Cultist Simulator News

- You can now set gridsnap to 'no gridsnap' again. Welcome, children of the Moth
- Magnet-grabbed cards now return to their original position afterwards (e.g. when the detective gets lost post-suspicion, he won't)
- Weird dropzone ricochet effect no longer occurs when you put a card into a slot where it doesn't fit
- Card stacks now place properly
- Card stacks no longer open information window when dropped on the desktop (don't even)
- Stack badge shader now uses backface cull so it doesn't appear on reversed cards
- KEEP SAVE button works again
- Perf improvements

Fixed a gridsnap bias that favoured left/top row. Damn that's better.
Fixed a blurry text issue on cards
Fixed frequency bug in card shuffle. Particular thanks to Chelnoque and Clocq (no relations) on this
Added workaround for crash bug in latest Unity version. This one was, for once, not my fault, folks

We're running a Midweek Madness sale throughout this week, where you can get everything Cultist Sim-y for basically dust and a broken ha'penny (50-66% off everything, to be exact). So that's

• Cultist Simulator (66% off)
  
• The Dancer, Priest, Ghoul and Exile DLC (50% off)
  
• Cultist Simulator's OST (50% off)
  
• The Anthology Edition bundle, which includes all of the above @ 65% off-ish (bundle maths is hard)
  
• The Lady Afterwards digital TRPG (50% off)
  

Enjoy!

The indomitable Canadian sensation that is Systemchalk - probably a Long by now, at least - is broadcasting Cultist on the store page, for anyone who'd like to see the game being wrestled to its knees while a soothing voiceover describes the inevitable descent into penury, madness and occult calamity.

We also have some Cultist x BOOK OF HOURS lore, game updates and new Secret Histories merch and events to share. Yee, as they say, haw.

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We're not ready to share a vertical slice of the game yet, but here're some updates.

We've finalised the design of the Wisdom Page, the occult sort-of skill tree where you can choose which forbidden knowledge to specialise in, and which affects what you can do elsewhere in the game based on your choices. We've hidden the full size of the chart, but you can see the first four levels here:



(Click for a larger image.)

Players choose cards or objects to commit to each slot up the chain, pledging allegiance - for example - to Birdsong by committing a skill card for Ramsund, the language of secrets. This will enhance the player's Birdsong affinity and ability, opening up new opportunities elsewhere and unlocking the next tier of the branch.

We hope it's also a nice roleplaying opportunity, as you can see that each of the nine Wisdoms is variously associated with several Principles from Cultist Simulator. People have strong feelings about whether they're a Winter-y sort who wants a beautiful end or a Lantern-type who's brilliant but a bit caustic or a Forge-person who really loves hitting things with hammers. The Wisdoms are deliberately broader, drawing from multiple Principles at once, so they should open up new avenues of characterisation. Which is useful in, er, an RPG!

Speaking of the Wisdoms, we've uncovered a new letter from a mysterious 'Arthur' to his nephew, discussing the Illumination-affiliated events that took place in a Pyrhhic battle against the Khusgai of Persia, and the bravery - and unmasking of Lieutenant Malcolmson. Most importantly, though, weep for Menander, the bravest steed that ever was!

"Nephew, make a fist of your hand. Muscles move beneath the skin. So powers move beneath the skin of the world, at impulses equally invisible, but greater."



Click here for full images + alternative read-friendly text.

And finally, we also have a mock-up of Hush House's layout to share. Please note that this is not what the game will actually look like (though mmmm isn't it all nice and neat in a grid), but it is likely to represent the layout of rooms in the final game. We've censored some of the more deep-lore rooms, and you can't see all of it - but here's a first glimpse at the library at the centre of it all!



(Click for a larger image, again.)

If you like what you see, please wishlist BOOK OF HOURS to keep updated with our progress! More on that in the next few months.



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"You’ve been summoned to Alexandria, a city of coloured lights and curious histories. An old friend needs you to track down a woman. She’s probably in trouble. Probably trouble herself. Plus ça change."

Since launching Cultist Sim in 2018, we made a TRPG based in its occult, Lovecraftian world called The Lady Afterwards. You can buy the digital edition here on Steam (50% off in the Midweek Madness sale!), and we've just re-released our luxury boxed edition in our merch shop too. We're releasing another 100 boxes at noon today, and the boxes will restock every Tuesday.



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"Secret gods live beneath the skin of the world. Five of them meet every year to exchange secrets and agree particular notes of history. Their conversations aren’t for our ears, but even after they’ve gone, their gossip still troubles the earth; the air still prickles with doors..."



Cultist Sim also inspired our latest venture, going live today: a series of live, overnight events set in a crumbling aristocratic mansion in Monmouthshire, UK. Each year the Avian Hours - that's the Beach-Crow, the Witch-and-Sister, the Elegiast, the Vagabond and the little-known Name of the Moth, Ferezeref - meet to discuss the topics of the gods.

Afterwards, mortals attend the Roostinghall to pick through abandoned tidbits of secret knowledge. This is what we're calling the Locksmith's Dream, and invite you to pick through the snippets of the gods this October and December with us.

Full details of the event, and of course tickets for sale, over on the official site.

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Happy birthday to Iris, the Mansus, all the Histories and most importantly to Cultist Sim, the little game that could. Celebrate in your favourite way for us, Believers! We couldn't have done it without you.

I've put a patch on beta that fixes the two really annoying leftover placement issues.

