Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead

[Tri-Tachyon'sClown]

Well, I just picked up this game a week or two ago, and can say with confidence that Wurm "Girl"'s mod has about or at least 85% less faggotry than the main.

Well, consider me impressed. Have not got around to her(?) fork yet but given the features it has and the lack of certain assets I might have a good time with it.

No fag flags to be seen in between getting my shit pushed around while trying to get some motherfucking metal to make a goddamned hammer why does every car have a fucking mosh pit around it

Best find cars by a road outside of town, all it takes it one zombie touching a car to start a chain reaction of autism. Also, I noticed in BN that fag flags were moved to their own separate mod, like a sensible developer should do. So if there's no fag flags it's either a separate mod or you may want to check the debug menu and see if they're even included and edit them out accordingly...if you want, it's a pain in the ass.

The only "patterned" flag is the Stars and Bars now, and most novels are just "action novel" or "classical poetry" and stuff.

See now that's the kind of bloat cutting I like, rather than removing fun features and guns because of some ideological purpose. Hell they fucked up suppressors and shit, someone proposed a fix, we all know how that went.

 

[Mooger Meng]

Best find cars by a road outside of town, all it takes it one zombie touching a car to start a chain reaction of autism.

That's where I've been trying to look. I'm thinking the fork turned down the amount of vehicles among all the other stuff, what with how far I have to go looking for cars sometimes. Or I'm just getting unlucky and taking the wrong road, where the nearest wreck is 2-3 hours' walk away rather than 30 minutes'.

Also, I noticed in BN that fag flags were moved to their own separate mod, like a sensible developer should do. So if there's no fag flags it's either a separate mod or you may want to check the debug menu and see if they're even included and edit them out accordingly...if you want, it's a pain in the ass.

That would be a smart move. I haven't thought to check the mods, but so far a lot of that removal in TLG seems to be hard-coded. I've run into precisely one item so far that might be construed as faggotry: a rainbow Gadsen flag, which might be an oversight for all I know. Also, it was in a trash can where it belongs and scrapped down to over 600 cotton sheets with a pocket knife, so at least it was useful.

Have not got around to her(?) fork yet but given the features it has and the lack of certain assets I might have a good time with it.

For what it's worth, it leans a lot more toward hardcore survival stuff from what I can tell. There's a lot less food overall compared to what little I saw of the base game; of course, my saves are dying in combat long before they starve, since the lack of food keeps pushing me toward buildings anyway. Also, more advanced zombies seem to spawn earlier, under the implication that the Cataclysm didn't just now happen, which means I'll be going along more or less okay for a few days before seeing whatever the fuck a Necroboomer is and dying in like, 5 rounds of combat from shit I can't outrun.
Granted, I suck and am probably playing like an idiot, but when my dude with Night Vision is getting vaudeville hooked from beyond sight range at the dead of night by some Dhalsim knock-off by day 2, it seems like it's either "die hunting for sauerkraut" or "starve innawoods".

 

[Mooger Meng]

After running a bunch of generic template characters through the meat grinder and looking over a few videos from other players, I finally bit the bullet and did a random start. It stuck me with some vegan chef in the middle of a city, and I'm pretty sure the only reason this crazy bitch made it out was the copious amount of fungus growing through the northeast corner of town and the fucking machete she stumbled on in her mad dash for freedom.
After something like a week and a half, maybe two weeks in-game, I've found several working vehicles that I kinda-sorta know how to control now, a nearby evac shelter with barely enough food to keep this picky bitch fed, and have some decent combat skills thanks to repeated raids into the city again in the hopes of finding fuckin' grass cakes or whatever the hell else she's able to stomach. Oh, and the survivor cowering in the basement wants her to go kill his mother, which I still haven't done because it's in the heart of town and every time I scout in that direction there's some gaggle of new monstrosities that evolved over the last couple of days.
My best run so far, and it's with some alt universe Rule 63 version of Jack Scalfani larping as a UAC employee.

I still don't quite know what to make of this fork, since I don't have a good frame of reference for the base game. But there are a lot of things I'm seeing that I'm pretty sure wouldn't show up until a bit later into the game, like mutated batmans or gigantic pillars of ambulatory carrion, and holy hell is it difficult to find enough food to keep going day-to-day. Being stuck with a filthy vegan doesn't help, but even still, I'd be hard-pressed to have more than a day or two of buffer, and that city isn't getting any less dangerous.
I think I'm enjoying it so far though, even if it has some personal grudge against you, the player, for daring to interact with it.

