We are proud to announce that after 17 years of development, Caves of Qud launches into 1.0 today. A new trailer celebrating the launch will also be debuting today at PC Gamer’s Most Wanted showcase. Make sure you tune in starting at 12 PM PST/3pm EST/8PM GMT/9PM CEST.

The Caves of Qud 1.0 update includes:

• The conclusion of the main quest, with multiple endings
• Lots of new music, sound effects, items, and final UI polish
• Tons of bugfixes and small feature improvements

And today starts the 1.0 Launch Sale, which includes:

• The base game
• The finished original soundtrack, now with over 2 hours of music
• The Pets of Harvest Dawn DLC, with your choice of 13 unique companions to start the game with

If you already purchased the base game, you can complete the launch bundle (which will continue on after launch under the name Dromad Deluxe edition) by buying the rest of the items in the bundle.

What’s Next?

What comes after 1.0 for Caves of Qud? First and foremost, the team will be taking a well-deserved break. Putting the capstone on a game as complex as Qud took a whole lot of work. After that, we plan to continue updating the game, with two big feature arcs already in mind. Whether those are free updates or paid DLC has yet to be determined.

And while we might push updates to the live branch, we’ll be keeping save game compatibility stable between big feature arcs. This should allow modders to feel comfortable getting to work on new mods. Compatibility might break when a big feature arc does drop (whether it’s free or DLC), but we’ll give plenty of lead time in the run up to those releases.

Other than that, we’ll be working on supporting other platforms. More news on that later.

Beginner Tutorial

We’ve collaborated with SBPlaysGames to create a beginner tutorial designed for first time players who want to jump in quickly. If you have been hesitant to start playing, this guide is a great companion to stat your journey. And if you have any friends who are Qud-curious, send them this video!

Reddit AMA

We are hosting an AMA on r/Games with the Caves of Qud team on Monday December 9th 2024 starting at 10am PST/1pm EST. Bring your questions about Caves of Qud development, what it’s like working on an Early Access title for over 15 years, or something dank such as their favourite Dune memes!

Merch is Live!

The first wave of official Caves of Qud merch by Mighty Merch is now available for pre-order! Show off your love for our esoteric indie roguelike with a Live and Drink t-shirt. Hang up a print of a fictitious sci-fi novel featuring a strange and wondrous vista from the world of Qud. The first wave will contain t-shirts, stickers, posters, and pins, with more designs and items coming in future waves.

Speedrun Contest for Content Creators - Update to Rules!

Attention Qud experts, speedrunners, and streamers alike! We are holding a special contest to celebrate the 1.0 update and the end of the game. Choose your run difficulty and beat the game as quickly as possible in front of an audience to win fabulous Caves of Qud prize packs. This is a contest designed to be streamed and shared with your community. PLEASE NOTE: Rules have been refined and updated since last week’s post so please review all the details again. Full details and rules can be found here.

A Thank You…

It feels like a fever dream to be releasing 1.0. Seventeen years of development, nine and a half years of Steam Early Access. The only constant has been that whenever we’ve shown the game to a wider audience, there are more and more weirdos just like us who are ready to connect with it. Thank you so much for supporting us through the years — some of you since the very beginning — and helping us bring something original and heartfelt into the world.

Full Patch Notes for Caves of Qud 1.0

END OF THE GAME

• We added the end of the game, including the conclusion of the main quest and the ability to beat the game, with multiple endings. In support of this we added many, many things that are too numerous to list and would need to be redacted anyway. Enjoy!

SOUND & MUSIC

• Added several new music tracks, mostly for the endgame but one for overland maps in the salt marshes, desert canyons, hills, and flower fields.
• Added several remasters of existing tracks.
• Added many, many new sound effects.

