Playing as a tree
Caves of Qud is getting its first expansion, and you can play as a tree. Diaspora enters early access on December 9, and Freehold Games is releasing it the same way it built the base game: in public, with the community stress-testing it.
“Caves of Qud is an extremely complicated game with many interlocking systems & features and lots of unpredictable, emergent gameplay,” Freehold wrote in its announcement, quoted by Rock Paper Shotgun. “Diaspora will add a whole new layer to that.”
At launch, Diaspora adds playable animals and plants, including cats, dogs and frogs, with new mutations such as claws, muzzles and tails. There are new creatures, “artifacts of disparate cultures”, and roads and rivers generated by “a much more sophisticated set of worldbuilding algorithms”. Freehold says that if you follow a road, there’s a good chance it leads somewhere interesting.
Diaspora adds playable animals and plants, with new mutations such as claws, muzzles and tails. Image: Freehold Games, via Steam.
The 2027 plan is bigger: a questline about “the migrants’ journey into Qud” and a dromad called Je’ome the Bounty, two humanoid factions (the foxen and the snailfolk), more biomes, items, ingredients and diseases, roaming mega-caravans, underground villages and multi-zone dungeons. Updates are planned weekly, or monthly in busier stretches, with a roadmap at launch. A free base-game update lands around the time Diaspora leaves early access.
Diaspora is on Steam now as a wishlist page. The snailfolk, though, are waiting until next year.
