We 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.


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.


So we started talking about permissive licensing. This is where we ran into a snag. It's the lore - the background, the story, the mysteries - that most attracts people. A lot of you want to write your own answers to the questions posed by Cultist Simulator et al. But we designed a lot of those gaps and mysteries very carefully, and we need to be sure there's a clean distinction between Weather Factory answers, and everyone else's.

Here's what we came up with. There is not only one History, as they say.  The known Secret Histories are five in number. So if there were an unsanctioned, unknown, unlawed Sixth History... it would be your playground.

We've talked to our lawyers and we're finalising the licence details. We'll release the licence next week but basically:

You'll be able to use the Secret Histories setting as a basis for your own TRPG, board game, app, fiction, art commission...and earn money from it, up to a limit of 50K GBP p.a... without needing to check with us... as long as you follow the licence, and in particular use the Sixth History logo to make clear it's not an official Weather Factory project.

That's the tl:dr;  but for God's sake do read the whole license, don't skip bits, if you're planning a project along these lines. (And of course this is meant for small-scale works. If you're thinking of proposing a serious commercial project that may make more than the revenue limit, or if it needs our direct creative involvement, like The Mysterious Package Company's super-deluxe Lady Afterwards, or the Locksmith's Dream, then you'll still need to talk to us, and we don't usually agree more than one of these a year.)

Where's the licence again?

Read it here.

I have other questions!

Come ask 'em on r/weatherfactory on Thursday 1st December at 6PM GMT. This is mainly an opportunity to talk Sixth History but we will inevitably end up talking about all things Cultist Sim, BOOK OF HOURS, merch, game dev etc. Bring snacks and a post-work drink! Or if you're in America and it's therefore early in the day, I don't know, bring porridge.


We're full-time on BOOK OF HOURS right now (launching in June 2023! Go wishlist if you haven't already!) but quality of life Cultist Sim updates will continue (see LONGIFLORUM, our most recent update). We also have a Cultist Sim-specific announcement in the new year that you'll like, though I can only tease you for the moment. So I leave you with...



...and hope to see you at the AMA in December!

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.



Chi is the same cat who appears in this image...



...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 example, when testing your own mod), add \"knock=1\" to config.ini.
- Additional precautions when loading mod-affected saves.

BOORING... NOT. At least half the support requests I get these days are mod-related. Often this happens because a save becomes addicted to mods and dies when the mods are uninstalled. The most frequent culprit is Genroa's excellent Shelves mod. Anyway the only answers I could give were 'talk to the modder' and 'purge your save' and occasionally 'UGH WHY DID I EVER ADD MODDING'. Many of these problems will now go away.

I can't promise you can now add and remove mods with abandon. There is always a risk to after-market work, as anyone who's tried to fit wings to their car will know. In the near future we're going to make it sliiightly harder to add mods which dramatically change functionality - i.e. DLL mods - by requiring installation of a gatekeeper mod which gives stern warnings. It's probably only a matter of time before some villain tries to slip ransomware into a mod, and we'd rather not feel responsible.

- Rites which consume followers will no longer suggest that they can be used to renew Burgeoning or Shattered Risen. Technically they renewed and consumed the Risen, which was legitimate but not very helpful.

This was hilarious, except when it happened.

- HOTFIX: Occasional save incompatibility with the previous version is fixed.\n

I'm very proud of the fact that you can still load a save from the 2018 version of Cultist in the 2022 version of Cultist. I still wake on winter nights sobbing about the save converter I had to write in 2021. Please don't prove me wrong by crashing the game with an old save.

- HOTFIX: Strange and unexpected card presences - seasons, books, and many more - are fixed. For a moment, you were peeking behind the veil of the game's inner workings - the game decks, and they became visible.

A digression. I can't talk too much about BOOK OF HOURS here, because the Steam admins are a bit sterner about flagging cross-promotion these days. But you know that thing with long runs of bad luck in Cultist? Like, you've got a 10% chance of failing a vault run and getting a curse, and it happens six times in a row?

