Greetings, First english is not my main tongue, so funny grammar incomming.
I find this game like 2 days ago, and it hook me hard (as well the game is hard too and deep as I like from a game)
After dying a lot just for start zombie, and annoying insanely fast jumper zombie, I lurked google and forums for find the best suitable starter build.
And most guides are outdated. That why I make this thread.
Any suggestions?
Honestly? Go with the experimentals. Tons of new stuff.
Real advice though: Just go with whatever sounds fun, tbh. Don’t read too much of the forums so you don’t get discouraged because you always die on day one. Eventually, you’ll find out what works best for you. Hell, use the debug menu. Bind it to a key and use it as a sort of sandbox learning tool. I still use it occasionally to get out of BS deaths and I consider myself at least somewhat decent 
Most of all, don’t fret about taking things too slow or fast. That’s what got me discouraged the most when I first started.
EDIT: An addendum! Go check the tips trick snad newbie questions thread if you have a question. The community’s pretty nice, so it’s not like you’ll be shunned for the heretical sin of not knowing how to cook food
Agree about experimentals. As to what build to use that depends on what strategy you want to do.
Do you want to do melee, ranged, build crazy vehicles, etc…
Generally I would say stay out of the city centers until you have a decent primary weapon with ammo and at least one or two backup weapons for those moments of near death.
Shotguns, motovs, rocket launchers all make great backup weapons.
Fire spraying spray can works well too.
Early on take few risks and try and stay away from enemies until you have some decent armor/weapons.
I will kindly disagree here; I feel that in a game like Cataclysm, doing “whatever sounds fun” isn’t necessarily a good way to go about true survival. There is always a set of goals you must aim for when starting a journey as a new character, whether you decide to put points into starting as a strong one (a professional wilderness survivalist) or as a weak one (say, a crack addict).
You know what sounds fun? Putting all your points into ranged weapon training and starting a soldier or a cop. Surely you’ll be powerful enough to survive because you have this ranged weapon, right? Oops, you don’t know how to cook a decent meal. Oops, you have no idea how to butcher this corpse for its valuable resources, or how to build necessary tools for survival. You’re cold and you don’t know how to sew clothing for you to wear and be warm. Oh boy, you wish you could build yourself a fireplace or a bed for warmth right about now; too bad you never learned how to construct these in the first place. How come this zombie is so hard to hit, yet you get hit so easily? Should’ve put points into training melee, or at least trained dodging.
Death is very quick in those situations, especially for new players. What I’m trying to say is, you must have SOME sort of idea what your style of survival will be. Do you intend to kill zombies quietly from a long range instead of dealing with them head on? Put points into archery + marksmanship. Do you intend to be a strong melee character, fighting with makeshift melee weaponry at first and then looting knives, swords and axes later on? Put points into melee + cutting/bashing weapons. Melee weapons are for pussies, you say? Unarmed + dodging. Do you even WANT to fight, or are you going to rely on NPCs to do the dirty work for you? Speaking + bartering it is then.
But wait, what about actual survival? Are you going to hunt and cook your own food? Survival + cooking. What about your base - constructing your own house? Points in construction. Building a huge death machine to annihilate and destory zombies splattering them all over the road? Points in mechanics. Are you starting in winter/spring? Put points into fabrication so you can sew your own, warm clothing.
I’m not even talking about perks and professions here. You just have to know the basics of the game and think about this logically. Don’t use the debug menu - it’ll spoil your fun. Trial and error is way better than straight up cheating “to avoid BS deaths”. Don’t be afraid to read about the game, just do stuff in-game while you’re at it too; if you wander off and start reading about the late-game it’ll spoil your fun just as badly.
Most of your mentioned deaths can be dealt with with just a little knowledge about the game… Just saying.
Also there is a very useful button… I can’t remember what it is by default, but it shows you all actions you can do with current equipment. It lets you know you can do things like activate your pocket knife to cauterize wounds if you have matches or a lighter.
So I’d say what he needs is less about build and more about game knowledge. 
[quote=“Etherdreamer, post:1, topic:11081”]Greetings, First english is not my main tongue, so funny grammar incomming.
I find this game like 2 days ago, and it hook me hard (as well the game is hard too and deep as I like from a game)
After dying a lot just for start zombie, and annoying insanely fast jumper zombie, I lurked google and forums for find the best suitable starter build.
