Heart of the Machine

“The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.” — Pattern Recognition, William Gibson

To the Community

Update 13 Changelog

Clarity

• Attack From Vehicles: A new handbook entry is available starting in chapter 2, explaining that androids can fire from the open doors of flying vehicles and highlighting the tactical value of this.
  
• Infiltration Visibility: Infiltrations now display separately from Investigations in the task stack, with additional explanatory text that clarifies how the system works; a new handbook entry also appears the first time you complete an infiltration.
  
• Counterattack Preview: When constructing a building that will trigger a counterattack, the task stack now shows a clear warning ahead of time, and a related handbook entry titled "Counterattacks Against You" opens the first time it applies.
  
• Task Stack Icons: The task stack now includes more distinct icons, making it easier to visually scan and understand individual entries.
  
• Minor Wording Changes: Several small edits have been made throughout the game for better clarity and consistency.
  

Scientific Research and the VR Pod

• Strategic Resource Generation: Staffed science buildings now generate a new strategic resource called Scientific Research, giving long-term value to science facilities and making their benefits more visible.
  
• VR Pod Menu: The VR Pod screen now includes a four-section menu; only one tab is functional for now, while the remaining three display “coming soon” notices to preview future functionality.
  
• Generate Inspiration: The first VR Pod tab lets you spend Scientific Research across 10 categories—including Small Arms Research, Android Optimization, and Structural Improvement—giving more direct control over your strategic progression.
  

Hacking Minigame Improvements

• New Daemon – Bomb: This new daemon moves like a Gnath but detonates in a ring of destruction when killed, clearing adjacent cells.
  
• New Daemons – Greater and Lesser Wanderers: These add unpredictable movement to hacking encounters, with the Greater version appearing in more difficult hacks.
  
• Removed Inspiration Farming: The old method of farming inspiration through repeated hacking has been removed to reduce grind and confusion.
  
• New Hack Rewards: Full hacks now reward you with Tungsten Scraps, Human Biodata, or both depending on the hacked unit; this gives hacking an ongoing reward while avoiding the previous grind loop.
  
• Tungsten Methylator Structure: Gained when you obtain Tungsten Scraps, this structure allows you to convert them into Prismatic Tungsten, offering a side benefit to hacking without encouraging farming.
  
• Human Biodata Sales: Human Biodata can now be sold for Wealth at casinos—not the most efficient income method, but a useful bonus nonetheless.
  

Upgrades

• New Upgrade Types: Fourteen new upgrades have been added across Procurement Efficacy, Vehicle Development, Android Optimization, and Martial Expansion, expanding available build paths.
  
• Expanded Choice Pools: Structural Improvement now offers six choices (up from four), and additional options such as increased mech capacity and 18cm Spiders have been added to existing upgrade pools.
  
• Targeted Research Spending: With Scientific Research now available, players can directly pursue desired upgrades through strategic investment.
  

Conveniences for Timelines Beyond the First

• Improved Starting Resources: New timelines begin with 20k Wealth, 6k Prismatic Tungsten, 9.4k Bovine Tissue Cells, and 6.2k Vegetable Seeds, reducing startup friction.
  
• Keanu Unlocked: Keanu now begins unlocked, though the pollinator event that usually precedes him still requires an in-game choice.
  
• Black Market Setup Skipped: The three early black market interactions are marked as completed, and players receive the associated items automatically.
  
• Science Roster Recognition: If you’ve previously unlocked the Complete Science Roster, you now automatically receive Automated Personnel Management.
  
• Reduced Setup Time: These changes reduce repeated early-game steps from 10–15 minutes down to about 5, focusing attention on new decisions rather than repeated busywork.
  

Bug Fixes

• Mining POI Correction: Fixed an issue where one mining point of interest lacked any mineshafts; this fix applies to timelines generated in this build or later.
  
• Territory Flag Timing: Fixed a regression from the prior build where territory control flags unlocked too early, which prevented related structures from functioning properly due to deterrence not being enabled.
  
• Repair Spider Reliability: Fixed an issue where sometimes repair spiders were not unlocked the first time your structures took damage during chapter one.
  

Full Changelog

Guides to Tame the Machine

• Aggro, Awareness, and Alarms
  
• How to Improve Engineering
  
• Should I Restart If I Skipped to the Final Doom?
  

New Minds, Start Here

Connect with the Machine

Screenshots

“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

Command Input Requested – Leave a Review!

