Caves of Qud News

Hey friends,

It’s Alexandra from Kitfox here with a quick update on how things are going. Development has started again after the Freehold Team was on a much deserved break! As we mentioned last month, the major focus post-1.0 will be to explore localization and porting to mobile and consoles but there’s so much more in the works. There’s a couple of updates you can expect in the next few weeks:

February 28th

This week there will be a maintenance patch on the main branch with bug fixes.

March 7th

Then we have the initial 'beta' branch release of 1.1, including an upgrade to Unity 6 and Windows 64-bit builds. No new game features yet, just technical and modding platform updates for now.

Future

After that, the team will return to a regular maintenance fix cadence, probably slower than weekly updates. The team is also building the technical localization API, and starting builds for mobile & consoles but we are just in the very early stages of this so we will have more to say later.

We are excited for more folks to be able to play Caves of Qud!

See you in the next one.

-Alexandra

Hey friends,

Happy 2025, happy lunar new year, and we hope you’re still enjoying the Caves of Qud 1.0 update. We have some updates to share with y’all. The team is still taking a rest, but we are still planning out the future of Qud, and the first priority will be looking at localization and console porting. Awards season is also in full swing and we’ve been nominated for some very prestigious categories!

[h2]Award Nominations! x4![/h2]

First is “Best Strategy/Simulation Game” at the D.I.C.E Awards. The show takes place on Thursday, Feb. 13 at 8:00PM PT/11:00PM ET and you’ll be able to watch from home on IGN’s streaming channels. See if you can spot Jason (lead developer, writer) and Tanya (Kitfox lead) in the crowd!



Caves of Qud has also been nominated for Excellence in Design, Excellence in Narrative, and the Seamus McNally Grand Prize at the IGF Awards. You can watch along on Wednesday March 19th at 6:30PM PT/9:30PM ET on the GDC Twitch channel.

We're honored to be nominated alongside these other fantastic games. Any time a game releases it's a miracle, but especially the 17-year wandering journey that it took to make Caves of Qud. To be recognized by other developers is really just the icing on the cake.

You can also participate in voting for Caves of Qud for the IGF Audience Award right here. Voting closes on Friday January 31st at 11:59PM PT so make sure you get your vote in ASAP! RIGHT NOW! Don’t keep reading! Go vote and come back!




OK you voted? Cool. FYI, Caves of Qud is also eligible for to be nominated for a Nebula Award. The only way a game can be nominated for the “Best Game Writing” award is via an SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Association) member. If you are a member you should be able to access this forum post and get a game key, to help you judge! If you have friends who are Nebula voters, send them our way if you think they would appreciate Qud’s unique writerly vibes.



Jason is also going to be hosting a special Writing Caves of Qud Nebula stream on his Twitch channel on Monday February 3rd, 3-5PM PDT. He'll be talking through the dev process and showing off some of the game's writing.

[h2]Porting, Localizing, and More...[/h2]

As we’ve said, first the team is resting. But, when the team is back from their break, one of our focuses will be to explore localization and porting to mobile and consoles. Localizing a game with procedural text like Caves of Qud is a unique challenge that’s not easily solvable, but it’s also a fun problem to dig into. We already have an international audience excited to take a look, so we need to take the time to figure out how to get it done properly and make sure its unique tone and writerly virtues shine through in every language.

And of course consoles and mobile are also not trivial projects to undergo, but we are committed to getting Caves of Qud available to more folks out there.

[h2]Speedrun Winners[/h2]

Here are the winners of the Caves of Qud Launch Speedrun contest! You can check out the Wander, Classic and Bzzt runs on Speedrun.com and the Ultra Ending run on Twitch. Thank you everyone who participated, whether it be the streamers, the viewers, or the folks who volunteered to help organize the event. If you’re interested in Caves of Qud speedrunning, you can check out the qud-speedrunning channel on the Caves of Qud Discord or Caves of Qud on Speedrun.com. We are interested in running another speedrun event in the future for non-streamers too so let us know if that’s something you’d be into. Winners will be receiving their prize packs from Mighty Merch soon.



That’s all for now! Please tune in and watch the award shows and cheer us on. We will have more to say on development soon.

-Kitfox + Freehold Games

Our favourite roguelike of the year was deeply strange and absurdly deep. It's the impossibly inventive retrofuturist fantasy Caves of Qud. For more awards, check out our Game of the Year 2024 hub...
Read more.

Hi friends,

It's been two weeks since we launched Caves of Qud 1.0, and WOW what a stellar launch it's been! There's always some uncertainty when you press the release button for a game that's been in development for so long, but we've been floored by Qud's overwhelmingly positive reception. Glowing reviews, hilarious player stories, so many interpretations of the ending...

