Good afternoon, everyone. Here's the latest beta->live patch:

- fixes legacy-carryover issues, e.g. the wrong cult showing up in Apostle runs
- more localisation fixes and tweaks.

Just a quick update, Believers! We've just released a new 52-card deck in the Church o' Merch which finally lets you buy something with Neville's face on it. Meet The Sibyl's Leaves: a gold-embellished Cultist-style future-telling card deck based on 19th-century cartomancy!





The deck uses the usual 52-card system - Aces through Kings for Diamonds, Hearts, Spades and Clubs - but each card also includes a unique meaning. When dealt in the proper way, these meanings combine to give you an idea of your future! And don't worry, there's an instruction manual inside each pack. 😎





Alternatively, you can just use this deck for any normal card game you'd play with a 52-card pack. The only difference is occasionally you'll run into Saliba. Won't that jazz up your next game of solitaire?!

I can't promise international adepts that this'll reach you by Christmas, but I'll be filling orders more quickly than usual to give you the best chance.

More info and a bit of historical cartomancy over on the blog. Enjoy!

Happy nearly-Halloween, believers! It’s Alexis’s and my anniversary today, so what better way to celebrate than, er, to release Cultist Simulator to Steam, GOG and Humble in Japanese and German! They’re now out! YAY! Please tell all your Japanese- and German-speaking friends about it! 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏



Thank you to everyone who helped us with beta testing this month. We’re extremely grateful! Please feel free to continue sending any bugs you find any of our translations to support@weatherfactory.biz.

It’s really weird not being able to read your own game, so we need your help to make sure that Cultist Simulator reads and plays well in different languages. Blessings of the Velvet will fall upon anyone who helps. Probably.

If Japanese and German do well, we may translate into other languages in future. For now, have a look in Cultist’s Workshop if your language is missing. A few trail-blazing linguists have uploaded fan mods for other languages (French, Italian, Korean…), so your language might be there if it isn’t in-game already. Enjoy!


Well, we have two biggies to share. Firstly:



😱😱😱 CULTIST'S COMING TO THE NINTENDO SWITCH! 😱😱😱

I can't talk too much about it here in case Valve shout at me. But if you'd like more info or to be notified when it's out to buy, sign up below! As Ezeem might say...

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Secondly, we finally announced that the EXILE DLC is coming to mobile on Tuesday 3rd November, along with the Forbidden Bundle, a one-stop pack of all DLC at a reduced price. You can nab the mobile versions on the App Store or the Google Play Store if you ain't got them already!



Anyway. Happy Halloween weekend! HAVE A SPOOKY DAY.

I'm going to talk about where we are with Cultist Simulator localisation. Throughout this post, I've embedded thumbnails of some of the Q&As I've had with translators. Click on 'em if you want to know why translating this game is such a total pain in the bum.



ON THE MATTER OF THE GERMAN AND JAPANESE TRANSLATIONS: We've moved the German and Japanese localisations from the beta to the main branch. We had dozens of extremely detailed and helpful bug reports - particularly for Japanese, where the culture gap from English is much bigger - and the localisation is in much better shape now.

There will still be issues we've missed. Please let us know at support@weatherfactory.biz; and please include a screenshot, it's worth a thousand Google-translated words. Thanks for all your help.




Some Russian-speaking players have objected to some of the choices the translator made. It's impossible for us as non-Russian speakers to judge quality, so we need to be careful with feedback from the Internet (there's always the possibility a stranger is mischievous or wrong). Please keep sending us specific details of specific problems, and we'll run them by the loc company, who generally say 'yes that was a mistake' or 'oh that makes more sense'.



I think the Exile translation suffered particularly because this was the first bit of Cultist that the translator had worked on (the main Russian translation was by two other providers that we don't use any more). This meant (a) they had a *lot* to digest, because the Exile lore builds on the Cultist lore (b) there were inconsistencies with translation choices in the original game.

This is more generally a problem Lottie and I are wrestling with for future localisations of Cultist and of BOOK OF HOURS. My writing is notoriously full of arcane references and stupid quasi-puns that you only get after forty hours of play or whatever. Most professional translators don't have the grounding in Cultist lore, but we need to keep working with professional translators because fan translations are hard to wrangle to deadlines and production plans. We'll find a middle way.




Talking of fan translations... our Chinese translation of the original game was the only one done by volunteers, but by professionally organised volunteers working through Indienova. This meant the translation was actually very high quality, because it was performed by fans of the game who knew and cared about the lore.

Last night Lottie and I happened to look at the Exile page and found we'd dropped into Mixed reviews, because a number of Chinese volunteers are cross that they haven't been credited. Lottie and I are really sorry about this - we feel strongly about crediting people fairly. We're waiting on a final credits list from Indienova now. If you're a volunteer and you're missing from the credits, please please get in touch with them to make sure you're included.

(There's another issue, where the translation was apparently not polished to the volunteers' satisfaction, which I don't completely understand - I've had conflicting emails about this - but I can say we're talking to Indienova about it now and we'll update it as it comes.)


We've had people asking for Brazilian Portuguese, French, Italian and Spanish translations, among others. This really depends on how well German and Japanese do. It costs us tens of thousands of Euros and probably three person-weeks of my and Lottie's time to translate into a new language (in case you missed it, Weather Factory is only two people) so we have a really narrow pipeline. But it might happen!



I recently updated the modding framework so that community translation mods are much more practical, and we've currently got four community translations on the Steam Workshop. Thank you to the creators for putting the time and effort into this. I've added Workshop tags so translations should be easier to find now.

★ Português Brasil

★ French

★ Italiano

★ 한국어

Hey everyone! Today we’re launching our Japanese and German beta. That’s over 160,000 forbidden words localised into two totally new languages, probably with a few typos and mis-translations at least. So please: help us make these translations shiny and great!

