Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
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Struggle to survive in a harsh, persistent, procedurally generated world. Scavenge the remnants of a dead civilization for food, equipment, or, if you are lucky, a vehicle with a full tank of gas to get you the hell out of Dodge. Fight to defeat or escape from a wide variety of powerful monstrosities, from zombies to giant insects to killer robots and things far stranger and deadlier, and against the others like yourself, that want what you have…
—Cataclysm's website blurb
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Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is a turn-based, community-developed survival horror roguelike game that is free to play. It is a fork of the original Cataclysm created in 2013 shortly after the original game ceased devleopment, and has a very similar focus on the simulation aspects of role-playing games. A Kickstarter to fund the payment of a full-time developer for 3.5 months waas successful, and it was named one of "The 50 Best Free Games on PC" by Rock, Paper, Shotgun in 2016.
Worlds can be shared between multiple player-created characters, which can be placed into a wide variety of opening scenarios and customized or generated from presets to your liking. These worlds are procedurally generated, but persist between games, and it is not uncommon to encounter the dead bodies of your previous characters and other survivors. Cities, towns, rivers, forests, bridges and other landmarks all abound, each with the common establishments expected of those areas - and, in the cases of cities, the zombified remnants of civilization lying in wait. There are also highly exotic locations such as labs, military bases, and missile silos hidden away in remote areas; high-depth crafting, construction and farming systems; and a plethora of creatures living and undead - some fantastic, some otherwise, almost all of them primed to ruin your day in some fashion. While ASCII-based by default, graphical tilesets are readily available, and 3D environments via z-levels have long been integrated into the game.
The game can be downloaded directly from their website, with a list of stable and experimental releases here - the game has a dedicated community that takes part in the constantly-ongoing development process. Cataclysm has its own Reddit (linked here), on-site forums at discourse.cataclysmdda.org, and finally a channel on IRC, #CataclysmDDA, that can be visited at Libera.Chat. The game's code can be viewed on and downloaded from their GitHub repo here under the CC BY-SA Creative Commons license.
- Abandoned Laboratory
- Action Survivor: The player characters, as with the previous game.
- After the End
- Everything Trying to Kill You: Cataclysm: DDA plays this roguelike standard to its logical conclusion.
- Zombie Apocalypse: Much like the original Cataclysm.
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