Updates 5-17-2026

When wearing items, the game now properly checks both the item to be worn and items you are wearing for insert pockets and checks the rigidity of the items in those pockets (and their coverage and layer data) to better determine when conflicts should arise.

Toggled bionic items such as the protective lenses CBM now respect rigid equipment conflicts. They will not deploy if you're wearing a rigid item that shares a layer on that same body part.

Removed the ability for turrets to return fire against targets shooting at them from unseen positions. This isn't how the real-life technology works and didn't make any sense in any event as it was somehow pinpointing the attacker's exact position even if they were using a silenced weapon or firing something weird like an arrow, yet it didn't work against thrown objects. Mostly it just felt like an attempt to hard-counter a perfectly logical strategy, but perfectly logical strategies are how you are meant to defeat robots, which otherwise tend to have huge advantages.

Reduced the marksmanship and rifle skills of CROWS II turrets from 8 to 7.

Upped the armor for all types of turrets. They are now fairly well protected from acid (but not completely) and somewhat more resistant to physical damage.

Barbaran Montante previously provided 75% of the user's strength as armor penetration to all melee damage types passively, and added another 225% of their strength if they paused for one second. This meant that if you had 10 strength, you could press . and your next attack would ignore 30 points of armor, which was just really over the top. Barbaran Montante now provides 50% of strength as armor penetration passively, and the onpause buff grants an additional 50%. This is still potentially very good, especially for a strong character or one with access to things like the Hydraulic Muscles CBM, but no longer allows the average Joe to ignore all of a skeletal juggernaut's armor with both the cut and bash damage on his axe because he pushed one button.

Added the Gorger mutation for piscine, reptilian, batrachian, and chimera mutants. This increases stomach capacity by 40%, cuts eating time in half, and cancels gourmand.

Reptilian mutants now get Poison Resistant and Venomous. They have fangs, it's a bit weird that they never had venom.

Troglobite mutants no longer get Venomous. Cave-dwelling animals aren't more poisonous than their surface-dwelling counterparts and none of the sci fi/horror inspirations (C.H.U.D., morlocks, flukeman, etc.) feature venom as a major thing they do. They still retain poison resistant.

Sweet Tooth and Snackaholic have slightly lower morale boosts, and these start decaying at 30 minutes instead of 1 hour.

Sweet Tooth and Snackaholic now reduce the enjoyability of non-junk food by 25%.

The Chain Lightning CBM had no mechanism to ever make it stop, it would just continuously rebound between targets, forever, eventually causing the game to crash in most cases. This has been fixed.

Fixed the names, descriptions, and activation messaging for a ton of explosives, most specifically the crafted ones. "Military explosive" is now "HE" (high explosive) and the names are much less clunky overall.

Renamed the "grenade" item to "frag grenade".

Fixed the names and descriptions of the grenade pouches, clarifying that one is specifically intended for 40mm (ie grenade launcher ammo, not hand grenades).

Improvised grenades of all types should now fit in the non-40mm grenade pouches.

Improvised gas grenades now produce a bit less toxic gas than a real one would.

Toxic gases have been reworked a bit. Breathing in the gas now causes some direct damage in addition to the lingering poison effect. Poison resistance reduces the frequency of this damage, but a certain amount of it is due to blistering throat and lung tissue rather than poison in the bloodstream.

An active undamaged gas mask with a filter will fully prevent this damage, but lesser protecton (e.g. from a bandana) will still make it less frequent. The level of protection required for complete safety is based on the density of the gas cloud.

Plant monsters, Mi-go, and monsters that don't breathe will not be damaged, though they may still be subject to some other effects from the cloud.

The Poison effect was not doing much at all to monsters because it takes such a long time and mostly causes pain and other character-only symptoms. This is now compensated for by having it cause a slowing effect and extra damage specifically to monsters, but it also has a shorter duration for them. This is not to be read as feral humans having a different reaction to the poison than the player character, it's just an artifact of them being entirely different types of entities on the code end of things.

In testing, a single improvised gas grenade in a small room with 4 feral humans killed 2 of them and left 2 at about half HP with lingering poison effects which killed them after several minutes. YMMV, but remember that gas clouds work better in enclosed spaces. This can be a Breaking Bad reference if you want to, like when Walt threw the chemicals together and Krazy 8 passed out and they thought he was dead but it turned out he wasn't.

Toxic gas clouds now cause eye irritation in the same manner as smoke. As with smoke, this can be prevented by environmental protection over the eyes. Gas masks and goggles come highly recommended.

Insecticide and fungicide had a mistake in their damage calculations. This has been fixed. They should deal more damage overall.

