This is Part I, introduction to basic mechanics of the game. The post got too long and became a waterhose dissertation of boring exposition instead of a fun slice-of-life record of post-apocalyptic survival. So I tried to break it apart. Expect more detailed accounts of specific adventures in later posts.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead has consumed my life the past few weeks. I started playing (on the ASCII version, no less! Had no idea tilesets were a thing) about 5 years ago when I first moved into my own apartment. It was that, and Necrodancer. A few months later my save got corrupted due to something weird bug related to bike racks, and I ragequit.
What is it? It's post-apocalyptic Stardew Valley meets Dwarf Fortress. Or it's Mad Max meets Dwarf Fortress. Anything meets Dwarf Fortress, depending on how you decide to roleplay.
The initial play experience was an unbelievable struggle. My battles were with the UI more often than they were with the zombies and other !!SPICY!! things that wanted me dead. There would be really stupid moments like accidentally choosing the wrong comestible to consume and downing some ammonia instead of eating the scrambled eggs. Or I'd bash a door instead of closing it, attracting attention of the zombie hordes outside.
Now that I've picked it up again, read some Reddit threads, tutorials, and the wiki, the game is much less intimidating. I'm less smooth brained, not to mention I'm now playing on a tileset (I know the ones I showed the game to hate how "lofi" the graphics are but after playing the game, the graphics are just right for clarity), and a lot of nice QoL changes were added to the builds since. Like fixing a few bike rack bugs.
The biggest content additions are probably improved NPC AI and "faction camps." When I played 5 years ago, the NPC code was so broken that NPCs were more of a detriment than benefit, and almost everyone recommended disabling NPC spawns, so your character became the lone survivor in the entire world. Now, NPCs are way more intelligent, NPCs in different surviving organizations have more quests, and "faction camps" became a great late game resource sink.
Faction camps allow setting up basic self-sufficient industry and infrastructure for your group of NPCs who can maintain it. Each camp is 3x3 squares, and you can set up to 8 different functional buildings in each square (middle square is the mandatory central HQ building).
I recently tried some of the overmap exporters in hopes that I could show the scale of the world but they're incompatible with the newer builds. Alas, I will have to take single screens and stitch them together.
The easiest way to find NPCs is going to the refugee center, which is populated with a number of survivors, along with some beggars in the lobby who weren't useful enough to be admitted into the main group but were allowed to stay for shelter and warmth. If you do the fetch quests for all the beggars, they will consider joining. They only join if everyone joins, so it's all or nothing.
The beggars are generated to have a bunch of negative traits. As warm bodies for the base, the negative traits aren't too detrimental since they don't engage in combat or do anything as intense as the player, but some of these combinations are hilariously awful.
This also brings up the difference between randomly generated NPCs and "static" NPCs. Static NPCs in different in-game factions are all hard coded, and will always have the same traits and similar stat spread. It also means if you manage to encounter multiple refugee centers, you can have clones running around. All the other non-static NPCs are randomly generated, with skill levels and starting items based on their profession.
I also found a bunch of prototype cyborgs in science labs, trapped in the medical holding cells. They're hostile by default, but it's possible to recruit them. You have to throw a scrambler grenade, go up to them while they're temporarily friendly, and deactivate them. Then drag their bodies onto the bionic implant surgical machine and remove the personality override. The surgical machines are extremely rare outside of science labs, so good thing the science lab medical wings always have one spawned. After a successful personality override, they become neutral NPCs, and if you're lucky, you can convince them to join.
The cyborgs have a laundry list of bionic impants, and being prototypes, most of them are really bad. They do have a number of good ones, some quite rare and useful. Once I removed all the bad bionics, they're above average. Also, as cyborgs (and not beggars), they start with much better skill levels.
I also found a randomly pizzaolo (static NPC) in a huge city I was raiding for supplies. He has a revenge quest chain to burn down the restaurant of a competitor and kill the people who foreclosed and moved into his home. Naturally, he has quite high food handling skills. He's also generated with the Lactose Intolerant trait, which makes me question his decision to keep the family tradition of pizza making.
Base building is mostly dependent on NPC skills, and the best way to grind skills in game for both NPCs and the player is by reading books.
The most important skills in base building are
- fabrication, the all-around skill for everything related to construction and crafting from raw materials. This one is used the most, and the later camp upgrades require decently high fabrication, so textbook grinding is mandatory
- survival, basic wilderness "survival" ability. This affects things like foraging plants and butchering animals
- mechanics, mostly ability to deal with vehicles but also for general mechanical systems. Some of the later buildings require some level in mechanics
There are a few other skills occasionally used in base building like food handling, devices, marksmanship (hunting large animals), and social (recruiting new warm bodies).
So with the warm bodies, let the textbook grind begin. Good thing everyone surrounding me can learn at the same time, or we'd still be spending all of winter and spring doing individual instruction.
I don't remember quite when I started the faction camp, but it was probably somewhere around Winter Day 70 or so. Seasons have 91 days so it's easy to track how much time has passed. I spent quite a bit of time removing the faulty bionics from cyborgs in a distant city so a week or so passed without much progress. My earliest screenshots are from Winter Day 82.
That is the main faction camp menu where almost all the camp controls are located. The individual buildings have their navigation at the top to reach the speciality functions.
The central building is where all the bedrooms are located. One room = one expansion allowed. It looks like I already had a bedroom built and expanded to have a farm. You can't plant seeds until the second half of spring when temperatures get warmer, but seeing how building things take forever, best to finish the farm early than scramble for resources later.
