“You will get anywhere between a fairly surgical battle with the more simple moves and synergies, to a downright-drunken-disaster run. [They] act with basically zero understanding of enemy mechanics, no regard for their ability order, and they couldn’t give less of a damn about tile hazards.” This is a section taken from the description of a mod which turns Mewgenics into an auto-battler, but turning the controls over to an AI chessmaster. That AI chessmaster just happens to play almost exactly like I have in my seven hours with it thus far.

Seriously, modder Bigbrotherjakeb appears to have found a way to clone me out of sheer desire not to have to play Mewgenics’ fights themselves. Their creation, ‘Auto-Battler Mode’, applies the Uncontrollable passive to all of the cats in your party. So, the computer will handle moving them about, targeting enemies, and unleashing abilities. Not that it’ll do a good job of any of that. “This is effectively a challenge mode with how dumb the default player AI can be with this implementation (simplest I could quickly find),” the modder wrote.

Cool. Bigbrotherjakeb has hopes of teaching the stupid computer how to pick suitable movement strategies based on the specific class of cat it’s controlling in future. I should probably get around to master the same thing.

A couple of other early Mewgenics mods which’ve caught my eye are ‘Less Cats’ and ‘good poop’. Contrary to what its name might suggest, the first one actually results in you having more cats by lowering the number of moggies the game’s coterie of weirdos ask for in return for upgrades. As someone who’s been a bit sad to part with my retired bois not long after they return from their sole adventure, that sounds good to me.

Good poop, meanwhile, leaves no room for misinterpretation. Poop now adds two pints to both your cats’ health and comfort, rather than dragging it down by the same amount. A relatively small tweak, unless you find a way to play in smellivision further down the road, in which case you might get a nasty surprise.

If you fancy giving the auto-battler mode or less cats a go, both require the Mewgenics Mod Manager dubbed Mewtator.

Also among the roguelike cat breeder’s early mods are a couple which swap around the audio files for in-game meows. This follows criticism directed at the decision of developer Edmund McMillen to include meows voiced by internet personalities such as Ethan and Hila Klein. You can read McMillen’s response as part of our report on the topic.