And, wow, so many folks are playing. We 2.5X'd the previous record for number of players, and that was just a single day of activity; this has been going on for two weeks! Whether you've been with us since the beginning or you just discovered the game this December, thank you for being here and transporting with us to the vine-strangled arches.


[h2]1.01 Patch[/h2]

Our 1.01 patch is live right now. It fixes some high priority issues from the 1.0 release. This patch isn't save-breaking and remains compatible with any mods made for 1.0. Full patch notes at the bottom of this post.


[h2]Designing Caves of Qud[/h2]

We recently uploaded a video featuring commentary by Caves of Qud writer, designer, and co-creator Jason Grinblat and composer Craig Hamilton, going over some of the gameplay, narrative, and audio design behind the game. It's a casual video, comprehensible by people who have never played the game, so feel free to share it with your friends who may be curious.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


[h2]Pre-order Qud merch[/h2]

It's not too late to pre-order our official Caves of Qud launch merch from our partners at Mighty Merch. Show off your love for our esoteric indie roguelike with a Live and Drink t-shirt. Hang up a print of a fictitious sci-fi novel featuring a strange and wondrous vista from the world of Qud. The first wave contains t-shirts, stickers, posters, and pins, with more designs and items coming in future waves.




[h2]Break time + happy holidays![/h2]
We are exhausted from the endgame work & launch, so we're taking a break! In the new year we'll probably be posting a few more small patches with bugfixes, etc. Then, sometime after, we'll be back with our bigger plans for what's next...

We at Freehold and Kitfox Games want to thank everyone for your continued support. We wish y'all a restful holidays, curled up with a glowsphere, a ray cat, and a mug of mushroom cider.

Live and drink,
Jason, Brian, & the team


[h2]Full Patch Notes for 1.01[/h2]

• Added an advanced option to disable all control binding conflict checking (Options > Debug > Disable conflict checking when rebinding controls).
  
• Added an advanced option to toggle autohiding of the mouse cursor (Options > UI > Automatically hide mouse cursor when inactive).
  
• The Skills tab details pane now scrolls properly with the right thumbstick or shift+arrow keys.
  
• Books now scroll properly with the right thumbstick or shift+arrow keys.
  
• Hatters no longer sell quartzfur cloaks.
  
• Made it more obvious that the [redacted] can be [redacted] to.
  
• Added a clarifying message when you try to enter the [redacted] after [redacted] already [redacted].
  
• The Reverse Engineer description now clarifies you can reverse engineer mods.
  
• Restored the mod status alert indicator.
  
• Fix-it spray foam can no longer be used to repair things that cannot be repaired.
  
• Reduced the memory pressure from using Precognition.
  
• Fixed a bug that prevented Page Right and Fire Missle Weapon from sharing a control bind.
  
• Fixed a missing duration stat in the description of cave spider's Spin Webs ability.
  
• Fixed a bug that allowed you to begin the tutorial with the modern UI disabled.
  
• Fixed a couple more very rare input focus loss issues.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused invalid quest locations to prevent the quest screen from opening.
  
• Fixed a rare freeze when drinking warm static.
  
• Fixed a rare exception with templar phylacteries.
  
• Fixed a rare exception in status bar rendering.
  
• Fix an animation bug with certain late-game holograms.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused leaving the battlefield during Reclamation to not generate a warning if you completed Beast Slouching before defeating all the warleaders.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused some generated books to always generate as a single type.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused some factions to not be visible in the [redacted].
  
• Made the [redacted] plural instead of singular.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused rebuked robots to continue hostilities.
  
• Fixed an exception that prevented you from viewing gamepad binds with no active controller.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused an unendable conversation if you interacted with the Grit Gate intercom without a tongue.
  
• Fixed an issue with the Pets of Harvest Dawn DLC not loading properly on some OSX devices.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused 'Melee attack nearest enemy' to stop working without feedback.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused loss of input focus when viewing the Records screen without any records.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the wrong endgame state to be logged in the Records screen.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused endgame Records to be saved twice.
  
• Fixed a bug that allowed you to recoil during the [redacted].
  
• Fixed a bug that caused [redacting] yourself to yield a [redacted] that was missing reactive objects.
  
• Fixed a bug on OSX that caused screen size to be reduced to 0 when toggling fullscreen mode.
  
• Fixed a typo in [redacted].
  
• Fixed a typo in the mod toolkit.
  
• Fixed a rare exception when objects were cloned.
  
• Fixed a tile flipping issue when charging.
  
• [modding] GetCyberneticRejectionSyndromeChance now returns 0 by default.