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

0.518

(Not Yet Released)

• Fixed another random ContinueToNextWaypointEarly exception.

0.517 Thursday Tester Wave

(Released May 23rd, 2024)

• Fixed another occasional exception that could happen in the background vehicle movement logic. Harmless, but in the way.

• Hardened RecalculateSubCells against a very random exception I encountered.

• The "use the city map" notification now comes up after you do a single investigative click, rather than after two.
  • It's possible for the first click to clear all the buildings you can easily see, and without the information to go to the map, some folks can wind up lost if they're not used to the flow of zooming out to look around.
  • Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting.

• Buttons throughout the general interfaces of the game are now easier to see. It's perhaps most important on the loadout screen, but it applies to most screens in general.
  • They now have a visible border, and are darker, and there's a light bit of animation to their edges. This makes it clearer that there even IS a button.
  • Thanks to Strategic Sage for suggesting.

• During the "spread to four androids" part of the prologue, it now has a "you must adjust the zoom" handbook entry that comes up in a non-optional way.
  • This basically establishes the idea of zooming in and out for those who would not find that to be their first instinct. And then it remains a part of the handbook in general after that.
  • Thanks to Strategic Sage for suggesting.

• The game now has new mid-importance handbook entries about Mental Energy Vs AP, and how to use that; and then about Sprinting, and how that relates to both of the above.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for the questions that led to these.

• When you are trying to move a unit to a restricted area they lack clearance for, it now clearly states that this is why they cannot move there in the tooltip by your mouse cursor.
  • It also has more detailed information about what this is and how to handle it if you hold shift.
  • The very first time you encounter this, after the initial combat at least, it also has a mid-visibility handbook entry that unlocks, but does not block your view.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for the questions that led to this.

• The Android Chamber project was stating outdated instructions that you needed to build a hidden room before installing the chamber, which was very confusing.
  • Now it properly specifies how to build the chambers in a single step.
  • Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting.

• The construction tooltip for embedded structures now specifies clearly that you'll be building inside of a highlighted human building.
  • Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting.

• When you are in build mode for an embedded structure, but you're not hovering over any valid building, it now has a message next to the mouse cursor telling you to click on one of the highlighted buildings.
  • Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting.

• Prevented one issue from territory control flags potentially creating a duplicate territory control option if they were destroyed and then scrapped.
  • Not a sequence meant to happen.

• Prevented territory control flags from being destroyed in general, unless you explicitly scrap them.
  • The only way this could happen was because of splash damage from enemies hitting them, but if it happened enough, it could happen.

0.516 Attack Plan

(Released May 22nd, 2024)

• For various abilities that must be used at a building, it now specifies in the tooltip what that means, to save on confusion.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where the required deterrence at territory control flags was not labeled in a sensible way in its tooltip.
  • Thanks to Trogg for reporting.

• The required deterrence on flags has a completely different explanation that is more clear and to the point.
  • Thanks to Mac for helping with the wording, and to c67f for reporting what some of the points of confusion were.

• If you have less than 20% deterrence at a territory control site, it no longer lets you activate the flag, and on the turn-change it will deactivate the flag if it's already active.
  • Thanks to relmz32 for helping me work though this one.

• The camera is now more deliberate about making only one movement (usually) when focusing on an npc that is moving.
  • Before, if the camera moved to an npc that was going to move, then it would move to their starting spot, and then they would move over 1 second, and then the camera would move again. Now it moves to their destination spot right off.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for reporting the discomfort.

