Hooray! You can now 'voluntarily amputate your own limbs' in the last major update before full release for the best roguelike out there

pcgamer.com:

I keep Caves of Qud and Dwarf Fortress in the same mental filing cabinet. Both consist of a very thin layer of graphics (though thicker now in Dwarf Fortress' case) spread atop a fathomless clockwork of interlocking gameplay systems and strange simulations. They are, if you ask me, two of the best and most impressive games ever made, and now Qud has gotten even wider, deeper, and weirder.

Qud's Creatures of the 7th Plague update hit today, bringing with it a new leg of the main quest, a UI rework, new creatures, new effects, and native gamepad and Steam Deck support. Developer Freehold describes it as a «year-long patch,» and it's set to be the game's «last major update» before the makers switch gears to focus entirely on the game's long-awaited 1.0 release set for 2024.

It's a big one, as you can probably surmise from the key features I just rattled off, but those don't really do it justice. I'll put the full patch notes below, but for now you should be aware that those new creatures I mentioned include late-game, pilotable mechs. That's not just a new kind of vehicle or something that the devs have chucked in, it's a full-on new system, with «special mechanics for infiltrating piloted mecha,» and all sorts of mech-related new mechanics and foibles.

Alongside that, we've got a grappling gun, a much more intelligible abilities screen, an «updated dream tortoise preset,» and—this one's my favourite—a revamped First Aid skill tree, which has been renamed Physic and will let you «voluntarily amputate your own limbs» as well as the limbs of your companions. Every game should have this.

So Caves of Qud is still great, in essence, and this seems like a fantastic final morsel before Freehold sets out on the road to 1.0. If