Caves of Qud News

200.20: We've posted an update on the beta branch.

A note on updates: our cadence has slowed a bit while our small team deals with some impactful life events. We'll be ramping back up soon. Live and drink, friends.

• Added a new cybernetic implant: medassist module.
  
• Added a new item: syphon baton.
  
• The co-processor mod now provides compute power that select equipment can consume.
  
• Added new descriptions for the following creatures, items, and objects: graverobber, exit teleporter, ornately carved marble, rotating machine arm, locking machine arm, strip fly, urn porter, urn, sarcophagus, machine press, reliquary, sultan reliquary, ornate chair, ornate bench, ornate table, plant in ornate pot, grave goods, Eater hologram, crypt sitter, and ghost perch.
  
• Added a new tile for the sign to village Ezra.
  
• Added flipped tiles for Eater holograms.
  
• Added some new tomb propaganda.
  
• Fungal infections and motorized treads are now immune to damage.
  
• More NPC tinkers can now repair, recharge, and identify artifacts.
  
• Piston presses now respect phase.
  
• Lunge now respects phase and flight.
  
• Juke now interacts better with effects that restrict your mobility.
  
• Removed the old tattoo gun.
  
• Cybernetics credit wedges are now stackable.
  
• Wraith-knights can no longer be duplicated or cloned.
  
• Robotic and otherwise inorganic creatures are no longer made thirsty by thirst thistle attacks.
  
• Disassemble now requests confirmation before disassembling quest items and items you have equipped.
  
• Disassemble now provides a "disassemble all" inventory action that disassembles a stack of items at once.
  
• Disassemble now has an action cost.
  
• Temporal fugue clones and various other forms of cloning no longer count toward the death and destruction toll of A Call to Arms.
  
• Sturdy spectacles and mirrorshades no longer incorrectly report that they have broken in melee.
  
• Having thirst inflicted on you by an attack no longer triggers tongue bleeding from glotrot.
  
• The Amphibious trait no longer reduces thirst that's inflicted by attacks, and amphibious characters get the same log messages as do non-amphibious characters when an attack inflicts thirst.
  
• A message now periodically appears in the message log when your companions are dehydrated. If they are visible when they become dehydrated, you get a popup.
  
• Fixed some issues with companions re-joining the player after traveling on the worldmap.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused an item type's repair cost to permanently depend on whether the first item of that type you repaired was rusted.
  
• Fixed some bugs that caused modifiers to secondary statistics like AV, DV, and movespeed to be double-applied when they came from mutations and cybernetic implants selected during character creation.
  
• [modding] The ability of NPCs to repair, recharge, and identify artifacts in the trade screen is no longer controlled by the CanRepair, CanRecharge, and CanIdentify properties. Instead, it's determined by the relevant tinkering skills. (Repair enables the repair action, Tinker I enables recharge, and Gadget Inspector enables identify, with Tinker II, Tinker III, Intelligence modifier, and any relevant equipment contributing to identification performance.)
  

We've released the OST for Caves of Qud!

Included are 14 original tracks by Craig Hamilton, totaling an hour of music, with more to come.

Live and drink.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1247760/Caves_of_Qud_Soundtrack/

200.17

We've posted an update to the Tomb of the Eaters beta on the beta branch.

[h3]Tomb-related notes[/h3]
We made some structural changes to the layout of the Tomb.

• We shifted the whole dungeon up several Z levels. The crematory is now one level above the surface.
  
• Removed the Lake of the Damned.
  

We included some more signposts toward finding the Mark of Death and entering the Tomb through the Death Gate.

• Implemented a partial redesign of the Arcades to the Twin Gates that includes a path and sign pointing to Ezra.
  
• Immediately upon finding the Mark of Death, you now learn the Mark of Death secret, and the 'Recover the Mark of Death' quest step now completes.
  
• Immediately upon inscribing the Mark of Death, the 'Inscribe the Mark" quest step now completes.
  

It should now be clearer that a certain post-Brightsheol body alteration is intentional.
Once you return from Brightsheol, you cannot go back via the same method. (Added two new cybernetic implants: fire suppression system and anchor spikes.
Added a new item: advanced toolkit.
Crypt ferrets are now better at hiding.
Made Vivira, the sentient turret, magenta in order to stand out more.
Added descriptions for the following objects: fulcrete, ebon fulcrete, wide bottle, crypt door, compacted bone, and grave moss.
Added some more tomb propaganda.
Renamed recarcassing nook to recoming nook.


[h3]General notes[/h3]
We made some changes to auto-equip.

• Auto-equip now gives you feedback on items that were unequipped as a result of your action.
  
• Eliminated most repetitive auto-equip messaging.
  
• Auto-equip now tries to unequip multiple items in order to equip an item that uses multiple equipment slots.
  
• Confirmation is now requested before automatically unequipping an item that will be destroyed by being unequipped.
  

We tweaked the temperature-related behavior of liquids.

• You may find differences in how pouring liquids on you affects temperature.
  
• Standing in a pool of lava is no longer safe once you've dealt with the initial temperature shock.
  
• Your equipment and inventory now experience more temperature effects than before, particularly if you expose yourself to large amounts of lava.
  

