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Idols & Aspects of Cthulhu (OUTDATED)

This mod is now out of date. You can find the newest version here: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1447699854


This mod is a major late game addon designed for the highest compatibility - no monsters, game mechanics or mashes were changed.

It adds approximately 40 Aspects (located to the left) and 40 Idols (located to the right) to your Districts Panel.

This comes up to a total of around 80 new districts. Each Aspect and Idol is named after one of the deities in Lovecraft's universe.

In vanilla Darkest Dungeon, the end game is usually nothing more than the pursuit of trinkets which gets a little dull and aimless after a while. Endless helps alleviate it somewhat but..

Eventually you can't push your heroes further. I, on the other hand, wanted the end game to be a playground, a sort of sandbox if you will.

Idols & Aspects of Cthulhu will give you new things to try, new combinations to test and provide motivation to keep improving your heroes' performance.



For those familiar with Bastion, Idols are the shrines you can build to make the game much harder while acquiring unique bonuses for your entire roster. Every Idol built significantly raises the game's difficulty in its own way but will reward ALL heroes with +3% Virtue and +5% Stun Resist.

Aspects, on the other hand, allow you to empower specific classes at the cost of your roster's life force. Every Aspect built will penalise ALL heroes with -3% Deathblow Resist and -5% Stun Resist but will allow you to unlock or enhance the potential of your favourite classes.

This shouldn't surprise you. Worshipping one of the gods of the Cthulhu mythos will always exact a price on those who seek out the abyss.


The system is designed to encourage the player to strike a balance between the construction of Idols and Aspects. Unlike vanilla districts where you will want to build everything, here you will have to pick carefully in your playthrough which Aspects and Idols to construct.

Build too many Aspects, and you will be quickly overwhelmed by how hard the game becomes. Build too many Idols and while many classes become more powerful, your heroes will also be far, far more susceptible to death.

And unlike mods that add new enemies or mechanics, you are free to make the game harder, different or possibly easier at your own lesiure. You choose what is comfortable for you to handle, and skip those you think will likely make your life more difficult.

Finally, the presence of Idols will shakeup your experience of leveling new recruits in apprentice and veteran dungeon runs. Those runs are often somewhat trivalised by trinkets your main heroes have found but with the difficulty modifiers in place, you can expect some nasty surprises.


Each Idol enhances a specific monster or a group of monsters. YOUR HEROES will receive additional damage from the monster / monsters, NOT the other way round as the tooltip may seem to suggest.

There are also Idols that increase damage in specific dungeons, penalise you for carrying around certain provision items or outright weaken your stats. Your choice to make on whether you think the exchange is commensurate with the difficulty.

Either way, you will have to eventually build a few Idols if you intend to counteract the penalities from Aspects.

I have not included Boss Idols yet and deliberately left out individual shrines for Courtyard enemies as vampires are not included in Endless, and won't show up once you complete the questline.


Each Aspect provides skill buffs for a class. Both vanilla and modded classes are supported, and if you do not have those classes installed, the Aspects will simply do nothing.

I have included support for Muscarine's, Marvin Seo's, S-Purple's, O'Nightmare's, Caedwyn's, Poljanan's and a number of other class mods I personally use. I will likely add more over time although that depends on the classes' default balance and stability - new classes usually change quite a bit for the first few weeks.

The buffs are not intended to make a class overpowered. It either improves utility that is usually neglected, weaker skills that see little use or improves the consistency of an important ability. However, balance is tricky to get so I apologise if your favourite class isn't represented well.


Districts CANNOT BE DEMOLISHED. Your choices, like those you make in Darkest Dungeon, are permanent.

Also, DO NOT MODIFY the loose files or haphazardly edit values, ESPECIALLY when you have built a district or are buffed by it in some way.

Because of the way the game handles districts, you can PERMANENTLY damage or screw up your heroes' stats or game mechanics in some way.

I REPEAT, DO NOT CHANGE BUFF / STAT / DISTRICT VALUES unless you know exactly what you are doing.


All the Idols and Aspects are represented with the Red Hook District animation / image. It will be impossible to do art for each of the Gods represented, partly because Lovecraft only described them in fairly limited words, and mainly because I have an easier time coming up with a unified theory of Physics than I would drawing anything.

For those wondering, there's a great deal of limitation in what I can achieve with buffing the monsters or skills because I am not making direct changes to the skills themselves. And since I did not want to overwrite vanilla files any more than necessary, this seems a reasonable tradeoff.


Marvin Seo: I looked at his Amphitheater mod to understand how the basic coding and insertion mechanics worked. His work is simply incredible.

O'Nightmare: For teaching me something about tooltips. Prior to that, I had no coding knowledge and had to figure out everything the hard way. His steam guide on the game's parameters was infinitely valuable. You can find it here: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1095670238

Clair de Lune: For her Discord channel which you can find here: https://discord.gg/VkXB87M
And also because I finally understood how to do up tooltips for rules and buffs by looking at her work in her Trinket Collection.


I felt it was important for Aspects and Idols to share at least one common buff / debuff to respresent a balancing act. Initially, each Idol gave different buffs and had a range of penalties but it became confusing quickly. Simplicity was always at the heart of something elegant, so I standardised the buffs and debuffs from Aspects and Idols.

I also made it a point of not touching anything stress related as that was almost always the domain of trinkets.

Virtue on the other hand was mostly useless as you would try hard never to reach a resolve check. It made sense that Idols would then benefit the roster's virtue and balanced by a max cap within the game's engine.

Stun and Death resist penalties were suble ways of hedging your bets without adversely damaging a class' potential or ruining party compositions.


Darkest Dungeon Tactics greatly remixes and improves enemy compositions. You can find it here: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1425215747

Increase Hamlet Maintenance Costs is essentially marathon mode for Darkest Dungeon which raises the cost of vanilla districts and activities by reducing the game's discount for said services. You can find it here: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1438310168