In Book of Hours I've moved away from (digital) dice rolls to (digital) card draws to manage randomness. In other words the runs of bad luck are limited. There's only one critical failure (or whatever) in the deck to draw. I wish I'd done this years ago.

- HOTFIX: Fixed a crash on lore subversion.

We codename our bugs while we're tracking them down. This was CONSUMMATUM.

- MODDING: Mods with empty synopsis no longer crash the game.

"Silence! Oh, well are Death and Sleep and Thou
Three brethren named, the guardians gloomy-winged,
Of one abyss, where life and truth and joy
Are swallowed up."

Nice bit of Tuesday morning Shelley. You're welcome.


- MODDING: Verbs can now have innate aspects (defined as \"aspects\": { \"something\": 1 }).
- MODDING: Verbs can now react to xtriggers - in particular, to transform into a different verb.
Keep in mind that verbs still <b>can't</b> have mutations.

Sneaking a significant one in at the end. This is actually a bit of functionality I wanted for BOOK OF HOURS, where verbs can be things like desks and houses, and you lucky CS modders are getting the benefit.

Let me end with a question.

The Mysterious Package Company's beautifully reimagined edition of The Lady Afterwards is out now!



It builds on our original edition by adding hand-aged clues, a silver cigarette case stuffed with calling cards, an antique magnifying glass and a hardwood "Taurus Express" travelling chest to keep it all in. It's TRULY MAGNIFICENT and includes all of the following:

• The Lady Afterwards Game Runner’s Guide, a ~50 page TRPG scenario set in 1920s Alexandria
  
• The Secret Histories Rulebook, a ~30 page mechanics primer
  
• 18 hand-aged clues, including telegrams, lovers’ notes, photographs and more
  
• An antique golden magnifying glass, to inspect them all
  
• “The Essential Hours” pocket tarot deck of 23 Major Arcana cards
  
• A full 78-card "Tarot of the Hours" deck
  
• Eight customisable character sheets with personalised questionnaires and connections
  
• Eight art deco character pins in silver and gold
  
• A sterling silver cigarette case, including several in-fiction calling cards and clues
  
• A Game Runner’s Journal to keep track of players, game-states and evidence
  
• A beautifully-scented black opium candle to evoke the Invisible Serapeum
  
• A full-colour A3 map of contemporary Alexandria with real 1920s photographs
  
• Two sets of antique TRPG dice in a burlap bag
  
• A year-long 10% discount token for our merch shop and the Locksmith's Dream
  
• Access to a custom-built mood-music playlist of 1920s songs
  
• A full digital edition of The Lady Afterwards worth £30
  
• Housed in a custom hardwood "Taurus Express" travelling chest

Only 1,000 sets are available, each costing $199. They're shipped from Canada, so North Americans - you don't have to worry about international shipping fees for once.


Each edition of MPC x TLA comes with a 10% discount for Locksmith's Dream tickets, apart from one lucky box. That box includes a winning ticket for a totally free stay at our Secret Histories scavenger hunt, worth $2,000. (If you can't attend any of the 2022 / 2023 events, you can opt instead for a free MPC experience of your choice.)

Good luck! We call upon the Flowermaker that it's someone from the Cultist Sim community who wins. 🙏

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

"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..."

We're working with the Mysterious Package Company to create a new, extremely high-end Lady Afterwards edition with MPC-level props and accoutrements!

MPC are the absolute top of the pile when it comes to making beautiful antique physical items. They usually specialise in Lovecraftian stuff (AK and I bought their Hastur experience years ago, and it was amazing), so The Lady Afterwards caught their eye. The MPC edition includes everything that's in our original Lady Afterwards box, but adds an extra layer of high-quality artefact...ry: a custom wooden  chest, hand-aged clues, and a few extras like an antique magnifying glass and silver case with new business cards inside, a Essential Hours and a full Tarot of the Hours deck...

