Expedition setup: five verb slots for the Star-Shattered Fane

About this game

Developer: Weather Factory · Publisher: Weather Factory · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Minimalist & vector · Screen type: HUD & Gameplay UI

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What to study

Cultist Simulator has no quest window, no party screen and no map for an expedition: it has this, one verb panel whose slots are a sentence. Explore is the place, Leader and Assistant are the people, Funds and Further Funds are the money, and the empty slots are drawn as black card-shaped holes, so what an expedition lacks is visible as absence, in the exact shape of the card that would fill it. The cost model is not in a tooltip: it is typeset into the panel's story text, in square brackets, one register shift away from the fiction ('A star fell in the deep desert'), rules and lore share a column because in this game they are the same substance. Below, the slotted cards collapse into a row of aspect icons with totals: the hand you assembled, restated as numbers. Frame at about 0:15 in BRING THE DAWN (Steam; manual extraction, the panel is held for roughly two seconds inside a fast montage, between tarot-card cuts the scene-change pass fired on instead).

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

slot-grid detail-panel card-row

Components

Parts on screen.

Card Data table Slots Badge

Screen inventory

• the expedition verb panel is a row of five labelled card slots, Explore, Leader, Assistant, Funds, Further Funds: Star-Shattered Fane fills Explore, 'Neville, a believer' fills Leader, a Funds card fills Funds, and Assistant and Further Funds stand empty as plain black rectangles
• the rules are printed inside the fiction, in brackets in the panel's own prose column: '[Expeditions need at least one Funds per obstacle. Followers will defeat obstacles. If you run out of Funds or Followers, the Expedition ends.]'
• along the panel's foot, a row of small aspect icons (Moth, Forge, Grail and others) totals what the slotted cards bring, ending in a flask icon with the number 2, the recipe is summarised as arithmetic before it is run
• one button commits the whole arrangement: 'Start', bottom-right; above the panel the table still shows Reason (5), Passion (5), Reason and 'Temptation: Enlightenment' waiting outside the decision
• to the panel's right a 'Treacherous Ground' card carries a circled 2 badge, an obstacle already counting itself on the table the expedition will draw from

Top 3 colors

#0f1a21 30%#1e393a 21%#070e14 16%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© Weather Factory, Cultist Simulator screenshot: PENETRATE THE HOUSE and BRING THE DAWN (Steam), Weather Factory, shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Weather Factory.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-25. verified 2026-10-25: manual extraction manual-dawn-expedition-14.5.png @ ~14.5s in BRING THE DAWN, MD5 47b0d3852d4ce03ece262b6fe9866652, from steam-718670-BRING-THE-DAWN.mp4 (88.52s, 1920x1080, 61,817,619 B, MD5 37def90f5fa2c77a07c8e13c980f2729; full decode to null exit 0, zero error lines), inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080 native); the title 'Beginning an Expedition: the Star-Shattered Fane', the five slot labels (Explore / Leader / Assistant / Funds / Further Funds), 'Neville, a believer', the bracketed expedition rules, the aspect icon row and the Start button all legible; no trailer text or marketing overlay in frame

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-25); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.