Help

Game Talk The Bunker
21

Chargen tips:
-Scoundrel profession is great for melee fighting/surviving. Its got a switchblade (decent enough starting weapon) , a lighter, lockpicks, and most importantly, a good carrying capacity and 2 skill in fighting and dodging.
-A decent min/max of traits is:
Quick
Fleet-footed
Night vision
Addictive Personality (Drugs arent worth it)
Heavy Sleeper (Just dont sleep were monsters might reach you)
Insommiac (Not much of an impediment, a bed help mitigate this)
Lightweight (Just dont use drugs)
Moodswings (Interferes with long crafting/reading sessions, but is otherwise not a big impediment)
Poorhearing (Hearing monsters is generally worthless outside of night looting, and you have night vision to compensate for it
Sleepy ( Not much of an impediment, it even gives you more time to heal per night AFAIK)
Truth Teller (Lying to NPCs is evil and generally worthless)

-Dont worry about putting levels in intelligence until you get several characters past the three day mark. Just leave it at 8 or decrease it to 6 if you want some more points
-In general, Try to aim for 10+ strenght and 12 dex.

22

Hi ianpwilliams.

A lot of new players struggle with early-game strategies because there is a huge learning curve after you learn the controls and start to get into the planning and long-term stages of play.

A good rule of thumb is to always stay unencumbered early on in the game. I always mark a few houses or otherwise safe areas to stash goods in until I am able to go back and get them so that I can run quickly and fight without having to drop items. Combat is really important in the early game, so find guns if you can, but only use them if you are too encumbered to melee or if you are wounded.

If you are having trouble with the cold, try changing the starting season to summer instead of spring. If you want to play legit, try to build fires when you can early in the game, and find some warm clothes asap. Generally, I tend to not pay much attention to the temperature of my character for the first few days. Unless parts of your body are becoming frostbitten, you’ll be okay. Combat is difficult when it is colder, because you will need to wear warm clothes, or fight quickly and put your clothes back on afterwards.

Try to find an easy enemy to train your combat skills with, knife spear is good, makeshift crowbar is good, but my personal favorite early game weapon is the standard pipe (+2 to hit). Baseball bats are amazing if you can find them, and they are easy to upgrade to the almighty nail bat. I tend to keep my eyes open for a black rat for the first few days, because these are the easiest creatures to train with. They will attack you, but they will have a lot of trouble killing you, much less piercing through your clothes, and you can train melee and dodging with them until you get a hit. I usually armor up as much as I can, and then go fight them for a few hours. You won’t hit them with high encumbrance, but that will help you train for longer, and you won’t get damaged too badly from fighting them. Don’t worry about your stamina either, just find a safe place to fight them and melee them until you kill them.

As for mid-game, the most important part of the game past day 1 is finding a working vehicle. I cannot stress how important this is. I generally regard my character in early-game until I have more than one working, armored vehicle, at which point I consider them to be in the mid-game. Farms can be good places to look, but parking lots of mines, sewage treatment plants, and public works are the places I check first. It’s rare to find a working vehicle randomly in a town, but it happens sometimes. Check cars, and if you find a working one, just shove all your stuff in it and drive somewhere safe. A working vehicle instantly takes your player to the next level. You can sleep in them without penalties, store your extra items, and get the hell out of danger very quickly. After this, you want to just kind of roam around collecting items such as fitted armor (clothing), weapons, food, fuel, and books. Books are really important in the mid-game. At this point, you can go back and clean out all of your marked safehouses of their items that you couldn’t carry before you had a vehicle.

23

what about Hoarder? and for profession security guard is good too in case you meet strong enemy early
alslo taking more than 10 perception is waste of points

24

what about Hoarder? and for profession security guard is good too in case you meet strong enemy early
alslo taking more than 10 perception is waste of points[/quote]

Yeah hoarder is not a real impediment either, feel free to take it, but I think the list I posted is already 12/12 negative trait points.

