Yeah, DDA got started when some people from the dwarf fortress forums forked the original Cataclysm by Whales. There's also Bright Nights which forked from DDA a few years back and focuses on fun over realism.
I like turn-based games and look forward to trying.
Went to download... someone is overthinking version numbers: "0.F-3 Frank-3"
Nothing is wrong with a simple 1, 2, 3 counter. Maybe a single decimal if you really want to signal minor vs. major upgrades (but all too many projects wind up at 0.x or 1.x).
It’s been a while but I’ve played this for hundreds of hours. I highly suggest playing terminal mode, your imagination is far cooler than any tile set and the in game description of things are very detailed considering the ridiculous amount of stuff in it. I once lived long enough to build a fully military armored RV, the memory of it still feels like a whole other life, with a tragic ending. Don’t drive too fast into unexplored territory.
Laser shooting eyeball creature. I survived the blast but my stuff was destroyed or scattered everywhere and I wasn’t armed well enough or healthy enough to get out of it.
I still remember how I lost my RVdeathmobile due to slippery road — the car felt from the bridge. It was such a nice car — with superalloy platings that I took from downed heli, plently of clean water ( I was boiling it in batches and filling one of RV tanks with it), all sorts of fuel and even turrets!
Fanniest death was caused by exploding arms. I found a distant house by the road and tried to make it my base. One night my char woke up due to the pain — fingers have exploded or something like that happened! I think it was some sort of fungal infection and unfortunately I had no medicine for cure...
Caves of Qud actually has a bunch of handwritten story mixed in. The main quest and some of the side quests are a lot more interesting. There are a few procedurally generated elements mixed into some of the quests as well, so they feel different on repeat playthroughs.
The game is tons and tons of fun as long as you treat the procedural background stuff as just filler to be explored for opportunities to find loot and cybernetics. The main story is absolutely worth playing through at least once though. I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys roguelikes and likes a game with a good story.
Helpful project if you want to know more about anything in game https://nornagon.github.io/cdda-guide/ saw it presented at the last Roguelike Celebration.
If you want to play, I recommend getting the newest experimental release from https://cataclysmdda.org/experimental/ instead of the 2-year-old 0.F-3. The experimentals are in good shape right now, as the next major release is very, very near, and will be almost identical to current experimentals.
I get that with my kids. I'm not an iPhone user, so I don't know the app store. But my very young kid will know how to open the app store on my wife's iPhone. With Android I type "open source" or use FDroid if I don't want ads. However with the iPhone it seems like every seeming game is just an ad for more games. My poor son will get nested 3 ads or more deep (for a new game) deep sometimes.
People make a big deal about the App store being all curated, but it all junk when I looked.
The open source community driven platforms tend to have gratis games with no purchases, unfortunately iPads don't let you install such platforms, so you might need to buy a different kind of device.
> “I played catadda 0.B on Lego EV3 brick through ssh about a year ago. Every simple move took a noticeable fraction of a second (like 0.3-0.5 second), crafting and such was very slow as well. The specs were - 300 MhZ CPU, 64 Mb Ram (+ another 64 Mb swap on microsd flash) running ev3dev (stripped ubuntu basically), ssh over USB CDC connection.” -burgerpro
A heads up for anyone trying to run this on their Lego EV3 Brick.
Strong unwilling mutant build:
Got lucky and got a reinfroced car early, stocked up really well and cleared out a small town just driving through them, that yeiled lots of resources including guns. I even was able to patch up the car. I spent a lot of time clearing out the town, healing up in between & training skills. I didn't really have any more books to read through & even completed a mission from a lab style compound.
I got ambushed by a really fast mover and was luckily able to shoot it. I retreated back to the town to heal up and foolishly ignored an eye bot. Once I realized what was happening the riot control bots were all over me. I didn't have my stuff on me and was away from the car, I tried to run and just got gased bad. I tried going back and submitting to arrest, but the police bot just killed me instead.
By the time I was dead I had mostly transformed into a tree & was Very strong (str 14 total). I had tons of ammo & all around was pretty decked out. A really sad and preventable death.
Strange bowman:
I started a happy mutant build thinking I'd go more towards archery & survival, but after getting a bite wound early I needed to seek out antibiotics. I ended up finding a car & driving almost a full day until I found a downed military chopper. This set me with with great clothes, guns, knifes & MREs. I found a small town, Mattamiscontis, just ~20 buildings, to try this out at. I ended up needing an extensive stay as I didn't do most of the clearing with the car, but rather methodically worked through using knifes, guns if necessary & developing my archry ability. By the time I cleared the town I had read through most of my books, gotten my skills quite good & was well on my way to mutating to a bee. My tear through the town was seriously slowed down by catching the flu. It's hard to find enough vitamins, but I kept fairly free from junk food.
After surviving for 28 days I drove too close to a military outpost and was immediately shot in the head.
