Cultist Simulator News

Phalaenopsis, better known as the moth orchid. It's a flower that looks like a thing with wings. The etymology means the name means literally something like 'mothy'.

Phalaenopsis philippinensis Golamco ex Fowlie & C.Z.Tang, Orchid Digest 51: 92 (1987)

MOTHORCHID is the final release of the year. In all we've had I think forty patches. I often point out that's not bad for a four-year-old game. In turn people occasionally point out that I completely borked the game for a little while back in March, and I have to admit that yes, that was a godawful two weeks followed by a grim month.

What have all those patches done? roughly,

(1) much, much better modding support
(2) various long-standing bugs and save stability issues
(3) quality of life stuff ('a dropbox for verbs finally'!)

Behind the scenes, we've also been prepping the codebase so it can support BOOK OF HOURS, our next game (out in June next year). This means that we can _keep on_ supporting Cultist into the indefinite future.

Ra ra loads of patches ain't we great... sure, but it's also enlightened self-interest. It's so tempting as a small dev to release-and-forget. Support takes time away from the development of new games. The codebase you worked on three years ago is the ugliest thing in the world and the codebase you're working on now is the one where you Get It Right. Same with the design. Fresh start! Green fields! But that means that you forget half the lessons you learnt on the previous project... and it also means your sales will suffer. Cultist hits its fifth anniversary next year, and it looks like we'll pass the million-sales-on-Steam mark around then. There's no way we'd have got there if we'd left the game to languish unpatched after release. We might have got BOOK OF HOURS out sooner, but then we'd have left _that_ to languish too, and ended up chasing the next release. Nasty cycle to get into.

This has been a hell of a lot easier since we brought in Chelnoque, the gentleman behind the Roost Machine, to do freelance work on bughunting and modding support. Chelnoque understands the game systems intimately, he's a lot better at QA than I am, and he's a steady source of thoughtful ideas. A toast to the gentleman behind the sealion avatar!

Anyway thanks for taking a chance on this weird, eternally uninviting, sempiternally janky little piece. We've got a lot more Secret Histories plans. I'll get on to the patch notes in a moment, but first...


[h2]WHAT ELSE LOTTIE AND I HAVE DONE THIS YEAR:[/h2]



The Sixth History Community Licence, which opens up our IP for use by anyone who fancies a pop at a Secret Histories creative work

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The Secret Histories boxes, limited edition treasures themed around the libraries of the Secret Histories - all sold out but we'll do a wider release for Hush House

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The Vagabond, an incarnation of a certain Hour - a collaboration with the sculptor Nicola Rigby

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The Locksmith's Dream - an experimental live event, a collaboration with Ivan Caric of Tricuspid

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The Lady Afterwards x Mysterious Package Company, a wildly luxurious version of our already luxurious TTRPG pack - a collaboration with the MPC

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The Snare of the Tree, "Essays on the Dangers of Game Design", my second book, which came out a year ago last week

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We also released a series of free in-universe letters and documents that you really shouldn't miss if the lore has its hooks in you: about the arts of light and war, about the horrible secrets of expansion, about bothering rabbits, about the long peace by the sea.

(also we got married, FINALLY, after years of pandemic. That's right, the two halves of Weather Factory are now united in the bonds of etc etc)

Next year we have BOOK OF HOURS, the Lucid Tarot ("I'M DRAWING IT AS FAST AS I CAN" says Lottie), a collection of unreleased papers from the Suppression Bureau's archives, and whatever other unlikely ideas occur to us after too much mulled wine at Christmas.

PATCH NOTES! Bold is Chelnoque, italics are my exegeses.

[h2]MOTHORCHID, v2022.12.m.2[/h2]

A quirk in Bureau's logic made it prosecute the player if the player tried to bail out a rival.

Some would say that pre-fix, this was a more accurate simulation of the Bureau's operating procedures. I definitely wouldn't, which is one reason the Bureau hasn't locked *me* up.


- An impossible looping Long bug became more impossible.

This was a bug that showed up in one case in one legacy save, and should have been theoretically impossible. But it wasn't. Which worried us. So Chelnoque took some time to track it down, and sealed the mouseholes where it might have got in.



- Sometimes cards yearned to connect with their relatives inside verbs and spammed the hover sound.

"Love, like the Mansus, defies boundaries."


- Achievement descriptions were invisible with High Contrast setting on.

'Does anyone really care about cheevos?' I occasionally incredulously ask Lottie, or Chelnoque, or the postman. The answers are approximately 'yes', 'yes duh', and 'wot?' from each.


