"What an enchanting place! The maze of polyps allowed me to slink along, mostly unnoticed, and take in the doings of its flora and fauna. A rich diversity of life radiates across Qud, but in the Reef, it flourishes on a new level. In but one hemmed in quarter I witnessed a tetrad of kaleidoslugs round the rune-cut cone of an enigma snail, a jelly huff a cloud of plasma onto a memory eater, and a polycule of tongue tyrants devour a squad of interdictors. At one point the Reef came alive and a polyp-jeweled hermit walked out of the lattice. He grinned at me and bartered a broken hand rail. When I turned my head to nod goodbye, he was gone." -Kaylenn Sand-Shell, In Maqqom Yd

GAME MODES

Alongside the classic mode of play, we added two new game modes. You choose a game mode when you start a new game. Here are all the modes.

• Classic. This is the standard Qud experience with permadeath. Nothing has changed.
• Roleplay.
  • Checkpointing at settlements. When you die, you have the option to reload from the last checkpoint. Your checkpoint is automatically set whenever you enter or leave a settlement. You can also set your checkpoint manually while at a settlement by hitting Esc and then 'c'.
• Wander.
  • Checkpointing at settlements.
  • Your reputation with every faction starts at 0 (or higher), meaning most creatures start neutral to you. Aggressive creatures of neutral factions will still attack you.
  • You get no XP for kills.
  • You get more XP for discoveries, completing quests, and performing the water ritual. This amount scales with your level.
• Daily. This is the daily challenge as it currently exists. We removed the weekly challenge.

You can't change your game mode once you start a game. To check what game mode you're on, your turn counter, and your world seed, hit Esc in game and select Game Info.


NEW CHARACTER CREATION SEQUENCE

• We entirely refactored the character generation sequence to be much more sensible, highly moddable, and use an all-new, responsive, fully keyboardable and mouseable UI.
• We added nine new preset character builds with their own tiles: Marsh Taur, Dream Tortoise, Gunwing, Star-Eye Esper, Firefrond, bzzzt, Praetorian Prime, First Gardener, and First Child of the Hearth. These are designed to help new players get started, but they're also fully customizable.

LATE-GAME REGIONS

• We added two new late game regions to the east side of the map: Lake Hinnom and the Palladium Reef.
• Added a new two-tiered settlement, the Yd Freehold, with many new NPCs.
• Added lilypad people, the slynth, and a hidden slynth settlement.
• Added two new factions: svardym and the denizens of the Yd Freehold.
• Added svardym eggcopter storms.
• Added a new side quest: Landing Pads.
• Expanded the Rainbow Wood and configured it to include dynamic sites like villages, ruins, and lairs.
• Added new creatures: svardym hatchling, svardym jut, svardym scrounge, svardym eld, prism perch, white esh, quatravolt glider, trining lamprey, giant clam, reef hermit, plasma jelly, kaleidoslug, enigma snail, junk dollar, tongue tyrant, sultan croc, star kraken, galgal, slynth, and slynth wanderer.
• Added new plants, plant-like animals, and reef infrastructure pieces: coral polyp, palladium strut, palliud strut with coral growth, finger coral, tunnel sponge, bop sponge, and arsplice hyphae.
• Added two new liquids: algae and sunslag.
• Added new butcherable and harvestable consumables: bop cheek and tongue twist.
• Added three new cooking effect domains: rubber-based, powerful rubber-based, and tongue-based.
• Added three new ingredients: congealed rubbergum, sliced bop cheek, and fermented tongue.
• Added [extremely redacted] and all its miscellaneous [redacted].
• Added a new music track for the Rainbow Wood, Lake Hinnom, and the Palladium Reef.
• Added many new items, implants, furniture, and other objects. They're listed below in the OTHER NEW THINGS section.

OTHER NEW THINGS

• Added a new wayfaring skill, Wilderness Lore: Rivers and Lakes.
• Added new items: gravity grenade, plasma grenade, eigenpistol, arc winder, high-voltage arc winder, light rail, hand rail, di-thermo beam, spaser rifle, spaser pistol, space inverter, psychal fleshgun, step sowers, 3D cobblers, slip ring, gas tumbler, thermo cask, high-energy thermo cask, chiral rings, tri-hologram bracelet, night-sight interpolators, precision nanon fingers, psychic meridian, kaleidocera cape, kaleidocera muffs, kaleidocera krakows, enigma cone, enigma cap, and sharpened polyp.
• Added new cybernetic implants: tibular hydrojets, optical multiscanner, magnetic core, skin glitter, stasis projector, crysteel hand bones, and [redacted].
• Added three new item mods: snail-encrusted, nanon, and fitted with beamsplitter.
• Added a new gas: plasma.
• Added a new type of cybernetic implant merchant: gutsmonger. There's one guaranteed in the SE corner of the Stiltgrounds.
• Added organ markets.
• Added two new books: In Maqqom Yd and The Murmurs' Prayer.
• Added new walls: crysteel plate shear wall, star orchid marble wall, and fulcrete with square wave.
• Added a whole bunch of new furniture.
• Added a whole bunch of new tile art.

