It’s Brent here, and I’m going to be showing off the cats we recently added to the city. Now, technically, there’s no proof there were tons of cats in Justinian-era Constantinople. But we were at least somewhat inspired by the cat-covered streets of modern Istanbul, but as cats have been present since *at least* Ottoman times, and tend to be rather popular among seafaring traders for rat-catching, we figured… why not? Most Kitfox team members have (or love) cats. They’re cute and fun and add a lot of life.

I assume the cat lives here.

Each of the hundreds of cats in the city get a unique name and set of traits to govern their behaviour, separate from human traits. Affectionate cats will try to nuzzle you, Cold Paws (seek out warmth), Irritable and Insane cats will both attack passersby (with additional zoomies added to the latter), some are Hoarders, some are Lazy, etc. And just like humans they have an influence value that affects how they react to you. Many of the available name and trait pairs are also taken from dev team cats, or our published games’ team cats (we had to memorialize the Bay 12 Mascot of Scamps, for example, RIP to a legend).

Right now the cats are probably a bit too chaotic but we’ll probably always want them to be a factor in your improvisation - an ill-timed encounter could ruin your plans to rob a location OR delay a member of city watch that’s on your tail. Getting scratched can make you drop items, so be careful when an irritable cat is around. If you’re really lucky maybe you’ll run into a hoarder cat that’s nabbed a jewelled necklace. Maybe we’ll add ways for you to befriend and persuade them to help you in the future beyond just petting, with perks or skills or good timing, even if you can never quite herd or order them. What kind of behaviours would you like to see in our cats?

This one scratched me when I went to pet it.

Cats are a special kind of resident slot in properties, and tend to spawn around residences and tavernas. Their personality traits dictate quite a bit about how far they tend to wander in their adventures — Lazy cats for example tend to not roam very far. Currently as NPCs don’t have relationships, they also don’t recognize a particular owner or even a roommate, but it’ll be fun to see how their habits and lifestyles develop in parallel to the human NPCs. But you can rest assured we will never allow serious harm to come to these creatures, as they are blessed and protected by the gods (i.e. the designers).

Adding cats has added so much life and reactivity to the city that it’s caused us to revisit some of the ways that the human citizens interact with the player. We love them, so they’re here to stay, and we’re pretty sure you’ll love them too. The future is bright for you if you can learn to take advantage (or bask in the glory) of the Cats of Fortuna.

You can watch the video devlog with some cute footage of the cats here:

-Brent