mod note: I'll be probating for this out of pure selfish interest, so please think before u post 
|
|
| # ? May 5, 2024 21:16 |
|
|
April 30th, 2023: "No, the riots were cool at first. I mean it was scary but people have a right to free speech, you know? But you could feel something change, like people stopped bringing signs and started bringing guns. They weren't looting anymore, they were just burning poo poo, and they stopped going home at night. I quit going and I told my friends to stay home, but they were still so mad about that FEMA video. I don't know if you still had TV when the army got here. It was crazy, they had one of those robot suit guys out in front of the convoy and I guess they figured people would get out of the way, but the crowd just dogpiled the guy and all the soldiers opened up on them. The internet was down but people were going around the neighborhood talking about zombies and poo poo. They had half of one in a dog crate to prove it. That was right before we got the evac order. Right before China started bombing us. So how did you make it out here, all on your own?" For this LP, we'll be sticking to the newest (or nearly so) experimental branch of the game. CDDA does periodically put out stable releases, but stable does not mean bug-free and the experimentals generally run just fine with lots of new fun content to boot. Saves are usually forward-compatible so we can update as needed.  Here are our world gen parameters. I've enabled wandering hordes, set the world to persist if we die, and increased the city size - by default it's quite small. The game also comes packed with several mods, but we'll look at those on another run.  Character creation is a point-buy system, and there are a lot of options. There are even options for which kind of point buy you want! For our first character we'll be sticking with the default Evacuee scenario and the Survivor profession. Survivor is a completely blank slate but doesn't start with much in the way of gear, and Evacuee is the recommended scenario for anyone who's new to the game. Our four stats are: Strength: Strength mostly represents muscle, but also affects our HP and overall health and fitness. Strength adds to our melee damage, especially with bashing weapons, and helps us carry things, drag stuff around, and break free of enemies who try to grab us. Strength is great for characters who use bows, bashing weapons, or anything really heavy. Dexterity: Dexterity affects our accuracy, attack speed, ranged aim speed, crit chance and ability to dodge, but not our move speed. It has a lot of minor effects as well, such as reducing the likelyhood that we'll damage our melee weapons when using them. Dexterity is great for characters who use cutting or stabbing weapons. Intelligence: Intelligence affects our learning speed, our reading speed, our social skills, and our success rate when crafting things that are above our skill level. Like dexterity, it also has a lot of minor effects sprinkled throughout the game's systems. Intelligence is great for characters who want to be versatile. Perception: Perception affects our ranged accuracy, crit chance, night vision, hearing, trap detection, and helps us spot hidden enemies. Perception is great for characters who want to use bows, guns, or stealth. Stats can be dumped as low as four or raised as high as fourteen. All four stats are useful for nearly every character, and having a low stat usually doesn't totally lock you out of any playstyle. The one important thing to note is that in an unmodded playthrough, stats are mostly permanent! There are late-game methods for adjusting our stats, but these generally come at a cost, so we must choose wisely.  Here are our skill choices. There are a lot. Most are self-explanatory, though it is worth pointing out that Melee and Marksmanship represent general competence in those areas and greatly affect our accuracy, while more specific skills such as Cutting Weapons and Rifles are more about damage and crit rate. Devices means traps, Survival means bushcraft, and Fabrication is a big generic catch-all skill for everything from bricklaying to blacksmithing. Skills are usually pretty easy to pick up during gameplay.    Traits, Jesus Christ the traits. The left column is good traits, the middle column is bad traits, the right column is our appearance. Our skin can also be light brown or rose but I'm not making another screenshot, so use your imagination. Appearance is entirely cosmetic. The game assigns point values to these in an attempt to balance them, but a lot of the traits are useless or can be trivialized while others are so good or bad that they can be run-defining. I am absolutely not going to go over all of these, we'll discuss them individually as they come up.  And here we are, staring at a blank character sheet. We can pick a few more options here. Gender is cosmetic, though age, height, and weight affect your metabolism. For our first character, we will need a name, one stat to raise, one stat to dump and two skills. Feel free to include any biographical details and if you really want to show off a trait or two, let me know. Otherwise I'll fill in the blanks myself to keep things moving. We will probably die horribly at some point, so don't be too upset if your pick doesn't make it.
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2022 01:29
|
|
|
Hmmm. Good luck. These sorts of runs tend to end very fast. I'll keep a watch on it though. I suppose to throw in content, don't care about name, but Boost Dexterity, dump perception for that scenario of 'oh poo poo, i didn't see this coming, now to make my grand escape!' Take at least Deft, Quick, and Robust genetics for boons, Illiterate and Mood Swings for negative traits. Basically speedrun to get to hella mutant asap. More traits at your discretion and the details are whatever fun you want.
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2022 02:18
|
|
|
This seems like an interesting game, I've never heard of it before. I'll just slide a suggestion out there. Name: Hunter H.H. Raised Stat: Strength Dump Stat: Perception Skills: Bashing Weapons and Social
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2022 02:21
|
|
|
Always wanted to get into this game, but never could. Always bounced off it one way or another. I'll throw a character into the pile: Name: Gray J. Hayes Raised Stat: Perception Dump Stat: Intellect Skills: Survival, Archery Optional stuff: Trait: Animal Empathy Profession: Hobo Background: Gray never fit into society well- it was always too restrictive and complex. They barely made it through schooling, only really ever showing interest in workshopping classes. Despite not being much of a student, books about the outdoors and the wild remained a constant interest, serving to banish the dreariness of life at home. People were hard to understand, but nature and animals were not. Gray tried a number of things over the years but never could fit in, and eventually found themself on the street, which is where they were when all hell broke loose.
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2022 02:52
|
|
|
Oh nice, another Cataclysm LP! No input on characters here, but I'll be excited to see the narrative you weave from any of these options! 
