Fixed a gridsnap bias that favoured left/top row. Damn that's better.
Fixed a blurry text issue on cards
Fixed frequency bug in card shuffle. Particular thanks to Chelnoque and Clocq (no relations) on this
Added workaround for crash bug in latest Unity version. This one was, for once, not my fault, folks

We're running a Midweek Madness sale throughout this week, where you can get everything Cultist Sim-y for basically dust and a broken ha'penny (50-66% off everything, to be exact). So that's

• Cultist Simulator (66% off)
  
• The Dancer, Priest, Ghoul and Exile DLC (50% off)
  
• Cultist Simulator's OST (50% off)
  
• The Anthology Edition bundle, which includes all of the above @ 65% off-ish (bundle maths is hard)
  
• The Lady Afterwards digital TRPG (50% off)

Enjoy!

The indomitable Canadian sensation that is Systemchalk - probably a Long by now, at least - is broadcasting Cultist on the store page, for anyone who'd like to see the game being wrestled to its knees while a soothing voiceover describes the inevitable descent into penury, madness and occult calamity.

We also have some Cultist x BOOK OF HOURS lore, game updates and new Secret Histories merch and events to share. Yee, as they say, haw.

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We're not ready to share a vertical slice of the game yet, but here're some updates.

We've finalised the design of the Wisdom Page, the occult sort-of skill tree where you can choose which forbidden knowledge to specialise in, and which affects what you can do elsewhere in the game based on your choices. We've hidden the full size of the chart, but you can see the first four levels here:



(Click for a larger image.)

Players choose cards or objects to commit to each slot up the chain, pledging allegiance - for example - to Birdsong by committing a skill card for Ramsund, the language of secrets. This will enhance the player's Birdsong affinity and ability, opening up new opportunities elsewhere and unlocking the next tier of the branch.

We hope it's also a nice roleplaying opportunity, as you can see that each of the nine Wisdoms is variously associated with several Principles from Cultist Simulator. People have strong feelings about whether they're a Winter-y sort who wants a beautiful end or a Lantern-type who's brilliant but a bit caustic or a Forge-person who really loves hitting things with hammers. The Wisdoms are deliberately broader, drawing from multiple Principles at once, so they should open up new avenues of characterisation. Which is useful in, er, an RPG!

Speaking of the Wisdoms, we've uncovered a new letter from a mysterious 'Arthur' to his nephew, discussing the Illumination-affiliated events that took place in a Pyrhhic battle against the Khusgai of Persia, and the bravery - and unmasking of Lieutenant Malcolmson. Most importantly, though, weep for Menander, the bravest steed that ever was!

"Nephew, make a fist of your hand. Muscles move beneath the skin. So powers move beneath the skin of the world, at impulses equally invisible, but greater."



Click here for full images + alternative read-friendly text.

And finally, we also have a mock-up of Hush House's layout to share. Please note that this is not what the game will actually look like (though mmmm isn't it all nice and neat in a grid), but it is likely to represent the layout of rooms in the final game. We've censored some of the more deep-lore rooms, and you can't see all of it - but here's a first glimpse at the library at the centre of it all!



(Click for a larger image, again.)

If you like what you see, please wishlist BOOK OF HOURS to keep updated with our progress! More on that in the next few months.



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"You’ve been summoned to Alexandria, a city of coloured lights and curious histories. An old friend needs you to track down a woman. She’s probably in trouble. Probably trouble herself. Plus ça change."

Since launching Cultist Sim in 2018, we made a TRPG based in its occult, Lovecraftian world called The Lady Afterwards. You can buy the digital edition here on Steam (50% off in the Midweek Madness sale!), and we've just re-released our luxury boxed edition in our merch shop too. We're releasing another 100 boxes at noon today, and the boxes will restock every Tuesday.



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"Secret gods live beneath the skin of the world. Five of them meet every year to exchange secrets and agree particular notes of history. Their conversations aren’t for our ears, but even after they’ve gone, their gossip still troubles the earth; the air still prickles with doors..."



