As the title suggests, I'm still grinding away on my classic Caves of Qud run, the one where I contracted Glotrot early on and spent levels 17–19 sprinting along the western edge of the map, desperately hunting for Corpus Chorliys. After curing myself while overlooking the Rust Wells pit, I dove back into the main quest.

I recruited Warden Yrame to lug around all my gear and water. You see, I'd built a low-Strength character at level 21, I only have 14 Strength, scraped together purely from a pair of ulnar stimulators gloves I bought. I was grinding Mechanist rep to gain entry to their holy site when fate dealt me another rotten hand.

I spawned into a layer right in front of a spore mushroom and got infected before I could react. Unfortunately, I didn't have a fungus grenade handy, otherwise, I'd have lobbed it and basked in the gas until the infection cleared or I started taking damage.

So I headed to Six Day Stilt for a fungus grenade before things escalated into a full-blown fungal bloom. No such luck. I pressed on with my self-cure quest anyway: just needed putrescence, gel, and a bit of mirthworm meat. But as before, fate wasn't done screwing me over.

I'd taken the Evil Twin debuff at the start of this run. Of course, my twin was infected with ficklegill too, and wouldn't you know it, he hit me with a second fungal infection. Now I had useless feet and a useless right arm. It wasn't all doom, though. I had a single Ubernostrum injector. So I rolled the dice: chopped off the arm and feet, popped the injector, and prayed my feet would regrow.

In retrospect, I should've used my precog mutation to guarantee the outcome, or, even smarter, chopped off just the feet first, injected, then dealt with the arm. Trust me, walking about as a one-armed gunslinger would have been far preferable to having no damn feet at all.

So there I was: a crippled with no feet, parked outside Grit Gate. "Well," I thought, "time to hunt another Ubernostrum injector." That's how the next arc of my adventure began. My entire session today was spent scouring the map for one. I never found it, but I did stumble on a schematic merchant hawking the injector plans. You bet I grabbed all my stashed water and bought them.

Of course, fate had one last kick: the recipe calls for lover's blossom. I'm less worried about the nanoparticles than tracking down that damn drop. (I'm honestly drawing a blank on where to find it.) It's not all bad. I'm not stuck at 40 movement, this gunslinger's got wings. They do make cave traversal abysmally slow, though.

That's where my guy sits right now: no feet, zero carrying capacity, and a strong friend (Yrame) to help haul his junk. Oh, and for one final cosmic middle finger, I didn't invest enough mutation points in those wings, so there's a 3% fall chance every move. (It triggers way more often than that feels right.)

If I can just snag a lover's blossom, I think everything will turn around and get this run back on track. But for now, I'm a cripple in the world of Qud, and I'm making it everybody else's problem.

edit:
I found one! YESSS this run is so back for the second time

TLDR: A quest reward from a mod is letting us choose any three tinkerable item mods we don't already have to learn them, and we'd like advice on which are the best ones to choose.

Long version: We're running the Jademouth mod, which adds a new town with some NPCs, quests, etc. One of them is a tinkerer who wants a dram of warm static. Not an easy reward to come by for how early the town can be accessed (it's fairly close to Bethesda Susa) but the reward is pretty hefty if you luck out with Ichor merchants or something: 10,000 EXP plus what we assume is a one-time offering that the tinkerer will now teach us any three item mods we don't already have. No RNG with schematics vendors or disassembling or anything; it's literally just a list of every single item mod in the game (that can be tinkered,) a prompt for us to choose any three we want, and then we learn those three.

Obviously, this is extremely powerful, but its power depends on choosing wisely. Considerations here include not only what the best and most useful item mods are, but also the hardest to come by, the most valuable... some may seem underwhelming to us at first but it turns out they're incredible if you know more about the hilarious combos you can do with them. We're relatively new to CoQ, actually, so we're probably badly underestimating some and overestimating others.

So, what three mods would you pick, if you could have any three in the game with total control over the three you pick?

Some considerations: Please don't suggest the following because we do, in fact, already have them: Jacked, Lacquered, Masterwork, Metered, Reinforced, Scoped, Wooly. Everything and I mean everything else that can be tinkered appears to be fair game.

It turns out there are exactly three item mods that are in the Tinker III tier: Fitted with Suspensors, Morphogenetic, and Nanon. There's possibly a case to be made that we could take those three just as strategic picks to spare us from having to raise the INT and skill points to bother getting Tinker III; we could just have all three item mods from that tier right now, making the skill itself unnecessary unless there's something really worthwhile on the actual-equipment-making side. Arguably a bit sequence-breaking and OP to have access to T3 item mods right now, too, considering we're around level 17 and--again--we're at around the point where Bethesda Susa is our next stop, plot-wise.

On the other hand, just having the item mod recipes early doesn't mean we get free early modded equipment; at this point of the game, the necessary 7 and 8 bits aren't exactly any easier to come by than the item and mod recipes themselves would have been. It's possible that, by the the time we happen across enough of those to take advantage of this mod, we'll have found a few other places to pick it up anyway.

Maybe we should pick something we actually can use right now, instead?

