Cataclysm: Roleplay Days Ahead

[Andrew]

in this thread instead of sell you on a game we shall take an adventure through a world of grief, sadness, fursuits, bionics, cannibalism, and sucking water out of corpses.


Firstly, let's make our world.

Spoiler: World Generation

This isn't preferable at all. Instead, I've enabled everything that doesn't simplify the game or make it silly,

and added some NPC's

and named our world to nothing it's randomized and this sounds cool

Our name is Male_07, otherwise known as "Bimmy Dibby"

Although our past is not known, we are alive.

Spoiler: Who are we?

also we're chad and strong as fuck because strength helps with melee a lot and we're gonna drink sewer water to mutate.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Spoiler: Day 1

We're alive! And the world has fallen. It's 2070, or sometime around there, and the world is a futuristic mess. On our way to the shelter we had dodged police bots attempting to make control, and found only one other survivor.

Or, we'll say we did, as I spawned here.

We open a dialogue with our only surviving friend. He exclaims that the world is fucked because of the elite.

Now, we could tell him to go fuck himself - but to gain his trust (and an item) we're going to say we'll help, because...

He'll give us something for helping him!

We wander our surroundings, scanning a nearby computer. We read a message.

Gas masks? Time to search the basement.

We wander downstairs, and immediately...

Hear something. We aren't alone. Not all is lost, however - those things on the floor are signal flares for a flaregun. We'll take them upstairs with us.

A quick scan of the lockers in the shelter yield nothing. We peek outside, and see a road.

Luckily, we know where we are.

No matter the case, we prep for leaving. With no food, we won't last long - time to make a trip into town.

We don't have much, but it's better than nothing.

We venture out. Shit's fucked already

But we'll be fine.

Standing between us and the freedom of a house is a grabber zombie.

So we're gonna go around, hopefully he doesn't see us. Walking past an engine on the side of the road, we manage to snake our way to the house, unnoticed. With no option, we're gonna have to smash the window open, and close the curtains on the other one - risking a room exposed to a field, nonetheless - a bedroom.

We enter. Immediately we spot a gameboy - we'll ignore it for now. Our first priority is to secure the house, shutting all curtains immediately.

And fail, spectacularly. We've wandered around too heavily, and are noticed.

Against our better wishes, we're going to fight this one out.

After sustaining a minor two bites to an arm and leg, we win!

To play it safe, we'll butcher this corpse, ensuring it doesn't revive at any point - they are zombies, after all.

We're immediately interrupted by the grabber from before smashing his way in.

We're going to stand our ground, and fight him, and win - after receiving a few bites, and being grabbed.

Round 3 starts.

We've lucked out. The grabber zombie had a dark cola with him, as well. Butchering time.

We end our introduction to zombies fine - we hurt a bit, but otherwise, we're doing fine.

Grabbing a nearby bookcase, we drag it over to a window - creating more noise, and bringing a zombie's attention to us - it finds its way inside, and we stab it to death almost immediately.

Shimmying our way around the house, we find our way into the kitchen - and swear to never go back to that corner of the house again, as the windows are wide open, and compromised.

We've scoured a TV dinner, uncooked, from the fridge. A fairly quick scan of the bathroom also yielded non-drowsy cough syrup - a must if we get a cold.

Let's check downstairs!

nevermind

we fuck off upstairs immediately - freeing ourself of the webs first, of course.

We head upstairs, and wait - seeing if the big bad spider followed us, and it didn't, for some reason. +1 to the nonexistent stealth stat we keep in our head.

Let's try another house.

Peeking the alley between the two houses for a moment, we stop - and move on.

Off in the distance is a skeleton.

Turns out it wasn't a house - it was a hardware store! We can only enter from the fenced-in front, and exposing ourselves on the sidewalk doesn't seem too bright. We'll duck into the nearby church first.

Jackpot.

We'll stay here for a while. See what we can scrounge, or if anything's inside.

Spoiler: The Raid: Church

Let's take this silent for now. We'll check the main hall first, primarily because of the glass.

Well, it's clean, barring the personal effects of anyone who decided to split at the last second - or didn't.

Upon further inspection. we find out the place is a mosque. We probably would've been able to tell if it was 3D, but the thawb and quran we found are also pretty good tells. We've taken some sunglasses to wear, a pair of bifocal glasses to focus the sunlight to start fires (redundant, since we now have four lighters - the sad part, however, is our normal glasses cannot achieve that)

However, the biggest haul so far was a telescoping umbrella. We can now stay dry, and not lose much storage space! On top of this, we've chosen to wear a holy symbol. There isn't much faith left, but we'll keep what we can.

