Cataclysm DDA Spoonfed: The Guide for Morons

Cataclysm DDA Spoonfed: The Guide for Morons

For 0.7

 

Get it here: http://www.cataclysmdda.com/

 

Download and compile the github version for the most up-to-date experience. There's a compiling guide on the wiki: http://www.wiki.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?title=How_to_compile

 

In the options menu: Don't enable NPCs, they'll fuck up your game. Enable Celsius/Metric/24 hour time if you like that sort of thing. Snap to target is very useful for long-range sniping, but can be disorienting. Skill rust can be annoying, so turn it off if you like. Make sure static spawn is set to true; this guide is only for static spawn and does not cover dynamic spawn. Turn on autosave; it now actually saves everything, so it's very good to have on in case of a crash. Make sure Circular Distances is disabled because it's stupid and bullshit.

 

>CharGen

 

Negative Traits: Heavy Sleeper, Poor Hearing, Glass Jaw, Lightweight, Addictive Personality, Truth Teller

Positive Traits: Quick, Fast Healer, Night Vision, Robust Genetics.

Profession: Chain Smoker

Stats: 10 Str, 8 Dex, 13 Int, 10 Per.

Skills: 2 Archery, 2 Survival.

 

All these negative traits together add up to be very slightly annoying, at worst. The other stuff you get in exchange is game-changingly good. Quick lets you outrun most zombies, ignore low levels of pain, and makes you generally 10% better at doing things. Fast Healer means all of your health heals overnight no matter how low it is. Night Vision increases your vision radius in the dark from 1 tile to 2 tiles, which lets you do things in the dark without being assraped by surprise zombies and makes ranged weaponry actually useable at night. Robust Genetics means that mutations are 1/3 good and 2/3 random, rather than 1/3 bad and 2/3 random; this is massively useful once you start playing with mutagen.

 

Once you stop always ending up at red torso health at the end of the day, and Fast Healer thus becomes less useful, you might want to drop it on your next character and pick up either Fast Learner or Optimist. Optimist increases all positive morale effects by 25%, and decreases all negative morale effects by 25%. So a +100 morale effect would become +125, and a -100 morale effect would become -75. Optimist also adds a constant +5 morale effect. Fast Learner is a constant +15 bonus focus, independent of how much focus you actually have. So if you have 100 focus, Fast Learner makes that function as 115. If you have 50, Fast Learner makes that function as 65. They are both very, very good for accelerating your skill gain. Or, instead of taking another trait, you could put those extra 2 points into strength, for a total of 12. This will let you get the maximum range out of the reflex recurve bow once you hit 9 archery skill; you lose 2 range for every 1 strength you are under the limit.

 

10 base Str lets you fire your longbow properly. Dex doesn't do much for us, so leave it at 8. High Int lets you read skill books quickly, which means you can spend less time reading and more time gathering loot for the pile. 10 Per is needed to spot land-mines so you don't suddenly blow up for no discernible reason and whine in the thread, and also provides nice bonuses to your longbow and guns in general.

 

2 Archery, 2 Survival lets you actually make the longbow+arrows right at the start of the game, butcher non-squirrel animals for reasonable amounts of meat, and make a bunch of other cool stuff like stone shovels, stone pots, spears for spiked pits, etc.

 

>Actually Playing The Game

 

In the Evac Shelter, smash (s) some of the benches and make wood arrow shafts until you hit 3 archery. Then smash 2 windows, pick up 2 strings and 1 heavy stick. Don't walk through the broken windows, open the door and go around. Craft (&) a longbow. If you fail, just do it again, gathering more strings and sticks from the other windows if necessary. Now you need to make some "field point wood arrows". You need arrow shafts, which you have a ton of, nails from the benches or rocks from the ground, and a stone hammer. To make the hammer, you need another heavy stick, 2 rocks, and 2 pieces of 6-inch string. Smash another window to get a stick and 1 piece of 3-foot string. Disassemble the string by picking it up, going to your inventory screen (i), selecting it by pressing its assigned letter, and hitting D. Get some rocks from the ground outside and craft a stone hammer, then make some pointy arrows. Note that you don't have to pick up the nails/rocks to make arrows from them, you just have to be within 2 tiles of the components you're trying to use. Press - to remake the last thing you crafted; this is useful to just walk around and hoover up all the rocks you come across to make more pointy arrows. Just pick up the arrows after you use them, and they should last for a good while. If you find some plastic bags or duct tape, you can use it to make fletching and thus fletched field point wood arrows, which are much more accurate than unfletched arrows.

 

Now that you've got a way to kill zombies, you need a way to get into buildings for looting purposes. Smash one of the lockers and pick up a pipe. Then get a rock, and craft a crowbar. This will let you open locked doors and windows without smashing them.