• The auto-gather stances have been removed from the game.
  • This also means that the "mass auto-gather" and "mass wake up" features have been removed.
  • To be honest, those were an accidental trap for players that could lead to all sorts of circumstances, and also an inferior version of another feature that's right next to them.
  • There is already a "go to next turn" feature that unlocks at the same time that these mass wake/sleep commands do, and it has none of the downsides of accidentally pressing a button to do one thing (select the next unit) and doing something else (go to next turn despite plenty of mental energy, since all your units are asleep). Skipping to the next turn is still a single button press or click (0 key is the default hotkey) when you have extra mental energy left over, and all of the auto-gathering still happens.
  • In short, this removes the trap-for-players, still has equal functionality, and actually involves fewer clicks than before.
  • Thanks to Shadow for the initial report, and then further discussion with Mintdragon, NullDragon, Tiberiumkyle, Cyborg, and Pizza.

• Added a new "Eliminate Enemies Left Behind" part to the handbook, which is unlocked at the same time as "Not All Enemies Go Away After Combat"
  • Thanks to Cyborg for the questions.

• Fixed a bug where the actual slot counts of at least some vehicles were not being properly honored. This would let you put units in a cutter, which has no seats at all, and then you could never get them out again.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• When not all NPC units have acted yet, if the player is on their own units somehow, it now shows a more detailed message that includes information about how to make the NPCs act.
  • Normally, as soon as you end turn, it will select the first NPC unit and they will act. The only way to cause this situation is if, instead of using the spacebar, you manually move over to one of your units and click them.
  • The goal is that if someone does this because they are worried about spacebar in some way ending their turn unfairly, they will see this and realize that's not a concern.
  • I felt like it was particularly important to remove the trap of mass-automated units (in favor of the 0 key) so that this statement can be fully true.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for reporting.

• The tutorial checklist item for building a private bunker now includes this additional text:
  • You can build the bunker at any highlighted building; if no buildings are highlighted near you, then scroll around to find some. All of the highlighted spots are good quality. You may wish to gather your androids near the chosen spot before building there.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug with very wide job or network range circles not being drawn if the actual source of the circle was being frustum culled. Now it still draws those if the source is selected.
  • Thanks to Bossman for reporting.

• Added in some extra protections against two background per-second threads running at once, since that seemed to have been the source of a few issues that at least one person was running into, even though that shouldn't be possible. But, stranger things have happened.
  • In addition to that, added extra checks so that if a single per-second thread takes more than 20 seconds, it will show an error every 20 seconds, rather than waiting a full 5 minutes after there's a problem.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for both reports.

• Fixed all of the cases I could find where new npc foot units would spawn in the wasteland out-of-bounds area at the edge of the city.
  • The only things that should be seeding out there at the moment are the regional and international transports.
  • Thanks to Leximancer and mblazewicz for reporting.

• For player units that have incoming damage (but not structures or bulk units yet), there is now a new "incoming damage percentage" meter that appears above them, showing what percentage damage they will take.
  • I had been very distracted trying to overlay that on the health bars, which wouldn't work well for that and are deeply difficult to handle that way with the way I handle instance batching. But this solution was staring me in the face. It makes a big difference when you're shooting at enemies and seeing the incoming damage to your unit go down as their health drops -- I wonder how many players didn't even notice that enemy squads to less outgoing damage when their members die? It wasn't obvious before.
  • Thanks to lordtrogg for suggesting this, and then the discussion about it.

Enemy Attack Plans

• The game now gives an alert summary when you have attacks incoming against any of your stuff, up in the checklist area.
  • In this checklist, it shows the list of the units or structures (up to 30, anyway), and what percentage health is going to be removed via the attack.
  • By clicking this alert, it cycles you through the various items of yours that are in danger in this way.
  • This tooltip also has some information that basically lets you know that the attacks are deterministic, and what triggers an attack plan change, and also the thematic underpinnings of that.
  • With this information, the outcome of the next flurry of NPC actions is not going to be a surprise, which is the idea. You know these things in advance, but your ability to affect the outcome of what you know dwindles as your mental energy gets lower over the turn.
  • Thanks to Cyborg and Leximancer for originally bringing this up, and lordtrogg, ptarth, and Tiberiumkyle for further discussion of it.

