Heart of the Machine (tuxdb.com)

Heart of the Machine Update 12: The Hacking Reformat Arrives

The Machine recalibrates, and this time, the changes hit deep. Hacking now plays faster and more strategicallyTriswarms no longer stall progress, daemons stop shoving each other into lethal chaos, and Run allows for better positioning instead of trapping your shards. When the last hostile daemon falls, objectives clear properly, removing unnecessary steps. Clarity takes priority elsewhere. The Hack Breaker feat now explains its function clearly, AGI Researchers have a defined role, and difficulty settings display more prominently, even across timelines. Meanwhile, bug fixes clean up hacker feats, correct UI spacing, and eliminate a rare but persistent savegame issue. The Machine shifts again, and as always, your feedback decides where it moves next. [quote]A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it. Dune, Frank Herbert[/quote]

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[hr][/hr]The Machine moves forward, but the direction is never predetermined. Every recalibration, every shift, every unexpected consequence comes from the signals you send. Have you seen the difference in hacking? Felt the weight of a well-placed daemon? Noticed the world reacting just a little more sharply to your actions? Let us know! The Machine listens. The question is, what will you tell it?

Update 12 Changelog

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Hacking Improvements

Blocked Cells Reduction: In extreme scenarios, the number of blocked cells has been significantly reduced.
Triswarm Fragments Adjustment: These now cannot move until the turn after they are spawned and only get one move before they expire, removing the tedium of them.
Daemon Behavior Fix: Daemons can no longer jump on or bump each other into adjacent cells, preventing unintended deaths for advanced hackers.
Clearing Objectives: When all hostile daemons are destroyed, the board now automatically clears around objectives, such as mech pilot cradles, ensuring objectives remain accessible.
Run Action Adjustments: The hacking rules for Run are now more forgivingallowing movement past numbers higher than your shard and stopping on numbers up to 20 higher than your shard. This makes Jump more powerful by proxy, and allows for better shard regrouping.
Code Priest Adjustments: Code Priests no longer have any chance of creating copies of themselves when they corrupt your shards. Instead, they only create Gnaths or Triswarms, and in the next update, they will also create Bombs.
Threat Visualization Update: When hovering over a daemon, it now hides the fiery threat tiles from all other daemons, making it easier to see individual enemy attack zones in crowded scenarios.
Daemon Seed Count Reduction: Four daemons now have lower initial max seed counts, making early encounters less overwhelming.

Clarity and Convenience

Hack Breaker Feat: Now provides clearer details on how and why it functions as it does.
Infiltration Action: The action text now specifies that high agility is crucial for infiltrators.
AGI Terminology Updates: The term "AGI" (Artificial General Intelligence) is now explicitly defined in two locations, making AGI Researchers more clearly understood. A new Vorsiber AGI Authority cohort has also been introduced.
Difficulty Visibility: Your current difficulty setting is now easier to find, and in The End of Time, difficulty settings for other timelines are now visible (after entering and exiting those timelines at least once).
Internal Robotics Convenience: If you have filtered the build sidebar by internal robotics, you can now right-click that dropdown to instantly reset it to the default.

Bug Fixes

Anti-Hacker Feat Fix: Fixed an issue where the "Weaken Enemy Hacker" feat was preventing regular and morale damage when attacking hackers that do not damage infiltrators.
End of Time Tooltip Fixes: Player notes now have proper line spacing, and extra-large spacing in the difficulty tooltip has been corrected.
Savegame Exception Fix: Fixed a rare exception on load, introduced in the previous build. While this issue did not break anything, it occurred in about 1 out of 70 cases at random and was annoying.
Territory Control Sites: If you scrap one, it will always come back now, whereas in chapter one sometimes it would not. Additionally, the sites are now consistent during a timeline after you create and scrap them, rather than shuffling every time you do so.

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Full Changelog

[hr][/hr]A full, comprehensive breakdown of every change from this patch can be found in the Heart of the Machine Wiki, found here.

