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[Xvareon]

>> Original game post <<
This is a Let's Play of a poorly-known but extremely proficiently-made survival horror roguelike RPG, called Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. Most human life has been extinguished in major cities, zombies run rampant, and several interdimensional forces from Lovecraftian abominations to plant-like Triffids vie for control of Earth. I started doing this on this forum about 3 years ago, and I actually reposted with it recently, but realized I should probably make a new topic rather than keep necro'ing the old one. Bad form, that. You can find a link to the original post above. So, here goes!

New world, new character, No Hope. That's the mod conditions—massively reduced item spawns and 50% more enemies on average. Aside from given set pieces, finding things I need in towns and locations is gonna be much harder, and I must rely more on improvised tools and equipment. I'm doing a standard Survivor start for now, which means I start with basic clothes, a messenger bag, pocket knife, bottle of water, smartphone, and a matchbook. Not much, but it's enough to survive the first day or two.

Spoiler: Map (click to show/hide)

This is actually pretty good for a start—I can see the highway in two places, which means I can follow it to find certain structures for loot, or I can find abandoned vehicles and supplies along the way. It's also far enough from any major towns that I don't have to worry about huge hordes just yet. North of me is a motel—staying away from that. Those are thick with zeds. Northwest is a scrapyard—a boon of a set piece structure, as you'll see in a bit! But for now, I need to set up with some tools and a weapon, fast. Luckily, there is a Derelict Shed close to my start, which is a good find early on. Solid shelter, hidden from prying eyes, and tends to have a lot of decent wood.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I break down the already-damaged door by (S)mashing it with a rock. This gets me some 2"x4' planks and a few nails. I fashion a club for now, just in case I run into something, though I expect to get a better weapon soon. In the little corner there are a couple sheets of 4'x8' plywood; good if I'm actually building a house, or if I want to cut them up for smaller projects, but useless at this stage.

Spoiler: Scrapyard (click to show/hide)

After traveling northwest a bit, I happen upon the scrapyard on my map. This is a suspiciously well-fortified junkyard with steel walls and barbed wire all around it except the front entrance. And there's a survivor here, too—the scrapyard owner, who effectively acts as a shopkeeper. You can buy things from shopkeepers by trading for other things, which are assigned a given $ value. Scrappers only tend to sell raw steel spare parts, which are common enough, so I don't find him that useful to buy from. However, the man was nice enough to let me use the little 3x3 shack in the corner of the junkyard, which is already outfitted with a sleeping bag. This'll be a decent safe location to stay in for a while as I gather supplies and make more tools. Also, he gave me a quest to go find 25 Magnetrons (key component in microwave ovens). I dunno what I'll get for it, as he didn't say, but I assume it's gonna be extra inventory, a lead to a supply cache, or maybe him joining my party.

Also, can I just say... the sound of rain pouring outside goes amazing with the ambient music. They even modeled the sound of rain hitting the roof instead when you go indoors!

I spend midday taking apart a couple pieces of scrap furniture. Scrapyards have ovens, consoles, broken vending machines etc., all of which are good for parts. Sheet metal is used to make a Brazier for safe fires, and a Makeshift Pot for cooking and boiling water. I craft a Simple mace out of a window curtain dowel rod and some scrap metal, which I can improve later if I find or make a drill to fasten it more securely, turning it into a Trench mace. Maces are brutal 22 bash damage single-handers that effectively deal with most zombies.

Spoiler: Newspaper articles (click to show/hide)

While foraging for food from the nearby forests, I happened upon these newspaper articles. You can find things like this all over the place, and they paint a stark picture of what went on behind the scenes before the Cataclysm occurred. Great stuff for those who are interested in piecing the story together, because I don't think even the developers themselves truly know.

When you're foraging for food, the single best thing you can find are cattails. You only find these in swamps or along riverbanks, of course, and swamps are especially dangerous because they're spawning areas for giant insect monsters—any of which can be hostile and extremely dangerous to an early game character. Cattail rhizomes can be roasted into 280 kcal servings apiece, and when you consider that meat is 400 kcal, that's a pretty sweet deal. The second best thing is to luck out and find eggs from underbrush. Eggs are calorie-dense and can be boiled to greatly extend their shelf life.

I would argue that finding food is actually not that difficult—it's getting proper water containers and food prep equipment that's tougher. I was able to mold some plastic tupperware using my fire + some scrap plastic chunks from furniture & electronics in the scrapyard, which store 0.75L apiece, but it'd be much more convenient to have a proper tank or canteen. My best bet early on would be to make a waterskin out of leather, because making a wooden canteen is an exhausting process requiring sealant like wax or rosin, and I need chemical knowledge or luck for that.