• Navigate to your Steam library and find Cultist Simulator
  
• Right click and select ‘Properties…’
  
• Select the ‘BETAS’ tab in the top of the pop-up window and choose ‘gateofhorn’ from the drop-down menu
  
• Click ‘CLOSE’

If you weren’t on the beta branch already, you should see Cultist Simulator begin to update. When it’s finished, open the game. You should see Japanese and German in the ‘Languages’ menu.

Please remember to start a new game when you change language. If you change languages in the middle of a run… well. I hope you brought a top-tier rite and a bucket of luck.


Please email any bugs you find to support@weatherfactory.biz. Feel free to submit bugs of any kind (visual, mechanical, language, etc), though we ask that you only include one bug per email. If you find lots of bugs, send us lots of different emails!

Please include a screenshot of the issue if you can, so we can see the problem just as you do. Thank you! 🙏


There are likely to be problems with key-mapping in Japanese (we don’t actually know what keyboards Japanese players use), and of course there are likely to be the occasional missed reference or janky translation in both languages.


We’re releasing final Japanese and German to Steam, GOG and Humble on Thursday 29th October. So please: tell your friends and help us make Cultist Simulator shiny and joyous in time for Halloween! 👻

Happy October, everyone! This is the month of ghosts, ghouls and gruesome things, so what better time to release the EXILE DLC in simplified Chinese and Russian?!

Thank you for being so patient while we finished translating. The latest update of Cultist Simulator now includes full simplified Chinese and Russian, so you can play the whole game start to finish in either language.

To start an EXILE legacy immediately, simply click on the ‘DLC & Mods’ menu on the title screen and select ‘The Exile’. If you don’t see ‘The Exile’ as an option, check that you’ve purchased The EXILE DLC or that you own Perpetual Edition. If you still have problems, email support@weatherfactory.biz.

If you find any bugs in the Chinese or Russian versions, please email them to support@weatherfactory.biz. And remember: start a new game after changing languages. If you change languages in the middle of a game, things might… explode.

Finally, tell us your favourite Chinese and Russian streamers so we can offer them Cultist Simulator keys! We’d love to grow our communities in those languages, but need your help to do it. So tell us your favourite streamers, and tell your Chinese and Russian friends that Cultist Simulator is now 100% translated and ready for them to play!

Thank you, and dream furiously. 🕯️

I've just rolled out STEAM WORKSSHOP INTEGRATION to the main branch... along with all the other beta changes since August. This means:

- improved modding framework
- Unity version update, which will probably fix various niggling technical issues
- perf improvements
- custom keybindings

Also I attached a picture of a cat to this update, because I can, and because it's his birthday.

I now have just a couple of features to add and a medium-sized list of bugs to fix before this can go to the live branch. The list of bugs will probably grow over the weekend, of course. Thanks, all, for your help so far.

A quick update for y'all from today's sprint round-up.




We're pushing Steam Workshop from beta to the main branch next week, on Thursday 10th September. Hold on to your modded hats, everyone!

We're also finally ready to release EXILE in simplified Chinese and Russian. That'll go live on Thursday 1st October.

Annnnnnd, we're also rolling out full-game Japanese and German. We're going to run a beta first to catch as many loc bugs as possible - that'll launch on Thursday 8th October. If you know anyone who speaks Japanese or German, please encourage them to pick up the game in October and help us make Cultist's translations top notch!

We'll then release full, shiny Japanese and German on Thursday 29th October, just in time for some other Halloweeny fun. 👻




They're now all designed and ready to go - just waiting on a test deck. Here are some final mock-ups, and a teaser for how the 100% definitely accurate system for predicting the future with them actually works!





They'll be up on the Church o' Merch ASAP, and I'll let you know the release date as soon as I know it.




Next sprint is the Weather Factory cats' birthday, so that's obviously the most important thing. Sulo and Chi will be TWO which is the same age as Cultist Simulator. What non-Euclidean coincidence is that?

Thanks for everyone who submitted bug reports to our old friend support@weatherfactory.biz. It's been enormously helpful. Issues addressed in this patch:


- images weren't working in some mod /images subfolders. They should now.
- merge-overwriting entities didn't quite work as advertised (property operations failed when merge-overwriting). This is fixed.
- fixed a subtle and horrible bug with expulsion filers, which now work again.

I've also done a lot more in the way of under-the-hood rewriting. The ideal situation is that you won't notice the difference at all. The likely situation is that I've introduced a handful of extra bugs (e.g., I just noticed the end game animation isn't firing properly). Why am I bothering, then?

Because back when I started building Cultist, I hadn't done any real coding for at least five years, and I was learning Unity from scratch. So there's a lot of nonsense in there at the foundations. Then I got four different freelancers in at various stages to write code- all of them extremely competent, but all with their own styles and quirks and all working independently.

So the effect right now is that of a big house built in the architectural styles of five different eras, mostly by one novice in a tearing hurry who's only read about houses in books, who's had seasoned craftsmen dropping by to help him with the windows and the plumbing and the electrics. The kind of place you'd love to go round with a knowledgeable guide who can explain why the builder saw fit to leave a hole in the ceiling above the kitchen table ('so guests can pass down mugs for washing') and put the front door on upside down ('just too much trouble to change back'). But not the kind of place you'd want to live in, in case you visit the bathroom in the small hours and plummet through a hole to crash into the kitchen table.

And definitely not the kind of place you'd want to use as a basis for a larger, more ambitious house... a library, for example.

So I'm taking some time to tidy it up. Bear with me. It'll stay on the beta branch until I'm fairly confident I'm not going to put a pickaxe through the wrong wall and release a gush of undesired spiders.