Cultist Simulator 
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HOTFIXFeb 27, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsHOTFIX: lore consumed on influence upgrades, sorry!Cultist Simulator gets much improved Steam Deck supportFeb 14, 2024 - GamingOnLinuxCultist Simulator was already Steam Deck Verified with Native Linux support but Weather Factory have put out a brand new update, which aims to improve it even further. Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/02/cultist-simulator-gets-much-improved-steam-deck-support 2023.12.s.4 "SARCODES"Feb 13, 2024 - Community Announcements- Steam Deck support! A nice excuse to add a QoL/accessibility feature here and there. - Added 150% UI scale. - Added a Font Size setting. May lead to stranger looks on higher ends. - MODDING: 'Sort' property for Elements, a string, the format is 'group.order' - ex. 'a1.z1'. Controls the order of Aspects appearance in card and situation info. Aspects are first sorted by 'group', then by 'order', then, within the same order, by the amount of aspect present, starting with the highest. - Several important Aspects are now sorted. This leaves us fixing such critical bugs such as: - A bug with keybinds showing default values until you loaded the tabletop at least once. - A bug when cancelling a key rebind resulted in keyboard controls not working anymore. - A bug when using ESC key in the main menu would not close an opened dialog. - A few typos in mod loading logs. - 2023.12.s.2: Mouse wheel functionality restored. - 2023.12.s.2: Fixed a bug with Options menu tabs not initializing. - 2023.12.s.2: Several small enhancements in a deck draw preview display. - 2023.12.s.3: A rare greedy slot crash is fixed. - 2023.12.s.3: A safenet against infinite saving loop on new game. - 2023.12.s.3: Contentment now *finally* acts correctly on influence upgrade and subversion. - 2023.12.s.4: Added more belts and braces against a very rare infinite saving chain. - MODDING: Following the arabic font support added in the previous patch, a possibility for right-to-left text display is added too. "rtl": true in culture JSON to enable.Advent Calendar 2023Dec 1, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsIt's the first of December, and we're trying something NEW this year! BOOK OF HOURS seems such an obvious fit, so starting from today we're running... ...a 25-day advent calendar of Hush House! 🎄🎁 {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/31397842/aaf20db2706b095e673c56c33e0556c695146433.png (There are some real-world Weather Factory gifts, and at least one Cultist Simulator-related treat - though the in-game items are all in BOOK OF HOURS.) Each day we'll open a door containing treats in-game or the 'real' world (you'll see it on all of our socials Twitter / Facebook / Instagram ], and we'll update our advent megablog daily with What's Behind Today's Door). Most are tasty amuses-bouches. Some are pretty major reveals. A few real world treats will only last for 24hrs, but you'll never miss anything in-game. Playing BOOK OF HOURS any time in December will give you everything the calendar's revealed to date whenever in-game winter rolls around. So there's no stress if you're 'out' having 'fun' with 'friends'. Except, you know. Have a think about your life choices there. To start with today's door as an example, it reveals: Door 1: Seasonal art in BOOK OF HOURS The next time you're playing BOOK OF HOURS and winter comes around, you'll notice some festive cheer sprinkled throughout Brancrug Village and Hush House. For anyone who wants to be left alone like the Weary Detective and his Illustrated London News, there's an option to turn off seasonal art in the Settings menu. For everyone else, take careful note of Reverend Timothy's Christmas tree next to the Rectory... {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/31397842/1ac216851ecab19b6d901f2151c9c2a7d9e55100.png More like this every day from now until Christmas Day. Check the advent megablog if you're not sure what today's gift is - we'll announce them every day at noon. That's it! Warmth, good cheer and a glass of Chateau Raveline to you and yours. Merry Christmas, friend.2023.10.r.9 RANUNCULUSNov 13, 2023 - Community Announcements- Fade during an autosave is made gentler and more gradual to prevent the feeling of flickering on high saving speeds. - Dropping cards on other cards while multi-dragging led to unexpected situations. - Fixed a confusion in German localization of Skills' descriptions, and other minor problems in various locs. - Fixed empty description in Starvation verb. - Yet another fix for GOG achievements not unlocking on the storefront side despite being unlocked in the Collection. - Greedy slots don't bug out on low framerates. - When a recipe warmup ends, any card-to-slot travel animation aimed at it completes instead of failing. - Zoom keys (Q/E by default) work sensibly at last - holding results in a continuous