Caves of Qud (now at Early Access Feature Friday #131) $

[getter77]

Feature Friday #123

We expanded the framework for creature travel AI and added new travel behavior to some creatures.
Some albino apes you encounter are now traveling toward Oboroqoru's lair.
Some feral dogs you encounter are now traveling toward humanoid settlements.
Some goatfolk you encounter are now traveling toward goatfolk villages.
Changed the 'Quit' option text to something much more accurate: 'Abandon Character'.
Changed the default action for books to Read.
Changed the default action for recoilers to Activate.
Crayons and plastic trees no longer rust.
Implanted NPCs now start with the proper amount of cybernetic license points.
Your party members no longer (easily) become hostile to one another.
Speaking to your own party members no longer causes you to regain your bearings.
Moved the 'Remove cell' option to the top of the cell dialog.
Fixed an issue where cybernetics sometimes became undroppable.
Fixed some common causes of extraneous zone generation.
Fixed an issue where having Iron Mind didn't always correctly give you the chance to shake off confusion.
Fixed some cases where a stack of objects was incorrectly replaced with a single object (eg., when you repaired a stack of scrapped waydroids).
Fixed some cases where quests to find historic relics didn't complete if you equipped the relics directly from the ground.
Fixed some rare cases where an invalid base object appeared in dynamic encounters.
Fixed several issues related to creatures determining the monetary value of their items, including inconsistent valuation when the items were socketed with energy cells.
Fixed several typos.
Fixed an issue where socketed cells occasionally replicated out of control when you recharged them.

[getter77]

Feature Friday #124

   

Warden Indrix no longer occasionally takes a sabbatical to another goatfolk village.
    Clonelings no longer clone inorganic creatures.
    You can now harvest yondercane from yonderbrush even if it's hostile as long as it's visible.
    Extradimensional psychic assassin templars with cybernetic implants now have their names appear correctly.
    Added new descriptions for acid gas, stun gas, sleep gas, blinding gas, and stinking gas.
    Jewelers now occasionally stock figurines.
    The left-most tile of the Edification relief is now correctly labeled.
    Charge is now a prerequisite for Charging Strike.
    Renamed 'pentacips' to 'pentaceps'.
    Gave the tunnels beneath Grit Gate a more appropriate name.
    Gave the 'tar-encrusted bones' tile a more appropriate color.
    Removed the prompt to save the game before abandoning a character.
    Added an option to disable smoke.
    Did some restructuring of the object hierarchy.
    Fixed a broken branch of Wardens' Esther dialog.
    Fixed an issue causing some achievements and quests to not properly trigger when equipping an item directly from the ground.
    Fixed an issue causing zone names to incorrectly persist across games played in the same session.
    Fixed an issue causing energy cells to show the wrong options in their dialog menus after one was loaded into a weapon.
    Fixed a bunch of typos.

[getter77]

Feature Friday #125

Albino ape hearts now count as meat.
Ogre ape hearts are now properly treated like other organs and corpses.
Watervine farmers now wield iron vinereapers like their descriptions say.
Sentient walls, doors, and tables now appear in more creature contexts. (Examples: as figurine models, Mechanimist converts, and esper assassins).
Cleaned up the logic around dynamic encounters and expanded the dynamic encounter framework.
Fixed an issue that caused improper options to occasionally appear in the item action menu of cybernetic implants.
Fixed an issue that caused occasionally caused zone building lockups while exploring very deep caverns (depth 30 and below).
Fixed a rare issue that caused historic sites to fail to build.
Fixed another issue that caused slotted solar cells to multiply indefinitely.
Fixed a slew of typos.

