Caves of Qud News

The deeply simulated roguelike strangeness of Caves of Qud won this year's Hugo Award for Best Game or Interactive Work

The Hugo Awards: they're not just for science-fiction novels that make you think "I should read that one day" and never do. Now they've got an interactive category, so once a year you can be told how excellent one more videogame is, think "I should play that one day," and then never get around to that either...
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Surprise Feature Friday - August 8, 2025

210.23

Phase spiders are now more reliably phased.
Dream wrens found outside of Chavvah are now part of the birds faction.
You now always start with a method of seeing in the dark when entering a waking dream.
Waking dreams now wait until you return to the main gameplay screen to end, so for example your dream does not end in the middle of a conversation.
Juking now counts as movement for the cooling effects of blaze tonic.
Burgeoning and Temporal Fugue no longer play the gain follower sound effect for each summoned creature.
You now only ask the wild-eyed water merchant about Mamon Souldrinker if you have Raising Indrix.
The game now recognizes ciderer Erah as a proper noun.
The Barathrumites are now called [redacted] if you get [redacted] in [redacted].
The flowers in [redacted] are no longer flammable.
Quest objects are now more consistently reachable.
Tents made out of creature skins should be improperly capitalized less often.
Removed an outdated section in the help files about different melee weapon types having different penetration values.
Fixed a bug that allowed Fix-It spray foam to repair permanently broken objects.
Fixed a bug that caused waydroids in adjacent zones to be hostile even if you had a droid scrambler.
Fixed a bug that caused adjacent scrambled waydroids to count as hostile for the purpose of calculating wildfire for missile weapons.
Fixed a bug that prevented item-based quest steps from completing when you obtained the item via tinkering.
Fixed a bug that caused interactable quest objects to sometimes spawn in cells with other furniture, rendering them hard to see or interact with.
Fixed a bug that caused nocturnal apex durations to be half as long as intended.
Fixed lots of misspellings and other errors in generated text.
Fixed lots of misspellings and other errors in non-generated text.
Fixed a pronoun issue with Asphodel.
[modding] Skills marked as ExcludeFromPool are now excluded from warm static rolls.
[modding] Attempting to register for string events on XRLGame or using a handler other than IPart and Effect now outputs a warning.
[modding] A GenericCommandEvent can now be queued for next action manager segment using GameEventCommand.
[modding] A map of mod "Exclusions" can now be defined in manifest.json directories, skipping the directory if any of the listed mods is active.
[modding] The DroppedEvent now has a static Send method.
[modding] Fixed a bug that caused AwardingXPEvent to only propagate to game systems.

We’re growing a new mutation

[p]Hey everyone,

It’s Alexandra from Kitfox here with the latest news from development. The team continues to work on several limbs worth of upgrades to the game. Localization is moving ahead and there’s even work being done on the first Expansion Pack. You can also expect to see a little patch this week with some bugfixes!

Today we have exciting news from the porting side because today we’re announcing that Caves of Qud will be available on the Nintendo Switch by the end of the year!

And it’s the start of the Kitfox Festival today so Caves of Qud and the entire Kitfox catalogue are on sale! Tell your friends (especially those who don’t have Qud yet, because what are they even doing???) [dynamiclink][/dynamiclink]

Lastly, our friends at A Sharp also just announced their brand new procedural adventure game, Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists. If you're into tense tactical battles and kaleidoscopic, mythological world explorations then this might be for you. You can watch the announcement trailer here and wishlist the game on Steam now:

[dynamiclink][/dynamiclink]

Happy festivaling + live and drink.

-Alexandra
[/p]

Maintenance Patch - July 28, 2025

210.22

Isahind and Warden Yrame now always have the appropriate freezing ray variants for their descriptions.
The n-pointed asterisk can no longer be disassembled.
Multi-turn charge abilities like Decarbonize, Run Over, and Wrecking Charge now render each turn spent charging.
Fixed a bug in zone building due to placing quest items on villagers or lair owners that lack inventories.
Fixed a bug that caused some ability bar buttons to not function when clicked with the mouse.
Fixed a crash when a burgeoning cooking effect triggered on gaining new followers.
Fixed a bug that caused several effects like flying, sprinting, or wading to sometimes alter your tile in the UI.
Fixed a bug that caused golems that were overkilled by several times their base hitpoints to be reshaped with 0 hitpoints.
Fixed a bug that caused mutations to be displayed with their class name when selecting an atzmus.
Fixed a bug that caused the gear from the Great Machine to disarm natural weapons.
Fixed a bug that caused secrets in multi-tile world terrain such as the Rivers Svy and Opal to not match the interests of any factions, such as fish.
Fixed a bug that caused incorrect or null values to be displayed instead of a creature's immature person term.
Fixed a bug that caused 'Her' and 'Their' pronouns to sometimes be displayed instead of the substantive 'Hers' and 'Theirs'.
Fixed a bug that caused the quest 'Reclamation' to soft-lock by pouring warm static on warleaders.
Fixed a bug that caused you to permanently be rendered below other objects after being enclosed.
[modding] Added a TierScaling flag to XP events, which when disabled skips scaling XP awards by level difference to the creature killed.

Caves of Qud dev teases "at least three" expansions for the sci-fi roguelike

17 years after development began and 14 on from its first public beta, sci-fi roguelike Caves of Qud hit 1.0 in 2024 to a tremendous response. Its old-school aesthetic puts it in the wheelhouse with Dwarf Fortress (with which it also shares publisher Kitfox Games), and its deep, retrofuturistic sandbox world will keep you similarly sucked in once you can get over the initial learning curve. Spurred by the success of its launch, developer Freehold Games now teases what's next, with multiple expansion packs currently on the cards.

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