And most guides are outdated. That why I make this thread.
Any suggestions?[/quote]
What kind of start are you using? The strategies to surviving vary with each situation. What are you getting killed by? Straight up damage, or zombie infections? Are you doing well with weapons, and fighting?
Other than that, for universally applicable advice, I’d say the primary thing to surviving your encounters is to take into account terrain. Shrubs are a life saver, all entities, player or otherwise that walks onto one will be slowed down for one or more turns depending on their speed. Often times this allows the player an extra hit or two if the zombie is standing on it letting the player get away with no damage at all.
A trick I like to use, if I’m desperate enough is to make a kill zone like a checker board but with holes. This would of course require planning in advance and a lot of time, but is very useful for non-ranged (or ranged if you make the checker board large enough) hordes.
Other than this, simply dragging around a shopping cart and positioning it between you and the zombie whenever they get close is a much easier and more versatile solution, although can’t handle large hordes as well as the checkers. I am not sure whether different types of vehicle modules slow down entities more than others, if anyone knows, please shower me in your knowledge.
For weapons, I generally like ranged weapons. Hand-to-hand, especially early hand-to hand, is a very risky business as damage in this game and the resulting pain is cumulative and will make your character perform worse and worse. At bottom, even if you can’t fashion a short-bow, a few point sticks that you throw (t) can often be enough, although they are quite bulky and you can’t carry that many thus limiting their usefulness. Slings also come easy, although they are near useless unless you have a lot of ammo.
Keep an eye on your encumbrance as well. It is cumulative, and its effects are cumulative as well. The higher it is, especially on your legs, feet, and mouth will impair your ability to run, and being able to run faster than zombies helps a great amount. Likewise, encumbrance elsewhere, like on the eyes, arms, torso, will hinder your ability to fight for instance.
Zombies can smell you, they can also hear you. So being behind a window or a wall is not always a solid cloak of invisibility.
That being said, going into the town at night (because zombies have no night vision unless you’re a masochist and gave it to them otherwise), breaking into houses and closing all the curtains does wonders. Heck, close all the curtains everywhere. My character just does this out of habit whether zombies are coming or not.
My advice is to learn by doing. Learn by failing, and try new things when you get the chance. the wiki and forums can help you,but learning the skill is so much more valuable than just reading how to.
As a new player you should start with the basics.
-Melee skill, mechanic skill, sewing skill. Melee of 3-5 will make combat much more survival for any character, though I dont recommend dumping so many points into melee after you learn. 3 mechanics will let you install all basic vechicle parts, while 2 lets you remove most parts. Sewing is important because it keeps you warm and provides storage and utility benefits like holsters or timepieces. Combat damages and can quickly destroy clothing, leaving you nake, cold, and all your loot strewn across the floor. 2 sewing is sufficient for basic maintainance.
-pick an easier start, with less immediate threats. burning buildings, labs, surrounded start, infections; all these will limit your ability to learn by imposing pressure. The extra points from harder starts wont be worth anything if you die getting out of the starter spot.
-attribuites are pretty cut and dry. What they say they do they do, and its very hard to permanently increase them.
-Traits. Pick these sparingly at first as some of tgese dramatically change gameplay. Ones to get as a newbie include: scout, fast learner, night vison, quick, animal empathy, martial arts of any kind, tough, robust genetics, pretty, and more. Ones that you could get that are good negative ones are: wool allergies, trigger happy, truth teller, and more. It dies require more knowlwdge of the game to play around negatives, but they can be a lot of fun.
-Priorities. your exact priorities in game depend entirely on you and you situation and planning. However your first step is to get warm, fed, and storage. A vehicle will increase survivbility dramatically, especially for harder starts. As such, a toolbox or at least a wrench and hacksaw is welcome. Duct tape or a welder, or the knowledge to build them, is helpful. After that you need to decide what kind of person you are and play to a suitable goal.
Once you are stable enough to experiment youll really get to see the game; early game is about survival, late game about experimenting.
Losing may not be Fun, but its a learning process. and inevitable.
Is experimental good for long-term games?
My typical procedure is to play until my survivor dies or theres a must have feature before updating. As long as you save a backup of your save before you transfer it over to the new version, you really can’t lose anything. Configs and templates are transferable also.
