Now in Early Access:

Caves of Qud is a science fantasy RPG & roguelike epic. It’s set in a far future that’s deeply simulated, richly cultured, and rife with sentient plants.

Now in Early Access.
Full release coming to PC, Linux, and Mac in 2023. More platforms to follow.

A player walks on the Caves of Qud world map and inspects a salt marsh tile.

Come inhabit an exotic world and chisel through a layer cake of thousand-year-old civilizations.

A shrine to an ancient sultan describes an event from her life.

Play the role of a mutant from the salt-spangled jungles of Qud, or play as a true-kin descendant from one of the few remaining eco-domes: the toxic arboreta of Ekuemekiyye, the ice-sheathed arcology of Ibul, or the crustal mortars of Yawningmoon.

All the player characters from Caves of Qud are assembled.

Do anything you can imagine.

  • Dig a tunnel anywhere in the world.
  • Purchase rare books from an albino ape mayor.
  • Contract a fungal infection and grow glowing mushrooms on your hands.
  • Charm a goat into joining you, then give him chain mail and a shotgun to equip.
  • Clone yourself, mind-control the clone, hack off your own limbs, then eat them for sustenance.

A character treats with some robots by a campfire in a mushroom jungle.

“There’s a sense of magnificent history to dredge from its depths.”

-Chris Priestman, Kill Screen

Caves of Qud is one of the best roguelikes in years, packed with evocative prose and featuring a captivating world of arcane secrets to explore.”

-Heather Alexandra, Kotaku

“Narratively, this is one of the most compelling game stories that I’ve seen in a long time.”

-Charlie Hall, Polygon

Caves of Qud has a particular kind of New Wave science fiction imagination that just can’t be beat.”

-Cameron Kunzelman, Paste Magazine

Caves of Qud weaves a handwritten narrative through rich physical, social, and historical simulations. The result is a hybrid handcrafted & procedurally-generated world where you can do just about anything.

  • Assemble your character from over 70 mutations and defects, and 24 castes and kits — outfit yourself with wings, two heads, quills, four arms, flaming hands, or the power to clone yourself; it’s all the character diversity you could want.
  • Explore procedurally-generated regions with some familiar locations — each world is nearly 1 million maps large.
  • Dig through everything — don’t like the wall blocking your way? Dig through it with a pickaxe, or eat through it with your corrosive gas mutation, or melt it to lava. Yes, every wall has a melting point.
  • Hack the limbs off monsters — every monster and NPC is as fully simulated as the player. That means they have levels, skills, equipment, faction allegiances, and body parts. So if you have a mutation that lets you, say, psionically dominate a spider, you can traipse through the world as a spider, laying webs and eating things.
  • Pursue allegiances with over 60 factions — apes, crabs, robots, and highly entropic beings, just to name a few.
  • Follow the plot to Barathrum the Old, a sentient cave bear who leads a sect of tinkers intent on restoring technological splendor to Qud.
  • Learn the lore — there’s a story in every nook, from legendary items with fabled pasts to in-game history books written by plant historians. A novel’s worth of handwritten lore is knit into a procedurally-generated history that’s unique each game.
  • DieCaves of Qud is brutally difficult and deaths are permanent. Don’t worry, though — you can always roll a new character.

Now in Early Access: