Hello friends!

We are excited to announce that the Spring Molting update is live now in beta. We'll be testing for a few weeks and then releasing the update on the main branch June 6th

. Full patch notes can be found at the end of this post, but here is a summary:

- 🚨ALL NEW INTERFACE🚨 Our transformational UI redesign is complete! Fully mouseable, fully gamepaddable, and much prettier, but all carefully designed to maintain the essence of what makes Qud Qud. More polish is coming, but everything functional is in.
- Support for Steam Cloud saves. Play between PCs or between Steam Deck and PC, at your leisure
- a refresh of the starting town of Joppa, with the same lived-in texture as the rest of the world
- hundreds of new sound and visual effects
- several new narrative touches, big bug fixes, & performance improvements

To access the beta, select Caves of Qud in your Steam library> Preferences> Betas> Beta Branch. No password required. For bugs and feedback, please post here.

If you'd like to watch some gameplay before diving into the update yourself, you can watch snapjaw V-Tuber Gra on Youtube. Here is the VOD from yesterday's Ludonarracon Stream.

Live and drink!

-Freehold

SPRING MOLTING PATCH NOTES

UI

We added an entire new UI. (ie, we completed work on the modern UI, for folks who've been following our progress). More polish will be coming over the next several weeks, but all the functionality is there.

• There are too many changes to fully document, but here's a partial list of new screens: trade, quests, message log, character sheet, skills, equipment & inventory, tinkering, game summary, every journal tab, status effects, reputation, world generation, interact nearby, books, in-game terminals.
  
• The new UI has full keyboard, mouse, and controller support.
  
• The new UI plays natively on handhelds like Steam Deck.
  
• Added a search bar to relevant screens.
  

SAVES

• Added full support for Steam Cloud saves.
  
• Vastly improved the performance of saves and loads.
  
• Greatly reduced the number of files per save.
  
• Greatly reduced save size.
  
• Saves are now more resilient towards breakage, from mods or otherwise.
  
• Saves now kept in the \Synced subdirectory, and unsynced files are kept in \Local.
  

WORLD

• We refreshed the starting village of Joppa.
  • Added a new apothecary: Nima Ruda.
    
  • Replaced Warden Ualraig with a more fleshed-out version: Warden Yrame.
    
  • Gave all major NPCS new dialog and new descriptions.
    
  • Widened the range of artifacts that can be turned in to Argyve. Concurrently, we gave some true kin castes fewer starting trinkets.
    
  • Made some significant changes to O Glorious Shekhinah! These changes carry through to the generated village starts, and in fact are slightly different in each village type.
    
  • Gave the village a makeover, with several new walls, pieces of furniture, and monuments.
    
  • Joppa NPCs now point you to questgivers, like the villagers of dynamic villages do.
    
  
  
• We refreshed the Naphtaali faction and culture.
  • Replaced or renamed several Naphtaali. Here's the new roster of creatures: Naphtaali forager, Naphtaali tinker, Naphtaali nimrod, Naphtaali jeer, and Naphtaali sap.
    
  • Replaced chrome idols with unplanished godheds, and their legendary counterparts, planished godheds.
    
  • Refreshed woodsprogs and added them to jungle populations.
    
  • Added Erah the ciderer to Kyakukya.
    
  
  

GAMEPLAY

• Strong feelings creatures have due to actions you take (such as attacking them) now weaken over time instead of reverting suddenly when a map is unloaded.
  
• Creatures belonging to multiple factions now take your reputation with all those factions into account when determining their attitude toward you.
  
• Creatures no longer ignore changes to your faction reputation if they have a personal opinion of you.
  
• Companions no longer revert to their base attitude when they lose track of their leader.
  
• Creatures now get mad at you if you tell your companions to attack them.
  
• Added a new piece of furniture: electric generator.
  
• Tables randomly have items. on them more often.
  

MISC

• COMING SOON THIS BETA: 40 new achievements
  
• Added many, many new visual and sound effects.
  
• Looping music tracks now play seamlessly.
  
• Made some alterations to the track that plays during Reclamation.
  
• Made some tweaks to hindren and mopango dialog.
  
• Refreshed and polished the dynamic wall generation system used for villages (e.g., "dragonfly chitin tent")
  
• Refreshed and polished the display names, tiles, and descriptions of uindentified artifacts and partially identified artifacts.
  
• Added some new trinkets: Added bubble level, spiral iron, and salt mill.
  
• Added a wrench and a pestle.
  
• Reduced memory fragmentation over long play sessions.
  
• Improved turn-by-turn performance.
  
• Improved lightray casting performance during the day.
  
• Changed Issachari renderstring to 'h'.
  

BUGFIXES

• We made many, many fixes to long-standing issues around creature attitudes, including creatures losing their
  
• Fixed Asphodel's followerss being limited to 8.
  
• Fixed nonspecific gender verb conjugation.
  
• Fixed several cases of messages referring to a *PooledObject.
  
• Fixed the performance impact when many creatures had died or objects had been destroyed.
  
• Fixed non-human village tinkers and apothecaries not having tier-appropriate stock.
  
• Fixed many other small issues.
  

MODDING AND DEBUGGING

• [modding] Creatures now have action-specific opinions of others. For example, being attacked by someone's ally now garners the OpinionAttackAlly opinion.
  
• [modding] Creatures now maintain a history of allegiance. For example: "On the 3rd of Ut yara Ux, <creature> was constructed by a turret tinker." and "On the 12th of Tuum Ut, <creature> was proselytized by you."
  
• [modding] Many invalid components are now removed gracefully when loading a saved game, making it possible to remove a mod from a saved game and continue playing.
  
• [modding] Made the Leader part more general and functional. Use it to generate a creature with companions.
  
• [modding] MinEvents now support registration with prioritized execution and optional serialization.
  
• [modding] Any class can now register for a MinEvent by implementing the IEventHandler interface.
  
• [modding] Event handlers now use event registrars to handle both registration and unregistration with a single method implementation.
  
• [modding] Some events are now sent and can be listened for on the global game level, such as AfterPlayerBodyChangeEvent.
  
• [modding] Added ModSingletonEvent, ModPooledEvent and IModEventHandler, which allow creating modded events with native performance. See XML docs for examples.
  
• [modding] Object instances can now tokenize themselves for the serializer by implementing the ITokenized interface.
  
• [modding] IParts can now define a priority which determines their order within the parent object's list. This has an effect on the orders of event processing and serialization.
  
• [modding] Inert parts with no functionality, such as those gained from some skills, can now define a skip priority that excludes them from event processing, for a minor performance benefit.
  
• [modding] Ported blueprint builders to be IObjectBuilders, which are singletons that can process many game objects without creating garbage or polluting the object's parts.
  
• [modding] Text variable replacers, such as "=verb:shloop=" or "=player.waterRitualLiquid|capitalize=", are now moddable by decorating a class and method with the related attributes.
  
• [modding] Complex and/or custom text variable operations can now use the Text.StartReplace() builder to do every replacement in a single pass.
  
• [modding] Abilities can now set IsWorldMapUsable to allow activation on the world map.
  
• [debug] Added a 'show attitude' action to creatures when debug information on object internals is enabled.