Building is a great use of time. Build yourself a great fort in the woods.
Also I can never really survive past the first few days. Any teeps?
Hmm, well since I don't know what you're having trouble surviving through, I'll just throw out a general walkthrough:
Top priority on the spawn is to get a good weapon. You have a few choices:
1: If you started with a profession that has a weapon (soldier, golfer, etc) you're already good.
2: If you took a martial art, you're probably good.
3: If you 's'mash the lockers, you can get a pipe. Does decent damage, and has a +2 hit bonus which is the best of the starting weapons.
4. If you 's'mash the benches, you can get a 2 by 4, which is a nice weapon. If you go outside and get a rock, you can craft (&) a nail board out of the 2 by 4 and some nails. If you prefer, you can use your starting pocket knife to craft (&) a pointy stick out of the 2 by 4.
Once you have a weapon, you should check the basement of the shelter to see if there's anything good down there. Fairly random, sometimes you get a bottle of water and a backpack, other times you get nothing. If you get a bottle of anything, I strongly recommend emptying it, chopping up a sheet ('s'mash one of the windows, the 'a'ctivate your pocket knife) and crafting (&) a filter mask. Without it, Smoker zombies will reduce your torso to one sliver of health, they're SERIOUSLY dangerous in the current build.
Next step is to find a nice section of the town to start clearing. You want one that sticks out from the rest of the city a little. This helps keep you from getting completely surrounded by zombies. Zombies aren't to dangerous on their own if you know how to deal with them. The key thing to remember is they're pretty stupid. If there's a bush directly between you and them, rather than walking around the bush, they'll try to walk through it which slows them down significantly. Once they're entangled in the bush (or a table, chair, window, sapling, or any other terrain obstacle that slows movement), you have an opening to hit them two or three times before they can move again. (ab)Using this technique, you can kill most zombies in the early game with little to no risk.
From this point on, the game becomes very non-linear. Here are some survival tips:
-Zombie bites suck. You can treat them with a bottle of disinfectant, a first aid kit, or you can cauterize them by 'a'ctivating your pocket knife or a soldering iron. Cauterizing hurts though, 20 pain in an instant, and it may be changed in an upcoming build, so that really should be a last resort. You can also ward off bites with heavy armor, if your armor is thick enough that the zombie can't hurt you, you don't get bitten.
-Your top priority is to find a sewing kit. You can 'a'ctivate it to repair clothing (note that with low tailoring, you can very easily damage the clothing instead of repairs, so practice by repairing junk clothing or crafting lots of socks), or 'a'ctivate it on full quality clothing to fit (which reduces their encumbrance by 1) and reinforce them, which increases the damage they absorb. This also opens up most of the crafting (&) items under Armor, which is extremely useful. Note that you'll need rags, which you can get by 'a'ctivating your pocket knife to shred junk clothing items. If you need more thread, you can get it by 's'mashing a window. The 3 foot string can be disassembled (select the string in your inventory, then 'D'isassemble it) into 6 6 inch strings, which can be disassembled into 50 thread apiece. Each window you see is 300 thread just waiting for you to use it.
-On the topic of clothing, it's one of the most important items in the game. There are five important stats: storage, warmth, protection, coverage, and encumbrance:
Storage increases the volume of items you can carry while you're wearing the article of clothing - items like Cargo Pants and Backpacks have very high storage, while items like a t-shirt have none. Volume is one of the limiters on how much loot you can carry, so it's important to have a large amount (I usually aim for 120, ymmv).
Warmth is a measure of how warm the clothing is - if you don't have enough when it gets cold you get frostbite, if you have too much when it gets warm you start to suffer severe pain. The game will warn you over on your status bar if you have too much/not enough warmth. There's a very wide range of acceptable temperatures though, usually the worst thing that not enough/too much clothing will cause is some morale penalties
Protection is a measure of how much damage the article absorbs if it's hit. Some attacks do bash damage (like zombie fists). Other attacks do cutting damage (like turrets). You want both, in large amounts.
Coverage, as the name suggests, is how much that article covers. You'll notice on the item's detail page (in the 'i'nventory screen, hit the key you see next to the item you want to view in detail) there's a covers category. This tells you which body part(s) the article of clothing covers. Coverage is the odds that an attack aimed at that body part will be absorbed by that layer of clothing. Higher is better - a wristwatch only stops 1% of attacks, a fursuit blocks everything. Be aware that some items which provide a lot of protection (arm guards, for example) have very low coverage, so layering multiple high coverage/low protection items may provide better armor than a single high protection/low coverage item.
Encumbrance is the godstat. You want it to be as low as possible. Encumbrance has negative effects depending on how much you have and on which part is encumbered. For example, hand encumbrance makes it harder to reload weapons, torso encumbrance severely increases the amount of time it takes to attack in melee, etc. Ideally you want to wear clothing with no encumbrance, which isn't too hard to find if you know what to look for. In particular, most cotton, leather, plastic, and kevlar clothing can be fitted, which reduces encumbrance by 1. A fitted 1 encumbrance item has 0 encumbrance, which means you can wear several layers of them over the same body part without being slowed down. Layering is important to get the best combination of traits. A Trenchcoat and Backpack offer moderate protection and fairly good storage. A Trenchcoat, two Survivor Vests, and an Army Jacket offers better storage, better protection, and fairly good warmth for the same encumbrance. Layering is a crucial survival skill.
-The character menu (@) is extremely useful. It shows you your stats, encumbrance and warmth, speed and effects, skills, and traits/mutations.
-You can 'G'rab shopping carts or wheelbarrows and drag them with you. Items 'd'ropped into them are added to the cart's inventory, which can massively increase the quantity of goods you can carry.
-Lastly, there are two non-obvious menus that will save you tons of time. The 'V' menu lists all the items and monsters your character can see, which can save you a lot of time looting, and can be very useful for finding unsmashed/unbutchered corpses. The second is the advanced inventory management screen (/), which gives you a sorted list of items in the spaces around you. No more keeping ordered piles of stuff in your home, just scoop it up and dump it in a giant pile and let the computer sort it out later. Much time saved.
Author
Topic: Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - A roaming horde appears on the horizon! (Read 1879678 times)