I keep Caves of Qud and Dwarf Fortress in the same mental filing cabinet. Both consist of a very thin layer of graphics (though thicker now in Dwarf Fortress’ case) spread atop a fathomless clockwork of interlocking gameplay systems and strange simulations. They are, if you ask me, two of the best and most impressive games ever made, and now Qud has gotten even wider, deeper, and weirder.

Qud’s Creatures of the 7th Plague update has hit, bringing with it a new leg of the main quest, a UI rework, new creatures, new effects, and native gamepad and Steam Deck support. Developer Freehold describes it as a “year-long patch,” and it’s set to be the game’s “last major update” before the makers switch gears to focus entirely on the game’s long-awaited 1.0 release set for 2024.

It’s a big one, as you can probably surmise from the key features I just rattled off, but those don’t really do it justice. I’ll put the full patch notes below, but for now you should be aware that those new creatures I mentioned include late-game, pilotable mechs. That’s not just a new kind of vehicle or something that the devs have chucked in, it’s a full-on new system, with “special mechanics for infiltrating piloted mecha,” and all sorts of mech-related new mechanics and foibles.

Alongside that, we’ve got a grappling gun, a much more intelligible abilities screen, an “updated dream tortoise preset,” and—this one’s my favourite—a revamped First Aid skill tree, which has been renamed Physic and will let you “voluntarily amputate your own limbs” as well as the limbs of your companions. Every game should have this.

So Caves of Qud is still great, in essence, and this seems like a fantastic final morsel before Freehold sets out on the road to 1.0. If you’re curious about the full patch notes, here they are in their entirety:

Caves of Qud Creatures of the 7th Plague patch notes

New Main Quest and the Girsh Nephilim

• Added the next leg of the main quest. Talk to Barathrum after completing the Golem.
• Added the Girsh nephilim, 7th plague of the Gyre: Agolgot, Bethsaida, Rermadon, Shug’ruith the Burrower, Qas, and Qon.
• Added cradles throughout Qud where the Girsh nephilim reside.
• Added secrets for the locations of the cradles.
• When one of the nephilim is killed, the ones remaining now absorb its essence and become more powerful.
• The nephilim now leave behind chorded circles of light when they perish.
• Added shrines to the nephilim throughout Qud. Occasionally they have gyre wights worshipping them, and rarely, legendary gyre wights.
• We made several changes to the glow wights faction.
• Glow wights are now known as gyre wights.
• Changed default gyre wight reputation from -650 to 0.
• Gyre wights now consider nephilim cradles, Golgotha, and Bethesda Susa holy places.
• Replaced glow-wight cultists of Agolgot and Bethsaida with gyre wights of Agolgot and Bethsaida, respectively.
• Added gyre wights of Rermadon, Shug’ruith, Qas, and Qon.
• Legendary gyre wights are now willing to share the locations of nephilim cradles. Gyre wights of a particular Girsh are more likely to share the cradle of that Girsh.
• Gyre wights now sometimes camp on the Stiltgrounds.
• We made several changes to girshlings.
• Added girshling variants as nephilim spawn: rank girshling, conjoined girshling, plasmatic girshling, burrowing girshling, polarized girshling, and cryptic girshling.
• Added a defanged girshling variant.
• Added a new butcherable to girshling corpses: girshling fangs, rank fangs, incadescent fangs, and zigzag fangs, depending on the corpse.
• Changed the Girsh water ritual liquid to cloning draught.
• Added a special water ritual option to the Girsh nephilim.
• Added new creatures: grand newfather, temple mecha mk I, and temple mecha mk II (legendary).
• Added a new music track for the next leg of the main quest.