Security guard’s gun can be useful, but if you are starting with the game i’d rate the 2 levels in dodge above it.

25

what about Hoarder? and for profession security guard is good too in case you meet strong enemy early
alslo taking more than 10 perception is waste of points[/quote]

Horder is increasingly an asshole of a trait as the game advances and your storage capabilities ramp up, I honestly really fucking hate it’s perpetual drain–it’s like a cop-out slow learner.

26

i never had problems with it, when i have a lot of storage and i need to craft/learn just take throazine or fill my inventory with junk, on looting runs my focus is high anyway because i collect nearly everything (its why looting a lab take me at least two seasons with max lenght) and at start of looting i can take some throazine too just before fight

27

Is there a way to start a fire without matches or a lighter? I had a non-survivor character (dead now!) And I couldn’t make fire. Can you not rub two rocks together against threads, or something similar?

28

There is a recipe that allow you to make an item that can start a fire, it cost, with other things, strings … and take more time that with a lighter. I don’t remember if it come with the more survival tools mod though.

Still it cost a decent amount of time to make and use, it’s only for the desperate guy. (a bit later you can even make a bow drill !)

There is also the possibility to have an amber keeper that will allow you to light fires for a while after you lit it.

29

The fire drill (and it’s larger cousin, camp fire drill) are in vanilla.

30

If you pick the base survivor profession, you start with a matchbook (20 charges) which generally can get you by until you can find a lighter with high charges.

31

This, Matchbooks and lighters are extremely common if you’re looting ordinary houses, and they weigh next to nothing and have 0 encumberance, so you can pick them all up without messing up your carrying capacity… In less than a game-week I often have more lighters/matches to never worry about them ever again… Yet you can still pick them up without any worry because they weigh nothing.

Same goes for cash cards, threads, and a lot of the drugs available in the game… You can carry infinite amounts of aspirin and only after a long time it’s going to put a real dent into the weight (where he stores them, is up to your imagination.)

Cash cards are semi-advanced things and very situational, but it’s never an issue to pick them up and hoard them… The charges work on the cent-scale, so 100 ‘charges’ is one dollar/euro/credit/survivorbuck and so forth.

32

Scoundrel’s a pretty decent profession to start with, if you can afford the points (which for most part is quite low compared to getting some melee skills in exchange). You also get a switchblade and a lighter, so you can get some hunting down to secure food - though you’ll need a means to boil water though, or find some clean drinks to supply you on your first few days.

If you pick the cannibal trait, you also get the cookbook which does have some value in trade. If you have static NPCs on, you can trade for some handy supplies in exchange, if you’re not in a hurry to feast on anything beyond cooked creeps.

33

Skater Girl/Boy profession is absurd. You get double speed on flat surfaces plus you ignore the fighting on skates penalties. If your evac shelter/other base is on a road, you can make getaways simply by sprinting through the streets. Combat is basically the standard hit and run strategy but even easier. Having the Parkour Expert trait makes you a mobility machine capable of achieving quadruple speed while jumping over counters left and right. All my best characters have been Skater Girls.

34

I’ve always gone with Tailor, just to start with that tailoring kit (though throwing another point in to have tailoring at 6 isn’t bad).

Go outside, grab rock. Smash locker. Tear down a curtain. Use scissors to cut up sheets. Make spike-> makeshift knife and makeshift crowbar.

Check basement now that I have a weapon.

Tear down other curtains and solve warmth issues (balaclava, duster, glove liners and/or light gloves)…possibly spending an hour tearing up a rag for more thread.

From there, ready to go food hunting. (though if the basement was loaded I may just stick around and read into the first night)

Obviously this is limited to a non-hostile evac shelter start, though.

35

Speaking of which, if you are in aa safe building with plenty of food and drink, then are you best off spending your time reading as much as possible (assuming I can manage to create some kind of light source to read by)? I’m in a pretty safe building for the moment at least. Also the basement of my latest shelter was covered in items, which kind of feels a bit like cheating, although if it can get me past day 1 then I can’t complain.

