Caves of Qud News

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.

Read the rest of the story...

The Future of Caves of Qud

[p]Hey friends,[/p][p]For a long time we hoped we could keep working on Caves of Qud after its 1.0 release. Not just porting and localizing to other languages (work that is well underway), but adding new layers of game to the already 17-year layer cake — things like new types of playable creatures, underground villages, new mechanics, and expanded lore. As we’ve hinted here and elsewhere, the success of the launch is allowing us to do just this! And now that we’ve had some time to take a rest, reflect on the release, and think through how we want to structure our future releases, we’re happy to share today the broad shape of our plans, even if details are yet to come. [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][h2]Expansion Packs[/h2][p]We’re going to be focusing development into a few big expansion packs that’ll come out one by one over the next few years. Each expansion pack will be paired with a big update to the base game. The base game updates will be free, and the expansion packs will be purchasable as DLC. The first one will likely come out sometime next year. We have at least three sketched out, but time will tell what they look like beyond the first.[/p][p][/p][h3]FAQ[/h3][p]What will go into the base game vs. the expansion packs?[/p][p]This’ll be a call based on what makes sense, whether we feel the feature being added is core to the game (a better version of what already exists) or part of a new set of non-vanilla features. Both the expansion pack and its paired base game update will have a lot of stuff in them, though.[/p][p]
How much will expansion packs cost? [/p][p]Still TBD, but since they will be big updates that take a lot of development time and energy to make, we plan on pricing them accordingly (i.e., definitely more than the Pets of Harvest Dawn pet pack). [/p][p][/p][p]Speaking of, what about future pet packs?
Originally our plan was to release a cycle of pet packs — Harvest Dawn was the first. Now we think it makes sense to just add more pets to the one pet pack, possibly paired with the timing of each expansion pack release. Everyone who owns the Harvest Dawn pet pack will get the new pets for free. We -may- slightly increase the price of the pet pack in the future to reflect this; we haven’t decided yet. [/p][p][/p][p]What will happen to Dromad Deluxe? [/p][p]The Dromad Deluxe bundle (base game + OST + Pets of Harvest Dawn) will eventually rotate out to make room for new bundles. So if you want your main menu dromad badge, get the bundle before it goes! We’ll post a warning closer to when it makes its exit. [/p][p][/p][p][/p][h2]r/Fantasy AMA[/h2][p]This Saturday, July 19th at 10 AM PST, we’ll be hosting an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) on r/fantasy. Come by and ask us a question, about expansion packs (maybe we’ll answer) or anything else![/p][p][/p][h3]Hugo Awards[/h3][p]And if you are a Seattle Worldcon member or attendee and eligible to vote for the Hugo Awards, please consider voting Caves of Qud for Best Game or Interactive Work! Deadline to vote is July 23rd, 11:59pm PST.[/p][p][/p][p]Thank you, friends. We’ll have more to say about expansion pack #1 later on, and a few more surprises coming soon. As always, live and drink. [/p]

Beta Bugfixes - July 4, 2025

210.21 - 'beta' branch

Fixed a bug in zone building due to placing quest items on villagers or lair owners that lack inventories.
Isahind and Warden Yrame now always have the appropriate freezing ray variant 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 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 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 will skip scaling awarded XP by tier differences to killed creatures.