- The deck details window didn't hide when the element details window was opened, and was hanging there awkwardly.

Very few people even know the deck details window _exists_, which is why this happened at all


- Made it very subtly clearer that taunting the Foe is repeatable.

The subtlest problems generate the most complicated conversations:

[expand]alexis
I remember going back and forth on this one when I was designing it. I can't remember if I took the limit out because I wanted to be generous, or whether I forgot to put the limit in properly
if you keep repeating it, you've got to keep spending resources on defending, haven't you? so it's not really a degenerate strategy?
oh goodness even worse
you get two wounds

chelnoque
You'll keep getting wounds, so there's a downside, but wounds cure on their own, so no, you aren't forced to spend anything but your time
So it can be like "get 3 defiance marks, run away, and return for ascension"
It's not terribly broken by all means, and without it the player is softlocked out of ascension if they ever betrayed a rebellion (cause they got -1 defiance mark, and there's only 7 overall)
On the other hand, Colonel players are softlocked in the same circumstances without any way of changing it
Overall, if there's no certainty, I think it's ok to leave it as it is, it's not like it turns the balance upside down
Asked more to check if there's a straightforward answer

alexis
I agree. I don't think 'too easy' has ever been reported as an Exile issue.
the other issue is that if we add the limit, we have to provide meaningful feedback if the player tries to repeat it. I'm reasonably sure this is why I didn't finish implementing it: that it was slightly challenging to write, approximately, 'that trick only impresses the Lionsmith once' in a flavourful way

chelnoque
Well, slot can just forbid it

alexis
It can, and that's probably apohenically sufficient, but it can also incite questions as to why only once
very much not a big deal, but let's leave it. Can you remove the -1 requirement? just to avoid future reports
[/expand]


- Cards warn about the nearing expiration by displaying their timer without hover-on.
This used to happen, then didn't, did, then didn't... I think I broke it in the notorious March Update



- Fixed a couple of typos in Exile.

"And still they come."



- HOTFIX: Alt recipes with a chance weren't always working correctly.

This was a rare, weird issue that would probably have made someone ask me in another month or five "are you sure probabilities are working" and I would have answered grumpily "yes let me tell you about streaks" and I'd have been wrong. Fortunately the issue actually crashed Chel's own mod, so we spotted it.



- MODDING: Mutation level can be defined as a reference - { \"mutate\": \"grail\", \"level\": \"heart\" }

I needed this for BOOK OF HOURS , so you ladeez and genz and others are getting it for CS



- MODDING: Reference-values can use negatives in appropriate contexts - \"effects\": { \"lantern\": \"-forge\" }


And this.


- MODDING: All verb refences (in slots' and recipes' actionIds) can now use wildcards - \"actionId\": \"verb.*\"


This opens up all sorts of really ooohhhh approaches, especially in the context of verbs now having aspects. Did anyone say BOOK OF HOURS workstations?



Have a glorious Yule, everyone. May ye neither eat anyone else nor by anyone else be eaten.



pictured: tree + cat infestation

We love mods and the people who make 'em. There are 136 mods in the Cultist Sim Workshop (!), someone turned CS's tabletop into Super Mario, and a while back we wrote a how-to guide to help modders get started. The more mods in Steam Workshop the merrier! Apart from that weird one which takes Laidlaw's shirt off. I see you, degenerates.

Aaaaanyhoo, all this creativity - not just mods, but all the fanart, writing, tabletop games, tattoos (you would not believe where some people get Moth tattoos) - leads me on to some big news. We're opening up Cultist Simulator's IP to let you use it for creative projects on a much larger scale, and even make money from it. SO READ ON! But in Alexis's voice, 'cause he wrote the next bit.



Something about the Secret Histories enthuses people. Fanworks, fiction, commentary, art; I've lost count of the number of TRPG homebrew rules projects I've seen. For a long time, our take on this was sure, it's nice to see this kind of thing, use our stuff... as long as you're not making any money out of it, because our IP is our livelihood, and we need to protect it.

But a few months ago I had a conversation with a smallish YTer who wanted to do actual-play videos with their own Secret Histories-based content. I said, sure, as long as you're not making any money out of it... they said, well, we make a little bit out of ads... but it's literally a couple of dollars a month. Oh lor, said I, that's not a problem, though I guess, like, revisit it if you get rich and famous?