UI

• Added a new main menu with animation.
• Refactored the main menu and secondary menu options.
• Polished the frames of several submenus, like the Mods menu and Modding Toolkit.
• Renamed the Skills & Powers screen to Skills, the Attributes screen to Attributes & Powers, and the Inventory & Equipment screen to Equipment.
• We made several functionality improvements to the Equipment screen.
  • Added a new option that allows pagination binds to move between inventory and equipment panes and arrow keys to collapse / expand categories. (Options > UI > "Navigate inventory and equipment panes with left/right pagination instead of movement binds"; must have advanced options enabled)
  • The option "Equip/unequip highlighted item when pressing right or left" now functions in modern UI when using pagination navigation on the Equipment screen.
  • Added a new option to expand whichever of the inventory or equipment panes is currently focused. (Options > UI > "Expand the equipment or inventory pane when focused"; must have advanced options enabled)
  • The proper pane on the Equipment screen is now selected based on how you enter the screen (ie, hitting 'i' will enter the screen with the inventory pane in focus).
  • Added a selection highlight to the inventory and equipment lists.
  • Added hotkeys to the equipment pane in list mode.
  • Dragging an item onto the paper doll background now autoequips it to an appropriate slot.
  • Right-clicking a piece of default equipment on the paperdoll now inspects it.
  • The inventory search filter now prefers exact substring matches instead of fuzzy searching by default. The search mode can be changed in the toggle options on the Equipment screen.
  • Added tooltips for the filter categories.
• Added compute power to the secondary attributes pane of Attributes & Powers screen. It only appears if you have compute power greater than the default of zero.
• Added a new option that allows the character sheet to expand to full height or full screen on large monitors. (Options > UI > Character sheet size)
• Buy Mutations and Show Effects are now navigable options on the Attributes & Powers screen.
• The Quests screen now supports expand and collapse-all binds.
• Left and right now expand and collapse categories correctly on the Tinkering, Journal and Quests screens.
• Collapsing a category on the Skills screen now selects the proper parent category.
• Using search on the Skills screen now searches all skills, including unexpanded categories.
• Added a sort menu to the Reputation screen.
• Added tooltips for the Journal tabs.
• Removed the unused "general" category from the chronology.
• The stage dock width is now saved between sessions.
• Improved the character creation UI on small screens.
• Improved the formatting of the Skills screen.
• Improved the formatting of the Tinkering screen on small screens.
• Improved the formatting of the Quests screen on small screens.
• Right-clicking on the worldmap now defaults to look instead of the interact menu.
• Becoming nook terminal lines can now be clicked.
• You can now right-click the background to exit the becoming nook terminal.
• The modern UI now properly shows robot modules.
• Opening the abilities menu when you have no abilites no longer shows placeholder text.

OPTIONS

• We did a big refactor of the options menu.
  • Massively simplified and reduced the number of default "simple" options.
  • There's now a "Show advanced options" checkbox next to the options search bar (and in the Legacy UI, an App Settings option). Enabling this reveals all options.
  • Did an edit & cleanup pass on option categories and text.
  • Deleted some deprecated options.
  • Added a volume slider for combat sounds.
  • Added a volume slider for interface sounds.
• We did a refactor of the control bindings menu.
  • Did an edit & cleanup pass on binding categories and text.
  • Deleted some deprecated binds.
  • Changed all references from 'keybindings' to 'control bindings'.
• Search text is now cleared when reopening the options menu or control bindings.

TUTORIAL

• The tutorial pumping station no longer stocks hundreds of drams of free freshwater.
• Sprint and Freezing Ray are taken off cooldown if you need to use them.
• Fixed a bug that allowed you to take the starting chest.
• Fixed a bug that allowed you to miss with Freezing Ray.
• Fixed a softlock in the tutorial if you failed to equip the torch.
• Fixed a bug that allowed you to reset the starting location to Joppa.
• Fixed a bug that prevented you from getting the battle axe.

GAMEPLAY

• We reduced the point cost of some mutations.
  • Quills now costs 3 instead of 4.
  • Psychometry now costs 3 instead of 4.
  • Stunning Force now costs 3 instead of 4.
  • Pyrokinesis now costs 4 instead of 5.
  • Cryokinesis now costs 4 instead of 5.
  • The Star-Eye Esper preset now has Sense Psychic.
• Stunning Force now deals damage in up to 3 increments based on proximity to the center of the blast, as it's supposed to.
• You may now seal yourself in [redacted] when you are gigantic.
• Pools of liquid indirectly affected by warm static pouring now glitch into a safer subset of liquids.
• Charge can now be used while standing next to plants without melee attacks.
• Love tonic effects now more reliably expire when old zones are loaded.
• Restocking merchants now more reliably trade away unimportant items sold to them.