 

[Friedrich Hayek's Ghost]

it has some personal grudge against you, the player, for daring to interact with it.

That's kind of just Cataclysm in general. It's made for the "dying is fun" crowd. You can use freeform character creation to mitigate some of that if you want to get your bearings first before jumping into the meat grinder.

 

[Reticulan Joe]

That's kind of just Cataclysm in general. It's made for the "dying is fun" crowd. You can use freeform character creation to mitigate some of that if you want to get your bearings first before jumping into the meat grinder.

Yeah, one of the fundamental problems Cata runs into is fundamental disagreement about what the power level should be. Is it gritty realistic survival horror, or is it Army of Darkness tier, “mod your car into a weapon and make explosives with a couple of college textbooks as references while kicking ass and dropping bon mots?” CDDA had largely been the latter until a few years ago, when it suddenly veered hard towards the former. Which is why I loved the old CDDA and play CBN now.

 

[Tri-Tachyon'sClown]

It's made for the "losing is fun" crowd.

FIFY. Sorry I had to, and even then once you understand the systems you can "win" pretty easily. Less than a full month and you can become a nigh unkillable cyborg mutant, but that is obviously less fun after a while.

 

[Reticulan Joe]

FIFY. Sorry I had to, and even then once you understand the systems you can "win" pretty easily. Less than a full month and you can become a nigh unkillable cyborg mutant, but that is obviously less fun after a while.

Yeah, that’s sort of the weird punchline of Cata and a lot of games like it. There’s a sort of power curve, with “brand new character with weak stats and no skills or gear” on one end, and “utterly untouchable except maybe by intentionally OP endgame shit that can one shot you” at the other, and the most fun parts are somewhere in the middle: tough enough to stand up to a few mooks but still very mortal in the face of serious opposition. Some of the most fun I’ve ever had in Cata has been abandoning the shopping cart full of loot I’d collected in a nighttime raid, before things went sideways, and trying to creep past large mobs or deadly single monsters while at half health and with one broken leg, hoping the pain meds that keep me from being incapacitated don’t make me uselessly slow if I absolutely have to kill a lone zed to make my escape.

 

[Orphaned Punk]

Yeah, that’s sort of the weird punchline of Cata and a lot of games like it.

Does changing the mutation speed of the zombies to curve/scale with your newfound ability to level up quicker via meta knowledge a solution to the problem?

 

[Reticulan Joe]

You can play around with mutation rates, zombie and item spawn rates, adding or removing stuff via mods, self-imposed challenge playthroughs, and so forth, but I think fundamentally you're always on that curve: all you can do is tweak the steepness of the slope. At least when I play, the game always has the same basic structure:

Stage one:
- find clothes/armor and weapon
- find water
- find food, medicine
- find somewhere safe to rest
- if necessary, escape initial predicament (lab, prison, etc.)

Stage two:
- set up camp, possibly short term or possibly long term
- stockpile food, water, medicine and/or ways to get those things (fishing, convenient water source, etc.)
- start collecting resources for crafting , tools, and books
- initial forays into the world to gather necessary-for-survival items

Stage three:
- begin scouring the map for missing books and tools, including specialty crafting tools
- learn martial arts, magic if available, work on mutations/bionics if applicable
- start grinding skills
- find a suitable vehicle and modify it to suit my needs
- figure out where to set up a permanent base of operations

Stage four:
- make sure I have access to a wide range of weapons - melee to long range sniping - and good skills
- make sure I have access to armor/environmental protection suitable to almost any situation
- achieve whatever post-threshold mutation I'm looking for, if possible

Stage five:
- raid difficult locations, sometimes recklessly
- attempt self imposed challenges (use only pistols and axes, wear only jeans & a tshirt, collect lots of obscure books or firearms)
- get bored, abandon the playthrough

I find that somewhere around mid-stage four is where the fun starts to peter out, and that a lot of my deaths tend to either happen in stage one or early two, or else stage five. Early stage one can get to be a slog, if only because you die a lot, but there's a definite moment sometime mid-stage one - usually when you get a good weapon, or lucky with an early good armor or martial art - that you go from being prey to being a predator, at least as far as lone regular zeds are concerned, and that's where it starts to get fun.

