@Pickle, I’m not sure if you’ve tried it, but Pain Resistant is a trait I take 100% of the time, and I also take -12 points in traits, stuff like milk or junkfood intolerance are easy to deal with.
You MUST level up on weak enemies if you’re going to “fight” bigger guys. Dodge is critical, and starts being useful around 3-4, because that’s when (if you’re watching your encumberance!) you can have at least 1-2 dodge available. At the beginning, crowbars or two-by-fours (and a 2-by-sword) are good, because they have high to-hit. Once you’re at melee/bash 2 or so, you can find other weapons. I think I usually look for baseball bat (19 bash) and if I get lucky, a fire-axe (19 bash 20 cut or something, ludicrous). Boomers don’t bite, so you can’t get infected, and if you have good dodge and/or armor, you can just grind up dodge a bit before your focus drops to useless. If you have the time, you can just sit there for hours letting the boomer harass you.
Only with minimum 3 dodge, good armor, and melee would I even suggest going near brutes, let alone hulks or other types. I was able to kill a brute at a low level only by setting all the bushes I could on fire, and it almost broke both my arms. This is with pain resistance, so I would’ve been obliterated without it. If there’s a shocker enemy, you can use wooden weapons, like the baseball bat or quarterstaff to not get shocked while you hit them. Ironically, guns are harder to level up because of their ammo scarcity, so in practice are worse to use, and far more dangerous if you haven’t leveled dodging.
Vehicle modification is battery intensive, so until you can survive (renewable or multi-season stored food, water, and clothing), you can just save up batteries, work on finding books, etc. Books are the only practical way to progressing in Cataclysm in my opinion, though I do occasionally have to craft 20 ergonomic grips or other things. Use the Find (search) function to look for the easiest, or at least, most manageable recipes if you have to grind. I don’t usually do it, but if you’re patient and look through houses (use ‘v’ to go faster) you can find lots of stuff you’d normally want skills for. Charcoal smoker for example, cooks and dehydrates food and you can make plenty of charcoal (constructed kiln + logs), but it takes something like fabrication or mechanics 4 and a book. I found one in a house literally as I was planning to grind up to the level. If you learn where you can reasonably find cool stuff (schools have books, restaurants can have food, spices, gallon jugs) you can get the barely surviving part of the gameplay over with, and work on the exploring parts, which in my gameplay is like “stage three”. Stage one is starting out and getting food and water going, stage 2 is grinding skills and scavenging up exploring a little if I need something unique, and stage three is when I get the vehicle, find a lab, and die to a turret. I’m going to get past stage three someday.