Cultist Sim also inspired our latest venture, going live today: a series of live, overnight events set in a crumbling aristocratic mansion in Monmouthshire, UK. Each year the Avian Hours - that's the Beach-Crow, the Witch-and-Sister, the Elegiast, the Vagabond and the little-known Name of the Moth, Ferezeref - meet to discuss the topics of the gods.

Afterwards, mortals attend the Roostinghall to pick through abandoned tidbits of secret knowledge. This is what we're calling the Locksmith's Dream, and invite you to pick through the snippets of the gods this October and December with us.

Full details of the event, and of course tickets for sale, over on the official site.

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Happy birthday to Iris, the Mansus, all the Histories and most importantly to Cultist Sim, the little game that could. Celebrate in your favourite way for us, Believers! We couldn't have done it without you. <3

I've put a patch on beta that fixes the two really annoying leftover placement issues.

One was the INSISTENT DROPZONE, where if you dropped the dropzone on top of existing cards, it would want to be picked up before it let you pick them up.

One was the GUTTER ENFORCED, where 1:1 gridsnap meant 1:1 horizontally, but left a vertical gap between rows. I liked the effect. A lot of folk didn't and let me know it, so I've changed it BUT only in new games. (Otherwise it'll screw up everyone's existing layout.)

To repeat this is on only on the beta channel for now - gateofhorn - and it'll stay there until at least next week. The latest Unity update keeps doing this to me in the editor:



and while it doesn't happen in the built version, it's giving me the spiderchills so I'm going to wait for a response to my ticket. Yes devs submit tickets too. Unity presumably submit tickets to OS vendors. I don't know who OS vendors submit tickets to. Maybe they submit petitions to a higher power instead. In Vak probably

Anyway tickets to *me* go to support@weatherfactory.biz. Please let me know about any spiders in the beta.

Alternatively, if you're technically enthusiastic, you can submit it as a Github issue. (In this case you might also be interested to know I make the source code available for the convenience of modders and the curious.)

The full bug list:

• More tweakss to card placement: moved card closer to desk, tidied dropzone grid placement
  
• Narrowed gridsnap so you can put cards immediately below each other at gridsnap 1. THIS ONLY HAPPENS IN NEW GAMES, so people's card arrangements aren't messed up\n
  
• Dropzone now reliably stays out of the way behind cards\n
  
• Stack badge and verb timer also now render behind\n
  
• Close button on deck details window now works.\n
  
• Some poor soul kept trying to use Rite Intercalate to baptise a Chosen Compass. People shouldn't do that, but let's not let them try.
  
• One more round of jp_loc fixes
  
• Non-Latin messages no longer display as tofu when returning from the Mansus

(the quote is William Carlos Williams in "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower". Patches are flowers from here on in. This is relevant if you're interested in BOOK OF HOURS, or if you're an Enigmatic.

YERMA is an opera based on a really savage play by Federico Garcia Lorca, about childlessness and murder. Lorca was one of the best-known sons of Granada, the very beautiful, very steeply sloping Spanish city where I lived two decades ago. He was murdered under murky circumstances, because a brilliant, gay, left-wing, avant-garde playwright is a bad thing to be under fascism. In another History, he almost certainly visited the Mansus on the night of his death.



Lorca RIP, thanks for ending our run of opera-based patch names. I was going to do one more (ZAUBERFLOTE) but YERMA is the PATCH WHERE CARD PLACEMENT IS FIXED, so I want to end it on a high.

NB that is FIXED, not PERFECT. There's room for further improvement, and I have a list of other QoL issues (yes detective homing) to work through. But card placement has gone from being FSCKED to being SHONKY to being MUCH IMPROVED to being FINE. Thank you all for your patience, bug reports, and feedback.

