Freehold Games has announced today that Caves of Qud is now available on GOG.com and Itch.io! With more than 1,000 overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam, Caves of Qud combines traditional roguelike features with an expansive, exotic, unmatched open-world experience rooted on the chrome steeples and rusted archways of ‘70s science fiction.

A NEW START

If releasing on two new stores wasn’t enough, Freehold Games is also unveiling a massive update today: the Generated Villages & Alternate Starts patch, which adds fully procedurally-generated villages, fully procedurally-generated quests, and – maybe most exciting – new alternatives to the starting location of Joppa. Each village features its own faction, history, architecture, art, relationship with local resources, proverb, signature dish, signature skill, and NPCs. There has never been a better time to dive into the verdant world of Qud.

Brian Bucklew & Jason Grinblat
(Co-Creators, Caves of Qud and Sproggiwood)

“It’s hard to overstate how big this patch is. We’ve been adding features to the game for the last several years – in both small, weekly patches and bigger feature arcs – and this is by far the largest update yet. Every aspect of these new villages is generated, including their own unique histories that are discoverable through various storytelling traditions. They also include their own generated quests as part of a fully dynamic quest generation system we’ve been building for months. Really, this patch is a culmination of all our generative systems work up until this point.”

ABOUT CAVES OF QUD

Caves of Qud is a science fantasy roguelike epic steeped in retrofuturism, deep simulation, and swathes of sentient plants. Come inhabit an exotic world and chisel through a layer cake of thousand-year-old civilizations. Decide: is this a dying earth … or are we on the verge of rebirth?

Who are you? Play the role of a mutant indigenous to the salt-spangled dunes and jungles of Qud, or play a pure-strain descendant from one of the few remaining eco-domes – the toxic arboreta of Ekuemekiyye, the Holy City; the ice-sheathed arcology of Ibul; or the crustal mortars of Yawningmoon.

You arrive at the oasis-hamlet of Joppa, along the far rim of Moghra’yi, the Great Salt Desert. All around you, moisture farmers tend to groves of viridian watervine. There are huts wrought from rock salt and brinestalk. On the horizon, Qud’s jungles strangle chrome steeples and rusted archways to the earth. Further and beyond, the fabled Spindle rises above the fray and pierces the cloud-ribboned sky. You clutch your rifle, or your vibroblade, or your tattered scroll, or your poisonous stinger, or your hypnotized goat. You approach a watervine farmer – he lifts the brim of his straw hat and says, “Live and drink, friend.”

KEY FEATURES

• Assemble your character from over 70 mutations and defects, 24 castes and kits, and dozens of cybernetic implants; outfit yourself with wings, two heads, quills, four arms, flaming hands, or the power to clone yourself: It’s all the character diversity you could want.
• Explore procedurally-generated regions with some familiar locations; each world is nearly one million maps large.
• Dig through everything: Don’t like the wall blocking your way? Dig through it with a pickaxe, eat through it with your corrosive gas mutation – or melt it to lava. Yes, every wall has a melting point.
• Hack the limbs off monsters: Every monster and NPC is as fully simulated as the player. That means they have levels, skills, equipment, faction allegiances, and body parts. So if you have a mutation that lets you, say, psionically dominate a spider, you can traipse through the world as a spider – laying webs and eating things.
• Pursue allegiances with over 60 factions – apes, crabs, robots, and highly entropic beings (just to name a few).
• Follow the plot to Barathrum the Old – a sentient cave bear who leads a sect of tinkers intent on restoring technological splendor to Qud.
• Learn the lore: There’s a story in every nook – from legendary items with storied pasts to in-game history books written by plant historians; a novel’s worth of handwritten lore is knit into a procedurally-generated history that’s different every game.
• Die: Caves of Qud is brutally difficult – and deaths are permanent; don’t worry, though: You can always roll a new character.

PRICING & AVAILABILITY

Caves of Qud is now available on Itch.io for $9.99 and on GOG.com for the sale price of $8.99 (10% off). The game is also on Steam Early Access (Windows, Mac, and Linux) for $9.99. A Freehold Roguelike Bundle – which includes Caves of Qud, Sproggiwood, and the Sproggiwood OST – is also available for $26.97 (10% off all products) as a Steam exclusive.