Book of Hours News

[p]Welcome to 2026, everyone, The sum of the digits in this year is 10. The sum of digits in 10 is 1. There's probably something in that.[/p][p][/p][p]New update (on the beta branch) for the new year. There's one big feature that I've already given away in the post headline, and a number of little ones.[/p][p][/p]

• [p]Full modding support. Find mods at [/p][p]https://steamcommunity.com/app/1028310/workshop/[/p][p][/p][p]We had limited modding support - just locmods for community translations. Our answer to 'full modding pls?' was always 'maybe, some day'. I'm happy to announce that thanks to the typically tireless efforts of our curator-freelancer Chelnoque, tthe answer is now 'yes, today'. This is a beta release! If there are no bugs, it will be a pleasant surprise to us all! [email protected] awaits your bug reports![/p]

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• [p]As a side effect of the modding introduction, Travelling at Night books in the lodge are now placed on the left side of the bookshelf instead of the right side[/p][p][/p][p]Weird, yet true.[/p]

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• [p]Further Affairs windows are now draggable and properly react to an ESC key press[/p][p]
  I just never got around to implementing this, back in 2024, and then forgot. Eventually a user politely asked for it. So we put it in. True story, no twist.[/p]

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• [p]Incorrect plants occasionally bloomed in garden spots right after a garden was unlocked - but no longer[/p][p][/p][p]'Go home Nature, you are drunk'[/p]

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• [p]Changed the Russian title of the Locksmith's Dream's fifth volume[/p][p][/p][p]If you're not interested in linguistic trivia, stop reading here. In English, books III and V are 'LD: Trespasses' and 'LD: Incursus'. ''Trespasses' and 'Incursus' have a similar meaning, and they'd been translated with the same word in Russian. 'Incursus' is a Latin loan word that doesn't really exist in English anyway. So we just transliterated into Cyrillic as Инкурсус for volume V.[/p]

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• [p]Bonus fix![/p][p][/p][p]A user pointed out that Щ Ъ Ю were displaying weirdly in title text in Cyrillic. I added these to our sprite atlas and also took the opportunity to add the Ukrainian-specific characters ґ є і ї - which I believe is all we need for Ukrainian-language modding.[/p][p]As ever, if you'd like to do a translation or standard mod in a particular language and our existing character sets don't support it, do email us and ask. We usually get around to adding it.[/p]

[p][/p][p]That's it, except for a reminder that we're making a third game in the series, and we're doing a regular podcast about it as the third season of Skeleton Songs: https://weatherfactory.biz/make-a-crpg-with-us/ Making games is fun. Releasing them is more stressful, but I've learnt that if we don't release them, nobody gives us goods and/or services in exchange, which in turn makes it more difficult to release games because we are forced to sip dew and live in a shed. Business, we say, knowingly tapping our temples.[/p]

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[p]"Reverend Timothy, having secured the attention of an attractive woman prepared to listen to his sermons, is now elucidating his previous *and* his next intended Christmas sermon. Coquille fastens her smile more charmingly on her face. Her eyes travel the room from end to end. There is no escape."[/p]

[p][/p][p]Starting today, BOOK OF HOURS' in-game advent calendar is LIVE. 🎄[/p][p][/p][p]From 1st - 25th December, presents will appear periodically on Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree next to the Rectory in Brancrug Village. When in-game winter rolls around, you’ll see Christmas decorations appear throughout Hush House and Brancrug Village and you’ll be able to open your presents at the Rectory. [/p][p][/p][p](Please note that you can’t get advent calendar gifts during in-game spring, summer or autumn, and won’t see the Christmas tree or decorations during those seasons either. Playing at 6x speed, you'll only need to wait around six minutes for winter to roll around again.)[/p][p][/p][p]All items remain on the tree for you to collect any time this month, so don't worry about missing anything. The advent calendar ends on Christmas Day, but all presents will remain in-game until midnight on New Year’s Eve just in case you were doing something shocking like spending time in the real world with friends and family rather than playing our game. [/p][p][/p][p]Merry Christmas, every one of you! Thank you so much for curating books, cultivating histories and preserving the melancholy peace of Hush House. 💖[/p]

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[p]“Language is the key. It was language that opened the doors of the Mansus; without language, we could have had no peace; without language, we would still be beasts, worms, mud.”[/p]