A quick roundup of the last set of changes:

Fixed a bug where dropping the card while the ghost was moving could leave the card stranded between the grid. - a real head-slap moment, this. A number of people pointed out that sometimes cards ended up off the grid, but it took some debugging time to work out why.
Added some camera angle correction. The game already compensated for the card being above or below the camera when calculating where it drops. (This was the biggest single fix previously.) It also now compensates for the table tilt.

Q. AK, why you tilt table? tilt table look confusing. There even mod to untilt.
A. Dear player, once long ago I agree, but a contract UI designer back in 2018 convince me not so. just make environment look more lively. Four years on I still think he's right. That said:

Turned off lively but confusing card wiggle when dragging cards - there's long been a pseudo-random wiggle on the cards when you move 'em. I did like this but it is needlessly confusing when you're deciding where to put the cards. So I finally turned it off, and I like the cleaner effect.

If I get twenty emails saying the wiggle's disappearance makes the game LITERALLY UNPLAYABLE, I'll put it back in, if I get just one, I'll write a sorrowful reply saying sorry, wiggle dead.

made the grid a bit more insistent - honestly this is too boring to explain
default gridsnap is now 1/2, give it a try - IMO 1/2 gridsnap is the sweet spot. (I haven't forgotten I promised a NO GRIDSNAP option too - still coming.)

Anyway this patch went live on beta yesterday and then again this morning. Then I noticed I'd included the stupidest bug of my entire career. From your side, this was 'GAME CRASHES WHEN I MOVE CARD DROPZONE', which is not a good back of the box feature. From my side this was



which for those of you who don't code means 'not only immediately crash Unity with an infinite loop when this method runs, but do so in a jaw-droppingly obvious way'. My testing is always a little shaky (we're a two-person team and Lottie is busy drawing skill icons) but I don't see how I missed this one. I'm hoping it's some weird build process/source control hiccup and not actual senility. ANYWAY IT'S FIXED NOW SORRY.

Talking of (a) testing (b) Lottie



the Book of Hours Secret Historian's packs are looking good. and Lottie was delighted that she'd found a wide selection of actual 1920s cigarette cards to add to them. but almost too late she realised that not everything that appears on a 1920s cigarette card is appropriate in 2020, and has had to go through them all carefully to make sure we didn't send anyone anything INCREDIBLY RACIST by mistake.

An extra thank you to everyone who suggested naming conventions for subsequent patches. I was tempted by cheese names. I was more tempted by Zulu names. But because of some relevant lorey backgroundy contexty business, I'm going with flowers, and the next patch will be ASPHODEL.

As Dagmar von Nagelburg would say, pip pip, pots of love.

AK

• CARD PLACEMENT - fixed a bug where dropping the card while the ghost was moving could leave the card stranded between the grid.
  
• CARD PLACEMENT - added some camera angle correction. CARD PLACEMENT - made the grid a bit more insistent
  
• CARD PLACEMENT - default gridsnap is now 1/2, give it a try
  
• CARD PLACEMENT - turned off lively but confusing card wiggle when dragging cards.
  
• Console fixes
  
• Fixed crash when a verb was deleted on the cusp of situation execution
  
• Trimmed player log spam

Hullo; contrary to unkind opinion, I'm still alive. Proof:



Any developer knows how important it is to make sure your game is stable going into a major sale, and not to patch it the night before. I'm not any developer, so I dropped two updates yesterday. Fortunately they don't appear to have broken anything important, and they have made some much-requested changes to the card placement mechanism.

Here are the patch notes for both VIOLET and WUTHERING:

• Fix: You no longer need to restart the game to restore CONTINUE to the menu
  
• Fix: $remove command no longer breaks mods
  
• Fix: correctly handling extends as well as inheritance in older mods
  
• Fix: Card ghost no longer disappears when card is removed from an additional slot
  
• MAJOR CARD PLACEMENT CHANGE: the placement position now corrects for the camera. This means the card ghost goes much closer to the card. Many thanks to Genroa, Dylan and others who managed to get this point across to me.
  
