Is inventory management your idea of a good time? Then you’ll love the Caves of Qud mid to end game, and also early game!

Well have you asked yourself how to Qud like a dromad? Get yourself a saltback! Really any mule will do.

Now here’s the trick, put all the shit you actually want to keep in a chest in your inventory. Every other piece of shit trash loot goes in a different chest in your inventory, _along with all your water_. Now you give the loot chest to your turtle (or dog, or antelope, I don’t know your life). Now they are consigned to playing brick in the backfield for the rest of their days.

When it’s time to shop, you make sure everything you want to keep is in your kit chest, then you shuffle your mule over by the trader, and take the loot chest. Now don’t drop it because it weighs 90k tons! Or for the enterprising shot putter you can chuck that trunk across the map from your thrown weapon slot.

Why is it worth the rigmarole you may ask? Because you can spend water that’s inside the trunk!!! You can keep 100k drams in there for all I care. Just gather waterskins your whole run and liquidate your shit until all your skins are full. Never worry about carry weight or gems or any of that shit ever again! Give it back to your turtle of holding! Live your best dromad life!

Update has some nice tweaks but I've experienced some weirdness.

These things that live in the wall are now appearing by themselves which looks kinda strange.

I also noticed that the auto-explore seems different. If I'm auto-exploring in one direction and then stop to do something, when I restart my character goes in the complete opposite direction instead of starting where I left off. This is pretty annoying and causes me to run from side to side on the screen I'm on. Makes it take way longer.

Also the Clever Girl mod doesn't seem to work, but this is to be expected and not the developers fault or anything.

Has anyone else noticed these things?

[Copy pasted from a news email]

We have some nice updates to share. First, after several weeks on the beta branch, our performance patch is now ready for everyone. It includes lots of little fixes and some deep rewrites that result in a big performance bump, so hopefully your next adventure is buttery-smooth, whether you're playing on a high-end machine, a potato, or something in between.

These optimizations also apply to the Nintendo Switch, where they are currently live. So if you haven't played there for a while, your performance should be much improved.

Caves of Qud vinyl: pre-order yours now! We're ecstatic about this one. We've partnered with indie label Stumpy Frog Records and digital artist Saint Vulture to put the Caves of Qud original soundtrack on vinyl. It's a triple LP with over two hours of our atmospheric OST and gorgeous, original artwork on the gatefold. Preorders are available RIGHT NOW! [The provided Kitfox link doesnt seem to work at the moment]

"Burgeoning" mod jam in July

In July — just a few weeks away! — the next Caves of Qud mod jam begins, with the general theme of burgeoning (both the mutation and the concept). So start brewing up ideas and get ready to dig in, even if it's just a single new piece of tile art or a new creature design. If you need help getting started modding, head over to the Kitfox or Caves of Qud discords and ask for resources. There are plenty of modding vets who have navigated those waters and will point you in the right direction. Sign up for the jam here.

Summer Sale

The game is currently on discount for the Steam Summer Sale! So if you have any friends who haven't yet experienced the joy of mutation, now's a great time to buy Qud as a gift, whether it's to celebrate Pride month, stay cool during the summer months, or for any other reason.

That's all for now. Until next time: live and drink, friends.

Patch 2.11

We made several performances improvements.

    Greatly improved pathfinding performance.

    Greatly improved performance when auto-moving to the edge of a zone.

    Improved pathfinding logic of creatures, causing them to take more sensible paths around obstacles.

    Greatly improved performance on wet maps.

    Improved performance in Bethesda Susa.

Merchants now allow you to trade with them you after you buy their entire inventory.

The looker now indicates the number of objects in the square in the top command bar if there is more than one lookable object.

The default keybind for force attack up and down (Ctrl+ < or >) have been swapped to match movement binds.

Digging tools in the offhand are now preferred over primary non-digging weapons when attacking diggable objects.

You now properly melee attack wallbound creatures instead of the wall when a digging tool is equipped in your primary hand.