Let's bounce - but not out that doorway.

From here, we cannot exit the building. All street exits would immediately end with us being spotted - and with no car to escape to or reliable object to put between us and a crowd, we're out of luck. However, we can see we have many goals to work towards - all will be talked about after clearing the church.

We've found a light jacket, and a jean jacket that fits us! Now we're warm, and have decent protection from cuts on our arms.

Hey cool, a computer. Wonder what it d-

nevermind, we'll pocket this for later, when we can lure everything and speed away.

End of church.

i'll update this whenever i play my boy bimmy, it's hard to show what we're doing without taking screenies every few moments

get this game, it's free https://cataclysmdda.org/ just get the tiles builds because terminal is a lot harder to read for new players, almost impossibly so

get tiles and change your graphics to 128/40 and ChestHole for the effects that clothing actually changes and your character wields things - for instance, if I put an army helmet on - chesthole will show it on my character.

 

[swagile]

can you recommend some mods for this? like quality of life mods and such

cause i know rimworld is similar in a sense that the base game is okay, but the modding scene has made so many good quality of life mods that playing without them is drastically different

 

[Andrew]

it would appear there is one major one

haven't dicked around with mods because i don't see much point yet, haven't hit any ceilings in the game and I'm having tons of fun with it already

there aren't any quality of life things I'd change either - you can already peek, grab items, construct furniture/barricade/reinforce doors/windows, the sky is the limit

i guess there's a few mods on the discourse main site, any more you'd have to probably venture elsewhere or scan the site for more

all of those "mods" i have in worldgen came with the game

if you want anything to simplify controls that's also possible, there's an action menu you can open with shift+5

the only real way to learn is to play it and play it until controls are secondhand, it takes a while but it flows like water now



EDIT TO PIGGYBACK NOW THAT I'VE READ THE PK'S REBALANCING README

I can't say that adding a mod that changes the ecosystem heavily and makes the game harder would be a solid addition. I mean, I haven't played it - it sounds good, and neat - but I'd recommend just sticking with the vanilla game for now to learn it. It's definitely a step-up to the point of "you should know what you're doing" levels i think.

For instance, a faction that I've largely not seen on any of my characters (most are 1-2 hour memes for fun, about three are actual characters with time and effort in them)

is rebalanced and improved upon.

You can see here on my imam I've never fought triffids - I can think of one character, probably the imam, that has something called a "triffid grove" that I've seen on the corner of my map, tucked into a forest deeply. Other than that, I've pretty much not seen them.

I do remember one of my characters actually having a fungal problem, but not in a bad way. Many of the streets and the town that character started in had a problem with fungal creatures in it - passive, and actually cleaned out zombies for me.

However, that was one character - this game is so heavily based on RNG and the content is so deep that each is vastly different.

I can rely heavily on Bissin that I'll find weed - I always do, and I can use it to roll joints, and use them to improve morale and reduce some pain. Yet, on other characters - I pretty much haven't found any.

 

[Andrew]

Spoiler: more Day 1

Boy, we're in a pickle. We've successfully gotten everything we could need for the day, barring maybe a snack or two. Let's take quick inventory in this alley.

Alright. Now to scan our map once more.

There's two gun stores in this town. We'll keep them in mind (both the red < and ^). However, we could waltz down across the street to our south and enter ^, which is a butcher shop - more than likely to carry a butcher's knife, and some food. Directly north of us is a home improvement store - they always carry shitty energy drinks and snacks in there, so we'll give it a gamble.

Seems like we can't move without being spotted. It's much too early to wait out the night to move safely in the dark - we'll shimmy around and run from the deep east.

Skeleton spotted us. Time to take it out. We'll stand our ground for now, and fight away from everything.

After a quick fight (and a now slightly-torn jean jacket) we can butcher and loot the corpse.

Or not.


Anyways, let's but-

While that does make for a tasty dinner, I don't think a pocket knife is a sufficient weapon.

Let's wander the field between us and the store. We'll pick up the two newspaper pages we see - good for fuel.

That second one doesn't paint a fun sight, but nonetheless, a pulping will leave a zombie weak when it revives - a butchering will leave it dead.

After making our way up to a house to the east of the store, we've seen two bodies - let's take a moment to see if we can check them out, or even butcher them, if time allows. Maybe we'll find something.

Perhaps not. It may be best to smash the kitchen window and hide in the house, as this is due north of us.