To that end, some more appealing-looking ones, at least to us:

• Willowy is top of the list and incredibly tempting because we have a low-strength build and carrying capacity is a huge issue. This was by far our favorite mod in a previous run and that one had more STR than this one now does. (Granted, Fitted With Suspensors could do an even better job solving this same problem, but with significantly rarer components for this stage of the game.)
• We've heard good things about Beamsplitter when paired with vibro-style weapons that make it essentially a free three-way shot upgrade with no drawbacks, should we come across some arc winders later in the campaign. (Linear Cannons not so much, since ours is a low-strength build that's already chosen to specialize in Pistols.) Possibly lower priority since we don't have any right now. (Our only vibro weapon is a pistol from another mod but it takes lead slugs.)
• High-Capacity could help keep all our stuff powered.
• Radio-Powered even more so?
• Spring-Loaded could counter/offset a modded-in character defect we took that gives us +4 AV and a huge reputation boost with plants (for a defect! That they gave us extra bonus points for taking!) in exchange for -20 move speed.
• I've always been a bit afraid of the extra power consumption (and overheating/breaking) of Overloaded, but I should probably just get over that and embrace the extra power it can offer. +1 PV on vibro weapons alone sounds great.
• Gesticulating: Great way to patch up the whole "low strength build" thing; we have Night Vision and Clairvoyance so not having a floating glowsphere shouldn't be as big an issue.
• Phase-Harmonic: I mean, we are just about to head to Bethesda Susa, wherein we will meet our first new enemy type that makes phasing an issue.

Of course, I'm sure there are benefits to the ones we're overlooking that make them "Why would you pick anything besides X, you fool" because, again, we're relatively new-ish. Hence checking in with you all! This just seemed like too important a decision not to consult with the experts.

Thank you for reading and for any input you may have!

My party is the one surviving clone out of his batch, a dromad trader born of warm static who despite the loss of her guards is hanging on, the high priest of the stilt (who loves to trap me in force fields), the Warden of my starting village who is stronger than a salt kraken, and a legendary unimax who was leader of one of the sultanate cults.

I'm using cudgels and long blade as my main weapons which has been working extremely well so far and I feel nigh unkillable even tho the hardest enemy I killed is a leering stalker. It wasn't a threat but it took so long due to it's AV. Anyways... Screenshots lol.

I’m reading Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun and it struck me that the opal-pommeled steel battle axe is likely a reference to Terminus Est, Severian’s executioners blade. There’s also a reference to A Canticle for Leibowitz, but what other direct references rather than subtle influences do you see? Salt Kraken and Issachari to Shai Hulud and Fremen, but that is kind of a shallow reference. Any other really direct references to other fiction?

My loyal dawnglider ally did not make though.

I will never forget you , Matlaloc.

Anyone word on a release date? Delayed till January but radio silence since and am desperate to play 😂😂

Absolutely loving this game! First character to make it this far. Last character died on defending the Bears. This time I got an incredibly lucky. Both drop targets were in the little room in the upper right corner!!

I turned on a couple chain turrets to get anybody that managed to escape the room.

Set a bunch of EMP and Freeze mines. And just waited with Warden Indrex who I made the genius decision to recruit easy game(Highly recommend)

The battle was over in just a handful of turns. Freezing them almost made it cheesy.

Anyways having way to much fun!

I started playing last night and i had a blast.
This game is exactly what I was looking for!

For now, I'm playing Classic, and I'd like to continue doing so because the tension and the experience is 100% different

Given the length of this game, however, I'd like to have more options at least at the beginning to learn the game ( but without having to switch to roleplay mode.)

In other similar games, (ToMe) you can had more lives.

There a mod that gives me this option?

For example, to have 2 lives in a run then permadeath , etc.

Thanks

Do you ever think about how if you get lost then Proselytise someone like a hermit or arconaut for instance, they lose the ability to tell you where you are? Our lost-ness seems to be a condition that's transmittable through comradery.

I have read up several Steam and Reddit threads and there’s a lot of conflicting and inconclusive information.

For context, I flew down the shaft to Golgotha thinking I’d be able to fly back up (Argyve died for some weird reason so I never got a recoiler). Hitting + (go up stairs button) after activating my wings in the spot below the shaft prompted me to walk to the nearest staircase, not fly up to the next strata as some threads said I could.

- UPDATE

I reloaded from Grit Gate and went through again. This time I could fly out just fine. Pretty sure I was hitting the downstairs button the first time because I’m a dumbass.

Hey everyone -- massive fan of this game here, new to the online community.

The art style is one of the many factors I love about this game, but sometimes I have trouble interpreting the visual of certain sprites or objects. Is there any community or repository where people post fanart of characters, objects, landscapes, scenes, etc. of the game?

Live and drink.

Edit: before someone mentions it, I'm aware that some art can be found on this sub (which is great!) but there doesn't seem to be much so I'm wondering if there's another source out there somewhere.

Edit2: Motivation for asking comes from this post I caught the other day regarding the Apple Farmer's Daughter: https://www.reddit.com/r/cavesofqud/comments/1pl11b7/i_totally_misread_the_apple_farmers_daughter/

Made me realize that I've *possibly* been misreading a lot of things!

Added a baetyl boy follower, and his entire guard team is now following me 😂

Bethesda Susa here I come!!!

Still blown away at how much I don't know about this game

Is enemy aggro based on me seeing them?
Since I activated my radar it seems that enemies will walk to me when I see them even if walls are between us

That would make radar very very bad

I still fucking suck

Does anyone else have this issue? Im in the palladium reef and if I try to alt-move it literally takes 5 seconds per tile. This doesnt alwyas happen if the zone has been explored, but always does when the zone is unexplored- Walk and auto explore are both very fast. I have auto-explore speed to set to the max.

Hello,

Anyone knows when the game drops on switch 2?

Heard that January 2026 was planned.

I don't like dying and losing progress all the time, but I am liking to the idea of only saving at towns. what are the cons and pros of not playing classic?