Lottie and I realised two things. Firstly, we get a lot of these sort of borderline requests - can I run a LRP based on your work and charge to cover costs, can I use your tarot deck to do professional readings, can I do DeviantArt commissions - and our answer is nearly always yes, but it's often complicated and we have to think about it. And secondly, we really don't mind if a semi-pro or even pro creator pays the rent using our IP, as long as it doesn't hurt our own ability to pay our own rent. And if someone does really well and helps grow the audience, so much the better.

But what, people always ask, if Hollywood calls and then their lawyers say the IP situation is too complicated? Bugger Hollywood. We got optioned for TV a few years ago, did I ever mention that? Like most options, it never went into production, and I realised afterwards how relieved I was. Even though the people involved (a) were clearly nice and smart and (b) had actually played Cultist. If the upside of community licensing is that people make interesting things, and the downside is that we damage the remote possibility of a someday deal which would make us, eh, about as much money as a really successful piece of DLC in exchange for titrating away a quarter-soul's worth of our distinctiveness over several subjective years of meetings... I lost my thread. You get the gist.



So we started talking about permissive licensing. This is where we ran into a snag. It's the lore - the background, the story, the mysteries - that most attracts people. A lot of you want to write your own answers to the questions posed by Cultist Simulator et al. But we designed a lot of those gaps and mysteries very carefully, and we need to be sure there's a clean distinction between Weather Factory answers, and everyone else's.

Here's what we came up with. There is not only one History, as they say.  The known Secret Histories are five in number. So if there were an unsanctioned, unknown, unlawed Sixth History... it would be your playground.

We've talked to our lawyers and we're finalising the licence details. We'll release the licence next week but basically:

You'll be able to use the Secret Histories setting as a basis for your own TRPG, board game, app, fiction, art commission...and earn money from it, up to a limit of 50K GBP p.a... without needing to check with us... as long as you follow the licence, and in particular use the Sixth History logo to make clear it's not an official Weather Factory project.

That's the tl:dr;  but for God's sake do read the whole license, don't skip bits, if you're planning a project along these lines. (And of course this is meant for small-scale works. If you're thinking of proposing a serious commercial project that may make more than the revenue limit, or if it needs our direct creative involvement, like The Mysterious Package Company's super-deluxe Lady Afterwards, or the Locksmith's Dream, then you'll still need to talk to us, and we don't usually agree more than one of these a year.)

Where's the licence again?

Read it here.

I have other questions!

Come ask 'em on r/weatherfactory on Thursday 1st December at 6PM GMT. This is mainly an opportunity to talk Sixth History but we will inevitably end up talking about all things Cultist Sim, BOOK OF HOURS, merch, game dev etc. Bring snacks and a post-work drink! Or if you're in America and it's therefore early in the day, I don't know, bring porridge.



We're full-time on BOOK OF HOURS right now (launching in June 2023! Go wishlist if you haven't already!) but quality of life Cultist Sim updates will continue (see LONGIFLORUM, our most recent update). We also have a Cultist Sim-specific announcement in the new year that you'll like, though I can only tease you for the moment. So I leave you with...



...and hope to see you at the AMA in December!

LONGIFLORUM: the Easter lily, the trumpet lily, the lily Aurelian. "Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin" - it was longiflorum that chap was talking about, probably. I didn't grow up rich, but I did grow up in Oxford, and my secondary school had a Latin motto, SICUT LILIUM, 'like the lily'. I never really understood why a school has a motto that incited its students not to work. I tried to use this as a philosophical platform for not doing homework. Consequently the secondary school threw me out and I had to go to a weird boarding school for weird kids. On the upside the headmaster of the weird school lent his copy of Gormenghast and changed the course of my life. I've left out some details but this all approximately happened.

Anyway lilium longiflorum is very pretty but also utterly lethal to cats. A couple years back I carelessly brought home a bouquet for Lottie with a couple of longiflora in it. By the time we realised, our hapless cat Chi (aka Chione, like the book in Cultist) had jumped up and coated himself in rust-coloured pollen. Lottie had to wash it off in the bath.



Chi is the same cat who appears in this image...



...which is a good segue to talking about what happened last week. We've been pushing out small releases from beta to live about every two weeks, which is a bloody good pace for a four-year-old game, and we'd got a bit gung-ho because it all went so well. Last week we put out LONGIFLORUM v1 as a reminder of the three basic truths of existence:

1. Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains;
2. Nature is red in tooth and claw;
3 Even well-tested code has bugs.

LONGIFLORUM last week was very well-tested (Chel is thorough)... but there were some changes to save code, which is always a pit of barbed wasps... so it wasn't well-tested enough. Consequently we had to roll it back, which itself caused some hiccups. So here it is again, after another week in the shop getting the dents knocked out.

