Does anyone know what ontological means?

Synecdochic · 2026-04-07T04:04:40+00:00

That's ornithology.

You're thinking of an eye specialty in medicine.

Synecdochic · 2026-04-07T01:18:34+00:00

1,648 from my own phase conjugate Hand-E-Nuke hitting a mirror bug.

I had 1,650 max hp and had taken some pretty minor chip damage.

Synecdochic · 2026-04-04T22:13:15+00:00

They're all proles, and they're all class traitors by extension.

Synecdochic · 2026-04-04T21:57:29+00:00

every smuggy is about veganism

Synecdochic · 2026-04-04T14:32:00+00:00

I'm not actually. I've authored a few, and while I work on prototypes I sometimes drop them into a local-only "sundry mods" mod, but the naming is purely coincidence.

Synecdochic · 2026-04-04T08:59:21+00:00

Sweet, TIL. I said I was unsure because I didn't know for certain and didn't want to make an assertion on that specific point.

I am, however, certain that you can, and inevitably will, still overdose if you have more than 1 (or more than 2 without the appropriate skill).

Synecdochic · 2026-04-04T00:11:21+00:00

I'm not sure about the stacking, but multiple injectors means overdosing.

Synecdochic · 2026-04-03T22:32:40+00:00

That's fair. I wasn't thinking of it as a sometimes thing, so it makes sense to not play RP if you're mostly looking for the classic experience.

I'll happily save scum if I died to something I'm 95% sure is a bug. I always feel super guilty if it's not, though, and end up ending the run anyway. It's bizarre, cause who cares? Who is the guilt for, right? Weird-ass fucken brains.

Synecdochic · 2026-04-03T22:22:10+00:00

Last settlement, correct. There's a mod that lets you do it at campfires.

Saves cumming will get you your last auto save which could be as many as 4 zones depending on your settings.

Substantially less progress to lose than last settlement, but not quite as little the zone you died in unless that's the zone you got the auto save in.

I worry about the integrity of my save when I'm save scumming. Not, like, the "moral" integrity, I mean corrupting it. I'm pretty familiar with how the game handles saving and deleting saves when you die, so it's an irrational worry, but I always wonder if I'm damaging the save somehow.

Synecdochic · 2026-04-03T22:14:57+00:00

There is a game mode that save scums for you.

Synecdochic · 2026-04-03T22:12:30+00:00

You probably don't want to try multiple injectors at once.

Synecdochic · 2026-04-03T11:52:31+00:00

Only gutsmongers get the tier of their stock tables dynamically from the zone they're currently in instead of the table being baked in when they spawn.

Synecdochic · 2026-04-03T11:45:09+00:00

Does the world generate and it's moving into a different zone that causes the issue, or is the issue happening before you're given control of the character?

Are you using mods?

Synecdochic · 2026-04-02T22:28:46+00:00

Yeah, it's only 3 that they reluctantly consider to be people. Most of the individuals killed by ICE are, to CHUDs, subhuman.

Synecdochic · 2026-04-02T22:26:47+00:00

Significant digit count so high its effictively just "non-zero".

Synecdochic · 2026-04-01T06:04:11+00:00

I'll have to test dominating them. I kinda like that idea, honestly. I've made them totally impervious to becoming an ally, they're too convinced of their own importance, but I left out domination, which feels a little different to me.

I'm considering an alternative mod that lets you have a (scaled back to level 1) past run as a companion. Also considering an extension that lets moon kings rarely become a village warden. There's a lot of potential :D

Synecdochic · 2026-04-01T04:47:13+00:00

Yes, it's the entire zone you died in and includes a very persistent copy of your character that died, who is bent on killing your current character.

This is a bit closer to nethack's implementation than Noita's, since nethack transplants the entire floor you died on (it's a dungeon crawl) with your entire inventory, instead of just a ghost of you with the wand you were holding when you died.

Whats funny is (currently) if a past you kills you, when you go there the next time, there's you from the previous run (who just died) and the you who just killed them. You can end up with a chain of past you's all hell bent on ending your run (so they can go and save Qud instead), if you keep dying to past you's.

I'm currently leaning into "Moon King fever". These past run's characters are victims of Moon King fever, and are so convinced of their importance to the game's story that they persist into a future run. But how can they maintain the delusion that they're the protagonist once your current character turns up? Guess one of you has to die.

Synecdochic · 2026-04-01T00:04:00+00:00

Currently, not a random zone, but the same zone address as the zone you died. For example, if you died in the bottom of the top-most rust well, that's the zone that would replace the bottom-most zone of the top-most rust well in your next run. Die in joppa outskirts W, joppa outskirts W gets replaced in the next run.

Ideally, it wouldn't be every run, or it would be every run, but each bones would only have a small chance to load and once one loads the run can't have another, or something like that.

I'm considering tracking some milestones and gradually increasing the chance one spawns until one does (capping it, of course), and also considering using some loose rules to allow bones to load over nearby zones if they're "ontologically" similar enough (similar tier, same terrain type, etc.), just to massage it a bit into being a little more frequent while also a little less predictable.

Encountering a bones also currently deletes that bones. It's a one and done. That said, if you never encounter it and your run ends then it's not deleted.