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2022 03:48
|
|
|
the only opinion i have here is that traps sounds cool so devices
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2022 04:42
|
|
|
Ok. Let’s see what you can do with this build! NAME: Bob, Son of Bob —MAIN STAT FOCUS: STRENGTH (gotta be healthy and hearty for the challenges to come!) ——SECONDARY STAT FOCUS (IF POSSIBLE): INTELLIGENCE (if Wasteland 3 has taught me anything, it’s that higher Intelligence is much better than lower Intelligence because versatility is handy) —MAIN STAT TO DUMP: DEXTERITY (yeah, it’s gonna hurt us long term in terms of accuracy and aiming, but that’s for later Bob to deal with) —SKILL FOCUSES: Marksmanship (primary) and Rifles (secondary) (generic for the genre, yes, but it’ll pay off quickly) —TRAITS: Fast Learner, Fast Reader, Masochist, Pyromanic, Bad Temper, Truth Teller (I have NO idea what any of these actually do; I adjust think they’d be a hilarious combination)
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2022 04:53
|
|
|
Those are some diverse answers. With no strong consensus I'll just go ahead and take something from each. We have two votes for +Strength, two votes for -Perception, and a clear interest in shooting and bashing weapons. So, for now we are...  Gray J. Hayes We've never really fit in. Being around people is stressful. We couldn't hold down a job and school was basically torture. About the only time we could settle down was when we'd go out hunting with Grampa, but Grampa's dead. poo poo, everyone's dead. Here's an interesting beginner character, and not a bad one. Our poor perception and dexterity impose a hefty aiming penalty, but this can be mitigated by getting closer to our targets until we have the skill to compensate for our inattentiveness. Our high strength will allow us to use more powerful bows and better control burst fire on rifles, and if we can't keep our distance, we are strong enough to do a lot of damage with a blunt weapon. Outside of combat we're all set for the outdoorsy life, and despite what our teachers said, we're pretty good at learning when we can focus. I also grabbed the archery background, which gives us 3 points of the archery skill and the proficiency Basic Archer's Form. This lowers the strength requirement on all bows by 1. We can become a pretty beastly archer if we have the patience for it. Odd Wilson didn't specify a gender when he supplied Gray's name, so I guess Gray is some kind of nonbinary redneck. The game doesn't have an option for that specifically, but gender is currently meaningless in this game and we can change it at will if we want. It's the gosh drat apocalypse, baby! Unfortunately, we also have some psychiatric issues, which should soon become apparent.  Earnest awakens with a jolt as we start moving around. Somehow we're the only two people who made it to the shelter. The Evacuee start places us in an emergency shelter with one neutral NPC. From here though, it's all procgen baby.  Eventually, he breaks the silence.  "Well, I guess it's just us." "What should we do now?" "I don't know, look for supplies and other survivors I guess. At least we've got shelter." "Want to travel with me?" We can size up Earnest's stats. He seems physically weaker than us, but it's never a sure thing. He sticks out his chin, trying to look tough. He's probably just scared. "Alright, nevermind, you can keep a lookout here. Maybe I can get you something if I head out?" "There's some important software on my computer that I need on USB." "...What?" "Back in town. Just put the data on this thumb drive and bring it back to me."He gives us a USB stick and an address. Seems like a stupid time to be thinking about that kind of stuff, it must be important to him.  We pocket the thing and go over our belongings. It isn't much, but Grampa's knife is probably going to come in pretty handy. Our phone hasn't had any signal for more than a week, but it's still got a flashlight and a clock, at least until the battery dies. CDDA uses a nested inventory system. I've highlighted our jeans on the right, which has placed a blue marker next to everything that's inside the jeans. The water is not marked because it's inside the plastic bottle (sealed), even though the bottle's in our jeans. If we take the jeans off and drop them, the items get left in the jeans. I've been playing long enough that this stuff is all second nature to me, but it's incredibly confusing at first. Our fingers find the matchbook... Nah. Let's check out the shelter first.  We open the curtains and peek out the windows on every side. It's quiet, no cars parked outside...nothing.  We can see the town of Steuben up north. Now that the sun's up it's easy to get our bearings. There's a gun store up at the big intersection, and it's right by Earnest's house... ...but for now let's see what Uncle Sam left us.  FEMA evacuation pamphlet posted:Welcome to your Emergency Survival Shelter. We hope your stay here will be short and comfortable. Provided are an emergency blanket, high visibility jacket, gas mask, and food and water rations for one day, as well as an emergency lighter and flashlight. There are further supplies in the communal cabinets should the facility be over its intended capacity. These resources are checked and updated by FEMA on a regular basis, but if you find some items missing, please contact a FEMA supervisor at your earliest convenience.  Muuuch better. As a pyromaniac, we get a pretty decent morale bonus from lighting fires or being near them. On the other hand, a couple times a day we will take a morale penalty if we don't play with fire.  We gather up everything we can find and sit down on a bench to count out our supplies. Shelter, check. Water, maybe a week's worth if we're careful. Probably less. Food? protein ration posted:SoyPelusa ran a highly successful crowdfunding campaign for their signature protein bar, dubbed "DaiZoom." It takes us a full minute to choke down one of the bars. We've never been picky, but this is like eating Silly Putty with sand in it. There's enough here for eleven days' worth of food, but let's hope it doesn't come to that. Other than that, there are some mylar blankets, cheap windbreakers, junk mostly. Let's just not forget that the extinguisher is there...  Shelter, water, heat, food. The survival basics are covered for a few days, so we have time to work on the next steps. Who knows, maybe FEMA will show up after all. We head outside and grab a rock. Then we take it back inside and start breaking furniture with it.  "What the gently caress are you doing?!" "I'm not going anywhere without a weapon, so unless you got one, let me work."We collect some nails, planks, and splintered wood from the wrecked cupboards. We grab Grampa's knife and get to carving.  Welcome to the crafting menu. It's impossibly huge, and just looking at it gives me a serotonin bump. Everything you can possibly imagine is in here. We already have hundreds of options and we don't even have any ranks in most of the crafting skills, let alone recipe books. For starters we'll be making a cudgel, whose stats you can see on the right. Most importantly, you want to look at the weight, melee damage, to-hit bonus, and moves per attack. At the bottom, in teal, you can see the cudgel also grants the use of several techniques. Precise strike will occasionally stun enemies, and rapid strike will do half the damage twice as quickly. The cudgel is a lightweight blunt weapon that is extremely easy to use. Its damage is low, but most armor isn't very good against bash damage, and our high strength grants us a very respectable 9 bonus damage to bash attacks. Combined with its high blocking ability, this weapon will give us the ability to hit and run very effectively without tiring ourselves out. Its only downside is that it isn't very sturdy, but it's extremely easy to replace.  While we're at it, we tear a few curtains down for their strings and carve ourselves a short bow, a handful of crude arrows, and a wooden sewing needle. The sun is coming up as we finish. We choke down another protein ration and lie down on the hard bench under a pile of mylar and torn curtains. Whatever's waiting for us out there, at least we're not defenseless. We have lots of options now. We can try to raid the near side of town, or we can go around the outside and try to get those files from Earnest's house. We've also spotted a cabin and a rural house nearby in the woods, so we could check those out while we explore the forest and try to gear up a bit more. In addition to weapons and armor, we need a lot of tools and supplies. We do know how to craft a bunch of stuff out of crap we find in the woods, but that takes a lot longer than just robbing dead people. That gun store is tempting, but getting there won't be easy. worm girl fucked around with this message at 10:59 on Feb 13, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2022 10:54
|
|
|
Out to explore the forest, that seems the natural thing to try and do in an apocalypse.
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2022 11:28
|
|
|
This is kind of interesting, yeah. I'd say do the favour for Earnest while we're still stocked up on supplies, so we can get him to cooperate and actually come with us.
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2022 12:04
|
|
|
Have pity on the ugly, help Ernest
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2022 15:48
|
|
|
Do that errand for Earnest. That will pay more dividends than just us tooling around the place.
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2022 17:09
|
|
|
Explore the forest and hit up those nearby cabins and houses. It may help to have a bit more than a carved table leg for whatever we come across.
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2022 17:23
|
|
|
Help out Ernest. He's our only friend right now and we don't want him distracted.
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2022 17:38
|
|
|
Help Ernest For direction if nothing else. Nothing stopping us from exploring along the way, after all.
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2022 18:16
|
|
|
Man, wait, is this modded or do modern versions of CDDA actually track like, vitamins and other nutrients? I mostly remember when it was just hunger/not hunger.
