Heart of the Machine Update 11: New Early-Game Paths, StreetSense Additions

• 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.