Kyzrati

I've now moved from one forested mountain to an area of even more forested mountains. (Very forbidden stuff in Complex 0b1, I tell you! 6R-33N would know.) This whole thing's been an unexpectedly long process since it wasn't just about the move itself, but dealing with funding and logistics on sever

Life goes on! And so does Cogmind! There's been big progress on the whole "gotta move out" issue, albeit having been dragged out even longer than expected, so that still hasn't happened yet. Fortunately our own landlady is quite nice, as is the the owner of where we're moving, though the former tena

Xom-point-one, much like Xom-point-zero but more refined, and with new tricks up that extradimensional sleeve! Beta 17.1 is ready to play, and as with 16.1 it is being released early to patrons despite not being a partially-completed experimental build. There could be more changes before public rele

Copied from the forums, where members can see this same content with alternative formatting, as well as stat analyses for previous versions. The leaderboards have been reset, Beta 16 (and 16.1!) is behind us, and it's time to pull some data from those versions to analyze, examining both the general

New version = new key = new commands! As stated before I excluded Wizard Mode from the initial Beta 17 release, something I normally do now for new versions to allow for more free-form community discovery without extra outside temptation to spoil things. Normally this period would have passed during

By now you may know that I just did a surprise release of Beta 17. It's out there, public, without any prereleases... surprise :D For years I've wanted to find an opportunity to do at least one more release that goes back to the early days of no one knowing it was coming, or even what was in it. The

Silence, but certainly not Calm. At least not here, where I've been super busy, nor in the community where we have been seeing a flurry of fun and challenging runs from many players (and GJ has returned!). As always I'm very eager to get the next release out for you, though there has been a bit of a

Wow have I been busy lately. Tons of design work going into future releases, followed by lots and lots of coding to make this stuff a reality, all a very vague way to say good progress is being made on some fun content for everyone :) In the meantime there's also been five patches to 16.1, about one

One of the Unchained clearly watched too much Star Trek. The good news is that 16.1 did not result in any major issues! There were many quick little patches, to be sure, but that's fine, nothing very time-consuming, meaning I did decide to go ahead and add a fourth Unchained for 16.1 as I'd original

Unchained systems expanding, increasingly balanced, and also now with more V4-D3R. The first playable version of 16.1 is ready, now available as a prerelease that is only sort of a prerelease! Unlike the past prereleases most of you will be used to, X-versions that are probably missing a chunk of wh

ALERT: Unchained "KY-Z71" authorized to operate in Patreon, avoid or assist as necessary. So the last Beta 16 patch went out last month, and in the time since there's been lots of run data coming in, which interestingly also marks the first time I've ever actively monitored run stats. Like, in the p

Copied from the forums, where you can see this same content with alternative formatting, as well as stat analyses for previous versions. I am adding Patreon as a new outlet this time since it may be more convenient for some. With Beta 16 released to kick off our future with Unchained in the fleshste

A collection of new commands, but most importantly for Beta 16: manual Unchained dispatching... I'd wanted to add this feature to wizard mode even during Beta 16 prereleases, but Unchained internal systems are naturally more complicated than usual and were still taking shape at the time, so didn't w

I jest! This is clearly the first (and hopefully better be the last) final Beta 16 build, here and ready for you now :D Kudos to all those confronting the Unchained menaces so far and in some cases repurposing their gear, though the Unchained have killed enough patrons--it's about time to send them

It begins. Our Beta 16 eponymous opponents are upon us. So the Unchained are finally ready to make their appearance! Some time, somewhere, they're ready to toss an unexpected wrench into your plans, at least once they've deemed you a worthy enough target. I've already given a general rundown of thei

They've been alluded to for years, they've gradually crept into the lore, they've tickled your imagination and possibly haunted your nightmares, and now they're finally coming. As you know from previous entries the final piece of Beta 16 is to start injecting the Unchained into Cogmind. Slowly but s