Traits are, indeed, very important and are almost crucial for easier survival in the harsh Cataclysm; the traits you mentioned are VERY far from being the most important ones on the trait list, and are also far from being good options for a new player to the game.
As for bad traits, don’t take Wool Allergy as you will probably be using wool clothing at one point or another. It’s an unnecessary limit and considered a bad trait to choose in general.
The traits I usually pick:
Animal Empathy (animals are a good source of food and you’d want easy access to it at some point).
Night Vision (for that night looting and basemet-foraging, especially useful in the experimental versions where your night vision increases from a 2-square radius to, like, 5 squares).
Light Steps (decreases the sound your footsteps make from 6-8 to 2, making you harder to spot whdn looting houses and walking around at night).
Weak Scent (your scent is harder to track by animals and zombies).
Bad Tempered (a mere constant -5 moral debuff which doesn’t really affect anything).
Addictive Personality (if you don’t intend to use alcohol and drugs to boost your stats, risking addiction).
Forgetful (skill-rust is cancer. Turn it off and get free points).
Trigger Happy (you won’t be using automatic weapons any time soon, unless playing with a specific build).
Weak Stomach (again, if you don’t plan to drink alcohol. Other than that it won’t be an issue as you’ll always purify your water and eat fresh, cooked food).
Ugly / Truth Teller (if you don’t intend to interact with NPCs too much this won’t really be an issue).
This creates a very nature-friendly character, zombies and hostile animals not being an issue if you’re being careful enough. Combine this with an archery setup and you get yourself a very competent hunter. Note how I made sure I’m not easily detectable by zombies and don’t scare animals off as easily.
few simple things:
-get night vision
-if you cant hit it throw all your (heavy or sharp) thing at it (cans of food, rocks, knives, katanas, fireaxes, guns)
-if throwing do not help use FIRE!
-taking slow zombie mod make it easier (but watch out for predators, they still leap)
Blegh. Sorry for that, was kinda just giving what I thought would help.
Cheating! I honestly only brought it up because I initially stopped playing because I kept getting killed by skeletons and skeletal dogs. That was before .A, so… Yeah. I got back to playing, decided to temporarily cheat just so I can actually survive and whaddya know, I started to really enjoy the game. Not saying cheating is a good thing if you want long term fun, but short term fun and/or getting confident in your abilities and avoid things that are over powered because of the RNG being mean is kinda what helped me become better. I realize anecdotes aren’t the end all be all, but whatever. Different strokes and all.
Reason I mentioned not readings stuff is because, at least in my opinion, a person who is new to the game reads about how people are building giant death mobiles while they’re just trying to figure out how to survive a season in game might be discouraging. No story here, but whatever! Point is, is that I didn’t intend to come off as rude or anything.
Yep! If you’re paranoid about getting an unstable experimental, make a new folder and play a new character for it and play for a day or two to see if you get any crashes and such.
Traits are, indeed, very important and are almost crucial for easier survival in the harsh Cataclysm; the traits you mentioned are VERY far from being the most important ones on the trait list, and are also far from being good options for a new player to the game.
As for bad traits, don’t take Wool Allergy as you will probably be using wool clothing at one point or another. It’s an unnecessary limit and considered a bad trait to choose in general.
The traits I usually pick:
Animal Empathy (animals are a good source of food and you’d want easy access to it at some point).
Night Vision (for that night looting and basemet-foraging, especially useful in the experimental versions where your night vision increases from a 2-square radius to, like, 5 squares).
Light Steps (decreases the sound your footsteps make from 6-8 to 2, making you harder to spot whdn looting houses and walking around at night).
Weak Scent (your scent is harder to track by animals and zombies).
Bad Tempered (a mere constant -5 moral debuff which doesn’t really affect anything).
Addictive Personality (if you don’t intend to use alcohol and drugs to boost your stats, risking addiction).
Forgetful (skill-rust is cancer. Turn it off and get free points).
Trigger Happy (you won’t be using automatic weapons any time soon, unless playing with a specific build).
Weak Stomach (again, if you don’t plan to drink alcohol. Other than that it won’t be an issue as you’ll always purify your water and eat fresh, cooked food).
Ugly / Truth Teller (if you don’t intend to interact with NPCs too much this won’t really be an issue).