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

"Mirrors glitter at the Cecil, Berbers whisper in the El Bab Cafe, and statues keep their secrets in the cold depths of the bay. Something’s in motion, from the Arab Quarter to the Rue des Soeurs. Somewhere, the Serapeum stirs. The Hours have taken an interest.

Cherchez la femme, the saying goes. But what does the lady look for?"

The Lady Afterwards is a Cultist Simulator TRPG for 2-8 players, set in 1920s Alexandria. It takes place in the world of the Secret Histories, where hidden gods watch over a world of apocalypse, yearning and forbidden arts.

It’s a non-linear, combat-light, story-centric tabletop RPG: an occult Egyptian noir inspired by classics like Chaosium’s Horror on the Orient Express.

Each MPC x TLA box includes:

• The Lady Afterwards Game Runner’s Guide, a ~50 page TRPG scenario set in 1920s Alexandria
  
• The Secret Histories Rulebook, a ~30 page mechanics primer
  
• 18 hand-aged clues, including telegrams, lovers’ notes, photographs and more
  
• “The Essential Hours” pocket tarot deck of 23 Major Arcana cards and a full 78-card "Tarot of the Hours"
  
• Eight customisable character sheets with personalised questionnaires and connections
  
• Eight art deco character pins in silver and gold
  
• A Game Runner’s Journal to keep track of players, game-states and evidence
  
• A beautifully-scented black opium candle to evoke the Invisible Serapeum
  
• A full-colour A3 map of contemporary Alexandria with real 1920s photographs
  
• Two sets of antique TRPG dice in a velvet dice bag
  
• A year-long 10% discount token for our shop
  
• Access to a custom-built mood-music playlist of 1920s songs
  
• A sterling silver cigarette case, incasing several characters' business cards
  
• An antique 1920s magnifying glass
  
• A custom wooden carrying case
  
• A full digital edition of the whole game

The MPC edition costs £180 + shipping and launches at 6PM BST / 10AM PDT on Tuesday 8th November 2022, just under two weeks from now. There's limited stock available, so if the above floats your boat, I highly encourage you to join MPC's Lady Afterwards waitlist to be pinged the moment the game is live.

(For the avoidance of doubt, we're still happily selling the original version of The Lady Afterwards. So if you prefer the original 'cottagecore' concept, that's available too! Regardless, it's incredibly cool to see this lil project that grew out of a pretty bad time in my life become something as gorgeous as this. Thank you, MPC, and HOPE YOU ALL ENJOY IT! ♥)

The expansive gentleman in the picture below is (probably) the naturalist Pehr Kalm:



He was a widely-travelled eighteenth-century Finnish naturalist, and the genus kalmia was named after him:

.

Pehr looks cross in that picture. It might be that his handsome waistcoat is too tight, it might be that the pinecone is spiky, or it might be that the flower named for him was later nicknamed kill-kid. This is less horrible than it sounds, because 'kid' is also a juvenile goat, and kalmia is also nicknamed lamb-kill and sheep-poison. It's stuffed with neurotoxins, is what I'm saying. Don't let your goats near it. Or your kids. If Cultist has taught us anything, it's the unwisdom of putting something in your mouth just cos it looks pretty.

Over to Chelnoque for the patch notes for KALMIA. These are pretty bland, because he's done a lot of work behind the scenes on content import and logging that isn't interesting to write about. We've also just put the LONGIFLORUM release on the beta branch, which is a bit funner, especially in that it makes games more resistant to the notorious Cat Jumped On My Keyboard bug. But I'll post the patch notes for that one when it goes live.

2022.9.k.3 KALMIA

- Several minor typos in slot requirements are fixed.
- Blank credits panel in Russian localisation is fixed.
- HOTFIX: The game started to treat some save files as if they were corrupted. They, in fact, weren't, and this all is now behind us.
- HOTFIX: Newly-spawned verbs no longer snatch a single random card from their birthplace.
- HOTFIX: Newly-spawned verbs no longer snatch a single random card from their birthplace.
- MODDING: Greatly increased the vigilance and informativeness of JSON import logs.

bonus content:

The Monastery of the Fifth Cup box. It's sold out, but there's some lore here that people got excited about.