[getter77]

Feature Friday #126

Extradimensional psychic hunters are now vulnerable to mental attacks regardless of their base creature types. (after all, they somehow acquired minds in their native dimensions...)
When you look at an extradimensional creatures or item, you now inscribe a note about its native dimension in the Gossip & Lore page of your journal.
Walls in other dimensions no longer block visibility unless your mind is appropriately altered.
You can now fly and jump over gates, fences, stakes, and rubble.
You can now shoot missile weapons through arrow slits, gates, fences, and over rubble.
Flaming jets, freezing jets, acid jets, electrical jets, and light beams now pass through arrow slits, gates, fences, and over rubble.
Gas and light seep through arrow slits, gates, fences, stakes, and over rubble.
The Pauli exclusion principle now properly applies to NPCs.
Turning off autoget on artifacts now takes precedence over other conflicting option flags.
Water ritual participants no longer offer to teach you blueprints you already know.
Fixed another issue that rarely caused energy cell duplication.
Fixed some more typos.

[getter77]

Feature Friday #127

   

You can now cook with acid.
    Added descriptions for late-mid period sultanate historic relics made from the slag deposits of ursteel blast furnaces.
    Added some more textual flare to gossip.
    Shield slam now works only on targets in the same phase as the attacker.
    When you fall down an open shaft, it's now much rarer that you end up in a small chamber without access to the rest of the map.
    You now properly get XP if you kill something with a resonance grenade.
    Painted and engraved items in your inventory at the start of the game now properly depict historic events.
    Fixed an issue causing manual cell recharging to improperly handle stacked cells.
    Fixed an issue where sphynx salt injectors weren't consumed when you reverted to the start of your vision.
    Fixed an issue causing windows and menu keys to issue spurious commands.
    Fixed a rare issue causing infinite zone generation, leading to out-of-memory errors.

[getter77]

Feature Friday #128

Glass bottles and phials now shatter when you throw them.
Cloning draught no longer clones inorganic objects.
You can now trade with your followers freely via conversation.
Changed the stun logic. You should get chain stunned much less often.
Added a visual effect to extradimensional items.
Added a sound effect for closing security doors.
Added a sound effect for page turning when reading a book.
Normalized the volume for a few sound effects.
When you engage in the water ritual with someone who offers to teach you blueprints, the blueprint options are no longer greyed out if the speaker has no more secrets to share.
Inorganic objects now have appropriate pronouns.
Baetyls no longer request troll axes.
Removed troll kings from dynamic encounters.
Changed the status icon for "Precognition - End Vision" to "?".
Achievements no longer spam the log.
Fixed a bunch of typos.
Added some descriptions.
Improved the use of indefinite articles and pluralization in generated text.
Fixed an issue with the salt desert visual effect that caused some tiles to disappear or smear across the map.
Fixed an XML issue with steel vinereaper's color definition.
Fixed a rare issue where liquid containers asked your permission to explode if they weren't owned by you.
Fixed a rare issue where liquid containers poured into themselves before being destroyed and thus vanished completely.
Fixed burst-style pickers allowing the selection of tiles beyond the range limit.

[getter77]

Feature Friday #129

   