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2022 20:55
|
|
|
We wake up feeling sore and thirsty. Reeeeal thirsty. Thirst is a huge debuff. It's reduced all of our stats by one, but more importantly in the upper right panel of our status menu, we can see that it's reduced our speed by 19%. Speed is hugely important as it affects almost everything we do. Walking, attacking, working, tons of actions get passed through our speed modifier. Speed is also affected by pain, temperature, stamina (a term that in this game refers to being winded), weariness (a term which refers to more long-term muscle soreness and exhaustion), and fatigue (a term which refers to sleepiness), malnutrition, and mood. These penalties compound with each other which can quickly make you too slow to fight back against even weak enemies. New players tend to have a lot of trouble grasping this, and even if they do it's not always easy to notice as the UI is very cluttered. If you are slow in Cataclysm, you need to get away from combat ASAP. Our bashing skill is also at 99% and colored pink due to skill rust. I think skill rust is a stupid, bad mechanic that is always extremely annoying in video games and I quickly turn it off in the options menu. You may also notice that our base move speed is 100. This is in the same panel as speed but is a separate mechanic. Time in cataclysm is usually expressed in "moves" which are 1/100th of a second. Thus, it currently takes us 1 second to walk 1 tile under ideal conditions. Going diagonally takes slightly longer.  The (w)ield menu shows us how many moves it will take to move items from our inventory (whether worn, in a pocket, or on the ground at our feet) into our hands. As you can see, taking a small item out of our jeans pocket is faster than taking off our shoes. It takes a whole 3.75 seconds to take our bow off, and if we had stuff in our messenger bag we might notice that it was slower to access than our pants pockets. In combat, messing with your inventory improperly can eat up a lethal amount of time. If you have the handgun at the bottom of a backpack, you are often better off running from the enemy than stopping to dig around for it. This makes specialized pockets like quivers and holsters very useful. We drink one bottle of water, then wait around for a few minutes and have another. Once we're feeling better, we grab a flashlight, a battery, and a bottled water for later.  We don't have a quiver and our arrows are too long to fit in our messenger bag, so we wind up awkwardly hauling our arsenal down the road. It slows us down a bit, but since we're only juggling our cudgel and some arrows it's not too bad. We'll drop them if we get into trouble.  We step out into an evening sunshower, the sky lit up dramatically as a southeasterly breeze chases away the stormclouds and tiny droplets pelt our skin. To the east, the grasslands give way to a swampy ravine, all oak trees and cattails. We make a note of it - cattails are an amazing survival resource - but there's a broken down van in the road that demands our immediate attention. You may notice the UI scale changing between screenshots. The game looks great at 1920x1080 in the screenshot above. The resolution's high enough that we can scale the sidebar down to be unobtrusive but still readable. However, when I shrink it for the forum it becomes pretty illegible. Luckily in the options I can change the UI scale...to x2 or x4. Those are my only options. I'd be fine with that, but I have to restart the game every time.  We've always been a "live off the land" type, "land" in this case being our mom's couch, so we never learned to drive. We don't know from cars, but we do know they usually have tires. Driving is pretty easy to learn now that there's no traffic, mechanics less so without a book. However, at a glance we can tell that this car has no tires, the alternator's busted, and the engine is faulty. The marks in front of the different car parts indicate their durability. Two Xs means the item is unsalvagable. A faulty engine means that while the engine is structurally in good condition, it's missing an internal part or has some other flaw. Engines are complicated like that. It usually takes a pretty good mechanic to fix a faulty engine. The fuel meter says there's still gas in the car. We'll just...keep that in mind.  We cut east through a field, passing a pond and a clear-cut. Someone, maybe the loggers, set a fire here after the trees were removed. Charred stumps and piles of old ash are all that remain. A flock of crows scatter at our approach.  With all the people and cars gone, the animals seem a lot bolder. We're pleased to spot a turkey and a jackrabbit along our walk, but our heart skips a beat when we see the moose. Moose can be especially aggressive during the fall mating season, but they're always dangerous. We keep our distance from the big bull.  All told it's a pleasant walk, and it only takes us about a half hour to get to our destination. We're enjoying ourselves so much we almost forget our situation when we see it.  There, stumbling around by the backyard firepit, just at the edge of our vision. zombie child posted:It was only a child, and little is different now aside from the hungry look in its eyes. You'd be hard-pressed to not feel like you were killing an actual child by putting it down. We have no illusions about what we're dealing with here. We watched the dead walk on live TV. Still, we've never killed anything that looked human, much less anything like...this. We back off, nervously watching the kid as it stands there, vacantly staring.  This whole thing seems pointless. What the gently caress did that kid ever do to anyone? Why are we even out here risking our worthless life for Earnest's ugly rear end?  Our despair is put on hold by a bizarre sight. Earnest's neighbor's back yard is absolutely swarming with zombie dogs. It hadn't occurred to us that dogs could be zombies. We've never seen a zombie up close, and we have no idea what they're capable of. Worse, we've never really been in a real fight. Sure we can swing a bat or a hammer, but the zombies aren't just going to stand there and take it. We fight down our panic and consider our approach.  Our short bow can't shoot very far, and dogs are pretty fast. Maybe we'd be able to put one down if it was charging us, but not a whole pack of them. We head north instead - if we can get into Earnest's house from the street, we could sneak out before the dogs even noticed us. What the hell are fourteen dogs doing in his neighbor's backyard anyway?  Ah.  We manage to creep past unseen and reach the cul de sac. We can see humanoid figures to the west, but if they're aggressive, they're too far away to make us out. As we move toward Earnest's bike (the tires are sadly blown), a terrible crash to the north draws our attention. A lone dog smashes through a closed window and charges us! We barely have time to nock an arrow and take aim.  Our first shot sails past the target, striking the house behind it. We hastily scoop up another arrow, really just a sharpened stick, and loose it. This time, our aim is true but we miss the heart. Undeterred, the dog keeps coming.  Bows do pathetic damage and are slow, with poor range compared to guns, however they're very quiet and have a fantastic x10 crit multiplier. Unfortunately, armor is applied before critical hits are calculated, so if your target is protected and you can't hit a weak point, you're not likely to do much to it. This dog is not armored, we just failed to get a crit. That's to be expected until we raise our skill some more - crit chance is affected by our skills and stats. As it is we did some decent damage to the dog and opened a bleeding wound (yes, zombies can bleed to death), which should help our chances a bit. I was a dummy trying to get this screenshot and accidentally nocked another arrow, which allowed the dog to move to melee before we were ready. We clumsily try to line up another shot, but the undead animal is too fast. We drop our bow and scoop up the cudgel, hoping we can fend it off.  