Caves of Qud is a science fantasy RPG & roguelike epic. It’s set in a far future that’s deeply simulated, richly cultured, and rife with sentient plants.
1.0 out now!
Full release coming to PC, Linux, and Mac in 2024. More platforms to follow.
Come inhabit an exotic world and chisel through a layer cake of thousand-year-old civilizations.
Play the role of a mutant from the salt-spangled jungles of Qud, or play as a true-kin descendant from one of the few remaining eco-domes: the toxic arboreta of Ekuemekiyye, the ice-sheathed arcology of Ibul, or the crustal mortars of Yawningmoon.
Do anything you can imagine.
- Dig a tunnel anywhere in the world.
- Purchase rare books from an albino ape mayor.
- Contract a fungal infection and grow glowing mushrooms on your hands.
- Charm a goat into joining you, then give him chain mail and a shotgun to equip.
- Clone yourself, mind-control the clone, hack off your own limbs, then eat them for sustenance.
“There’s a sense of magnificent history to dredge from its depths.”
“Caves of Qud is one of the best roguelikes in years, packed with evocative prose and featuring a captivating world of arcane secrets to explore.”
“Narratively, this is one of the most compelling game stories that I’ve seen in a long time.”
“Caves of Qud has a particular kind of New Wave science fiction imagination that just can’t be beat.”
Caves of Qud weaves a handwritten narrative through rich physical, social, and historical simulations. The result is a hybrid handcrafted & procedurally-generated world where you can do just about anything.
- Assemble your character from over 70 mutations and defects, and 24 castes and kits — 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 1 million maps large.
- Dig through everything — don’t like the wall blocking your way? Dig through it with a pickaxe, or 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 fabled 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 unique each game.
- Die — Caves of Qud is brutally difficult and deaths are permanent. Don’t worry, though — you can always roll a new character.