This house is impossibly tiny - we'll have to hug the walls as we shut curtains.

Done - there's a glass door over by the southwest, and we can't see any curtains on it.

Looting time.

Armor located. We've even found a plastic shopping bag in the trash - easily reusable if we make a grocery store run. We'll just not be able to hold any weaponry when we use it, as it's very encumbering.

Surveying the kitchen paid off. We've found enough food to last a day, and that's not even counting what we're carrying.

We've found a temporary home. Let's check the bathroom, and whatever that other door was.

Omega jackpot. We've secured an item that will not only keep us dry, but also keep us from catching a cold. Being wet carries a heavy burden on our morale, after all - so much so that the simple act of drying off can bring us from the depths of depression to the forefront of happiness.

We can't carry the towel. Time to ease our weight, and drop what we don't need in the house.

Space created.

Reading material.

The bed has a blanket and a down-filled pillow - we'll be comfy tonight. Just grab the sheets from the curtains of the window we smashed, and use those as extra warmth later.

Believe it or not - it's clear to move. Let's get to that hardware store.

Hmm.

Peeking the corner, we see nothing. Time to smash the window and (hopefully not) trigger the alarm. We'll peek the front first.

Window it is - we walked past many, and the inside is rife with things.

We're in the home improvement store, not hardware.

Many blankets and paint, and a paint chipper. We'll grab a down-filled blanket from the front, and wear it as we take it back home.

Scoop up that onion and charcoal on our way in.

We're feeling a little hungry and thirsty - let's go back in and have a delicious meal.

Remember this trait? It means we can eat and drink more than normal, and also get more bonuses from eating delicious food, and less morale damage from eating less-desirable food. We'll take advantage of the morale gain (and the stat gain we acquire from high morale) and eat some clam chowder.

Curry, nevermind - we ate that tuna fish earlier, when we broke in initially.

We're doing fine. It's still early, though - time to maybe just run through the streets, disregarding the whole "being spotted" thing. We still need a better weapon, anyways.

Better yet, we'll stop for now. I can't upload to imgur anymore because I'm too fast and too furious in my gameplay.

 

[Andrew]

another post because 50 image limit per post

Spoiler: More Day 1

We're in a field - we're here to search for rocks, for a simple reason.

We've found 2 - one sharp, one normal.

Remember that patio furniture? Well...

We can't take it apart without some tools.

See?

Let's get to work.

After weighing our options out, we've decided with...

Although the pointy stick falls under piercing weapons (which is at 1, thanks to our use of our pocket knife) we're going to go with a nail board. Best we get some practice with bashing weaponry, as we'll soon more than likely find a bat, or something similar. We'll also fabricate a fish hook out of a nail, just in case - it's tiny anyways.

Wielding our nail board, we'll move out.

Just kidding, I made a pointy stick anyways. It cooks food (which is useless, we're more likely to find a frying pan soon in a house - an inifinitely more useful item, so much so that it's a permanent mainstay of your inventory as a hunter) and it even uses piercing, good if we see a cop, or - god forbid - a zombie soldier, and we need to fight.

Peering down towards the nearby road, we see a single zombie. There's no doubt still that group north of him that we saw earlier - if it was late, we'd read a book until nightfall. We may have to just run across the intersection to get deeper into town.

Directly left of us across that road is an electronics store. To the left of that is a laundromat - we'll keep that in mind as we head into town, as new clothes are grand. Below that (purple >) is a restaurant, which will definitely have a steak knife. However, the red ^ to our south is a butcher shop, which will carry a butcher knife - an immensely more powerful, slightly better butchering tool. That v in purple is a pizza parlor.

To stop wasting time, we're going to head left, and maintain that direction. The last two stores on this grid to our left are a sporting goods store (>) and a gun shop (^). If we're lucky, a car will be near the gun store, and there'll be gas in the tank - we'll be able to ram the wall, and break in, bypassing the barricaded windows and locked metal door in the front.

Peek the alley - nothing.

Nevermind. An assortment of different enemies. Not worth risking the bodies out on the sidewalk near us - being spotted would lure them to our abode.

Wrapping back around the store, we're going to head into town. That's me on the northeast corner.

Spoiler: The Town

Let's roll. Forgot I had 14 strength.

wh-

We turn around.

This street is populated. We're going to throw caution to the wind - loot the bodies near me, and run into the parking lot to our north.

Nothing so far. That car is running, and has items in it - it's gamble time. We're leaving town.

See that text in the bottom left? That's what gets you. There's no wheels.

