Cultist Simulator News

There is never only one History. We've used the mechanics and the world of Cultist Simulator for our next game, BOOK OF HOURS - but we've added more graphics, more lore and, well, more everything: we think BOOK OF HOURS is going to be about five times the size of Cultist Sim when it's finished.

We're releasing the first playable demo next week as part of Steam Next Fest. It'll be available from Monday 6th Feb at 6PM GMT / 10AM PDT, so now's a great time to play the demo and see what you think!

We'll also be live streaming the game next Thursday, if anyone wants to drop in and say hi. The chat'll be open, the questions'll be flowing, and hopefully we won't find a really embarrassing bug while we're playing. If you'd like to see behind the game dev curtain and hear AK talk about the world, join us on Thursday 9th Feb at 6PM GMT / 10AM PDT.

Hope to see you there!

♥ Alexis & Lottie

Welcome to the first charming flower pic of 2023. As regulars will know, we're currently naming all our updates after flowers, occult or otherwise. This is the Danish Flag cultivar of nemesia strumosa:



(What would you call that colour? Dark fuchsia? Bloody burgundy? Clarified vermilion? Peaceful Grail?)

Now! here's is the reason I've marked this as a Major Update. It's only relevant if you use mods:

[h3]- To work, DLL mods now require the GHIRBI, THE GATEKEEPER core mod installed and enabled. The mod can be found in Steam Workshop, or on Cultist Simulator GOG discussions page.
- To avoid confusion, DLL mods can't be enabled at all without GHIRBI, THE GATEKEEPER. Disabling GHIRBI automatically disables all enabled DLL mods.[/h3]

I talked about this here, but the short version: we're putting some an extra confirmation layer to protect against the _remote but theoretically possible_ risk of malicious mods. If you use any significant mods, you may need to install and enable GHIRBI.

On to the other fixes. As usual, Chelnoque's notes, my exegesis:

- Ally recruitment action in Exile didn't display its end description properly.

Exile continues to be the wild borderlands of Cultist Simulator

- Wounded cultists turned into Risen lacked Follower aspect.

I think poor Neville should be allowed to rest in dubious peace, bt since everyone's _going_ to drag him from the grave...

- Display of verb window is slightly more resilient against lower frame rates.

We all want to be more resilient against lower frame rates.

- Removed secret stray tech text from ascension rite.

So secret that even I don't know what it was. This means either Chel is embarrassed or he is preserving me from embarrassment.

- THE INVISIBLE SERAPEUM is renamed THE SIXTH HISTORY.

Because of the Sixth History Community license! Last year we opened our IP for wider use (with some caveats and limits, natch). It would be possible now to turn a mod into a complete game in its own right and sell it, if that 's your bag.

- Various enhancements in the mod panel display.

"AK's logging code had a silly performance bug that actually started to matter in edge cases."

- Debug console now opens on ctrl + ~ (instead of just ~). People are now safe from opening it on accident and ruining their playthrough in all kinds of ways.

This was always super on-theme - you accidentally find a key combination that allows you to PIERCE THE VEIL OF THE MUNDANE - but it was one of the few remaining frequent causes of support tickets. Anyway the VEIL OF THE MUNDANE is now a bit more robust.

Incidentally Subnautica introduced the same feature on the same day that we put NEMESIA on the beta branch. Coincidence or conjunction? The Hours know.

- Debug console now can be opened in the main menu, allowing to see the log without starting the game.
- Other various small console improvements.
- Clear console button now works.
- achievements.json file had an incorrect path on Linux.
- MODDING: Levers (cards that are transferred between playthroughs) can now be defined and modified by JSONs.
- MODDING: 'description_long' in mod synopsis can now be left empty in order to preserve current Workshop mod's description. The game no longer crashes if this property isn't set.


Lottie wants me to say 'wishlist Book of Hours', though if you like Cultist Simulator enough to read all the way down you've probably already wishlisted the sequel. It's an open question whether we'll get a short demo in Next Fest - I lean no, cos there are distractions - but there will be a closed beta in the next coupla months. So let's end as we began with flowers:


(Book of Hours: the Physic Garden at Hush House)


- AK

There are now a hundred and forty mods on the Cultist Simulator Steam workshop. The number’s exploded since we enabled DLL modding – that is to say, we allowed modders to run their own code as part of a mod, changing fundamental game behaviour rather than just adding new narrative content and images. Four of the top five mods are DLL mods.

Any time you run someone else’s code on your machine, there’s a risk. In theory, a modder could include malicious code in a DLL mod. The risk is very low – AV programs may notice it, Steam will block malicious modders – and the same applies to games anyway – there’s nothing in principle to stop a game developer from putting malicious functionality in their work.

But there was an incident earlier this year where a modder did include malicious code in a Cities: Skylines mod. It was trivial – it just interfered with other mods as part of some sort of community drama, it wasn’t ransomware or anything. It was spotted within days. And it only affected about fifty people. But it did happen. (A few months later we got an email from a security researcher pointing this out.)



So from the beginning of next year, we’re making it slightly harder to enable DLL mods. All you’ll need to do is install a gatekeeper mod, Ghirbi, and all Ghirbi does is show you a notice making you aware of the theoretical risk. This is basically the same as making the user tick a box to say ‘I am OK with this’ – but most people tick most checkboxes without reading the notice, especially when they’re playing games.

[You won’t need to download or install Ghirbi to use DLL mods until after our next patch, NEMESIA, but you can install him now to save hassle. If you don’t use Steam, you can download Ghirbi here.]

Honestly I think the risk here isn’t traffic-accident low, it’s hit-by-a-meteorite low. But if someone was hit by a meteorite because they’d installed our game, then even if it was a bizarre accident, we’d feel bad about it. So we’re adding a meteorite warning it’s impossible to ignore. Happy Christmas.

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

[hr][/hr]

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!