- Flaming tar pits are once again flaming.
- Terrified creatures no longer charge.
- Tumbling pods that are cult leaders now grant XP if they explode during combat.
- You can now select stacks of items when donating books to Sheba or throwing artifacts down the Sacred Well.
- You can now rename yourself in your original body or one your mind is stranded within.
- The name for your saved game is now updated when you take a new name via stranded mind or otherwise.
- Stilt Day Stilt pigs no longer open their pens.
- Conjoined girshlings are now considered plural.
- If you're standing next to friendly creature, you can use their culture when renaming your companions.
- Clarified the popup message when you can't autoexplore the full map due to unusually dark darkness.
- Goggles are now referred to in "pairs" rather than sets".
- Gave thistle pitches a sell value.
- Made Asphodel's description respect dynamic pronouns.
- Added info about using the Alt overlay to the manual.
- Fixed a bug that caused a popup message when one of your companions incurred extradimensional disappointment.
- Fixed a bug that caused intact cryochambers to spawn on stair landings.
- Fixed a bug that caused Neelahind to say the well has been poisoned by a previous accusation when the evidence did not match the culprit.
- Fixed a bug that caused the 'Jeweled Dusk' achievement to unlock when you were not the target of the gemming attack.
- Fixed a bug that caused the waking dreamers to always start one experience point away from leveling up.
- Fixed a bug that caused temporary merchants to drop non-temporary wares on death.
- Fixed a bug that caused 'Petals on the Wind' to be unfinishable if you had already started 'Find Eskhind'.
- Fixed a bug that caused 'The Earl of Omonporch' delegates to spawn with and leave behind companions.
Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Simulator, Strategy, Turn-based strategy (TBS), Adventure, IndieCaves of Qud
Feature Friday - April 26, 2024
Patch schedule + Spring Molting Beta coming!
Here's an update on last week's Feature Friday plus some other news. Since it's already Thursday, we've decided to just wait and post Feature Friday along with this week's patch tomorrow. Then, we'll be skipping Feature Friday next week, because: the following week we're posting the Spring Molting beta!
So the schedule is
- Friday, April 26th: Feature Friday
- Friday, May 3rd: no Feature Friday; patch skipped
- Sometime between May 6th - May 10th: Spring Molting beta
You can read about Spring Molting and our roadmap for 1.0 and beyond here.
Live and drink, friends.
Feature Friday coming a few days late this week
Got some team tech issues so we'll be posting this week's patch a few days late, likely some time this weekend.
Until then, live and drink.
Feature Friday - April 12, 2024
- The salt desert is once again populated with scorpiocks.
- Credit lockboxes are now made out of metal, as claimed.
- Gigantic tonics now indicate they contain double dosage.
- Flowers are no longer breakable.
- Symbiotic fireflies are now treated as live animals.
- Legendary animated objects now have "animated" in their display names, where appropriate.
- Added plants and farmable plants to Mountains population tables.
- Motorized treads and gun racks can no longer be dismembered.
- Made Spinnerets' web stickiness scale better with mutation rank.
- Clarified in Spinnerets' description that you are immune to getting stuck.
- When you have Dystechnia, tinkers now give the right message when you ask them to identify an artifact.
- Light chords no longer display their blank armor stats.
- Stalagmites now render above liquid pools.
- Creatures are now less prone to walking over catch basins and polluting their contents.
- Opening yourself when you are an animated container (for ex. a table) will now open your inventory rather than saying "You have nothing to trade."
- Fixed a bug that caused some spiders not to weave webs.
- Fixed a bug that caused the AI to toggle many toggleable AI abilities on and off again repeatedly.
- Fixed a bug that caused the sacred well to prompt you twice about important items.
- Fixed a bug that caused limbs dismembered from creatures implanted with a phase harmonic modulator to stay omniphase indefinitely.
- Fixed a color issue with mumblemouth.
- [modding] Fixed a bug that caused IPlayerParts to be deep copied.
Roadmap to 1.0 đşď¸ Caves of Qud Dev Update
As you probably know, we announced that Caves of Qud is finally releasing on Steam in its full glory later this year, after more than 15 years of work. But we havenât talked a ton about how we get there and whatâs left to do. So letâs get to it!
Very Soon: Spring Molting
Weâve decided to put out one last pre-release feature arc on our Journey to 1.0. This update is already in private beta, coming to Patreon supporters extremely soon, and then going to open beta in early May & releasing a few weeks after that. Hereâs whatâs included:
- đ¨ALL NEW INTERFACEđ¨ The much-touted, transformational UI redesign is complete! Fully mouseable, fully gamepaddable, and gorgeous, but all carefully designed to maintain the essence of what makes Qud Qud.