This town is live. We're leaving. We're running to the alley northwest of us - between those storage units and the subway station.

All of those vending machines are loaded with food - we don't have a cash card, though.

Time to take a gamble.

Too dark.

Back upstairs. Heading north we see...

Jackpot. A SWAT van - two, in fact - and there's probably a gun or two in them. It's also armored, and will easily run down a zombie - or several.

This ambulance lacks wheels. Inside the back, however-

We take everything inside. That syringe will help if we can't outrun a crowd. Moving on...

Moving on this new van revealed to us bubble wrap on the floor nearby - an impeccable trap. All we must do is place it near a broken window, and we'll be alerted when a zombie wanders into our house - waking us up with the noise of the popping.

This is not the mission.

Rushing behind the van, we see things inside. It's a pair of knee-pads and a two-by-four. We already have hard leg guards on.

They're coming.

This security van has wheels, and 4% gas. We can move it to the north part of town before running out.

spoiler the car doesn't have controls

Let's take a break and catch our breath.

Gonna have to run this out - we're full on stamina now.

Door to an abandoned storefront - we're going to assume it's locked, as it's abandoned. Heading west at top-speed...

We see some crips on their low-riders

Still moving - this picture is larger to give you an understanding of what's going on.

Tasty electronics. We aren't smart enough to use them properly, though.

We peek the corner from the alley. We're still gonna have to run.

Past the gun shop, sadly.

The fast ones are hot on our heels.

Sadly, we'll have to stop before we run out of stamina, and fight this monstrosity.

This story will continue at a later date. I can't upload to imgur anymore for now

 

[Powley]

Looks interesting, how much does it cost?

 

[swagile]

Looks interesting, how much does it cost?

its a completely free game

 

[Stalker]

On my first day I spawned in some sort of prison and spent three days fighting off the old inmates of it while crawling because one of them broke my legs.

I died of starvation after 3 days

 

[Andrew]

take robust genetics, find a rock and pipe. make a makeshift crowbar, find a sewer grate. Go into the sewer, drink the water - mutate and profit.

e; also i'll probably finish bimmy's story at the end of day 1 and then just take snippets of screenies from other characters for this thread - it's tedious to constantly take pictures every few moves as things happen

 

[Andrew]

Y'all remember that innawoods shit that used to be on /f/ a ton and there'd be threads for it all over the place on 4ch

you can pull that shit on cataclysm and it's amazing

what you don't see is me not realizing i had two pairs of sunglasses on a few days ago

y'know what fuck it this'll be the post where i spam images to sell this game super hard

Spoiler: the correct mixture of bionics is good

the only downside to this character (which starts with all of these implants) is the "frail" status - meaning I have 50% less HP

hey let's make an anime character

oh no

let's make adam jensen

failed adam jensen preset

HE'S REAL

shoutouts to anyone who sees schizo and decides to use it for free points - I've gone days without any notable effects from it barring things like "you feel a little hot" and such but my friend makes a character with it and immediately hallucinates

 

[Andrew]

Spoiler: WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

 

[swagile]

Spoiler: WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

> newbies version of anarchist cookbook gained

now to find materials bud, good luck LMAO

 

[Andrew]

 

[Andrew]

Spoiler: some stuff on my main

Taken while I was defragging my PC today.

Matchhead bombs are great -I urge anyone who finds matchbooks to save them and use lighters instead. This is the aftermath of luring the better part of a large group away using gunfire from a glock 22 loaded with .40 S&W FMJ and then testing out a matchhead bomb.

Spoiler, the fuse is intensely long at 20 turns, meaning that I lucked out as the majority of the group had wandered over the bomb and it was behind them as it went off - killing a few basic zombies and hurting the rest of the group in varying damage levels. The rest were primarily finished with a dao I had gotten from an antique store.

Shoutout to the giant wolf spider that decided to join and made me target it faster than a rebel targets a poison crab.

lucked out with 2 filthy items from the litany of corpses

Going to clean the rest out of the barricade so I finally have access to the doctor's store in this town. Since this is my first character, this is pretty much the last street in this town that's populated - I've cleaned out and secured the city, apart from the occasional random zombie spawn.

update:

I really wanted to style and use capoeira for its bonuses in movement pre-combat but karate did fine. Still trying to find a way to make it viable over it other than just situational rare use. That dao is amazing though, really solid against basic enemies. Thinking about making a rebar spear later to train up piercing before I go back to a mansion near me and grab the ceremonial armour and the awlpike inside.