36

Generally when you have a little bit of a buffer built up regarding supplies, it’s always smart to do some reading. Although it’s always smart to think ahead about the future and becoming (semi) self sustaining…
Also if you can get your hands on a screwdriver and hammer, your best bet is to remove most furniture (except the top right console!) and start boarding the place up so that there’s one way in and out and you won’t have the odd zombie flail itself through a window and have him piss on your carpet.

A few useful survival supplies are…
Knife, Screwdriver, Hammer, Funnel(s) (for water!), pot’s or other utensils with boiling/cooking, bottles, brazier (for indoor fires that won’t burn the building down).
Also useful are leather patches (gained from cutting up leather items), which can help you create makeshift funnels (for water), and also with a few tailoring levels allow you to create useful and durable leather items like armoured gloves, which are durable, warm, and have low encumberance.

One thing you should never do is eat uncooked meat/bones you harvested from animals, nor should you ever touch tainted anything… Also be sure to drink CLEAN water and not just ‘water’, because the latter can make your survivor very sick.

Finally any clothing you find be sure to use a few sweaters and other warm items as makeshift ‘blankets’, you just dump them on the tile you use to sleep and your survivor will use the items to keep him/herself warm at night, which goes a long way in getting rested and not getting frostnip/bite.

Another unrelated ‘tip’ for someone that’s new to the game, it helps a lot to just watch others play the game and show you the ropes in basic surviving. So if you just need some visual assistance, you’re best off finding a reasonably current Cataclysm DDA lets play/tutorial on YouTube, it’s how I first got into the game and also learned general useful ‘tips’ on making it far.

37

Good idea on the YouTube thing, I think I’ll give that a go.

38

I watched a YouTube video and I seemed to know most of what he talked about which is good, although he had a modded character with a bow which seemed to help him a lot.

One issue I’m having right now is that I can’t see to read, even though it’s the middle of the day (I’m in an apartment). Shouldn’t there be done natural light? I have a flashlight but I don’t want to waste batteries. Also I read about how disassembling a flashlight into a flashlight strip can extend battery life, is that worth doing?

39

[quote=“ianpwilliams, post:38, topic:10814”]I watched a YouTube video and I seemed to know most of what he talked about which is good, although he had a modded character with a bow which seemed to help him a lot.

One issue I’m having right now is that I can’t see to read, even though it’s the middle of the day (I’m in an apartment). Shouldn’t there be done natural light? I have a flashlight but I don’t want to waste batteries. Also I read about how disassembling a flashlight into a flashlight strip can extend battery life, is that worth doing?[/quote]

Lightstrips are only useful as a basic crafting lamp or something, they don’t provide light more than two or three squares away and it’s not enough to read by quickly, so you shouldn’t make one out of your flashlight so early in the game.

As for the light: if you’re in an apartment and you’ve drawn the curtains ("c"losed the windows till you couldn’t see through them) then natural light won’t be able to get in and you won’t be able to see, or if you’re too far away from a window–you can roughly tell where it’s bright enough by where the tiles have color, or from the lighting indicator right above the time/date on your status panel, if it says “brightly” or “cloudy,” you should have enough light to read.

40

As I tested recently, bow aren’t worth much early/mid because how armor, range, skill works. Damage will be low, range won’t be much, speed will be low, and you can’t hit after 70%-100% max range because of the malus that will just make you miss/grazing near all the time unless it’s a weak zombie you can kill by hand.

At best there is some use for hunting, but at this point a sling do the trick with more efficiency. It’s faster and easier to make ammo early. However feel free to use archery at low skill if you find a recurve reflex box somewhere; They are quite useful (especially for the noise :slight_smile:
One thing though, throwing and archery isn’t the same mechanic, so depend of your stats and encumbrance you may want to switch for a bow, and stack backpack of all sort.