Weather Factory

Cultist Simulator Updates you say? Shiny fixes you scream unnecessarily?

That’s right, we have some spicy info to drop on Version 2019.5.a.1 of Cultist Simulator. That’s not even including the big exciting reveal at the end of the month, but ssshhh for now.

Research Update!

The most important thing you may notice is in relation to Research!

We’ve just released a major, long-promised change to the Research mechanics – the ones that allow you to upgrade Lore to the next level, or subvert it to different types. As a refresher, this is a feature that was going to go into Christopher’s Build in January, except that the New Game + Apostle content ate Christopher’s Build.

Research was one of the earlier mechanics in Cultist, and we’ve never really been happy with it. The way it used to work – you matched a Lore fragment with another type to upgrade it, or a different type to subvert it, and then you watched the Study timer tick round, asking you for Glimmering or Erudition or Reason at random. If you fed it what it wanted, the Research succeeded. Hurrah!

This was a problem because it required a lot of care and feeding, it took a chunk of time, and it was hard to plan for – especially because Glimmering and Erudition decay. It also meant that upgrading Edge lore and upgrading Grail lore worked pretty much the same way.

Here’s how it works now:

(1) Every lore fragment has one or more challenges you need to solve in order to upgrade it. So a Practical challenge means you need to risk your own Health, or use a Prisoner. A Grim challenge means you might need to provide Dread (which might breed) or use the Silent Intensity top-level Reason skill, or use an HQ with a Pit. An Obsessive Research challenge means you need an HQ with a Library; or the Never-No skill; or you need to risk a Reason which might be damaged. There’s always more than one way to solve a challenge.

(2) The challenges now suit the lore types! So Winter and Edge lore tends to involve Grim challenges, but Lantern lore might involve Paradoxical or Illumination challenges.

(3) You can stop a complex research process halfway through, with just some of the challenges solved, so you can come back to it later. Handy when you really need that Study verb for something else.

Finally, you might have noticed that both Skills and HQs are involved in the research mechanic, because this change is what we were leading up to. So high-end Reason and Passion skills now finally have a proper use, and swapping HQs is now a lot more than just flavour.

(Note: There’s a nuisance issue right now with card stacking around the new mechanics, but we’re working on that.) Thank you as always for your belief!