UI and Input

• Merged all input managers down to one, meaning you no longer have to change settings for gamepad to work.
• Added a new keybind screen and made key binding more flexible, with many more commands now bindable.
• Made keyboard, gamepad, and Steam Deck input much more robust across the board.
• We added a new Abilities screen (‘a’).
• Added icons for every ability.
• Added in-depth, dynamic descriptions for many abilities (the rest to come).
• You can reorder abilities on the Abilities screen and they will also reorder in your hotbar.
• We made several enhancements to the ability hotbar.
• Your abilities are now automatically hotkeyed. You can change the hotkeys from the Abilities screen.
• Added hotkeys for scrolling through your hotbars (default ctrl+1 – ctrl+5).
• New ability icons also appear on the hotbar.
• Added the new ability icons to the old UI sidebar. They also now respect the order of abilities on your ability screen.
• We added many new visual effects.
• Added new visual effects for several abilities: flaming ray, flame breath, teleportation, slammed, digging, and temporal fugue.
• Added new visual effects for several types of deaths: decapitation, transmuted, consumed, lased to death, and immolated.
• Added new visual effects for several missile weapons: all lead slug weapons, all arrows, laser rifle, chain laser, laser pistol, point defense laser, spitting seed plant, light rondure, flamer thrower, null ray pistol, and rocket launchers.
• Added new visual effects for several other creatures and items: aloe pyra, flaming vents, HE grenades, neutron flux, and hookah.
• Added new visual effects for throwing.
• Replaced the combat slash animation with a new one that has three grades of intensity for 1, 2-3 and 4+ penetrations.
• Added a new animation for bludgeoning damage.
• Added a new block animation.
• Added a new, highly visible autoexplore danger indicator.
• Added new tiles for some flashing status indicators: swimming, wading, covered in spores, flying, and sprinting.
• Holding down movement keys to move quickly is now safeguarded by the autoexplore danger indicator.
• Added gamepad button glyphs for Xbox and PlayStation controllers wherever the UI indicates a button bind.
• Right-stick up and down now defaults to page up and down in menus.
• Added default force-attack diagonal bindings: Ctrl+Shift+arrow keys.
• Added a bunch of new keybinds.
• Page Up and Page Down can now be used to navigate popups and the look menu.
• Changed the default bind for the Factions page to ctrl+f.
• Removed “laptop defaults” keybind options. The new defaults should be usable without numpad.
• Added a user interface option to select the main menu background image.
• In the new main menu, the Continue button is now disabled if there are no games to continue.
• Added an autoget option “Exclude liquid in containers you’ve dropped from auto-collect”.

Gameplay

• We added mecha, late-game pilotable robots.
• Added special mechanics for infiltrating piloted mecha.
• Added a key card requirement for piloting an unaccessed mecha.
• Mecha do not heal on their own and must be repaired with 7 or 8 bits.
• Mecha require a special type of energy cell to function: mecha power core.
• Piloted temple mecha appear in dynamic encounters.
• Unpiloted temple mecha can be found, very rarely, abandoned in caves.
• Added new items: grappling gun and longreach grappling gun.
• Added new cybernetic implants: grafted mirror arm, holographic visage, stasis entangler, phase-adaptive scope, and precision force lathe.
• Added a new piece of furniture: wire extruder.
• Added wire extruders to Grit Gate, Yla Haj’s workshop, and the Yd Freehold.
• We revamped the First Aid skill tree.
• Renamed the skill tree to Physic and reduced the initial purchase cost to 50sp.
• Staunch Wounds now simply improves your bandaging rolls, both in and out of combat.
• You can now use Staunch Wounds on your companions.
• Removed the Heal and Set Limb skills.
• Added a new skill: Nostrums. 100sp. INT 21.
• You can treat bleeding, poison, illness, and disease onset at a campfire.
• Treatments can be applied to companions.
• Some treatments require a medicinal ingredient.
• Added a new skill: Amputate limb. 25sp. INT 23.
• You can voluntarily amputate your own limbs.
• You can amputate your companions’ limbs, if they are infected or equipped with unremoveable equipment.
• Added a new skill: Apothecary. 100sp. INT 25.
• Healing tonics you apply last an extra round.
• We revamped the Dual Wield skill tree and made changes to how offhand attack changes are displayed. (Experimental: subject to change)
• Renamed the skill tree Multiweapon Fighting and the skills Multiweapon Proficiency, Multiweapon Expertise, and Multiweapon Mastery.
• The bonuses to offhand attacks granted by Multiweapon Fighting skills now apply to all offhand limbs, except mutation-based weapons like Horns and Stinger. This now includes chimera limbs, as before, but also limbs granted by Multiple Arms and Helping Hands.
• Reduced the offhand bonuses from the three skills from (effective) +20/40/60% to +20/35/50%.
• Reduced the skill point cost of Multiweapon Fighting and Multiweapon Expertise to 150sp, down from 300sp.
• Reduced the skill point cost of Multiweapon Mastery to 200sp, down from 300sp.
• Increased the stat requirements of Multiweapon Expertise and Multiweapon Mastery from 21 and 25 to 23 and 27, respectively.
• Natural offhand limbs and weapons wielded in offhand limbs now display their offhand attack chance in their descriptions.
• When you swap your primary limb, your old primary inherits the offhand chance of the new primary you swapped to. This was always the case but is now easier to track due to the offhand chance getting displayed in the limb/weapon description.
• We added a new Single Weapon Fighting skill tree.
• Single Weapon Fighting. 100sp. STR or AGI 17. You no longer make offhand attacks in exchange for mastery with a single weapon (toggleable).
• Opportune Attacks (free with skill) – Whenever you score a critical hit with a melee weapon, the cooldowns of up to two random weapon or shield skills are immediately refreshed.
• Weapon Expertise. 150sp. STR or AGI 21. Whenever you make a melee attack, there’s a 50% you immediately make a second attack for free.
• Penetrating Strikes. 200sp. STR or AGI 23. Your attacks always penetrate one extra time.
• Weapon Mastery. 300sp. AGI 29. Whenever you make a melee attack, immediately make a second attack for free.
• We made several balance changes to the Horns mutation.
• Horns now costs 4 mutation points instead of 3.
• Changed the damage scaling from 2d(3+[rank/2]) to 2d(3+[rank/3]).
• Changed tho to-hit bonus scaling from +rank to +(rank/2)+1.
• Changed bleed damage scaling from 1d2+(rank-4)/3 to 1d2+(rank-4)/4.
• Changed the bleed save target from 20 + 3*rank to 20 +2*rank.
• Updated dream tortoise preset to comply with starting point requirements now that Horns mutation point cost is increased (removed Telepathy).
• We made improvements to how mutation variants are chosen and displayed.
• Added new tiles and descriptions for each mutation variant. E.g., horns, horn, spiral horn, antlers, and casque now each have their own tiles and descriptions.
• Added new tiles and descriptions for Flaming Ray’s ghostly flames and Freezing Ray’s icy vapor.
• When you choose a variant during character generation, the appropriate tile and description are now displayed.
• When you randomly choose mutations during character generation, you can now get mutation variants.
• When you gain a mutation after character generation, you can now pick a variant.
• Increased Gun Rack’s license point cost from 4 to 6.
• Intravenous ports now stack by adding to the tonic’s duration its original duration, before any modifiers, for each implant.
• When two spacetime vortices come into contact, they now explode instead of one being sucked into the other.
• Objects that occlude vision, like trees, and stationary pieces of furniture now have a chance to be hit if a missile passes through their space.
• Creatures now refuse to chat or trade with you when they are on fire.
• Kesehind now knows how to use the shield he carries.
• Made gyre wight apotheotes have a hostile temperament.
• NPCs can now use healing foods like witchwood bark and urberries.
• Leather whips can now be modded with some item mods.
• You no longer switch targets to a clockwork beetle when one spawns.
• Neutral-temperature liquids now stabilize their containers’ temperature, including in the case of liquid-cooled overloaded weapons.
• Holograms are no longer immune to normality fields.
• Friendly creatures can no longer swap you out of their way.
• Added a command “Rest until party healed” that waits for you and your companions to recover full hit points, excepting any who do not heal naturally.
• Carapace now gives 400 tortoise reputation, per its description.
• Forcefields from force bracelets and Force Bubble must now be within 1 space of their emitters to continue existing.
• Galgal charges are now interrupted by [redacted].
• Gigantic arc winders now receive the appropriate bonus to their damage roll.