It's time to buff your non-prototype parts via Scanalyzers, and you can start to go after the many new achievements NOW. Although Beta 16 is officially dubbed "Unchained," you will find that the Unchained are the only thing not in this prerelease :P Lots of bug fixes, a few tweaks and other features

You've voted for expanded Scanalyzer functionality, and here it comes... enabling new or improved builds, especially those made of salvage! As a player, given my normal play styles I mostly ignore Scanalyzers except for a few special situations. Although some players get quite a lot out of them alre

A deep dive into building roguelikes that leave room to demonstrate mastery even when facing extreme challenges in environments defined by RNG, procedural content, and permadeath. We did another Roguelike Radio recording! Been a long while and the episode (recorded last week) is still in editing, bu

While we wait for votes... new Cogmind QoL features! Yes, Heavy ARCs are also a sort of QoL, as you'll see ;) At the start of this week I prepared the minor feature list for Beta 16, and have been making very good progress chipping away at that, especially with the extra day available--I was suppose

12 options up for voting this time--heat map overlay, bothacking expansion, more encounters, overmap view and more... New version, new voting! Okay mostly the same topics, but time for another round... So last time we got new legs, well received in Beta 15 and even came with a handful of those new m

Woohoo, they're done! Come Beta 16 release, Cogmind will have a new achievement total: 466. Yeah we lose the funny 256 number, and no the new set didn't quite reach 512 as some hoped, but the precise count is also not entirely relevant since going forward with our new more flexible architecture for

As you probably know, Beta 15 went out, and it was good! We've only had one patch and no need for more, though on my end I've already addressed several issues to be rolled into Beta 16, where we'll start to see... the Unchained?! More on them later since work in that area is still a ways off. Instea

Public release of Beta 15 is imminent. Ideally it would've happened earlier this week but I was trying to get healthy again before taking the leap, and was finally on the road to achieving that personal goal but apparently that's suddenly headed in the wrong direction again... So unfortunately still

New wizard mode command! Wasn't going to announce it here yet, but it's in the latest Beta 15 X4 and is probably a bit of a time-saver (which is why I finally added it for myself in the first place :P), so probably worth announcing. From the latest How-to manual... "a [XXX]": A more advanced shortcu

The experiment is over, and results are good! You may recall that Beta 15 began with the introduction of a new tracking system for extermination and assault dispatches, and that the initial implementation was a quick placeholder, just enough to see how the concept would play. The beginnings of that

As of the latest prerelease Beta 15 now includes a whopping 97 new items since Beta 14, even more than the already huge 87 added with that version. Funny enough it's possible there's still a need for a few more coming up soon, though I don't anticipate breaking 100. But in doing all this work on pri

The X-release that wasn't supposed to be, now is. After slogging through other roadblocks (sickness, new dev machine, also actually a little sick again now xD) and pushing another back to who knows when (7DRL play) as yet another looms close (taxes, yay), X3 is done, and we're now all way up to 97 n

Well this has certainly been a March unlike what I'd envisioned! I wanted to complete Beta 15 and get it out there so the ongoing work wouldn't conflict with my upcoming annual 7DRL streaming (not to mention a desire to finally release the polished version for everyone), then came the delays already

The release of Beta 15's X2 version at the end of February marked the completion of the UFD story arc together with its new ending and related challenges. Many thanks to everyone who's been doing UFD runs and trying out the new content! I'm pleased with the results on that and it was clearly worth a

YES! The UFD is at last prepared to... do whatever it is they're out to do you'll just have to find out ;) X2 is ready to play, and it even comes with a new ending, Cogmind's 10th and the first ending possible prior to even reaching -1. Now that doesn't mean it's easy... on the contrary, it offers a

A rather well-known aspect of Cogmind's map generation among long-time players is that there are a handful of "semi-important" areas that may not actually appear in their respective maps even though you consistently encounter them across the majority of runs. They're not absolutely vital areas, and

Welcome to the end of 2024, as the UFD prepares to boldly march its way into the new year with another major Cogmind release! Soon enough they'll be ready to show you what they can really do... Looking back, though, as mentioned in my annual review over on the dev blog this week it's been a great ye

