Game Review: Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (0.G Stable Version)

[dorchadas]

I originally learned about Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead from the same place I learned about so many other games--a Rock Paper Shotgun article. As an old devotee of Dwarf Fortress (from before Z levels!) and UnReal World, I loved the article's description of an expansive crafting system and an apocalypse where nearly everything went wrong at once, so I downloaded the stable version--despite the disclaimer on the article, I was put off from downloading the experimental version--and made a character and loaded into the world. I started in the evacuation shelter, talked to my starting NPC who gave me some mission I don't remember, and with some bare supplies I left the shelter. There was a road to the south but I struck off into the wilderness for a while, reasoning that a place with a large population was a place with a lot of zombies, and saw a few wild animals and some giant insects that I avoided before noticing the outskirts of a small town. With a stout branch in my hands, I snuck from the forest to the closest of the houses and shattered a window and entered the house.

Mistake. I immediately hear shuffling footsteps approaching from the street outside, and as the thumping started on the front door I grabbed a couple cans of food and climbed out the window, cutting myself on the broken glass. I was greeted with a zombie coming around the corner of the house, and I laid into it with the stick. I managed to kill it, but the noise attracted a few more, and though I tried to run a tough zombie grabbed me and I couldn't break free. RIP.

That's a pretty good summary of how a lot of CDDA games go to this day.

YOU DIED.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is an old-school roguelike, with procedural generation, permadeath, ASCII graphics (though a tileset is standard nowadays), keybinds that take up basically the entire keyboards, the works. It takes place in the modern day, twenty minutesone year into the future, after a series of events lead to a local breakdown of reality that results in giant monsters rampaging, the dead rising, a double-digit percentage of humanity devolving into animalistic savagery, mutated insects and animals preying on the survivors, invasions by at least two interdimensional alien empires, exploratory probing by two different interdimensional alien empires...the works. If it could go wrong, it did go wrong, and that means that the average lifespan of a character in the post-cataclysmic world is probably on the order of days. You can die to zombie attacks, of course, but you can also be eaten by mutated animals, get sick from bad water, starve to death, fall off a building, be shot by automated defenses, be murdered by feral humans, be shot by bandits, be captured for experimentation by mi-go, be infected by the mycus and be subsumed into the hive mind, freeze to death, be torn to pieces by fragmenting reality during a portal storm, and I'm sure there's something I'm forgetting. "Dark Days Ahead" is not just advertising copy.

The guiding development principle is realism within the bounds of the post-apocalyptic scenario, so how zombies work isn't explained (and isn't something a traumatized survivor is likely to ever learn anyway), but most parts of the game work the way you would expect them to in the real world. A lot of effort is put into making specific values match the real world ones--for example, there was just recently a PR that rebalanced all food cooking costs based on the actual BTUs needed to heat them. If you go on the dev Discord server, you'll see people discussing weapon calibers, the weight and density of materials, the energy density of specific fuel types, and other real-world technical topics in order to figure out how to bring them into the game. If you've played pre-0.G versions this can be a bit jarring, because the focus on total realism is relatively recent--previous versions of the game were set in 2040 and had autonomous robots, wide-spread cybernetic augmentation, and other futuretech--but essentially everything is currently being reworked to support it. This does mean that starting CDDA characters are very fragile and liable to die if they aren't very careful about where and when they choose to fight, but it can often be in the player's favor as well. For example, the above-mentioned rebalance means that all food costs much more energy to cook, but compared to the previous 2040 version of the game, food is far more plentiful. The cataclysm happened suddenly after a few months of civil unrest and the game is assumed to start about a week after the total collapse of society, so nearly every home you go to has a variety of appliances, canned goods, clothes, books, etc. It's very easy to end up with far more loot than you can carry after checking a single house.

I went overboard preparing for winter and killed two moose. In other games, a moose might drop a few pieces of meat. Maybe ten to fifteen at max. In CDDA, a moose has a realistic amount of meat, which means those two moose that I killed, dressed, and smoked gave me half a ton of meat. More than enough to survive until I get bored and do something stupid and die. I said above that you could starve to death, but in the actual length of most games (a few months, before you run out of stuff to do), it's never going to happen.