The Locksmith's Dream. Pictures from the beta!

Have a spooky day, as they say on that one podcast. - AK

Happy Friday, everyone! I hear you like the secret gods known as the Hours, and AK is good at tantalisingly not revealing much about them. So I just wanted to share a quick update on the Lucid Tarot, our upcoming tarot deck for BOOK OF HOURS, whose Major Arcana focuses entirely on the Hours of Cultist Simulator. It's all-new art drawn directly from the saucy, source-y lore of AK's 'CS Design' spreadsheet. You can't get tastier than that.


Bask in the joy of seeing pockets of colour appear out of an inky blackness...



...or enjoy a few close-ups of my favourites below:







...and a final one for those pale-skinned dweebos like myself who pass all signs of melanin and go directly to BURN. We call upon your mercy, Flowermaker!



Each of these cards was designed, drawn and coloured from scratch, because obviously the Hours deserve as much love and attention as they can get. I wanted to put a more human spin on the Hours with this deck, as we already have a lot of gorgeous symbolism in the Tarot of the Hours. But what would you see in the chapel windows of the Church of the Bright Edge, for example? Or what would gaze semi-benevolently down upon the altar of the Temple Unceasing? I'd love for these to actually appear in the windows of Hush House in BOOK OF HOURS, but AK and I spent a lot of time talking production schedules this week and we have quite enough to get on with for that game already...

Minor Arcana cards are more numerous than Major Arcana (56 Minor, 22 Major) but they'll deliberately harken back to cards you've mostly already seen in Cultist Sim. We've shared the 10 of Swords already, for example:



The 10 of Swords represents martyrdom, victimhood and 'bottoming out' - so the Incursus seemed like a pretty good touchpoint for that. You can expect to see a Lucid Tarot reimagining of your Cultist cards in the next set of these cards you see - anyone want to guess which Cultist Sim characters I've chosen for the Page, Knight, Queen and King of Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles...?

Teeny hotfix for lore upgrades

ILEX is not a wild goat. That's 'ibex'. Ilex is holly: a glossy, pretty plant that takes no nonsense from anyone, with glossy, pretty berries that occasionally murder people. And it means Christmas. I'm very fond of holly. I'm also very fond of JUNIPER, because it's what makes gin taste like gin.

Holly was sacred to thunder gods, and juniper to fertility goddesses. So the Thunderskin is the official sponsor of the ILEX patch, which we released today, and the Red Grail is the official sponsor of JUNIPER, which is now on the beta branch. Let's talk about what you can find in each one. Chelnoque wrote the patch notes, and [my comments are in italic brackets]

• Improved performance and display of card timers
  
• Aspects were counted twice for cards in the Verb output.
  
• Upgrading lore sometimes destroyed innocent bystander cards. [So sometimes you might lose a Health when you were trying to upgrade Heart lore. Thanks to Xardis for bringing this one up.]
  
• Incorrect chance of getting an Exultation when preaching with Passion is fixed. [Apparently this had been there since 2019. Now I think about it, I vaguely remember the bug report, and I vaguely remember fixing it, long ago. Maybe I forgot to commit ]
  
• Formula: Elixir Zeboim cannot be consumed in a rite. [Elixir Zeboim, as any ghoul kno, is something you consume that helps you get value out of consuming dead bodies. It's not real. Don't eat dead people. Anyway it was getting used up if you put it in the consumption slot of a rite.]
  
• MODDING: In-game debug panel now allows to manually xtrigger present cards. [When I saw Chelnoque had added this, I grunted appreciatively. If you use the dev console, you might grunt appreciatively too. If it means nothing, think of it as pleasant background noise, like the Shipping Forecast, or a bumblebee in a holly tree.]