GAMEPLAY

• Flawless crysteel gear is now a bit rarer.
• Zetachrome gear is now much rarer.
• Gunslingers now start with Akimbo instead of Weak Spotter, and they start with much more ammo.
• Water Merchants now start with Short Blade.
• Gave several existing merchants cybernetic implants as wares.
• You can no longer disassemble non-takeable furniture.
• Tier 6 bits are now a little more common.
• You can no longer manipulate the results of cooking with nectar by using Precognition.
• Creatures beguiled via the cooking effect triggered action now lose interest in their beguilers after the metabolizing effect expires.
• Salt kraken now have their own unique behavior.
• Modified how plant-based cooking effects work.
• Updated Burgeoning plant-summoning tables to be better distributed and include more plants, particularly late-game plants.
• Soup sludges now appear in dynamic encounters.
• Moved the river referenced in Raising Indrix to south of the Kyakukya instead of north. Also fixed a bug with its starting location.
• Made moving across rivers, lakes, and the Rainbow Wood a little slower.
• You can now jump through squares that contain creatures who are out of phase or flight with you.
• Village ovens can no longer include psychal gland paste.
• Serrated and nanon weapons now have a very small chance to decapitate independent of whether you have the Decapitate skill power. Having Decapitate does not augment this chance.
• The Rainbow Wood is no longer considered a jungle for the purposes of wilderness lore.
• Generated villages now interact more robustly with their surrounding terrain.
• Gorged growths now dehydrate and crumble apart after a while.
• Meditation no longer occasionally cures gamma moth mutation.
• Damage reflected by equipment is now attributed to the equipment's wearer.
• You can no longer talk to your original body while dominating another creature. (This led to bad things.)
• Psionic weapons no longer affect inanimate objects.
• Night-vision goggles are now overloadable.
• Eater's flesh and luminous hoarshrooms now count as mushrooms for the purposes of triggering cooking effects.
• Creatures are now a little better at escaping environmental damage.
• Creatures no longer use Force Bubble if an ally is adjacent. This prevents rare Force Bubble + Temporal Fugue crashes.
• Nulling weapons now apply astral burdening for a short time after they hit, rather than only instantaneously as they hit.
• Temporal fugue clones are now placed a little more intelligently with respect to natural movement modes (e.g., aquatic creature clones will prefer spawning in swim-depth water).
• Rummaging creatures, such as arconauts, no longer rummage as villagers.

UI

• Made several general enhancements to the look and feel of the new UI.
• Added all new tiles for most missile weapons.
• Most things that interrupt autoact now provide a visual indicator of what caused the interruption, if it's something external.
• Disassembling something now exits the inventory menu when you're done.
• Disassemble-all is now interrupted if you become threatened by a nearby creature.
• Morphotypes now show up in the character sheet.
• Added a prerelease input manager binding for "move to point of interest".
• The carrying capacity bonus from Multiple Legs now reflects its description.
• Looking at objects in force fields and stasis fields now gives info on the object instead of the field.
• Rephrased messages about additional body parts needed to equip items in more abstract, inclusive terms.
• Slightly decreased the traversal speed of most projectiles.
• Irritable Genome's message now includes the mutation that was affected.
• Added a popup confirmation for targeting yourself with a geomagnetic disc.
• A visible rhinox getting ready to charge now interrupts autoact.
• The prerelease input manager now lets you rebind the cancel action.
• Getting from the current cell now prioritizes takeable items over liquids.
• Missile weapon targeting now has a bindable context menu.
• Changed ghost perch's color.
• Changed memory eater's ASCII glyph.
• Changed giant amoeba's ASCII glyph.
• Change twinning lamprey ASCII glyph color.