❗️‼️

Death is very easy from other sources if you're not prepared, though. A starting character with no combat skills is at high risk even fighting a single zombie, and even strong characters can have trouble against a horde thanks to zombie evolution. Like Left4Dead, Shadow Theory, and other modern zombie horror games, zombies evolve. A basic shambling zombie can get faster, its legs gradually lengthening as the bone extends, until it's a horrible spider skittering on bone spikes and lashing with a lengthy tongue. Sometimes their muscles get tougher and tougher, until they're a hulking brute that can smash down walls, or even a ten-foot-tall monster who can throw cars. Some develop powerful vocal cords and too-wide mouths to better enable their shrieks that alert the horde that prey is near, and some turn into incubators for predatory fleshy things. This evolution happens to other mutants as well--bears gain extra heads, coyotes' mouths extend into shark grins, and insects get larger and larger and larger. Someone is currently working on mutant paths for dogs too, so even man's best friend isn't immune to the Cataclysm.

The point of all this is the same as the food clock dating back to the original Rogue. Food in Rogue exists not due to any realism concerns, it's to keep the player moving and prevent them from staying on one level and farming monsters for XP. The point of evolution in CDDA is much the same: to encourage the player to get out and do stuff instead of finding a single safe place and just waiting there. If you don't get into combat regularly, your combat skills aren't going to keep up with the deadliness of monster evolution. At the same time, you need to find enough downtime to heal up, repair gear, and accomplish any crafting you want to do, so it's a balance between making forays to monster-dense areas to scavenge and thin out the horde and then retreating back to safe areas to recover. In version 0.G, any areas you clear out are monster-free forever, so it's possible to slowly depopulate a city with repeated forays and once you claim a base and secure the area, you never have to worry about it being attacked again. This is definitely somethings the devs want to change but it's a hard problem to solve, so enjoy it while you can. Spend some time working on that Deathmobile instead.

Wheels: Enough

One of the big innovations of CDDA that isn't really found in any other survival roguelike is the vehicle system. The world is littered with cars, trucks, bikes (both motor-powered and not), and even a few helicopters. Most of these have some kind of mechanical problem preventing them from moving, from damaged engines to missing wheels to smashed controls, but with the proper parts and mechanical knowledge, you can get them working again. Having a working car vastly increases your storage and looting potential, since you can outrun enemies and keep most of your gear with you. While in previous versions cars were the ultimate weapons and a single mid-sized sedan could run down dozens of zombies, 0.G pulled back on this and now cars require both regular maintenance and part replacement. Take enough damage and parts need repair, parts that are repaired enough times suffer permanent degradation and need replacement.

However, thanks to the variety available in the vehicle system it's still possible to create the ultimate Deathmobile out of that mid-sized sedan. There are dozens of possible parts, from armor plating to putting welding stations or internal kitchens into your car to loading it with cargo spaces to putting turrets and cameras on it and turning it into an armored fortress. You're limited only by your time, the availability of parts and fuel, and basic physics--you can't create a truly monstrous mobile fortress because no engine you'll find will be able to move it--but otherwise if you want to take a luxury RV and turn it into an armored car with turreted machine gun, reinforced windows, cameras and floodlights for night driving, and a bike rack with electric bike for in-and-out city forays as I did in the image above, you can. Fuel is currently everywhere and gasoline does not yet go bad, so build that car and drive.

Living out of an armored Deathmobile used to be the one true meta, to the point where people would even find cows and tie them down in Deathmobile animal compartments, but the devs have been trying to pull back on that to encourage stationary bases. They aren't quite there yet, but the above-mentioned portal storms are a first attempt to giving you some reason to want a place with a basement to retreat to. Despite that, cars are still extremely strong. Even a standard hatchback can offroad, so any vehicle you have is a pathway to power. Check every car you find. You never know when you'll find one that works.

Time to get magnets in my hands!

The other paths to power besides "get a car" are cybernetic enhancement and mutation.

In pre-0.G versions cybernetics--called CBMs, "Compact bionic modules"--were easier to get but harder to make use of. They were found in bank vaults, in zombified researchers and the labs they inhabit, in prototype cyborgs, in the electric line of zombies (whose powers were themed as malfunctioning cybernetics), and in the dangerous bio-operator zombies, and could be removed and then cleaned by dissecting those zombies. They're no longer found in most of those places following their theming as devices brought to Earth by the Exodii, a group of extradimensional refugees fleeing similar cataclysms in their own dimensions and now holed up on Earth for a while. Their spokesman is Rubik, a near-full-conversion cyborg--the better to resist the source of zombification--who speaks the King's Anglic and thus is the only Exodite who can actually talk to the people of New England where CDDA takes place. After ingratiating yourself with the Exodii, they'll install cybernetics in you for a nominal fee. This makes it much easier to get cybernetics earlier in the game, and with minimal install difficulty as compared to previous versions of the game, but it does have a major disadvantage--repetitiveness.

