For some reason every time i try to sneak in to town you know staying well away from zed on night missions and raids they ALWAYS see me and for some reason i have like 4 jabberwockeys outside of my lmoe shelter any ideas on how to stop getting anal raped by the horde? Also i saw a wolf kill a zombie brute by ITSELF! *** Also great game just hard to survive unless you like camping out side your Lmoe with shit tons of arrows taking potshots at squirrels***
Just for clarification I have played for about 67 Hours Irl.
even the veterans get killed when they least expect it. i say stay in your car and do not get out unless you really really really god damn need to.
I found a answer get a pick up truck noise transmitter and a hotel tower = free tower 
Dying is… ahem… fun. But when you spend a lot of time with your character, it makes you feel sorry when he dies. I spent quite some time with my last char, and since he died, I’m having a bit of a problem to make a new one. This game hurts in RL. Argh.
rilo12, I really feel your pain.
I never do night raids and use static spawn most of the time, and don’t get mobbed that often. The strategy is simple: leave a clear line of exit, and as soon as you get a pain level of around 24, withdraw. I try to get a book early so I can read while I bleed, moping around my evac shelter waiting to be tired enough for sleep.
That strategy is no good at night, because you can’t see how many zeds are nearby.
Just go in to a residential area and stay off the streets as much as possible. Establish a route into town, and kill your way to your target. Fight your way in, exit when you get hurt, heal up, and repeat. It’ll take a few days, but that’s better than being torn limb from limb. Once you get a vehicle, the strategy changes to: run up and down the main drag and splatter as many as you can, then make smash & grab raids on key targets.
I hope that helps.
Those sure are boring strategies , i always take the ninjutsu martial art , wich isn’t the best martial art , it just has silent strikes and pretty much nothing else exceptional to the art , but still i manage to just cassualy walk through piles of zed’s at the start of the game. I can imagine what would be if i would someday grow up and pick the goddamn Krav Maga wich seems like the best of best martial arts and i could probably cruise through the city with my fists casually swinging around knocking zed’s into oblivion.
The only thing that scares me is zombie dawgs , schockers , brutes and the butt-raping hulks.
In the last attempt i had a perfect base in public works near a city , few guns , ass-load of bionics installed (no power source :() a car that i needed fuel for and a dream of brighter future. Then i went to the city to pick up fuels for my flatbead truck and first thing ma boy sees is a mofo hulk that is already charging in my direction. I ran through a sporting goods store and 2 houses but that bastard just didn’t want to leave my ass alone and smacked through windows like they would be made out of paper. I had no drugs , needles to say , i died.
everyone is like you. Check out my .6 starter guide.
http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=2143.0
Few things to remember. (the real post is very long)
You can make the game easier for yourself by going to options and giving your self 24 starter points instead of 6. you can increase trait points too. See my guide for a list of negative traits to take. The ones I pick dont really hurt you. I suggest always starting with archery so you can craft a bow early. Its easy to train survival to 1. Once you learn the game, go hardcore and only use 6 traits. The only skill I take is archery. Rest go to positive traits and attributes. See below for first day. you dont need to go to town much early. you can survive in woods.
- do NOT sneak all the way into town early. Creep around the edges. You do NOT need to go to town to survive with the additional crafting
- you can go to options and give yourself 24 points to start with. See my guide. There are negative traits that dont hurt you. I have suggestions on how to buff yourself. This is good for a newb to learn the game. However, your still not very strong since you dont have skills or good weapons.
- first day priority: throw rocks at rabbits and butcher. Get survival 1. I recommend starting with archery. go back to shelter, smash bench and make a bow and some arrows. Have rocks with you so you can make good arrows. you need 2 strings. You can get string by smashing 2 windows. you can smash window in your shelter (then use construction * to board them up). or sneak to the outskirts of town and smash 2 windows and leave. take the string.
- go train archery by shooting rabbits. Use survival to butcher. Get (B) to 2 atleast. You need 2 to craft a stone pot which you need to make clean water. At level 2 butchery you should start getting more food from the butchery. Take food and drop it outside shelter.
- get splintered wood (dont use 2x4s) from smashed benches. Drop 1 piece at a time. (a)ctivate matchook on wood. Cook the food. Eat it and use this to train cooking to 1. You need to craft one thing to be able to cook. Its some kind of easy weapon. Press & and see what it is. Not at hime. With 1 cooking you can craft Stone pot.
- Make sure while you kill rabbits you wander around some and explore in the woods. Look for corpses. Mark them o nth emap. The priority to grab is clean bottles, jugs of ammonia/bleach. Other stuff can wait.
- you need to 'u’nload the jugs so you can put real water in it. To do this type 'w’ield to wield the jug. The 'U’nload to unload the ammonia/bleach on the ground. This is not intuitive and not clear so I type out the process.
- At night take jugs with you to town (if you dont have them this is your priority. yoiu can usually find some in the first couple of houses on the outskirts. Very common. Press ‘e’ when you are next ot a sink, toilet., or batchtub. Many have water. Some dont. Fill up the jugs. Do NOT drink this water.
