Heart of the Machine Update 12: The Hacking Reformat Arrives

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.