Cultist Simulator News

The expansive gentleman in the picture below is (probably) the naturalist Pehr Kalm:



He was a widely-travelled eighteenth-century Finnish naturalist, and the genus kalmia was named after him:

.

Pehr looks cross in that picture. It might be that his handsome waistcoat is too tight, it might be that the pinecone is spiky, or it might be that the flower named for him was later nicknamed kill-kid. This is less horrible than it sounds, because 'kid' is also a juvenile goat, and kalmia is also nicknamed lamb-kill and sheep-poison. It's stuffed with neurotoxins, is what I'm saying. Don't let your goats near it. Or your kids. If Cultist has taught us anything, it's the unwisdom of putting something in your mouth just cos it looks pretty.

Over to Chelnoque for the patch notes for KALMIA. These are pretty bland, because he's done a lot of work behind the scenes on content import and logging that isn't interesting to write about. We've also just put the LONGIFLORUM release on the beta branch, which is a bit funner, especially in that it makes games more resistant to the notorious Cat Jumped On My Keyboard bug. But I'll post the patch notes for that one when it goes live.

2022.9.k.3 KALMIA

- Several minor typos in slot requirements are fixed.
- Blank credits panel in Russian localisation is fixed.
- HOTFIX: The game started to treat some save files as if they were corrupted. They, in fact, weren't, and this all is now behind us.
- HOTFIX: Newly-spawned verbs no longer snatch a single random card from their birthplace.
- HOTFIX: Newly-spawned verbs no longer snatch a single random card from their birthplace.
- MODDING: Greatly increased the vigilance and informativeness of JSON import logs.

bonus content:

The Monastery of the Fifth Cup box. It's sold out, but there's some lore here that people got excited about.



The Locksmith's Dream. Pictures from the beta!

Have a spooky day, as they say on that one podcast. - AK

Happy Friday, everyone! I hear you like the secret gods known as the Hours, and AK is good at tantalisingly not revealing much about them. So I just wanted to share a quick update on the Lucid Tarot, our upcoming tarot deck for BOOK OF HOURS, whose Major Arcana focuses entirely on the Hours of Cultist Simulator. It's all-new art drawn directly from the saucy, source-y lore of AK's 'CS Design' spreadsheet. You can't get tastier than that.



Bask in the joy of seeing pockets of colour appear out of an inky blackness...



...or enjoy a few close-ups of my favourites below:







...and a final one for those pale-skinned dweebos like myself who pass all signs of melanin and go directly to BURN. We call upon your mercy, Flowermaker!



Each of these cards was designed, drawn and coloured from scratch, because obviously the Hours deserve as much love and attention as they can get. I wanted to put a more human spin on the Hours with this deck, as we already have a lot of gorgeous symbolism in the Tarot of the Hours. But what would you see in the chapel windows of the Church of the Bright Edge, for example? Or what would gaze semi-benevolently down upon the altar of the Temple Unceasing? I'd love for these to actually appear in the windows of Hush House in BOOK OF HOURS, but AK and I spent a lot of time talking production schedules this week and we have quite enough to get on with for that game already...

Minor Arcana cards are more numerous than Major Arcana (56 Minor, 22 Major) but they'll deliberately harken back to cards you've mostly already seen in Cultist Sim. We've shared the 10 of Swords already, for example:



The 10 of Swords represents martyrdom, victimhood and 'bottoming out' - so the Incursus seemed like a pretty good touchpoint for that. You can expect to see a Lucid Tarot reimagining of your Cultist cards in the next set of these cards you see - anyone want to guess which Cultist Sim characters I've chosen for the Page, Knight, Queen and King of Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles...?

Teeny hotfix for lore upgrades

ILEX is not a wild goat. That's 'ibex'. Ilex is holly: a glossy, pretty plant that takes no nonsense from anyone, with glossy, pretty berries that occasionally murder people. And it means Christmas. I'm very fond of holly. I'm also very fond of JUNIPER, because it's what makes gin taste like gin.

Holly was sacred to thunder gods, and juniper to fertility goddesses. So the Thunderskin is the official sponsor of the ILEX patch, which we released today, and the Red Grail is the official sponsor of JUNIPER, which is now on the beta branch. Let's talk about what you can find in each one. Chelnoque wrote the patch notes, and [my comments are in italic brackets]

[h3]ILEX: MAIN BRANCH[/h3]

• Improved performance and display of card timers
  
• Aspects were counted twice for cards in the Verb output.
  