0.515 Hotfix

(Released May 22nd, 2024)

• The project related to armor-piercing rounds was utterly broken in the prior build, apologies. It needed to be completely reworked in general, as it had a lot of wrong stuff in it relating to mechanics that have been improved today.
  • This project now asks you to build a stack of x3 armor piercing rounds, and points out how beneficial this is. This is really key information for the player at this early stage, so I had wanted to get that in there in general. Works out in the end.
  • Thanks to Pizza for the report!

0.514 Consumable Flow

(Released May 22nd, 2024)

• The Cold Blood action now has more text that clarifies what is going on with you getting mental energy, and makes it more disturbing in a mild way.
  • Thanks to LilLillyFox for reporting the lack of clarity on what was happening.

• In map mode, there is now a big golden network symbol that always shows above your network tower, no matter what else you have going on with your view. That way you can always find your home, and can orient.
  • Thanks to Draco18s in particular for the suggestion, but also other folks who mentioned confusion.

• Added one more mid-visibility handbook entry that talks about navigating the city and how you will always be a bit lost by design, but reminds you that where you construct things, you have orienting landmarks.
  • Thanks to several people for asking about further orientation, including things like a minimap, which would reduce the disorientation of the wider city in a way that is thematically opposite of what I'm going for. Now the game itself actually properly explains that, hopefully with enough clarity while still being thematic.

• Fixed a spot that said clock here rather than click here.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed a missing localization key related to getting units into vehicles.
  • Thanks to Bossman for reporting.

• All of the various forms of mech rockets and lasers and such should behave more now.
  • They may do some fancy loops briefly, but then they beeline for your unit. And in other cases, no loops happen at all. All of their munitions actually explode at the target, rather than sometimes on the ground.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the most recent report.

• When you switch between the map mode and the regular streets view, it now immediately syncs the position of your views.
  • I was going to make this an option, but it feels so much better this way that I'm just going to make it how it works.
  • A bunch of people had been asking for this, but in particular thanks to Leximancer and Lailah for bringing it up.

• Investigations that are invasive and which will cause enemies to appear regardless of security clearance now tell you exactly that.
  • Apologies for forgetting who exactly asked about this. There were at least two people.

Subnet Vision Rework

• Scanning improvements:
  • The old and confusing way that subnets would grant scanner range has been removed.
  • Buildings previously all provide a small amount of invisible npc revealing capability around themselves, but that also has been removed.
  • The wording of the tooltip on the Scan data point has been improved a lot in clarity.
  • Network towers (not relays, though!) now provide scan range and npc revealing power.
  • A new Scanner job type has now been added, which provides scanning and npc revealing.
  • Thanks to Mac and ptarth for the initial reports on this.

Consumables Overhaul

• The new system for consumables and bulk androids is now in place, where you simply pay for them on-demand when you are going to use them.
  • This is handled at events, and in the items footer, and so on.
  • This has put NanoSeed back into being a resource rather than a consumable, as a small aside.
  • This is fully compatible with prior savegames, but whatever you had spent on making consumables or bulk androids that you had stored will just be gone. It's not that much expense in a lot of the cases, anyway.
  • What I have not yet done is set up some of the intermediate resources, so that's coming next.
  • This also entirely removes the (very confusing) storage space upgrade caps for both consumables and bulk androids.
  • Consumables still have a separate inventory section, just so that you can see what's going on with possibilities of them and browse them, but it has no creation functionality anymore.
    • Bulk Androids do NOT have a section in the inventory at all, because there are fewer of them and if you want to browse them, then that's something you can do in command mode much more easily.
  • To be clear, this also means that there are no generalized cooldowns after you deploy bulk androids or use consumables.
  • Big thanks to :[þs\)\?] for kicking off the discussion, and then lordtrogg, ptarth, and LilLillyFox for helping figure out a solution. And another thanks to Draco18s and many others who reported who stuck they were at the water mission because of the consumables.