We've had over a hundred X1 runs uploaded since it came out earlier this month, in the meantime having also released a couple updates to that build as reported via additions to the original release post. The first patch was mainly a pair of important bug fixes, the second however was a modified vers

No, not the Z-kind of experimental, today we have a new build! And it's super experimental! Why? It changes a fundamental aspect of Cogmind that's been deeply rooted in the gameplay since the beginning, for better or worse... We shall find out soon which it is. The change: Extermination and Assault

Scattered throughout my notes from over the years were some interesting possible stats to include in our scoresheets, though some were either of uncertain value or rather involved to implement, so as optional pieces of info they'd been left by the wayside for some time. Well, following the recent re

Voting complete! Yesterday I ended the recent Beta 15 feature poll after a full week had passed, with most of the votes having come in the first few days, followed by a trickle and then just about one participant by the second to last day. You can see the description of each option in that post, but

Feature voting is back! I originally said I wanted to wait until getting past the UFD arc before doing this again, in the interest of focusing on completing that and its rather extensive related feature list, but Beta 13 and 14 together have already been a pretty big success, and already comprise a

Over the past couple weeks I've found myself on a new and important detour! (Surprised? Probably not :P) I decided we'll do some feature voting here for Beta 15 (more on that later), and as I went through my incredibly lengthy primary TODO notes fishing for potential ideas to include in the list, I

Many of you are probably familiar with the recent Botcube Brawl event hosted by Plexion and organized via Discord. I summarized the info here on the forums. (art by Plexion) There you'll also find a link to a recording of the event, and the results, but what I wanted to write about here today was th

Blog time! In order to put out Beta 14 as quickly as possible, while concentrating all my efforts on what was a very significant update that needed to happen at once, I kept the blog on hold despite having several topics I wanted to cover. Now that Beta 14 is complete, I've subsequently patched it s

Beta 14 is done!* *done means ostensibly done with no more balance or content changes, but if any annoying new bugs are discovered it could still be updated at the last minute if necessary, by all means avoiding any changes to the save format and therefore this version is now identical or nearly ide

As I mentioned in the primary announcement, wizard mode is back for the Beta 14 prerelease :) As usual the latest key is attached to the How-to manual, the contents of which have also been updated to reflect the current state of the game in Beta 14. To summarize the changes... I filled in a few of t

A longer wait than I had intended, but X2 is here! If you've been on Discord you'll know the main reason: I added more stuff, oops :P In the wake of X1, most of the issues were either quickly hotfixed or resolved on my end and awaiting the final version update, I just wanted to wait about a week to

The UFD is here! Beta 13 was the original target for adding the UFD (new faction!), but as most of you know we were side tracked with the whole new mega UI update, which as it happens came at just the perfect time. Very glad for that, but also very glad to have finally completed the vast majority of

Okay so I'm not adding a whole slew of side quests to Cogmind (YET), but I have been doing a bit of side questing of my own lately, using some extra time to work on a few, well, yeah side questable things. Always nice to have the occasional alternative short-term goal, or more unexpected possibiliti

There are some items on my still very long TODO list of potential features or changes for Cogmind which have always been inevitable, but myself being able to only work on one thing at a time, some of these items have continued to sit there, waiting their turn, in some cases year after year. Some bec

What goes up, must come down! Things are finally settling down, at least on the outside, but I've been hard at work as ever, late nights and very full days, dealing with all sorts of stuff--design, optimization, debugging, tech support, keeping up with the community, trying to replace the freaking D

April has already been a very eventful Month. If you hadn't heard by now, after exploring the depths of Cogmind and falling in love with it, DoshDoshington made a great video introducing it to his followers. As a YouTuber perhaps best known for his Factorio videos (and games like it), his viewers na

As many of you likely know from reading my work (or even played it back then :P), Cogmind originated as a 7DRL in 2012, and the pretty good reception, combined with a concept so full of potential, were what convinced me to start turning it into something bigger the following year. Ever since then, e