Fellow cultists, at last, the dawn of the Old Ones is upon us. It is finally time to don the robes, grab your sacrifical knife, dust off the altar and spread the gospel far and wide. Feel free to consult the patch notes below, or dive right away into the game to discover it all by yourself.

Thank you for being a part of Worship’s journey! We hope you’ll enjoy this labour of love we’ve been creating over those past few years.

Before heading into the patch notes, please be aware that everyone will start with a fresh save file. Considering the 1.0 version of Worship altered the game heavily, we had to make some changes in the save system. As mentioned previously, we’re also changing the way Gods are unlocked. Completing prophecies now permanently unlocks gods, upgrades, content and more on your save file.

• Account Progression - Eldritch Prophecies

  • Tackle a growing list of challenges and objectives called prophecies, each unlocking a different reward:

    • Gods unlocks

    • Permanent upgrades

    • New content for your next runs

    • Skins for cultist, followers and blood

    • Cult base trophies

    • Lore and Bestiary entries

  • Over 90 prophecies to complete and rewards to obtain!

• Lore entry and Bestiary

  • You can now unlock lore and bestiary entries and read them between your runs in a dedicated UI accessible from the eldritch prophecies menu.

  • 40+ Lore/Bestiary entries to obtain

• Final Area - Cabal Marshlands

• Final Test of Faith - Mortals’ Last Stand

• 3 New Worshippable God Aspects

  • Basically new gods with their own kit, mechanics and playstyle that explore different facets of An-Ansgaidh, Hubryus and Kessessa.

    • An-Ansgaidh, Shepherd of Martyrs

    • Hubryus, Nightmares Shaper

    • Kessessa, Mother of the Coven

• Fast Travel

  • Finishing major encounters creates a portal to your cult base

  • Town portal ritual can be unlocked through prophecy reward

• 10 new random encounters

  • We won’t say more about them we want you to discover them in game!

• 1 new major encounter, with variants - The Tainted Farm

• 5 New utility building

  • Cursed Garden

  • Lighthouse of the Faithless

  • Fighting Pit

  • Eleanor Soul Vessel

  • Follower Transmuter (previously an encounter, was overhauled as a utility building)

  • Existing utility buildings have been updated to also provide passive buffs:

    • Summoning mirror: now also gives all your summons +20% Max HP

    • Blood Factory: now also gives your cultist +30% Max Blood

• 20 new upgrades, including 6 new rituals

• New enemies

  • Coven Witch

  • Tome Familiar

  • Ancestral Huntress

  • Folhorror Neonite & Elder Folhorror

  • \[Secret new Unspeakable Horror enemy]

  • \[Redacted name] - Final Boss

• Over 13 new music tracks by our very own Léandre Monette to accompany the new content!

  • If you want to listen or buy the full 40+ tracks OST, you can do so on Steam or Bandcamp[leandremonette.bandcamp.com]

• Balancing. A lot of balancing. On all aspects of the game.

  • So much balancing that it’s impossible for us to list all of the changes. But starting from 1.0 all subsequent patches will contain detailed information for balancing changes.

  • We’d love to hear your feedback about the balance of the game in the 1.0 update.

• The swarm command can now make your followers drop their carried object in the sockets your swarm over.

• There’s now a section in the cult base for Trophies.

  • Trophies can be obtained by certain prophecies. They adorn your cult base with sculptures of your exploits.

• Throw behavior on controller was improved and made faster and more precise.

• Various improvements for the symbol recognition. It should be more lenient to recognize less precise shapes.

• During Eleanor and Uhr boss fights, the walkway is now obstructed by a damage area, encouraging you to stay in the arena.

• The sealing path of the Sealed titan encounter was improved.

• Blood blob encounter was overhauled.

  • The more you hit the blob before it explodes, the more animal corpses are ejected from it. Then you can tribute all the corpses for a reward. Basically a timed piñata.

• Each cultist memorial encounter now has its own rewards, based on the tomb visuals.

• Improved and streamlined tutorial.

• We made major optimization for the game at large, both CPU and memory wise. The game should run a lot smoother for everyone!

• Also worth noting that we are now officially Steam Deck verified! Enjoy Worship on the handheld if you so desire!

• We squashed hundreds upon hundreds of bugs! Too many to list here, but starting from the 1.0 all subsequent patches will contain more information for which bugs were fixed.

• The game has never been this stable. If you’ve played the game during early access, you can expect a much smoother experience.

• Let us know if you encounter any leftover bugs and we’ll get them fixed asap!