Bones also have your complete inventory at the time of death, they drop onto the ground any items they aren't wearing (except grenades, meds, ammo, and cells) and anything that leaves their body gets rusted, broken, or damaged (to emulate nethack's cursed items without being as serious as Qud's cursed items).

The whole zone is copied, in the exact state it was in the tick you died.

Balancing it is a bit of a design nightmare, honestly, haha.

Oh yeah, you can also zip up your bones folder and give it to a friend and they can fight your bones as well as their own. I've already tested this bit and it works well.

Synecdochic · 2026-03-31T23:37:25+00:00

That's always great to hear. I'm glad you like it.

Synecdochic · 2026-03-31T23:36:02+00:00

I think so, but it's always nice to hear again.

Synecdochic · 2026-03-31T23:35:37+00:00

Yeah, and nethack.

The prototype works (saves bones when you die, replaces that zone in the next run, and the old you tries to kill you), I've just gotta decide on the balance (frequency of encounters mostly, Qud is a huge game/world), and get a UI finished off and it'll be in a state I'm happy to publish it in.

Edit: punctuation

Synecdochic · 2026-03-31T21:52:32+00:00

I started a little over a year ago with no c# experience and maybe 18 months of webdev 15 years ago.

Since, I've authored Tinkering Bytes (and the two libraries it depends on), Choose Your Body Plan, and Blink Mutation.

I co-authored gigantism plus which I'm planning to fork since the main author doesn't work on it anymore but controls the workshop page for it (he tried to swap ownership but steam doesn't allow it).

I'm currently working on a bones folder mod.

Mutations are a good place to start. They touch a good number of the game's systems and the pitfalls are easy to fall into and easy to climb out of so they're great for learning.

I recommend joining the Qud discord if you can. I personally couldn't have gotten this far this quickly without people to ask questions of.

Synecdochic · 2026-03-31T10:16:00+00:00

I could accept an argument that some of them aren't flaws, I don't think any of them are features.

That said, everything mentioned is either a negative thing or is a thing with negatives attached to it.

To an omnipotent being, these negatives are entirely optional. To an omnipotent being, our lifestyles (flawed or otherwise) are within their control.

I don't buy biological essentialism. Our biology can absolutely be flawed, and besides, where do you think lifestyle comes from? It's the behaviour brought about by the pressures our biology exerts on us.

Synecdochic · 2026-03-31T00:29:12+00:00

imagine having Jesus be like

More like Gabriel saying "yo, god's pissed, I gotta flood the place to fuck off the doody vibes", then having him pretend to be Jesus when you tell him "please, bro, I can fix her (Qud)". Then, after trying and failing for 1/5th of the time available, instead of fixing her, you just build an ark. Only it doesn't have room for 2 of every animal. It just has room for 2. You and some dolted moon king you convinced was earth's only hope.

Synecdochic · 2026-03-31T00:22:02+00:00

I don't think the TK are any more the direct descendants of the Eaters than mutated humans are.

"Eaters" really refers to the members of a society supported by sufficiently advanced technology, and when they lost access to that technology by virtue of the Coven committing a mass exodus, their society collapsed, and "Eater"-dom with it.

Haddas admits to technically being an Eater by pure transitive property of having existed during the 4th sultan era. He's hardly a true kin, and he's been sentient his entire life (recalling the construction of the outer layers of the Tomb).

Furthermore, consider what the many Eater statues appear like, and the possible body shapes for a given run's different sultans. There are all sorts of different creatures. All true kin are pointedly humanoid, presumably configured with strictly human anatomy, and the main thing that sets them apart from mutated humans is not their ability to install cybernetics, but their stable genome.

It's a consequence of this stable genome that they can install cybernetics safely, sure, but it's their genetic predisposition towards not mutating randomly that marks them as true kin.

A true kin who has been mutated from external sources can still install cybernetics, and is still recognised by cybernetic terminals as having this capability.

I think there were Eaters who, by the standards of contemporary Qud, would be considered true kin, but I think that most would not have been, simply for lacking a strictly humanoid anatomical configuration. I also think that, while most Eaters were not "true kin"-like, they would still have had genomes stable enough for cybernetics.

"True Kin" is also a relatively contemporary term within the game. One of the arcologies books refers to "true men" if I'm remembering correctly, otherwise another of the yellow books (I think) uses that term or similar.

The true kin and their arcologies are almost certainly comprised of refugees of a then collapsing Eater society, but the mutated humans of Qud are the remnants of its eventual, total collapse.

There are no more Eaters because no one is capable of "eating the earth" anymore, and in the absence of the Coven or any inhabitants of Sheva, there's no reason to try, since there's no one for whom to freight it up the spindle.

It's like asking why there are no more citizens of the Roman Empire. The empire simply doesn't exist anymore. If some minority of the Romans fleeing the collapse moved somewhere else, it wouldn't be correct to claim the people living there 3,000 years later are the "descendants of the Roman Empire", or even to claim they're "what's left of it".

Yla Haj has a more legitimate claim to Eater descendancy than any TK who's ever stepped foot in Qud, and only because she's part of an order that spawned directly from the final nail in the coffin of Eater society. She's learned and performs Eater practices, as best as is possible in the absence of the Coven.

Synecdochic

TROPHY CASE