We scramble for the cudgel, but the dog gets a bite in before we're ready. Stupid, we're so stupid! We counter, but it's hard to focus on the fight. Our thoughts go back to the kid, to the innumerable swarm we're up against. There must be billions... The sight of our own blood snaps us back to reality. The zombie dog is not a particularly large or strong animal but it's relentless! We have to fight back!  Two more smacks and the thing goes down. The "quickly strike" messaging indicates we're using our cudgel's Rapid Strike technique, which costs half the moves and does half the damage. This technique is great for preventing wasted moves from overkill attacks and gives us more chances for critical hits, which can proc stuns with this weapon. This can make it worse at dealing with armor if we can't beat the target's damage threshold, but as stated before, that's less of a concern with bash damage.  We can't stay out here, in any case. We duck into Earnest's house through an open window, but we're spotted by a pair of hefty-looking zombies. They start staggering toward us with a clumsy gait that leaves no doubts as to their undead status.  We dive inside and crouch behind a table. Zombies are stupid, right? Maybe we can hide from them.  No such luck. We crouch in the shadows, wincing as the zombie crashes through a window in the other room and knocks a bunch of poo poo over on its way to us.  This time, we're ready. Our second strike stuns the zombie and then we're on top of it, clubbing it relentlessly - fourteen times in total - until it stops moving. Its snapping teeth rip a hole in our jeans and cut into our leg, but the bleeding is minor and our pants will hold up for now. Now we just need to find that computer before any more show up. We grab the cotton hat off the table. Earnest can get hosed if he thinks he gets two hats in the apocalypse.  We leave our bow behind for now. It's replaceable, and it gets in the way if we wear it in melee combat. Earnest has a little art studio or something in here, there's a big workbench in the corner and some filing cabinets. Passing a bookshelf, we grab a war novel, a book about winemaking, a technical manual about biodiesel, and an issue of Top Gear magazine. These will help pass the time if nothing else. In the kitchen, we grab a bag of pine nuts, some dish rags, a scrub brush, a sponge, a cast-iron pan, some detergent, a big jar, two pears, a cookbook, some lettuce, and a can of cola. In the kitchen junk drawer we find a battery charger, a candle, some ketchup, another flashlight, a hammer, a bunch of string, matches, a meat cleaver, scissors, pliers, a screwdriver, a Sharpie, and an x-acto knife. It all goes into our messenger bag.  Another bookshelf. This one has some kind of hacker book on it. I guess that makes sense considering our mission. Conspiracy theories got real big over the last couple years. For a while it was just the usual political bullshit, but they started getting weirder. UFOs over Japan, major corporations forming a New Illuminati, Chinese mind control rays, Havana syndrome. Some of it had to be true, right? If Earnest is some kind of hacker guy, maybe that's what he wants on his USB. We grab the books. We can ask him if we get back.  We head down the basement stairs. It's dark, so we reach for our flashlight...  Oh hell yeah man. The basement is kind of bare, but it would make a good hideout. We grab the scarf from the coffee table, the copper wire off the shelf, and check out the water heater. Most utilities stopped running, but there's still clean water in there. We drink what we have and refill our bottle.  Back upstairs we spot the computer. The windows in Earnest's room don't have any curtains and the dogs are right there, but we can duck behind the bed and they won't see us, as long as we're quiet... We grab a book about canning and something called Birdhouse Monthly and then get up to the computer. The power's out all over town but the screen is still lit. Weird, it must have a battery.  I guess that's that. Let's get out of here.  drat. The second zombie from earlier. I thought we'd lost it.  We back into the living room and start whacking it as it gets close. In the process, something clicks. We're not just desperately flailing at it now, we've started to figure out how to control the fight. Our melee skill reaches 1 as we fight, which automatically unlocks our first martial art, Brawling. Brawling is one of the best all-around martial arts in the game, and switching to it automatically grants us a ton of special abilities that we will automatically use in combat. These special abilties are in addition to and can synergize with the ones granted by our weapon. Currently this gives us a disarm, a feint (we recover faster if we miss an attack), a grab break, and the ability to block attacks with our arms (attacks can be redirected to our arms and will do reduced damage). This will greatly improve our survivability, and works with any weapon. We can unlock even more techniques for this style if we also train in unarmed combat. Needless to say, we switch to Brawling immediately, as there are no disadvantages.  We grab our bow and look at the two corpses. We've been hunting plenty, we know all about how things decay, but this is weird. The zombies stink and they look like they've been dead for days, maybe longer, but there's fresh, bright red blood coming out of them. If something's really dead the blood congeals in a day or two. Their clothes are too filthy to even consider, but one of them has a bag of chips, a wallet, and a lighter. We feel numb as we loot the former humans.         Our leg itches. worm girl fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Feb 14, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 00:17
|
|
|
That leg wound is gonna come back to bite us soon, for sure.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 00:43
|
|
|
Oof. Suppose we don't know enough to whip out that knife and tend to it, eh? The background of this game is morbidly and hilariously interesting. Oh you wanted a zombie apocalypse? How about all the apocalypses?
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 00:55
|
|
|
Drakenel posted:Oof. Suppose we don't know enough to whip out that knife and tend to it, eh? Yeaaaaah, that leg wound may be a problem. CDDA's crazy maximum apocalypse background also provides for a lot of strange character choices, and it's great. It has the added bonus of being tweakable to various settings as well. It's just sometimes you walk over a hill and get shot up by an alien.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 01:37
|
|
|
Moose? Nah, they aren't that scary. Zombie moose, on the other hand...
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 02:50
|
|
|
The fact that the game allows you to just set fire to a house and just have it go up in flames elevates my interest. Seems like interactivity is one of the watchwords here, huh. It's also a game that I honestly wouldn't have fun playing myself, so I'm looking forward to the rest.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 03:39
|
|
|
Keldulas posted:The fact that the game allows you to just set fire to a house and just have it go up in flames elevates my interest. Seems like interactivity is one of the watchwords here, huh. Even back in the Whales days the only thing fire can't solve... is being lit on fire. Interesting to see kitchens filled with stuff, I stopped playing sometime between the first Halloween special edition and the second.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 06:01
|
|
|
So that’s what the Pyromaniac trait does!
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 06:09
|
|
|
HereticMIND posted:So that’s what the Pyromaniac trait does! AS CIVILIZATION WAS BORNE OF FLAME, SO SHALL IT RETURN! THE OUTSIDERS SHALL NOT HAVE OUR WORLD. ASHES TO INHERIT, AND ASHES TO REMAIN.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 06:22
|
|
|
Drakenel posted:AS CIVILIZATION WAS BORNE OF FLAME, SO SHALL IT RETURN! THE OUTSIDERS SHALL NOT HAVE OUR WORLD. ASHES TO INHERIT, AND ASHES TO REMAIN. NO SURVIVORS!
