LONGIFLORUM: the Easter lily, the trumpet lily, the lily Aurelian. "Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin" - it was longiflorum that chap was talking about, probably. I didn't grow up rich, but I did grow up in Oxford, and my secondary school had a Latin motto, SICUT LILIUM, 'like the lily'. I never really understood why a school has a motto that incited its students not to work. I tried to use this as a philosophical platform for not doing homework. Consequently the secondary school threw me out and I had to go to a weird boarding school for weird kids. On the upside the headmaster of the weird school lent his copy of Gormenghast and changed the course of my life. I've left out some details but this all approximately happened. Anyway lilium longiflorum is very pretty but also utterly lethal to cats. A couple years back I carelessly brought home a bouquet for Lottie with a couple of longiflora in it. By the time we realised, our hapless cat Chi (aka Chione, like the book in Cultist) had jumped up and coated himself in rust-coloured pollen. Lottie had to wash it off in the bath.
Chi is the same cat who appears in this image...
...which is a good segue to talking about what happened last week. We've been pushing out small releases from beta to live about every two weeks, which is a bloody good pace for a four-year-old game, and we'd got a bit gung-ho because it all went so well. Last week we put out LONGIFLORUM v1 as a reminder of the three basic truths of existence: 1. Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains; 2. Nature is red in tooth and claw; 3 Even well-tested code has bugs. LONGIFLORUM last week was very well-tested (Chel is thorough)... but there were some changes to save code, which is always a pit of barbed wasps... so it wasn't well-tested enough. Consequently we had to roll it back, which itself caused some hiccups. So here it is again, after another week in the shop getting the dents knocked out. What's actually in the patch? - Game no longer crashes when challenged with a corrupted save file. Instead, you are prompted to try restoring a backup. Almost half of the support requests I get are corrupted saves. I think a good 10% of all those are specifically 'a cat jumped on the power button and turned off my game as it was saving'. I'm serious, though I haven't actually run the numbers. I'm ready to claim that almost 5% of all the support requests over the last few months are caused by cats. Anyway there was some code (mine) in there which was supposed to revert to backups but it wasn't working properly. There is some new code (Chel's) in there which works better. - Upon crashing on startup, the game will automatically turn off all enabled mods. If don't want this behaviour (for example, when testing your own mod), add \"knock=1\" to config.ini. - Additional precautions when loading mod-affected saves. BOORING... NOT. At least half the support requests I get these days are mod-related. Often this happens because a save becomes addicted to mods and dies when the mods are uninstalled. The most frequent culprit is Genroa's excellent Shelves mod. Anyway the only answers I could give were 'talk to the modder' and 'purge your save' and occasionally 'UGH WHY DID I EVER ADD MODDING'. Many of these problems will now go away. I can't promise you can now add and remove mods with abandon. There is always a risk to after-market work, as anyone who's tried to fit wings to their car will know. In the near future we're going to make it sliiightly harder to add mods which dramatically change functionality - i.e. DLL mods - by requiring installation of a gatekeeper mod which gives stern warnings. It's probably only a matter of time before some villain tries to slip ransomware into a mod, and we'd rather not feel responsible. - Rites which consume followers will no longer suggest that they can be used to renew Burgeoning or Shattered Risen. Technically they renewed and consumed the Risen, which was legitimate but not very helpful. This was hilarious, except when it happened. - HOTFIX: Occasional save incompatibility with the previous version is fixed.\n I'm very proud of the fact that you can still load a save from the 2018 version of Cultist in the 2022 version of Cultist. I still wake on winter nights sobbing about the save converter I had to write in 2021. Please don't prove me wrong by crashing the game with an old save. - HOTFIX: Strange and unexpected card presences - seasons, books, and many more - are fixed. For a moment, you were peeking behind the veil of the game's inner workings - the game decks, and they became visible. A digression. I can't talk too much about BOOK OF HOURS here, because the Steam admins are a bit sterner about flagging cross-promotion these days. But you know that thing with long runs of bad luck in Cultist? Like, you've got a 10% chance of failing a vault run and getting a curse, and it happens six times in a row? In Book of Hours I've moved away from (digital) dice rolls to (digital) card draws to manage randomness. In other words the runs of bad luck are limited. There's only one critical failure (or whatever) in the deck to draw. I wish I'd done this years ago. - HOTFIX: Fixed a crash on lore subversion. We codename our bugs while we're tracking them down. This was CONSUMMATUM. - MODDING: Mods with empty synopsis no longer crash the game. "Silence! Oh, well are Death and Sleep and Thou Three brethren named, the guardians gloomy-winged, Of one abyss, where life and truth and joy Are swallowed up." Nice bit of Tuesday morning Shelley. You're welcome. - MODDING: Verbs can now have innate aspects (defined as \"aspects\": { \"something\": 1 }). - MODDING: Verbs can now react to xtriggers - in particular, to transform into a different verb. Keep in mind that verbs still can't have mutations. Sneaking a significant one in at the end. This is actually a bit of functionality I wanted for BOOK OF HOURS, where verbs can be things like desks and houses, and you lucky CS modders are getting the benefit. Let me end with a question.