- a refresh of the starting town of Joppa, with as much texture & lived-in feeling as the rest of the world
- hundreds of new sound and visual effects
- 40 new achievements
- several new narrative touches, big bug fixes, & performance improvements
Gallery of the gorgeous new interface: https://imgur.com/a/slSlWbh
Summer & Fall 2024: Secrets til Launch!
We donât want to spoil everything, but throughout summer and fall our central project will be to finish the main quest, and then add something to satisfy those who complete the entire narrative arc of Caves of Qud. Weâll add a more hands-on tutorial, too.
Thereâs also always tons of tâs to cross and iâs to dot when finishing a game: those last achievements, missing sounds and visual effects, more bugfixes, etc. All of these things will need to be built and tested behind closed doors, and theyâll keep us busy.
Late 2024: Launch
No, we donât have a date, as itâs still awhile away and we donât want to be up against the marketing budget of the next Assassinâs Cry: Breath of the Duty (trademark pending).
Part of the lead-up to launch is preparing the game architecture so we can properly handle big meaty updates post-launch. Which begs the questionâŚ
What About After Launch?
Yep! Weâre going to keep updating the game! Major content and system releases. Of course how many exactly does depend on the financial realities of sales, but no matter what, we have two big DLCs planned already. We honestly donât know yet if theyâll be paid purchases or free upgrades, but weâre thinking about the right approach.
Weâre also considering how to best support other platforms. Itâs not urgent or pressing, but we want to make sure we donât code ourselves into a corner if/when the time comes to maintain several control schemes, hardware, etc.
Back to Work!
Those are all the updates for now. Weâll shout-n-video when we have Spring Molting up on Steam for you, but hopefully this clears up any lingering confusion about what comes next. Feel free to keep asking us questions on the Discord; weâre watching out for âem.
Live and drink,
Tanya, Alexandra, Jason, and Brian
Feature Friday - April 5, 2024
- Bundles of noisegrass are now more appropriately priced.
- Added ability icons to the gas breath mutations of breathing lizards.
- Fungus-ridden robots now actually host fungi.
- Spacetime vortices now remain stationary for the first round they appear, giving you a window to step outside their range.
- Cragmensch and glittermensch are now harder to set on fire.
- High-powdered magnets now indicate when they are destroyed due to application.
- Your DV is now set to zero while you are dominating.
- Stasis now freezes the timer on bombs.
- Fixed a bug that caused interact nearby, the nearby objects list, and the looker object list to consider objects inside solids differently from one another.
- Fixed a bug that caused the direction of the current local map to be displayed incorrectly when choosing a local map to travel to from the world map.
- Fixed a bug that caused the item description in power switch abilities to be wrong.
- Fixed a typo in murals describing the historic liberation of cities.
- Fixed a bug that caused dynamic turret tinkers controlled by you to be unable to place turrets.
- Fixed a bug in the ability text of turret tinkers that displayed the internal blueprint or table name it was using.
- Fixed a bug that caused the target details text of a hidden sidebar to be clipped when using bio-scanning bracelet.
- Fixed a bug that caused cleave to indicate a target was cleaved even when it was immune to effects.
- Fixed a bug that caused zones below strata 50 of Eyn Roj to be devoid of creatures.
- [modding] Fixed a bug that caused population items that did not specify a load strategy to be skipped.
- [modding] Fixed a bug that caused load strategies on population groups to be ineffectual.
- [modding] The full file path is now displayed when a conversation part referenced in XML cannot be resolved.
Feature Friday - March 29, 2024
- Extradimensional psychic assassin weeps are no longer noted in your journal on sight.
- You are now allowed to pick your target when there are multiple creatures available to beguile or proselytize in a cell.
- Flying objects that become stuck (for ex. in webs) will now stop flying and fall.
- Fixed a bug that caused some golems to retain their mental shield.
- Fixed a bug that caused some golems to drop a corpse or their inventory on death.
- Fixed a bug that rarely caused several webs to spawn stacked in a single square.
- Fixed a bug that caused phase webs to break immediately.
- Fixed a bug that caused phasing from phase webs to wear off immediately.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the phased VFX from rendering.
- Fixed a bug that caused frost webs to behave differently for player and NPC use.
- Fixed a bug that rarely caused fixed settlement ovens to appear in random encounters.
- [modding] Added support for removing any blueprint tag by prefixing them with remove: e.g. removetag, removebuilder, removestat, etc.
- [modding] Buttons in Options.xml can now declare an OnClick method.
- [debug] We made some changes to modding population tables.
