Cataclysm: The Last Generation

I made a suggestion on Wormgirl's discord that the glass system has confusing and inconsistent naming. She first went on a weird condescending tangent about how "wired glass was invented in the 1950s blah blah it's worse than reinforced glass, windshields don't need wired glass". Then I posted a screenshot of how the reinforced windshield for vehicles requires wired glass, and she shrugged it off as her making a mistake and went off on another tangent talking about how she already removed so many redundant glass varieties from CDDA (cool, that's good). When i said "I just wanted the glass naming to be consistent" she went off on me saying "i don't care what you want". Then when I asked about why laminated glass is a worldgen only thing that can't be crafted. She muted me and deleted my suggestion post. This is EXACTLY the sort of behavior I hated from the CDDA devs, slightly worse even because at least they can't delete github conversations like Wormgirl deletes discord posts, otherwise I would post a screenshot of it as proof of her behavior. I regret paying for this on Steam.

Yea I played this one a little bit. It's fine. Ignore the negative reviews by salty CDDA devs, they are mad that their toxic attiude towards fans has now come back to bite them in the @$$. They were the monopoly on "decent realistic survival cataclysm branch", and now with the introduction of CTLG, they are not. This fork is rough, and I said it as someone who has 1000s hours in CDDA and CBN. But not in the sense that it's bad, it's just harder than the other two, and you won't feel like a demigod among men anytime soon, but when you do, it would feel like you earned it. It would feel like you have torn that $h!t from the mouth of defeat and the gate of hell. It would make you proud (after it made you sweat and shiver countless times before that. I swear I spent ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MINUTES in real life for a turn in which I stupidly or carelessly put my character in precarious positions. But when I managed to get out of those by any means possible, the high I've got was incomparable to anything I've experienced in my gaming life so far. Buy it, play it. Or do it the other way around because Worm Girl is a chad who gave the world this gem for free on github. But no matter which way you go about doing it, just ignore the blatant negative reviews. It's a shame that a game as magical as Cataclysm got so much drama behind it, but that's life I guess.

The fork this is based on is going down the toilet but Worm Girl has an actual vision for the game. As far as I am concerned this is the definitive version of Cataclysm.

[h1]Another Broken Cashgrab[/h1] If you are here, you probably already know the CDDA drama: mods — sorry, “devs” — slowly self-inserting themselves and their personal tastes into what used to be a fun game. Guns? Sci-fi tech? QoL? Player options? God forbid. We have a VISION here. The problem is that this “vision” is usually several miles behind what an average zombie apocalypse sandbox player actually finds fun. They are not designing around gameplay. They are designing around what feels correct to them, then acting like everyone else is too dumb to appreciate the genius. That rant is mostly about CDDA. Unfortunately, the same applies to TLG. Go read the GitHub. Half the README feels less like documentation and more like the maintainer doing a victory lap around their own importance: do not bother me, do not question me, do not expect too much, I am very serious and very busy. Then somewhere in there, allegedly, there is a game. Or at least the remains of one. Because what I see is not a proper fork. It is a political self-insert survival platform with the fun sanded off and “core gameplay loop” stapled over the wound. You liked custom settings? Mods? QoL? Weird toys? Build variety? Actual player freedom? Too bad. Those things keep getting sacrificed to the sacred altar of CORE DESIGN. And it is impressive, in the worst possible way, to loudly posture about game design while not even caring enough to avoid breaking Shift+Tab, the default Steam Overlay shortcut. “Just change your Steam settings.” Fantastic. Peak UX. User problem, obviously. At some point you have to ask: why pay for this, or support it at all, when the answer to 99% of questions is basically “code it yourself”? And the GitHub / Discord / forum moderation culture does not help. The dev tries very hard to present herself as the victim of bad dev culture elsewhere, but from the outside it looks like the same power trip with different branding: fragile moderation, aggressive tone, and a tiny personal kingdom where every mild question gets treated like an attack on the throne. I regret buying into the “poor indie dev fighting the bad CDDA devs” story. What it feels like I supported instead is another person using a game as infrastructure for their own little power-flex kingdom. That is the warning for potential buyers. As for the fork itself: Bland. Grindy. Anti-fun. A chore. It does not feel like a bold alternative. It feels like someone changed some numbers, removed a lot of the fun, increased friction, and called the leftovers “design.” You used to smash corpses, eat food, level skills, find strange tech, build ridiculous setups, drive around, experiment, and enjoy the sandbox? Well, now enjoy no food, no real tools, corpse-smashing turned into manual labor, no bionics, no cars, no crafting depth, no sci-fi, no custom settings, and barely any of the chaos that made the original entertaining. What is left? An ego. A message. A “vision.” If you came here because CDDA has been patching out fun and you hoped this would be the answer, it is not. Play your favorite old build. Play CDDA experimental. Play literally anything else before rewarding this kind of dev culture with your money.