Miscellaneous

• Added remastered music tracks: Pilgrim’s Path and Overworld.
• Added MANY new sound effects.
• Changed the penetration SFX to match the 1, 2-3 and 4+ tiers.
• Replace “Then Things to Do When You Start the Game” with a “Quickstart” guide that has up-to-date info and dynamic keybinds.
• Tweaked “What’s Eating the Watervine?” quest dialog.
• Tweaked the language of the book From Entropy to Hierarchy.
• Added a From Entropy to Hierarchy, 2nd Edition.
• There is now case specific death messaging for dying from reflected damage.
• Removed the unfinished dungeon Trembling Dunes, to return at a later date.
• Simplified the campfire sounds.
• Gave portable wall a new tile.
• Greatly improved save & load performance for both the game and previously visited zones.
• Greatly improved performance when new game objects were created.
• Improved general rendering performance.
• Improved performance when sounds would play during your turn.
• Improved performance when custom effects play during your turn, particularly offscreen.
• Improved performance when a creature takes damage and attempts to alert nearby allies.
• Reduced memory usage & fragmentation for long play sessions, particularly when saving or loading the game often.
• Reduced save file size.
• Stable, stationary spacetime vortices are now points of interest.
• Walking by flowers now refers to some flowers rather than a set of flowers.
• Made some performance improvements to autoexplore.
• Added a popup message when a companion fall down a pit.
• Improved messaging when robots are affected by Sunder Mind.
• The chiming rocks at Eyn Roj and the glowing soft below it are now points of interest.
• Liquid collection now indicates the direction the liquid is being collected from, and the source if from a container.
• You now receive a popup when non-trifling companions fall down a pit or similar terrain feature.
• Granite and tangled mudroot are now treated grammatically as mass nouns.
• Sparking baetyls no longer ask you for things you have equipped and cannot unequip.
• Missile weapons now prefer to autoequip in an unoccupied slot.
• If you get multiple pieces of scrap at once and autodisassemble is on, they are now all disassembled.
• Shrines becoming desecrated by non-player damage no longer issues a popup message.
• In several places we rephrased “+1 penetration” to “+1 to penetration rolls” to differentiate that bonus from when you get a full additional penetration.
• It’s no longer possible for you to become your own target.
• Added an autoexplore option: “Attack ignored hostile creatures that you move adjacent to during autoexplore.”
• The Bey Lah village stores are now consistently referred to using the definite article.
• It’s now possible to interact with wall-crawling creatures while they’re on walls.
• Skin glitter is now treated grammatically as a mass noun.
• You are no longer offered a trade conversation option with baetyls.
• Tweaked the electromagnetic shielding description to include its effect on magnetism and expanded the items that can be modded with it.
• Tweaked zone names in Oboroqoru’s lair.
• Normalized all instances of Agolgot and Agolgut to Agolgot.
• Tools are now included in the categories expanded by default when choosing an item to equip on a hand.
• You can now escape out of dialogs to name an item.

