Cataclysm: Cold and Dark

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Having recently noticed the complete lack of games that have a nuclear winter as their setting, I thought that Cataclysm could provide a nice framework to actually make the first survival game in this setting. I have listed some of what I think should be main aspects of the mod/scenario to get some feedback and remember them so that i can start working when I have time.

-Temperature dynamically affects monsters. Under extreme cold, zombies and other creatures may freeze, resulting either in a frozen animal or a frozen dead body walking toward you. A frozen monster is slower, brittle and weak, the real danger comes not from fighting them, but from the temperature that caused them.

-Freezing rivers/lakes/ocean. Large bodies of water should freeze if the temperature gets low enough.

-Extreme weather affects the player. Things like blizzards and extreme storms should reduce perception and slow the player. This shouldn’t affect zombies at all, unless temperatures are low enough for them to get frozen, in which case you better start searching for shelter unless yo want to die from hypothermia.

-Fallout. Possibly in the form of irradiated snow, this would replace acid rain and will irradiate you and the ground if you get covered by it, the environment radiation caused by it should last some days

-More complex underground. As of now, the underground of cities is a rather bland place, sewer and subway system should be expanded and overhauled to provide with places to call home/explore as the above ground freezes over. There should be the possibility for NPCs to form Metro 2033 style settlements underground.

-More common underground wildlife.

-Destroyed and fortified versions of the existing buildings. Assuming that at least 3 months passed for the nuclear winter to set in completely, you should find more extensively looted and destroyed buildings as well as shelters with dead/hostile NPCs inside them. In general, food and water should be scarce in the aboveground forcing you to resort to hunting inside the sewers for sustenance. Builidngs like Public Works, Evac Shelters and Waste treatment Plants should have high chances of being modified into shelters.

-Ability to spawn underground. or in small shelters (Already coming).

-More widespread Radiation. After all a nuclear war had to happen for you to end in this situation

-Eternal Dark Winter.

2

I am loving your thoughts!! I’m going to be very interested in a mode/mod like this if you or anybody else ever get around to trying to muck around with the files and code to make something like this.

3

I’ve never survived till winter, so I have no idea what the cold is like. Don’t spoil it for me. Anyway, this sounds great! Maybe it’ll be an alt mode.

4

I’m very interested in your ideal. If you need any help, I offer my coding services to you.

5

Very interesting ideas.
There wasn’t a nuclear war in the game , but i guess some places on the world have similar winters.
So it might also be interesting to be able to start in different places on the world like tropical places where it is extremely hot , colder places where it obviously is extremely cold , dry deserts , wet islands , international space station (please add this as an easter egg to start on the 2030 ISS).

6

Nuclear weapons were used to (attempt to) close the portals. Results=Mixed.

Extreme weather currently does affect vision range, and I believe it affects critter-vision as well. I kinda like it that way: zeds shouldn’t be able to see any better than you.

Shoes was specifically asked not to have temperature affect critters. Can dig up xyr post if you like. I agree that, at minimum, stuff that doesn’t show up on IR ought to be a LOT less prevalent in Winter. (One place they get it right: Swamps don’t spawn critters in the Winter.)

Freezing and snow-effects would be nifty; they don’t currently exist IIRC.

7

Care to elaborate? Also I’ kind newb here, who is Shoes?

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The only games I can think of where winter is a big problem are Unreal World, where it is the main adversary for the early game (you basically spend all the time before winter putting together enough warm clothes, preserved meat and fish [and stolen crops from villages :wink: ] to survive). Building a log cabin with a fireplace is a huge deal because you have a safe place to nurse your frostbite back to normal (a process that takes weeks) as well as smoke cuts of meat.

The other game is Don’t Starve, where in the winter if you are not standing near a fire, your health will quickly drop. Warm clothes give you more time, as does your character’s beard. The enemies are harder, food is harder to come by (as your farms stop working and the big meaty animals go hibernate), and finally, the nights are longer.

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Care to elaborate? Also I’ kind newb here, who is Shoes?[/quote]

Shoes is the chap who made temperature actually affect the player. When you’re taking morale and speed hits in the summer, can’t sleep because you’re too cold or too warm, etc: thank Shoes.

(At least xe finally wrote some code to let you just leave stuff like jackets, blankets, etc on your bed and auto-use them as needed, rather than having to manually grab & equip. Just got merged tonight.)

Link to dev-directing

10

As KA101 said, temperature already affects the player. There are not many times where temperatures get extremely cold or hot, so it’s hard to know if the system works well at the extremes; after the sleep changes I’ve added (yay!), I feel like the system works well in normal summer/winter conditions.

That means all you really need to do is add temperature effects to critters (probably easy to do? “speed = 100%*(abs(60F - temperature)/60F)” or something like that). Freezing rivers would be new; I don’t have much experience with maps, but I would like to think it’s as easy as adding a temperature check there too. Maybe a little delay so it doesn’t freeze instantly. More developed underground would be nice too.

If you were to code these features, the devs would probably pull this into the mainline of the game.

I myself have been thinking of adding freak weather patterns too. Haven’t looked much into it.

11

I like the idea. Critters should be affected by temperature, too.

12

This doesnt seem too difficult to implement.
The only real barrier i can see of would be trying to code settlements, as Not Particularly Clever brainsplosions

13

Thanks for the support guys, I dont know if I will be able to code the temperature features (my small coding skills cannot get me that far) but I am already trying to implement more interesting weather effects and get actual snow into the game.

14

While on the subject, could we have snowing be somewhat tied to the temperature? It felt a little silly to have a snowstorm in 14C.

15

If you keep working on weather, we may avoid duplicating each others work. I am working on getting temps to dynamically affect critter speeds (testing shows positive results, but can be improved).

16

When this got implemented I’d like to see a “Initial season” option in the… options :slight_smile: Never naturally lived long enough to see a CataDDA winter :expressionless: Probably would need a way to hack and harvest/haul ice or snow for melting to water too…

Another (possibly idiotic) thought is that… don’t most nuclear freezes come from the air being so filled with dust and ash that it blots out the sun almost completely? Was just wondering, because if that were the case then this would probably be better as its own separate (but equally valid/vanilla) mode from the normal game… Just did my research, half-assed, and it is caused by dust and debris, and can also be achieved with a violent volcano (volcanic winter) or asteroid impact (impact winter)… Those two options would the same cold hell, just without the widespread radiation. Also all three events generally involve quite a bit of fire at the start (asteroid the least of which, though it could burn plenty of things under the right circumstances), so there should technically be some pretty bad burn damage in some areas…

Another option, in the generic game, heading north far enough could lead you to the icy wastes instead of it being a seasonal/“time passes” event… But then you could head south and find deserts by that logic (not that Cata’s map is supposed to represent an entire planet, anyway, but it’d serve to add some new biomes).

Anyway, that’s my 87 cents on the subject, to be taken or left! :slight_smile:

17

If you open up the debug menu (you have to assign a key to it), you can set the season manually. I don’t think it would be very hard to have an actual option to start in a certain season either.

18

Shoes did you receive my PM?

19

Having cata take place in New England is very… whats the word… holding it back. Yeah, that’s the word. I mean, I wanna randomly start in a desert or a tundra or something. I really wanna add more to this post and rant about how having cata set in New England is kind of unessary, but I would prob butch up what I’m trying to say and yeah.

20

On one hand it’s “limiting”, but on the other it lets us add enough content to make the setting interesting, we don’t have the content necessary for desert or tundra, etc. If we add that stuff, we can spread out into that kind of thing, and perhaps even make long-distance travel have some point to it.