Caves of Qud’s First Expansion Lets You Play as a Tree

Caves of Qud left Early Access with its 1.0 launch in December 2024, and its first expansion is going right back in. Diaspora launches into Steam Early Access on December 9, 2026, and Freehold Games announced it on Thursday alongside a teaser trailer and a Steam page that lists the expansion for Windows, Mac, and Linux, with the base game required. The headline addition is two new genotypes, Mutated Animal and Mutated Plant, which join Mutated Human and True Kin at character creation and let players start as a dog, cat, frog, chameleon, vine, or tree before customizing from there. True Kin get a new arcology as well, with the Great Rondures on the Ocean of Iber offering four denizens to choose from: Propeller, Starsteer, Man of Kelp, and Delphine.

New animal and plant mutations let a Mutated Human get even more protean than before, while animals can upgrade their Species Traits with options like Claws, Muzzle, and Tail, the last of which can be mutated again into a Prehensile Tail. Spears arrive as an entirely new weapon skill tree with attacks that reach two tiles away, and a host of new creatures and items have migrated into both the surface and subterranean habitats of Qud. Dromad trade caravans have been overhauled, including mountable saltbacks and trading with the dromads on their mobile shell-bazaars. Road and river networks now use more sophisticated worldbuilding algorithms as well, which Freehold says should mean following a road has a good chance of leading somewhere interesting.

Freehold expects Diaspora to stay in Early Access for about a year, and it says the reason for going that route is to give the team the time and space it needs to finish its vision for the expansion. The roadmap on the Steam page includes a multi-step questline about the migrants pouring into Qud and a dromad named Je’ome the Bounty, more animal and plant stocks at character creation, and two new humanoid factions in the Foxen and Snailfolk. Roaming mega-caravans, underground villages, large multi-zone dungeons, and new dynamic quests are on the list too, along with new creatures, items, item mods, biomes, ingredients, diseases, fungal infections, and music. As for pricing, Freehold hasn’t settled on whether the full release will cost more than the Early Access version, saying it will likely stay the same or increase a little.

When 1.0 launched, Freehold said it planned to take a break and then work on two major feature arcs, without deciding whether those would arrive as free updates or paid DLC. Diaspora answers that question as a paid expansion built around several new feature arcs, with cybernetic implants also listed among the additions coming later in Early Access. Since then, the game won the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Game or Interactive Work and arrived on Switch on February 16, though Diaspora is currently only listed for the Steam version.

Caves of Qud: Diaspora – Official Expansion DLC Teaser with Launch Date