Haha, actually yours were the first videos I found earlier today so thanks.
My main concern right now is that the game appears to be broken. It seems all food freezes. If you cook something or heat water, it freezes before you can eat/drink it. If you kill an animal, it freezes before it hits the ground. Everyone says stay on version 7700 but the launcher doesn’t go back that far. Someone on Reddit posted a compiled version of 7700 so I’m going to try to use the launcher to install the game and get the paths and tilesets installed properly and then manually overwrite that directory with the older version. We’ll see if that works.
The fact that there is no recent stable version of this game and that they would release broken versions without a stable version to fall back to does not give me much confidence in whoever is overseeing this project. It also certainly dampens my enthusiasm to try this game out.
I’ve been playing it heavily for a little more than a year and this is the first time an update has caused this kind of issue. the game gets multiple updates every day so that’s a pretty good track record. They should get it sorted out fairly soon.
I was able to get the older version installed so I’ll play that one until they get it sorted.
After install, the first thing I wanted to do was change the terminal size and the font and font size. I saw that you had a video just for that very thing. It was extremely helpful and just what I needed so thanks for that. I found numbers that fit my 16:10 monitor perfectly for the terminal size and I was able to find a font that looks great.
I’ve discovered over the years when playing old DOS games that if you want sharp looking fonts, stick to the truetype fonts. I didn’t have that many installed on my system but the truetype unispace bold (unispace bd) font looks great. So if anyone is looking for one for this game, give that a try.
Cool. Glad to hear you got the earlier version working and that you found the episodes helpful.
Now get out there and kill some zombies! Or run away from them. Or run them over in your Apocalypse Mobile. Or launch a nuke at them from the missile silo computer terminal you hacked. Or…
I’ll probably do more running from them than anything else to start with. I set up a game world and survivor character using your excellent guides so I’m ready to start playing and become a tasty zombie meal. Survivors, the other white meat.
Started my first CDDA game. The town I’m near has houses very close to the other businesses. I did a quick scouting trip but zombies are all around the most isolated house. So I backed off and looked for other resources. To the south is a ruined house site. I went down there and there was a bear, Amoebic Mold and some zombies there. There were many bodies around the mold and one of them had a machete on it so I ran in, grabbed it and retreated back to the shelter. Are machetes any good?
To the north, isolated in some woods off the road north is a mansion. Should I avoid mansions because they’re full of zombies? I may have to find out. I’m getting desperate for a container to put water in to boil. There’s a big river just west of the starting shelter so finding water isn’t a problem, just carrying it and purifying it.
That house of the outskirts of town with the zombies also has 2 vehicles out front. One appears to be a big RV bus. Maybe I can see if they have anything inside without the zombies spotting me.
I’m afraid this game has it’s hooks in me now. Can’t wait to get back to it.
Reading this really makes me wish I could get it working on the Mac without it crashing all the time. I am probably going to trying running that stable release in Wine.
Sounds like your doing things correctly. Early game is all about combat avoidance. Once you get some skills/gear you can start taking the fight to the enemy. The machete is pretty good for early game use.
Mansions are great, definitely get to it if you can safely. Yes, it will have zombies but generally only the lowest level versions which are fairly easy to fight/avoid. The mansion will have tons of stuff on 3 levels (main, basement, upper) and makes a great starting base/home if you can clear it out.
I’m outside the mansion now. I made my way over to the highway north of town and took that NW towards the mansion. There were some gun turrets set up in the middle of the highway where there was an abandoned police vehicle and body of an officer that had some nice stuff on it. But no way to get near. I was being chased by a swimmer zombie that spotted me so I lead him into turret range and that was that.
A bit further up the road was a gas station with a few abandoned cars, a bus and a motorcycle. The motorcycle didn’t have an engine unfortunately and nothing else would start. Inside the gas station I found some cold medicine, bandages, a sandwich, some seed snacks and a bottle of cranberry juice. The juice was the big find because I’m really worried about thirst.
I had to leave the machete behind at the shelter because of space/volume issues. I really need to find a way to expand how much I can carry. I’m hoping that the mansion will have something.
There are zombies all along the perimeter of the mansion so I need to kill one and break in or find a window somewhere where one can’t see me. I was chased by a rattlesnake for a bit in the woods outside but I seem to have lost him without alerting any zombies.
I have to say this game really has some tense moments.
The item you wield in your hands does not count against volume limits so you should be able to keep the machete. If there are woods near the mansion, you can perform a Pied Piper maneuver and lead a group of zombies into the woods, lose them, then circle back to the mansion. Rinse and Repeat as necessary depending on light/food/thirst requirements. If you must fight, try to position the zombie so it stands on a terrain feature like a window sill, bush, table, etc. This causes them to lose action points (slow them down) so you get more swings in during combat. lots of rooms/doors/floors to break line of sight and contact in the mansion also.