- as you finish your plastic bottles of clean water. you can make clean water. See under ‘drink’ section for supplies. when you make it, you need empty bottles to put clean water into. if you have no bottles you can put the water into a 2nd jug. only drink clean water.
Now you have food since you can kill rabbits, etc easily in the woods. and you should see a house on the outskirts you can run to at night to fill up jugs to make more water. Run around the woods and use you rbow to make it good. train this up. Train up dodge and melee some. Dont go to town and do raids until Bow is atleast 7-8. Make sure to run the hell away from Smoker zombies. Skeletons cant be hurt with bow. bashing weapon (bat if you find one or a spiked board) to kill them. Keep your raids at a minimum.
You see , if you go on “upgrading” the game by adding extra starting points , why don’t you just add more points and avoid the annoying “going around launching rocks in all directions”.
Also in the guide you say NPC’s should be disabled , but they are a great way to get free starting loot.
And the traits (near-sighted, trigger happy, heavy sleeper,ugly, truth teller, wool allergy) that you show as “not so disableing” are quite bad. I would chose Bad hearing , Insomniac , Addictive personality , Trigger happy , Truth teller and Ugly , they give you 12 points and are the best ones (Those traits won’t make anything harder for you) in my opinion.
I’m not judging , since we all have different tastes in char creation , but there are some things in your guide that could just make it harder for new people to live in their deathmobiles.
Just a note: there was a bug in one of the versions which made the Jabberwocky spawn A LOT more frequently than it should. You shouldn’t ever see 4 Jabberwockies in the newer builds.
They are also extremely buggy.
Heavy Sleeper & Insomniac are a favorite combo of mine. Just always make sure you sleep in a safe, comfortable area and only sleep when you are Tired.
(If you have NPCs disabled, traits like Truth Teller and Ugly are just free points. Arguably, if you just want free points, you can always increase your starting points in the Options and then you don’t have to clutter your character screen with inconsequential traits. That’s just a personal preference.)
I highly recommend Fleet-Footed and Quick. Those are essential traits in my opinion. Night Vision is handy.
Night raids are not too hard to pull off. You just have to be quiet and be prepared for when it all goes south.
Pry open a window at the back of a house with a crowbar, sneak in, and close all the curtains. Loot the house, and retreat.
If you are spotted by any zombies, hole up near a window and try and get them to attack you from there. Use choke points, make sure zombies always have to come at you from awkward points of attack (e.g. through windows, over shrubs, across vehicle frames) and use the terrain and your speed advantage to beat the hell out of them.
Always try to avoid getting flanked by more than one.
And if you’re losing the fight, remember to run BEFORE it’s too late.
If you are forced to fight an enemy you can’t outrun, use FIRE AS A WEAPON.
Arguably, quick is really the only positive trait you “need”, because it’s 10 speed that you would otherwise have to drug up for, stacks on top of said drugs, and applies to both moving and actions. Even without fleet footed, a hit of Adderall combined with Quick gives you somewhere between 130 and 140 speed, which allows you to outrun almost anything. Quick also serves to dampen the speed penalties of pain and overburdened (or cold, painkillers, etc), allowing a damaged or weighed-down character to fight for longer, or escape more easily. I also hate seeing speed in red, so it’s a personal thing.
NPCs I can’t recommend enabling. The two times I’ve created worlds with random NPCs, they crashed my game at some point. You also can’t count on the shelter NPC being able to teach you martial arts as a means to bypass the 3 point investment in martial arts. I attempted this and crashed every time I tried to have him teach me ninjutsu. Sometimes they start with inappropriate equipment, too. I recall starting a game and killing a shelter NPC, who had on him a fusion rifle as well as the charge rifle. Another game, I started in an evac shelter that managed to be located downtown in a major city, surrounded by zombies, brutes, a master zombie, and the zombie dogs that master zombie created to later run me down and kill me. The NPC wielded a CBM: Time Dilation and ran into the fray. I just stared. He didn’t survive long.
In general it feels to me that the difficulty of the game is inversely proportional to how many points you invest in the strength stat. Strength is vital for almost every playstyle. The most effective martial art I’ve used so far is taekwondo. It’s a slow start to get the blocks unless you find 101 Wrestling Moves, but with a character touting 14 or 15 strength, your blocks will make 63-70% of the blow’s damage magically disappear, before armor mitigation comes into play. With arm guards and leg guards, a player could tank most of the melee mobs in the game without any trouble, as the damage to the arms and legs will often be negligible. It let me tank two Zombie brutes in the street side by side with no problem, so it should serve in the majority of situations, except when dealing with ranged opponents, which at the moment are a rather small portion of the total population.
And of course, there’s always cars.
