Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

Games
21

This game is madness, still my most played game of the last 3 years. Let me try and capture recent adventures in seven sentences:

Snuck into a few houses on the edge of a city crawling with zombies to rip up furniture and bring back as many nails as I could find to build walls for my shelter.

Used a screwdriver to disassemble a washing machine, and used that hose to siphon gas from a wrecked police car into a waterskin I had stitched together from a cut-up leather jacket I removed from a corpse.

Fired my last two shotgun shells into a moose that started to charge me, then butchered it to cook over my fire which kept me fed for two days before the meat spoiled.

Accidentally rammed my hippie van into a mass of black goo, which stalled the engine, and had to flee through the rear doors as the goo started to pour into the cabin.

Found a car that started but would not move, no wheels, so I turned on the car alarm to alert the zombies that were infesting a nearby mansion, hoping to lure them out.

Ran top speed down the middle of the road in the darkness, stumbled into a Zombie Bear and luckily had one charge left in the taser I have from my pre-apoc job as a Mall Cop.

Made it back to my half-built log cabin but realized I used to sleep in the hippie van, so I threw some wood on the fireplace and used the light to sew a pile of rags into a blanket that kept me warm as I slept through the cool summer night.

A large team continually improves the game, try it here:

http://dev.narc.ro/cataclysm/jenkins-latest/Windows/Tiles/

I suggest these changes:

Options - Graphics - Terminal Width = 150 (1200 pixels, or your choice)
Options - Graphics - Terminal Height = 50 (800 pixels, or your choice)
Options - Graphics - Choose Tileset = MShock24Modded

22

Fantastic write up, I keep meaning to try this. This pushed it up the queue.

-Todd

23

Why has it been a year since they’ve released a stable release? Have they abandoned the website and stable releases?

24

Also, I don’t see where you can choose a tileset.

25

Well, that’s the curses version.

http://dev.narc.ro/cataclysm/jenkins-latest/Windows/Tiles/

26

Ok, now I see it. So what is the difference in the 2 download locations? They seem to be the same version number.

27

Eh, one is curses, and the other is tiles.

28

Usually, with this kind of in-flux types of games it doesn’t make a lot of sense to make “stable” releases.

The latest nightly builds are stable enough to be playable and since you are going to restart a billion of times there’s never the issue of playing the same stable version over a longer term. So lots of dedicated players just download the latest nightly and play that.

(ASCII version is still superior if you have a square font for the map, and a different one for the UI)

29

I love these games, but find I can’t really dig the ascii anymore.

30

It’s about preference qualms since the big problem with ASCII is about memorizing the symbols. But with mouse support you can simply hover on the fly on something and immediately know what it is, so there’s no real “readability” issue.

31

Whoops, fixed the link!

The experimental builds are often more stable than the last release. I update them aprox monthly, or when a large tileset change or function change comes in. You can copy the save, config, template and graveyard folders over from build to build.

32

Arise! We’ve been posting a lot about this game in the roguelike games thread recently and it was pointed out we already had an old CDDA thread so I’m bumping this and will post here from now on.

I’ve been experimenting trying to get a Shaolin Dragon Style martial artist off the ground and it’s tough. My starting survivalist gear may be too encumbered for him and slowing him down. I’m not sure what’s best for a martial artist to wear.

I got a good start this last try but was chased by a shady zombie (after killing 3 other zombies and bitten up pretty good in the process) into a house which apparently had belonged to a survivalist. It had a nice room with ammo reloading equipment and a door that was boarded up. I pried open the door and saw some stuff on a table and a bear trap on the floor to the north. I was walking over to the table when I stepped on a hidden land mine and got blown to pieces.

33

This game is a lot of fun and I’ll admit that I’m a bit obsessed with it right now. I switched tilesets to the CDDA-MSX-DeadPeople tileset and I like it a lot. It’s based on work by Xotto, but heavily edited and expanded. It’s updated frequently with recent main game additions and mod support. The only thing is you need to download and install it manually since its not one of the default tilesets that come with the game.

Playing as a melee build is very difficult because there are so many nasty ranged zombies that shock, spew acid, bile and other nasty stuff from a distance. A lot of zombies are damn fast and tough too.

