Freehold Games and publisher Kitfox Games have announced that "at least three" Caves of Qud expansions are planned "over the next few years", and that major updates will accompany each expansion as it arrives.
In a post on Steam, Freehold says that the "success" of the game's 1.0 release, which came in December last year, has allowed it to consider "adding new layers of game to the already 17-year layer cake".
The developer says it will be focusing its efforts on "a few big expansion packs" that will come out over the next few years, with the first one due sometime next year. Not only that, but "a big update" will arrive alongside each expansion, and that update will be free for all players.
With regards to what will be included in free updates and what will be added to DLC, Freehold says it will make that decision "based on what makes sense"; if a feature is "core to the game", it will be part of an update, but if it's "part of a new set of non-vanilla features", you'll probably find it in an expansion.
Pricing is still to be determined, but Freehold says the DLC packs will almost certainly cost more than Caves of Qud's Pets of Harvest Dawn pet pack, which you can currently get for $4.99. That's because they "take a lot of development time and energy to make", the developer says.
When it comes to pet packs, Freehold says it's planning to add more pets to Caves of Qud, but that the plan is now to simply add more pets to the aforementioned pack rather than to continuously create new pet packs. The price "may" increase as a result, but that hasn't been decided yet, according to Freehold.
If you're not familiar with Caves of Qud, it's described by its developers as a "science fantasy roguelike epic steeped in retrofuturism, deep simulation, and swathes of sentient plants".
Like Dwarf Fortress before it, Caves of Qud is built around simulated systems; relationships and situations are generated prior to each playthrough, and the world of the game can progress in different ways depending on that initial generation.
You can check out Caves of Qud right now on PC via Steam.