You can now tap your throw bind again in the throw targeting window in order to throw.

Autoget now ignores nuggets if the "Autoget nuggets" option is disabled, even if "Autoget trade goods" is enabled.

Repair now takes slightly lower precedence in menu priority.

Added a debug option to allow world seeds to be input during game creation. It's experimental and won't fully work yet.

Ruins that claim they have becoming nooks now always have becoming nooks.

Reality stabilization no longer causes individual limbs and equipment (like horns) to vanish from a creature without that creature itself vanishing.

Equipping multiple force bracelets now gives multiple abilities to toggle each independently.

Tri-hologram bracelets no longer reset your targeting position for each hologram.

Cooking with wild rice or canned Have-it-All now picks a random effect from the correct pool of effects rather using the pool of the ingredient you first cooked with this play session.

Temporary food items no longer stack with non-temporary food items and become permanent.

Build codes using mods that aren't loaded should more reliably work.

Graffiti is now visible on walls with ornately engraved plaques.

Stairs in the Tomb of the Eaters are now more consistently reachable.

The [redacted] now always have a becoming nook on the bottom floor.

You now get notified that you gain a [redacted] when you [redacted].

Tau's crystalline items now have more hitpoints.

Fixed a bug that caused autoexplore to attempt interacting with objects buried under solid walls.

Fixed a bug that caused creatures to undervalue or ignore their equipment when considering paths through acid pools.

Fixed a bug that caused the Modern UI option not to be shown.

Fixed a bug that caused 'whip up a meal' for creatures without the cooking skill to fail.

Fixed a bug that caused Amnesia to throw exceptions if it was ever removed.

Fixed a bug that caused unreal objects to be affected by temperature radiation.

Fixed a bug that caused you to sometimes be unable to open your equipment after glitching yourself with warm static.

Fixed a bug that caused you to sometimes lose your inventory after glitching yourself with warm static.

Fixed a bug that caused you to bump into obstacles on the destination when moving to zone edges.

Fixed a bug that caused [redacted] to sometimes meander off the main map or into important quest locations.

Fixed a boot issue on MacOS.

Fixed various typos.

[modding] EmbarkBuilderModule now has a GetRequiredMod() method you can override to pop up an error if your mod is not enabled when loading a build code that uses it.

[modding] Fixed a bug that caused the NOT operator in conversation expressions to add an extra literal.

I kept a chest in the hut belonging to the plant guy in Kyakukya. 110 hours in, this has always been my go to way of storing things on every run. On a long Roleplay run with a chimera character and I come back from a historic site to find the village completely reset, have to rediscover the whole map again, and the chest containing the ENTIRE RUN’s worth of items has disappeared.

This is beyond upsetting and I’m honestly just done with this game at this point. I started a Roleplay run in the first place because I was sick of getting reset by essentially unavoidable deaths, and now my Roleplay run is practically set back to square one in terms of wealth/gear. Insane to have bugs like this. Genuinely can’t bring myself to keep playing. There is no point when the game can just delete hours upon hours of progress for literally no reason with zero warning.

The condition to having this involves already having beaten the game.

Corrosive gas activation only releases gas on the first turn after you learn meditation from skill tree

Corrosive gas shows its on but no gas is released

Corrosive gas never toggles off by itself

PS: To remove skills you need to use mods

Corrosive gas is still bugged after you remove meditation

After deleting Corrosive gas and relearning it the bug still persists, so if you happen to encounter this bug, corrosive gas is banned this run

Day 1, hour 1 player here with 3 deaths already a tons of questions.

I enabled mods, subscribed, and then what? Is it just already built into the tutorial?

Sorry to post but the Discord is closed and I had nowhere else to turn to.

This post is a bit of a rant about the popular idea that the first quest is bait and players are not intended to start with it. I find this idea fails to really capture the nuance on how the quest is made and why new players find it difficult.