  • The bug form is accessible here![bugs.chasingratsgames.com]

In case you missed it from our past update!

If you’ve been following the Chasing Rats Games discord server, you may have seen the various gifs and screenshots we’ve shared regarding the account progression feature that we’ve been working on. Timed with the full release of the game, players will now be able to interpret the whims and whispers of a new eldritch being tearing down time and space. Concretely, this means you’ll be able to consult a growing list of challenges and objectives called prophecies, each promising a different reward.

By completing Eldritch prophecies, you will unlock a variety of permanent upgrades, ranging from additional building sockets in your cult base to the number of followers you start each run with. Alongside upgrades to make your cult stronger, you will be able to unlock cosmetics, new content to appear in your next runs, lore entries and fill up a bestiary giving you access to more information regarding the enemies in Worship.

One of the most requested features from players was a better sense of permanent progression, including additional objectives to complete, content to unlock and more reasons to interact with Worship’s content. The Eldritch prophecies are our answer to this feedback. We’ve put a lot of love into this and we think it’ll be a game changer that will give players a lot more playtime and enjoyment out of their experience. The Eldritch Prophecies will come along with Steam achievements on the release of Worship 1.0.

We can’t have a 1.0 release without a final area followed by a boss powerful enough to stop your apocalyptic goals, can we? Your cult will now have to desecrate the Cabal Marshlands once you are done with the Untamed Borderlands (the game’s second area). As we mentioned in a previous post, this zone is the temporary home of the coven caravan. As such, abundant signs of Coven activity and occupation can be seen there. Caravan paths and camps are established in the scarce safe zones scattered about. Some of their members decided to settle there, studying the taint and its effects on the Marshlands, uncovering different relics of the past in their research.

Additionally, the growing threat of the cult looms heavier than ever before. The factions will temporarily set aside their feud and mount an alliance against the enemy that seeks to end their world, you. That’s all we’re willing to say, since we want to keep the area mostly under wraps for players to discover by themselves.

As you well know, each new area comes with its own Test of Faith and this one is no different. Expect an epic encounter in which the remaining forces of the mortal realm make a last stand against your cult. Will you be able to extinguish the last hopes of an entire world that refuses to die?

We are giving our all to make the final encounter a memorable experience and a worthy challenge for cults that make it all the way to their final goal.

The first and most impactful change we are putting in Worship is a dynamic cap on the Followers in your flock at a given time. Now we know this might sound like a downgrade, but bear with us while we explain why this makes the game more enjoyable!

Depending on which God you worship, the amount of followers you can command simultaneously will change. The way it works is pretty straight forward. Let’s say you serve An-Ansgaidh. At the start of a run you will have access to a maximum of 20 followers. Once you convert enough followers to go above the cap, the excess followers are warped away, your total follower count goes up, but the number of followers physically present is restricted by the cap. This means you will still be able to add more and more members to your cult even if you reach the limit of followers you can command at once. Excess followers are safely stowed inside a dedicated building in your cult base. As soon as you lose some followers bringing you below the cap, you can summon the stowed one from anywhere simply by casting the conversion ritual.

An important part of this feature is that this cap is meant to grow! We believe that having a huge army of Followers swarming through your enemies is fun and satisfying. Don’t worry, this will still be part of Worship, but your cult will have to work for it. The main way to raise your follower cap is by expanding the influence of your cult during a run. Once per area, reaching a certain devotion threshold will substantially increase your follower limit. That means you can still end up controlling a big mob of devout maniacs, but later in your runs. You can also increase that cap through different catalyst upgrades that raise the limit, making you able to reach unexpected highs in lucky runs. Lastly, you can also permanently obtain a higher cap through account progression. Some of the Eldritch prophecies will conservatively increase the amount of followers at your command at once, across all of your runs.

We’ve implemented this change to Worship for many reasons, the main one being game balance. What we’ve observed through our playtests is that having a high amount of followers (80+) makes most of the content trivial. This is especially true because we had no way of knowing how many followers the player will have at a given moment in a run. Because of this, followers were difficult to balance with the rest of the game. Another reason is tied to the player fantasy and pacing of runs. Players will be much more likely to feel the cult’s influence expanding in relation with their progress through each area and test of faith if the amount of followers they command matches this progression.

The last reason is to make the game less punitive. When you walked around with the entirety of your followers, one bad fight was enough to make you the cult sole survivor. With this change, even if you lose everyone under your command, you most likely have many more in reserve that you can swiftly bring back in the action.

Thats all for this update!

Now get out there cultists, the gods won't summon themselves!