[p][/p][p]At long last, we’re delighted to launch full Japanese translation for BOOK OF HOURS and HOUSE OF LIGHT! Everything is now fully playable in beautiful Japanese, and we hope any Japanese speakers diving into the melancholy beauty of Brancrug for the first time enjoy it.
[/p][p]Please note: we recommend starting a new game after you switch languages. Switching mid-game can cause issues with the display of some text.
[/p][p]If you don’t speak Japanese, fear not. We’re also running a 45% discount (our deepest ever!) on BOOK OF HOURS, the soundtrack and the HOUSE OF LIGHT expansion, and a deep sale on all items in the merch shop (Christmas is coming, after all).
[/p][p]Get everything BOOK OF HOURS for 45% off, below![/p][p]
[dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink]Enjoy! ♥[/p]

[p]\[Note: this patch went briefly live earlier this week, but it broke custom key bindings. We rolled it back, and that's fixed now.]
[/p][h3]2025.8.e.3: "EAGLES"[/h3][p]
A number of tiny ameliorations from the redoubtable Chelnoque[/p]

• [p]Perfected skills stop displaying upgrade slots[/p]
• [p]Films and phonograph records can no longer be contaminated[/p]
• [p]The cursor is anchored more thoroughly when trying to zoom right after moving the camera with keys[/p]
• [p]Verb windows now (again) resize correctly on slots removal[/p]
• [p]Better hitbox for a craftable recipe selection[/p]
• [p]Better support of ultrawide resolutions[/p]
• [p]Edge scrolling now retains consistent speed regardless of the zoom level[/p]
• [p]Fixed an assortment of bugs that occured during the key rebinding[/p]
• [p]In Severn Chamber, a certain comfort slot placement area was too short[/p]
• [p]In terrain unlock preview window, the period image was placed incorrectly when the preview description was only a single line[/p]
• [p]Various Japanese localisation fixes[/p]
• [p]Unity security update[/p]

[p][/p][p]Actually the Severn Chamber one was me, thanks to the player who wrote in to ask why they couldn't put their arthropod friend back where they found him. I don't know how we missed this for two years.[/p][p][/p][p]I'll talk briefly about the Unity security update, because you've probably seen, like me, a steady flow of updates in your Steam library, and most people are a bit vague about what it entails. (If you've read our Cultist Simulator update post, you already know these details, this post is almost identical.)[/p][p][/p][p]--[/p][p][/p][p]The short version: it's a vulnerability that seems to have been in Unity since 2017, but no one seems to have noticed or used it because it's pretty niche. So you probably dont have much to worry about even in unpatched games. [/p][p][/p][p]The long version: I'm not a cybersecurity bloke, but broadly as I understand it, there were command line flags in any game built with Unity that could be used to tell your game to load arbitrary code. Like this one:[/p][p][/p]

bh.exe -overrideMonoSearchPath "C:\\somefolder\\ransomware.dll" 

[p] [/p][p]Importantly, they couldn't make the game load code from a remote location. So someone has to (a) get the code on to your machine or a local network path, then (b) convince you to run the relevant command line, which isn't straightforward. But on Windows, it's quite easy to register an application to open any URL in a specified format, like this[/p][p][/p]

steam://getSteamToDoSomeConfigAction

[p][/p][p]So attacker tricks you into (a) registering "bookofhours://" as a schema and then (b) gets you to click a link like this[/p][p][/p]

bookofhours:// -overrideMonoSearchPath "aSimpleHttpURLWouldntWorkButAttackerCouldPotentiallyGetCreativeAndMakeYouDownloadAFIle"

[p][/p][p]Windows tells Book to start running and supplies the -overrideMonoSearchPath as a launch parameter. Poor Book obediently tries to load the file supplied in the malicious link, maybe it works, and if it does, you're now running their code.[/p][p][/p][p]So again, someone still needs to convince you to run an app in the first place to register Book as a schema handler, maybe your AV software will flag the download, idk, but the Internet is rife with clever cyber bastards. And it's a bigger deal for a game that actually is registered as a schema handler for genuine reasons.[/p][p][/p][p]Either way, it's fixed now, for Book and a lot of other games! But there will be unmaintained games out there with the vulnerability forever, so maybe if someone's read this far, I've saved them a visit to the Misery Palace ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]https://unity.com/security/sept-2025-01/remediation[/p][p][/p][p]https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/update-unity-games-cve-2025-59489/54542/[/p][p] [/p][p][/p]

- ACCESSIBILITY: Edge scroll (moves the camera when the cursor is near the edge of the screen) - off by default, can be toggled in the settings
- Custom window size persists after closing the game
- Certain impossible save names are now properly impossible
- Input fields on Steam Deck now correctly react to letters that aren't a part of a standard Latin alphabet