 

Remember to check downstairs in the Evac Shelter for mostly useless crap but occasional good stuff.

 

Press " to enable auto-safe mode. Press m for map, figure out where the nearest town is and walk towards it. Don't try to go for any of the big stores in the middle of town just yet, stay on the fringes and loot houses for now. Open doors or windows with your crowbar by pressing a to apply, pressing the letter assigned to your crowbar, and then selecting the direction you want to apply it in. Doors or windows may require multiple applications, and windows may break. Just move to another window, it's not worth the time to clean out the broken glass.

 

If you really want to, you can clean out the broken glass with the construction menu (press * then g). Broken glass might cut you or damage your clothing as you go through, which is mildly annoying and can eventually destroy your clothes if you do it enough. Feel free to go through uncleaned window-frames in emergencies, though.

 

Just ignore the nicotine cravings, they'll go away in a day. It'll slow down your skill gain slightly, but not by much, and you'll still gain skills a whole lot faster than under the exp system. The worst thing that can happen is you'll get three in a row while crafting something and have to take a short break before making the next thing.

 

>Looting

 

You're looking for clothing with high volume and/or low encumbrance, drugs, water, food, books, and assorted tools like sewing kits/thread/batteries/duct tape, in that order. You're also looking for a bedroom on the fringes of town with all the windows and doors intact, with the bed a reasonable distance from any windows, and with a toilet in the same house. Use this as a home base and dumping ground for all your stuff. If you find a place with lots of good stuff that you can't carry just yet, mark it on your map by pressing N in the map screen and come back later. You should also mark places you've finished looting so you don't waste your time, your home base so you don't forget where it is, and large clusters of monsters so you don't accidentally die. You only need one of each skill book.

 

Get renewable food by killing animals, butchering them, and cooking the meat. Cooking meat requires a fire, a pot/pan/stone pot, and uncooked meat. If you haven't found an actual pot or pan yet you can just make a stone pot with the 2 survival you start with. Set fires by activating a matchbook or lighter and selecting a square with some kindling on it, like a two-by-four or some splintered wood. Don't set fires inside, you'll burn the house down and kill yourself.

 

Get renewable water by (e)xamining the toilet, filling up a watertight container like a plastic bottle or gallon jug, boiling the water from the crafting menu, and putting it into a different container. Boiling, like cooking, requires a fire and pot/pan/stone pot, and the unboiled water, but also requires another water-tight container to put the clean water in. Drinking regular water runs the risk of getting poisoned and food poisoning, so only drink clean water.

 

>Encumbrance

 

Encumbrance is very, very bad. Going over your volume limit causes high amounts of encumbrance. Only go over your volume limit if you're totally sure you're safe, and preferably not even then. Wearing more than one layer of clothing on a body part increases encumbrance, so check to see which parts of the body a given clothing item encumbers and take off clothing that you don't need to be wearing. Torso encumbrance is very bad for your melee effectiveness, so don't melee fight with Torso encumbrance.

 

IMPORTANT: TheDarklingWolf has officially confirmed that mouth encumbrance does NOTHING. The stat page LIES.

 

http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=1736.msg20693#msg20693

 

>Early Game Clothing

 

You're aiming for a fitted trench coat, fitted cargo pants, a backpack, fitted under armour, fitted long underwear, and fitted sneakers. Those are the most important clothing items, and what you'll be wearing most of the time. Later on you can pick up a fitted tank top and a belt rig for slightly more storage space. You also want a filter mask so you can kill smokers effectively, and something to prevent you from getting wet so you don't get -60 morale every time you go out in the rain. Wearing Torso gear with 50 warmth total will prevent you from getting wet, and you've got 40 warmth from the trenchcoat+underarmour, so all you need is to carry around another piece of clothing with 10 warmth, like a t-shirt, and put that on whenever it starts to rain. You can also use a raincoat during the summer, when it's a bit too hot to wear 50 warmth of stuff.

 

With 3 tailoring, you can craft everything except for the underarmour. You can get all the raw materials you'll need by breaking windows, then cutting up the sheets into rags and disassembling the string into thread. Cut up fabric by activating your pocket knife, selecting "cut fabric", then selecting the thing you want to cut up. Disassemble items by selecting them in the inventory screen, then pressing D. Get 3 tailoring by reading the book "Sew What? Clothing!" or just by practicing tailoring a lot with reasonable focus levels. You can find underarmour on zombies, but it'll be damaged and probably not fitted, so you'll need around 3 tailoring to have a good chance of repairing it and making it useable.

