• New Side Goal—Dark Underbelly: Introduced to house smaller side stories. The first, The Executive Tomb, can begin in Chapter 1—rare for timeline goals.
  
• Quick-Hack Failsafe: During the first hacking scenario, players now always receive enough Determination to choose the quick-hack route.

• Contemplation Unlock: "Exploring Wealthy Residences" is now available as a contemplation when Contemplations first unlock.
  
• Flexible Timing: Can be pursued across most chapters (not post-apocalypse).
  
• Dome Encounter: Optional fight under a dome unlocks 3 new rapid-fire weapons and a new augment—designed by community member Pingcode.
  
• Diseases Introduced: Completing the storyline unlocks the first in-game diseases, with wide-reaching timeline applications.
  
• Achievements: 5 new achievements tied to this storyline.

• Networked Arsenal:
  
  • 4 new android weapons with networked targeting
    
  • 1 cruise missile for vehicles
    
  • Augments for androids, mechs, and vehicles that enable telemetry-sharing for these weapons
• Community Credit: All networked weapon content designed and implemented by Pingcode.

• Flag Placement Guidance: Territory flags now show tooltips and draw a line to the nearest valid placement.
  
• Embedded Structure Assistance: Structures placed inside human buildings now draw a pink line to the nearest valid host (e.g., skimmers).
  
• Minor Wording Improvements: In chapter one, several minor pieces of wording have been clarified.
  
• Bulk Unit Equipment: Feats and costs on equipment that don't apply to bulk units are no longer shown on bulk androids. For example, the Ambush feat, or the Mental Energy cost.
  
• Building Status Visibility: Badges and other statuses on buildings are now drawn in their tooltips as they are on units, making them much easier to see.
  
• "Highest Respect" Confusion: If you reach chapter one without overwriting any other androids, it now gives you Highest Respect immediately, rather than only doing that after you've talked to the AGI researchers.

• Microbuilder Upgrade Extension: "Better Microbuilder Fabs" now boosts Full and Industrial Microbuilder Fabs. Vorsiber DRM-locked midsize fabs remain unchanged.
  
• Cybercratic Haven Establishment: When you are in the project Secure Your Cybercratic Haven, if you've reached at least 98% secured, then it goes ahead and just marks it as done. Those last 1-2% could be painfully slow in some cities.
  
• Unidentified Hostile Aircraft: For vehicles that are marked defective, they are instead now marked as Unidentified Hostile Aircraft, which is much more thematically-appropriate, as well as being just much worse in general. Aka, it's a lot more like Innately Alarming, and guards and other passerby really want to shoot down the aircraft a lot more intently.
  
• Enemy Spawn Cascade Prevention: Vulnerable buildings now stun themselves when overwhelmed, preventing uncontrolled enemy spawns in mid-to-late game.
  
• Enemy Spawn Cascade Reversal: After units have spawned against your vulnerable buildings, they now leave the battlefield if their target is destroyed. This is useful for cases where you're all right taking that loss, but don't want a ton of angry enemies then swarming the rest of your empire.
  
• Faster Housing Agencies: Housing Agencies now work 50% faster than before, making the Solve Homelessness project not last so long.

• Chapter One Achievements: The Journey Begins, Budding Pacifist, and Taking Extra Care can now be properly achieved on a playthrough in a secondary timeline in an existing profile.
  
• Mech Hacking: Fixed a regression where the hacking scenario for mechs was always being the basic tutorial, rather than the full hacking experience.
  
• No Revelation During WW4: Fixed a bug where The Revelation was still available during WW4.
  
• Exponential Power Growth: Fixed an issue where you could get softlocked in chapter one if you finished building a better brain before you build any computronium refineries (this is very difficult to do, and quite an edge case).
  
• Worker Units Tab: Fixed a bug where if you played through The Great And Terrible Protector, it was possible that the "Worker Units" concept was not also unlocked, and therefor you could not use the Workers tab of command mode.
  
• Messages On Replay: Fixed a generalized issue with certain messages not showing up if you were replaying chapter one for a second time in the same profile.
  
• Stuck Freighters On Long Maps: Fixed an issue where on long and narrow maps, if a regional or international freighter spawned at just the wrong spot, and the related airport was super far away, then they would just sit around indefinitely at the edge of the map.
  
• Worker Android Sanity: Worker androids will no longer open fire on protestors or other nonviolent parties.
  
• Proper ID Scrub: Fixed an issue where the Contractually Valid Target badge was not being removed by ID-scrubbing-type activities.
  
• Territory Flag Aggro On Load: Fixed an issue where, when loading savegames, sometimes it would act like you did not have enough deterrence and spawn in a bunch of enemy units around territory control flags.
  