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 06:47
|
|
|
Keldulas posted:The fact that the game allows you to just set fire to a house and just have it go up in flames elevates my interest. Not only did the house burn, it started collapsing, which caused dozens of zombies to wander inside trying to investigate the noise and consequentially getting buried in the rubble or burned to death. I was surprised at how many we actually got with it.  We carefully probe at our leg. Our other wounds were superficial but this one really hurts. That burning house was mesmerizing, but the high is quickly replaced by a cold knot in our stomach. Are we going to turn? Is that how this works?  Let's take a look at these numbers real fast. On the left is encumbrance, on the right is warmth. See how our torso is yellow? That's because both our bow and our messenger bag are strapped across our torso. Individually they'd only amount to 26, but because they're sharing a layer on the same body part, they add an additional 10. As you can see, that makes us bad at dodging, slows our melee attacks by 1/3rd, and makes us 25% less accurate. Documentation says that balance score modifies thrown attack speed, movement cost, and melee attack rolls. That's probably already expressed in the other listed penalties, but anyway it's bad. Generally if you are playing CDDA, you don't want more than ~30 total encumbrance on any body part during combat. There are exceptions, but it's a good rule to follow if you don't know the system well. Always drop your bags and unsling your weapons before a fight. The green numbers to the right of that are warmth. 0 indicates that the part is neither warm nor cold. Green numbers are within a comfortable range. We may want to pick up some gloves, but for now we're doing OK. Drakenel posted:Oof. Suppose we don't know enough to whip out that knife and tend to it, eh? We consider our blade. We could heat it up with a lighter and cauterize the bite, but that sounds like it would hurt like hell. We'll keep it in mind, but we saw something earlier that might be easier.   These are cattails, which can be used for food, fiber, and medicine.  Using our phone's flashlight to see what we're doing, we collect a few stalks, split them open, and scrape out the jelly with our knife. We get quite a bit, and everything we collect gets stored in an empty water bottle. Cattail jelly is a folk remedy for cuts and scrapes. It's not as good as actual antiseptic, but it's all we got. We slather some on our bite wound and into our other cuts and scrapes as well. Bites are not automatically infected. Sometimes bites will cause a "painful bite" effect on the limb they hit. This causes pain and can develop into an infection, or it can clear up on its own. During this time your limb's name will be blue on your sidebar. Applying antiseptic has a % chance based on your medical skill and the antiseptic quality of immediately clearing it up. Barring that, you can cauterize bite wounds by (a)ctivating a blade, though it's massively painful and only has a 50% success chance, or you can wait it out. If the limb turns white, you're good. If it turns green, it has proceeded to an infection, and that's always very bad news.  In our case, our leg turns from blue to white and the effect disappears from our @stats, so we know we're good. Antiseptic also increases the rate of normal healing if used on any injured body part, and applying it teaches us medicine. It's important stuff!  Home again, such as it is. We reek of smoke, but that's a blessing in disguise - we haven't showered in a week and it's not looking like that'll change any time soon. Sorry for the crusty text, I wasn't paying attention when I resized it. You're not missing anything important in this screenshot.  We find Earnest exactly where we left him. We briefly consider being a dick to him for no reason, but decide against it for now.  "Here you go man." "You actually got it? I seriously owe you for this." "Hey, no problem. I wouldn't mind learning what all this was for, though."We could have asked Earnest for a reward from his inventory, or we could have said we didn't want anything, which would I believe would further improve his opinion of us. He doesn't have anything and he should like us well enough to join now, so we go with the third option and ask him to teach us about computers.  All skills have a practical rank and a theoretical rank. The theoretical rank is always equal to or higher than the practical, and represents the sum of our knowledge. The practical rank is how good we actually are at the skill. Practicing skills, using them for real, or being instructed raises your practical and theoretical rank, but reading out of books only increases your theoretical. Practical skills train much more quickly if the theoretical skill level is higher, so depending on your situation, books can be the fastest way to learn. It doesn't take Earnest long to realize he's talking to a luddite. After an hour, we've learned the difference between a worm and a botnet, and that the movies where guys type really fast to hack things in real time were lying to us. The USB stick we got for him has some of his hacking programs, plus a bunch of encrypted data people in his network got for him before the bombs fell. Hard to imagine it's worth anything now, but it's clearly important to him, so whatever.  I didn't expect we'd have such a poor chance of convincing him, but it worked out OK. It's based on our attractiveness, our social skill, our intelligence, and Earnest's opinion of us. Opinion is decided by the circumstances of our initial encounter and adjusted when we do jobs for people, but after that there's no way to change it as far as I know. There's also no way to check opinion without debug - there's a lot going on under the hood, but the NPC system could still use some work.  Earnest still seems skeptical of us, but now that he's got his files he's relaxed a bit. It turns out he did a stint in the army back in the early oughts, but became disillusioned and went into hacktivism after he got out. Most of Earnest's traits are totally meaningless on an NPC. NPCs don't require food or drink by default, and they have no morale score. Spiritual, Junkfood Intolerance, Lactose Intolerance, Mood Swings, Pacifist, and Ugly won't affect anything except his combat skill learn speed. Glass Jaw means his head HP is 20% lower than his other body parts. At 7 strength that means he's only got 51 head HP. If your head or torso HP reaches 0 you immediately die, so our boy isn't frontline material. Tough feet lets him move at normal speed without shoes, which is mostly pointless in any event. Earnest's skills also include 2 athletics, 4 computers, 4 social, and 2 devices.  Looking at Earnest's gear, we can see he's suffering from a common bug - NPCs loooove to wear their underwear on the outside of their clothes. This looks stupid and adds to their encumbrance. We'll quietly fix it for him.  "Here, you should check out this magazine if you want to learn more." Earnest hands us a copy of Computer World, a spare battery, and some candy for the ration pile. We might ask to borrow his backpack later, it might be big enough to hold arrows and we don't have a quiver. This is the trade menu. Prices are listed, though allies will always accept any trade offer.  If you don't go through and set all the rules like this, your allies will wander off and die at the stupidest times unless you know exactly what you're doing. We go over what we'll do if we run into trouble, and ultimately decide that for now one of us should stay put while the other goes out. If another survivor showed up and stole our supplies, we'd be in trouble. Hey, didn't the pamphlet say this place had a basement?    Disappointing. It's cooler underground though, maybe we can use that if it gets too hot. Not that there's any chance of that for a few more weeks. "There's a message on the computer, by the way. Check it out." Evac shelter computer posted:GREETINGS CITIZEN. A BIOLOGICAL ATTACK HAS TAKEN PLACE AND A STATE OF EMERGENCY HAS BEEN DECLARED. EMERGENCY PERSONNEL WILL BE AIDING YOU SHORTLY. TO ENSURE YOUR SAFETY PLEASE FOLLOW THE STEPS BELOW. "Hey have you seen any gas masks around here?" "Not that message, the other one."Evac shelter computer posted:REFUGEE CENTER FOUND! IF YOU HAVE ANY FEEDBACK CONCERNING YOUR VISIT PLEASE CONTACT THE DEPARTMENT OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICE. THE LOCAL OFFICE CAN BE REACHED BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 9AM AND 4PM AT 555-0164. We make a note of the location.  "That's...what, twenty miles, give or take?" "If we had a car and knew the route it wouldn't be so bad, but we don't and there are zombies everywhere. That poo poo may as well be on the moon." "So what, we wait for FEMA?" "I'm not saying that, but if we wanna go we need a plan." "What do they mean by refugee center, anyway? Isn't that what this is?" "It's where the FEMA bus is supposed to take us, if it ever gets here. If anyone made it, that's where they'd be."He's right. It could take days to get up there, depending on what's in the way. We barely have any gear and Earnest is out of shape. We need guns, medicine, some kind of armor, maybe a car... For now, we'll take a break, do some reading, go over our supplies and figure out what we need most. For dinner, we eat two of the cattail roots we dug up. They taste like raw potatoes, but that's still better than the protein rations. We light a candle and read our cookbook with Earnest, dreaming about real food. For dessert, a pear.  Our phone's alarm clock wakes us up a few hours before sunset. Time to get to planning. We did alright yesterday! Earnest isn't much good in a fight at the moment, but just having someone around to help craft and train is a big help, and in a pinch he'll help out despite his pacifist ways. Long-term, we should think about whether we want to go to the refugee center or gently caress off in some other direction, and whether we should look for a car, use the subway tunnels to travel, or hike around everywhere like a couple of hobbits. No matter what we decide, we need supplies we don't have, so after I've had my beauty sleep we'll search the forest and houses closest to our shelter for loot and craft up some starter gear. If you can think of anything else we should be doing, post about it. And keep the no spoiler policy in mind! worm girl fucked around with this message at 09:05 on Feb 14, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 08:55
|
|
|
Ref Center should be our target, there might be clues there about other shelters. Hiking is slow so lets look for a car whatever we do I'd avoid the subway tunnels, getting boxed in by zombies is not good time.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 09:21
|
|
|
I don't think I've actually seen the subway tunnels back when I played, I'd be interested in seeing if there's anything worthwhile there, and the Ref Center sounds like a fun target.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 09:40
|
|
|
Have you learned nothing from the Fallout series?! Ain't nothing good in the tunnels.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 09:51
|
|
|
To the ref center we go. And use those dang subway tunnels, they're a magical land of wonder and enclosed spaces.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 15:40
|
|
|
What tile set are you using? I use UltiCa chibi I think it's called? Go to the Ref Center. Don't use those subway tunnels though. Who knows what could be waiting in the darkness there!