Strange dodger:
I spawned in the outskirts of a city. I was lucky to find a lot of valuable stuff early, two working cars (one of them a semi) a garage with welding gas & even an autodoc! I was training my important skills after clearing much of a block with the semi, and drinking coffee. This threw my sleep schedule off and I ended up feeling tired when I needed to run away from some zombies. It was just 3 normal zombies that were able to surround me. I was able to fight them off, but I suffered 3 bite wounds. I tried to just rely on antibotics that I had on me, but that wasn't enough, I got to badly infected and tried to find more antibiotics, but got over whelmed just venturing out.
I should have used the semi more & worked to try and treat the bite wounds instead of relying on the anti biotics.
Radiation leak
This build is great! It has low amounts of radiation leak as well as radiogenic. This yields a pretty good healing factor for very cheap. I cleared a small town and stumbled upon a great security van in working order. With this I slowly aquired most of my important skills and a lot of small arms & small arm ammo. I even had a couple shotguns, but mostly bird shot. I was feeling decked out enough to start exploring a lab. I ended up save scumming and getting killed by a turret in the lab. It was a one hit kill b/c I was walking around without bullet protection & Overburdended.
On the save scum I was more careful and never really got far into the lab. I was going around killing almost everything with a fire axe. I had a couple close calls, but got much better about dropping my loaded backpacks before fighting & keeping back up stuff on me.
I was heavily mutated in a really good way. I could recover from near death within two days. Unfortunately I was also very ponderous which was a big drawback. I had 17 STR (!)
Marti Urban
Spawned as a bionic sniper in a helicrash. I had a bad wound on my arm, an...
Don't feel any shame in turning down the difficulty a bit while you are learning (turning down spawn rate, starting with more stats etc.) My brother turns off spawns all together and just plays it as a survival sandbox game. That's pretty extreme but the game has a lot to offer outside of combat, and if the difficulty is too high to get to any of that, turn it down.
With that being said, you should be dying pretty often. I think I made about 50 characters before I made it to winter for the first time.
My preferred starting character type is a taylor, of all things.
Your starting inventory isn’t great but you can craft a coat, backpack and cargo pants from the starting refuge’s courtains. You are effective at repairing your clothing from the start.
Tailor is an over powered start for sure! Things fall apart constantly in the apocalypse, and another name for clothes is armor if you’ve got enough of it on.
Never considered starting as a tailor, but after enough playtime I eventually realized that tailoring is something I should skill up in very early in game, as it makes a lot of difference.
The big strength of CDDA as a roguelike for me is that when you die, it's usually clear what you did wrong in the days or minutes leading up to your death.
Just tried this out. After my character died the "quick saves" I'd done prior to them dying seem to have been deleted. eg no way to "quick load" or otherwise load the character :(
Guessing this is a permadeath game, though that's not mentioned in the GitHub README nor FAQ.
As KyleBerezin hints at, they're for when the game crashes. Also when you lose power, or some other random event kills the game process.
Not sure if it's still the case, but last time I played (~2 years ago), closing the game window would also work as such "exceptional circumstance", so if you want your quick load, be quick with your ALT+F4 when your character dies :).
(I am not going to elaborate on the reason I know this.)
This is something everyone who plays Cataclysm long enough learns. The first time the rage quit is real. But once you start the game again and realize you can continue from your last save the save scumming begins. Honestly some of the scenarios are so difficult it's either save scum or repeat the same opening dozens of times hoping RNG will let you escape the initial onslaught.
I even used it as a table top role playing game, where I was the only one seeing the screen, would describe the situation, and players come up with the actions. There were no action they asked for I couldn't perform in the game.
An extremely extensive crafting system as well. The crafting system is fairly realistic too (within reason). You can get a lightstrip from tearing apart something (like a plastic jackolantern) then combine it with a water bottle, wire amplifier circuit, and some batteries to get a flashlight. There are thousands of recipes for hundreds of items, and if you find that something is missing, you can change some json and PR to get it added to the next experimental.
I like making characters based on my fiends then later informing them of what terrible way they ended up dying.
I would also suggest taking advantage of the open source nature of this game, most of the game lives in json files and they are very receptive of PRs. I personally am why smashing toilets yields wax.
47 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadWent to download... someone is overthinking version numbers: "0.F-3 Frank-3"
Nothing is wrong with a simple 1, 2, 3 counter. Maybe a single decimal if you really want to signal minor vs. major upgrades (but all too many projects wind up at 0.x or 1.x).
0.F.3 but of course that doesn't vocalize well so "Frank 3".
Postgres rules though, so 0.B to 0.C was (potentially) breaking.
Fanniest death was caused by exploding arms. I found a distant house by the road and tried to make it my base. One night my char woke up due to the pain — fingers have exploded or something like that happened! I think it was some sort of fungal infection and unfortunately I had no medicine for cure...
Caves of Qud is another similar game.
The game is tons and tons of fun as long as you treat the procedural background stuff as just filler to be explored for opportunities to find loot and cybernetics. The main story is absolutely worth playing through at least once though. I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys roguelikes and likes a game with a good story.
https://github.com/qrrk/Catapult
Does anyone know similar games for iPad, that’s not infested with in-app purchases?
Progression, survival, maybe some base building?
