Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is a turn-based survival game set in a post-apocalyptic world. While some have described it as a "zombie game", there is far more to Cataclysm than that. Struggle to survive in a harsh, persistent, procedurally generated world. Scavenge the remnants of a dead civilization for food, equipment, or, if you are lucky, a vehicle with a full tank of gas to get you the hell out of Dodge. Fight to defeat or escape from a wide variety of powerful monstrosities, from zombies to giant insects to killer robots and things far stranger and deadlier, and against the others like yourself, who want what you have...
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Cataclysm is a guide to the zombie survival roguelike game Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. You can search for things in the game, like items (e.g. a flashlight), furniture (e.g. a table), or monsters (e.g. a zombie), and find useful information about them. The data in the Guide comes directly from the JSON files in the game itself.
You can also search for things like ***** pride flags, dildos, and fursuits.
Or you could play Bright Nights instead.
Or you could add Era of Decay mod to CDDA to "alter some item descriptions so as to not have them assume support for any real-world political ideas, instead providing a politically neutral factual description. This includes descriptions for flags, hard hat, summer hard hat, dust mask, and rashguard shirt."
The main point behind this fork is providing a lot of easily adjustable options and modifiers, in order to enable both gritty realistic playthroughs (the way that DDA currently goes) as well as less realistic but more gameplay-focused ones.
General design principles of this fork are as such:
All the more obscure features are tried to be made as clear as possible to the player by providing info about what and when should be done to avoid negative consequences, even if such info normally wouldn't be available in such detail IRL.
In general, no features that represent any real-life concept will be possible to completely disable in a way that skips all the code originally written to implement it. However, for those who do want certain things to be largely irrelevant, adjusting modifiers would allow making them irrelevant.
Realism and balance exist separately from each other, in that the default option values represent how something would work in real life, but it'd be possible to readjust those values to get the type of gameplay that someone would prefer. More options to adjust whatever are always welcome.
Any time a disagreement on how one of the game mechanics should work (whether realism-wise or gameplay-wise) happens and finding a consensus seems impossible, an option to make both ways possible via options should be figured out.
Any kind of feedback on the project is accepted, even if it's negative, as long as something useful can be figured out from such a feedback.
An extremely long term goal is to eventually enable playing a large variety of different settings within this single project, including fantasy, sci-fi, medieval, prehistoric, or whatever else, without having to do any significant modifications or additions of content; ideally would just need to choose a pre-made setting preset for it and generate a different map.
Most important changes so far compared to DDA (there's more as well, check out GitHub):
Many easily accessible options to adjust different aspects of gameplay, including per-category item spawn rate, hunger rate, thirst rate, fatigue rate, vitamin consumption rate, healing speed, stamina amount and recovery speed, weariness caps and recovery speed, crafting time scaling (separate for short and for long recipes), adjustable effect of missing proficiencies on failure rate and crafting and an option to make helicopters repairable and modifiable, with the option to either require a proficiency for it, or not.
Significantly expanded and realistic detailed chemistry, with more than double the new chemicals, in addition to many new recipes. Some of the things you could produce now are smokeless propellant, various explosive chemicals, modafinil, bakeline, ebonite, factice rubber, nitroglycerin, calcium and iron supplements, chloral hydrate (the equivalent to sleeping pills) and various drugs extracted from respective plants.
More sensible crafting of explosive devices, including the use of blasting caps.
Integrated, updated and expanded Mining Mod, with somewhat more realistic ore processing, as well as a few new ore varieties.
Proper handling of gases the same way as liquids; said gases an also be used to refill oxygen tanks and scuba tanks. Currently unfinished, as no tools are necessary to facilitate this (but should be).
Bleach can be used to disinfect water, making it safe to drink.
Power armor conflicting with worn gear was changed to allow it to be used together with strapped-layer gear. The choice of the loadout that you can carry conveniently is no longer limited by storage space of power armor itself, as well as its' hauling frame.
Added two optional mods to either disable portal storms entirely, or make portal storm monsters unable to open doors.
Debug menu option to install bionics.
The possibility of dragging heavier vehicles, as long as they have wheels and are moving over a good road.
Various new craftable food items and drinks.
Craftable stoneware vessels.
Extended furniture descriptions display items that could be gained from deconstruction.
If you're playing Cataclysm: Era of Decay, and you want to use mods made for Dark Days Ahead, use mods made for DDA builds before Cataclysm-DDA experimental build 2023-07-31-1032. This build merged PR #60885, which removed charges from solid comestibles; mods that account for PR #60885 will cause problems for the latest EOD build.
User Standing-Storm's My CDDA Personal Tweaks mod restores CBM drops from specific dissected enemies, and makes a few other changes for mutations, etc.
Last edited by Lich on October 17th, 2023, 21:26, edited 1 time in total.
I stopped playing when the ******** infesting the project ganged up on Some Dead Guy and he gave up his pixel art pack.
Project dickheads being precious: "Some of those pictures were NOT PUBLIC DOMAIN and may be licensed material!"
Me: "Who gives a ****?"