[Xvareon]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I get through the night without incident. I've got enough access to food and water for a while, though I'm nowhere close to being winter-secure. My little borrowed shed is a great shelter for my minimal needs. For those of you who don't know, if you place a fireproof container of water on top of a fire, it will eventually all turn into clean water!

I wish I could say breakfast went better...

Spoiler: Food poisoning (click to show/hide)

...I accidentally ate some wild carrots that happened to be poisonous. Wild carrots have a chance to be either safe or dangerous, and you need a high enough Survival skill to tell the difference. I did not, so I ate poison carrots, and now my Strength is set to a pitiful 3, which is too weak to pry anything open with a crowbar, so no looting for a while. Poison damage also deals periodic damage to your Torso part. The best I could do was just wait it out, and eventually, it did subside. But the penalties in pain, damage, and stat loss are really nasty, so do NOT try to eat wild carrots, even roasted ones, unless you have a Survival of around 3.

Spoiler: Supply Drop (click to show/hide)

Once I recovered from poisoning, I set out to a point on my map noted "Supply Drop". These are really handy things because they contain several crates of military-grade gear and supplies that were destined for the National Guard forces, but fell short. These four crates between them had a ballistic vest, load-bearing vest, army winter pants, tactical gloves, an MRE and an IFAK (Individual First Aid Kit). The IFAK has bandages, but not antiseptic by default, so I've got to find some of that ASAP. Also, the army clothes are unfortunately not the right size for my character to wear. I would have to resize them with a Tailor's kit, which I do not have and cannot make yet. I can wear the ballistic vest and the load-bearing vest simultaneously without an encumbrance penalty from having more than one item on a given body slot, because the armor is Outer and the load-bearing vest is Strapped. The latter is really just a harness with space for MOLLE pockets. That one came with two chest ammo pouches for mags and a canteen pouch. The ballistic vest is a seriously good find at this stage because torso armor can be a lot harder to make than arm, leg or head armor. Still, this isn't a full ESAPI vest, so it only protects the upper torso, not my stomach. Coverage % determines if the 1d100 roll attacks make hits that piece or not.

Oh, and the crates also had a flashbang grenade and an incendiary grenade... neither of which I plan to use just yet. Those are to be saved for making escapes from the worst kind of hordes. Either of them can ruin me if I use them wrong, too. Being blinded SUCKS.

With my little messenger's bag and a sling, I have just enough storage capacity to bring a few key things with me when I raid somewhere, and I'm gonna need to do that soon because even though I'm reasonably safe, I lack access to even a proper claw hammer or a wrench. I'm not gonna get far with just things foraged from the woods. Now, there's a way I can turn this scrapyard into a metalworking factory by making my own refining and forging equipment, and then forge my own tools, but that's extremely time-consuming business. I may still do that, but to speed things along, I at least want to find some decent tools first. Luckily, while looking around, I happened upon some Light Industry— basically two garages with plenty of tools between them, and usually at least one heavy lift vehicle. So, with my trusty fire-hardened wooden spear in hand, I set out.

It... doesn't go quite as smoothly as I hoped. There were some zombies in garage #1, and one of them bit me, so I got infected. I know a way to fix this, but I've also got other problems, like... it started raining on the way, and my character got soaking wet, and was losing core body temperature and actually started freezing to death. So I wound up starting a !!fire!! in an office. I burned the whole office down, and probably a bunch of zombies with it that I saw come in to check out the noise.

Spoiler: Raiding (click to show/hide)

One of the zombies I stabbed to death had an electronics crafting recipe book on them. I looted it, skimmed it, then scanned the whole thing into my smartphone, which means all the book's crafting recipes are now part of the phone, so I don't actually need to keep the book around! I toss it right after.

Spoiler: Books (click to show/hide)

I loot a Cordless impact wrench, a drift, and a swage and die set from the garage. The first is a perfect bolt turning tool, the others are for metalworking, which, given where I'm headed, will be quite a time saver for me. I don't linger long, though, because I have a bite wound to deal with. I head to the swamps along the riverbank to the north, and harvest some Cattails. The stalks can be cut up (you need Cutting 2) to make Cattail Jelly (you need a liquid container), which is a serviceable antiseptic. It takes me a couple tries to make it work because it's not as good as alcohol or peroxide, but I successfully treat the bite. Saved!