This creates a very nature-friendly character, zombies and hostile animals not being an issue if you’re being careful enough. Combine this with an archery setup and you get yourself a very competent hunter. Note how I made sure I’m not easily detectable by zombies and don’t scare animals off as easily.[/quote]
what you’ve given is a minmax recipe, and not somethinig a new person, one who presumably doesn’t have minmaxing in mind, would use. for shame.
-Scout and selfaware provide new players with the information they’d need to make choices without exposing themselves to city hordes. binoculars have become markedly more rare in newer experimentals as well.
-youre right that martial arts are not necessary, but if youere going to bumble around the world they do wonders on your life expectancy. honestly, how are you telling a new player without meta-knopwledge not to take a melee oriented character to begin with? Serious?
-Robust genetics I could grant you, but for 2 points its a nice way to ease into mutagen, radiation, or bionics.
-Pretty is similar, except that when a crazed npc wielding a submachine suddenly appears in the dark at me I die if I dont let him rob me. Dont know about you. The bonus to pacification is enough that Ive gotten single digit successes with pretty RE: ‘Drop your weapon’, ‘No, go eat a dick’.
-Tough is a percentage based statup. Dont be silly.
Your own suggestions are fine, and in many ways line up to my suggestions
Learn to craft and always think outside the box.
The starting shelter has enough materials to make some basic melee weapons when you know how.
Go outside and find a rock. Smash the metal lockers and you can craft a makeshift crowbar-- which can also be used to open locked doors and some locked windows. If you smash the benches, you can craft a nailboard.
Note the encumberance system-- if you wear several backpacks and jackets, you won’t be able to dodge or hit stuff in melee easy or at all until your skill is much higher.
Personally I’d stick with 0.C until you get the hang of the game-- there are a lot of nasty new critters in the experimentals and I’m not sure that the spawn weighting has been addressed yet.
As to traits, I’d suggest quick and fleet-footed, or parkour. Quick helps you attack faster, fleet-foot and parkour help you run faster on open ground or through shrubs/windows respectively.
Remember your priorities-- clothing for storage, a decent weapon and some way of making fire and purifying water. A lighter or matches are good enough and fairly easy to find-- but you’ll need a pot or a frying pan or something to boil water and then a container to store the clean water. Remember things like gallon jugs of milk (rotten) can be emptied-- gallon jugs are really damn handy.
Once you’ve got your essentials, start working towards getting a decent ranged weapon. Pointy sticks, Spears and javelins can be crafted pretty easily and make nice throwing weapons. Bows are great when you’ve got the skill to craft them.
Tools are always handy as well. A Screwdriver and hammer allow you to deconstruct furniture for mass amounts of wood, nails, cloth etc. Sewing kits and tailoring kits allow you to reinforce and repair your clothes-- and make ill-fitting clothes fit properly (aka reduce encumbrance.)
Coming back from a couple-of-year break from Cataclysm, I have managed to survive for what, 21 days on my first try? Whereas I could never survive for longer than half a day beforehand. I’m not currently using and never needed to use Self Aware to maintain a good body condition, as the HP display really is similar to the health-bar display, just more accurate. By the point you get to : or 5 HP it won’t make a difference what you see one way or the other. Self Aware is helpful when it comes to various infections but I’m not sure this is worth the points you could be spending on something more useful (unless there’s more I don’t know about).
Like I said earlier, I see no use for the Scout perk early on unless you plan to escape the area you spawn at in the first place. Without the Scout perk and without binoculars you can see an area of 15x15 map-tiles around you after you spawn in, usually enough to spot the outskirts of a city, a forest or a river, all of which can be used to get water and food. Think about it: even if you see what’s on the other side of the city with Scout you won’t be able to get there as going into a city as a fresh survivor is suicide, so what’s the point?
You’re right, perhaps I should’ve been more clear. We’re all here to learn though, aren’t we?
Basically, what I’m saying is:
Low skill (1-3) marksmanship + archery > low skill melee + bashing/cutting weapons. You will be doing around the same amount of damage with both, the downside to melee being the risk of getting hurt and the downside to archery being arrows fairly expensive to build. It depends on what you prefer to take; I personally don’t want to risk getting hurt, my speed reduced because of pain and then dying because one hit made me unable to escape due to lower movement speed as a result of said pain. I’m willing to sacrifice this one plastic bottle or plastic bag to kill a few enemies with it (the three other ingredients - wood, scrap metal and thread being extremely common). As for creating your weapon, it’s as basic as it can get, on par with the makeshift crowbar almost everybody is using. I believe the crafting recipe for a basic bow is a heavy stick and 1-2 long string(s). Required skills are fab2, arc1 and sur1, which you are most likely to already have by then.