zoom instead of having to tap. - HOTFIX: Verb SFXes work once again. - MODDING: new xtrigger morph effect - 'setmutation' - for non-additive mutations. - MODDING/HOTFIX: expulsions for instant recipes work correctly once again. - MODDING: At the request, added Arabic font support (for that, set fontscript to 'arabic' in culture file).2023.5.p.12 PEONYSep 13, 2023 - Community Announcements- Made it more clear that allies can't kill the Foe in Exile. - Fixed 'Our Enemy's Identity' description. - Fixed an assortment of memory leaks. - Cards in verb slots and outputs don't play their decay animation if the verb window is closed. - Small rework of the influences' upgrade and subversion: - Interactions with Contentment are less erratic. - The Lore slot doesn't spoil lore fragments' descriptions. - Verb windows now display text in a consistent size and use scrollbars if it doesn't fit. - Experimental changes in the flow of timers. - Alt recipes correctly display their deck draws (instead of displaying the main recipe's deck draws). - Fixed an incorrect description in the Russian localization of the Younger Sister. - Fixed a verb timer sometimes not assuming the correct colour. - Restored a special audio cue for the Time verb. - Cards in the Mansus disappear dramatically again. - Cards in the Mansus are flipped before vanishing - that was an accidental change, sorry! - Added a description for missing Essential slot requirements. - Escape button does not close an opened verb window while the settings window is open. - Exile cities are properly highlighted and faded once again. - Cards in verbs don't occasionally jump when clicked. - Streamlined the pause behaviour in the Mansus and settings menu. - Fixed the Mansus portal window not closing under mysterious circumstances. - Fix for cards sometimes thinking that they occupy slightly more space than they are in reality, and thus preventing cards to be placed in a space near them, despite it being actually empty. - At some point, cards that were supposed to be invisible - but only inside verbs - became also invisible on the table - but, like, confusingly invisible. Now visible again, as they always were. - MODDING: An order in which element's aspects react to xtriggers is now consistent (by id, alphabetical). - MODDING: Entities now have a '$depends' and '$incompatible' property - a list of mod ids that are required/forbidden for this entity definition to be applied. More specifically, $depends mean 'all listed mods must be enabled', and $incompatible means 'none of listed mods must be enabled'. Mod id is taken from serapeum_catalogue_number.txt in the mod's folder - it is created automatically on first Workshop upload, but can be created manually for non-Steam users. If no file is present, mod id equals its name. - MODDING: Custom input settings now work properly. - MODDING: Aspect xtriggers are significantly reworked - this was an obscure feature and it collected dust for years, but now, hopefully, assumed its final form: - All aspects of a card now react to xtriggering (previously only mutations did). - The 'Transform' morph effect now transforms a card, even when triggered by an aspect. This way, all morph effects work uniformly, regardless of where they are defined. - MODDING: The new 'xexts' property on the elements. A string-string pair, works in a way similar to xtriggers - whenever ...THIS UPDATE JUST PUTS A 'BOOK OF HOURS IS OUT NOW' BUTTON IN THE MENUAug 17, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsTHIS UPDATE JUST PUTS A 'BOOK OF HOURS IS OUT NOW' BUTTON IN THE MENU I'M SORRY I CAN ONLY EVER TYPE IN ALL CAPS EVER AGAINCultist Sim has a new baby sister: enter BOOK OF HOURSAug 17, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsOur new game in the Secret Histories universe - that’s the one Cultist Simulator started, with the Hours and the Principles and the Suppression Bureau and the early twentieth-century occultism played out in text-boxes and cards - is out now. Manage an occult library in BOOK OF HOURS, where you can’t be murdered by Dread! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1028310/BOOK_OF_HOURS/ You may be interested in the weeklong Perpetual Edition deal, the same deal we offered in Cultist's launch week. This means if you buy BOOK OF HOURS in its first week of sale (that’s any time from now to 6PM BST / 10AM PDT on Thursday 24th August) you automatically get ‘Perpetual Edition’, meaning all future content expansions are free forever. There’s also a 10% launch discount, and a bundle of free desktop and mobile wallpapers included in it, so it’s a fantastic deal if I do say so myself! But the choice, as always, is yours. BOOK OF HOURS is a kinder, less punishing game than Cultist Sim, but I strongly suspect if you like Cultist you’ll enjoy this new game too. It’s three times the size in terms of content; its recipes are more complex; and there’s no way to actually die - except sort of, I suppose, if you set fire to your journal or throw it down a well. See how that works out for you. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/31397842/addbdd07103847d2864861715d62c2997c8601a1.png {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/31397842/e8e11419b7febf8dfedaf3895cf76691fd32b6e1.png Cultist Simulator is in a good place right now. It’s stable, there’s a healthy mod community to keep things fresh, and we’ll still be updating it regularly with bug fixes and QoL improvements. (We might even come back with some larger DLC later down the line, but no promises yet!) So while our focus for the moment is on BOOK OF HOURS, I just wanted to let you know that we’ve not forgotten about the game that started it all. It’s just walking Streets Strange By Moonlight, and dreaming strange sweet dreams. Thanks for playing, and may you glimpse the Mansus in your dreams tonight. Love, Lottie & AlexisCultist Simulator BETA (gateofhorn) patchAug 5, 2023 - Community Announcements- Black rectangles were appearing briefly instead of card labels in verb slots. - HOTFIX: Verb text scrollbars weren't appearing and/or acting irrationally sometimes. - At some point, cards that were supposed to be invisible - but only inside verbs - became also invisible on the table - but, like, confusingly invisible. Now visible again, as they always were. - Fix for cards sometimes thinking that they occupy slightly more space than they are in reality, and thus preventing cards to be placed in a space near them, despite it being actually empty. - MODDING: $plus/$minus work again. - MODDING: levers now can have default values, and you can change default values of vanilla levers. - MODDING: Card labels display rich text correctly.COME HOMEJun 28, 2023 - Community Announcements"Marksman, detective, renegade. He has always been a quiet man, but since he left the Suppression Bureau, he has grown even quieter, and terribly still - except for his fingers and for his eyes, always in restless motion." It's June the 28th, once again. So I thought I'd pop in briefly to share our beautiful, melancholy new trailer for BOOK OF HOURS, the next game in the same universe as Cultist Simulator. (AK says I'm not allowed to call it a spiritual successor because that sets the wrong expectations, so, er, I won't! I'll just say that anyone who likes Cultist will almost certainly like BOOK OF HOURS, and will find out more Secret Histories lore along the way. Praise be to the Chandler.) Hope it tugs at your heart strings! If you want more info, check out our latest blog. Otherwise, back to bringing the Dawn! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1028310"I see those colours still."May 31, 2023 - Community Announcements"I don't recall exactly what occurred, last night, in the beating black between the trunks of the trees, where winged things moved beneath my hands. But now this morning my brain fizzes with fragments: IN GI RUM IMUS NOC TE ET CON SUMI MUR IGNI RUM IMUS NOC TE ET CON SUMI MUR -" Game dev, unlike jobs in Cultist Simulator, is not "an arrangement to exchange one's life for money". It's something AK and I spend an embarrassing amount of time doing, thinking about and discussing. We talk about grand things like the Importance of Art and apophenia and the unplumbed depths of a player's heart, and we talk about petty things like what colour the glow effect around an empty slot should be, and whether or not 'Guardian' is the most charming Aspect in the game. (It is.) Cultist Simulator turns five today, which basically makes it the game version of a Long. But it isn't off to Port Noon quite yet: we're still patching and fixing and improving it. We've come a long way since launch - four DLCs, four new languages, mobile and Switch ports, a whole code rewrite, 170 Workshop mods, a TRPG and a certain card placement SNAFU that one really needn't remember - to the point where our launch trailer looks janky compared to the actual game! I have to do the dev thing and mention, loudly, that we're running a 70% off Daily Deal to mark the occasion, that Cultist Sim's follow-up BOOK OF HOURS brings new Secret Histories in August, and that we're delighted to be a husband and wife team hustling to make strange flowers grow in the garden of our lives. But aside from all of that, I wanted to thank you. Thank you to everyone who Kickstarted the game back in 2017. Thank you to everyone who bought a copy in launch week, helping us with Steam's frightening and vital algorithms. Thank you to everyone who bought a copy since, making sure we can still afford Ultra-Nom Jelly Snaxx for our cats, to everyone who joined our mailing list or follows us on social media, to the people who read our blogs and the people who send in nice messages and the people who buy merch and anyone, honestly, who's reading this. Cultist Simulator is a weird, bright pocket universe: I'm so glad you answered the riddle, and are counted among the Know. Here's to