• Morale Can't Be Murder: If you attack units with morale attacks, that no longer ever counts as a murder or an attempted murder. It wasn't intended to, but there were some cases where it did.
  
• Safety From High-Altitude Transports: Even if high-altitude military transports (and a variety of other NPC units) have less than full health, they will no longer attack players and player-allied units UNLESS the player has done either physical or morale damage to the units in question.

Four substantial updates in one week, this week! Next week will be slower, as I'll be working on new late-game goal paths, and that takes a lot of time. That said, there's a lot of exciting things on the horizon over the next couple of weeks, including another feature update tomorrow.

Update 20 includes a lot of long-time player requests -- and some more from the last few days. The game has always supported borderless windowed, but now it does so in a manner that does not minimize when you click out of it. There's now a dedicated screen to seeing how much neural expansion you get from each source in a timeline. Several elements that were confusing to new players have been clarified. A couple of the weaker weapons have gotten buffs to ensure they remain interesting.

If you’ve spent time with Heart of the Machine and want to leave a review, that’d be appreciated. No need to say more than you mean, but if you’ve been meaning to write one, I’d be grateful. Steam reviews carry weight. For a project like this — developed by a single person over many years, every review makes a difference.

Honest thoughts are what matter. Whatever your experience has been, sharing it helps. It’s a powerful way to have your voice heard and contributes to how future patches are prioritized and addressed.

Thanks for reading and for playing.

• True Borderless Windowed Mode: The game has been adjusted to be visible in the background if you switch away from it using OS hotkeys, or clicking to an adjacent monitor.

• Clarity For Vorsiber Collaborators: If you are a Vorsiber Collaborator start, it now makes sure that you have the midsize microbuilder fabs from the very start of that point, and also makes sure that you are instructed to build those rather than the mini-fabs. This was biting some new players who were using this exit from the prologue.

• Flamethrower Math: When holding shift to see the expanded tooltip, Flamethrower now shows the math of how it gets to the amount of morale damage it will inflict.

• Quick Electrical View: Clicking the electricity display in the resource header now takes you directly into the input/output list for electricity.

• New Neural Expansion View: In the input/output screen of the Resources window, if you have unlocked seeing your intelligence class, Neural Expansion is now the second option in the menu, under Electricity. This shows you the details of where all of your neural expansion is coming from in the current timeline (it also shows contributions form other timelines in one lump amount, for reference).

• Firestarter: he AG-31 Relumine shotgun now has a new Firestarter feat attached to it, which sets targets on fire if they are vulnerable to that. The strength of the fire damage is 2.5x of what a Flamethrower does, but only applies to a single target rather than a group.

• High-Density Rounds Utility: These have been rebalanced so that they have less of a range penalty, give a little bit less of a damage boost, and give a powerfully-scaling armor-piercing boost.

• Shotgun Ambushes: The TS-11 Light Shotgun now gives a 3x Ambush feat (which does stack with other sources of Ambush), making it actually an interesting weapon for those that can use it. The TS-29 Shotgun, which is already quite useful, has been given a 1.5x Ambush value to make sure that it remains competitive in the spectrum of other weapons around the game.

• Precision Flamethrowing: Flamethrowers by non-shell-company operatives no longer hit units targeting your shell company, and vice-versa. This is much more in keeping with the nature of how the shell companies are meant to function combat-wise.

• More Targets Vulnerable To Fire: The following units were not considered Flammable for purposes of being able to be set on fire by flamethrowers or Firestarter, but now are: Vorsiber Soldier, Vorsiber Inquisitor, SecForce Negotiator, Citizen Advocate (both kinds), and PMC Troopers. Originally, the idea was that their armor protected them, but this was very unclear and gave the wrong impression, such as that perhaps the Fearless perk was blocking them from being set on fire. It also didn't feel right for balance in general.

• Nickelbot Engineering Balance: "Nickelbots Are The Worst" now only requires a Nickelbot with 116 engineering skill, rather than 140, making this a bit better balanced for early chapter two.

• Drone Cores: The Avionics Core has been split into that plus also a Drone Core. In chapter one, it was really easy to get into a spot where you could block yourself with building too many drone factories and then being unable to build the aerospace hangar.

• Pathfinding Exception Fix: Hardened some of the npc pathfinding methods against having exceptions when a building has just recently been destroyed when they are trying to pathfind around.

• The Return Of Stealth Vehicles: Fixed a regression in Update 19 where I accidentally removed the ability to cloak from the Iris, Spectre, and Wraith vehicles. That has now been restored.

Full notes here[wiki.arcengames.com].

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