One was the INSISTENT DROPZONE, where if you dropped the dropzone on top of existing cards, it would want to be picked up before it let you pick them up.

One was the GUTTER ENFORCED, where 1:1 gridsnap meant 1:1 horizontally, but left a vertical gap between rows. I liked the effect. A lot of folk didn't and let me know it, so I've changed it BUT only in new games. (Otherwise it'll screw up everyone's existing layout.)

To repeat this is on only on the beta channel for now - gateofhorn - and it'll stay there until at least next week. The latest Unity update keeps doing this to me in the editor:



and while it doesn't happen in the built version, it's giving me the spiderchills so I'm going to wait for a response to my ticket. Yes devs submit tickets too. Unity presumably submit tickets to OS vendors. I don't know who OS vendors submit tickets to. Maybe they submit petitions to a higher power instead. In Vak probably

Anyway tickets to *me* go to [email protected]. Please let me know about any spiders in the beta.

Alternatively, if you're technically enthusiastic, you can submit it as a Github issue. (In this case you might also be interested to know I make the source code available for the convenience of modders and the curious.)

The full bug list:

• More tweakss to card placement: moved card closer to desk, tidied dropzone grid placement
  
• Narrowed gridsnap so you can put cards immediately below each other at gridsnap 1. THIS ONLY HAPPENS IN NEW GAMES, so people's card arrangements aren't messed up\n
  
• Dropzone now reliably stays out of the way behind cards\n
  
• Stack badge and verb timer also now render behind\n
  
• Close button on deck details window now works.\n
  
• Some poor soul kept trying to use Rite Intercalate to baptise a Chosen Compass. People shouldn't do that, but let's not let them try.
  
• One more round of jp_loc fixes
  
• Non-Latin messages no longer display as tofu when returning from the Mansus
  

(the quote is William Carlos Williams in "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower". Patches are flowers from here on in. This is relevant if you're interested in BOOK OF HOURS, or if you're an Enigmatic.

YERMA is an opera based on a really savage play by Federico Garcia Lorca, about childlessness and murder. Lorca was one of the best-known sons of Granada, the very beautiful, very steeply sloping Spanish city where I lived two decades ago. He was murdered under murky circumstances, because a brilliant, gay, left-wing, avant-garde playwright is a bad thing to be under fascism. In another History, he almost certainly visited the Mansus on the night of his death.



Lorca RIP, thanks for ending our run of opera-based patch names. I was going to do one more (ZAUBERFLOTE) but YERMA is the PATCH WHERE CARD PLACEMENT IS FIXED, so I want to end it on a high.

NB that is FIXED, not PERFECT. There's room for further improvement, and I have a list of other QoL issues (yes detective homing) to work through. But card placement has gone from being FSCKED to being SHONKY to being MUCH IMPROVED to being FINE. Thank you all for your patience, bug reports, and feedback.

A quick roundup of the last set of changes:

Fixed a bug where dropping the card while the ghost was moving could leave the card stranded between the grid. - a real head-slap moment, this. A number of people pointed out that sometimes cards ended up off the grid, but it took some debugging time to work out why.
Added some camera angle correction. The game already compensated for the card being above or below the camera when calculating where it drops. (This was the biggest single fix previously.) It also now compensates for the table tilt.

Q. AK, why you tilt table? tilt table look confusing. There even mod to untilt.
A. Dear player, once long ago I agree, but a contract UI designer back in 2018 convince me not so. just make environment look more lively. Four years on I still think he's right. That said:

Turned off lively but confusing card wiggle when dragging cards - there's long been a pseudo-random wiggle on the cards when you move 'em. I did like this but it is needlessly confusing when you're deciding where to put the cards. So I finally turned it off, and I like the cleaner effect.

If I get twenty emails saying the wiggle's disappearance makes the game LITERALLY UNPLAYABLE, I'll put it back in, if I get just one, I'll write a sorrowful reply saying sorry, wiggle dead.

made the grid a bit more insistent - honestly this is too boring to explain
default gridsnap is now 1/2, give it a try - IMO 1/2 gridsnap is the sweet spot. (I haven't forgotten I promised a NO GRIDSNAP option too - still coming.)

Anyway this patch went live on beta yesterday and then again this morning. Then I noticed I'd included the stupidest bug of my entire career. From your side, this was 'GAME CRASHES WHEN I MOVE CARD DROPZONE', which is not a good back of the box feature. From my side this was



which for those of you who don't code means 'not only immediately crash Unity with an infinite loop when this method runs, but do so in a jaw-droppingly obvious way'. My testing is always a little shaky (we're a two-person team and Lottie is busy drawing skill icons) but I don't see how I missed this one. I'm hoping it's some weird build process/source control hiccup and not actual senility. ANYWAY IT'S FIXED NOW SORRY.

Talking of (a) testing (b) Lottie



the Book of Hours Secret Historian's packs are looking good. and Lottie was delighted that she'd found a wide selection of actual 1920s cigarette cards to add to them. but almost too late she realised that not everything that appears on a 1920s cigarette card is appropriate in 2020, and has had to go through them all carefully to make sure we didn't send anyone anything INCREDIBLY RACIST by mistake.

An extra thank you to everyone who suggested naming conventions for subsequent patches. I was tempted by cheese names. I was more tempted by Zulu names. But because of some relevant lorey backgroundy contexty business, I'm going with flowers, and the next patch will be ASPHODEL.

As Dagmar von Nagelburg would say, pip pip, pots of love.

AK