the Mansus, the House, and its Seekers. Each flame has its fuel. This is ours. ♥ Love, Lottie & AlexisCULTIST SIMULATOR 'ORACHE' on beta branchApr 5, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsORACHE, aka 'saltbushes', is one of the less interesting-looking plants we've chosen as a version name. So the picture above is atriplex hortensis, aka 'red orache'. Here's the patch on the beta branch now. Shorter update than usual cos I have a beta update for BOOK OF HOURS to get out too! a quick gloss on Chelnoque's update notes below: - Sometimes Biedde's Blade was inflicting a normal wound instead of an unstanchable one. - Opening a verb window on low FPS caused it to disappear. This fiendish little critter took Chel weeks if not months to track down and involved some proper detective work - The options window now scales correctly for various edge-case resolutions. Thank Christ, we can import that into BOOK OF HOURS too - Fixed a false-positive log spam on inspecting the credits window. (codename VARLEY) - The status bar doubled the displayed number of exhausted Passions. - The volume of the SFX for entering and exiting the Mansus is halved. I promised we would do this! Sorry it took a while - Disabled camera's motions on entering and exiting the Mansus. - The legacy selection screen won't suggest you to select from two Exiles anymore. oh pf. EXILE is the best DLC - FEATURE: Multidrag now works properly at last. Select multiple cards while holding the SHIFT key and drag them as a group. I detect a degree of sass, it was my code that didn't work properly, but he's right - MODDING: $plus and $minus now correctly parse values without \"\". You can stop reading unless you're a modder - MODDING: $append and $prepend now correctly work on uninitialized lists. - MODDING: Recipe 'Xpans' property, which runs xtriggers on all cards on the table (as opposed to 'aspects', which applies them inside the current verb only). This is something I added in BOOK OF HOURS to make the day cycle work properly, and you get to enjoy the benefit. ENJOY. benefit. - MODDING: Status bar elements can now be defined more flexibly. Consult with Aspirant legacy in JSONs for an example. A brief rundown of properties: - 'Ids' specifies elements that are tracked by this status bar entry. - 'Format' allows to specify any additional characters that accompay the value display. '({value})' meants the value is displayed in brackets, ''-{value}' means it's preceded by dash/minu, etc. Keep in mind that you can use TextMeshPro rich text tags, same as everywhere else in the texts. - 'Icon', naturally, defines an icon. If not defined, the first entry in 'Ids' is used instead. - 'Styles' allows to modify value's display at certain numbers. Currently, there are only possible two modes, that look like 'colour_red_0' and 'hide_0'. The first makes the display red when it equals 0, and the second hides it under the same conditions. Note that you can use any value instead of 0, and any colour instead of red - defined as a plain string colour name, or a hex code. A simple string definition is still possible too, of course. This makes my eyes cross but it's cool and will find uses elsewhere! yrs...BOOK OF HOURS closed betaMar 29, 2023 - Community Announcementshttps://store.steampowered.com/app/1028310/BOOK_OF_HOURS/ Our next game is BOOK OF HOURS, a spiritual successor to Cultist Sim. We've just started a BoH closed beta, and figured some Cultist Sim players might a) not have heard of it and b) want to join in! (Anyone who enjoys Cultist Sim is likely to enjoy BOOK OF HOURS. AK will probably not approve of my saying this, but It's sort of a holiday for stressed out CS players - it's the same Lovecraftian world, but with new lore and fewer stressors. No dying suddenly of Dread!) If you'd like to get an early look at BOOK OF HOURS and help us make it great, register your interest in being a beta player. We're picking a bunch of people to join each month, so you might not get in. But perhaps the Watchman will favour you..."Though much is taken, much abides"Mar 17, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsThis is the least interesting patch ever, folks. I've literally just put the beta link for BOOK OF HOURS in the title menu, and moved some stuff about.The Path to the WoodFeb 1, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsThere is never only one History. We've used the mechanics and the world of Cultist Simulator for our next game, BOOK OF HOURS - but we've added more graphics, more lore and, well, more everything: we think BOOK OF HOURS is going to be about five times the size of Cultist Sim when it's finished. We're releasing the first playable demo next week as part of Steam Next Fest. It'll be available from Monday 6th Feb at 6PM GMT / 10AM PDT, so now's a great time to play the demo and see what you think! We'll also be live streaming the game next Thursday, if anyone wants to drop in and say hi. The chat'll