Spoiler: Cattail jelly (click to show/hide)

[EuchreJack]

Awesome!

[King Zultan]

Good stuff!

Sense we abandoned the last thread I'll just repost the thing I said in the last thread sense I made that post without reading the bit about the new thread.

Also I'll mention that your character's smell shouldn't be as big an issue early game these days as a lot of early game human based zombies had the ability to smell reduced quite a bit, dog based zombies are unchanged though.

[Xvareon]

Ah, I didn't know that about the zombie smell! I already knew that it tends not to be an issue unless you stick around one place for too long or you use the same path too many times, though.

-----

I want to talk "midgame tools" for a bit. Early game tools for cooking, etc. tend to be a sheet metal pot, and some plastic or wooden containers for basic water storage. You can also luck out and hunt some animals, which gets you both stomachs you can turn into waterskins, and fat that can become tallow or cooking oil. In order to make actually decent cookware and containers, I need to find clay. So, I carve a digging stick.

Now, I could hope to luck out on lumps of clay by just digging around in random dirt. This has a chance to give you clay, but not a good one, in my opinion, since if you're not skilled you can end up wasting clay in the crafting process, same with most other recipes. To really expedite the process, I need to find naturally-occurring concentrations. Clay spots can spawn at random in fields, but riverbanks always have clay along them. Always. And there happens to be one on my map!

Gathering clay is a labor-intensive process, especially if I'm using a non-ideal tool like the digging stick which only has Digging quality 1. A proper shovel would have 3. I can easily exhaust myself if I'm not careful, so I don't plan on pushing it too far, because I don't want to risk running into enemies and not being able to fight them off. Also, clay deposits will become exhausted after several rounds of using the "Extract clay" construction project on them.

Spoiler: Clay (click to show/hide)

Next up after clay is charcoal. This isn't as easy as just assigning a dwarf to Wood Burner duty; no, I need to actually make a charcoal kiln out of rocks, then stock it with about 125L of wood material. If I were just gathering sticks one by one from the woods for this, this would take me forever, but luckily I salvaged some steel wire from the light industry before, so I can make Bundles. These are tied-together numbers of items, i.e. 100 cotton patches, 5 long sticks or 10 pipes tied together by cordage, rope or wire, faciliating easier transport. I go out to gather sticks, tie them together, then disassemble the bundle back at base to feed the kiln. 6 hours later, I'll have charcoal.

Spoiler: Charcoal (click to show/hide)

And why is coal important? Three reasons—for cooking; metalworking; and filter cartridges for masks/water purifiers. With a loaded Smoking rack like I've set up just northwest of my character sprite there, it substitutes for a fire in most crafting recipes! I can also smoke meat and vegetables to preserve them long-term—meat tends to spoil in a day, but lasts three weeks if smoked, and pretty much forever if dehydrated into protein flakes. Smoking racks can smoke up to 40 chunks of meat at a time. They're utterly essential for hunting so as not to waste food.

Speaking of hunting, I'm gonna want to start doing that much sooner than later. And yes, hunting, not fishing, because the critical resource I'm trying to get is fat. To put this in perspective, boiled fiddleheads give only 18 calories. Sauteed fiddleheads? 60-334, depending on which kind of fat or butter you use. My high metabolism character needs calorie-dense food. Fried burdocks, dandelions, eggs and more give so much more energy than their base variety. You can eat foods that make you feel full (their 'satiety' level), but fullness doesn't indicate that you've eaten enough calories.

I also lucked out and found a couple sets of ammo for sci-fi caseless firearms in another supply crate. I lack the gun to shoot them with, but that has a chance to spawn in these crates, too. If I luck out on more supply crates, maybe I'll find one.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Eventually, I may want to move into the Light Industry as it's got a frickload of furniture I can disassemble for raw materials, thick brick walls, metal garage doors that only open with the winch, and fireproof floors. I went back just to check it out and see what other loot was there, and found the !!fire!! I set is still burning, because such things are frozen in state after they leave the "reality bubble" around my character.

