Raves of Mud — August 2026

How do you make Caves of Qud feel deeper without making exploration smaller?

Raves of Mud is a 2.5D / 3D augmentation layer for Caves of Qud, not a reimplementation.

A real, paid, modded copy of Qud remains the authoritative simulation. An in-game C# mod publishes what the player can see over a local socket, a Godot 4 client renders that state as a lit 3D scene, and input travels back to Qud to resolve the next turn.

The player-facing 3D view is called the Holodeck.

August was largely about making that world feel like it continues beyond the tile, wall, room, or zone directly in front of you.

The world started extending beyond the current zone

One of the things I love about Qud is the feeling that there is always more world beyond the part you currently understand.

Moving the game into 3D creates a strange problem: simply seeing farther can make exploration feel smaller if the renderer turns the world into a set.

So Raves of Mud now remembers neighboring zones, renders explored areas beyond the current one, freezes departed zones in place, and thaws them when needed. Those remembered spaces are bounded so the renderer does not keep the whole world alive forever.

This lets distant geometry, objects, light, and landmarks give you small promises of what exists beyond the immediate scene.

The goal is not maximum visibility.

It is depth and wonder.

Qud’s light and sight became the truth

A large part of the month was spent making the 3D renderer obey Qud’s own concepts of light, darkness, line of sight, and fog of war instead of inventing a parallel visibility system.

Fog now reaches geometry, voxel props, walls, particles, containers, and remembered zones. Torches carry their flames and light pools with the player. Fires are bounded by distance. Light stops at rock. Darkvision is treated as a sense rather than mistaken for brightness.

There was also a multi-day global lighting experiment that did not improve the scene.

So it was reverted.

The measurement and diagnostic tools built during that failed pass were kept, and the three global lighting changes were removed. That retreat is part of the project history on purpose.

Walls became matter

Earlier versions could render walls, but August pushed them toward behaving like actual objects in the scene.

Walls became watertight voxel volumes rather than collections of quads. Roof patterns can continue across seams. Doors are slabs set into wall runs, oriented from the surrounding geometry, and swing on a hinge instead of swapping between flat sprites.

Archways gained physical depth. Statues became monuments. Trees stopped being treated like blocks. Wall families can inherit one hand-authored voxel model rather than requiring a separate model for every variant.

The renderer is increasingly deriving 3D structure from Qud’s existing art instead of replacing that art with an unrelated visual language.

The world gained weather, fire, water, fog, and grime

A lot of smaller visual systems began behaving more like matter:

• fires flicker and emit light
• glowfish carry bioluminescent motes
• flying things fly
• swimming things disturb the water
• desert dust moves at multiple scales
• gas forms soft puffs
• liquid stains paint onto sprites
• coatings coat and spatters spatter
• the Joppa waterwheel turns, dips into the river, and throws water from its south side

These are individually small effects, but together they make the Holodeck feel less like a visualization layer and more like a place.

Raves became much more playable with a mouse

The UI and interaction layer also moved forward substantially.

On-screen key hints can be clicked. The cursor can say what an action will do before you click. Walking, looking, trade, nearby-object interaction, context menus, abilities, cybernetics, inventory, skills, quests, reputation, journals, tinkering, options, save management, and other pieces of Qud’s interface have been mirrored or driven from Raves while still writing back to the real game.

This work matters because the project is not intended to create a second set of game rules.

Qud remains the game.

Raves is another way of inhabiting it.

The project got its name

This month the project became Raves of Mud.

The repository still carries the older raves-of-qud name, but the player-facing project now has its own identity, including a new title treatment and in-game credits that make the underlying art and authorship explicit.

Where this is going

The interesting question is no longer whether Caves of Qud can be rendered in 3D.

It can.

The more interesting question is what 3D can contribute without flattening the mystery that makes exploration work in the first place.

For now, the answer is distance, partial visibility, remembered places, physical geometry, light, fog, and glimpses of things you have not reached yet.

That is the direction Raves of Mud is going to keep exploring.

---

Raves of Mud ships no Caves of Qud game assets. Tiles are extracted at runtime from the player’s own installation.

For the exhaustive implementation and tag history, see the project changelog in the repository.