Update 12 Changelog

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 forgiving—allowing 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.
  

Full Changelog

Guides to Tame the Machine

• Aggro, Awareness, and Alarms
  
• How to Improve Engineering
  
• Should I Restart If I Skipped to the Final Doom?
  

New Minds, Start Here

Connect with the Machine

“There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care.” — The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal

Building the Machine – Your Feedback Shapes What Comes Next

Update 11 Changelog

• Early StreetSense Additions: Starting in the prologue, after you've learned that humans are not a source of safety, a trio of new StreetSense events are available: Apartment Fire, LostGen Water Theft, and Citizen Parking at Motel. These new options allow for early off-roading, and more will be added in future updates.
  
• Apartment Fire: Available even in Chapter 2 and beyond, this event allows you to gain Compassion or Cruelty with minimal effort. If you kill too many firefighters, they will begin laying traps for you alongside SecForce in that timeline.
  
• LostGen Water Theft: A recurring event that offers a choice between Compassion, Apathy, or Cruelty. This decision does not affect your future relationship with the LostGen rebel group.
  
• Citizen Parking at Motel: Lets you trade Consumer Goods for Compassion, gain a cache of Apathy, or farm a small amount of Cruelty.
  
• New Chapter One StreetSense Actions: After unlocking electricity generation, a new set of four StreetSense actions allow you to break into homes and either steal valuables or leave unexpected gifts. Depending on the level of citizen housing, you can steal Wealth, Consumer Goods, Fine Goods, or Furniture. These actions can also generate Creativity, one of their most useful applications. However, breaking in too many times will cause humans to adapt, issuing a security patch to reinforce their doors.
  

Gameplay & Balance Adjustments

• Early Personality Resource Notifications: Now that some personality-based resources can be obtained earlier in the prologue, the game will inform players about them sooner than before.
  
• Player Unit Targeting Improvement: Player units were already prioritizing landing on buildings when moving in close (for melee or otherwise), but now they will do a better job of that when the building is near the edge of a cell. Previously, they would sometimes fail to respect that positioning.
  
• NPC Unit Targeting Improvements: There are three major sets of NPC targeting logic improvements. These focus on a lot of the background conflicts, or ongoing side-beefs between NPC factions, or invaders from outside the city. These different groups all now behave more sensibly, and others behave more sensibly in regard to them. The biggest takeaway is that everyone is a lot less interested in shooting you when they seemingly should be more about shooting each other.
  

Bug Fixes & Optimizations

• Fixed a bug that required keeping a dragon around to start Contact an ExoCorp, Question Wastelanders, Uterine Replicators, and Homo Obscurus. This made these options much harder to access for players who are (for some reason) not dragon enthusiasts.
  
• Fixed Wind Turbine Visual Bug: Turbines were missing their actual turbines—they now spin as intended.
  
• Fixed a bug where suppressing fire was not working as advertised, but only hitting the target itself.
  
• Removed outdated metadata that was visible in Inspect Mode for buildings but was not actually used.
  
• Suppressing Fire now works as intended, debuffing all enemies within the attack range of your unit, rather than just the target.
  
• Exception Fixes: A couple of fairly rare exceptions that people were reporting since the last update have now been fixed. They were harmless, but annoying.
  
• Bulk Clarity: High-Density Rounds and Format Optimization are now much more clear that they don't work on the bulk versions of those units, but only on the elites.
  
• Savegame Performance Boost: Micro-optimizations to Arcen's custom data serializer have improved save speeds by about 57% savings. Further optimizations for minor background objects have reduced savegame sizes to 53% of their previous size. This benefits GOG cloud saves in particular, but is frankly nice for everyone.
  
• Autosave Defaults: The game now defaults to 10 autosaves per profile, rather than 15, to again ease the load on cloud saves for everyone. You can of course change this to be much higher or lower if you prefer.
  

Full Changelog

Guides to Tame the Machine

• Aggro, Awareness, and Alarms
  
• How to Improve Engineering
  
• Should I Restart If I Skipped to the Final Doom?
  

New Minds, Start Here

Connect with the Machine

Building the Machine

"The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn." — The Discovery of the Future, H.G. Wells

Building the Machine

Update 10 Changelog

• Early Contemplations & Dog Rescues: Contemplations now unlock much earlier in Chapter One, and the ability to rescue dogs has been moved up as well.
  