Added a new gas type: normality gas. It has various space-time stabilizing and inhibiting effects on forcefields, vortices, teleportation, phasing, temporal fugue clones, time dilation, and psychic twinning.
    Added three tiers of normality gas grenades.
    Added a rare normality gas-emitting vent.
    Added a new heavy weapon: normality gas pump.
    Added a new creature: anomaly extinguisher.
    Added a confirmation dialog when world generation completes (so you can finish reading the on-screen quote).
    Eating a raw dreadroot tuber now causes fear.
    Eat and disassemble are no longer the default actions for equipped severed faces.
    Sleeping in bedrolls, sitting in chairs, lunging, and slamming no longer trigger teleport-based cooking effects.
    Rebuked robots no longer become grazing hedonists.
    Emission vents are now subject to electromagnetic pulses.
    When you shake off confusion with Iron Mind, you now get an appropriate message in the message log.
    Widgets now equip their whackers.
    Missile weapons with unidentified energy cells no longer report their charge level.
    Made the reload command work for liquid-loaded missile weapons.
    Improved creature AI when out of missile ammo.
    Spiffed up missile weapon status display in the sidebar.
    Fixed an issue that let you use Temporal Fugue without spending energy.
    Fixed an error in the amount of bonus reputation displayed as a baetyl reward.
    Fixed some issues with stacking confusion effects.
    Fixed several typos in the following text: Warden Indrix's description, Agyve's mumblings, Aggressive Stance's description, two-handed ursteel battle axe's description, icy vapor's description, rubbergum tonic's description, a Beak defect variant's description, merchant identification, some procedural histories and cooking descriptions, defensive lunge's failure message, boomrose arrow plurality, nocturnal apex's description, and Stopsvalinn-related text.
    Added a bunch of modding functionality.
        [modding] Added a FearOnEat part that applies a fear effect to the eater at an attack strength and duration specified by the Strength and Duration properties.
        [modding] Made ConfuseOnEat allow the specification of the following properties: Strength, Duration, Level (die roll: confusion per mutation level), and BuildupTimeout (integer: number of turns before the effect overrides older ConfuseOnEat effects).
        [modding] Added a new part, TreatAsSolid, for projectiles. If projectiles encounter an object in their path matching TreatOnSolid's criteria, they treat it as impassable. Supported criteria are TargetPart (the object has this part) and TargetTag (the object has this tag), the latter with an optional TargetTagValue (the object has TargetTag tag with this value). The Hits property specifies whether the projectile hits the object and has a chance to damage it (defaults to true).
        [modding] Added a new part, DestroyContiguous, for projectiles. If projectiles encounter an object in their path matching DestroyContiguous's criteria, they roll to destroy it, and if successful, they roll to destroy objects matching the criteria in adjacent cells. Supported criteria are TargetPart and TargetTag, the latter with an optional TargetTagValue. The Chance property specifies the percentage chance for destruction (defaults to 100). The ChanceDegradation property is a cumulative reduction in the effective chance of destruction per hop to adjacent cells (defaults to 0).
        [modding] Added new parts GasOnHit and GasOnEntering for weapons and projectiles. Weapons that hits and projectiles that traverse through cells, respectively, spawn the gas specified in the Blueprint property at a density specified in the Density property (die roll specification). GasOnHit also includes the OnWielderHit property.
        [modding] Generalized GasAcid into GasDamaging. This new part includes the properties GasType (basic type tag like "Acid"), Noun (specifies the damage type in messages), ColorString (for tile rendering), MessageColor (applied to Noun in messaging), DamageAttributes (same as Attributes in MissileWeapon), TargetPart (only affects objects with this part), TargetTag (only affects objects with this tag), TargetTagValue (only affects objects with TargetTag and this value), TargetEquippedPart (only affects objects that have an item equipped with this part), TargetEquippedTag (only affects objects that have an item equipped with this tag), and TargetEquippedTagValue (only affects objects that have an item equipped with TargetEquippedTag and this value).
        [modding] Generalized StasisGrenade into DeploymentGrenade. This new part includes the following properties: Blueprint (the blueprint of the objects it creates), Duration (how long the objects last, defaults to permanent), Radius (integer radius it fills with objects), Chance (the percentage chance a given cell spawns an object, defaults to 100), AtLeast (a minimum number of objects to try to deploy when Chance is in use, defaults to 0), UsabilityEvent (an event that must be successfully broadcast to the cell it lands in in order for the grenade to work, defaults to null), AccessibilityEvent (an event that must be successfully broadcast to a given cell in its radius in order to deploy an object there, defaults to null), ActivationVerb (the verb used to describe the grenade activating, defaults to "detonates"), RealRadius (whether to deploy in a circular radius rather than the usual engine "square radius"), BlockedBySolid (whether solid cells block deployment, defaults to true), BlockedByNonEmpty (whether cells must be "empty" for deployment, defaults to true), Seeping (whether BlockedBySolid uses "seeping" logic, defaults to false), DustPuff (whether the grenade emits a dust puff when it activates, defaults to true), DustPuffEach (whether each deployed object emits a dust puff, defaults to false), and NoXPValue (whether deployed objects lose their XP values, defaults to true).
        [modding] Added a new CooldownAmmoLoader part, which makes a missile weapon require cooldown between shots. Supports the usual ProjectileObject property for loaders, a Cooldown property specifying the number of rounds, and a Readout property specifying whether the weapon shows a display of its remaining cooldown time (defaults to false).
        [modding] Added architecture to try to make multiple ammo loaders on a missile weapon coexist peacefully. Only one loader should be given a ProjectileObject. Use this to add the CooldownAmmoLoader with other loaders for weapons that need both ammo and a cooldown time.
        [modding] Added an AIShootCooldown part for missile weapons. Its Cooldown only applies when creature AI uses the weapon.