be open, the questions'll be flowing, and hopefully we won't find a really embarrassing bug while we're playing. If you'd like to see behind the game dev curtain and hear AK talk about the world, join us on Thursday 9th Feb at 6PM GMT / 10AM PDT. Hope to see you there! ♥ Alexis & LottieNEMESIA updateJan 17, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsWelcome to the first charming flower pic of 2023. As regulars will know, we're currently naming all our updates after flowers, occult or otherwise. This is the Danish Flag cultivar of nemesia strumosa: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/31397842/2f61b7cfdeb6d5a086bac906cfa18d10dd6e6f6f.jpg (What would you call that colour? Dark fuchsia? Bloody burgundy? Clarified vermilion? Peaceful Grail?) Now! here's is the reason I've marked this as a Major Update. It's only relevant if you use mods: - To work, DLL mods now require the GHIRBI, THE GATEKEEPER core mod installed and enabled. The mod can be found in Steam Workshop, or on Cultist Simulator GOG discussions page. - To avoid confusion, DLL mods can't be enabled at all without GHIRBI, THE GATEKEEPER. Disabling GHIRBI automatically disables all enabled DLL mods. I talked about this here, but the short version: we're putting some an extra confirmation layer to protect against the _remote but theoretically possible_ risk of malicious mods. If you use any significant mods, you may need to install and enable GHIRBI. On to the other fixes. As usual, Chelnoque's notes, my exegesis: - Ally recruitment action in Exile didn't display its end description properly. Exile continues to be the wild borderlands of Cultist Simulator - Wounded cultists turned into Risen lacked Follower aspect. I think poor Neville should be allowed to rest in dubious peace, bt since everyone's _going_ to drag him from the grave... - Display of verb window is slightly more resilient against lower frame rates. We all want to be more resilient against lower frame rates. - Removed secret stray tech text from ascension rite. So secret that even I don't know what it was. This means either Chel is embarrassed or he is preserving me from embarrassment. - THE INVISIBLE SERAPEUM is renamed THE SIXTH HISTORY. Because of the Sixth History Community license! Last year we opened our IP for wider use (with some caveats and limits, natch). It would be possible now to turn a mod into a complete game in its own right and sell it, if that 's your bag. - Various enhancements in the mod panel display. "AK's logging code had a silly performance bug that actually started to matter in edge cases." - Debug console now opens on ctrl + ~ (instead of just ~). People are now safe from opening it on accident and ruining their playthrough in all kinds of ways. This was always super on-theme - you accidentally find a key combination that allows you to PIERCE THE VEIL OF THE MUNDANE - but it was one of the few remaining frequent causes of support tickets. Anyway the VEIL OF THE MUNDANE is now a bit more robust. Incidentally Subnautica introduced the same feature on the same day that we put NEMESIA on the beta branch. Coincidence or conjunction? The Hours know. - Debug console now can be opened in the main menu, allowing to see the log without starting the game. - Other various small console improvements. - Clear console button now works. - achievements.json file had an incorrect path...GHIRBI, the GatekeeperDec 13, 2022 - Community AnnouncementsThere are now a hundred and forty mods on the Cultist Simulator Steam workshop. The number’s exploded since we enabled DLL modding – that is to say, we allowed modders to run their own code as part of a mod, changing fundamental game behaviour rather than just adding new narrative content and images. Four of the top five mods are DLL mods. Any time you run someone else’s code on your machine, there’s a risk. In theory, a modder could include malicious code in a DLL mod. The risk is very low – AV programs may notice it, Steam will block malicious modders – and the same applies to games anyway – there’s nothing in principle to stop a game developer from putting malicious functionality in their work. But there was an incident earlier this year where a modder did include malicious code in a Cities: Skylines mod. It was trivial – it just interfered with other mods as part of some sort of community drama, it wasn’t ransomware or anything. It was spotted within days. And it only affected about fifty people. But it did happen. (A few months later we got an email from a security researcher pointing this out.) {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/31397842/0bcc7c72f8158d9a08c0e2334bef366f469a8577.png So from the beginning of next year, we’re making it slightly harder to enable DLL mods. All you’ll need to do is install a gatekeeper mod, Ghirbi, and all Ghirbi does is show you a notice making you aware of the theoretical risk. This is basically the same as making the user tick a box to say ‘I am OK with this’ – but most people tick most checkboxes without reading the notice, especially when they’re playing games. install him now to save hassle. If you don’t use Steam, you can download Ghirbi here.] Honestly I think the risk here isn’t traffic-accident low, it’s hit-by-a-meteorite low. But if someone was hit by a meteorite because they’d installed our game, then even if it was a bizarre accident, we’d feel bad about it. So we’re adding a meteorite warning it’s impossible to ignore. Happy Christmas.MOTHORCHIDDec 6, 2022 - Community AnnouncementsPhalaenopsis, better known as the moth orchid. It's a flower that looks like a thing with wings. The etymology means the name means literally something like 'mothy'. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/31397842/a7d3eeb36fb51d6e276a8d0b18f386e320fed689.jpg Phalaenopsis philippinensis Golamco ex Fowlie & C.Z.Tang, Orchid Digest 51: 92 (1987) MOTHORCHID is the final release of the year. In all we've had I think forty patches. I often point out that's not bad for a four-year-old game. In turn people occasionally point out that I completely borked the game for a little while back in March, and I have to admit that yes, that was a godawful two weeks followed by a grim month. What have all those patches done? roughly, (1) much, much better modding support (2) various long-standing bugs and save stability issues (3) quality of life stuff ('a dropbox for verbs finally'!) Behind the scenes, we've also been prepping the codebase so it can support BOOK OF HOURS, our next game (out in June next year). This means that we can _keep on_ supporting Cultist into the indefinite future. Ra ra loads of patches ain't we great... sure, but it's also enlightened self-interest. It's so tempting as a small dev to release-and-forget. Support takes time away from the development of new games. The codebase you worked on three years ago is the ugliest thing in the world and the codebase you're working on now is the one where you Get It Right. Same with the design. Fresh start! Green fields! But that means that you forget half the lessons you learnt on the previous project... and it also means your sales will suffer. Cultist hits its fifth anniversary next year, and it looks like we'll pass the million-sales-on-Steam mark around then. There's no way we'd have got there if we'd left the game to languish unpatched after release. We might have got BOOK OF HOURS out sooner, but then we'd have left _that_ to languish too, and ended up chasing the next release. Nasty cycle to get into. This has been a hell of a lot easier since we brought in Chelnoque, the gentleman behind the Roost Machine, to do freelance work on bughunting and modding support. Chelnoque understands the game systems intimately, he's a lot better at QA than I am, and he's a steady source of thoughtful ideas. A toast to the gentleman behind the sealion avatar! Anyway thanks for taking a chance on this weird, eternally uninviting, sempiternally janky little piece. We've got a lot more Secret Histories plans. I'll get on to the patch notes in a moment, but first... WHAT ELSE LOTTIE AND I HAVE DONE THIS YEAR: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/31397842/b2b74e80e0fdc30ecaaf35bd02488b639ec7fcad.png The Sixth History Community Licence, which opens up our IP for use by anyone who fancies a pop at a Secret Histories creative work {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/31397842/2f9da6a4328c38e709d8f1c160a8a72e50b3d6b1.png The Secret Histories boxes, limited edition treasures themed around the libraries of the Secret Histories - all sold out but we'll do a wider release for Hus...Announcing: the Sixth History Community LicenceNov 18, 2022 - Community AnnouncementsWe love mods and the people who make 'em. There are 136 mods in the Cultist Sim Workshop (!), someone turned CS's tabletop into Super Mario, and a while back we wrote a how-to guide to help modders get started. The more mods in Steam Workshop the merrier! Apart from that weird one which takes Laidlaw's shirt off. I see you, degenerates. Aaaaanyhoo, all this creativity - not just mods, but all the fanart, writing, tabletop games, tattoos (you would not believe where some people get Moth tattoos) - leads me on to some big news. We're opening up Cultist Simulator's IP to let you use it for creative projects on a much larger scale, and even make money from it. SO READ ON! But in Alexis's voice, 'cause he wrote the next bit. How It Is Something about the Secret Histories enthuses people. Fanworks, fiction, commentary, art; I've lost count of the number of TRPG homebrew rules projects I've seen. For a long time, our take on this was sure, it's nice to see this kind of thing, use our stuff... as long as you're not making any money out of it, because our IP is our livelihood, and we need to protect it. But a few months ago I had a conversation with a smallish YTer who wanted to do actual-play videos with