Bugfixes

• Rejoinder no longer counterattacks while toggled off.
• Fixed a bug that caused Light Manipulation to cast ambient light even when out of charges.
• Fixed a bug that caused some popup selections to cancel autoexplore immediately after.
• Fixed an issue that caused a spurious option popup when selecting a category in the trade menu.
• Fixed some grammar issues in Disintegration’s messaging.
• Fixed a bug that caused several dynamic quests to stop working if you swapped bodies.
• Fixed a bug that prevented “find a relic”” dynamic quests from immediately completing the find step if you already had the relic when you got the quest.
• Fixed a bug that caused the first step for site-finding dynamic quests to not complete if you found the site before you got the quest.
• Fixed a bug that made Flaming Ray and Freezing Ray hands variants stop working after eating the Cloaca Surprise or Crystal Delight.
• Fixed a bug that made the first deployment of a stasis grenade’s stasis field be unaffected by normality.
• Fixed a bug that brain brine to not be consumed upon drinking.
• Fixed a bug that prevented entering clams.
• Fixed a bug that caused the achievement for defeating a chrome pyramid to not be awarded.
• Fixed a bug that caused you to be unable to attack with hooks for feet.
• Fixed a bug that caused hooks for feet not to regenerate again.
• Fixed the spelling and capitalization of Dyvvrach’s name in the fourth step of If, Then, Else.
• Fixed a typo in a medassist module loading message.
• Fixed many issues with faulty zone generation. Canyons and canyon-like areas should be more canyon-like again.
• Fixed a bug that made relics providing improved block not remove the effect when unequipped, quickly resulting in 100% blocking chance.
• Fixed a bug that made some relics associate themselves with an incorrect historical period.
• Fixed an issue that would sometimes cause tomb stairs to spawn encased in walls.
• Fixed an issue that would ocassionaly cause historic sites to not generate correctly.
• Fixed an issue that caused pit ledges to render incorrectly after a serialization cycle.
• Fixed a bug that caused missile weapon penetration to be more limited than it should have been under some circumstances.
• Fixed a number of issues involving environmental power systems when entering a zone.
• Fixed some message composition issues in mimic, jilted lover, and livid creeper special attacks.
• Fixed some issues causing NPCs to interfere with and delay each other in combat by swapping positions.
• You can no longer dupe chairs by equipping them as weapons and then sitting on them.
• Fixed a bug that prevented unlocking the ‘Become as Gods’ achievement.
• Fixed a bug that caused some sultan relic retrieval quests to fail to recognize completion.
• Fixed some issues arising from hostile creatures being considered impassable by autoexplore.
• Fixed a bug that caused dynamic interaction quests to complete with actions that didn’t match the quest requirements.
• Fixed a bug that caused dynamic location quests to not complete correctly.
• Fixed a bug that caused some non-artifact items to be considered the most advanced artifact in your possession at a end of the game.
• Fixed a bug that caused you to open (or try to) animated doors when swapping positions with them.
• Fixed a bug that made the offspring of segmented mirthworms, worms of the earth, and fire ant queens employed as hired guards not be as peaceable as their parents.
• Fixed third-person shield slam messages telling you the shield in question was yours.
• Fixed awkward phrasing when a shield slam was performed against a phase-mismatched target.
• Fixed a bug that caused NPCs to fail to fully utilize extra equipment slots granted by worn items.
• Fixed a bug that made zone-wide identification effects fail to identify natural equipment artifacts.
• Fixed a bug that made liquid coverings involving algae mixes sometimes use the word algae where they should use the word algal.
• Fixed a bug that prevented Call to Arms from scoring correctly.
• Fixed a bug that prevented “drink from”, “opened” or “closed” quests from completing properly.
• Fixed a rare bug that caused startup crashes when configuration files became corrupt.
• Fixed a bug that made Electrical Generation not accumulate charge during turns when you weren’t taking actions.
• Fixed a bug that caused companions to keep attacking a creature they had been targeting after you have Dominated it.
• Fixed a bug that made NPCs lock up trying to use Quicken Mind when it was unusable.
• Fixed a bug that disabled the “Attack ignored hostile creatures that you move adjacent to during autoexplore” option.