- Populations and their groups with the same IDs are now merged by default, specify Load="Replace" to replace them.
- Objects and tables can now be merged by explicitly specifying Load="Merge".
- Any population item can now be removed by specifying Load="Remove".
- Populations and their groups with the same IDs are now merged by default, specify Load="Replace" to replace them.
Feature Friday - March 22, 2024
- Added new visual effects to throwing axes and geomagnetic discs.
- Poison-tipped spears are now thrown with the pointy end towards the target.
- Throwing axes are now categorized under Thrown Weapons.
- You are no longer required to die permanently in order to unlock the achievement 'Jeweled Dusk'.
- Motorized treads can no longer rust.
- There's now a popup message when you or a companion has a stat drained by a creature for the first time.
- Fixed a bug that occasionally prevented popups from being displayed when equipment was removed by a pulse field magnet.
- Fixed a messaging oddity when losing the use of dependent limbs, such as hands.
- Fixed a bug that caused trails on thrown items to render over their sprite.
- Fixed a bug that caused your average armor to not be recalculated when regenerating limbs.
- Fixed a bug that caused dismembered limbs of named creatures to be referred to with an article.
- Fixed a bug that caused dismembered limbs to not inherit the article of the creature they were dismembered from.
- Fixed a bug that caused the "worn around wings" slot to lose its name after eating the Cloaca Surprise.
- Fixed a bug that caused you to permanently lose your beak after eating the Cloaca Surprise.
- Fixed a bug that caused your disguise to disappear in completely dark areas.
- Fixed a bug that caused graffiti to sometimes not change the foreground color of a tile.
- [modding] Added several configurable parameters to throwing visual effects: e.g. speed, arc, rotation, trail, color, etc.
- [modding] The ending transparency of projectile trails can now be set with a full-length RGBA value, e.g. '#77bfcf60'.
- [modding] Fixed a bug that caused transparency on custom projectile trails to be overriden.
Feature Friday - March 15, 2024
- Added new hamsa effects to various grenades.
- All heavy weapons will now be reloaded before each individual shot while using Sweep.
- Fixed a bug that caused the automove interrupt code to be incorrectly 'sticky' in some situations.
- Fixed a messaging oddity when attempting to recoil to the court of sultans in combat.
- Fixed a bug that caused some factions to not gift their cybernetics credit wedges via the water ritual.
- Fixed a bug that caused irisdual beam to misreport its dealt damage.
- Fixed a bug that allowed you to lunge with a dismembered stinger.
- Fixed a bug that caused thermal and freeze grenades to not have appropriate hamsa effects.
- Fixed a bug that caused armed mines to be reported as disarmed in their description.
- Fixed a bug that caused the item category of the scrapped waydroid to be incorrect.
- Fixed a bug that caused the 'Auto-pickup of zero weight items' but skip picking up items with fractional weight.
- [debug] Added a new debug option to show current faction reputation when looking at creatures that grant reputation.
- [modding] Name is now a required property of population groups.
- [modding] Added a Name to every population group.
Feature Friday - February 16, 2024
- Added new descriptions for several pieces of armor and ceremonial vibrokhopesh.
- Trash and scrap can no longer break or rust.
- Creatures no longer expel their quills against inanimate objects.
- Clues for the Kith and Kin quest are now properly marked as quest items, warning you before being sold.
- Autoexplore no longer picks up Kith and Kin clues.
- Gas masks and filters now reduce damage caused by dangerous gases only if they are dangerous to inhale, but when they are, the damage reduction is much more effective.
- You are no longer prompted multiple times about your ability to swoop when flying.
- Star kraken no longer extrude unidentifiable tubes.
- The recoil ability can once again be used on the world map.
- Made death by damage reflection messages a little more sensical.
- Unidentified hoversleds are no longer seen as 'small boxes'.
- Increased the value of rubber tree seed.
- Fixed a bug that caused Eskhind to sometimes travel back towards the hollowed tree after returning to Bey Lah.
- Fixed a bug that caused Keh-hind to sometimes not leave Bey Lah right away when exiled.
- Fixed a bug that sometimes caused creatures to spawn directly over pits.
- Fixed a bug that rarely caused creatures to spawn directly on top of spacetime vortices.
- Fixed a bug that caused fish to sometimes spawn without water.
- Fixed a bug that caused daggers in the thrown weapon slot to be eligible for Rejoinder.
- Fixed a bug that prevented your notes from displaying properly on unidentified items.
- Fixed a bug that caused walls and furniture to remain targeted even when out of line of sight.
- Fixed a bug that caused death from thirst to be attributed to the last creature that damaged you.