• Deploying a bulk android now costs 6 mental energy to do, rather than one.
  • This makes it much harder to use them in a rapid-fire reactionary way, which is not what they're for. But it's not that much of a barrier when you're placing them defensively in advance.
  • Bear in mind that at the end of chapter one, and then into chapter two, you're going to be getting more mental energy per turn.

• Bulk Android Frame Kits, and Drone Frames, are two new resources which are used for those two types of bulk units, respectively.
  • There are also new production facilities in the form of the Bulk Android Prep Center and the Drone Factory. These increase the cap of what you can keep on hand, as well as actually producing these parts.

0.513 Electric Handbook

(Released May 21st, 2024)

• The tooltips for repair spiders and contraband jammers are now vastly more clear, and also give a bit of a hint of how to build off the existing subnets you have.
  • Thanks to Cortexion and lordtrogg for reporting the confusion here.

• Fixed a splice of two sentences that was in place in the optical processing mod.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for reporting.

• Improved the additional CPU description to better point out what it's good for, and also to suggest stacking multiple of those in a single android.

• Fixed a regression from about a week ago where network towers that are destroyed would leave the underlying building in place, while deleting it as a structure.
  • Thanks to KillerFrogs for the initial report, and relmz32 for the repro save.

• About three seconds after loading into a savegame that has extra network towers that are not actually functional network towers, those will all burn away.

• NPC units are now forbidden from attacking your network tower... until a certain internal flag is tripped.
  • That flag is not tripped during any of the current content, and it would not make sense for it to be. I'm just noting that this isn't blanket forever-immunity.
  • There's a solid lore reason for the tower to not be attacked, and also mechanical reasons like certain death-loops you can get into.
  • The lore reasons will be made a part of the game shortly.
  • Thanks to Draco18s and Leximancer for the acute reports about particular pain here.

• Mech Factories have been properly renamed to Mech Parts Factories, and their descriptions have been updated as well.

• Adjusted the color of when investigators are investigating a crime to be the same teal color as their normal magnifying glass, rather than shifting to purple. This was needlessly confusing.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for reporting.

• The default autosave interval is now every 3 turns rather than every 10. This will apply for new players, but not retroactively change anything for existing ones.
  • Thanks to relmz32 for suggesting.

• The number of autosaves kept before pruning in a profile is now 60, rather than 30.

• A large new mid-visiblity handbook entry type is now in place, and basically is able to trigger with a new kind of notice for you when a batch of these appear.
  • They can then be read or ignored, and it tells you about them from the checklist area.

• Added a whopping 15 new mid-visibility handbook entries that explain a wide variety of topics, and which unlock contextually as you go through the game.
  • In your existing savegames, a bunch of them will unlock at once, most likely.
  • Big thanks to ptarth for suggesting most of these, and doing the first writing pass on a bunch of them. Also thanks to Cyborg, Draco18s, and :[þs\)\?] for other questions that are now answered here.

• The number of valid spots to place a starting network tower / bunker is now dramatically reduced.
  • Basically, it sorts out anything directly next to something very scary, things too close to the edge of the map, and things that are not adjacent to enough good other space.
  • This makes it so that any of the (many, many) valid options for a starting network location are now much higher-quality for players, so they can spend less time searching around for that at the end of the prologue.
  • Most of this logic was already in place for the auto-placed tower if you skipped the prologue, but a few enhancements have also been added in.
  • Thanks to ptarth and crazykid080 for reporting the angst here.

• Added in a new explanation (mandatory viewing) handbook entry about how networks are never cramped since you can always use relays to expand outwards.
  • A number of people were not realizing that relays were a thing, and were thus acting like they were trapped in a corner when really they had the whole map to use.
  • Thanks to Mateusz Błażewicz for the most direct report.

• Also added in the restriction for network towers beyond the first, to ensure that they are never placed too close to each other. Not that you can do that in the game yet, but it had been on my backlog forever, and the code was right there.