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 16:57
|
|
|
Rec Center and let's hit the subway. This could only result in success. We'll get a car when we get to the refugee center!
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 17:27
|
|
|
Refugee center and while I would normally never suggest the subway, seems that's the way of the vote, so Subway with the caveat of 'its ok to bail if it's dicey'
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2022 18:26
|
|
|
I'm using MSXOtto, which comes with the game and is (imo) the best looking and most complete tileset. There used to be a better one called UndeadPeople, but it was full of uncredited and stolen assets and the guy maintaining it poo poo his pants and went on a transphobic rant in the discord when one of the devs enabled the option to change your character's name, gender, cosmetic appearance, and profession name.  It is no longer meaningfully maintained.There are many other tilesets, in particular I think cuteclysm and chibi ultica look great, but they're still very incomplete. We can check them out as we go. It looks like we'll be trying the subway and heading toward the refugee center, but we need to prepare for the trip first.  We spend almost an hour carving some new arrows. It's an annoying chore, but we do seem to be getting better at it. Note the yellow text. We're missing the Carving proficiency. Proficiencies represent narrower areas of expertise than skills and are used as soft gates to progress so you can't become a renaissance man in a couple of weeks by raising skills alone. Learning a proficiency typically requires eight hours of total work, but your learning speed is affected by your focus. What's focus? It's a stat derived from our current morale and it continually decreases as we learn. That's sort of complicated, but it basically means that you have a reason to keep morale up besides just work speed and combat effectiveness, and that learning for a long time becomes steadily more difficult, and learning multiple things at once becomes exponentially more difficult. These arrows only require one proficiency and our fabrication and survival skills are above its requirement, so for us they're a good way to learn that proficiency. Trying to make an item that required two or three proficiencies we didn't have would teach us very poorly, and it would take a frustrating amount of time to get done. It's tempting to try to grab a skill book and rush endgame gear, but progress comes paradoxically faster if you do it brick by brick.  Our first destination is the house at the end of the road, mostly because we checked Earnest's backpack and it's not big enough to store arrows. Since we have to haul them around, we won't be able to move quickly enough to use our bow anywhere else before the sun sets.  We say goodbye to Earnest for now and head on down the way. It's a short walk, and soon the pavement gives way to dirt and gravel.   "Hello?"That might have been a mistake, but we're not exactly in town here. Someone alive could be home, and walking into a stranger's house on a dirt road is a good way to catch a load of buckshot.  After several seconds of nothing but silence, we creep up and peek in through the windows. It really doesn't seem like anyone's home.  Jackpot! We don't know dick about cooking, and it's not like Foodplace is still open. The cooking oil should come in handy, too.  Speak of the devil, it's Foodplace's Delicious food! Foodplace's delicious food™ posted:The best-seller from Foodplace, delicious food™ is made with real foodstuff and is guaranteed 100% edible! Foodplace is like Old Bay or coffee milk. It's just how we do things around here. This stuff is pretty much the same as the protein rations except it's much more enjoyable and doesn't have any vitamins. It never goes bad and it's pretty compact, so it's nice to have.  Out in the woods, at a safe distance, we spot the moose. It stares at us as it gnaws on a peanut bush. That's got to be the same one...  It seems like these people left, or maybe it was a vacation home or something. It's all furnished, but there are no clothes in the drawers like we were hoping to find. Instead, we use our meat cleaver to shred one of the mattresses. It yields a lot of rags we can use for all kinds of things. That done, we start hauling it all back. The sun has set by the time we get everything back to the shelter, but we've got a load of books, some food, and the makings of our first big craft project. When I say haul here, I'm typically referring to the \ key. This causes your character to move every single item in the tile they're standing in along with every step they take, even if it's too big or heavy to carry around normally. I usually think of it as dragging the items, though sometimes that doesn't make any sense, how are we dragging 100+ loose rags? We pay for this in time and weariness, every step back from the house took almost 2 minutes and counted as moderate activity. What's moderate activity? Hoo boy.  Weariness is a stat representing the raw toll that expending calories takes on your body. If you run two blocks, you might be out of breath, but you'll recover quickly. If you chop wood for six hours, you won't be gasping for air at any part of it, but you're going to be sore and tired for days due to joint strain and lactic acid buildup in your muscles. That's weariness, and it sneaks up on players. As you can see, we're currently lightly weary. This has no affect on anything unless we perform an action that has an activity level of extreme, in which case it applies a 1.25x speed penalty to that action. If we got more weary, we'd start seeing speed penalties on actions at lower activity levels, and the penalties would get bigger. What this means for you is that you shouldn't go out and try to fight enemies after you've just spent eight hours blacksmithing. For us, right now, it means nothing. We don't have any strenuous activity planned for the immediate future and we're in a place we can rest. If you're unfamiliar with the game this might seem onerous, but it's easily avoided if you take good care of your character. If we'd found a better way to move all that loot from the house just now, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Just remember that weariness exists and compounds with all the other things that can slow us down. The game is layers upon layers of speed penalties.  We light a candle and sit down to read. Reading is a great way to relax, and if we want armor, we should probably learn how to sew. Candles are a great source of light. We could also use the computer monitor to read by, though it would be slower as that light is very dim. Candles also satisfy our pyromania in a non-destructive manner, so that's nice. A very cute touch is that we will read aloud to any NPCs we have with us and they'll learn too. Eventually, Earnest falls asleep, so we tiptoe out of the room and study until we pass out as well.  2:55 AM. There's no point bringing our bow this time, so we grab our cudgel. The plan is to cut through the woods, navigating to the cabin by flashlight. We could take the trail but it's a bit out of the way.  There's another pond out this way, and we actually catch sight of a fish as we approach. Fishing can be a great way to get high-quality food, so we'll make a note of our finding. The flashlight works pretty well. In town it'd draw a lot of attention, but it's doubtful there's anything hostile so far from civilization. We're hoping we can find some light amplifying goggles at some point so we're not so helpless in the dark. It's the kind of thing you might find in hunting supply or outdoorsy shops.  The west end of the forest here is pretty swampy, but if we go slow and use our flashlight, we can get through without getting our feet wet. We stop to grab some foragables - it's still too early for berry-picking, but there are dandelions, fiddleheads, burdock, and lots of plants we can use for cordage. We can pick spurge for a natural asthma remedy, chamomile for a sleep aid, pine needles for tea, and all kinds of wild herbs and vegetables. None of it will fill us up, but there are plenty of vitamins, and anything beats the protein rations. We also grab willow and birch bark as we go. We don't have any specific plans for it, but it's generally useful stuff.  We almost miss the cabin for all the trees.  