• Upgrading lore sometimes destroyed innocent bystander cards. [So sometimes you might lose a Health when you were trying to upgrade Heart lore. Thanks to Xardis for bringing this one up.]
• Incorrect chance of getting an Exultation when preaching with Passion is fixed. [Apparently this had been there since 2019. Now I think about it, I vaguely remember the bug report, and I vaguely remember fixing it, long ago. Maybe I forgot to commit ]
• Formula: Elixir Zeboim cannot be consumed in a rite. [Elixir Zeboim, as any ghoul kno, is something you consume that helps you get value out of consuming dead bodies. It's not real. Don't eat dead people. Anyway it was getting used up if you put it in the consumption slot of a rite.]
• MODDING: In-game debug panel now allows to manually xtrigger present cards. [When I saw Chelnoque had added this, I grunted appreciatively. If you use the dev console, you might grunt appreciatively too. If it means nothing, think of it as pleasant background noise, like the Shipping Forecast, or a bumblebee in a holly tree.]

[h3]JUNIPER: BETA BRANCH[/h3]

• An inability to interact with certain UI elements that occurred in windowed mode at widescreen resolutions is fixed. [This one was actually a Unity bug, and it's fixed by 'updating to the latest version of Unity']
• In addition, due to a hiccup in update releases, several DLC-related fixes were declared, but weren't properly present. [And this is just a fancy way of saying 'we didn't run the right scripts'. There's an extra step to updating DLC on Steam that's easy to forget, and we forgot it :)]
• When devouring a reckoner, Ligeians no longer consume the content of the Reckoner verb slot. [e.g. if you had just fended off the Reckoner with your Edge lore, the Ligeian would eat the Edge lore too. Ligeians don't play fair, but this was _particularly_ unfair. ]
• The game will no longer suggest you relax or negotiate when you're trying to start an operation in Exile.
  
• Buying a profane weapon with another profane weapon does not result in mutual annihilation. [This was an unbelievably obscure and complicated bug that only cropped up in a rare exploit where someone tried to buy a loaded gun with an unloaded gun. I would never have noticed it]
  
• MODDING: Mods now can self-define their tags through \"tags\" property in synopsis.json. Consult with MODDING_README.txt in StreamingAssets folder for the details. [This is also of most interest to modders... but it's important to everyone who uses mods too.]
  
  

[You'll notice there aren't many tags populated here. That's because I didn't realise there's no way for modders to update their own tags via the Steam front end! Anyway, from JUNIPER onwards, they'll be able to set the tags themselves.]

Crikey, we're up to 130+ mods now. You're an inventive crowd.

Dream furiously, all

AK

PS ILEX is sponsored by the Thunderskin, JUNIPER by the Grail, but this post is sponsored by cats. This is the SIXTH BUG REPORT of cats corrupting saves that I've received this year.

(guest-starring Chelnoque again)

- Yet another round of card-handlery tweaks:
- Cards put more effort into finding a landing zone as close to the hover position as possible.
- Card ghosts sometimes ended up in a wrong position (and generally made no sense).
- Cards save their preferred tabletop location between sessions.
- Cards should no longer completely overlap each other - or, at least, should do this significantly less often.
- Cards correctly replace each other in slots.
- Dropzones are now more proficient (and elegant) in their craft.
- Verbs occupy a more modest space on the grid.
- Verbs go straight to the dropzone when spawned.
- Different kinds of camera movement should feel smoother, and are less interruptive towards each other.
- Dragged cards follow the camera movement.
- When a card is moving into a verb slot, it no longer slows down if said verb's windows opens or closes.
- Initial board setup respects the grid.
- Interactions with the Mansus are slightly oiled up.
And also:
- Shattered Risen could sometimes lack Follower aspect.
- Buying a profane weapon with another profane weapon does not result in mutual annihilation.
- Rare freeze on \"Collect All\" is fixed.
- MODDING: Deck effects now support aspect references, as in \"deckeffects\": { \"deckeffects\": \"lantern\" }.",