 

To practice tailoring or to make any clothing, you need a sewing kit, thread, and rags. To practice tailoring, activate your sewing kit and select an item made of cloth or wool; this will consume thread, and if the item is repaired or reinforced, a rag. You'll need some rags to practice tailoring up to 3, but not a whole lot. This will also repair, reinforce, or make items fitted at high skill; around 3 skill is sufficient to do all of that. You can also reinforce/repair leather items by doing the same with leather patches. Repairing plastic or kevlar items is possible, but requires a soldering iron with charges and plastic chunks/kevlar plates, which you can get by cutting up plastic or kevlar clothing.

 

Get some fitted glove liners, light gloves, socks, and some kind of hat for warmth. You should also wear a pair of sunglasses to get rid of the -1 perception Glare effect from bright sunlight.

 

>Sleeping

 

Once it gets dark, head back to your bedroom base. Duct tape or board up the windows through the construction menu if you can, shut all the windows and the curtains if you can't. Windows have three states: open, closed, and closed curtains. You can see and move through open windows, you can see but not move through closed windows, and you can't see or move through windows with closed curtains. You can shut the curtains of a closed window by closing it again. Close all the doors, too. You don't want any zombies to see and attack you while you sleep. If you have time, disassemble a flashlight, make a lightstrip to read by and read a skill book until you get tired.

 

Boarding up or taping up windows sets them into the closed curtains state permanently, and also reduces the amount of smell that will leak through them. This is good for reducing surprise nighttime zombie attacks.

 

>Skills

Mental Focus is the percentage of exp you gain from doing something that raises your skills. If you played with the exp system before, think of it like always having a full exp pool, but training a skill only gives you (focus)% of the exp you would have gained for doing something. You don't have to keep your focus at 100 all of the time, but you don't want to have it always be at 20, either. Keeping your morale up is actually useful now. High morale will increase focus regeneration, but low morale will actually make your focus degenerate. Being in pain will also decrease focus regeneration, as will reading skill books.

 

You train skills by using them; you train skills faster when you have high focus. Don't go to sleep with high focus; without a constant morale bonus or malus, it'll just regenerate to 100 (120 with Optimist) while you sleep anyway. If you're about to go to sleep with high focus, Archery and Firearms are easily trainable by firing your longbow at the space next to you. Don't forget to pick up all the arrows after you're done. If you have the time, read a skill book before you go to bed: your focus will drop like a rock, but you'll regenerate it all overnight anyway.

 

>Important Early-Game Skill Thresholds

 

Mechanics 1 + Archery 5 lets you make proper wood arrows, Mechanics 1 + Archery 6 lets you make heavy wood arrows, and Mechanics 1 + Archery 7 lets you make metal arrows. They require arrowheads, fletching, and their specific arrow shaft type. These arrows do more damage, are more accurate, and break less than field point wood arrows.

 

Tailoring 1 + Mechanics 1 lets you make filter masks from rags and plastic bottles.

 

First Aid 1 lets you make bandages from alcohol, duct tape, and rags. Bandages heal relatively small amounts of health, but you can easily make a whole lot of them and they don't take up any weight or volume.

 

Tailoring 3 lets you make all the clothing you'll ever need, as well as letting you repair, reinforce, and refit clothing.

 

Cooking 3 lets you make zombie pheromones, which are a very good emergency button. They turn all zombies friendly for a short period of time, letting you safely run away.

 

Survival 3 gives you a 100% of getting meat when butchering squirrels and rabbits, which is almost like getting food for free. Survival 5 lets you forage for wild vegetables, which is like getting food for free.

 

Get at least Computers 2 before you try to hack any of the police station or doctors office consoles; preferably as high as you can to minimize risks of robot attacks or breaking the console.

 

Electronics 2 and Mechanics 1 lets you make batteries out of ammonia/lemons, tin/aluminum cans, and scrap metal/knives. If you're using a steak knife for anything important, drop it at least 3 tiles away from where you're crafting, or else you could accidentally turn it into batteries. This recipe won't use pocket knives, so don't worry.

 

>Killing Zombies

 

Kill zombies by leading them into a shrub, pit, or abandoned car and filling them with arrows, funneling zombie packs through a window-frame and filling them with arrows, or running away with your superior speed while filling them with arrows. Ranged weaponry is more accurate the closer you are, so if you're not doing enough damage or missing a lot consider moving a bit closer.

 

Moving through shrubs/window-frames/shallow pits/car frames takes 4 times as long as usual, so avoid doing so yourself while leading single zombies through shrubs and funneling packs through window-frames. Don't pull more than you can chew; if you're in doubt, don't engage. All zombies will revive after about 6 hours if you don't butcher them, so after you're done killing everything attacking you just pick over the loot and butcher all the corpses. Don't butcher shocker zombies until you have 3 survival; they'll drop bionics at 3 survival, but not beforehand.