[getter77]

Feature Friday #130

   

Creature AI now better copes with being in the same tile as something it's trying to kill or flee from.
    Blood splatter no longer sticks to gases and holograms.
    Gases no longer physically damage you if they're out of phase with you.
    Sultan shrines and becoming nooks now show up on the alt display.
    When you autoequip a weapon, it now defaults to equipping in an empty hand instead of replacing your primary hand's weapon. It still replaces your primary hand's weapon if all your hands are full.
    Acid now eats through organic containers.
    Eyeless crab shells and salthopper mandibles are no longer tagged as metal.
    Corrupt bananas are no longer subject to electromagnetic pulses or rusting.
    Corrupt bananas can no longer be laid as mines.
    Scrap shovelers now have Dual Wield.
    NPCs now take more care in avoiding fracti, campfires, torch sconces, torch posts, and arc sconces.
    Oozes, snailmothers, ickslugs, snailmother eggs, and broken snailmother eggs no longer slip on slippery liquids.
    NPCs no longer charge at things they shouldn't charge at.
    Ovens are placed on top of doors less often (and so less frequently set them on fire).
    Gases no longer shield things on the ground from being attacked.
    Excluded merchant advertisements from baetyl requests.
    Made items described on gravestones usually show up identified.
    Made Hurdle, Longstrider, and Conatus grant the ability to sprint if you don't already have it.
    Gave acid, oil, gel, and slime commerce value.
    Made acid eat through organic containers it's poured into.
    Hook and Drag and madpole latching no longer work if the target is out of phase with the attacker.
    Dismembered limbs now have proper descriptions.
    Specified that carnivores can't eat fungi.
    Fixed the organic vs. inorganic statuses on several items.
    Fixed a bug where pouring the entire contents of a container into another container prevented liquid effects from occurring in the second container. This allowed lava to be carried around by transferring it from one waterskin to another.
    Fixed various instances of NPCs only wielding one of their natural weapons instead of both.
    Fixed a bug that caused gases of different types to merge as if they were the same type.
    Fixed a typo in gravestone text.
    Fixed a typo in dismemberment notification.
    Fixed a run-on sentence in Precognition messaging.
    Updated credits.
    [modding] You can now remove parts from an inherited blueprint by using the <removepart> element in objectblueprints.xml.
    [modding] The object blueprint XML now supports no-close-tag form. For example: <part Name="Metal" />.
    [modding] Creatures with the 'slimewalking' tag can now properly walk over sap, wax, and honey without impediment.
    [modding] The xtagGrammar element now supports the IsPlural property. IsPlural="true" specifies that the object should be treated as plural for purposes of text generation.
    [modding] Added the Except property to the NoDamage part. Damage of the excepted type bypasses the NoDamage logic and does damage.
    [modding] Separated plants and fungi more thoroughly in the object inheritance structure, with new 'Fungus' and 'BaseFungus' blueprints, and added 'LivePlant' and 'LiveFungus' tags where appropriate.

