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

0.507

(Not Yet Released)

• 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.

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