The Cata devs (both DDA, BN and other forks) are all aware of this, and in some ways a lot of the shit that Kevin & co are doing with skill specialties and all that other nonsense are fundamentally about making it take longer to climb up that curve. Yes, they are prolonging the "fun" part of the game, but they're doing it in some incredibly un-fun ways that just add tedium. Ultimately, though, this fundamental structure can't be changed without making the game something fundamentally different: Cataclysm as constituted is always going to be a game where your choices are either A) become more powerful, or B) die, and as long as you can become more powerful, you will climb that curve.

Edit: Ah, fuck, now I want to start a new BN playthrough. Haven't fucked with it since August, and one of the nice things about checking in on a game like Cata once or twice a year is that there's always something new and surprising when you do.

 

[Mooger Meng]

That's kind of just Cataclysm in general. It's made for the "dying is fun" crowd. You can use freeform character creation to mitigate some of that if you want to get your bearings first before jumping into the meat grinder.

I did that for quite a few runs in the beginning, rolling a fairly generic survivor with Night Vision and a low end combat background. I've gotten confident enough in the day-1 steps that I'm up to at least a random Evacuee start, but I have tried a few full-on randoms... which usually end up with my ass in a midcity mosh pit from the word "go" where I can't figure out an avenue of escape in the short window I have.

My problem now is building up player knowledge on how to survive for more than a week and get anything done in the process. TLG looks pretty stingy with its resources and peppers late-game enemies in the cities (where all the resources are, of course), so it's been very "fly or die" from my experience.

 

[Scream Aim Fire]

So, question for everyone; what mutation mods do you guys recommend for Bright Nights? Base game ones are already done, and I already grabbed and tried out the Arcana and DinoMod ones; anyone got any other options?

 

[Reticulan Joe]

I’m only just now starting to investigate the Arcana ones - I’ve dabbled a bit with the Monster Girls one but it seems like a lot of them are just re-branded animal mutations. Supposedly there’s a dragon mutation path with Magical Nights, as well as a vampiric one with that or Arcana. Poking around in debug mode it looks like there’s some BL9 mutations as well, though those might be item-based.

 

[Scream Aim Fire]

I’m only just now starting to investigate the Arcana ones - I’ve dabbled a bit with the Monster Girls one but it seems like a lot of them are just re-branded animal mutations. Supposedly there’s a dragon mutation path with Magical Nights, as well as a vampiric one with that or Arcana. Poking around in debug mode it looks like there’s some BL9 mutations as well, though those might be item-based.

Not in Magical Nights, no; you might be thinking of the Black Dragon mutation path from Magicalysm, which was only available in CDA, not C:BN. There's been some talk of people trying to add onto Magical Nights, including possibly it's own unique dragon form, but nothing's come of it so far.

 

[Jose Beaner Luna]

Damn there's truly a thread for everything in the Shiwi, anyways i returned to this game again, DDA was too gay and autistic than what i remembered, i started to play Bright Nights instead because people say is like when the game was actually fun, they were right, im having a blast rn.

First year on the apocalypse. this is the first time i survive this far, towns have size maxed out (however this one is a fairly small one) with a mod that makes resources and everything more scarse and dificult, got decent gear n shieeet after cleaning up the town and crafting and reading some shit, discovered a lab network down in the subway, i never did them before so thats on the list for things to do.

Meanwhile i think i will upgrade this condo, i usually play full deathmobile nomad but i want to settle down here and see how much can i fortify this part of the town and maybe, just maybe, get some npcs and have a village going, i will construct an electric grid with some car parts i got laying around so i can put those batteries to use and start crafting some real shit, im tired of using fire and rocks like a caveman.

 

[Reticulan Joe]

Looks fun! Find yourself an electric car and loot some panels and it’s storage battery (careful, they’re heavy, might need a shopping cart or a vehicle if it’s not close to your home) and a optionally a voltmeter from a lab or electronics shop. Put the solars on the roof and the battery in a basement or an out of the way corner with the constructions menu (you’ll need probably some plastic, pipes, and solder, but those aren’t hard to find) and enjoy your power. In addition to the lights being on, you can also turn on the fridge, the oven, and install other stuff like 3d printers.