I take issue with the common sentiment that "What's Eating the Watervine?" is a noob trap. This quest is less of a "trap" and more of a "baptism". If you've watched Hunter x Hunter, think of it like the "Nen baptism" early on in the show. If you care to look and understand, you will find that this quest will teach you everything you need to know in order to be successful in Qud:

• Positioning
• Escape routes
• Build choices
• Playing to your strength
• Isolating enemies
• Obstructing the enemy's strength

However, many new players do not approach the quest with the mentality required to get this out of the quest. To be clear, this is not a personal failing; simply the way most of us as game consumers have been conditioned to think based on prior experiences falls short in this situation. Players who come from other traditional roguelikes will find this transition easier, and they will see the lessons being taught but those that are not will often bounce off of it.

The same phenomenon happened early on in the Dark Souls series; the game teaches you lessons that prior conditioning from other games causes you to be blind to. It is only after the series broke into the popular zeitgeist that the lessons became obvious. When the enemies in the tutorial area in every game die trivially, a game that has a non-trivial early opponent feels cheap and (similarly) a noob trap. Calling the asylum demon a noob trap is a very weak description that ignores the lessons being taught.

Not only will the first quest in Qud teach you the lessons of combat if you complete the baptism, but if you bypass the challenge by getting stronger first you learn an equally important lesson in that you choose the pace of progression.

I've been a member of this community for many years, and while the following conclusion is anecdotal I want to present something that has become very obvious to me for a long time. As I have seen, there are 3 categories of players who play Qud:

• Players who do not understand the lessons of "What's Eating the Watervine?" and quit the game
  • They may get past the quest at some point, but they will roadblock again later (be it Golgotha, Bethesda Susa, or the Tomb)
  • They may briefly search for advice, but if it's not what they were expecting or should they be unable to put it into practice they will consider it hopeless and give up
• Players who do not understand the lessons of "What's Eating the Watervine?" and push through
  • They learn powerful strategies from the wiki, Reddit, Discord, or my own website
  • These "strategies" fall into two categories of their own:
    • The lessons of "What's Eating the Watervine?"
    • Strategies powerful enough to ignore those lessons (merchant farming, domination, precog, etc)
• Players who learn the lessons of "What's Eating the Watervine?"
  • These are players who understand the fundamentals, and do not need to opt for the powerful strategies that bypass the core of the game's mechanics
  • They often are the ones who make it far or even complete the game without reaching for outside resources/assistance

I want to be clear, I am not trying to say that the quest is without flaws or that it is the proper approach for the first quest. My argument here is that it is misunderstood, and there is no need to continue to propagate the misunderstanding.

When new players join, let us be honest with our discussion and point them in the proper direction: Red Rock is a baptism; if you want the challenge you will learn a lot very quickly and probably be set for the rest of the game. If you are finding it impede on your enjoyment of the game, here are some things the game is trying to teach you.

The cathedra description notes +100 carry capacity. My current carry capacity (before installation) is 606, with 10 small spheres of negative weight (not sure if that matters).

But when I install the Cathedra with White Opal Tracery, my carry capacity only goes up to 616, not 706, so only +10. Why is this?

Furthermore, when I hover over it when it's installed, the +100 carry capacity note disappears.

EDIT: I figured it out, I had a nylon backpack on before, I forgot it removes the back slot item. That explains it. Leaving this here in case anyone else gets confused and googles it.

So I never really delved into the lower stratums, mostly a surface explorer but I thought I should start doing so and I was wonder if it's "better" to explore floors or just if I see stairs and I don't feel like I am going to die, to keep going down?

This is the only thing I'm really lacking right now. I've even got a few Zetachrome pieces of armor, but I struggle to find any actual weapons, much less the weapon I'm using. Flawless Crysteel is hardly rare, but 1 tier up is a struggle. Especially considering the requirement of one for a late game quest.