Last edited by Rand on October 18th, 2023, 17:25, edited 4 times in total.
You may as well not bother replying to my posts if it's to argue anything except concrete facts or your personal opinion. I still probably won't see it.
Reject your retarded-wing political programming and learn to think.
If you can.
People need to stop arguing from the standpoint of "children shouldn't be exposed to this" - really only a couple of steps removed from 19th century liberalism - because this is the response you'll get.
Arguments should be "this is an affront to God and Nature" because then, even if they argue against it, they are condemning themselves.
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People need to stop arguing from the standpoint of "children shouldn't be exposed to this" - really only a couple of steps removed from 19th century liberalism - because this is the response you'll get.
Arguments should be "this is an affront to God and Nature" because then, even if they argue against it, they are condemning themselves.
People should not argue this at all. They should carry out God’s law and kill them on the spot.
Game looked remotely interesting but there is a suspicious amount of troonery.
And it's starting to leak into the game, little by little. Because at least one of the main coders now is a ******* seriously demented *****.
Strange ideologically-based items being found on children and such. An unnecessary feature to change your sex and appearance at will, crowed about by the ***** weirdo that coded it.
It's why I left the project. These people are insane and insufferable, and the head autist won't listen to me when I told him to burn them out or they'd just get weirder and more gatekeepy.
But he's a fool.
You may as well not bother replying to my posts if it's to argue anything except concrete facts or your personal opinion. I still probably won't see it.
Reject your retarded-wing political programming and learn to think.
If you can.
Game looked remotely interesting but there is a suspicious amount of troonery.
And it's starting to leak into the game, little by little. Because at least one of the main coders now is a ******* seriously demented *****.
Strange ideologically-based items being found on children and such. An unnecessary feature to change your sex and appearance at will, crowed about by the ***** weirdo that coded it.
It's why I left the project. These people are insane and insufferable, and the head autist won't listen to me when I told him to burn them out or they'd just get weirder and more gatekeepy.
But he's a fool.
People now think false union with evil is a virtue. The solution is lynching ********/girlbosses/sodomites from anywhere you have the power or capacity to and refusing to participate in anything
Involving them.
Game looked remotely interesting but there is a suspicious amount of troonery.
And it's starting to leak into the game, little by little. Because at least one of the main coders now is a ******* seriously demented *****.
Strange ideologically-based items being found on children and such. An unnecessary feature to change your sex and appearance at will, crowed about by the ***** weirdo that coded it.
It's why I left the project. These people are insane and insufferable, and the head autist won't listen to me when I told him to burn them out or they'd just get weirder and more gatekeepy.
But he's a fool.
Game looked remotely interesting but there is a suspicious amount of troonery.
And it's starting to leak into the game, little by little. Because at least one of the main coders now is a ******* seriously demented *****.
Strange ideologically-based items being found on children and such. An unnecessary feature to change your sex and appearance at will, crowed about by the ***** weirdo that coded it.
It's why I left the project. These people are insane and insufferable, and the head autist won't listen to me when I told him to burn them out or they'd just get weirder and more gatekeepy.
But he's a fool.
And it's starting to leak into the game, little by little. Because at least one of the main coders now is a ******* seriously demented *****.
Strange ideologically-based items being found on children and such. An unnecessary feature to change your sex and appearance at will, crowed about by the ***** weirdo that coded it.
It's why I left the project. These people are insane and insufferable, and the head autist won't listen to me when I told him to burn them out or they'd just get weirder and more gatekeepy.
But he's a fool.
So is the worm girl fork de trannified and do they hate her because she is a real woman and they will never be a real woman?
I don't know what she did with the ****** stuff that was added to the main fork; I don't know when she decided to fork the game. If you want to avoid the ****** flags and socks try the EOD fork posted earlier or the Bright Nights fork.
Game looked remotely interesting but there is a suspicious amount of troonery.
And it's starting to leak into the game, little by little. Because at least one of the main coders now is a ******* seriously demented *****.
Strange ideologically-based items being found on children and such. An unnecessary feature to change your sex and appearance at will, crowed about by the ***** weirdo that coded it.
It's why I left the project. These people are insane and insufferable, and the head autist won't listen to me when I told him to burn them out or they'd just get weirder and more gatekeepy.
But he's a fool.
Game looked remotely interesting but there is a suspicious amount of troonery.
And it's starting to leak into the game, little by little. Because at least one of the main coders now is a ******* seriously demented *****.
Strange ideologically-based items being found on children and such. An unnecessary feature to change your sex and appearance at will, crowed about by the ***** weirdo that coded it.
It's why I left the project. These people are insane and insufferable, and the head autist won't listen to me when I told him to burn them out or they'd just get weirder and more gatekeepy.
But he's a fool.
With some leftist gay race commie freaks cheering him on:
Last edited by Rand on March 2nd, 2025, 03:53, edited 1 time in total.
You may as well not bother replying to my posts if it's to argue anything except concrete facts or your personal opinion. I still probably won't see it.
Reject your retarded-wing political programming and learn to think.
If you can.