[getter77]

Feature Friday #131

   

New item: telemetric visor.
    Autoexplore and creature AI now avoid spacetime vortices.
    Applicators no longer work when broken or rusted.
    Sense Psychic now has a chance to identify psychics every time you move closer to them instead of only when they move.
    Generalized artifact attunement for items like ganglionic teleprojector into a standard boot sequence and applied it to a few artifacts.
    Refreshed bio-scanning bracelets. They are now tinkerable, require an energy cell, are subject to EMP, have a boot sequence, and have new name ANSI.
    Gave Horticulturalists a solar cell to power their bio-scanning bracelets.
    Twinning lampreys are now considered psychics.
    Twinning lampreys are more proficient with their bites.
    Energy cells loaded in items you start the game with are automatically identified.
    Cybernetic implants you start the game with are automatically identified.
    Homoelectric wrist warmers can no longer be modded with the full range of armor mods.
    Fixed an issue that made phase webs stickier than intended.
    Fixed occasional cases where Precognition appeared to malfunction on NPCs.
    Fixed several instances where zones were built when it wasn't necessary to do so.
    [modding] The gases produced by the billowing conch of the Aji are now controlled by the tag DynamicObjectsTable:AjiConch.
    [modding] The interaction of gases with the Gas Generation mutation is now data-driven. See the gas object blueprints for details.
    [modding] The color of gas objects is now based on the ColorString attribute of the Gas part. The GasDamaging part no longer has a ColorString.
    [modding] The SensePsychic mutation part can now be configured with Levelable="true" if you want to make it levelable, in which case its level is added to its detection radius and the chance of identification. Specify BaseRadius="n" if you want to make its base detection radius something other than 9. You can also use the intproperty TreatAsPsychic to force Sense Psychic to sense an object even if it doesn't have mental mutations.
    [modding] Generalized the BioScanner and Inspector parts into IntPropertyChanger, which supports these properties: AffectedProperty (the name of the property on the item's wielder that gets manipulated), Amount (the amount added to the property when the property is changed; defaults to 1), ChargeUse (an amount of charge to use per turn the item is active; defaults to 1), WorksWhenHeld (works if you wield the item in a slot other than its designated armor slot, defaults to false), and MustBeUnderstood (only works if the wielder understands the item; defaults to true).
    [modding] Added a BootSequence part for adding a delay between wearing an item and being able to use it. If the item has an EnergyCellSocket, changing the cell reboots the item. EMP, Broken, and Rusted statuses also reset the boot sequence and prevent it from proceeding while they're active. Supported properties are: BootTime (the number of turns booting takes; defaults to 100), VariableBootTime (die roll, if specified then the higher of this and BootTime will be used), ReadoutInName (specifies whether to add a precise indication of remaining boot time to the item's name; defaults to false), ReadoutInDescription (specifies whether to add a precise indication of remaining boot time to the item's short description; defaults to false), TextInName (a text string to add to the item's name while booting), TextInDescription (a text string to add to the item's short description while booting), VerbOnBootInitialized (defaults to "beep"), VerbOnBootDone (defaults to "ding"), and VerbOnBootAborted (defaults to "bloop"). Right now, the BootSequence part integrates with IntPropertyChanger, Teleprojector, and DecoyHologramEmitter.

[Skeletor]

Really glad to see the developers are still doing  a great work. Looking forward to get back into playing this gem once I find some time; haven't played it since October and looks like there's lots of new additions since then.
Is the high ego esp still overpowered or have they balanced things a bit?
Is it still common to find infinite amounts of water?

[jim]

Hey Skeletor

They "balanced" Espers some time ago by creating otherworldly threats that are hungry for Espers. The more powerful a psychic you are, the more frequent and deadly their incursions. Upon defeating one of these threats, your character has a chance to gain a point of ego - which ratchets up your power and the danger. It's a great mechanic, less a nerf and more separating the progression of Espers from that of normies, which feels appropriate for intensely powerful psychics. Not sure that this predates October but there you are.

Water is very available. Personally I wish it were a bit more rare, and that merchants carried less of it around, but oh well. They've also drastically changed the way food works. Rather than having to carry around food, you instead "make camp" and can cook meals, either using ingredients or by referencing learned recipes. There's even a cooking skill tree now.

