A new Heart of the Machine update 0.651.4 released on PC. According to the official Heart of the Machine patch notes, the latest update 0.651.4 addresses some bugs and crashes.
Since the last patch, players are experiencing problems with the game. Today’s Heart of the Machine patch 0.651.4 will fix a few of these issues.
Check out more details below.
Heart of the Machine Patch 0.651.4 Notes – February 7, 2025
- There are two new health bar styles, for units with very low health, and for units with very high health.
- These keep very low-health units (like pet cats or pacifists) from just having a single confusing box under them, and very high health units (most notably in extreme mode) from having incredibly tall doom-stacks of health bars that fill up too much of the screen.
- Thanks to mblazewic for reporting.
- The purpose of the various SysOp functions are now far more clear, as you no longer have to hold shift to see the strategy tip on them.
- This is also true of the exotic comms probing, and also a number of the regular hacking targets.
Balance
- Heavy metals storage has been increased tenfold, from 16 million units to 160 million units per storage bunker. Ya’ll are filtering a lot more water than I expected.
- Thanks to Fueruano for the report.
- The route that gets you the Cult of Danver is no longer blocked off if you have bought some Danver Donuts.
- Previously if you had bought at least one, they would punish you for this disloyalty, which doesn’t make a lot of sense in context, and was confusing folks.
- Thanks to Pingcode, TastyMints, and rakeela for reporting.
- Automated Personnel Management as a contemplation can now be started by shell company units as well as regular units.
- Cat houses now only cost 3 pet sitters, rather than 6.
- Rebalanced the thresholds for the higher intelligence classes starting at intelligence class 6 and up so that they are now substantially higher numbers, and will take players longer to hit.
- Above level 7 there are no longer any rewards at this time, and those are really for long-form showing off some of your cross-timeline things.
- Fixed an issue where the game was intentionally clamping people to intelligence class 5 (I completely forgot I did this). It now properly clamps people to only intelligence class 17.
- This means that players can finally get the Mech Carrier, which was not accessible since you couldn’t get to intelligence class 6.
- Thanks to Kuron and kenken244 for reporting.
Bugfixes
- Fixed three minor typos.
- Thanks to Elegant Caveman for reporting.
- Removed a useless log message that said “Unpack event!” on the debug log. Very harmless in every sense, but also useless.
- Fixed a pair of issues where certain “queued events” could play multiple times in a loop, rather than once, and similarly the “project complete” could also wind up being played repeatedly.
- This was a multithreading issue related to the event queue, which was one of the last things I added prior to launch. It should work fine now, and even in existing saves where there was a queue of like 6 of the same thing, it will not just play them once.
- Thanks to _arcus, Lord Of Nothing, veevoir, EagleShark, Dimitry, Wiktor, and Lailah for reporting.
- Fixed an exception that could happen during events if the unit that is engaged in the event had died right as it was starting the event.
- Fixed a related issue with trying to draw lines to/from these units, where it would spam exceptions if the unit was in the process of death, but not yet dead, in just the wrong combination of timing. It was trying to find the center of mass of the unit, and failing.
- Thanks to Phoebe for the logs that showed both.
- Fixed a bug where the name of things, most notably your pet can and your shell company, were not properly saved and loaded if they were in anything other than very basic English characters.
- New names will have to be entered for ones that were in problem saves, but I have tested that this works using the names 健太 and だいき, respectively.
- Thanks to snowcat for reporting.
- TextMeshPro has been updated with a new and better logging system that now pipes those errors to the game’s main game log (which is memory efficient) rather than to the unity log (which is memory bloat).
- As part of this, also quieted two messages where were not actually problems.
- Also as part of this, quieted some on-shutdown messages where the game was logging some exceptions during an orderly shutdown, but only in TextMeshPro.
- Discovered that the read-write flags were not set write on the dynamic atlases for East-Asian fonts (sigh), since they had reset themselves. This is corrected so that they now are properly read-write, and so if you type in some characters that are not already part of the game’s text, it will now properly draw those characters.
- Fixed a bug where some more lines and icons were being attempted to be drawn in an invalid way that was causing invisible unity exceptions to flood the unity log when the player had a unit selected and then moved their cursor over the interface or outside of the game window.
- This was another defacto memory leak, if it went on long enough.
- Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.
- Added further instrumentation to the HandleActionRequiredPopups method to catch any stray errors that happen in there. There was an extremely rare case of one popping, but at the moment I don’t have enough information to fix it, and it’s quite rare. The good news is, it’s also harmless.
- The next time this happens, there should be enough information for me to fix it.
- Thanks to McHatters and ScreenDoor for reporting.
- Hardened the POI tooltip against exceptions if the POI is in an invalid or partially-deleted state.
- Thanks to Will for reporting.
- In the event of a race condition that was pretty rare, your network tower should no longer self-destruct right when you build it. On the off chance that this does not fix it, there is extra logging information to give more information for fixing it in the future.
- Thanks to Pariwak and casual for reporting.
- Fixed an issue with the Protection Required project where one of the things that was required for it was looking for a factory tag type that was never set up. And then the other two were overly-restrictive to the point where there might not be anything in the city to actually meet the criteria.
- Thanks to Troubleshooter for reporting.
- Added in some logic to make sure that there are enough hospitals and clinics in the city, in the same vein as the donut shop logic.
- In the seemingly-problem-case situations, there were indeed plenty.
- Discovered a general problem with a bunch of the projects where you have some events that you need to go around the map and do. Essentially, in all of the cases, it was excluding things that were not near enough to your own buildings. So if you did not build across a lot of the map, then it would just not show these options, which was very surprising. I guess playtesters and myself just really built very widely across the map. This fixes issues with:
- Designing The Crucible
- Designing A Bridge
- Searching For Wastelanders
- Wastelander Mythology
- Gadolinium Mesosilicate
- Organometallic Form
- Protection Required
- Exciplex Lasers
- If you were already building in a sprawling way on the map, then this did not affect you.
- Thanks to Troubleshooter for the report that led to this discovery.
- Fixed a really stupid mistake in my custom serializer, which somehow just never really got noticed until now. I had a simple logic error relating to the footer of the serialization file, and the end result was that the internal buffer would increase by 2 MB of memory every time you saved the game.
- So if, for example, you played for 10 hours and 500 turns, with autosaves every 3 turns, this was wasting 300 MB of RAM.
- That’s actually not that giant of an expansion, all things considered, but it’s still not a thing I wanted in the game, and I’m glad to have that fixed now.
- When memory was otherwise at a premium, this is what was causing errors with saving games, and so now that won’t happen.
- Additionally, this was slowing down the savegame progress progressively with each save, so now it remains snappy and quick.
Download Heart of the Machine update 0.651.4 on PC.