• A couple of other minor placement tweaks
  
• Card grid no longer assumes a gap between rows. This may require some fiddling with big existing layouts, sorry, but the feedback over time was clear here.
  
• Slightly better Mansus exit experience
  
• Fixed hilarious bug with multi-select. (yes you can shift-drag to multi-select cards, semi-hidden feature)

This was the hilarious multi-select bug. I slightly regret fixing it, but my support email queue won't.



VIOLET and WUTHERING do place us in a slightly tricky position, in that I've nearly run out of alphabetical opera names. The next two updates, whenever they arrive, will be YERMA and ZAIDE but after that I'll need another update name theme. Suggestions welcome, keepitclassyladiesandgents.

Anyway in the meantime I really am going back to focus on BOOK OF HOURS now, at least if real life will leave me alone for ten minutes. Lottie will chide me for not giving you a wishlist link, so here it is.



and here's the Secret Histories / BOOK OF HOURS box we mentioned last month:



Before I go, a couple of rounds of thanks to a couple of contractors whose names you may see in the credits:

Clocq,a Japanese-speaker who pointed out that big chunks of our Japanese localisation had been garbled and mixed up. Some of them were bits like the Ghoul memories and Dancer marks, so it took quite a while for our Japanese-speaking players to realise it wasn't just me being weird. Clocq put painstaking work into fixing it.

Chelnoque, a long-time modding stalwart who I asked to quote me for a wishlist of the most urgently requested modding framework upgrades - this is where the modding upgrade in TARTUFFE came from. So yes, I am investing actual money in third-party contributions to the modding framework, but Chelnoque then one-upped me by donating his fee to charity. Well done everyone, I guess.

Those who've been keeping track of our updates will already know what this picture is, but it's probably already destined to sell out out so I am literally not going to make it a link. I just like the picture.

This is a smallish patch with a couple of significant hotfixes. The first is the problem that made people think they were losing their saves: you weren't, they're still there, but you needed to restart the game to get at them, which was extremely not ideal, sorry. The second was an issue with the modding upgrades which were breaking a popular mod; props to Chelnoque for getting back quickly with a hotfix.

- Fix: You no longer need to restart the game to restore CONTINUE to the menu
- Fix: $remove command no longer breaks mods
- Fix: correctly handling extends as well as inheritance in older mods
- Fix: Card ghost no longer disappears when card is removed from an additional slot

- Card ghost uses the mouse cursor, not the centre of a blocking card, to determine direction to seek in. This makes, ah, quite a difference to card placement feel.
- Better handling of corrupt save files
- More variety in the menu screen promo blocks
- Fixed Exile content bugs: Velvet, Medusa, Book of Suns (which I thought had been fixed!)\n
- OSX/GOG now works again
- Substantial fixed and upgrades for modding. Many thanks to Chelnoque. More details in MODDING_README
- Animations and images should work correctly in mods
- Options Panel now better supports mod-driven config options (see /testcontent/core/settings/z_mod_config_demo.json)
- More stable modding incompatibility / interoperability
- More modding commands - see MODDING_README and /testcontent/core/settings/mod_ops_demo.json

- Quick fix for silliness with the starting dropzone alignment
- Fixed lots of Japanese loc garbling. Particular thanks to Clocq for their work on this!
- Console slot now allows stackables.
- Fix for insane bug where game became unresponsive when you alt-tabbed out of the Mansus. (I caused this bug.)
- Applied kibble to cat bowl to shut up cat. You don't think that's a bug but then you don't have to listen to this monster.

- Notable token snap improvement (position wasn't updating when your pointer was above a ghost)
- Tokens now drag from the cursor position where you pick 'em up
- Right/double-click to send now goes reliably to closest token, if no window is open
- Book of Suns in EXILE can now be assembled again, again.
- Medusa now gives pentiments again
- Prev and next buttons for notes now show usable usefully again
- A once-stacked token returning to its stack after a window is closed will now merge with that stack
- Corpses now retain more effects from their previous lives (again)