I also found some SD memory cards while I was there. These can contain very useful things such as crafting recipes, maps, and software that aids in other tasks (like hacking), but I need a laptop or at least an E-ink tablet to make any use of them. They're still worth keeping around, though. You never know what you might find on cards!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Xvareon]

With my home base situation secure, I take my trusty spear and go looting again, this time to check out a Pump station along the southern highway. Contrary to what I expected, this is not a gas station, but a municipal water treatment plant with generators and heavy gauge pipework. This is a good spot to find a lot of quality tools, including Duct tape, vital for crafting; and some Tin snips, which can cut wire fences, and also padlocks off doors. Sweet! Through manholes on site I pried up with my makeshift crowbar, I found some more stuff, plus locked bars with some Giant slugs behind them that leave some nasty acid around—I don't want to tangle with that just yet. I don't even have a proper flashlight to see down there, just my mobile phone.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I also found a Cordless drill, which is the Drilling quality item I've been looking for, allowing me to make my Trench mace and a plethora of other items! The mace is a pretty good weapon because it's a convenient one-hander that's reasonably fast, hits quite hard, and can "Sweep" enemies, knocking them down and forcing them to waste turns getting back up.

Spoiler: Trench mace (click to show/hide)

And getting that is a good thing, because I'm doing some night raiding in the town of "Peacham" tonight. And this is where I get to let you guys know about a couple nasty "special" zombie types I never covered in the last games.

Zapper: Not to be confused with its big brother, the Shocker, which can shoot lightning, Zappers are constantly arcing current through their bodies that they release when they hit you, or you hit them with something conductive (like a metal weapon). Ranged attacks are preferred with them, or just use a wooden weapon and wear non-conductive armor so it can't shock you. Electric attacks hurt like a bleep, and pain slows you down dramatically in this game, so be careful. Fortunately, Zapper zombies naturally light up themselves and the tile they occupy due to their constant electricity, so you can see them from pretty much any distance.
Technician: Basically zombies who worked on power lines and infrastructure in life. They have the nasty ability to magnetize any metal object you're holding in your hands and try to pull it away from you at a distance, the success chance of which depends on your "Grip strength" score, governed chiefly by your Strength stat but also your hand encumbrance. Otherwise, they tend not to be too hard to kill 'cause they just wear jumpsuits and work clothes, although I've noticed some technicians can be dissected for bionic modules & parts, suggesting they made enough to qualify for CBMs. I'm not sure if they kept harvesting zombies for intact CBMs in this game or not, though. I know it was there when I first started playing. It's meaningless to me right now, though, 'cause I need a tool with Fine cutting quality, like a scalpel, or at least an X-acto knife to do dissections.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In town, I stumble on a set of coincidences so hilarious it practically writes itself as a story:  In the basement of one house, someone had set up a long, 25ft wide room filled with planters... full of cannabis. Weed. Jungle fungus. -_-  Oh, and a couple heavy canvas bags full of commercial-grade fertilizer. ...And a full temperature control system. They made weed paradise down here. I found the apparent owner, now a crawling zombie with no functioning legs, and smacked them dead. Two giant cellar spiders, aka. granddaddy long-legs, scurried away from me as I went through the room and into a small office space on the other side. Inside, I found nine 00 shotgun shells and a book on social graces for dummies or something like that.

But it gets even better.

When I went back upstairs, I found a zombie cop. Still decked out in his gear. I put him down by running back to the stairs, dragging benches in front of me to make obstacles, then smacking him up with my mace. But... wow. I can only assume that the cop had come to sniff out the town's weed supplier, got as far as inside the house, then the cataclysm happened and everyone became zombies. There's a STORY here, man. If these walls could talk.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

(Oh, and since I mentioned dissections earlier, there's one more thing I wanted to mention. Dissecting enemies of pretty much any type gets you insights into their biology/makeup, helping you find weak points. This means that you can more easily land critical hits on enemies by striking vital points, or go through enemies' armor because you've done a thorough analysis and know the chinks in it. Dissections are also neat because they give you flavor text on every enemy you dissect.)

[King Zultan]

On the subject of Technician zombies I believe that their magnetic pull was removed awhile back along with them dropping CBMs, and you need to check their corpses as some times they drop a special suit that makes you resistant to electric attacks.

[Xvareon]

On the subject of Technician zombies I believe that their magnetic pull was removed awhile back along with them dropping CBMs, and you need to check their corpses as some times they drop a special suit that makes you resistant to electric attacks.

Not in the version I'm playing, d6ec466 (Gaiman). The Technician I encountered tried multiple times last session to pull my Trench mace away, but failed. You're probably right about the suits, though, as Technicians were basically electricians in life, as you see them all the time at power substations.

