Post by aka Cthulhu on Mar 24, 2015 4:54:27 GMT -5
I've mentioned this game in the Roguelike threads I've made a while ago, and since the game is an ongoing project it gets new changes and I reckon it'd be nice to get more people hearing about this game.
More or less, Cataclysm DDA is a roguelike, a zombie apocalypse survival roguelike with one hell of an open sandbox. You can generate worlds, and each one has a huge map to explore and get killed in. After all, getting killed in roguelikes is part of the fun. And there's a ton of things to do in this game, and I'll try to cite them all to get people interested.
First things first, tilesets are not available. If ASCII graphics is not your thing, the new tilesets are pretty much complete, so you can select three different tilesets to help shape your zombieland.
Since it is survival, aside from trying not to get killed by Zs, you need food to eat and water to drink. You can hunt, but you need to cook them. Same with water. Unclean water and uncooked food will have a chance to make you sick, and your character doesn't like raw meat. You can find and forage for food, but pretty much every food will rot without proper preparations. You can eat rotten food, if you are desperate.
Clothes. Lots and lots of clothes! Strength affects how much weight you can carry, but volume is another thing. There is no magical bag where you can stuff televisions and turrets into. You need to wear clothes with pockets, or backpacks that have a volume limit separate from your weight limit. And clothes also provide valuable warmth to your player. You can layer yourself with lots of clothes to keep you warm in long winter nights, or less clothes during the heat of the summer. Too many layers, you'll have a hard time fighting or running, not enough layers you're just a sack of meat that'll get killed by zombies, or the elements. Don't let you things flap around in the wind, it's unhygienic. Your clothes can also get ripped, so you need to repair or replace them, otherwise you go back to nothing.
Speaking of temperatures, the game can be divided into four seasons. Summer heat can make food rot faster, winter will freeze your ass off. Weather is also a problem. Rain can provide you with water to drink, if you're home base is far from a source of water. Thunder can make noise, and lightning can brighten up the night. Oh, about night, without a flashlight or similar things, your field of vision is crap and night. You can't read, you can't craft, if it's too dark. You can go about with a flashlight to light up the place, but do note that Zs can see the light, and then you.
Zombies and other creatures can use sight, sound, and even smell to find you. Running around town in the middle of the day is a bad idea. At night, smashing a door or window open makes a lot of noise - so you need to find a way to go around that. Of course, you can also use sound to your advantage. A rock thrown elsewhere, or setting of an alarm on one point and hiding on another can help you. Of course, a lot of zombies can be lurking around, so there's still a big possibility that you'll still run into them. During the day, your line of sight is a little better than most, but at night you're pretty much in the dark. Heh, that was a nice pun.
You can craft a ton of things, and construct just as much. Wanna make a log fortress, go and chop up some wood. Wanna make a katana? Forge one for nine hours in-game time. Wanna make a katana that can be set on fire using gasoline? Go find the craft recipe for that! You can also construct and make a car, or a motorcycle, and if staying in one place isn't your thing, then you can create a mobile deathmobile fort complete with sleeping quarters and all the wonderful features of post-zombie civilization.
Basically, the game really focuses a lot on surviving. There's a lot of skills you need to learn, and in the case of crafting you need to have the right tools available to make use of the items needed for crafting. Early on, you have to rely on raiding towns at night, under the cover of darkness, to get supplies. You can also try the nomadic lifestyle, hunting un-zombiefied animals for food, or you can also try farming. Most zombies aren't too tough, but they are numerous. Try firing off a shotgun in the middle of the street, and see how many types of zombies you can find.
Also, zombies, being zombies, can revive. You need to find a way to dispose of them, otherwise they'll just show up again.
And seriously, the map is huge. It can take days and days, to explore just part of the map and more. There are undergound places where you can find nice loot, or death. A little bit of both.
