Our 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.




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 & Alexis

- 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.

"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 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 & Alexis

ORACHE, 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 ever

- AK

https://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, {LINK REMOVED}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...

This 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.

There 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 & Lottie

Welcome 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:



(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:


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 <sprite name=forge> 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 on Linux.
- MODDING: Levers (cards that are transferred between playthroughs) can now be defined and modified by JSONs.
- MODDING: 'description_long' in mod synopsis can now be left empty in order to preserve current Workshop mod's description. The game no longer crashes if this property isn't set.

Lottie wants me to say 'wishlist Book of Hours', though if you like Cultist Simulator enough to read all the way down you've probably already wishlisted the sequel. It's an open question whether we'll get a short demo in Next Fest - I lean no, cos there are distractions - but there will be a closed beta in the next coupla months. So let's end as we began with flowers:


(Book of Hours: the Physic Garden at Hush House)


- AK

There 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.)



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.

[You won’t need to download or install Ghirbi to use DLL mods until after our next patch, NEMESIA, but you can [url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2901287611]install him now to save hassle[/url]. 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.