Mistake #1: turning Random NPCs on. They’re so unstable I’m not sure how people manage to survive with that option on. Clearly not for long, if a simple “crazed NPC” can ruin in-game months and even years of progress. Feel free to play however you want, but a new player using Random NPCs or Wander Spawns can’t be taken as seriously attempting survival.
P.S. I apologize if I come off as rude, it truly isn’t my intention to look like a complete ass in my posts. I’m just trying to show a different point of view advanced players might not see because they’re actually close to being really good, unlike me who’s closer to being a noob.
NPCs have had a lot of work done :v, and you could give them a go. A shotgun or revolver on backup might still be advised though.
I dont mean to imply youre wrong; Im trying to argue a barebones build that could be tailored into whatever you needed it to be. Your build isnt noobish it is balanced for your play.
-Scout is the explorer’s trait. Its the trait of those who live permanently out of their vehicles, or who want tht perfect nesting ground. That 15x15 starter map is such a small portion of the map, and sometimes it reveals nothing important.
Someone has obviously forgotten the most important function of all for Scout. Doubling the distance at which you can spot HORDES. Which will fuck your shit up if you allow anywhere near your base. Or if you meander into one.
Pretty much all of my survivors take Scout for this purpose, and hoard binoculars like they’re going out of style. I kinda like knowing where my enemy is, so that if necessary I can lure hordes around with talking dolls, AWAY from my base. And late-game it allows me to locate and track down the movements of many hundreds of zombies at a time. With that knowledge, I can Infiltrate, Isolate, and Destroy the vanguard of hordes, until they get split up by a lack of zombies.
[quote=“evilexecutive, post:17, topic:11081”]Someone has obviously forgotten the most important function of all for Scout. Doubling the distance at which you can spot HORDES. Which will fuck your shit up if you allow anywhere near your base. Or if you meander into one.
Pretty much all of my survivors take Scout for this purpose, and hoard binoculars like they’re going out of style. I kinda like knowing where my enemy is, so that if necessary I can lure hordes around with talking dolls, AWAY from my base. And late-game it allows me to locate and track down the movements of many hundreds of zombies at a time. With that knowledge, I can Infiltrate, Isolate, and Destroy the vanguard of hordes, until they get split up by a lack of zombies.[/quote]
Someone hasn’t forgotten hordes, someone plays with hordes OFF as last they’ve heard hordes we’re imbalanced as shit, spawning monsters out of thin air and behind ridiculous things like the nearby house you just finished looting.
I said this in my previous post and will say this again: if you’re a new player and you’re playing with Wander Spawns / Random NPCs on you won’t get a stable/balanced game and you’ll be making it infinitely harder for yourself to survive. A noob ought to try the game without those first and then decide if it’s easy enough to turn these on or hard enough to keep them off and play the game without them.
I’m with you man. When hordes spawn at the edge of the area loaded around the player and travel across it sensibly, responding to stimuli as normal while maintaining the hordes overall direction, then turn back into hordes again at the edge of the loaded area…I’ll turn them on. It’s bullshit that they magically appear 3 tiles away from you because you opened a door as the overmap horde was passing through. They pop up inside locked bathrooms, appear in closed cars, teleport into closed basements…it’s not fun. If anything it’s df style !!FUN!!, which just doesn’t lead to enjoyment when you only get 1 life and can’t watch the hilarious aftermath.
For me, at least, I learned how to survive in this game (and pretty much every other roguelike) by dying. Lots and lots and lots of times. I’d figure out how not to die in that situation, and slowly learned a little bit more after every death.
For newbies, I suppose it would be ideal to start off some distance away from a small town, normal spawn rate or lower. Should be good practice for sneaking around at night, and a little combat practice thrown in. Having hordes on might be a little too difficult for starters, since that pretty much forces you to be on the move from the start.
Of course, you can get some knowledge by watching LPs. I recall an LPer named Aavak who LPed 0.C stable, so that might be a good source of info.
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