Caves of Qud's New Expansion Lets You Play as a Tree

Ever wanted to start a roguelike run as a sentient tree? Well, your oddly specific dream is about to come true. Caves of Qud, the delightfully weird science-fantasy roguelike we named best of 2024, is getting an expansion called Diaspora, and it's bringing playable plants and animals to the mix.

Diaspora hits early access on Steam on December 9. According to publisher Kitfox, it "includes several new feature arcs centered around the influx of riotous life and culture into marsh-moated ruins of Qud." The headline act? You can now begin a playthrough as a mutated animal or plant. That means starting life as a tree and mutating into a man—or just becoming an increasingly bizarre tree with wings and a scorpion tail. The choice is yours.

Now, Qud veterans might point out that animal- and plant-themed mutations already exist. True, but before you had to start as a human and mutate into beast- or plant-form. Diaspora flips that around, offering a beautiful symmetry: start as a tree, become a man. Or, you know, a progressively weirder tree. The expansion also adds new mutant stocks and expands the catalog of potential player mutations.

But that's not all. Diaspora seeds new creatures and artifacts throughout Qud, each bringing their own exciting forms of existential peril. The camelfolk trade caravans are getting some love too—their saltback tortoise steeds will be mountable for the first time. Because who doesn't want to ride a giant tortoise?

Since this is an early access launch, those are just the initial offerings. Over the course of about a year, the developers plan to add a new multi-step questline, new factions and underground villages, roaming seasonal mega-caravans, more items, creatures, mutant stocks, and—take a deep breath—new fungal infections. If that doesn't sound exciting, you've clearly never hosted a sentient skin infection of tiny mouths that occasionally harmonizes into sensible speech to reveal a secret about the world.

So, will you be embracing your inner tree when Diaspora launches on December 9? Let us know in the comments!