What's actually in the patch?

- Game no longer crashes when challenged with a corrupted save file. Instead, you are prompted to try restoring a backup.

Almost half of the support requests I get are corrupted saves. I think a good 10% of all those are specifically 'a cat jumped on the power button and turned off my game as it was saving'. I'm serious, though I haven't actually run the numbers. I'm ready to claim that almost 5% of all the support requests over the last few months are caused by cats.

Anyway there was some code (mine) in there which was supposed to revert to backups but it wasn't working properly. There is some new code (Chel's) in there which works better.

- Upon crashing on startup, the game will automatically turn off all enabled mods. If don't want this behaviour (for example, when testing your own mod), add \"knock=1\" to config.ini.
- Additional precautions when loading mod-affected saves.

BOORING... NOT. At least half the support requests I get these days are mod-related. Often this happens because a save becomes addicted to mods and dies when the mods are uninstalled. The most frequent culprit is Genroa's excellent Shelves mod. Anyway the only answers I could give were 'talk to the modder' and 'purge your save' and occasionally 'UGH WHY DID I EVER ADD MODDING'. Many of these problems will now go away.

I can't promise you can now add and remove mods with abandon. There is always a risk to after-market work, as anyone who's tried to fit wings to their car will know. In the near future we're going to make it sliiightly harder to add mods which dramatically change functionality - i.e. DLL mods - by requiring installation of a gatekeeper mod which gives stern warnings. It's probably only a matter of time before some villain tries to slip ransomware into a mod, and we'd rather not feel responsible.

- Rites which consume followers will no longer suggest that they can be used to renew Burgeoning or Shattered Risen. Technically they renewed and consumed the Risen, which was legitimate but not very helpful.

This was hilarious, except when it happened.

- HOTFIX: Occasional save incompatibility with the previous version is fixed.\n

I'm very proud of the fact that you can still load a save from the 2018 version of Cultist in the 2022 version of Cultist. I still wake on winter nights sobbing about the save converter I had to write in 2021. Please don't prove me wrong by crashing the game with an old save.

- HOTFIX: Strange and unexpected card presences - seasons, books, and many more - are fixed. For a moment, you were peeking behind the veil of the game's inner workings - the game decks, and they became visible.

A digression. I can't talk too much about BOOK OF HOURS here, because the Steam admins are a bit sterner about flagging cross-promotion these days. But you know that thing with long runs of bad luck in Cultist? Like, you've got a 10% chance of failing a vault run and getting a curse, and it happens six times in a row?

In Book of Hours I've moved away from (digital) dice rolls to (digital) card draws to manage randomness. In other words the runs of bad luck are limited. There's only one critical failure (or whatever) in the deck to draw. I wish I'd done this years ago.

- HOTFIX: Fixed a crash on lore subversion.

We codename our bugs while we're tracking them down. This was CONSUMMATUM.

- MODDING: Mods with empty synopsis no longer crash the game.

"Silence! Oh, well are Death and Sleep and Thou
Three brethren named, the guardians gloomy-winged,
Of one abyss, where life and truth and joy
Are swallowed up."

Nice bit of Tuesday morning Shelley. You're welcome.


- MODDING: Verbs can now have innate aspects (defined as \"aspects\": { \"something\": 1 }).
- MODDING: Verbs can now react to xtriggers - in particular, to transform into a different verb.
Keep in mind that verbs still can't have mutations.

Sneaking a significant one in at the end. This is actually a bit of functionality I wanted for BOOK OF HOURS, where verbs can be things like desks and houses, and you lucky CS modders are getting the benefit.

Let me end with a question.

[h2]MPC x The Lady Afterwards edition now available![/h2]

The Mysterious Package Company's beautifully reimagined edition of The Lady Afterwards is out now!



It builds on our original edition by adding hand-aged clues, a silver cigarette case stuffed with calling cards, an antique magnifying glass and a hardwood "Taurus Express" travelling chest to keep it all in. It's TRULY MAGNIFICENT and includes all of the following:

• The Lady Afterwards Game Runner’s Guide, a ~50 page TRPG scenario set in 1920s Alexandria
  
• The Secret Histories Rulebook, a ~30 page mechanics primer
  
• 18 hand-aged clues, including telegrams, lovers’ notes, photographs and more
  
• An antique golden magnifying glass, to inspect them all
  
• “The Essential Hours” pocket tarot deck of 23 Major Arcana cards
  
• A full 78-card "Tarot of the Hours" deck
  
• Eight customisable character sheets with personalised questionnaires and connections
  
• Eight art deco character pins in silver and gold
  
• A sterling silver cigarette case, including several in-fiction calling cards and clues
  
• A Game Runner’s Journal to keep track of players, game-states and evidence
  
• A beautifully-scented black opium candle to evoke the Invisible Serapeum
  
• A full-colour A3 map of contemporary Alexandria with real 1920s photographs
  
• Two sets of antique TRPG dice in a burlap bag
  
• A year-long 10% discount token for our merch shop and the Locksmith's Dream
• Access to a custom-built mood-music playlist of 1920s songs
  
• A full digital edition of The Lady Afterwards worth £30
  
• Housed in a custom hardwood "Taurus Express" travelling chest
  

Only 1,000 sets are available, each costing $199. They're shipped from Canada, so North Americans - you don't have to worry about international shipping fees for once.

[h2]Will you win the Golden Ticket?[/h2]

Each edition of MPC x TLA comes with a 10% discount for Locksmith's Dream tickets, apart from one lucky box. That box includes a winning ticket for a totally free stay at our Secret Histories scavenger hunt, worth $2,000. (If you can't attend any of the 2022 / 2023 events, you can opt instead for a free MPC experience of your choice.)

Good luck! We call upon the Flowermaker that it's someone from the Cultist Sim community who wins. 🙏

Originally posted by Afterwards

"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..."

We're working with the Mysterious Package Company to create a new, extremely high-end Lady Afterwards edition with MPC-level props and accoutrements!

MPC are the absolute top of the pile when it comes to making beautiful antique physical items. They usually specialise in Lovecraftian stuff (AK and I bought their Hastur experience years ago, and it was amazing), so The Lady Afterwards caught their eye. The MPC edition includes everything that's in our original Lady Afterwards box, but adds an extra layer of high-quality artefact...ry: a custom wooden  chest, hand-aged clues, and a few extras like an antique magnifying glass and silver case with new business cards inside, a Essential Hours and a full Tarot of the Hours deck...

Originally posted by Afterwards

"Mirrors glitter at the Cecil, Berbers whisper in the El Bab Cafe, and statues keep their secrets in the cold depths of the bay. Something’s in motion, from the Arab Quarter to the Rue des Soeurs. Somewhere, the Serapeum stirs. The Hours have taken an interest.

Cherchez la femme, the saying goes. But what does the lady look for?"

The Lady Afterwards is a Cultist Simulator TRPG for 2-8 players, set in 1920s Alexandria. It takes place in the world of the Secret Histories, where hidden gods watch over a world of apocalypse, yearning and forbidden arts.

It’s a non-linear, combat-light, story-centric tabletop RPG: an occult Egyptian noir inspired by classics like Chaosium’s Horror on the Orient Express.

Each MPC x TLA box includes:

• The Lady Afterwards Game Runner’s Guide, a ~50 page TRPG scenario set in 1920s Alexandria
  
• The Secret Histories Rulebook, a ~30 page mechanics primer
  
• 18 hand-aged clues, including telegrams, lovers’ notes, photographs and more
  
• “The Essential Hours” pocket tarot deck of 23 Major Arcana cards and a full 78-card "Tarot of the Hours"
  
• Eight customisable character sheets with personalised questionnaires and connections
  
• Eight art deco character pins in silver and gold
  
• A Game Runner’s Journal to keep track of players, game-states and evidence
  
• A beautifully-scented black opium candle to evoke the Invisible Serapeum
  
• A full-colour A3 map of contemporary Alexandria with real 1920s photographs
  
• Two sets of antique TRPG dice in a velvet dice bag
  
• A year-long 10% discount token for our shop
  
• Access to a custom-built mood-music playlist of 1920s songs
  
• A sterling silver cigarette case, incasing several characters' business cards
  
• An antique 1920s magnifying glass
  
• A custom wooden carrying case
  
• A full digital edition of the whole game
  

The MPC edition costs £180 + shipping and launches at 6PM BST / 10AM PDT on Tuesday 8th November 2022, just under two weeks from now. There's limited stock available, so if the above floats your boat, I highly encourage you to join MPC's Lady Afterwards waitlist to be pinged the moment the game is live.

(For the avoidance of doubt, we're still happily selling the original version of The Lady Afterwards. So if you prefer the original 'cottagecore' concept, that's available too! Regardless, it's incredibly cool to see this lil project that grew out of a pretty bad time in my life become something as gorgeous as this. Thank you, MPC, and HOPE YOU ALL ENJOY IT! ♥)