MISCELLANEOUS

• Added special time icons for Tzimtzlum and [redacted].
• In addition to all the new objects, we added several new tiles for old objects.
  • Added a new figurine tile.
  • Added four new sultan statue tiles.
  • Added a tile for portable wall.
  • Added a tile for psychic glimmer.
  • Added new tiles for all golems.
  • Added new tiles for albino ape, ogre ape, cragmensch boulderer, cragmensch luminary, glittermensch boulderer, glittermensch luminary, several merchants, Mayor Nuntu, plated knollworm, worm of the earth, dromad caravan guard, juicing cannibal, bow turrets, yempuris phi, and the Pilgrim calling.
• Proselytize now asks which creature to target when there are two+ targets in a square.
• Bask is now disabled when not usable.
• Plants summoned by Burgeoning are now considered trifling and, for example, won't generate messages for follower deaths.
• Toggling the Trash Rifling ability now resets the autoexplore ignore list for trash in the zone.
• Added an explanatory popup when a vendor identifies an item for you.
• Improved the performance of power transmission elements.
• [modding] Subtype tiles are now flipped to be right-facing programatically.
• [debug] Added a new “resetauto” wish to reset the autoexplore ignore lists for the zone.

BUGFIXES

• Fixed a bug that caused containers to rarely become filled with 'objects' and 'pooledobjects'.
• Urchin cherubs are now properly mobile.
• Fixed a memory leak on the Attributes & Powers screen.
• Fixed a bug that caused creatures separated from their leader to sometimes ignore your attacks.
• Fixed a bug that caused powered items to be drained rapidly if traveling on the world map in a vehicle.
• Fixed a bug that caused sensing effects like Heightened Hearing to apply to yourself in darkness.
• Fixed a bug that caused gigantic, two-handed equipment to use more slots than required, if any were available.
• Fixed a bug that caused flame and frozen sound effects to rarely play at inappropriate times.
• Fixed a bug that caused blank 'this rank' and 'next rank' entries in mutation descriptions.
• Fixed a bug causing rapid mutations to not apply some changes to mutation effects.
• Fixed a bug that caused the layout to jitter on the Skills screen when the scrollbar appeared and disappeared.
• Fixed a bug that caused stacks to temporarily disappear from trade after recharging an item from the stack.
• Fixed a bug that caused sultan statue names in the journal to not be properly highlighted.
• Fixed a bug that caused extremely long names to break the layout on the Attributes & Powers screen.
• Fixed a bug in the scrollbar positioning of wide popups.
• Fixed inconsistencies in the direction the player tile faces.
• Fixed a rare exception during object destruction.
• Fixed an issue with right-trigger wait on Steam Deck.
• Fixed an issue with click-to-explore pathing.
• Fixed some responsiveness issues at 1.5x in 1080p.
• Fixed some responsiveness issues with Skills lines.
• Fixed some intermittent layout issues in the status screens.
• Fixed some layout issues in character creation
• Fix a rare exception during zone build.
• Fixed the "mod with tinkering" item action in the classic UI.
• Fixed a description error with ThermalAmp and hamsa selection.
• Fixed problems with the disabled mouse input option.
• Fixed a bug with display names of some quests involving dynamic items.
• Fixed a bug that caused tooltips to get stuck open.
• Fixed a bug that caused tinkering line items to be unclickable.
• Fixed a rare bug in zone generation due to random baetyl rewards not generating properly.
• Fixed a bug in the scroll position of the journal map when highlighting a new entry.
• Fixed a bug that caused layout issues in the map editor when reopening after reloads.
• Fixed a bug that caused the comparison tooltip to overflow on small screens.
• Fixed a bug that caused the hover tooltips to sometimes flicker.
• Fixed some layout issues on small screens on the Equipment screen.
• [modding] Fixed an issue with AllowedMutationCategories on Genotypes during character creation.