There are two different ways to get NPCs to be useful. You can "assign" them to the camp, where they'll permanently stay and run around doing chores based on a priority system. However, keeping them at the camp will deplete the camp food supply by 2500 calories a day. Calories are the camp "currency" used to "pay" assigned NPCs for sticking around or doing work. The default calorie consumption is 2500, but it might be more for specific jobs like going out to cut logs. If they don't get their calories they'll eventually mutiny. I know mutiny is in the code, but I'll not be testing that one, thanks.
You can also have NPCs stick with you, and they can be assigned individual tasks by talking to them. Technically keeping them with you also requires feeding them, but that part of the code is currently so bugged most people turn the "Disable NPC needs" mod on so they will never need to consume calories or water. The forums and Let's Play videos have too many horror stories of giving the NPCs gallons of water and they're dying of thirst because the AI doesn't know how to drink. That's the nice thing about how faction camp food supply is designed, the eating and drinking are abstracted out into an easy calories deduction.
I personally like keeping NPCs with me in the camp area instead of assigning them because the task priority system slows the game to a crawl, especially with multiple NPCs. If you're leaving and need to go alone, there's always the option to tell the NPCs to "guard" the area instead of assigning them to the camp. The nice thing is that faction and unassigned NPCs both use the "zones" system to finish tasks, so they function the same way. The only benefit faction NPCs have is that they will constantly check for tasks that need doing, whereas unassigned NPCs need to be delegated for a task every time.
On the topic of zones, they were designed (with a financial incentive, kek their words not mine) to allow easy automation of loot sorting and tedious menial labor. I don't know how anyone can manually manage all the hordes of crap without setting up at least a few zones.
I've never used zones until I started faction camps, and this is like being introduceed to dual monitor setups. How did I ever live without this??
There are two mandatory zones in a camp, the storage area and the food area. All the faction camp tasks that require raw materials will pull from the storage area. So if building the kitchen requires a hammer and it's in your inventory, no bueno. Gotta drop it in the storage area. It embodies the spirit of communism: it's not "my stuff." It's "our stuff." The lame thing is that the player can't take advantage of the zones for individual crafting, there's a "within-6-tiles" limitation we have to follow. Unfair.
The food area is where you drag all the food to add to the calories supply, so you can guarantee it's only stuff you want to donate.
Onward to the actual camp building.
First of all, the raw material requirements for even a corner of a room are ENORMOUS. The devs have stated the sink is intentional because it reflects resource usage in real life, and it's supposed to be a high-investment high-reward endeavor. In the current "metagame", game balance heavily biases a nomadic playstyle with a "Deathmobile" vehicle because the infinite map mechanic means you will never run out of food scavenged from towns or weapons from military locations.
Additionally, trying to build a custom base all by yourself is extremely tedious because of the auxiliary mechanics that limit how much you can do in a day. Construction builds up your "weariness" very quickly, and if you don't spend hours resting to recover, all activity efficiency slowly down to a crawl. There's also the issue of needing huge number of calories to simulate "intense hard labor." Reddit threads have calculated that construction ups calorie requirements to what Olympic athletes consume in a day. Personally I think it's unbalanced and needs tuning but that's just how the state of the game is at present. Add in time spent sleeping, and you spend more in-game time mitigating the effects of base building than actual base building. Even if you start your base at an advantageous building like a farm or mansion, adding onto what's there still takes way too much time.
The other main issue with bases is that the main branch of the game does not have power grid support for buildings. Vehicles, on the other hand, already have sophisticated energy and application systems to support everything the player ever needs. Vehicle mounted solar panels allow for infinite energy, and most tools can be mounted on vehicles and draw way more power from vehicle batteries instead of limited portable batteries. Even people roleplaying in a stationery base will set up a barebones indoors "vehicle" with all the appliances and connect a jumper cable to a huge solar panel wall outside to get their electrical needs. So it's still a vehicle powered base with a lot of extra steps.
I am told a fork of the main game packaged in a mod called Bright Nights does have working power grid infrastructure but I've never tried BN so I can't say much. But there are requests to have that code ported into the main CDDA game. (Maybe I'll put a bounty for the port kek.)
With Deathmobiles being so versatile and a all-in-one solution for everything, stationary bases really have very little going for them. I've never tried building a base until I started this world and found a really two really nice locations: an apple orchard brewery farm, then a nice mansion right next to a farm house. Both had basements to mitigate freeze mechanics (basements are always a constant 6C). I tried some minor construction in both bases, and believe me. Very time-consuming, tedious, and low reward.
That experience has me excited for the faction camps. Even after finding the refugee camps, I had no intention of having anything to do with NPCs until I saw all the faction camp improvements and a few videos of it in action. Then I thought "ok, might as well give it a try."
So far, I'm extremely excited. A lot of the construction-related tedium is abstracted out by the NPCs and construction has a strictly defined finished time. NPCs can also take care of the more boring stuff like planting and sorting loot. Mostly, my gameplay experience is not interrupted by doing post-apocalyptic chores. The other good thing is that some of the tasks like hunting large game and foraging can generate loot from "thin air" so even if the camp area's natural resources are depleted, you are guaranteed to survive.
Next post, I will finally show the progression of my base building from a poverty shack into a food-secure and self-sufficient base. I'll introduce my OG underlings, and a few that joined recently. A stitched world map with the points of interest highlighted will be done too. More pictures, less exposition, that's the hope.