Do NOT speak in the Discord, you WILL get banned. Wormgirl was being honestly pretty condescending to someone I saw that as ♥♥♥♥♥♥ and said 'Don't be rude : 3' And then got banned instantly. Really scummy person, seemingly unable to take the most mild shift in views. Overall the game is pretty decent though, with good pushes and active time, just don't let the creator trample over you.

(I have about 400 hours on a different version) This is a fantastic fork of Cataclysm , that focuses more on survival , with the idea being the world has slowly been getting worse until the event, the "Cataclysm"- resources are far more scarce, and food is a constant issue. You can play as a regular guy, who made it to a evac center , makes a new friend, and treks out to find a base and start his own camp- or you can play a mutated lizardman-thing who escaped some nasty creatures tower, and rolls around in nuclear waste to gain mutations (he has 7 intelligence- he can't help it)- or one of the many other types of mutants , maybe you want to be a cow? or hell why not a giant ass bear mutant There more death, more struggling, but the reward of surviving is great - the game is updated frequently, and feedback is taken in by the developer. She does a great job of developing this version, and if you wanted a harder , gritter world to play Cataclysm in, this is the version for you. I played it a few months back on a whim, and got hooked as this is now the main version I play now. SOMETHING GRIPS YOU BY THE BRAIN STEM. IT'S TIME! 🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎🦎

Thankyou for this fork Worm Girl.. this is exactly how i want to play the game after all the years of changes

Great version of Cataclysm that is actually fun to play. Most of the negative reviews either complain about personal issues with the developer or about the game not being the exact version of Cataclysm they think would be perfect. You can look up the changes and even try them out for free by getting the fork from GitHub; it’s not like the changes are hidden. You can easily decide whether you like them before buying the version on Steam. Buying this is a way to support the developer and get your game updates through Steam. If you don’t want that, just try the free version first.

Great iteration of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, that addresses many issues I had with C:DDA. Tons of excellent work with game balance (items. mutations, combat tweaks), enhancing survival aspects, new enemies and encounters, etc. Gameplay feels more cohesive, challenging and rewarding, I recomment trying it. The community and the dev are cozy and helpful people, so check out its discord as well. The game itself is free, so you can download it freely from the github links, but steam is more convenient due to frequent updates + it supports the dev.

Do I like this game? Yes. I'm giving it a thumbs up because of that- but I like the game despite itself. Now let me rant for a *bit* here. It has the worst UI and controls I've experienced since Dwarf Fortress and Nethack. That's bad. Like *real* bad. Better contextual menus, better mouse support, more hidden mechanic explanations, more *anything* to explain what all the things do and what you need to be doing to do all the things would be really *really* great- and not just pages of text tucked in an encyclopedia, just little contextual hints (that you can turn off after you know what you're doing!) would make all the difference. Centralize more menus so you can look up things about your character/items more easily... there are like 8 different menus all mapped to 12 different keys to look up 20 different bits of information instead of, you know, a single character or item menu with actual tabs- and no, not that one character menu that has fake "tabs" all on the same page that you have to play a separate minigame to navigate- that's also bad and *still* lacks character info. Make better groupings in menus for making selections for actions you want to do, add categories to the ? contextual keybinds menu. Nuke most of the default keybinds and keep keybinds for important things, for example instead of '&' it should be 'c' for crafting, c for close doors can instead just open/close doors as a toggle with the open door key (which also probably shouldn't be 'o' and probably could just be wrapped into the 'a'ctivate menu)... there are so many more things like this in the game that could just be toggled or pulled into other existing systems. Lots of nonsensical keybinds too, my v key is for insert items into containers, p for Bionics, [ for Mutations, $ for sleep? Okay, I'll admit that @ for a character stats page *is* a nice touch. Also, I get that you can rebind things, but come on- most people will use the defaults and that's their first experience of the game. Make inventory sorting easier. Consolidate the '/' and 'g' menus- there should only be one "get/move items" menu and it should have the functionality of both since / doesn't handle containers super well (heck, maybe this should just be rolled into inventory tabs for inv vs nearby). Have containers be the top level of all inventories and open into new bag menus/tabs showing contents- not just mixed in randomly in places. Have a single separate "here is what you have equipped" menu with better controls/indicators of what things are ACTUALLY doing for you- all in one place! The { menu (yep, that's the keybind!) for body parts is practically useless since it lacks so much info and you can't do anything there. Add an option to blacklist all categories in one go so I can more easily make containers that are "No, really, I just want *this* in there" It's also buggy, I've encountered several errors that you just type ignore to keep going to and when I started I had to mess with the graphics settings a lot just to get the game to stop flickering. But you know what? Despite *ALL* that my constantly mutating extra large cold blooded alligator razor girl with bladed bionic fingertips wearing a crafted pink faux fur coat, a quilted gambeson, combat boots, an army helmet, a leather tail sleeve, and a long wool scarf for muzzle warmth is tearing through zombies with kung fu style dragon tail sweeping attacks and clawing monsters from another world in twain... once victorious she can then pulp their corpses into fine mushy oblivion so they never come back. Which is pretty f'ing rad. Simultaneously the best and worst game I've played in a while.