Cultist Simulator News

"Marksman, detective, renegade. He has always been a quiet man, but since he left the Suppression Bureau, he has grown even quieter, and terribly still - except for his fingers and for his eyes, always in restless motion."

It's June the 28th, once again. So I thought I'd pop in briefly to share our beautiful, melancholy new trailer for BOOK OF HOURS, the next game in the same universe as Cultist Simulator. (AK says I'm not allowed to call it a spiritual successor because that sets the wrong expectations, so, er, I won't! I'll just say that anyone who likes Cultist will almost certainly like BOOK OF HOURS, and will find out more Secret Histories lore along the way. Praise be to the Chandler.)

Hope it tugs at your heart strings!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

If you want more info, check out our latest blog. Otherwise, back to bringing the Dawn!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1028310

"I don't recall exactly what occurred, last night, in the beating black between the trunks of the trees, where winged things moved beneath my hands. But now this morning my brain fizzes with fragments: IN GI RUM IMUS NOC TE ET CON SUMI MUR IGNI RUM IMUS NOC TE ET CON SUMI MUR -"

Game dev, unlike jobs in Cultist Simulator, is not "an arrangement to exchange one's life for money". It's something AK and I spend an embarrassing amount of time doing, thinking about and discussing. We talk about grand things like the Importance of Art and apophenia and the unplumbed depths of a player's heart, and we talk about petty things like what colour the glow effect around an empty slot should be, and whether or not 'Guardian' is the most charming Aspect in the game. (It is.)

Cultist Simulator turns five today, which basically makes it the game version of a Long. But it isn't off to Port Noon quite yet: we're still patching and fixing and improving it. We've come a long way since launch - four DLCs, four new languages, mobile and Switch ports, a whole code rewrite, 170 Workshop mods, a TRPG and a certain card placement SNAFU that one really needn't remember - to the point where our launch trailer looks janky compared to the actual game!

I have to do the dev thing and mention, loudly, that we're running a 70% off Daily Deal to mark the occasion, that Cultist Sim's follow-up BOOK OF HOURS brings new Secret Histories in August, and that we're delighted to be a husband and wife team hustling to make strange flowers grow in the garden of our lives. But aside from all of that, I wanted to thank you.

Thank you to everyone who Kickstarted the game back in 2017. Thank you to everyone who bought a copy in launch week, helping us with Steam's frightening and vital algorithms. Thank you to everyone who bought a copy since, making sure we can still afford Ultra-Nom Jelly Snaxx for our cats, to everyone who joined our mailing list or follows us on social media, to the people who read our blogs and the people who send in nice messages and the people who buy merch and anyone, honestly, who's reading this. Cultist Simulator is a weird, bright pocket universe: I'm so glad you answered the riddle, and are counted among the Know.

Here's to the Mansus, the House, and its Seekers. Each flame has its fuel. This is ours. ♥

Love,

Lottie & Alexis

ORACHE, aka 'saltbushes', is one of the less interesting-looking plants we've chosen as a version name. So the picture above is atriplex hortensis, aka 'red orache'.

Here's the patch on the beta branch now. Shorter update than usual cos I have a beta update for BOOK OF HOURS to get out too! a quick gloss on Chelnoque's update notes below:

- Sometimes Biedde's Blade was inflicting a normal wound instead of an unstanchable one.
- Opening a verb window on low FPS caused it to disappear.

This fiendish little critter took Chel weeks if not months to track down and involved some proper detective work

- The options window now scales correctly for various edge-case resolutions.

Thank Christ, we can import that into BOOK OF HOURS too

- Fixed a false-positive log spam on inspecting the credits window. (codename VARLEY)
- The status bar doubled the displayed number of exhausted Passions.
- The volume of the SFX for entering and exiting the Mansus is halved.

I promised we would do this! Sorry it took a while

- Disabled camera's motions on entering and exiting the Mansus.
- The legacy selection screen won't suggest you to select from two Exiles anymore.

oh pf. EXILE is the best DLC

- FEATURE: Multidrag now works properly at last. Select multiple cards while holding the SHIFT key and drag them as a group.

I detect a degree of sass, it was my code that didn't work properly, but he's right

- MODDING: $plus and $minus now correctly parse values without \"\".

You can stop reading unless you're a modder

- MODDING: $append and $prepend now correctly work on uninitialized lists.
- MODDING: Recipe 'Xpans' property, which runs xtriggers on all cards on the table (as opposed to 'aspects', which applies them inside the current verb only).

This is something I added in BOOK OF HOURS to make the day cycle work properly, and you get to enjoy the benefit. ENJOY. benefit.

- MODDING: Status bar elements can now be defined more flexibly. Consult with Aspirant legacy in JSONs for an example. A brief rundown of properties:
- 'Ids' specifies elements that are tracked by this status bar entry.
- 'Format' allows to specify any additional characters that accompay the value display. '({value})' meants the value is displayed in brackets, ''-{value}' means it's preceded by dash/minu, etc. Keep in mind that you can use TextMeshPro rich text tags, same as everywhere else in the texts.
- 'Icon', naturally, defines an icon. If not defined, the first entry in 'Ids' is used instead.
- 'Styles' allows to modify value's display at certain numbers. Currently, there are only possible two modes, that look like 'colour_red_0' and 'hide_0'. The first makes the display red when it equals 0, and the second hides it under the same conditions. Note that you can use any value instead of 0, and any colour instead of red - defined as a plain string colour name, or a hex code.
A simple string definition is still possible too, of course.

This makes my eyes cross but it's cool and will find uses elsewhere!

yrs ever

- AK

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1028310/BOOK_OF_HOURS/

Our next game is BOOK OF HOURS, a spiritual successor to Cultist Sim. We've just started a BoH closed beta, and figured some Cultist Sim players might a) not have heard of it and b) want to join in!

(Anyone who enjoys Cultist Sim is likely to enjoy BOOK OF HOURS. AK will probably not approve of my saying this, but It's sort of a holiday for stressed out CS players - it's the same Lovecraftian world, but with new lore and fewer stressors. No dying suddenly of Dread!)

If you'd like to get an early look at BOOK OF HOURS and help us make it great, register your interest in being a beta player. We're picking a bunch of people to join each month, so you might not get in. But perhaps the Watchman will favour you...

This is the least interesting patch ever, folks. I've literally just put the beta link for BOOK OF HOURS in the title menu, and moved some stuff about.