Most professions start like the Cataclysm was a sudden thing. The evacuee was suddenly brought into an evac shelter (by whom?!). Then there is the shower victim and others, you should get what I mean.
But the lore indicates that there were literally skyscraper-sized monsters some months ago and one especially cataclysmic portal storm. This all happened some time in the past, probably around up to 9 months.
I would expect that things did not derail just before the game started. Everything seemed to have been abandoned and people turned to ferals/zombies at game start, which appears illogical.
The entire world was literally breaking apart the entire time already, so why is april 30th (or something) so special?
It seems that no people really prepared for this, except the LMOE shelter folks maybe. Were they all struck by the blob psychosis? There is also no way supermarkets still worked with portal storm monsters and mi-gos flooding the world, so where did people get their food? No houses were looted. No makeshift bases were built (except the bandit fort and the one survivor camp). I would expect masses of people to leave the city and flee (and leave shanty towns of impromptu camps on their way), but this did not happen either.
What am I missing? I did read the wiki on the lore but it differs immensely from the current experimental and the Erk’s plans, so unfortunately it could not bring me clarity.
Also random shower thought: Is the player afflicted with blob psychosis, too? Is this why especially newer players get overconfident, try to bash Z heads in and die, only to become one of them? Or why overconfidence is still the number one killer amongst even experienced players?
I’m also curious now, though I always assumed the default date is just set that way so the weather ain’t too cold or warm due to most starts not being geared for either ambient temperatures.
But the answer to your last question though is yeah, you have blobby within you which is why you could be shot to near death yet still recover far quicker than you can irl. And you also become one of the Zs after dying 'cuz of blobby itself.
Blob is our only god, and he is real, how else can we explain the incredible desire of all players to kill everything that moves and die because of it?)
Ghe only one way to exit blob slavery-become one with mycus
There are no in-game indications of the sky scraper monsters, as no completely smashed buildings exist (there are some fires and a collapsed office tower, but that’s it), with no trails of total destruction of man made structures and terrain alike.
I agree the default start date is probably selected for temperature reasons, as well as to give the player a chance to get some farming done while it’s warm.
However, if blob fueled riots would happen and those killed would rise again about a day later, things could get out of hand very fast. If riots were still going on when zombies rose the kill count would escalate rapidly, so if someone in charge of a working command structure hadn’t figured things out by the third day or so and still have the means to contain it by pulping dead at a mass scale (all the while dealing with riots) things would probably be lost to the zombie hordes. However, there ought to be some that saw things happening and secured themselves somewhere, and some of those may have made it. If some of these were rich, powerful, and sufficiently paranoid, they may still be safe within luxury bunker complexes hidden from the world…
Those of lesser means may make it safely out of the cities, but they’d probably not be prepared for mutated fauna, and a lot of people would probably die from a reluctance to pulp loved ones who encountered said fauna and didn’t make it. There’s also the worst monsters of them all, human scum…
The Cataclysm is a sudden thing, but various things already happened like the feral riots and the rising of the dead. That appears to be the first thing they have to deal with, hence the FEMA death camps and the Mass Graves. I dunno if they’ve changed it now, but people going Feral in the early days prior to the Cataclysm happened en masse. The probable reason why there’s more zombies than ferals is that, according to one type of survivor you can start with in the Evacuee scenario, you could snap out of it, which to me isn’t exactly best thing to do within a sea of crazies, so probably most of those zombies are ex-ferals.
And the reason the Evacuee scenario is vague on how you get there, at least the way I see it, is because most professions is available there and it’ll be hard to state a mode of arrival that would make sense for them all. Do you expect a fully-geared soldier to be allowed to board an evacuation bus to go to them shelters? Or a deathrow inmate?
And last thing to say is that the lore is still growing, and it may even change. I used to play the stable version in Playstore not long ago and they had no Portal Storms there, but in the latest they do. Because despite how long CDDA has been developed, it is still under development.
EDIT: And another thing, it seems to me that in most scenario you are only alive because of luck, as to which side of the spectrum your luck is? Its probably gonna a different answer if your attire is either military gear or a bath towel.
You’ve got a hiccup in your timeline mainly because the actual world ending stuff didn’t start happening a year ago. The cataclysmic events have been rolling in force for about a month, and the big portal storms and monster invasions only went on for about two weeks. It was quick enough that some people kept their heads in the sand and convinced themselves it was just a bad news cycle until it was too late.
Some of this stuff isn’t represented in game because until a year or so ago we didn’t have a consistent rule for it and the game alternated between starts that made the cataclysm seem immediate and world building that made it seem years ago. We’ve only fairly recently started organizing it around a clear timeline.
the answer to the question why we don’t have titanic monsters in the game is quite simple-we haven’t learned how to create them. not hostile machines, nor titanic monsters. all we can do now is create a monster-a “blob controller”, make all the nearest drops gather around it, and the zombies go to eat and turn into drops. as a result, there will be 1 huge horde that looks like 1 huge organism. But that not a zombie godzilla
A question I would like to ask you, @Erk, the master of the lore, which also concerns me in terms of lore (is the Cataclysm just affecting Earth?): Let us say we somehow get into space and look at the (formerly?) great blue marble from the orbit. What would we see?
Also considering that the majority of the Earth is not land but water (deep sea monsters ahead?) and also rock, is this affected by the Cataclysm, too?
If we cut the Earth in half, would we see the Mycus or something else infest the planet from within like regular mould on food would? Considering we got strange things in the mines already, is this an indication there is more down below?
Another thing: New England is far from active volcanos, yet lava spawned in the mines and scattered rifts. There are also hot springs (indicates volcanic activity, in real life there is only one single warm (not hot) spring in New England, List of hot springs in the United States - Wikipedia). Why is this?
For the moment, earth would look pretty much the same from orbit. The seas are also infected though. I imagine it will be a little bit before the blob penetrates to the mantle and core, but I’m not sure about that one.
I thought we removed the weird lava seams. However they’re likely less about plate tectonics and more about something at the surface level.
I think they’re only associated with the portals now. I mean if intense energy is pouring out of them it could melt the rock and dirt on the surface. Pretty annoying though.