Thick smoke was able to cause damage to characters, but not to monsters. This has been corrected. Non-triffids that breathe will now take damage if they're standing in thick smoke. Triffids are still slowed by it, but they can't die of smoke inhalation.

Added opioid withdrawals, making opioid addiction more punishing in the short term and less in the long term. These work like alcohol and nicotine's withdrawals, and in this case give you symptoms similar to the flu but without the coughing and sneezing. They last from a minimum of 48 hours to a maximum of 144 hours, after which you will be detoxed and mostly only subject to the morale hits and painkiller resistance effects of your addiction. The addiction can then take a couple weeks to over a month to clear depending on how bad it was. As always, taking more drugs will clear the withdrawals or get rid of your detoxed status if either of those are active.

Added lithium tablets. These reduce the effects of the Mood Swings trait, and at present have no downsides. They do not help people who do not have Mood Swings. One tablet lasts a full day.

Removed most of the old "stimulants" and "depressants" effects and their hardcoded components. This stuff is now all handled by bespoke effects for each drug.

Made alprazolam and diazepam's hardcoded interactions mostly the same, so you shouldn't be forced to try and remember which one helps with nyctophobia and which one helps with tremors even though they'd both work. These drugs are due for a rework like the others have had, but pose some unique coding challenges I'll have to figure out first.

Nicotine addiction doesn't mess with fatigue quite as much anymore.

JITTERY can now be prevented with alprazolam, diazepam, and (sometimes) nicotine. It is worsened by most other stimulants.

When you meet a new NPC for the first time (random NPCs only, not e.g. faction guys) their opinion of you will be affected if you are visibly intoxicated, meaning if you have the weed, alcohol, opioid, or amphetamine effects above intensity 1. Weed and booze make you less frightening, amphetamines and cocaine make you scarier. Alcohol, amphetamines, cocaine, opioids, and weed all make you less trustworthy. This scales with effect intensity, so a crossfaded mutant might have an easier time approaching new NPCs without immediately flipping them hostile or afraid.

RX11 and RX12 injectors are now worn on the thigh (or a cephalopod arm). Some NPC factions will buy these and their ammo as important medicine or ultratech.

Improved various messaging throughout the code to make things a bit easier to understand.

Removed the old hardcoded alcohol overdose death which pretty much had a 100% chance to happen. Overdose death for alcohol and cocaine now works like hypovolemic shock: At the highest effect intensity (Dead Drunk or Whiteout), there is a tiny chance every second that the character will simply die. This chance goes away once they get below the highest intensity.

• As a refresher, opioids work similarly but it's a scaling chance at the highest 3 intensities (Nodding Out, Opioid Overdose, Severe Opioid Overdose). As previously mentioned, opioid overdose can be treated with Naloxone. There's currently no cure for smoking too much crack or drinking too much tequila, so pace yourself!

• Drug interactions do not yet increase the lethality of drugs. Expect that to change in the future.

Added concealable ballistic vests in XL and XS. These can be crafted, and XS concealable ballistic vests can rarely be found in gun stores or in NPC shop inventories.

Added XL plate carriers. These only take XL ESAPI-style plates and they're a bit more encumbering than a normal-sized plate carrier+plates. They have more MOLLE slots though.

Added XL steel/scrap/fiberglass/wood/paper ballistic plates for said carrier.

Removed all the old XL kevlar vests and plate carriers. They were weird and outdated.

Removed some of the redundant types of steel ballistic plates. There's now just a forged steel plate and a scrap plate, in case you wanted to see if sheet metal can stop bullets.

Fixed up the recipes for these items.

Added @Drawsstuff's new tile for a worn concealable ballistic vest.

Slightly raised the damage on the kanabo. You may have noticed that the kanabo is slower and does less damage than the wooden and stone war clubs. This is because those weapons are built to prioritize damage over all else. The kanabo has a higher block rating, 2 or 3 more accuracy, and techniques that the war clubs lack. Some characters might do more damage with it simply because they're critting more often, while others might do less damage but want to make use of its unique defensive capabilities. Damage isn't everything!

@SZ-5600 updated the simplified Chinese translation.

@False Ritchie updated the Russian translation.

• @False Ritchie завершил первоначальный этап русского перевода на ~100%. Это означает, что весь текст, который можно перевести, в настоящее время переведён, но это НЕ означает, что все переводы правильные. Если вы играете на русском языке и заметите что-либо, что переведено на русский, но текст некорректен, пожалуйста, напишите об этом на форуме обсуждения или заходите в Discord и публикуйте это в #ctlg-translation.