Other tricks to try if you aren’t doing them already are wearing fitted sneakers and crafting yourself long underwear to wear. With those two your feet and legs will be at -1 encumbrance, dropping your movement cost. Glove liners also give a -1, but hands don’t seem to be capable of getting -1 encumbrance. It still lets you wear 1 encumbrance gloves or gauntlets without taking a penalty to encumbrance, however. Wearing two fitted tank tops and two fitted underarmors will, in addition to making rain no longer bother you, give you -2 torso encumbrance, which is effectively +2 to melee and dodge as well as -40 to melee cost. In addition to providing that boon, it allows you to wear one rucksack or two backpacks and avoid being encumbered at all in the torso region, making meleeing while wearing them more feasible. Soft arm guards, should you find them, will serve in keeping your arms warm, should you need to use ranged weapons.
Other tricks to try if you aren't doing them already are wearing fitted sneakers and crafting yourself long underwear to wear. With those two your feet and legs will be at -1 encumbrance, dropping your movement cost. Glove liners also give a -1, but hands don't seem to be capable of getting -1 encumbrance. It still lets you wear 1 encumbrance gloves or gauntlets without taking a penalty to encumbrance, however. Wearing two fitted tank tops and two fitted underarmors will, in addition to making rain no longer bother you, give you -2 torso encumbrance, which is effectively +2 to melee and dodge as well as -40 to melee cost. In addition to providing that boon, it allows you to wear one rucksack or two backpacks and avoid being encumbered at all in the torso region, making meleeing while wearing them more feasible. Soft arm guards, should you find them, will serve in keeping your arms warm, should you need to use ranged weapons.
Cool, thanks for the tips.
Fast learner. That’s my thing, really does difference. I’d say that with this trait and 8 int, you learn faster than guy with 18 int. If you plan to go archer way, have at least 10 strenght, for longbow.
generaly , if you are making more of a combat character , -2 torso encumbrance with centipede style will allow 10 or more free hits without making the zed’s climb over stuff (and if they’re in a window it’s probably 40 hits) as i saw some time ago while using ninjutsu i could pull off 5 free hits.
also mansions are the best places ever , if you manage to find plate mail , great helm and owl pike/broadsword/katana/rapier , you are invincible killing machine.
I was playing around with a newly started character and found the full armor with owl pike. I cleared out the mansion without getting a scratch and stabbing zombies on regular non-movement fucking terrain.
I was even once surrounded by 5 zed’s and managed to slice them all , but watch out if you’re going to do this , because the plate mail is not very durable and after few battles it might get tattered and disappear in the middle of battle.
I’m with ya there, woflsipder, i found a katana in a mansion i was clearing out to become my new base, and lets just say i dont have to worry about those hungry hungry bears
@woflspider: npcs are disabled by default. i didnt say ‘should’. I said are. they are disabled cause they are buggy. the loot you get from them isnt real valuable. evne if you turn them on its beneficial to take the negative traits for a new person.
your complaining cause i told a newb who was having trouble to buff his charcter by changing an option? dude seriously… if you dont want to use that option than dont.
near-sighted doesnt hurt you at all. you just need to wear eyeglasses and you start with it. they are very common to find. so you can stockpile them in case they break. in .6 daily builds you can tkae both near sighted and far sighted. they added bifocals which though not as common as eyeglasses are common enough to get a big stockpile.
insomniac is a good idea. I never took it.
bow is the best weapon in the game. It is even more so with the archery enhancements in .6. It doesnt work on some mobs, but for most its like carrying a machine gun. plus its silent.
one more point. noise from breaking windows is not really a big deal with static spawns. noise in generally is not as big of a deal with statisc spawns as they were with dynamic (though shooting a shotgun in town is noticeable). i am sure this will change when they get to it. however, you need to smash 2 windows to get 2x string to make a bow early. It really is best to start with archery, get survival to 1 and get a bow. try it. bows are way over powered and have been for a while. plus crafting arrows is so easy you have unlimited ammo. using bow also disproportionately trains firearms (this is way too much in my opinion). so by the time you raise archery to 5 your firearms wil lbe at 3 (and that is with you starting at 2 archery from creation). you also train archery by crafting arrows. once archery is at 8 you are auto-killing most zombies with headshots.
Using archery just makes the game cheap , like you say that all you need is to put a point in archery and survival (why do you bother throwing rocks and butchering) and you have the ultimate survivor.
People can use archery if they want to , but from a irl perspective , longbow and wooden arrows round terrible for a post apocalyptic weapon.
and NPC related crashes are very rare in the newer builds and NPCs do drop mutagens , backpacks and top hat’s.
Irl a bow with the right arrow fuck zed up even decapitating em so point is not valid.
Oh really? hahaha , pick up a longbow and try to shoot arrow straight while having your friend as a zombie to run up to you.
well , you could hit him , but it takes more than a arrow to the kidney to make a zombie slow down.
It’s called bowhunting. People do it all the time. A headshot at close range with a bow is A.) Insta-death and B.) Not that hard to do. Archery is really only innacurate at longer ranges. But at a close range you don’t even need to aim high in order to allow the arrow to fall. If someone is only 25-40ft away from you an arrow aimed right at their head will hit, if not go all the way through.