My first time back playing Cataclysm... Walked into a house and jumped down a flight of stairs, guess where I ended up? A giant ass lava pit. O.O
So uh... Any tips for my next character? 
Given how long this thread is and how long ago I posted this, I'll go ahead and re-post and elaborate on my earlier guide.
Let's start with character creation. I usually focus more on stats than skills. Strength gives you a bonus to damage, which is always nice, and massively boosts your carrying capacity and health which is important. My current starting loadout is 12 str, 8 dex, 10 int, 11 per. I take a full compliment of negative traits for the extra 12 points. The only trait I always take is Fast Healer, since it basically gives you a full health bar overnight which is extremely useful. I often take Robust Genetics and Fast Reader as well. This leaves about 4 points for skills and a profession.
With the current build, Tailor is my new favorite profession. Spend another point to start with 2 additional tailoring skill (for 3 total) and you can craft (hotkey: '&') a full set of a backpack, cargo pants, trenchcoat, and reinforce it all. To get the required thread and rags, smash the windows (hotkey: 's') for two sheets (which you can cut up with the scissors (select them in the inventory (hotkey:'i') and activate them (hotkey: 'a') for 40 rags total) and disassemble the 3 foot strings (select in the inventory and disassemble them (hotkey:'D')) into 6 inch strings, which you can further disassemble into 50 thread apiece, for the materials to craft a full set of reinforced clothing. Don't forget to load the thread into your sewing kit (select in inventory and choose reload (hotkey: 'r')). You can repair and reinforce the clothing (reinforced clothing is just clothing that's been repaired past full durability) by activating the sewing kit (hotkey:'a') and selecting an item of clothing that is below full durability and that you have enough scrap pieces (typically rags or leather chunks) to repair. Now you're ready to tackle the town.
Before you head out, be sure to 's'mash one of the lockers (look around with 'x', there should be a bank of lockers against the north wall) and grab a pipe. The pipe does decent damage, and has a +3 hit bonus which makes it much easier to hit the zombies. Now you're ready. Find an isolated edge of the town to start looting. You want to search for a location that's mostly houses, they'll have plenty of food, a mix of medicines, and some basic tools and supplies you'll need to craft better gear. When you get to the town, you want to lure zombies into things like chairs, bushes, windows, tables, and other obstructions that slow them down. While they're struggling to get through a bush, you can hit them one or two times, then back off and find another terrain obstacle to lure them into. Repeat until they're dead. Contrary to what you might think, you want to clear a section of town of zombies before you start looting too much. Zombies move about as fast as you do, these are runners not shufflers, so you want to ensure that you won't have a zombie come through a window while rummaging through the fridge and raiding the medicine cabinets.
The items you want to focus on finding certain items during the first few days fall into three categories: food, water, medicine. Exactly what you'd expect. Particularly important are the bottles of disinfectant, which you need to treat zombie bites (these aren't disease zombies per-se, but the human mouth is
filthy and it only gets worse when your immune system turns off). Liquor makes you stronger and happier, but it doesn't provide much hydration (hard liquor actually dehydrates you) so don't make the mistake of thinking you're good on water because you found a bottle of wine.
I'll try to find an earlier tutorial post of mine that goes over things like volume, weight, and encumbrance. Give me a minute.
Edit: Found it
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.
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Topic: Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - A roaming horde appears on the horizon! (Read 1894142 times)