Other few more things, and I'm sure I forgot some more, but you can also get sick, or infected. Not zombie infected, but their bites can go deep, and if left untreated, can put a lot of pain in you, and possibly kill you. Pain is also another mechanic. Zombies are slow... well, most of them are, but if you're in too much pain, you slow down, your stats get lowered, and you get swarmed and eaten. You can get infected with fungi, which starts off quiet and then BAM! mushrooms burst out of your arms and break both of them. On a more mundane type of sickness, you get the flu. Your stats are lowered, you cough, you make noise, and lots will hear it.
On health points, the max health you get at the start of the game won't go any higher. You won't even see the exact numbers, unless you pick out a certain trait. Your arms and legs can reach zero health and you'll still live, but you need to find a way to fix that quick. If your torso or head reaches zero health... well, it's a roguelike. Permadeath is there. If you don't reset the world you make, you might get lucky and find the corpse and/or base of your character, with all your loot still in them.
And on the subject of traits, you can select them at character creation, and only then. At creation, you get points to allocate on stats, traits, and starting skills. Most starting skills begin at zero, unless you choose certain professions. Some give you points, some require points. Same with traits. You can select a number of good traits, but if you're lacking in points you can pick bad ones. They can vary quite a bit. Like on bad traits you can pick illiterate which provides a large amount of points... but you won't be able to read books and computers, which can be a huge blow to figure out crafting recipes. Though, if you wanna learn some recipes without books you can disassemble things and you might figure out how to make them.
As you play the game you can get mutations. Like starting traits, they can be good or bad, except they're completely random and bad luck can really screw you over. There's also the option of bionics, which you can install. They can be pretty varied and handy, but are just as rare as mutations, and require another bionic to give you power. Plus installing bionics has a chance of failure, depending on your skills. Failure can cause, pain, loss of your other bionics, mutations, or giving you some nasty passive bionic effects, and are riskier to remove than mutations.
That's about it. Oh, and there are some drugs and booze you can consume. Former can be painkillers, and some of them can provide you a boost in some stats for a while. You can get addicted though, and too much might cause you to die from overdose. Booze is more of a morale boost, but you can craft handy molotovs from them.
And that's that. I think I covered most of the important points of the game. If anyone is interested, Cataclysm is free and doesn't need a lot of computer power to run (since after all, it's ASCII, though it has tilesets now). Just search it in Google and start doing your post-apocalypse fantasies.
More or less, Cataclysm DDA is a roguelike, a zombie apocalypse survival roguelike with one hell of an open sandbox. You can generate worlds, and each one has a huge map to explore and get killed in. After all, getting killed in roguelikes is part of the fun. And there's a ton of things to do in this game, and I'll try to cite them all to get people interested.
First things first, tilesets are not available. If ASCII graphics is not your thing, the new tilesets are pretty much complete, so you can select three different tilesets to help shape your zombieland.
Since it is survival, aside from trying not to get killed by Zs, you need food to eat and water to drink. You can hunt, but you need to cook them. Same with water. Unclean water and uncooked food will have a chance to make you sick, and your character doesn't like raw meat. You can find and forage for food, but pretty much every food will rot without proper preparations. You can eat rotten food, if you are desperate.
Clothes. Lots and lots of clothes! Strength affects how much weight you can carry, but volume is another thing. There is no magical bag where you can stuff televisions and turrets into. You need to wear clothes with pockets, or backpacks that have a volume limit separate from your weight limit. And clothes also provide valuable warmth to your player. You can layer yourself with lots of clothes to keep you warm in long winter nights, or less clothes during the heat of the summer. Too many layers, you'll have a hard time fighting or running, not enough layers you're just a sack of meat that'll get killed by zombies, or the elements. Don't let you things flap around in the wind, it's unhygienic. Your clothes can also get ripped, so you need to repair or replace them, otherwise you go back to nothing.
Speaking of temperatures, the game can be divided into four seasons. Summer heat can make food rot faster, winter will freeze your ass off. Weather is also a problem. Rain can provide you with water to drink, if you're home base is far from a source of water. Thunder can make noise, and lightning can brighten up the night. Oh, about night, without a flashlight or similar things, your field of vision is crap and night. You can't read, you can't craft, if it's too dark. You can go about with a flashlight to light up the place, but do note that Zs can see the light, and then you.
