This week, we're introducing two new feature arcs that have been in development for a few months. The first is the Journal. As you play Caves of Qud, you accumulate a bounty of knowledge. We added a journal that tracks important locations you discover, gossip and lore you come across, historical snippets you learn about ancient sultans, and your character’s chronology. You can also add your own notes to the journal and keep track of interesting places on the world map.
The second is the Water Ritual. The reputation system lets you befriend any of Qud’s sixty plus factions by treating with or slaying faction leaders. We expanded the rewards for earning high reputation and gave more cultural texture to the process by adding the water ritual, a custom based on sharing precious fresh water with a faction leader to secure a bond with their kinfolk. When you engage in the water ritual with a faction leader, you can spend reputation to learn secrets that get logged in your journal, earn rewards specific to that faction, or recruit the leader to your party.
The details are below.
- The journal has five tabs.
- Locations.
- The locations tab lists locations you learn about in game, categorized by type.
- When you learn a new location, it'll appear in this tab. You can learn locations by finding them yourself or by learning about them via another method, like the water ritual.
- When you go to the world map, there's a marker on the worldmap tile that's home to the location. The description of the worldmap tile includes all the location notes it contains.
- The alt display on the worldmap shows an alternate icon for locations with notes.
- You can toggle off the worldmap markers for a category by hitting Tab on the Locations tab.
- When you enter into a category, you see all the locations of that category and their distance in parasangs to the nearest landmark. 1 parasang = 1 worldmap tile.
- You can hit Tab or Space on a specific location to track it on the worldmap. When a location is tracked, it appears green and flashing.
- You can enter your own notes on the Locations tab by typing +. Your notes appear under the Miscellaneous category.
- You can delete notes with -.
- Gossip and Lore. Currently, this tab contains any gossip you learn through the course of the game. Gossip is a type of secret that you can learn during the water ritual. See notes on the water ritual below.
- Sultan Histories. When you reveal a secret about a sultan, it appears in this tab categorized by the sultan's name. As you reveal more secrets, they'll appear in chronological order.
- Chronology. This tab tracks the narrative of your character's life. This is the same chronology that appears in your death summary. You can add or deleted player-added entries by typing + or -.
- General Notes. Use this tab to add any additional notes you'd like. Example: "I hate the crab."
- Locations.
- As part of the conversion of character knowledge to journal entries, we refactored world generation and the location discovery process. When you discover a special location, such as a ruined site, historic site, goatfolk village, lair, merchant, pig farm, super secret location, etc, it'll be added to your journal now.
- If you descend from the worldmap to a tile with a location note, you have the option to descend directly to that location.
- Added procedurally-generated names for goatfolk villages and ruined sites.
- You begin the water ritual through conversation with a faction leader. You'll know faction leaders by the backstory relationships they have with other factions when you look at them.
- You start the ritual by sharing 1 dram of (usually) water with the faction leader. If you do, you gain 100 reputation with the leader's faction, and you gain or lose reputation with factions that like or dislike the leader, respectively.
- Once you're engaged in the water ritual, you have several options. Here are some of the common ones.
- Share a secret.
- Depending on the types of secrets this faction is interested in, you may be able to share a secret with the leader. Check out the right column of the Reputation screen to see what types of secrets each faction is interested in trading. Potentially sharable secrets include anything in the Locations, Gossip and Lore, or Sultan Histories tabs of your journal. If a leader is interested in your secrets, you'll get a choice of a few to share. If you share one, you get reputation with the faction leader. Each leader only has a certain amount of bonus reputation they can give you toward their faction.
- You can only share each secret once. Once you do, it's out in the world.
- You can't share a secret with the faction you learned it from. Who you learned each secret from and who you shared it with are listed in your journal.
- Learn a secret. The leader shares a secret with you. The type of secret depends on the faction.
- Share gossip. Factions tend to want to hear gossip about themselves. If you have some, they'll reward you with extra reputation.
- Learn a skill. Faction leaders can teach certain skills in exchange for reputation.
- Join the party. In exchange for a lot of rep, most leaders are willing to join your party.
- Special (oooo). Some factions have special rewards.
- Share a secret.
- Added a new skill: Customs & Folklore.
- Tactful (150 sp, 19 int): Whenever you start the water ritual with a new creature, you get an extra 25 reputation.
- Trash Divining (150 sp, 21 int): Whenever you rifle through trash, there's a 5% chance you piece together clues and discover a random secret.
- Lowered starting reputation with the villagers of Joppa and Fellowship of Wardens.
- Changed the logic for finding directions. Now, only humanoid creatures can give you directions if you're lost.
- Fixed an issue with the new input manager not detecting gamepad stick x-axis movement properly.
- Fixed an OSX launch issue.
- Fixed a rare exception instantiating Sheba Hagadias.