This build includes the first half, roughly, of Civil Spycraft. I wasn't intending to release that in parts, but it turns out it works well that way. The beta branch (English only) includes 95% of the second act of Civil Spycraft if you want to see that. This build looks small based on the release notes, but there's a large amount of gameplay and story in here.
You may notice I'm slowing down a bit lately with the releases, but that's actually because I'm working on really large pieces of content. Expect that to continue for another 4 weeks or so. I'm wrapping up the last of Civil Spycraft, and then diving headfirst into a bunch of Tier 3 goals for the first time. That's all very exciting, but it makes it harder to do smaller intermediate releases. You'll see about one per week during this period, and you'll also notice that I'm a lot less responsive to feature requests or bugs that aren't severe.
After this sprint, I'm going to be back onto feature requests, lesser bugs, and so forth. Sometimes these things come in waves!
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.
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Update 44 Changelog
Civil Spycraft Act One
- "Attempt To Restore Order" During The Civil War: Later this will be noted as starting Civil Spycraft, but for now it does not have that label since you can only get through act one. Regardless, you can go far enough with this that you make some surprisingly major changes to the city, involve your cult, and can end the civil war.
- "Two Branches: The first act of Civil Spycraft has two completely independent branches that involve two different fedcorps. They are mechanically distinct, give you some two separate angles on the story, and also have their own separate major useful buffs/jobs that come out of them.
- Two New Achievements: I'm not saying much because of spoilers, really.
- Mysteries Unresolved: The first act of Civil Spycraft does kind of deepen a few mysteries, and act two (on the beta branch now, or will be more widely available in 2ish weeks) ties those up.
Other Changes
- Make A Shell Company: If you somehow get to the Organometallic Form project (for creating mimics) without ever having created a shell company, there is now an Establish Shell Company project that pops up with guidance on that.
- Resource Cost Clarity: Improved the readability of StreetSense project actions when they cost one or more resources.
- Aftermath Text For Goals: There have been notable updates to the post-goal summary screen. It now shows what resources you gained from that goal, and which paths of the goal you completed. In English, it also then has aftermath text for every goal except for the "Pressuring The City" side goal (which doesn't need aftermath text). This is something that will be coming to other languages in about two weeks. You can then click through from this first screen with this new info to see the same mix of stats and possible achievements that you would see in the past. In both of these screens, the header also now shows the name of the goal that you completed, and lets you see its tooltip simply by hovering that header.
Full notes here.
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