Debug & Modding

• Improved the map editor UI.
• The workshop uploader now provides a native file picker for images.
• The workshop uploader now allows you to close the upload status screen after an error.
• The workshop uploader now allows you to elide hidden files from your uploads.
• The map editor now provides a native file picker for maps.
• Fixed a bug in the map editor that caused dragging the map to be scaled improperly.
• The mod manager now displays disabled mods as grey instead of red.
• There is a new GameSystems class which provides public static helpers for raising an event on all game systems.
• Added string, int, float, list, and dictionary properties to Quest XML.
• ReflectDamage is now an IActivePart.
• Systems now support PlayerEquipped, PlayerActivating, and PlayerObjectAddedToInventory.
• The Consumer part now has the fields Message and FloatMessage for configuring its message log message and, optionally, a floating text message.
• The parts Breeder, LeavesTrail, LeaveTrailWhileHasEffect, PopulationSpawner, and DeploymentGrenade all now support extended blueprint syntax (# can preface a comma-separated list of blueprints to select from, and @ can preface a population table name). The first four also have a new Range parameter that allows objects to be deployed at a randomizable range from the source.
• ModSerene and ModHorrifying now work with existing equip slots configurations, adding a head and/or face requirement if not already present, rather than replacing existing configurations entirely.
• Any mutation that grants natural equipment (such as wings or hooks for feet) can now specify variants using the “MutationEquipment” tag.
• Severed body parts now have string properties EquippedBlueprint, DefaultBehaviorBlueprint, and CyberneticsBlueprint set to the blueprints of the respective attached objects, if any.
• Added a Tree tag to objects considered trees.
• Added ‘music’ and ‘widget’ tags to Worlds.xml, which are aliases for ZoneBuilders.Music and ZoneBuilders.AddWidgetBuilder, respectively.
• The BleedingOnHit part now has a field Holographic that, if true, causes it to inflict holographic bleeding instead of regular bleeding, and no longer has a SelfOnly field, instead using its IActivePart scope configuration to control what it affects (with WorksOnSelf, WorksOnEquipper, WorksOnHolder, WorksOnWearer, and WorksOnImplantee supported).
• Symbolic links are now be excluded from workshop uploads.
• Populations within interiors are no longer be placed outside the bounds of the map.
• ModTransmuteOnHit’s description is now moddable via the DescriptionTerm field, and creatures transmuted into other creatures are no longer considered to have died.
• The Impaler part now has a field NeedsToBeHidden, true by default, which if set to false makes being hidden unnecessary for the impalement functionality to work.
• Added weights to water ritual secrets and journal entries, making secrets more or less likely to be shared and discovered.
• Added weight modifiers to interests in Factions.xml, specified via a Weight attribute. Ex: Weight=”50″.
• Added GetWaterRitualSecretWeightEvent, which can modify the final weight of secrets in the water ritual.
• Added BuySecretWeight and SellSecretWeight attributes to the water ritual xtag, which can override a creature’s weighting of secrets by id.
• Added EntityID and EventID to factions, allowing retrieval of their historic entities and events, respectively, when they exist. Example use is to get the village inhabited by a given village faction.
• Added Transmitter and Receiver to conversations to facilitate long-distance physical communication.
• Pressing Control now brings up the blueprint XML for a hovered object in the map editor blueprint list.
• Reduced the mouse wheel sensitivity of the map editor blueprint list.
• Added a scroll bar to the blueprint list.
• Fixed a bug that caused the blueprint list to jump to the top whenever a blueprint was selected in the map editor.
• BioAmmoLoader now has two new fields StartAvailable and VariableTurnsToGenerate. Start Available provides a randomizable amount to be assigned to the field Available at object creation. VariableTurnsToGenerate provides a randomizable amount of turns taken to generate another point of Available firing capacity.