July has come and gone and I managed to beat back a number of health issues that were keeping me away from the keyboard! As such I wanted to give everyone here a little update on the state of the game, all the cool stuff that's been happening recently, and what you can expect in the future! The biggest thing is that 0.14 is on its way! (No firm release date, but I'm hoping by the end of September at the very latest) Let's see what's coming with it:

Important Changes Coming to 0.14

There's two major changes that are coming to 0.14 that are easy to implement in your current game! The first is that Fall Damage now only occurs is the Fall is sudden or unexpected (eg the floor beneath you collapses or you are knocked out of flight from Stuck or Dazed). This means you are free to jump to your heart's content (especially helpful to get into Melee Range with flying enemies) knowing that you'll land safe and sound on your own two feet. You are a giant MEC after all.

The second is a tweak to Kinetic Regen: It'll now generate 1 SYN per 6 DMG you deal instead of per 5. This is for a lot of reasons, namely that there's a lot of ways to stack DMG so this slows Regen's ramp a bit.

For 0.14 I have a few aspirational goals, it may mean it doesn't come out for a while but here's what I hope to bring:

• Virtual Table Top Tokens of the 9 Starter MEC Classes and the Wyrms that have art done for them'
• An FAQ Page covering various edge cases and giving a condensed explanation of various core resources.
• A full page covering Creative Actions, suggested TNs and potential moves
• Balance tweaks to existing Biomes and Bosses as well as a potential new Biome and Boss to be added!
• A new Cross-Over MEC!!

Community Forum Launches

Notice anything different about the game page? I've also swapped Steel Hearts from having a Comments List to having a more accessible Community Forum built right into the page!! 

I know more than a few people have asked for some kind of official Discord channel, and while I don't have the energy to mod or run one of those, I'm more than happy to give people a Forum to share all their cool ideas and feedback! (Speaking of, did you see Xevious573 has made some Form Fillable PDFs?)

From Around the Web

Firstly a big shout out and thanks to DragonKid11 who made this fantastic video reviewing Steel Hearts! If you haven't checked it out yet, definitely give it a watch:

Additionally, I know more than a few of you have been looking for more online tools and I'd to give a special shout out to Justin A who built this amazing interactable Google Sheet to track your Steel Hearts Character! (It even does a lot of the math for you!)

Lastly, I recently posted a (somewhat spoilery) blog post about how I ran a Hex Crawl using Steel Hearts on the distant Martian Green Spot - If you're looking for campaign inspiration, you can give it a full read here!

Wargames Preview

For those of you who follow me on Twitter X.com (groan) you'll know that I'm brewing up Steel Hearts' first Data Pack: Wargames! 

The Wu Wei collective has tracked down a piece of the Arcadia (an Olympian colony ship that broke up in the chaos of the Awakening) deep in the Indian Ocean. They're looking for Pilots brave enough to plumb its depths in search of a fabled lost technology, a philosopher's stone for bioengineering: Amrita. But this isn't just another scrapping job. Ask anyone whose had dealings with the Collective recently and you'll hear rumors of a rampant Olympian AI, a twisted combat gauntlet that's surged back to life, and... dinosaurs? There's only one way to find out the truth of what's going on...

Wargames is a Dino Themed Data Pack heavily inspired by my love for Exoprimal (and Dinosaurs) and will serve as a testing bed for what a Data Pack can be and look like!

Data Packs are my attempt to give 100% free modular content that you can inject into your campaign as much or as little as you want, including NPCs, map layouts, and plenty of enemies. This Data Pack will probably take a while since I'm trying to make its Master Pages as modular as possible ((Which, as an added bonus, means this Data Pack template will also be something I can release to all of you to quickly generate your own content!)) Here's a peak at some very early WIP Templates:

Well that's all for today! As always feel free to let me know in the comments and the community forums what you think! (And if there's anything on your wishlist for these Data Packs!)