Fungal infections are now immune to heat, cold, electricity, and acid.
Projectiles coming from a distance and passing near the player now produce a message in the message log.
More combat sound effects are now properly controlled by the General > Combat Sounds option.
Any NPC with whom you can perform the water ritual can now give you directions.
The following actions performed while autoexploring now also operate on adjacent tiles: autoget, harvesting, butchering, trash rifling, opening a chest, and interacting with a bookshelf.
Puffer fungi can now be hit by normal ranged weapons.
Lava and acid now spawn less often in containers that are unsafe to house them.
Companions now attempt to generally follow you even if they can't pathfind all the way to you (for example, because you have Force Bubble active).
Mirrorshades now give a very small chance to reflect light-based attacks.
Objects embedded in walls can no longer be taken or interacted with via the interact nearby command (unless you are also in the same tile as the wall).
Items embedded in walls are now partially visible with penetrating radar.
The overlay inventory screen now better handles having two heads or two faces.
Multiple applications of Hobble now renew the duration of the effect rather than stacking the movespeed penalty.
Carbide hand bones no longer modify hands added by Helping Hands, and they only affect the set of hands where the implant was implanted (in the event a True Kin has somehow acquired multiple sets of hands).
Trader repair and recharge actions now more effectively handle plurality and stacking.
Tattooing a companion no longer tattoos you instead of them.
Smart use no longer pets Sheba Hagadias by default if Sheba is pettable.
You can no longer open and close doors while frozen solid.
Magazine-loaded ranged weapons now account for the weight and value of the ammo loaded in them.
Solar and radio-powered cells now receive their charge more reliably on the world map and should cause less lag.
Take-all no longer counts untakeable items when checking whether you're going over your weight limit.
Added a new tile for the basic toolkit.
Fixed some item duping exploits with evil twins and prism clones.
Temporal fugue clones no longer lose their items before they expire.
Fixed an issue with legendary breathers' and miners' names not showing up properly.
Fixed a bug that made Berate 10x as likely to take effect if you had an Ego modifier of exactly zero.
Fixed some bugs with explosions, other types of forced movement, and the generation of maps with ruined buildings.
Fixed a bug that made DV and MA penalties from confusion become permanent if the game was saved and loaded.
Fixed an issue with portable walls.
Fixed an issue with nano-neuro animators.
Fixed a typo in village monument descriptions.
[modding] In character generation, whether a genotype is considered a mutant is now controlled explicitly by the new attribute IsMutant="true" in the genotype entry rather than by whether its name contains the substring "True". Mods affecting genotypes may need to add this attribute.

Tomb cherubim now attack back if provoked.
Tomb cherubim now properly defend one another and give chase across zones.
Grave moss is no longer considered aggressive by the looker.
You can now properly save and load once you return from Brightsheol.
The message log now works per normal when you return from Brightsheol.
Exit teleporters in the crypts no longer send you back to the catacombs.
The sarcophagus in Resheph's burial chamber no properly responds to the yes/no dialog.
Added descriptions for the following objects.

• conservator
  
• gorged growth
  
• flowers
  
• bouquet of flowers
  
• low wall
  

Added a new item: point-defense drone.
Added a new cybernetic implant: biodynamic power plant.
Added sound effects for the following:

• various creature deaths
  
• Broken effect getting applied
  
• Shattered Armor effect getting applied
  
• using Clairvoyance
  
• using Disintegration
  
• using Sunder Mind
  
• using Flaming Hands
  
• using Freezing Hands
  
• using Freeze Breath
  
• decarbonizers targeting and firing
  
• beep/ding/bloop artifact startup sequences
  
• resonance, stasis, and time dilation grenades exploding
  
• objects freezing
  
• the firing of phase cannons, rondures of light, laser rifles, linear cannons, eigenrifles, chain lasers, freeze rays, nullray pistors, hypertractors, and normality gas pumps
  
• light being refracted
  
• teleportation
  

Getting reduced to 0 movespeed no longer causes you to become infinitely fast.
Spacetime vortices and rifts now deposit all objects that enter through them into a consistent destination zone (randomly determined per anomaly), rather than destroying non-player objects. Companions sucked into a vortex are unable to rejoin you until you find them.

Welcome to the second Tomb of the Eaters beta! This patch takes you through the back half of the Tomb of the Eaters dungeon and through the rest of the quest. The full feature arc should be ready in January.

If you're interested, come help us test! Our focus right now is on broad scale testing: big bugs, big balance issues, and big UX challenges. See this thread for details.

To access the beta: right-click on Caves of Qud in Steam, select Properties, click the Betas tab, and switch to the 'beta' branch.

We'll post the comprehensive patch notes with the full feature arc. For now, here's a summary.

• Added the upper half of the Tomb of the Eaters dungeon.
  
• The Tomb of the Eaters quest is now completable.
  
• Added a slew of new content in support of the quest: new creatures, new items, new NPCs, new locations, etc.
  
• Added [extremely redacted].
  
• Made some balance changes to several of the Beta #1 creatures, particularly conservators, crypt sitters, and crypt ferrets.
  
• Made some balance changes to accommodate the new movespeed calculation.
  
  • The Multiple Legs mutation now costs 4 points.
    
  • Motorized treads now gives more movespeed.