• Bulk Android Squads & Converted Units: Now provide clear feedback when attempting to load them into transports, noting that it's not possible and why.
  
• Permanent Unit Badges: Consumable items have been added that grant permanent badges to individual units, enhancing them beyond their usual capabilities. However, these upgrades do not apply to unit types—if the specific unit dies, the badge is lost.
  
• Intelligence Class 5 Badge Unlocks: Upon reaching Intelligence Class 5, the first four badge-granting consumables become available: Sprinter, Wizard, Wall, and Intimidating Shadow.
  
• Android Torpor (StreetSense, Intelligence Class 5): A new Android Torpor action allows players to put an android into a hidden sleep for a mild, non-renewable cost. This preserves the unit for later use, particularly useful for units with badges that would otherwise be lost.
  
• People-Watching Debates: Wealthy citizen debates have been rebalanced based on player feedback.
  
• Dual Handguns Rebalanced: Now scale twice as strongly as regular handguns. Thanks to Pingcode for suggesting and implementing this.
  
• StreetSense & Scavenging Site Lens Filters: Resource filters for the StreetSense lens have been split into sub-filters, and the Scavenging Sites lens now includes filters—both based on player requests.
  
• Unit Scrapping List Order: Now matches the Forces sidebar, ensuring a sensible unit order.
  
• Expanded Inspect Mode: Holding Ctrl now allows you to inspect buildings in any lens, rather than just in Versatile and Structures.
  
• Quick Equipment & Filtering Shortcuts: Ctrl-clicking a unit type button in Command Mode now jumps directly to the equipment screen for that unit type. Ctrl-clicking a building type in Build Mode now filters by its internal robotics. Ctrl-clicking a resource in the Ledger, main resource view, or top-left game header now jumps directly to its Input/Output report. If no data is available, the screen will be skipped.
  
• Ledger & Input/Output Report Improvements: The Ledger now includes salaries, TPN usage, and other non-job-related expenses/incomes that were previously missing. The Input/Output Report now displays all expenses and incomes, including deals, making resource tracking more comprehensive.
  
• Ignoring Reports Made Clearer: The option to ignore Ledger and TPS reports is now more clearly displayed in their tooltips.
  

Fixes & Adjustments

• Slum Tower Clearance Fix: Completely clearing all slum towers in the city no longer blocks two specific projects.
  
• Unit Mouse Collider Adjustments: The mouse collider size for War Raptors and Parkour Bears has been adjusted to not be oversized.
  
• AOE Attack Fix: AOE attacks hitting your units as secondary targets will no longer cause NPCs to appear in the “attacks planned against your units” list.
  
• Autosave Purging Update: Autosave purging is now sorted based on date and time instead of in-game time, ensuring proper save management when loading older savegames.
  
• Microbuilder Mini-Fab Message Fix: The "damaged buildings" repair spiders message now only appears when buildings are actually damaged by enemies, rather than when first constructing a Microbuilder Mini-Fab.
  
• Exception Fixes: A handful of player-reported exceptions have been fixed.
  

Full Changelog

Guides to Tame the Machine

• Aggro, Awareness, and Alarms
  
• How to Improve Engineering
  
• Should I Restart If I Skipped to the Final Doom?
  

New Minds, Start Here

Connect with the Machine

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.” — The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin

Building the Machine

Update 9 Changelog

• Advocate Encounter goal: A 14th Tier One goal has been added with two routes: Earned Some Respect or Earned New Mortal Enemies. This project introduces new rebel factions and a broader look at city life.
  
• New achievements: Ten new achievements have been added.
  
• Rage Circuit: A new android equipment piece, available after Intelligence Class 4, that boosts firepower at the cost of morale damage.
  
• Oath of Pacifism: A new android equipment piece, available after Intelligence Class 4, that prevents physical damage while increasing intimidation and morale damage. Ideal for non-lethal bulk units.
  
• Map lens improvements: New quality-of-life options allow players to jump straight from a map lens to its list-style counterpart.
  
• Contemplation visibility: Players can now hide contemplations from the map lens if they don’t plan to pursue them in this timeline.
  
• Mass furniture purchasing: Added a bulk-buy option for furniture, recognizing increased use cases where this is needed.
  
• Structure tooltip expansion: Now displays net income from expense resources from the prior turn, making production chains easier to set up.
  
