By some miracle, the NPC follower I got was carrying
light amplification goggles, aka. NVGs! No glasses, though, so even with that I am limited to my near-sighted range, and they don't allow me to craft or take apart furniture in the darkness. Still, at night, these are a godsend, and the zombies' viewing range will be screwed even worse than mine. I "Trade" for the NVGs, giving the NPC a crowbar and screwdriver in exchange so they can perform furniture deconstruction work—though they can't work in the dark, anyway.
Before I go into town proper, I'm going to take a moment to get into the enemies one is most likely to encounter early game.
Zombies: These come in subtypes, such as Zombie, Zombie Child, Fat Zombie, etc., and all can have different clothing/items that you can't see until they drop dead with their inventory. In short, a zombie could be a biker wearing motorcycle armor, hence why it takes more hits to bring down. You can generally be sure that SWAT zombies and police are wearing quality riot gear that'll easily stop most attacks, aside from high-caliber FMJ bullets and hits from sledgehammers.
Zombie Dogs: Enough of a difference to count. Dogs have a lower profile than zombies and are slightly harder to hit. They are also much faster. Police dogs can wear kevlar harnesses. They are less adept at getting through doors and fencing than their two-legged friends, though. Dogs have a better sense of smell and will pick up on your trail more easily.
Giant Cockroaches: These tend to infest basements in buildings. Think the Radroaches from Fallout, except these are a good bit nastier. Cockroaches can mess you up fast, especially in the numbers they tend to come in, and their chitinous exoskeleton is fairly resistant to blows, so bring a good blunt weapon
(like a quarterstaff) and some decent armor.
Police Robots & Military Roadblocks: Towns & cities tend to have these around. If you commit a "crime"
(like breaking into a gun store) it can summon police interceptor bots with tasers and handcuffs. Flying police drones can also alert the robocops to your location. Zombies aggro on police bots and will gladly hurl themselves at their steel plating, potentially making an easy getaway for you. Military roadblocks have gun turrets and searchlights, along with sandbag walls. The turrets will warn you with loudspeakers if you get close, afterwards they'll shoot you dead. But all of this attracts a LOT of attention from the zeds, causing them to swarm the roadblock and attack. Almost no early game zombie has the damage to get through a turret's armor plating, and they will throw themselves endlessly at the guns even after they run out of ammo and just keep blaring "PLEASE, DISPERSE" to the ravenous mob.
You'll notice I mentioned
scent trail. Yes, that's right, the zombies can smell you. How? Well, humans leave an invisible, slowly-blooming trail of scent around them over time. The more you stay in one place, the further out this expands. Zombies can follow this trail and hone in on you. Scent is blocked by objects, including closed or blocked windows. So, even if you are Crouching as I do and make only enough noise to be heard within 3 tiles, which is about how close they can spot you at night, they can trace your scent at a much further distance, so the longer you linger with looting in town, the riskier it gets for you. Grab what you need and get out fast.
Alright. Now that I have the goggles, I take a moment to make a
Quarterstaff out of a long stick from the woods. Staves are very solid early weapons with good damage and defensive blocking techniques, and can be upgraded into a Bo or Ironshod Quarterstaff later. Then I head to town, hoping to find something worthwhile amidst the devastation. The goggles let me sneak around Sam Fisher-style, avoiding enemies and picking when and where to loot.
I ran into a Giant Cockroach in the basement of this house. It gave me some nasty bites, but by dropping my staff and waiting a bit in place, my character automatically puts pressure on bleeding wounds to staunch them without needing bandages. I found a portable
Charcoal Smoker out back, which is great for cooking meals because it functions in place of a fire when loaded with charcoal. But then I got a bite from a Decayed Zombie
(elderly people who got infected), which was marked
blue indicating risk of infection. I fervently looked around, and found a bottle of
hydrogen peroxide in some rich guy's stone-walled house's golf cart garage. Peroxide, along with alcohol-based antiseptic, is a literal lifesaver for stopping otherwise fatal infection before it takes hold. Once you're infected, you need to find antibiotics
fast.For some reason, though, the houses seem almost as loaded with supplies as they should be without the
No Hope mod on, so either I did something wrong or the mod isn't working as it's supposed to. Ah, well. I managed to find glasses! Several pairs, in fact. These let me see at full distance, which also means now I can actually use those binoculars. And I don't linger long in town that night, especially not after two fights and sustaining some nasty pain that I kept at bay with a bit of aspirin. I go to sleep for the night, and in the morning, after eating some canned chicken and graham crackers, I head back to the radio tower with my binoculars to get the lay of the land.
Apparently, my little cabin, marked "Daysville", is sandwiched between two towns with less than 14 tiles of distance between them. This is a
very risky place to linger for too long, as it's well within the wandering distance of zombies. I will probably want to pack up and move to a better spot soon, possibly the leftmost Radio Tower west of my cabin, which has a little service shack with it I could set up in. Arguably even more ideal would be a shed, which doesn't show up on the map and spawns regularly in fields. Sheds are good shelter spots because they have four walls and a roof, and don't need much effort to make livable. A pond is also a good choice because of the functionally infinite water supply it gives you, though you will need to deal with rain. If I was really pressed, I would make the trek to one of the red
+ signs up north and northwest, which are LMOE
(Last Man on Earth) shelters—underground bunkers for wealthy doomsday preppers. They have literally everything one could possibly need to handle the apocalypse in safety, although I don't like them on principle because they make the game far too easy.
Author
Topic: Xvareon plays: Cataclysm - Dark Days Ahead (Read 8887 times)