I’ve been unsuccessfully looking for one for some time.
People make a big deal about the App store being all curated, but it all junk when I looked.
> Minimum
> “I played catadda 0.B on Lego EV3 brick through ssh about a year ago. Every simple move took a noticeable fraction of a second (like 0.3-0.5 second), crafting and such was very slow as well. The specs were - 300 MhZ CPU, 64 Mb Ram (+ another 64 Mb swap on microsd flash) running ev3dev (stripped ubuntu basically), ssh over USB CDC connection.” -burgerpro
A heads up for anyone trying to run this on their Lego EV3 Brick.
Strong unwilling mutant build: Got lucky and got a reinfroced car early, stocked up really well and cleared out a small town just driving through them, that yeiled lots of resources including guns. I even was able to patch up the car. I spent a lot of time clearing out the town, healing up in between & training skills. I didn't really have any more books to read through & even completed a mission from a lab style compound.
I got ambushed by a really fast mover and was luckily able to shoot it. I retreated back to the town to heal up and foolishly ignored an eye bot. Once I realized what was happening the riot control bots were all over me. I didn't have my stuff on me and was away from the car, I tried to run and just got gased bad. I tried going back and submitting to arrest, but the police bot just killed me instead.
By the time I was dead I had mostly transformed into a tree & was Very strong (str 14 total). I had tons of ammo & all around was pretty decked out. A really sad and preventable death.
Strange bowman: I started a happy mutant build thinking I'd go more towards archery & survival, but after getting a bite wound early I needed to seek out antibiotics. I ended up finding a car & driving almost a full day until I found a downed military chopper. This set me with with great clothes, guns, knifes & MREs. I found a small town, Mattamiscontis, just ~20 buildings, to try this out at. I ended up needing an extensive stay as I didn't do most of the clearing with the car, but rather methodically worked through using knifes, guns if necessary & developing my archry ability. By the time I cleared the town I had read through most of my books, gotten my skills quite good & was well on my way to mutating to a bee. My tear through the town was seriously slowed down by catching the flu. It's hard to find enough vitamins, but I kept fairly free from junk food.
After surviving for 28 days I drove too close to a military outpost and was immediately shot in the head.
Strange dodger: I spawned in the outskirts of a city. I was lucky to find a lot of valuable stuff early, two working cars (one of them a semi) a garage with welding gas & even an autodoc! I was training my important skills after clearing much of a block with the semi, and drinking coffee. This threw my sleep schedule off and I ended up feeling tired when I needed to run away from some zombies. It was just 3 normal zombies that were able to surround me. I was able to fight them off, but I suffered 3 bite wounds. I tried to just rely on antibotics that I had on me, but that wasn't enough, I got to badly infected and tried to find more antibiotics, but got over whelmed just venturing out.
I should have used the semi more & worked to try and treat the bite wounds instead of relying on the anti biotics.
Radiation leak This build is great! It has low amounts of radiation leak as well as radiogenic. This yields a pretty good healing factor for very cheap. I cleared a small town and stumbled upon a great security van in working order. With this I slowly aquired most of my important skills and a lot of small arms & small arm ammo. I even had a couple shotguns, but mostly bird shot. I was feeling decked out enough to start exploring a lab. I ended up save scumming and getting killed by a turret in the lab. It was a one hit kill b/c I was walking around without bullet protection & Overburdended.
On the save scum I was more careful and never really got far into the lab. I was going around killing almost everything with a fire axe. I had a couple close calls, but got much better about dropping my loaded backpacks before fighting & keeping back up stuff on me.
I was heavily mutated in a really good way. I could recover from near death within two days. Unfortunately I was also very ponderous which was a big drawback. I had 17 STR (!)
Marti Urban Spawned as a bionic sniper in a helicrash. I had a bad wound on my arm, an...
I run outside, and die from a hoarde of zombies.
Or:
I run outside, and am killed by an automated tank
With that being said, you should be dying pretty often. I think I made about 50 characters before I made it to winter for the first time.
Your starting inventory isn’t great but you can craft a coat, backpack and cargo pants from the starting refuge’s courtains. You are effective at repairing your clothing from the start.
Great game.
1. If it's early game and you think you died because zombies are OP, you don't understand the clothing encumbrance mechanic.
2. Otherwise, the reason you died is because your luck run out.
Guessing this is a permadeath game, though that's not mentioned in the GitHub README nor FAQ.
Unless games saves are actually supposed to work?
That being said, thanks for confirming it's a permadeath game. :)
It's bizarre they don't mention that anywhere.
Not sure if it's still the case, but last time I played (~2 years ago), closing the game window would also work as such "exceptional circumstance", so if you want your quick load, be quick with your ALT+F4 when your character dies :).
(I am not going to elaborate on the reason I know this.)
I even used it as a table top role playing game, where I was the only one seeing the screen, would describe the situation, and players come up with the actions. There were no action they asked for I couldn't perform in the game.
I would also suggest taking advantage of the open source nature of this game, most of the game lives in json files and they are very receptive of PRs. I personally am why smashing toilets yields wax.