreciate until today. All seems good now.

0.503 The Return Of Testers!

(Released May 18th, 2024)

• Fixed a bug where a structure without a job at it would throw an exception when it took damage.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Hardened the InvestigateSpecificBuilding method so that one error that might have been possible is no longer possible. Not sure if that was the error actually encountered.
  • Also added in more direct instrumentation so that if this happens again, I'll know much more precisely what the problem is.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The rebel you're supposed to find at the start of turn one now has a giant pulsing ring around them, to make them easier to find.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change, but he wasn't the only one who ran into this over the last months.

• The tooltip for finding the rebel now mentions some extra details about the fact that you can interact with things outside of your scan range.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the more specific notes related to this.

• The checklist item related to the slayer ability no longer specifies a specific ability slot, as there are several options depending on what unit types you have, and it was referring to the wrong one for the most-likely case.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The "find more androids" tooltip now mentions explicitly that you probably need to turn the camera to see all your options.
  • Thanks to AC for mentioning this months ago.

• Added a further clarifying note when StreetSense is introduced in the prologue that each individual unit is in it separately, so that players know to turn it on for further android capture if they are running lower on units.
  • The fact that StreetSense is not on by default is important for the flow later in the game, so trying to overcome the speed bump the learning experience for players is my goal instead. Hopefully this is sufficient, but if more people run into the same thing, we'll have to see.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the related report.

0.502 A Year Of Updates

(Released May 17th, 2024)

Literally the entire game has been rebuilt from scratch, in terms of every gameplay system, almost every UI, and even a lot of the graphics. It was tens of thousands of logged changes over the span of a year, so be glad you didn't have to read all those notes.

Prior Release Notes

HotM: Initial Tester Groups