So seeding this community is a nice excuse for writing a guide for Cataclysm which is not inside Discord or the R*** site silos. Hopefully it will encourage some people to brave the cursed depths of this wonderful game, which has so many hidden things and horrors to offer on top of its very detailed simulationist sandbox.

For the unitiated, Cataclysm seems to be a modern day zombie apocalypse game until it doesn’t. It is a traditional roguelike in a way, but stretched to a huge scale of infinite New England. With the right mods you can have dinosaurs.

I try to avoid spoilers.

I see that there are now CDDA-specific communities: !cataclysmdda@lemmy.ml and !catadda@sh.itjust.works and possibly others. You can seek help there, but I’m writing this post for the general roguelike audience, not hardcore Cata players.

This will be a collection of tips and pointers intended to help you survive long enough to get hooked (be warned and have techniques in place not to let it consume your life). There will still be a lot of death for you still, but hopefully you’ll learn something actionable each time. If you reallly dislike permadeath, ctrl+f “Prompt on character death” on this page.

To collect observations suitable for newbies I developed two chars a tiny bit, one in Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead (DDA) and one in Cataclysm Bright Nights (BN) with current versions, standard(ish) settings and character builds.

These two are actually the same game, with caveats I’ll explain in a second, and I try to be general enough to cover most versions of Cata you can realistically play. There are many vastly more competent and knowledgeable players than myself, but I think I can say a thing or two about the basics.

Resources

They are largely applicable to both versions. Note that people mostly gave up on keeping the wiki up to date (because of Discord and fast-paced development), so in a way they can be somewhat incorrect for any version.

• item browser for CDDA: most useful for item qualities, lets you see what has “hammering” for example.
• Guides on CDDA wiki: search for the “Beginners” guides that can be somewhat useful.
• A crucial list of Controls on CDDA wiki. You can also check out Game Mechanics, can be spoilery.
• The “MOTD” section in the main menu will point you towards the official homepage of your game, the Discord and IRC channels etc.
• Hit Enter in-game. It lets you perform many commands and actions, but also has an option of displaying a bunch of old internal help files.
• BN offers a tutorial in the New Game menu. It is old, broken and assumes you’re on ASCII (not generally done nowadays), but gives you a little advice and a safe sandbox. Start by going straight south, through the door and picking up the clothes (it will prompt you to (W)ear them). As far as I tested there’s nothing beyond the second floor. They give you some useful items (so you know what they are) and you can experiment with the Controls list (see above). See also notes on Interface below.

Choosing the version

Long story short, Dark Days Ahead (DDA) during the recent decade has been moving towards adding complex systems simulating physics and human biology, while removing or nerfing features deemed unrealistic, too “easy” or incompatible with the lore that was instituted at some point. While this policy lets CDDA achieve impressive things, it perpetually leaves game in a state where you have to ask on Discord or the R-site or follow the right youtubers to learn the newest quirks and workarounds, in order to progress and survive.

This led to the formation of Bright Nights (BN) which preserves some older features, add some ones of its own, and ports some select ones from DDA. To illustrate (the specific example might be outdated), in old CDDA or BN you could learn basic car mechanics from a book; in newer CDDA you’d have to hunt down some arcane lore on the web, to know what the game allows you to do to gain the required “practical” knowledge (like repeatedly removing and installing some very specific vehicle parts).

Note that BN is not easier per se, it’s just supposed to more legible. CDDA throws you some bones CBN doesn’t. The truth is that CDDA is a bigger game with a larger developer base and community. Most of the fanart and letsplays are done for newest CDDA.

Some people engage in stupid version wars with high school mentality, which I don’t encourage. You can play both depending on your mood and preferences.

Choose DDA if you want a mind boggling simulation with even more complex systems and detail, larger community, Lovecraftian helplessness.

Choose BN if you want a well crafted game with a lot of options for the player, a little more sci-fi, and have a better chance of discovering and figuring out stuff by yourself.

Both of these offer stable and experimental (nightly) versions. The community seems to mostly use experimental, but if you don’t want to bother with the update process (and occasional breakages) you won’t lose much by just playing stable.

Getting the binaries

Go here for CDDA, here for CBN.

Interface

Even by the standards of such classics as NetHack or OG vanilla Dwarf Fortress, Cata interface is a cryptic mess. But you will find ways to be proficient enough with it. Once you have a character, start with the Controls wiki page. You can experiment in a throwaway world, the CBN tutorial, or in the actual gameplay (you don’t start in any immediate danger unless you want to).

Pressing e or E (shift+e) is different in the game, just so you’re aware.

A very general tip is to use Tab and shift+Tab to change tabs in menus, the right arrow are often used to select and the left arrow to unselect. Sometimes you can move between columns with <, > keys. PgUp and PgDown sometimes scroll when up/down arrows do other things. Use these combinations when confused, until you find something that works. Also you can often hit ? for help within the context. And of course look for keybinding tips somewhere on the screen you’re in.