 

Keep a 2 tile distance from regular zombies at all times. They can lunge and attack you from 1 tile away, and you're trying not to get hit. Regular zombies can potentially cause a bite wound or bleeding, which will be listed in the effects menu on the character screen (press @). If you're bitten, retreat and cauterize it by applying your pocket knife and selecting cauterize; this will cause a lot of pain, which reduces your speed, so do it when you're safe and take painkiller right after. Taking more than 1 aspirin at a time doesn't do anything more than taking one; take 1 aspirin every 12 minutes for maximum effect. If you're bleeding, you can either cauterize the wound, causing pain, or stop the bleeding with bandages or a rag, which doesn't cause pain. A bandage will be used up, but a rag will turn into a "blood soaked rag", which can't be used for anything until you clean it.

 

Zombie Dogs are fast, jumpy, dodgy assholes. Fill them with arrows. They move too erratically to drag them through shrubs, so don't try. Get inside and lead them through a window frame if possible, but don't go through a window frame yourself to do so. They can also cause bite wounds and bleeding.

 

If you don't cauterize a bite wound before it becomes infected, you need to take antibiotics to cure the infection or you'll eventually die.

 

Brutes are faster than you at 0 pain, have large amounts of health, and are very dangerous in melee. Fortunately, if you have around 4 archery, you can just repeatedly headshot them to death before they even get close. They're generally just arrow fodder unless you run into one on the very first day.

 

Shrieker and Boomer zombies are also just arrow fodder. Retreat if you get hit by bile, and don't let shriekers shriek too many times.

 

Trying to kill smokers or skeletons with your longbow simply will not work. Every other zombie in the city except hulks are fair game for your arrows, but not these two. Wear a filter mask if you're killing a smoker, drag the smoker/skeleton through windows/shrubs, and use a melee weapon to kill it. Hammers are one of the best early game melee weapons for this purpose; it hits fast, has adequate bashing damage, and can drop from the regular zombies that you're killing.

 

Note that in the git version, cutting and stabbing weapons have been reworked to get stuck a lot less and waste far less time when they do get stuck, so they are now actually viable to kill things with. Hammers are still very good, but other weapons are now also useful.

 

Other good early-game melee weapons include:

A rock, if you haven't yet found a hammer.

A butcher knife, if you find one and want to stab things.

A combat knife, rarer but better than a butcher knife.

A wood spear, craftable with the 2 survival you start with and very common components.

A knife spear, also craftable but requires you to get a spike. You can get a spike by disassembling a steak/butcher/combat knife, or you can craft one with a hammer and some scrap metal.

 

Don't longbow hulks. Don't melee hulks. Run from hulks. If you have to kill a hulk, prepare beforehand and do not pull the hulk before you're ready. Raid a liquor store and make some molotov cocktails, and dig some pits beforehand to drag the hulk into. If you haven't found a shovel to dig non-shallow pits, you can just make a stone shovel out of some rocks, string, and a stick. Activate the molotov to light it on fire, (t)hrow it at the hulk to light it on fire, then drag it into the pits and plink at it with arrows or a gun if you've found one. If the hulk stops being on fire before it dies, hit it with another molotov.

 

Shocker/Spitter Zombies are about as fast as you are, and can throw electricity/acid. The shock effect gives you one turn to move to a different tile before it hits your tile, but most of the tiles around you will be filled with electricity. The acid effect will hit your tile, but you only take damage for moving over acid; not standing in it. Don't move into the hurty stuff, move them through shrubs/window-frames if you have the chance, kill them with arrows. Acid/electricity will damage other zombies.

 

>Long-Term Goals, in no particular order:

 

Loot lots of stores for lots of stuff. Libraries and schools are good places to find skill books. Mil. Surplus stores have survival gear, army clothes, and rations. Liquor stores have lots of alcohol, pharmacies have pills, gun stores have guns, grocery stores have non-perishable foods, etc.

 

Get a welder from a hardware store, public works, or garage, then make a deathwagon out of the vehicle wrecks you find on the road. You'll also need a wrench, hacksaw, lots of batteries, and Mechanics 3, but those are mostly easily attainable.

 

Find a bunch of purifier in case of really horrible mutations, then roll around in radiation/drink a bunch of mutagen to become an uberpowerful monster person.

 

Raid military outposts for ID cards, guns, and useful bits for electronics crafting and tons of 9mm from turrets. Use the ID cards in military bunkers for rare weapons and other good stuff.

 

Raid labs for bionics, weapons, map data, and lots of turret loot.

 

Set up a CBM: Power Battery home manufacturing lab with the electronics crap from turrets and burnt out bionics from shockers, become a 100+ bio-power cyborg.

 

Raid mines and temples for artifacts, become Indiana Jones.

 

Raze fungal spires and triffid groves to prevent them from taking over the world.

 

Wear a fursuit and pretend you're really a werewolf.

 

Loot mansions for medieval melee weapons, lots of books, jewelry, and other rich person stuff.