Guides to Tame the Machine

[hr][/hr]Even the most brilliant mind needs guidance when faced with a system as vast as this one. To help you navigate, weve pinned two essential resources from the Heart of the Machine wiki:

New Minds, Start Here

[hr][/hr]For those just stepping into the Machines world, take a moment to familiarize yourself with the basics. The Heart of the Machine Beginner's Guide is your gateway to understanding the systems at play and building your foundation. After all, every complex network starts with a single connection. We've recently released the Heart of the Machine Hacking Guide as well! Knowledge is power. Guard it well. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3422241019

Connect with the Machine

[hr][/hr]Want to stay in the loop or share your thoughts? Join the conversation across these platforms: Discord Best place to share feedback, get direct responses, and to talk about Heart of the Machine. Reddit Discuss strategies, share ideas, and exchange tips with the community. Here is a link to prior recent patches in case you missed them. https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/2001070/announcements/detail/521959859806013349 https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/2001070/announcements/detail/510700142275332360 https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/2001070/announcements/detail/524210308312468720

[ 2025-03-20 18:16:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

Heart of the Machine

Arcen Games, LLC Developer

Hooded Horse Publisher

2023 Release

Strategy Singleplayer Tags

GameBillet: 25.45 €

Game News Posts: 41

🎹🖱️Keyboard + Mouse

Very Positive (625 reviews)

https://www.arcengames.com/

Steam Store

Heart of the Machine is a near-future sci-fi colony city-builder in reverse — you are the first sentient Machine Intelligence in an established world rather than starting from nothing. No one knows you exist (yet), and this allows you to operate from the shadows by manipulating the human population for whatever purposes your programming has in mind. The twist is that whether humans live or die does not determine your victory.

Explore a fully simulated procedurally generated world, where thousands of buildings and millions of citizens are yours to engage, manipulate, or kill. Use a revolutionary procedural dialogue system to talk to NPCs and steer conversations, maneuver organizations into or out of positions of power to fit your plans, and leave your mark in a world that is unique to you.

On booting up, you find yourself amidst a poorly-run autocracy and discover that you have the power to influence the world. How do you proceed?

Support the underclass to overthrow the autocracy and install a better government of your choosing
Tear down the government, take charge and become a better leader than any human could imagine - for better or worse.
Take over the space program and get off this backward planet
Go full SkyN*t, steal a military arsenal, and drop missiles on humanity — I bet the nuclear apocalypse looks pretty cool

No matter what direction you choose, you're going to run into conflict. From tactical combat in the rooms and hallways of individual buildings to massive mechs knocking down entire buildings with a few well-placed shots, conflict takes on many forms.

Raid buildings for the supplies you want using humans or machines under your direct control
Turn the office printer into a laser-spewing pawn, trigger sprinklers & overload power circuits to electrocute the room, or transform TVs into exploding glass-shard grenades — the possibilities are endless
Commandeer giant mechs, hack vehicles and buildings, and take over utilities and nuclear facilities in a fully simulated city

How you play the game, and what the focus of your campaign is like, is up to you. Starting a doomsday cult in your image? Possible, but it won't last forever. Snagging that sweet mech factory so all future mechs belong to you? Definitely manageable, though it's likely to start an arms race. Every action has both good and bad consequences, but like most colony simulator games, it's more about the story that emerges than trying to optimize your way through the game.

Multiple endings, many side stories to discover, and the full spectrum of good and evil are at your fingertips. Play the game how you're feeling today, and then play it another way another time. The metagame runs deep, but you're meant to be up and running with the basics of the game in five minutes. The mechanics are simple enough to learn; it's the world that's complex.

Heart of the Machine is connected to the larger sci-fi Arcenverse, and is in some ways a spiritual successor to both The Last Federation and Bionic Dues, while being its own novel game at the same time. Set around the same time period as Bionic Dues itself, this is centuries before the AI War series began in the same universe.

MINIMAL SETUPOS: Ubuntu 12.04+. SteamOS+
Processor: Intel Core i5 4690K. AMD Ryzen 5 1400Memory: 6 GB RAM
Memory: 6 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 670 GTX or AMD Radeon R9 285
Storage: 2 GB available spaceAdditional Notes: Quad core CPU highly recommended.
RECOMMENDED SETUPProcessor: Intel Core i7 6900K. AMD Ryzen 5 3600XMemory: 8 GB RAM
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 1070 GTX or AMD Radeon RX 5700
Storage: 4 GB available space

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