• Added another four handbook entries.
  • These explain why your tower isn't attacked, why your buildings are, what the deal is with persistent aggro of enemies after combat, and the casual relationship between your androids doing an away mission and those units then wanting to attack your stuff.
  • Thanks to Draco18s for the originally flurry of questions around all this, and also :[þs\)\?] and several others.

• Prevented an exception that could happen when AggregateResidentsAndWorkers was called.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for reporting.

• Jobs all now have a percentage of provided network electricity at which they shut off, or they are noted as having emergency backup power.
  • Brownouts that are mild are still just as mild, but ones that are more serious now start shutting off other structures.
  • This shouldn't affect many situations, at least not in chapter one and prior. But as power needs grow, this is an interesting dynamic. And power doesn't feel fully real without this. It was a thing I just forgot to put in, previously, after originally having it on my list.

• When you are placing buildings, it now states what subnet it will join, in yellow, or if it will be a new subnet, in blue, at the mouse cursor.
  • Thanks to several folks for asking about this sort of thing.

• When you are in build mode, and it's blocked by something, it now specifies what it is blocked by.
  • There was some confusion related to overlapping buildings, and this should solve that.

Chapter One Split

• Chapter One has been renamed to "Tactics" instead of "The Tower."

• A new Chapter Two has been added, and is called "Strategy." The old chapter two is now chapter three.

• When skipping the prologue, chapter one, or chapter two, it now defines a set of upgrades to give you.
  • For the prologue, it's just a single mission reward, so it's no big deal to not have it. But for chapter one, it's a huge amount of stuff.

• The settings option for skipping the prologue has been removed.

• When starting a new profile, there is now a Start Type dropdown, which allows you to choose either the prologue, chapter one, or chapter two to start in.
  • Originally I wanted this to be more hidden, but now I actually have shifted and want the extra visibility so that players quickly understand what is an extended tutorial.
  • Right now it allows you to skip to chapter two, which is basically just an idle city, since that content isn't there yet.
  • It also does NOT allow you to skip to chapter three, but the full game will, later. The demo never will, not that that applies to testers.

• Skipping chapter one now gives you a proper set of upgrades that is kind of my "recommended set" from the various choices in chapter one.
  • If you're thus skipping to chapter two, you don't start out back-footed compared to someone who played through chapter one, in terms of upgrades, anyhow. You still will need to build all your buildings, but not quite as much other stuff.

0.512 Curvature

(Released May 20th, 2024)

• Fixed a bug where the p key, which cycles through all of your units regardless of status, was not actually selecting units after one was selected, but was just moving the camera to the,/
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Added some hardening to prevent errors in StartRoundOfAssignmentsIfNotAlreadyRunning, which was a very funky and rare exception. Not sure exactly how it happened, but it should be stopped from now on.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for reporting.

• There are now small borders around the toast popups, to make it more clear how they are stacking like folios.
  • It might need some tweaking over time, will see. But thanks to the folks who suggested it, whose suggestions I can not currently find for some reason.

• All of the Conflicts data, which was not yet shown in the game, has been commented out in xml.
  • After seeing what testers are enjoying of the game, and how long various things take, I think that this feature that was partly done but not completely done was just going to be seen as un-fun busywork, and also a lot of clutter.
  • In case I am wrong, I'm leaving the code for now, but I don't want the text to accidentally get localized and waste time and money.

• Hardened the MachineAndroid_ActualDestinationIsValid method, but unfortunately did not see where the actual error was in the code. So also instrumented it such that it will be obvious next time this happens. Bit of a good news bad news situation there.
  • If you see the same issue, feel free to reopen the ticket, or make a new one, as it will have the info I need to stomp it out for good.
  • Thanks to bearforceone for reporting.