As a permadeath roguelike, CDDA relies on creating interesting and novel situations to deal with, because having to do the same thing over and over again as you die repeatedly and start new games is incredibly annoying. It was one of my major problems with Dungeons of Dredmor, where doing the top floors with one or two skills was tedious the first time and mind-numbing the tenth time, and removing all sources of particular gear except from a specific faction means that you have to do those quests every single game to get that gear. No longer do you scavenge in the ruins of the old world for what cybernetic enhancements you can find and then install them in the ruins of a scientific lab, now you have to track down the castle with the Cockney robot and get him to do it for you, every single time. The first time was neat flavor. The tenth time?

I remember someone on reddit saying "I wanted to be a survivor, not do fetch quests" and I feel the same way. Gating things behind specific quests in a procedurally generated game where the unpredictability is part of the fun is a poor design decision, but it's one we're stuck with. Unless you mod cybernetics back into other enemies like I did, anyway.

Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Survivors.

The other option is mutation, and that's a route that still involves scavenging the remnants of the old world. In the background of CDDA, a secret government organization called XEDRA ("Xenophysical Energy Defense Research Agency") discovered a compound that allowed for controlled stable mutation of animals and humans, and by finding and recreating their research you can mutate as well. Besides the obvious human-but-better path (Alpha), there are a myriad of animal-themed paths, including ones like Snail that possibly no player of CDDA has ever taken, a Cenobite path (Medical), a living weapon path (Chimera), and one path where the scientist tried to create a fantasy elf but using existing creatures' tissue samples so it's more of a human-plant-bird person (Elf-a. You know, like Alpha but...elf). Mutations tend to have higher possible benefits than cybernetics--for example, the maximum possible bonus to Strength from cybernetics is +2, or +20 for short periods of time, and the maximum possible bonus from mutation is +11 for a truly enormous bear mutant--but also have drawbacks. That same bear mutant with +11 strength will almost certainly have predatory mindset mutations that carry an intelligence penalty, paws that make fine manipulation difficult, and a muzzle that prevents wearing gas masks at minimum, with the possibility of being almost impossible to wake from sleep and exuding a thick musk as well. Other mutation lines have similar bonuses and penalties: Chimera gets a ton of combat prowess and can regenerate from near-crippling wounds in minutes but needs to eat roughly 20,000 calories a day to avoid starving to death. Bird has wings but also hollow bones. Snail is a snail.

The mutation system used to be instant, drink mutagen gain mutation, but now takes place gradually. Injecting mutagen and a mutagenic catalyst will jump-start the process and mutations will occur gradually over the next forty-eight hours or so. Initially all mutations are beneficial or neutral, but as you mutate more and more a hidden value called "instability" rises and the chance of harmful mutations rises with it. In 0.G the only cure for instability is to wait it out, so it's important to mutate as early as you can in order to have more time for instability to lower. For players who want to deal with mutation, this also increases the time pressure as the later you find the tools to make mutagen, the longer your game will have to be. I was being overly cautious and didn't find any until July (the game starts at the end of April), and then after I started mutating into a bird/plant/elf-man, I had to do it over the course of a month so that my instability didn't get too high. At least it gave me time to work on my Deathmobile.

There is one thing to be wary of and that's that the definition of "positive" mutation is pretty straightforward but can seem opaque to the player because of how mutation rolls work. Each mutation category is divided into pre-threshold and post-threshold mutations, and you need a certain number of pre-threshold ones before you can cross the threshold and really become a bear-man or fish-man or whatever. It's possible for the game to roll post-threshold mutations with some pre-threshold prerequisites, and while if you already have a different threshold it won't give you the final part of the chain, it will give you the prerequisites even if they're negative. This is most common with Carnivore, which is a prerequisite for the various predatory mindset mutations, but can happen with other mutations too, so it's not strictly true that you can only gain negative mutations at high instability. Be judicious when drinking multiple types of post-human drugs.

Secure. Contain. Protect.

