caves of qud: chrome, concrete and primordial soup

[fairyrune]

has anyone here played Caves of Qud? i got back into it recently. i got it a couple years ago before 1.0 released and it floored me with its depth, art style and writing. i'm fascinated by the world and it really inspires me to create something with that pulpy, science-fantasy energy!

for those unfamiliar, Caves of Qud is a science fantasy roguelike inspired by a variety of things, like Gamma World, Ursula K. Le Guin's sci-fi works, the Dune books, and many more. it has a charming, retro art style made up of little sprites - in my opinion, evoking its ancestor, the original Rogue. the world is many layers deep - literally, as you might have guessed by "caves"! - and full of relics, ancient machines and paranormal(?) encounters.

i don't think my words can really do justice the amount of exploration that's in this game. part of that is down to the fact that many, many things in the game are procedurally generated. for example, i created a save recently in which one of the beds in the starting town, joppa, was extradimensional. examining it taught me about the dimension it came from. it flickered in and out of reality... and i was wowed! you can come across stuff like this completely by accident. the game rewards patience and exploration in a way i find satisfying.

there's also a very interesting battle system. fighting mostly just involves whacking something with whatever you've got, but you can gain mutations or cybernetics to give you weird and powerful abilities. my current build is growing arms to hold as many weapons as i can, meaning i can hit for massive amounts of damage with every swing. if you get psychically powerful enough, however... there may be consequences!

i figured that a community like this full of creative and quirky people who appreciate retro tech and such might find this game very interesting! has anyone played it? do you have any funny or interesting stories to share about things you've discovered?

[milo]

Oh man are we talking about Caves of Qud???

I love this game so much. It's one of my most played games on Steam. I go through phases where it's all I play for hours and hours since it's been in early access around 2015 or so. I'm so happy to finally see it officially release and the final version is incredible to play.

You're right about the depth of the game!! There's so much going on I don't even know what to touch on. I love that there's a big overarching story, but all the little details around the world are randomly generated each play through.

Currently, I have one character I've been leveling up in Roleplay mode so I can actually experience the whole game. If I'm feeling especially wily, I'll roll random builds and see how far I can get with them. My current guy is a psychic wizard of sorts and his Ego stat is so high that he has made waves across different dimensional planes and is constantly hunted by extradimensional beings. He also has a command of spacetime and his best abilities are teleporting others, slowing down time and opening portals to other parts of the world for people to fall into (sometimes by accident!). Sometimes if I'm out matched by a foe I'll open a portal and just jump in hoping for a better situation than the one I'm currently in.

I love how many approaches you can take to everything in this game. If you can think it, you can probably do it. I was having trouble getting past one of the ice trolls in Golgotha. The best strategy I came up with was to just bum rush him before he could get more than a few hits in and stick him with a love serum causing him to... well, fall in love with me. And now one of the big bad bosses of the whole area just follows me around doing my bidding. Amazing.

One of my favorite random generations: I was wandering around and found a new village. I inspected the warden and saw his name was "Lost Warden [name]". I'm like, whoooooa, a Lost Warden?? What does that mean? How epic!! That's so cool! So I go up and talk to them and a box pops up. "Warden [name] asks about his location and is no longer lost." ...Oh. He was literally lost. How was he the warden of a village he didn't know anything about?? His description said he was enemies with some faction for cooking them a rancid meal which added to the aloofness of this generated character.

[fairyrune]

He also has a command of spacetime and his best abilities are teleporting others, slowing down time and opening portals to other parts of the world for people to fall into (sometimes by accident!).

i've seen the space-time in action! when i headed to bethesda susa a few days ago, a roaming NPC had this ability. while i was wrestling with a cragmensch in deep water, they opened a portal that floated right on over to the cragmensch and spirited it away somewhere... wonder if i'll see that cragmensch again somewhere.

"Warden [name] asks about his location and is no longer lost." ...Oh. He was literally lost.

oh wow, i've never seen an NPC who was lost before - i have over 70 hours in this so far and i didn't even know that was an option!! it's really cool hearing about these stories. i love browsing like, the Qud subreddit to see people's funny encounters, like what you've told me i'll learn a surprising amount about the game from them!

recently i had a funny encounter in joppa, too. i didn't keep this save as i wanted to continue my previous one from 1.0+, but i spawned in and discovered an extradimensional bed in a farmer's house in joppa?! it was from a dimension called "the vast circle"... freaky. i didn't know extradimensional things existed, let alone that they could spawn in joppa. i wonder if that farmer tried to sleep on it and it simply blipped out of existence.