• An inability to interact with certain UI elements that occurred in windowed mode at widescreen resolutions is fixed. [This one was actually a Unity bug, and it's fixed by 'updating to the latest version of Unity']
  
• In addition, due to a hiccup in update releases, several DLC-related fixes were declared, but weren't properly present. [And this is just a fancy way of saying 'we didn't run the right scripts'. There's an extra step to updating DLC on Steam that's easy to forget, and we forgot it :)]
  
• When devouring a reckoner, Ligeians no longer consume the content of the Reckoner verb slot. [e.g. if you had just fended off the Reckoner with your Edge lore, the Ligeian would eat the Edge lore too. Ligeians don't play fair, but this was _particularly_ unfair. ]
  
• The game will no longer suggest you relax or negotiate when you're trying to start an operation in Exile.
  
• Buying a profane weapon with another profane weapon does not result in mutual annihilation. [[i]This was an unbelievably obscure and complicated bug that only cropped up in a rare exploit where someone tried to buy a loaded gun with an unloaded gun. I would never have noticed it

[/i]]

MODDING: Mods now can self-define their tags through \"tags\" property in synopsis.json. Consult with MODDING_README.txt in StreamingAssets folder for the details. [This is also of most interest to modders... but it's important to everyone who uses mods too.]

[/list]

[You'll notice there aren't many tags populated here. That's because I didn't realise there's no way for modders to update their own tags via the Steam front end! Anyway, from JUNIPER onwards, they'll be able to set the tags themselves.]

Crikey, we're up to 130+ mods now. You're an inventive crowd.

Dream furiously, all

AK

PS ILEX is sponsored by the Thunderskin, JUNIPER by the Grail, but this post is sponsored by cats. This is the SIXTH BUG REPORT of cats corrupting saves that I've received this year.

(guest-starring Chelnoque again)

- Yet another round of card-handlery tweaks:
- Cards put more effort into finding a landing zone as close to the hover position as possible.
- Card ghosts sometimes ended up in a wrong position (and generally made no sense).
- Cards save their preferred tabletop location between sessions.
- Cards should no longer completely overlap each other - or, at least, should do this significantly less often.
- Cards correctly replace each other in slots.
- Dropzones are now more proficient (and elegant) in their craft.
- Verbs occupy a more modest space on the grid.
- Verbs go straight to the dropzone when spawned.
- Different kinds of camera movement should feel smoother, and are less interruptive towards each other.
- Dragged cards follow the camera movement.
- When a card is moving into a verb slot, it no longer slows down if said verb's windows opens or closes.
- Initial board setup respects the grid.
- Interactions with the Mansus are slightly oiled up.
And also:
- Shattered Risen could sometimes lack Follower aspect.
- Buying a profane weapon with another profane weapon does not result in mutual annihilation.
- Rare freeze on \"Collect All\" is fixed.
- MODDING: Deck effects now support aspect references, as in <i>\"deckeffects\": { \"deckeffects\": \"lantern\" }</i>.",

- New modding feature: configurable local achievements
- Verb windows display cards, aspects and deck draws more cleanly and more clearly.
- Influences are properly removed on a skill upgrade.
- Fixed dropzones sometimes blocking interactions with their contents.
- Cards more reliably seek the nearest verb on a double-click (and on a right-click).
- Purging cards in a completed verb now correctly updates the previewed amount.
- Aspect display in a verb window now updates properly on mutations.
- Various optimizations to make the game more stable in longer sessions.
- Korean text fixes.
- HOTFIX: EXILE borkage
- HOTFIX: it's again possible to create a seventh-level lore fragment through combination
- HOTFIX: a lamentable surplus space in the log was baking Chel's noodle
- HOTFIX: more optimisations when lots of cards are created at once
- HOTFIX: scrollbar adjustments
- HOTFIX: issue with card expulsion to new situations
- HOTFIX'S HOTFIX: an expulsion issue that was introduced in the previous hotfix is fixed
- HOTFIX'S HOTFIX'S HOTFIX: explulsions are truly really fixed this time
- MODDING: mod long description is no longer overwritten on mod re-upload
- MODDING: expulsion filters now can have negative requirements\