their own Secret Histories-based content. I said, sure, as long as you're not making any money out of it... they said, well, we make a little bit out of ads... but it's literally a couple of dollars a month. Oh lor, said I, that's not a problem, though I guess, like, revisit it if you get rich and famous? Lottie and I realised two things. Firstly, we get a lot of these sort of borderline requests - can I run a LRP based on your work and charge to cover costs, can I use your tarot deck to do professional readings, can I do DeviantArt commissions - and our answer is nearly always yes, but it's often complicated and we have to think about it. And secondly, we really don't mind if a semi-pro or even pro creator pays the rent using our IP, as long as it doesn't hurt our own ability to pay our own rent. And if someone does really well and helps grow the audience, so much the better. But what, people always ask, if Hollywood calls and then their lawyers say the IP situation is too complicated? Bugger Hollywood. We got optioned for TV a few years ago, did I ever mention that? Like most options, it never went into production, and I realised afterwards how relieved I was. Even though the people involved (a) were clearly nice and smart and (b) had actually played Cultist. If the upside of community licensing is that people make interesting things, and the downside is that we damage the remote possibility of a someday deal which would make us, eh, about as much money as a really successful piece of DLC in exchange for titrating away a quarter-soul's worth of our distinctiveness over several subjective years of meetings... I lost my thread. You get the gist. How It's Going To Be So we started talking about permissive licensing. This is where we ran into a snag. It's ...LONGIFLORUM patchNov 16, 2022 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/31397842/2985228e2ab026a33d5613fd6eb93dacee939f52.jpg LONGIFLORUM: the Easter lily, the trumpet lily, the lily Aurelian. "Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin" - it was longiflorum that chap was talking about, probably. I didn't grow up rich, but I did grow up in Oxford, and my secondary school had a Latin motto, SICUT LILIUM, 'like the lily'. I never really understood why a school has a motto that incited its students not to work. I tried to use this as a philosophical platform for not doing homework. Consequently the secondary school threw me out and I had to go to a weird boarding school for weird kids. On the upside the headmaster of the weird school lent his copy of Gormenghast and changed the course of my life. I've left out some details but this all approximately happened. Anyway lilium longiflorum is very pretty but also utterly lethal to cats. A couple years back I carelessly brought home a bouquet for Lottie with a couple of longiflora in it. By the time we realised, our hapless cat Chi (aka Chione, like the book in Cultist) had jumped up and coated himself in rust-coloured pollen. Lottie had to wash it off in the bath. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/31397842/afd4b274ce0cf71744cd9984819e74952117caa2.jpg Chi is the same cat who appears in this image... {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/31397842/3cd1d7d38497592d6e0395cbf92ee8823511592a.png ...which is a good segue to talking about what happened last week. We've been pushing out small releases from beta to live about every two weeks, which is a bloody good pace for a four-year-old game, and we'd got a bit gung-ho because it all went so well. Last week we put out LONGIFLORUM v1 as a reminder of the three basic truths of existence: 1. Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains; 2. Nature is red in tooth and claw; 3 Even well-tested code has bugs. LONGIFLORUM last week was very well-tested (Chel is thorough)... but there were some changes to save code, which is always a pit of barbed wasps... so it wasn't well-tested enough. Consequently we had to roll it back, which itself caused some hiccups. So here it is again, after another week in the shop getting the dents knocked out. What's actually in the patch? - Game no longer crashes when challenged with a corrupted save file. Instead, you are prompted to try restoring a backup. Almost half of the support requests I get are corrupted saves. I think a good 10% of all those are specifically 'a cat jumped on the power button and turned off my game as it was saving'. I'm serious, though I haven't actually run the numbers. I'm ready to claim that almost 5% of all the support requests over the last few months are caused by cats. Anyway there was some code (mine) in there which was supposed to revert to backups but it wasn't working properly. There is some new code (Chel's) in there which works better. - Upon crashing on startup, the game will automatically turn off all enabled mods. If don't want this behaviour (for examp...
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