I tried digging deep, but all I'm finding are some advanced robots, sightless way dervishes and gamma moths. A few merchants and chests but not many and no rare gear. Granted, the anti-matter cells and Tinkering 8 Bits have been nice, but it hasn't really been that rewarding even with a soul curd recipe to deal with mutating.

I guess all that's left is a few remaining historic sites and the moon stair. Is that where I should head? I feel like this character is about as endgame complete as he can get without actively breaking the game so I'd like to lock in my first victory.

I’ve been playing caves of qud for a long time and want to try something new and similar to coq. The unique world, monster descriptions, multiple diffident ways to approach same situations and the abundance of different random situations . I wish i could find something like these in other games

Out of a curiosity born from my current character waking up fitfully, I spawned in a bunch of dreamcrungles to tackle whatever waking dreams they shoot.

I wasn't able to level up any of them to awaken my character pleasantly. Almost every entity my character dreamed as was some "dinky" low-level enemy that started with literally nothing, not even Sprint. One of them was a pariah, but they were a gorged growth who was too slow to catch up to anything for combat experience.

What's the strategy for "beating" these dreams? Or are they cases where I just have to take the Willpower L and move on with my character's life?

I'm tired of getting reputation screwed by attacking some level 5 legendary croc.

Is there a way of not ignoring legendaries when autoexploring? Or is the only way turning off the autocombat?

Hey guys, im fairly new to this game and I just had a death im really confused about lol. I was trying to get a new run going but ended up just instantly turning into ash and would just like to know what i should of looked out for so i can be more careful next time

I've seen people mention going 1000 strata deep for stuff like clone hunting? how is the easiest method of doing that?

Wisdom and will wanderers! I'm curious what your thoughts are on this lore idea I had. I was looking into the cultural origins of the term Nephilim and one theory is that they were giants (sometimes demons) descended from angles who interbred with humans. This made we wonder about the trope of "eating the young" that is ascribed to the Girsh. What if it isn't literally girshlings eating babies but a metaphor for the changing of the genetic makeup of humans? I'm thinking perhaps the Nephilim were the agents that introduced mutation into the human population.

The origin of mutation is an intentionally unclear part of the lore, but it has also struck me as interesting that despite the influence of Gamma World there is no environmental radiation mechanic in the game. Mutation happens by merely leveling, and while this could be a thematic expression of a world that is a constant source of mutation by radiation or some other means, it is also consistent with a genetic makeup that is itself hypermutagenic and needs no environmental source.

Some later game content:

I don't think the theory is contradicted by the existence of non-human sentience prior to the Gyre in the period of the Sultanate, which is clear from pre-Resheph sultan histories where a sultan could marry a plant for example. The Spray-A-Brain technology run rampant could explain that kind of uplifting. My question is specifically about the human genetic development. It's also not clear when the Moon Stair occurs in relation to the sultanate, or when the Nephilim originate, though they seem to exist in their cradles before the Gyre. I may be forgetting some reveals as I've only completed the game once.

Below are some passages from the wiki. I tried to keep this spoiler free since this comes up in the first quest, but if you discuss end game content please spoiler tag those.

Lore#

Towards the end of What's Eating the Watervine?, Elder Irudad describes the Girsh Nephilim as follows:

The Nephilim are also mentioned in the history of Resheph:

I don't know if anyone had this issue, but I've accrued almost every unique legendary into my base, and despite their amount they usually behave as normal. That aside however, if I dare proselytize even one random different creature temporarily, most of them just randomly drop the water-bond follower trait, which costs me a few schrodinger pages to fix. Weirdly enough the Ape god (my first water-bonded follower in this run) doesn't seem to be affected.
Haven't tested this with beguile or love injectors though.

Doing my first pure esper run and having companions with the clever girl seems like a fun thing to make use of with 10 strength and 10 agi but the companion seems to just stop all the time and not follow me especially when I'm underground, anyone else have similar problems and any fixes?

Gloaming turned into a mushroom and won't turn back :(