Yeah, but I’m already wielding my knife-spear and based on your video it seems like a better weapon against zombies since it can attack from 2 spaces away and thus prevent infected bite chances. I see that the machete can block but I’m not sure how reliable that is.
I like the pied piper idea. I’ll give that a try.
Well, the pied piper approach didn’t work very well since I ended up having to kill two zombies on the way but I’m now inside the mansion. It’s a gold mine in here. I found a plastic shopping bag and soon after that a backpack in one of the bedrooms. So now I can carry plenty of stuff.
There are several fireplaces and I found a pot so I assume I can fill that with water and boil it over the fireplace somehow? I’m not sure if that’s crafting or just some kind of interaction with the fireplace. I assume I’ll have to stick some wood in the fireplace and light it first. I found a plastic bottle with a resealable top so I think I’ll be able to store any boiled water in that.
I found some food in one of the kitchens and with a way to boil water, I may be though the most dangerous part of the beginning game now (I hope).
Edit: I also found ‘Computers 301’ and "How to Trap Anything’ books. I can read the book on traps but don’t have the skill yet to read the computer book.
For cooking or boiling water you need a fire source (oven, fireplace, brazier) onto which you drop wood and then light it up using a lighter/matches etc, a container of water that you want to boil, and a destination container for the clean water. just get the fire going and then use the crafting menu “&” to select ‘clean water’ from the food tab. if you are missing anything the recipe screen will show it in red color.
Spock
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I haven’t tried Cataclysm yet, but I notice that it’s available for iOS as well as the PC. Does it play as well on an iPad as on a PC?
I have no direct experience with the mobile versions but my understanding is that they use significantly older versions of the code and have some interface issues. Hopefully someone with actual hands-on knowledge can comment here.
I was able to store water from an indoor pool (very nice unlimited water source) in a bottle and get it boiled in a pot and then back into a third bottle. Kind of a pain because you need 3 containers for the process but it works.
I tried to read a book on mechanics to raise my skill there to 3 but it got too dark to read before I finished. So, I decided to explore the place some more in the dark.
The mansion is crawling with zeds. I’ve killed about 10 of them so far in there, most of them upstairs. Downstairs had mostly crawlers but upstairs was a different story. One fat zombie and a bunch or regular ones. One of them trapped me in a small room and bit me on the arm and torso before I could kill him. Fortunately, I didn’t get infected. In the other battles the throwing sticks I had saved my bacon for the most part. They’re very useful to soften up the zeds before finishing them with the knife-spear.
Two of the zombies had pistols on them. One was a S&W 6 shooter and the other an automatic that appears to be loaded with ammo. Sadly, it doesn’t look like I have the skill to use it. All of the fighting did raise my throwing and melee skills a level though.
I used the bandages I found at the gas station on both wound sites and took some aspirin for the pain. I explored the upstairs some more (found a nice knitted cap that fit and a pearl bracelet worth $5000). My character status said I was tired, hungry and thirsty so I ate some granola I found, drank some boiled water and went to sleep in a huge king sized bed in one of the bedrooms. When the morning light woke me up my wounds had all healed.
Thus passed my first day in the wasteland. Maybe I’ll explore the basement on day 2. Or maybe try to kill a critter outside and cook it.
magnet
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The iOS version appears to be abandoned, since the last update was in 2016.
However there is an Android version that is still being updated.
Hey Vorm, do you know if there’s a mod to replace the over-world map ASCII with a map tileset, like you can with the main screen? It’s kind of jarring to have a nice graphics tileset in the main game and then you hit ‘m’ and there’s ASCII on the world map instead.
I saw where someone had created an over-world map tileset way back in 2013 (below) but I can’t find an actual mod that implements it or something like it. Are you aware of any? It seems like this would be a no-brainer for someone to do unless there’s a technical reason it can’t be done.
Hmm…i have never seen one and can’t imagine how it would be better than the ASCI version. Trying to tell the difference between 100 unique buildings in a tileset graphic small enough to show a useful amount in a map screen would be…very very hard. While the ASCI map takes some getting used to it does the job of giving exact info in a compact manner and allows a fairly large map area to be displayed on screen at once.
I’m not sure if it helps, but you can make changes to the overmap font size/type to improve the visibility. Here is the one i use to make things more legible for my viewers (especially those watching on mobile devices).
That looks great. What font and size are you using for the overworld map?