The front door is locked, but after peeking in the windows, we get in through the back door. Nobody's home. These items are almost all totally useless unless you want to melt them down as scrap metal. A lot of people complain about them, but I think having them in is immersive, plus it leaves the door open for contributors to find uses for them. The tongs are actually a good find as some crafting recipes require a pair.  This time there are clothes in the bedroom, including a leather belt and corset, which are just what we're after.  We'll probably wind up cutting up the corset for parts, but we take a moment to consider its usefulness as a piece of armor. It looks like we could wear it under our clothes, or we could loosen the strings and wear it more like a vest. Armor is a bit confusing, but here are the basics: Encumbrance - This number simply adds to the total encumbrance score for that body part. Pretty simple and we've gone over that before. Coverage - Coverage is the % chance that this armor will intercept any given attack made against that body part. The corset has a 75% chance of blocking torso shots. Protection - Protection is flat damage reduction. So this corset has a 75% chance of reducing incoming Bash, Cut, and Ballistic damage by 6. Environmental - Environmental protection works differently. Some biological and chemical attacks hurt you simply by contact, and they can be completely shut out if your total enviro protection beats the effect's threshold. Otherwise, you get the full effect. This doesn't come up very often and is probably due for a refactor. The most important thing about armor is that attacks check every piece of armor when they hit a body part, from the outside to the innermost layer. The attack checks coverage and if it is intercepted, it has its damage reduced, then it checks coverage on the next layer. Several pieces of weak armor can chip the damage on a big attack down to nothing, and often more effectively than a single piece of strong armor, as it's harder to bypass coverage on multiple layers. Some weapons have an armor piercing value. This lowers the effective protection value on every piece of armor they are checked against. Stab damage (also called pierce) is a bit weird. If a piece of armor or an enemy doesn't have a specific stab armor value, it is equal to 80% of its cut value. Stab attacks also get extra armor piercing on crits, and since that's applied before the crit multiplier, that can be really really good. There's also elemental damage. Elemental attacks do damage the same way as other damage types, but often have extra effects that we'll get into when we find them. We grab the corset, a belt, the ring, a long underwear top, a pair of work gloves, a wool scarf, and the glasses. We don't need glasses, but corrective lenses are going to be pretty valuable now that no one's making them. Belts can be used to negate the penalty for ill-fitting pants, but we just want the leather. We also snag a down pillow. We may be able to use the feathers inside for arrow flights, and if we can't, we still have a pillow. Having soft things to sleep on keeps you warm and comfortable.  On the way back, a zombie spots our flashlight and begins approaching. We've noticed that the human zombies tend to move at about a normal walking speed, but they stumble all over the place which slows them down. We could walk away from this one pretty easily, but it's too close to the shelter for comfort. Our cudgel is a blur as we batter it with seven strikes and drop it before it gets a chance to act. The cudgel's rapid strikes cost something like 42 moves, which is less than half of what it costs us to walk a single step. A fat zombie's base attack speed is 55, but it can't go blow for blow with us because it's often trying to use scratch or bite, which are special attacks that cost 150 moves. Pretty much every other hit we land is a crit now, which keeps them stunlocked. As long as we're fighting one on one and nothing's slowing us down, we can handle these zombies.  While we're going through the zombie's stuff, a second approaches. It manages to get a scratch in, but we dispatch it almost as easily. Then it dawns on us - there's a whole group of them in the dark, and they can all see our flashlight. We start to consider a tactical retreat when we spy someone moving toward us - another human! We call out to her, but something is wrong. Her lip is curled in a vicious snarl and her hateful gaze is fixed on us, not the zombies. cunning feral posted:This feral human's eyes look more focused, and its movements steadier, than others of their kind. They're carrying a crude spear, and have assembled some basic armor from scavenged clothing and bits of riot armor, though you can see several gaps. Despite these signs of greater intelligence, this creature is still only a few steps away from being a zombie themself. The undead ignore her. Our first thought is that they're too distracted by our flashlight, but...  Spears can be used to make reach attacks, as the feral demonstrates. Some people swear by this, but I see it more as a situational thing. Instead of throwing herself into harm's way like the zombies, she hangs back, jabbing at us with her spear. She spits and growls like an animal, and does not respond to our pleading. Our thoughts go back to the protests. At first they were all about the usual crap. China, gas prices, wall street, insisting that the governor was either a fascist or a communist or somehow both, but after a while people just started acting crazy, just shooting each other over nothing. Then the cops went crazy, so they called in the military and they went crazy too.  A vicious melee ensues. We're feeling pretty good about our footwork until we get stabbed in the ankle. Over her shoulder, we can see the other zombies slowly approaching.  "Hate...you..." We almost can't make out her final words, and there's no time to think about them before the others are upon us.  We're getting winded and our wounds hurt like hell, which makes it a lot harder to fend off the last two zombies. One of them grabs our shirt and won't seem to let go no matter how hard we club it, but eventually it stops moving.  We're not a doctor, but the woman seems to be dead. What the hell is going on here? Her shoddy armor fell apart in the fight, but her spear's still intact. The head looks like scrap copper that was beaten to a jagged point and stuck on a mop handle. Insane. We also find an SD card in her pocket, and what's this?  Some kind of homemade gun. Is it even safe to use? There are no bullets... The +1 indicates a modification, in this case a shoulder strap.  The presence of a proper firearm is much more reassuring. One of the zombies had this holstered, I guess it's a lucky thing they're too dumb to use them. We've only got six rounds, but we'll keep it on us in case of an emergency - guns are much easier to use than melee weapons. If something's slowing us down or we're badly hurt, we'll still be able to shoot.  Oh what the gently caress.  shrieker zombie posted:An elongated human body with a swollen chest and a gaping hole where its jaw used to be. The sound this zombie makes isn't human. As it comes into the light we see that it has somehow changed in death - maybe it's just bloat or something, but...  We kill the light and run back to the treeline. We can hear the enemy on our tail - we're hurt too bad to get away and that dog will eventually run us down if we try. The best we can do is try to separate the two and take them one at a time. We're ready when the dog comes crashing through the underbrush. We impale it again and again until it stops kicking. Then we wait, eventually the shrieker shows up and gets the same treatment.  We set our spear down and see to our wounds. We're scratched up all over and we'll have some bruises in the morning, but none of it is too bad. The spear stabs are shallow, though they hurt like hell. Bleeding reduces our blood volume and hemoglobin count, which in turn dehydrates us and makes us iron deficient over time. Most bleeding wounds are no real concern and will close up on their own, though it's best to stop the bleeding if you can so you don't die by a thousand cuts. We haven't lost much blood, we're mostly just tired and in pain. The zombies we ran into could have been part of a wandering horde, which is a world gen option you can enable. Hordes can be large or small and they tend to show up wherever there's a lot of noise, though they wander all over. There are some corner cases where it's buggy or annoying but I think it's a much better system than just having the static spawns at world gen that let you slowly depopulate the world. Now we wait in the dark to see if anything else is after us. After a few minutes, it seems the coast is clear.  