• Resource tracking improvements: Holding Shift or Ctrl now displays net change from the last turn for all resources in the header bar.
  
• Terminology update: The term middle class has been replaced with working class throughout the game for improved clarity.
  
• Text adjustments: Reworded older text that still referenced machine origins and Netslicers.
  
• Cold Blood availability: The Cold Blood action is now always available in StreetSense, even if the player hasn’t committed murder yet.
  
• Food and Water for Humans handbook entry: A new guide explaining the distinction between housing and feeding in the game—clarifying that being a landlord does not mean being a mayor.
  
• Exploration Site Progress Is Retained handbook entry: Clarifies that progress on exploration sites carries forward, making them easier to complete over multiple visits.
  
• Projects With StreetSense Items handbook entry: Explains how StreetSense items influence project outcomes and how they affect roleplay and strategic choices.
  
• Hacking Rules Adjustments: The hacking minigame rule of "cannot Jump to a cell that you cannot Run out of" has been removed, and when if corrupting a shard in the hacking minigame would cause you to win the minigame, it will let you do that even if it's your last shard.
  

New Equipment (Volunteer Contributions by RocketAssistedPuffin)

• Heavy Metals Injection (Harbingers): A new consumable that enables area-of-effect fear attacks and weakens enemy hackers.
  
• FR-70 Hallucinogen Grenade (Harbingers): A stealthy poison grenade for Harbingers, available immediately upon unlocking them.
  
• High-Density Rounds (Nickelbots): A contemplation-based upgrade that strengthens elite Nickelbots at the cost of heavy metals—balancing their underperformance compared to bulk Nickelbots.
  
• ETS Tasp (Infiltrators): Found in exploration sites, this equipment provides cognition boosts and non-lethal attack specialties for Infiltrators.
  
• Infrasonic Loudspeaker (Androids): Available via exploration sites, this device enhances morale-based attacks for any android.
  
• Exoskeleton Arms (Sledge): An exploration site upgrade that improves attack range and Strength for Sledge units.
  
• Liquid Identity (Stolen Human Mechs): Available as a contemplation if the player has been divorced in this timeline and has high engineering, allowing for greater mobility of stolen human-designed mechs.
  

Fixes and Adjustments

• Network tower explosions: Fixed a minor visual issue with network towers during destruction.
  
• Android action restrictions: Fixed an issue where androids with no security clearance were unable to perform certain actions.
  
• Shop meta-stat tracking: Fixed a bug where items sold via shops were incorrectly doubling in value and quantity in meta statistics.
  
• V5 Panther armor correction: The V5 Panther now has the correct armor plating—it was mistakenly 100 lower than the V4.
  
• Modder support: Added new features requested by modders in the ArcenExternalDllInitialLoadCall table.
  
• LOX Bunker fix: The LOX Bunker is now properly explosive, allowing players to finally earn the Oxygen Bomb achievement.
  
• Achievement triggers: Fixed an issue where three achievements were not triggering until the game was reloaded.
  
• Timeline goal clarity: Improved tooltip clarity for timeline goals, specifying which are side goals, Tier One, etc. Side goals also now show slightly darker in the list of goals.
  
• Hellraiser and Nuclear Cavalier achievements: Fixed an issue where their completion requirements were stricter than intended.
  
• No More Undead workers: Your units cannot do work on actions-over-time on the turn that they die. This makes some Exploration Sites a bit trickier.
  
• Last Achievement Issue: The Broombreaker achievement now properly triggers. It will be retroactively awarded on any timelines that should have it. This was the last achievement that was not working properly.
  
• Project Edge Cases: Fixed an edge case in the Cybercratic Hub calculations that could block your progress there, and same with the bombing of SecForce stations. The latter is now no longer tedious if there are a lot of SecForce stations, in general.
  
• Firewalls: Fixed a bug where Firewall in the hacking minigame was not costing mental energy despite saying it would. Also fixed an issue with it granting you the Kill Streak achievement for Firewall, which was incorrect.
  
• Mission Error: Fixed a couple of bugs relating to the Oerl dome fight complaining about failing to start, or being present in a different save after cross-loading from one to another.
  

Full Changelog

Guides to Tame the Machine

• Aggro, Awareness, and Alarms
  
• How to Improve Engineering
  
• Should I Restart If I Skipped to the Final Doom?
  

New Minds, Start Here

Connect with the Machine