The typical gameplay loop for CDDA is thus as follows. Start in an evacuation shelter, with the clothes on your back and maybe a few tools depending on what your pre-Cataclysm background was. Talk to the NPC with you in the shelter and see if they can help. Carefully check outside the shelter to see if it's safe, and if so, follow the road to find a town. Arm yourself with something simple, like a stick or even some rocks, and sneak in--there's a huge debate over whether day raids or night raids are better, day raids have greater visibility but it goes both ways, night raids it's easier to sneak but also easier to have your escape route cut off, so pick one. Go to a house on the outskirts and break a window if you have to, or go in an open window. Loot the house for whatever you can, looking especially for tools like hammers, knives, or screwdrivers; food; and healing supplies like bandages or antiseptic. If there's one zombie, you can try fighting. If there's more than one, run.

With your tools back at the evac shelter, make a better weapon. Spears are traditional since they allow you to attack from range, and with your better weapon raid again. If you kill a zombie with any kind of armor, even something like a tracksuit or kevlar vest, look for soap so you can wash the grime off and wear it. Also keep an eye out for pre-Cataclysm weapons--one aspect of realism and the game being set in New England is that guns are everywhere, and guns are obviously much better than sharpened sticks for a survivor with low skills. Continue building up your supplies until you feel more confident, then check the evacuation shelter computer console to learn where the refugee center is. Travel there and do their quests. From the refugee center you can learn where other factions are, like Hub-01, the Exodii, or the Artisans, and you can purchase extra supplies like welding materials or bullets. From Hub-01 you can get better armor and occasionally better weapons, from the Exodii you can get cybernetics, and from the Artisans you can get custom weapons and armor. With all those materials, you're ready for lab-diving.

Look for isolated forest tiles on the map or check out a subway to find the entrances to secret XEDRA experimental sites, which will have recipes and chemistry materials needed to make mutagen. Mutate yourself into post-human intelligence. With your cybernetics, weapons, mutations, and skills you've gathered through your journey, you are now well equipped to take on your next challenge, which is...

Uh...

My glorious mansion base. Power, light, heat and aircon, a farm, a moat...and no reason for it all.

And that's probably the biggest problem with CDDA right now. The devs are categorically opposed to any kind of win state or ability to make the world better, because the reasons for the Cataclysm are more like a Lovecraftian return of the Old Ones rather than any scientific quandry. A single person cannot defeat multiple interdimensional empires, nor can they kill literally billions of zombies, so it's impossible to save the world. They're even against the idea of making the world locally safe, so there's no creating a bastion of civilization to hold off the tides of dead. But that means that once you've attained personal power and a loot stash, there's nothing in the game to do.

This has been a problem in every version up to 0.G and will probably continue for quite some time. Since a lot of characters die within the first 24 hours, and many more die within a few days, almost all of the development is focused on things that affect the early and mid-game. CDDA is open source and very easy to mod using JSON--I myself have built up a psionic powers mod called Mind Over Matter that people like--but deeper changes all require actual programming knowledge and C++ and are thus much harder to implement. Changing the flow of the game so that, for example, the triffids and the mycus and the zombies all go to war over territory, or the player's base is periodically attacked, or new factions are established and old factions suffer setbacks, or New England itself is xenoformed into an alien jungle, a fungal bed, or a deathworld crawling with mutated flora and fauna would all require C++ changes to implement and generally the people with the skills to do that have the skills to get paid doing it. There was a change a couple years ago to make pockets explicit rather than abstract which required a lot of work, and I saw one estimate that if the person who did it had been paid at a senior developer rate they could have billed for $80,000 for the time it took.

The advantage of an open-source collaborative project is also the disadvantage--anyone can work on it and they work on what they want to work on, so while a project to overhaul the mycus to a more workable status was closed since the person working on it ran out of free time, there are multiple aluminum projects all completed and merged. The answer you'll get to many complaints about content is "Do you want to add some?" and that is the appropriate answer but it doesn't conjure up non-existent content from the aether. It's definitely possible that all of my issues with CDDA will be fixed in the future but this is a post about 0.G, where the best part of the game is the initial survival, and all long-term goals are self-generated.

If all else fails use fire.