• When an attack of opportunity is happening, and the shots don't make it to the destination for some reason, the actual after-logic now still happens, rather than stalling the game.
  • This was something I could only replicate at lower framerates than 144fps, but at 30 it happens reliably. Step one was fixing the full-stall, step two is fixing the actual bug in projectile movement.
  • Thanks to KillerFrogs for the save that reproduces it, and Mac and ZeusAlmighty for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where homing shots were being calculated completely wrongly in terms of how their rotation was handled. At very high framerates, this rarely caused an issue. At 60fps, it sometimes did. At 30fps, it always did.
  • Fundamentally, this was because I was using the wrong function, and the effect was like trying to mail a letter with a phone number in the address slot. Good info, but used in a context where it meaningless.
  • Anyway, for all of the homing shots, I had to rework their numbers, so they now look a bit different. If any have trouble getting to their targets, please let me know in another ticket with a save. I've tested the bulk of them in a lot of common circumstances, and they all seem reasonable for now with the new numbers, while looking similar to what they did before.
  • Thanks to KillerFrogs for reporting, and with a repro case for this also. And to ptarth for the first report of this.

• Also made it so that the timeout for shots getting to their destination is now 4 seconds rather than 15. So in the event where something gets really wrong for some reason, it will hang much less long. But you shouldn't be seeing that in general at all, anymore.

• Fixed some inconsistencies in what was considered a combat vehicle, which meant that Foundry and Cutter were not valid for the large bore AP rounds.
  • Thanks to Ant for reporting.

• The old handbook entry that unlocked at the secforce cruiser route about streetsense giving side activities as a key form of difficulty is now gone.
  • The other one that talks about getting some content from street sense is still there.
  • And then the one about difficulty being controlled now talks about contemplation instead, and unlocks after you unlock contemplation.
  • Thanks to KillerFrogs for reporting.

• Structure hidden balance:
  • Relays are now substantially more hidden, since they are weak spots and also it makes sense for them. They also have more contraband scanner resistance.
  • Machine cabinets no longer are hidden at all. That was encouraging self-destructive micro to no end.
  • Fake trees are now much more hidden than before, and a bit more resistant.
  • Storefronts are much more hidden, and a lot more resistant. Ditto hollowed-out buildings.
  • Thanks to Draco18s for reporting issues in this area.

0.511 The Monday Crew

(Released May 20th, 2024)

• 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.

• If you are being super careful and never take any damage to your buildings, then Civil Engineering would never open up, because Repair Spiders never open up.
  • Civil Engineering now opens up when the Aerospace Hangar or Refugee Towers are unlocked, whichever comes first, if not already unlocked.
  • Repair Spiders and such I'm fine with just not happening until the first time you take damage, if you're that careful. But gating civil engineering behind that was a big problem.
  • Thanks to Lailah for reporting.

• Verified that Technicians are indeed providing a massive boost from Structural Engineering. Fully upgraded, and not even with the new smart pistol, they double the speed of construction of a massive structure.

• Fixed a mouse handling bug where if you had a structure selected and clicked into empty space, it would not deselect the structure.

• Toast popups are now accurate on the radial menu about either "click here to open" or "click here to close".
  • Before it said the former always, and was often incorrect.
  • Thanks to ptarth and Mac for reporting the confusion.

• Fixed the issue with a loud noise being made when your unit is in auto-gather mode and being given orders.
  • This was super low priority, but I found it on the way to something else.
  • Thanks to Mac for reporting.

• Dramatically improved the targeting logic of NPCs when they are distracted by aggro, real or service-disruption-caused (aka hackamajig).
  • The first part of this was changing how they search for targets, and making sure that for any units mutually within range, it only cares about aggro and not range for target chasing. This is a more minor bit of things, but it keeps them shadowing the right units if need be.
  • The second is that, the usual "allowed to fuzz to a random other target" is being removed in the cases where the aggro from the intended target is more than twice the aggro of the possible recipient of fuzzed targeting.
  • Units now behave as I'd expect in the presence of the hackamajig.
  • Thanks to Mac and Ant for the reports.

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