[Skeletor]

Hi Jim, I hope you are doing well 

That's great news to hear that they found a way to balance the game and I finally decided to reinstall the game and play it again. There must be heaps of other changes since I last played it, so I will eventually write about my experience with it.

I agree with you, would be better if water was more scarce and those water generating monsters (forgot the name) were made extremely rare to find. Let's see what they came out with regarding food.

Haven't seen this thread updated in a while though, did the devs stopped updating the game?

Hey Skeletor

They "balanced" Espers some time ago by creating otherworldly threats that are hungry for Espers. The more powerful a psychic you are, the more frequent and deadly their incursions. Upon defeating one of these threats, your character has a chance to gain a point of ego - which ratchets up your power and the danger. It's a great mechanic, less a nerf and more separating the progression of Espers from that of normies, which feels appropriate for intensely powerful psychics. Not sure that this predates October but there you are.

Water is very available. Personally I wish it were a bit more rare, and that merchants carried less of it around, but oh well. They've also drastically changed the way food works. Rather than having to carry around food, you instead "make camp" and can cook meals, either using ingredients or by referencing learned recipes. There's even a cooking skill tree now.

[getter77]

Not at all, just go to the Steam page in the OP and behold a ton of updates there in the Recent News/Updates section as I've been operating at a severely reduced capacity of late.   

[Skeletor]

Thank you getter and great to see you are still around :-)
Yes, just noticed how active the developers have been.. really looking forward to play this again.

Not at all, just go to the Steam page in the OP and behold a ton of updates there in the Recent News/Updates section as I've been operating at a severely reduced capacity of late.   

[Skeletor]

I used to play this until May 2017, then stopped. Decided to reinstall steam and played CoQ intensively for the last few days.
Here are my impression on what has been done in those 15 months of development:

What I liked:
- Weeps don't produce unlimited pools of liquid anymore (but unfortunately occasionally large weeps can still be found), high ego espers have been made more challenging to play with but in a very interesting original way without being nerfed, and other balancing has been done; this show the devs gave importance to the players' feedback and as a result the metagame has changed making things interesting again.
- The introduction of cybernetics makes true kins more interesting to play and adds further depth and fun to the game.
- The cooking system makes food not anymore an inbuilt anti-farming component, but to be fair it never was in this game (such as in many others.. actually there's only a few games such as DCSS which kinda achieve that purpose with food) as now anyone can always find food just camping anywhere, and the point of advanced food becomes gaining various bonuses. Fun and different nevertheless, positive implementation.
- Being able to chose the starting village is also a nice addition; Joppa is beautiful but everything gets tiring after a while.
- The soundtrack! Was already fantastic, and new awesome tracks have been added. Big, big, big factor in enhancing the mystique and atmosphere of this game.

What I didn't like:
- Minor things such as the inventory necessarily remaining always full of junk which can be sold for more than 4$ per unit of weight (thus better value to weight than water, and players will be carrying those items in the hope of finding merchants with a good enough item to buy such as an encyclopedia of 15 different books, clocks, pelts, hearts, useless cybernetics and weapons, etc).
- Mainly this: after15 monhts I didn't play this, it's a shame to see no visible work has been done on the fixed quests and the right area of the map still feeling very unfinished. The mutation "confusion" still says it's not yet fully implemented (yet it seems to work), and there's still no way to win the game. All of this make it feel like one is playing for the sake of testing, which I don't like. What I did enjoy the most was indeed trying to score as many points as I could with the daily and weekly challenges, but still not ideal that after the main quests have been done, there's no incentive nor direction to progress.

Summary:
I hope the development will go on and focus on removing that feeling of "unfinishedness". Adding a final battle and a couple of endings within a final quest would be good. All of the polishing can be done later.
This still remains one of my favourite roguelikes but I am now uninstalling will play CoQ again in 2019.