I don't want to give a false impression, though--getting to those long-term goals is hard. The gameplay loop I mentioned above contains hundreds of possible ways to die throughout and as a beginning player you will definitely die to many of them. Like all roguelikes, CDDA relies on a certain amount of prior knowledge of the dangers for success: knowing that shocker zombies should not be fought in melee and that more evolved shocker zombies have ranged attacks, or that some zombies can spit acid, or the spear/sprint/stab dance for fighting low-level zombies, or how to force zombies to crash though bushes or furniture or cars to slow them down. What places to loot first, what places to avoid--area difficulty is totally unrelated to loot value, so some places like nursing homes or stadiums are crawling with zombies but without any meaningful loot while a simple house has tons of useful materials for a beginning survivor--whether to day or night raid, what items are useful in crafting and what currently has no purpose, all of that comes with time and probably a lot of deaths. There are YouTube tutorials about the basics but a lot of it won't be engrained until you see that ASCII gravestone more than once.

As it is, I'm a little unusual in caring that much about the long-term game. You can see the in screenshot above that I have quite a few NPCs populating my base, but many people don't use them at all (for take the Cannibal trait and only use them for food ). While the game runs at a pretty speedy clip normally, taking maybe 5 seconds or so to sleep through an eight-hour night, every additional entity nearby increases this time. With sixteen followers, two cows, and a small flock of chickens, plus all the lights and wiring in my base (also processor hogs), that 5 seconds ballooned to more like 7-8 minutes. Long-term crafting also increased by a similar amount, so once I transitioned into the stage of making my own goals, to repair, power, and light the entire mansion, most of my gameplay was spent tabbed out waiting for tasks to finish. This is a major problem with any sim heavy game, not just CDDA--Stellaris, Rimworld, and Dwarf Fortress also suffer from this--but it discourages collecting or interacting much with NPCs, and as a lone wolf there's only so far you can go. Having all the NPCs to help me with projects decreased the in-game time they took but greatly increased the out-of-game time.

That said, while early survival is currently the major challenge, there's still plenty to do once you master it. Make characters with lower stats, or choose more challenging starts like an experimental mutant who has to escape the lab, or the last living soldier in a military base full of zombies, or a survivor who lived a year out in the wilderness and whose dwindling supplies have forced them to confront the hordes of evolved dead and insects. Play with the mods that ship with the game, like Innawood, which erases all signs of civilization and turns CDDA from a game of scavenging to a game of bushcrafting and wilderness survival (with optional dinosaurs and prehistoric megafauna); or Dark Days of the Dead, which gets rid of mutants and zombie evolution but evokes classic zombie movie rules so that being bitten just once will kill you; or Magiclysm, and master ancient spells to take on dragons and demons; or the still-in-development Aftershock, which turns CDDA from a game of zombie survivor in the ruins of Earth to a game of alien survival in the ruins of an extra-solar colony after the collapse of interstellar civilization. The possibilities are vast.

Plants vs. Zombie (Dinosaurs).

When I first started playing CDDA, I was surprised at the devs' hardline stance in favor of permadeath. Even games like Tales of Maj'Eyal and Caves of Qud have difficulty settings without permadeath nowadays, what makes CDDA different? Well, as I said above, the difference is that CDDA does not have an ending that you work towards--like old school D&D, the story is what happens to your character. If your character only lives six hours after leaving the evacuation shelter, trying to loot a grocery store but being chased onto the roof by zombies, jumping off the other side and breaking their leg, drinking bad water while hiding in an abandoned house and then contracting dysentery...well, that's probably the same story that a lot of people had after the Cataclysm. It's the journey, not the destination, because the road is endless.

Not everyone enjoys an open-source hardcore permadeath survival simulator, but Cataclysm is absolutely the game for fans of the genrethem. And it's under continuous and active development. If there's something you like and it fits with the devs' vision, you can add it in. I mocked the aluminum PRs above but they took a lot of work, they fit the goal of being realistic, and they're the result of one person deciding that since aluminum is in the game, it should be usable the same way it is in real life. If you manage to fix one of the major problems in the current game, like road generation being confusing or the triffids in-game being walking salads despite their lore place as a conquering interdimensional empire, then you'll get a bunch of acclaim and the knowledge that you've made the game better for tens of thousands of people. Or maybe you can just add fluffernutter sandwiches. CDDA is set in New England and after ten years of development, they're still not in the game.

You can get Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead for free here.

Comments

[corvi]

Neat! I have also played dwarf fortress, but hadn't heard of this one and enjoyed your review.

[dorchadas]

Thank you!!

C:DDA is definitely a very specific sort of game--I was just reading an argument on about the proper force needed to smash down a brick wall with various kinds of sledgehammers on the development discord--but there's really nothing else like it out there.