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[areyoua]

Cataclysm is a wonderful zombie-survival roguelike made by Whale, but there is no Let's play of it even though there are almost 200 pages in its thread, which is http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=87501.0, so here I go.

It has been an awful few days for Thomas Crowder. First, he discovers that he has lost his job as a messenger in the city, then he finally gets thrown out of his apartment for not paying his rent, and then almost the entire world is eaten alive by marauding zombies. He's got simply incredibly bad luck, or so it seems. Not many people survived the initial outbreak, and even less managed to not have their brains "reappropriated" as zombie-chowder, but he did. Fleeing the metropolis in a stolen car, he found a town just as the gas ran out and broke into a home to find some supplies to carry him through the next few days. If there will be a next few days...

Initial Stats

As a messenger, Tom had to learn how to traverse a city with the speed of a "cheetah on crack", as his boss told you, so he developed a quickness unrivaled by any in the business. Additionally, he was used to carrying large quantities of stuff on his back giving him a above-average strength. He had taken the job as a messenger after graduating college with a degree in business, but not getting a job even though he had graduated near the top of his class with his intellect. He ascribed it to bad luck and the sight of him sucking on his inhaler for his asthma during the interview, but he always suspected that the real reason was that he regularly tripped on unavoidable and invisible obstacles others would call chairs due to his unperceptive nature and pretty average dexterity. This combination of a low-paying job and expensive college tuition led to his being unable to sleep, but his insomnia in turn led him to read books by the millions, so he was was quite the fast reader through the sights of his trusty eyeglasses for nearsightedness.

Starting Conditions

? - Books
# - Bed
[ - different articles of clothing
= -the one on the left is a battery and the one on the bottom-right is ammunition for a BB gun
. - floor
+ - Doors
, - small items, in this case a sewing kit
> - stairs down
the lines are walls
" - windows
anything with a backpack represents a stack of items, but you can only see one of the stack by using the look key

Thomas found himself in the bedroom of some victim of the apocalypse and thought about what he was to do. His car was broken down, so that was not an option, but he did see a backpack to use. He decided that he could either:
A. Explore the house for any useful tools
B. Leave the house and look outside for something helpful
C. Some other decision that suddenly came to him in an epiphany from the community what gods there are left in the apocalypse

[Frumple]

Loot house. Get biggest hammer equivalent. Go smash zombies until you die

Die or find a lab, that is. If the latter, load up on purifiers and make stats better. Then go hunting for dead scientists and getcher cyborg on. I wouldn't bother with mutagens, really. Robust genetics hasn't helped me out much in th'past

[The Merchant Of Menace]

Beat down a door or that dresser and grab a 2x4.
Then, grab any crafting tools and skillbooks

[GlyphGryph]

Check out that basement! It's probably chock full of goodies! Maybe the guy who lived here was some sort of survivalist fella!

[areyoua]

Right then, here we go, first update.

Looting the house


Thomas first grabbed the backpack and put it on, giving him to ability to carry much more than he could with just his hands, he then moved around the room picking up the books, hoping that some of them would be useful, but to his disgust, all he saw was not one but two copies of "Self-Esteem for Dummies," a "How to succeed in Business," and a "Under the Hood," so the owner of the house must have been a mechanic with his own garage and serious self-esteem problems. He also ignored the the three pairs of sneakers in the room, and the pair of jeans in the dresser which implied that this mechanic was obsessed with shoes and went around bare-chested. He opened the door to the south and saw a hallway, to the east was what he thought was the kitchen, but there was nothing in the fridge, and only a plastic bottle with bleach, a plastic bottle, and a butter knife lying on the ground. To the west, he saw what amounted to an empty room with clothes just laying around. Specifically, he saw a rain coat and some leather gloves, but thought that they weren't important enough to merit getting into his backpack. Taken all together, the man living here before Tom must have been in some serious financial trouble, which makes sense when you saw his basement.



Solid rock. Really. So instead of putting perhaps drywall around the basement, this man had simply told the builders to dig a rectangular area out of the earth under his house, and left it that way. Perhaps even scarier though was the complete lack of light in the basement, but Tom screamed like a little girl was brave and made his way due north hoping to find some stuff, and he did. North of the stairs were a few rows of shelves from which Tom grabbed a hammer, a baseball bat (of which there were two), and nothing more. It seemed like this mechanic loved playing baseball, but without a ball. Tom was then dejectedly made his way up the stairs with his new possessions after an apparently fruitless search for some goodies with a very poor opinion of the mechanic when he saw a map of the surrounding area just hanging from the wall of the basement. It was too dark to see inside the basement, so he took it upstairs and unfurled it to see the following



0(or is it an O?) - parking lots
. - fields
lines- roads
yellow crosses - intersections with manholes
H - Highways
F - green are forest blue are swamps
v, <, >, ^ (various colors) - buildings of various types, I won't list them here as there are simply too many, but it seems that the only people here are ones that know what they're doing.
Also, there's more to the map, but nothing terribly interesting, which is interesting in and of itself.

What to do next? Decisions, Decisions.

A. Loot stores for supplies
B. Flee the city for the forest
C. Epiphany time

[The Merchant Of Menace]

Is the light blue < to the left a sporting goods store or a hardware store?
Either way, head there.

E: It might be a clothing store too.. Ah well. My suggestion is to head there anyway.

[areyoua]

That's a gas station, also, how did you read so fast?

[The Merchant Of Menace]

I'd considered that, but any more in my post and I may as well have listed every building type

Head there anyway, because beef jerky and hopefully water.

[areyoua]

Well, things are going to be interesting, not now, but later.

The Gas Station


Tom had a strange craving for beef jerky for reasons even he couldn't explain, so he decided all of a sudden to sprint the gas station to the east of the starting house in hopes of spoils of war. Entering the gas station, he glanced around and was immediately disappointed by the lack of cow, but this was rapidly overcome when he saw "CHOCOLATE!" He saw only one "plastic wrapper of chocolate bar" as the apparently grammatically illiterate company had printed on the bar, but upon searching the whole store found one more chocolate bar and a plastic bottle of water. He also opened the doors the the northeast and saw one bathroom and one storage room, and he wondered where the men's bathroom was as the bathroom had no urinal. Then...



He had a distinct feeling of impending doom, but miraculously managed to keep his head and looted some aspirin and a mp3 player from behind the counter, the signs of a old gas station worker who loved listening to music. How bizarre. Anyway, he left from the front door of the gas station and looked around, hoping to have some inspiration of where to go next.



N - places I have put a note saying "Searched" the one with a blue background is where Tom is now.



Where to go now?

A. The grocery store to the SE
B. The gun store to the NE
C. Epiphany time!

[The Merchant Of Menace]

Liquor
Go west, taking a stop in the library on the way

[Stworca]

Liquor

Aye. What's the point of living, if you deny yourself the pleasures? 

[The Merchant Of Menace]

Plus there's the more practical uses

[Stworca]

Are you implying that one can make Molotov cocktails in this game?

[The Merchant Of Menace]

Perhaps, perhaps.

[areyoua]

Well, that's a subway station not a library, and again you manage to get out a reply almost immediately, you sir have 20 intelligence and fast reader. (and I've played too much cataclysm)