[Xvareon]

~ Ambience ~

So, last time we left off, we raided town for some more tools and supplies. I also spent some quality time at base taking apart some of the furniture in my scrapper friend's shop area, because while NPCs hate when you steal their stuff or interact with their vehicles, they aren't programmed to care if you deconstruct furniture and loot the parts. This got me a couple dozen wood planks and several nails. I even looted his fridge, which I can't power yet, but the insulated construction will still mildly slow down food spoilage.

Spoiler: Base (click to show/hide)

I also managed to craft one of the best midgame weapons in Cataclysm, and that is the Knife spear. This is the blade of a knife bolted onto a spear shaft—a properly-sanded and oiled shaft, mind you, as no simple stick will do. I had to dig around for sand to make sandleather (sub for sandpaper), and I even butchered a pair of zombies to get some tainted fat, which I turned into tainted tallow. That can be used as oil treatment for certain weapons such as a bo staff or a bokken... or a proper spear shaft for my new weapon. Behold its pointy glory!

(For reference, btw, normal walking speed for a human is 100 moves per 1 tile on normal ground. "Base moves per attack" is how quickly you can strike with a weapon. The knife spear has 111 BMPA, so I can stirke in a little over the time it takes someone to move 5 feet, and spears can hit from 10 feet away. Zombies tend to be slower than healthy humans, too, so if I spend my time Running for the most part and luring enemies over difficult terrain like bushes or wire fences, a spear like this can be ridiculously strong.)

Spoiler: Knife spear (click to show/hide)

Now, some of you may be wondering if this is all building up to something. Literally. After all, what do I need all that wood for from the deconstructing? Didn't I say I was moving out of here at some point? Well, yes. You see, I'm not building something static. Not this time. I needed the planks and nails, together with some seatbe—COUGH, cough... ROPES I scavenged from wrecked cars, to assemble frames. What kind of frames? Vehicle frames. I built my own travois out of wood frames and a homemade cart wheel! I can pull or push this along at my normal walking speed without too much trouble, as it's basically a wheelbarrow. Yep, Cataclysm lets you build vehicles from scratch, and that includes single-tile things like this. You do need some mechanics skill to assemble the wheel mount, but once you're done, you're off to the races! Shopping carts and wheelbarrows like this make looting and gathering SO much easier, as you won't need a heavy backpack that dramatically slows down your fighting ability and requires that you spend the precious few seconds taking it off that you could have spent running and not getting your face chewed off by a zombie. The only real issue is that carts' movement efficiency tends to slow down dramatically offroad, though you can mitigate this with a lighter vehicle or an actual offroad wheel, like a dirtbike wheel.

Spoiler: Wheelbarrow (click to show/hide)

[King Zultan]

On the subject of Technician zombies I believe that their magnetic pull was removed awhile back along with them dropping CBMs, and you need to check their corpses as some times they drop a special suit that makes you resistant to electric attacks.

Not in the version I'm playing, d6ec466 (Gaiman). The Technician I encountered tried multiple times last session to pull my Trench mace away, but failed. You're probably right about the suits, though, as Technicians were basically electricians in life, as you see them all the time at power substations.

I just realized I had forgotten you were using the No Hope mod which let Technicians keep ability after it was removed from vanilla, so none of what I said there matters in this play through except the part about the electricity resistant suits.

Reminds me that I really should try that mod out as I've never played around with it.

[Xvareon]

Ooo, I wasn't aware it did more than stated! I did No Hope with 50% item spawns and 150% enemy spawns above normal. Last time I did No Hope, which was months ago, it caused all items to be excruciatingly difficult to find, and most houses and businesses were trashed, and NPC raider humans with guns were everywhere. This time, items don't seem to be as crazy hard to get, although most vehicles are still trashed and fuel is still rare. If enemies get abilities outside vanilla, too, then that's gonna make this run pretty interesting... hehe.

In any case, Technicians now can't just no-sell your metal weapons and guns without a fight. The stronger your character is, the higher their grip strength, and thus the better they can keep hold of items in hand. I believe hand encumbrance also plays a role in this. Before, grip strength was not a thing, and so whenever you fought Technicians you wanted to have wooden weapons on hand. I've personally found a sling with rocks quite useful, too.

[Xvareon]

My Health score is high from leading a healthy lifestyle! This means my wounds heal faster, plus I recover from stamina quicker than most. Which is good, 'cause I'm gonna be getting bolder on my raids today.