MISCELLANEOUS AND BUGFIXES

• Our official, community-managed wiki has a new home: https://wiki.cavesofqud.com. We updated the link in the Modding Utilities.
• Made significant visual enhancements to the world map.
• Made some changes to the ASCII worldmap.
• Added Omonporch and the Yd Freehold as landmarks.
• Renamed Wilderness Lore: Mountains to Wilderness Lore: Hills and Mountains.
• Having the equipment rack cybernetic implant no longer prevents you from receiving a certain achievement.
• You no longer receive a certain achievement earlier than is appropriate just by being repeatedly dismembered.
• You can no longer use the following items and abilities on the worldmap: hologram bracelet, Force Wall, Light Manipulation, Time Dilation, gas generation, and Spinnerets.
• The trip back from [redacted] now works more consistently.
• Using the sit interaction on a chair that's in your inventory now places the chair on the ground and sits on it, rather than silently failing.
• Recycling suits can no longer (uselessly) get the recycling mod.
• Added a new description, name color, and eat message for arsplice seed.
• Turrets mounting blood-gradient hand vacuums are now called blood-gradient vacuum turrets.
• Crab cherubim and mechanical crab cherubim now have claws.
• Clarified that the fitted with filters mod only protects against harmful gases if you're breathing them.
• Clarified in the description of giant hands that it applies to all weapon types.
• Clarified in the description of Akimbo that it applies to all missile weapon types.
• Greatly improved performance when a large party of creatures is on screen.
• Fixed a bug that caused autoexplore to dig around boulders and rubble instead of through them.
• Fixed a bug that caused Temporal Fugue clones to always spawn northwest of you.
• Fixed a bug that caused jewelers to occasionally have double-jewel-encrusted items.
• Fixed a bug that caused you to occasionally get stuck inside walls when using Space-Time Vortex.
• Fixed an error when a creature with no back grew wings.
• Fixed the worldmap tip displaying too soon (during world generation).
• Fixed incorrect pronouns in the description of sultan crocs.
• Fixed a bug that caused Regeneration to regrow your tongue while you were still affected by glotrot.
• Fixed a bug that caused ubernostrum tonics to remove glotrot without the cure.
• Fixed a bug that caused Light Manipulation's lase ability to fail when targeting a creature with mental mirror.
• Fixed a bug that caused creatures to sometimes generate inside walls.
• Fixed a bug that caused natural claw weapons from Skulk Tonic to remain after the effect expired.
• Fixed a bug that caused map notes to not load until you opened your journal.
• Fixed a bug that caused recipes intended to give corrosive gas generation to have no effect.
• Fixed a bug that made it impossible to complete an important Tomb of the Eaters quest step.
• Fixed a bug that prevented relics that bestow extra carry capacity from working.
• Fixed a bug that caused you to be referred to in the third person when dealing damage with Sunder Mind.
• Fixed a bug that caused [redacted] to fail to render correctly if entered with penetrating radar enabled.
• Fixed an issue that would prevent [redacted] from carving murals if interrupted by a serialization cycle.
• Fixed a bug that caused pits and chasms to drop you into solid walls.
• Fixed a bug that caused objects to be placed on top of pits, leading to excessive build times as multiple zones were built.
• Fixed a bug that caused zone transitions to happen rapidly every time an object was swallowed by a vortex.
• Fixed a bug that caused gas generation to continue after transitioning to the world map.
• Fixed a bug that caused visual effects like torches to sometimes persist after teleporting to another zone.
• Fixed a bug that caused geomagnetic disc to sometimes bounce to neutral and friendly creatures.
• Fixed a bug that caused villages or village outskirts to build over Pax Klanq's hut.
• Fixed a performance issue caused by aquatic or wall-walking creatures in your party trying to pathfind to you.
• Fixed a bug that caused Mental Mirror to be very unlikely to reflect mental attacks.
• Fixed a bug that caused bonded companion cherubim and soup sludges to spawn without their party leaders or factions set.
• Fixed a bug that caused soup sludges to only render their first four liquid colors.
• Fixed a rare exception that prevented the ability manager from opening.
• Fixed a rare crash in Grit Gate.
• The "you" pronoun is no longer incorrectly used when creatures collect liquids.
• Fixed a bug that caused the minimap to share the message logs opacity setting.
• Fixed the pluralization of pneumatic pistons, anchor spikes, palladium electrodeposits, and tibular hydrojets.
• Fixed a bug that caused Golgotha and Bethesda Susa to not build properly.
• Fixed a bug that caused Joppa's opening story popup to give incorrect info.
• Fixed a bug that confused Joppa and the ruins of Joppa in certain contexts.
• [pets] Fixed a bug that caused You, but Mechanical not to inherit your anatomy.

DEBUG AND MODDING

• Added a new, highly-extensible data file, EmbarkModules.xml, that drives character creation.
• Added three new body types for clams, jellies, and starfish.
• Added some new predicates to conversations: IfTrueKin, IfNotTrueKin, IfGenotype, IfNotGenotype, IfSubtype, and IfNotSubtype.
• Unity impostors now support X and Y offsets.
• Fixed populations being replaced instead of merged.
• AllowedMutationCategories defined in Genotypes.xml now supports a comma separated list of included/excluded categories. E.g., "Physical,Morphotypes" = only physical and morphotypes; "*,-Mental" = everything but mental.
• Added a context menu to objects in the map editor for adding a part without the need of a new blueprint.
• Fixed a boot crash when defining duplicate conversation nodes.

It's a big patch, so we probably missed some things here! If you have a question, just ask.