We clean up our wounds, catch our breath, and then follow the trail of blood back to where we dropped our loot.  We quickly gather up our loot, then stack the bodies and set a fire. That woman deserved better, maybe they all did, but this is all we can manage now. They probably won't even burn up all the way without fuel. In the process we get jumped by another zombie, and after almost breaking our cudgel, we kill it. We fish some buckshot out of its pockets before adding its corpse to the pyre. I am playing reeeeally incautiously here. Really any time we're above "distracting pain" it's probably time to cut and run. The stat and speed penalties get really extreme from there.  The sun starts to rise as we make our way back, and it becomes clear that they were all over the place out there. We were lucky not to run into any on our way to the cabin. Once home, we use our rags to make some makeshift bandages and apply them to our wounds. We're not bleeding, but bandaged wounds heal faster. Combined with our cattail jelly, we should be better in no time. Earnest confirms the pipe rifle is chambered for 9mm, which is something we don't have at the moment. He sounds almost unimpressed by our story about the feral woman.  "Weren't you paying attention? People went crazy first, and turned into zombies second. The insanity must have been the early stages of the infection." "Well why wasn't she a zombie? And howcome we never got sick?" "I don't know. Maybe we got lucky, sometimes people are just immune to a disease." "I thought this was chemicals in the tap water." "Or alien mind control. Whatever it is, it didn't hit us."The next step is probably hitting the southern houses in town, but today's adventure taught us that we need to take it slow. We're wearing the corset under our shirt now which should help a bit, but we can do better. We'll do some reading while we heal and see if we can craft anything up with all our loot. worm girl fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Feb 20, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2022 01:08
|
|
|
Bahaha. Right, the ferals. gently caress em, the rocks they sometimes throw is like looter stones from M&B Bannerlord. That poo poo pierces through armor somehow. On the other note, I personally don't like wandering hordes. Slowly depopulating dangerous areas is actually really cool to me. Sense of accomplishment if you're persistent and methodical. But I understand the want for it. Will admit the zombie and feral origins aren't something I've seen elsewhere, though I haven't delved that deep into popular culture. I won't spoil it now but it's interesting enough.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2022 03:39
|
|
|
May 6th, 2023 The Storm Earnest has just gone to bed, but we're up reading. We think we might be able to make a thick jacket or something, but it's a big project.  The hair on the back of our neck stands up, and we taste copper. We cannot shake the sudden feeling that we are not alone.  Let's put the book down for now.  Earnest is asleep on one of the benches. There's no sense waking him up until we're sure we know something's up. Our old cudgel was basically in splinters, so we take a few minutes to carve a grip on another plank. It doesn't need to be pretty. With that done we have a drink of water and gag on a protein bar.  We spot a zombie out in the field. We don't like how close it is to the shelter, but it just seems to be roaming around out there.   What the gently caress was that? Are we hallucinating? Is that how it starts?  What used to be a little girl comes stumbling out of the grass. We do what has to be done to protect our home, but...  See you in Valhalla, kid. Where the hell are they coming from?  Not far from the shelter, half-hidden among the tall grass and low hills, we come across a field hemmed in by a wire fence. The smell hits us before we process what we're looking at.  Hundreds of human bodies have been dumped here in a mass grave and left to rot in the sun. Most lie still in a tangle of sprawled limbs and old clothes, but movement is visible here and there - some of the cadavers are not quite dead, and every now and then one manages to break free of the dogpile and crawl to the edge of the pit. This explains the trouble we had last night.  The nearest zombie approaches us. This one used to be in good shape, and it seems to still be able to use its rotten muscle. Despite this, we're still faster. It's dead in a few whacks. His icon changed because I had to reload to change the UI zoom level. Each type of zombie has a couple different ones but they don't persist if you reload the game, even though it's the same zombie. This has no gameplay effect.  One of the zombies that climbs out of the pit is so badly decayed it's almost falling apart. It promptly gets tangled up in the barbed wire and thrashes around until it bleeds out.  Today is the most hosed up day of the apocalypse so far. We can see spent casings on the other side of the mass grave. The people - the government, we guess? FEMA? The National Guard? Whoever did this didn't realize the corpses they were burying weren't going to stay dead. Hell, we didn't realize that until just now. How many of the zombies we put down are back up walking around again? We're still musing on our increasingly dire situation when the coccoon just loving explodes. This is the sound we heard last night!  A pair of batlike things come flying out of the corpse and straight toward us. We stumble away, hoping to lose them.  They swoop in, stabbing with their barbed tails. We bat one hard enough to nearly knock it out of the sky, but catch a nasty wound on our arm. This time, the bleeding is serious. Before we can follow up, they flutter away. We take the chance to try to get back to the shelter, but before long they're circling back to divebomb us again.  We're in too much pain to fight properly, but our corset saves us from what could have been a nasty jab. The creatures swoop away again.  We're desperate to reach the shelter. Our ears are ringing and the pain is drowning out every other thought. Crack! The feel of our cudgel striking one of the monsters out of the sky is wonderfully cathartic.  Somehow, we made it. We smash the window and call out to Earnest.  We hit (C) to talk to Earnest at a distance, then change his combat and engagement rules. We had previously set him to follow us and not worry about enemies, but this is an emergency. Proper NPC management can be a literal lifesaver.  We pitch ourselves through the shattered window, the bone-bat clawing at our back, and dash for the medical supplies as Earnest moves to intercept. There's so much blood!  The adrenaline is failing us now. We do our best to bind our wounds, but there are so many. At some point, we pass out. When we wake up, things have quieted down. Earnest stands over the dead bat, but... We down our water, tear into the plum. We're so thirsty, and we can't catch our breath...   We down our water, tear into the plum. We're so thirsty, and we can't catch our breath... "What the gently caress?"We down our water, tear into the plum. We're so thirsty, and we can't catch our breath... "What the gently caress?" "What the gently caress?"We down our water, tear into the plum. We're so thirsty, and we can't catch our breath... "What the gently caress?" "What the gently caress? "What the gently caress?The rest comes in flashes. Something is squealing outside, Earnest is yelling. He stops to close the door as he drags us somewhere, and outside everything looks wrong, but we're so far from caring. There's a sound like a 747 engine, and a pain in our chest like we're being crushed. The ghosts of seven billion dead scream for the last few drops of our blood. Darkness, no dreams... This one's a bit of a short post, but I thought it would work better if I cut it here for the sake of suspense. The next will be normal length. worm girl fucked around with this message at 07:14 on Feb 15, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2022 07:08
|
|
|
I honestly can't tell if that ending was a bit or you just made a copy/paste error of some kind.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2022 07:13
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 5, 2024 21:16 |
|
|
It is a bit. The game was literally warping us back in time repeatedly, see the message on the lower right of the screenshot there.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2022 07:15
|
|