 

[Jose Beaner Luna]

Looks fun! Find yourself an electric car and loot some panels and it’s storage battery (careful, they’re heavy, might need a shopping cart or a vehicle if it’s not close to your home) and a optionally a voltmeter from a lab or electronics shop. Put the solars on the roof and the battery in a basement or an out of the way corner with the constructions menu (you’ll need probably some plastic, pipes, and solder, but those aren’t hard to find) and enjoy your power. In addition to the lights being on, you can also turn on the fridge, the oven, and install other stuff like 3d printers.

Wait you can power the buildings now!? thats so cool, that explains why i was getting the "fridge" item instead of the parts when i dissasembled them, i was going to do the old method of making a vehicle and all of that, but if i can just power the building that opens so many possibilities to make my dream survivor town.

 

[Reticulan Joe]

Wait you can power the buildings now!? thats so cool, that explains why i was getting the "fridge" item instead of the parts when i dissasembled them, i was going to do the old method of making a vehicle and all of that, but if i can just power the building that opens so many possibilities to make my dream survivor town.

Yeah, you can still do the whole pseudo-vehicle thing if you like, but one of the neat things about BN is they actually implemented power grids.

I suspect the survivor camp code might still be around, if you’re interested in trying that. I fooled around with it a bit, and found it to be incredibly glitchy and grindy. But there’s no reason your NPCs can’t just hang out at your building.

A partial guide:

https://cddawiki.danmakudan.com/wiki/index.php/Faction_Camps

 

[Reticulan Joe]

Ok, I'm in the mood to sperg a bit about my current playthrough.

Spoiler: How it started

(ok, this is actually a brand new character, but using the "Last Character" template, so functionally identical in initial stats to the one below) Key to survival in deep lab starts is some skill at Computers (so you can hack terminals) and First Aid (so you can remove failed bionics without dying) and a martial art and some fighting skill isn't bad either.

Spoiler: How it's going

Spoiler: Bonus modlist

This is after maybe 25 hours of play; started a couple weeks ago, doing lab starts, lost maybe 6 characters before this one got momentum going on her side. Despite the obvious beefiness of the character, I'll say that the BL9 monsters do a fairly good job of keeping my character in check; one or two isn't a big deal, but any more than that and I either need to fight very sneakily or beat cleats, because they hit hard and are massive damage sponges. I've been having a lot of fun with my helicopter, which other than fixing up I didn't modify too much: added solar panels and two cargo hatches on the outside, removed a seat and added a fridge and battery charging trunk in the cockpit. I have a home base; and using zones I "park" the helicopter so the cargo bays are in the unsorted zone; I then press a button and it auto-unloads all my looted crap.

A couple other things: "Transcending The Human Condition" gives you four spells that can boost your stats by +4 each, which is huge. I also like Nature's Bow a lot - it's range and damage aren't all that great, but a ranged weapon that I can summon at need with unlimited ammo is nice. Normally I don't run around with two huge backpacks, but I just finished looting a mansion. Often, when I'm not pressed for time, I like to scout with a small pack, kill everything, and then make a second pass with several packs to pick everything up. Doesn't work for nighttime forays deep into cities, but works great for isolated locations like large countryside mansions.

I started with Taekwondo this time to mix it up a bit. It honestly didn't help that much. Escrima or Silat are my usual early-game go-tos, but I haven't found either in this run through, and at this point I don't need them. Early on I got lucky with this character and found a CRIT manual and a CRIT hatchet, and those let me make short work of almost everything in the lab.

 

[Orphaned Punk]

Assuming that you're 40-50 map tiles away from a city and have wandering hordes set to true, is there any chance a horde of zombies or a hunter-type thing can siege or track you after a long while? The game still surprises me with random events now and then, and I have yet to spend a couple of hours IRL time settling down, so I wonder if the game was capable of it.

Also, I have like four character archetypes I like running to give meaning and a story to the RNG and familiar tiles set before me,
Generation Kill inspired Grunt in a technical for the ultimate road trip,
Cheerleader called Tracy Tzu with the sociable trait, recruiting a PMC to cheerlead,
Otaku nerd zero to hero,
Gordon Freedman with 15-stat points across the board, self-imposed mutism, and lab-start.

 

[Reticulan Joe]

I think wander spawns, if turned on, can show up at your door unannounced. The game tends not to spawn creatures near you, but if you do a lot of wandering in the map tiles around your base it’s likewise possible for something to spawn and follow you home. Even around your base it’s not a bad idea to have a weapon on you. But in my experience it’s pretty rare.