The in-game controls list is, in my personal experience, uniquely useless for discovery. Try the enter menu instead and the Controls wiki page mentioned above. In the next installment there will be a section on some in-game menus you should be familiar with.

Options

These are ones that you can access from the “Settings” in the main menu or Esc -> Options in-game. I like to set the units to metric there (unthematic because it’s all in New England but whatever) and “Reverse steering direction in reverse” to True like in real life. These are all available in the Interface tab that you Tab or shift+Tab to.

In CBN I also turn off “Auto-shift the view while driving” (IMO confusing and potentially hiding stuff behind you, though useful if you’re foolish enough to drive very fast) and “Auto notes (map extras)” in the General tab (I think it pollutes your map with too much useless junk and is less immersive).

“Prompt on character death” is a big one in CBN. It lets you officially use the dirty secret of alt-F4’ing when you die a stupid death, so the game doesn’t delete your last autosave. I set it to False, but it is there for you if you want to relax permadeath. In that case you might want to mess with “Game turns between autosaves” in the future, if you see that your savescummy time warp sends you too far or too close in the past for your liking.

Creating the world

There are a lot of options. You will probably be fine going with defaults at the start (Tab, Tab, Tab… (Y)es, or just “f” in DDA). In modern Cata worlds are disposable by default anyway: when you die, you’re supposed to generate a new one.

But here’s some opinions on stuff you can change anyway.

On CDDA you hit “m” on the first screen of world creation to see the mods manager. CBN shows it by default. There you can add or remove packs of monsters, buildings, items, features etc. bundled with the game. The standard advice is to go full vanilla first, but you are a free person. Mods like Aftershock and Mythical Martial Arts add more “out there” stuff that mapgen (map generation) may or may not throw you. On this screen you change tabs with <, >, select with Enter, to unselect you have to hit Enter after going to the right column with right arrow or “l” (that’s non-capital L: hello vim keys, you can use them everywhere along with the yu/bn extension, or numpad if you prefer).

My personal preference is to dial down NPC generation (as NPCs are often dangerous and/or exploitable in stupid ways, and less interesting than the environment) and zombie evolution speed. If you want to do the latter, you’d have to hit “s” for advanced options in CDDA. “Monster evolution scaling factor” makes evolution (i.e. worse versions appearing) slower if you make the value higher. IMO the defaults assume competent power gamer play and short timespan before everything goes crazy. I tend to play on 6.0, as a noob you can go even something like 12.0, unless you do want see the crazy stuff early (to be fair you can be very well dead before that happens).

There is also season length. CDDA has 91, which means you may very, very rarely advance from spring to summer. CBN sets it to 14 days, which I consider an overcorrection. Seasons affect monsters, weather (i.e. dealing with your char being fried by the sun or freezing) and what is available growing on plants. You can consider something like 30 or 60 days here.

“World end handling” means whether the world will be deleted on character death. I set it to query, so I am asked each time. If the world persists, you can start in the same one and, in theory, loot your old stashes if you get to them. But also the time advances, the monsters evolve, food spoils etc. This option is somewhat unmaintained nowadays.

Creating your first character

At last! Here again I wouldn’t go too hard on yourself if you’re just starting out, and gradually advance to more challenging characters if you want. The standard advice is go with the default Evacuee scenario (you can easily find tutorials for using stuff in the starting evac shelters) and choose the Survivor or Backpacker profession.

But even if you choose Single pool in the first screen (which is more liberal than Multiple pools) and load up on a fighting related-profession, good Stats and Traits etc., you are likely to get killed or starve in a couple of days if you don’t have experience. So you may choose to relax some aspects of difficulty that way initially.

IMO for a new player Dexterity and Strength are the most useful, in that order, because they let you land hits easier and carry more stuff (while you don’t know yet what is actually the most important to have). Skills you can level up in game, assuming you live long enough. The Stats will be constant (if you don’t enable specific mods).

The most valuable Traits are probably speed and stamina related (like Quick, Indefatigable, as well as the Parkour background), possibly Night Vision and Pain Resistant as well. If you’re looking for bad traits to get points, I may suggest Ugly, Short Sighted, one of Intolerances, possibly Squeamish because you probably avoid filthy clothing anyway. Of course with a well “constructed” build you’re getting a game easier than it “really” is, but as I said it’s better to advance gradually than to give up early from frustration.

On the last screen you can randomly or deliberately select things like name, gender, height etc. and Tab one last time to land in the game world!

Closing this part

I have notes for the second part, dealing with surviving while in-game. This is a huge, huge, huge topic, so it’ll be a semi-random bag of tips and things that are good to know, still avoiding spoilers. I plan to edit and send it sometime next week. In the meantime, you can see how far you can go by the CDDA wiki.

Edit: Part (2/2): navigating the UI and tactical fundamentals is now out!

If you have questions, ask away. Comments and suggestions also welcome!