Or tonight, rather. Some of you might notice that every raid for supplies I've done has been at night. Why? Because night screws over most zombies' vision just as much as it does yours, but my character has the Night Vision perk, which increases my sight range just a bit more in the dark, and helps get me that crucial tile or two over enemies before they see me. I still make noise when moving, though, so I have to be cautious. Still, it's so much easier to evade enemies when it's dark. It's also easier to not get shot by awkwardly-placed turrets.

Wait, what?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

We have some new enemies to deal with, looks like. I went a different direction this time, and stumbled upon a military roadblock -- two autonomous riot control turrets along with a searchlight. The turrets only use low-caliber pistol rounds, but this is still enough to shred through me if I get close. Fortunately, at night, the turrets rely completely on the searchlight to find targets, and so all I have to do is stay out of its watchful beam. The real turrets, the ones that can put a hole clean through me and send me into hypovolemic shock, are in here.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is a Trans-Coast Logistics building—basically an Amazon warehouse, but on a smaller scale, and equipped with 5.56mm TALON-derived gun platforms, as well as state-of-the-art security systems. TCL is a bit of a weird thing in the lore of this game. I think that as the Cataclysm got closer, they acted as specimen & artifact transportation for government projects. Why else would they have a concrete-walled compound guarded by killbots? Still, while I'm curious what kind of exquisite goodies might be had from there, there's no WAY I'm getting in without a keycard for the doors, a jackhammer for the walls, or a blowtorch for the freight shipping hatch... or maybe I could somehow get up to the roof. But all of that is for another day. The only reason I'd come back here in the short term is to salvage one of the vehicles in the parking lot—there's an electric car (like a Tesla) there that looks pretty good, though it's missing storage batteries.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

After leaving TCL, I headed up the road north, and found the remains of a military cargo truck. Using my trusty knife spear and a flashlight, I lured zombies close, making them clamber over the steel wreckage at great movement cost, while I impaled them effortlessly and looted their bodies. I got into the first house of a large town they were guarding, and found a Kel-Tec KSG bullpup shotgun that can hold those 00 shells I found earlier! It was then that I turned back, though, because I realized I made a stupid mistake—the travois I made has only one cart wheel, which means it doesn't actually work. It needs TWO wheels to work that way. I only realized this after the fact, of course. So I left the town behind for now, dragged it back to base, and set about for a bit longer to fix things up more.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

On the way, I killed some local wildlife—apparently some feral dogs were having it out with some opossums in the field. That scuffle got me a good bit of meat for smoking, and also some hides for leather! That's a good thing, because I can turn just a single tanned hide (a 12x24" piece of leather) into a waterskin. This will remove the need to carry a water bottle with me, and let me carry up to 3 liters everywhere I go.

[King Zultan]

Ooo, I wasn't aware it did more than stated!

I believe it maintains a lot of the sci-fi content that used to be in the game such as CBMs being in labs and other things I'm probably forgetting.

It was then that I turned back, though, because I realized I made a stupid mistake—the travois I made has only one cart wheel, which means it doesn't actually work. It needs TWO wheels to work that way. I only realized this after the fact, of course. So I left the town behind for now, dragged it back to base, and set about for a bit longer to fix things up more.

I was thinking that was a possibility when you first showed it off but didn't say anything as I wasn't sure if I was remembering right. But if you have a bicycle wheel you can install it on there as an unicycle wheel and it will work as you originally intended, not really sure why there are so few wheels that work alone.

[Xvareon]

Didn't know that about the bicycle wheel. Thanks! I knew that casters, i.e. the 4" set of wheels on a shopping cart or office chair, can be used to make a one-tile cart vehicle. Eventually, I plan to turn this cart into a bicycle I can ride around, or preferably a motorbike, but all that's gotta wait until I find some welding gas for an acetylene torch.

Another neat thing I like about carts -- you can bind a single-tile Zone to them for storage, and then when you draw loot zones around buildings, you can grab everything from the area and put it in that storage space! Makes looting easier, although such a zone wouldn't discriminate on which items not to grab, so you still have to filter it.

[King Zultan]

The unicycle wheel should be able to mount onto the wooden mount you have because it worked in my test, besides that and the casters I think there are only two other types of wheels that work on single tile vehicles one being the wheelbarrow wheel and the small set of wheels.

I will say that you should be able to make a bicycle without any kind of welding by just using wooden frames, because I was able to in one play through I did awhile back.

Zones are one of the new features I know nothing about as they were added way after I started playing, how would you even start trying to figure them out as I don't know which key gets into the menu for them.