I know you’re supposed to stay away from towns in the beginning but the problem is that towns are where all the good stuff is. I tried staying away in a few previous runs only to run into thirst/starvation/exposure issues. Plus there’s plenty of nasty stuff to run into outside of town too.

In my current start my shelter is jammed right up next to a town. There’s 3 houses about 30 feet south of it and a gun store just south of them. There’s a LOT of zombies. I’d like to get into the gun store but it has locked metal doors and iron bars in the windows. I think I’d need explosives to get in there so I’ve stayed away.

I found an armored Humvee with a giant roof mounted machine gun just sitting on the highway a bit north. It starts up and runs fine so I thought I’d lucked out but when I tried to drive it I quickly saw that the wheels were gone. I’m not sure how you’d ever fix that.

34

Welcome to the Cataclysm.

If anyone feels the need for some help i have created some new player friendly series on Youtube designed to introduce the game and answer questions. Here are some links:

Full Tutorial Play-through (Evac shelter/Survivor start):

Cataclysm University:

Cataclysm Quick Tips:

The goal of these video’s is to ease the early game frustration and show how cool/complicated the systems are once you realize just how much is simulated. I’m happy to answer any questions in the comments or on my Discord channel (or here of course).

35

My recommendation for town raiding in the early game is to do it a night. 98% of the enemies are nearly blind at night. Shady zombies are the only ones generally that can see in the dark and they are fairly easy to kill/avoid. I have Quick Tip and University episodes that discuss Night Vision and City raiding with in-game examples showing how to move around effectively.

The Gun Store front door can be picked with improvised lockpicks. at low skill it may take a bunch of attempts but with persistence you can usually get in that way. Alternative methods are to cut the bars in the windows (need a hacksaw or other metal cutting tool) or the good old vehicular ram (make sure you have a seatbelt).

You can fix/repair/remove/replace everything on a vehicle with the right skills/tools/materials. For wheels you need a bit of mechanics skill, a jack (size/type depends on weight of vehicle), and a replacement wheel.

36

Thanks, I actually had been going going through the crafting recipes looking for something that would work and saw the improvised lockpicks there. I figured it was worth a try. I broke 3 picks but it worked. I grabbed a Remington 870 shotgun and some ammo for it.

I found a sleeveless duster, leather pants and some other nice gear. I’ve been trying to figure out how to do the clothes re-layering and the interface is obtuse (at least to me). I’m not sure if I’m doing it right or not. I’m going to watch your video episode on re-layering and figure it out.

I’ll make another try at a run into town at night. Last time didn’t go well (got gangbanged by 6 shady zombies) but it’s dark right now so might as well give it another try. No shotgun for that, unfortunately, it makes way too much noise and draws them like flies. Time to break out the martial arts instead.

37

Vorm, I watched your " Firehouse Foiled Fooey!" episode for the layering info and noticed that you stayed away from the Firehouse because you were worried about the turret seeing you. You’ve probably figured this out by now but you didn’t have to worry about that because it was night. At night, the turret’s range is limited to the range of the light radius around the turret. You can clearly see the light radius ends just short of the credit card looking thing on the ground north of the dead zombies in the video. Also, when you were in the zoomed out view you could see the fairly small lighted area around the turret. As long as you stay out of that light, it can’t see you to shoot at you at night. They can’t see in the dark at all.

I tested this on the turret in my game. When I left the mansion and went back to my starting shelter, it was dark. The body of the zombie I lead into the turret previously was lying there just barely outside of the lighted area around the turret. I walked up to the zombie and looted it without being shot at.

38

While you are generally correct…i have been killed multiple times while outside that supposed ‘safe’ light radius and therefore give them a wide berth whenever possible.

39

This game is so cool. I was slinking around the edge of town at night looting some houses (damn those shady zombies, I had to kill 4 in a row) and I found an innocuous looking house with a basement. When I went downstairs I found a gun nut’s survivalist paradise. Every type of ammo and gun you can think of laid out on long tables. Scopes, gun safes, other gun accessories, tools and gun books everywhere. Jackpot! Of course it also has a few survivalist zombies in there throwing smoke grenades around. I had to laugh. This game is great.

40

Yeah, that’s a fun basement to find. The survivor zombies are not throwing smoke grenades though, that is a smoke zombie in there with them.