Zombies and other creatures can use sight, sound, and even smell to find you. Running around town in the middle of the day is a bad idea. At night, smashing a door or window open makes a lot of noise - so you need to find a way to go around that. Of course, you can also use sound to your advantage. A rock thrown elsewhere, or setting of an alarm on one point and hiding on another can help you. Of course, a lot of zombies can be lurking around, so there's still a big possibility that you'll still run into them. During the day, your line of sight is a little better than most, but at night you're pretty much in the dark. Heh, that was a nice pun.
You can craft a ton of things, and construct just as much. Wanna make a log fortress, go and chop up some wood. Wanna make a katana? Forge one for nine hours in-game time. Wanna make a katana that can be set on fire using gasoline? Go find the craft recipe for that! You can also construct and make a car, or a motorcycle, and if staying in one place isn't your thing, then you can create a mobile deathmobile fort complete with sleeping quarters and all the wonderful features of post-zombie civilization.
Basically, the game really focuses a lot on surviving. There's a lot of skills you need to learn, and in the case of crafting you need to have the right tools available to make use of the items needed for crafting. Early on, you have to rely on raiding towns at night, under the cover of darkness, to get supplies. You can also try the nomadic lifestyle, hunting un-zombiefied animals for food, or you can also try farming. Most zombies aren't too tough, but they are numerous. Try firing off a shotgun in the middle of the street, and see how many types of zombies you can find.
Also, zombies, being zombies, can revive. You need to find a way to dispose of them, otherwise they'll just show up again.
And seriously, the map is huge. It can take days and days, to explore just part of the map and more. There are undergound places where you can find nice loot, or death. A little bit of both.
Other few more things, and I'm sure I forgot some more, but you can also get sick, or infected. Not zombie infected, but their bites can go deep, and if left untreated, can put a lot of pain in you, and possibly kill you. Pain is also another mechanic. Zombies are slow... well, most of them are, but if you're in too much pain, you slow down, your stats get lowered, and you get swarmed and eaten. You can get infected with fungi, which starts off quiet and then BAM! mushrooms burst out of your arms and break both of them. On a more mundane type of sickness, you get the flu. Your stats are lowered, you cough, you make noise, and lots will hear it.
On health points, the max health you get at the start of the game won't go any higher. You won't even see the exact numbers, unless you pick out a certain trait. Your arms and legs can reach zero health and you'll still live, but you need to find a way to fix that quick. If your torso or head reaches zero health... well, it's a roguelike. Permadeath is there. If you don't reset the world you make, you might get lucky and find the corpse and/or base of your character, with all your loot still in them.
And on the subject of traits, you can select them at character creation, and only then. At creation, you get points to allocate on stats, traits, and starting skills. Most starting skills begin at zero, unless you choose certain professions. Some give you points, some require points. Same with traits. You can select a number of good traits, but if you're lacking in points you can pick bad ones. They can vary quite a bit. Like on bad traits you can pick illiterate which provides a large amount of points... but you won't be able to read books and computers, which can be a huge blow to figure out crafting recipes. Though, if you wanna learn some recipes without books you can disassemble things and you might figure out how to make them.
As you play the game you can get mutations. Like starting traits, they can be good or bad, except they're completely random and bad luck can really screw you over. There's also the option of bionics, which you can install. They can be pretty varied and handy, but are just as rare as mutations, and require another bionic to give you power. Plus installing bionics has a chance of failure, depending on your skills. Failure can cause, pain, loss of your other bionics, mutations, or giving you some nasty passive bionic effects, and are riskier to remove than mutations.
That's about it. Oh, and there are some drugs and booze you can consume. Former can be painkillers, and some of them can provide you a boost in some stats for a while. You can get addicted though, and too much might cause you to die from overdose. Booze is more of a morale boost, but you can craft handy molotovs from them.
And that's that. I think I covered most of the important points of the game. If anyone is interested, Cataclysm is free and doesn't need a lot of computer power to run (since after all, it's ASCII, though it has tilesets now). Just search it in Google and start doing your post-apocalypse fantasies.
