I was biking across the field than a coyote jumped into the back of my bike and took a ride with me.
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Arshes began setting out the various tools required for the ritual, she traced a faint circle of protection and set candles to the cardinal points. There was no moaning, swaying or chanting and the like, her teacher had been contemptuous of such things “Magic is a tool like any other, don’t be taken in by the foolish practices of showmen”. Ironic considering how much he had liked to grandstand in battle… He was so cool 
The circle was simply a safe guard and the candles a focus, nothing more. She eyed the mushrooms she’d foraged with distaste, they helped uncouple the mind but frankly tasted like crap. Still, if she was to attempt to communicate across planes she’d need all the help she could manage…
Really I just wanted an excuse to chow down on some magic mushrooms 
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I appreciate the thought ZomTech but somethings not right?
This seems fine but the other… hmm
looks like the arrow duped wrong ahh well whats one arrow
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After spending months trying, in vain, to figure out where she was and how to return home Arshes had finally decided she needed to explore this unknown world more thoroughly.
Her first move was to secure a foothold in the nearby city, the architecture and styles of this alien land seemed strange to her sensiblities but she had little choice. From towers rising higher then any castle to buildings seemingly built largely from glass and other stranger structures.
Eventually she decided to base herself in what she believed was a communial residence, though it was like none she had ever seen. A place full of artifacts and wonders that would of astonished even her teacher.
It’s actually a modest town but for someone like Arshes a place this big would be considered a fair sized city 
.
The rule I’ve set for myself is no crafting electronics and no computer skills at all so having a place to loot “artifacts” from should make things a bit faster.
In the end I chose an apartment tower, clearing it out was probably the longest and most drawn out fight so far, I’ve mostly been avoiding pitch battles where possible but since I wanted somewhere more central to work from I figured a place full of raw materials would be a good spot.
Edit:
Two days later and I’ve managed to move everything over. Repeated attacks, including a frickin’ shocker brute sneaking up on me mid haul, made everything more difficult then it needed to be but Arshes can settle into what will hopefully be a more comfortable place. First task will be clearing up this floor, there’s bodies everywhere, then I’ll sort out a proper “stable” for my horses since the bathroom seems like a strange place to keep them. After that I’ve got a few ideas to try out, someone on here suggested using a vehicle to build bridges between buildings and I might give that a go and if the funnels/water tanks don’t work as they currently are I’ll do something with another “vehicle” to extend out from the balcony to set up a water collection unit. I know I said no custom vehicles but this but this is more a work around for the limits of the game rather then an actual vehicle so I’m not counting it
Edit 2:
For anyone wondering, vehicles definitely do work as bridges.
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Yay obesity attained! And 80 beef jerky stocked.
update:
The karma! I’m too heavy to ride horse now. And my health is low. I’ll go eat some vegetable.
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I see a lighthouse far from shore in the middle of a lake… I’m going to make a boat.
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The lab choices absolutely sucked, one ice lab I could only manage to explore the first two levels of and an ant infested lab but I’ve successfully collected all the lab journals I need to turn Arshes into an elf!
Happy times!
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Helping the outpost get started and supplying some of the manpower to guard their caravans was working out nicely. They see Basil as someone they can trust and who helps them. Much different than their distant overlords.
Ashes crouched with her back against a tree, eyes fixed on the nest before her. The place was crawling with the adult forms of the demonic spiders she’d seem before, intimidating alone but her eyes remained fixed on something far far more dangerous looking… she’d dubbed it “The Queen”. Many times bigger even then the adult forms she’d seen, it was impossible, radiating malice and magic, dwarfing everything around it. Arshes however wasn’t one to back down from a challenge. Remaining hidden, she began muttering the words to a spell…
Damn this thing was a tank, it had an absolute brick of hp and something tells me if I had of tried to fight it fair it would of wreaked me. If you try and take this on I suggest in the strongest terms bringing a plan and your A game because I doubt hitting it with a sword would be a good idea. On the plus side it jumped me 3 whole levels in stats through kills. 
Congrats on taking out such a monster. Demon Spider Queens have the highest raw stats of any monster I’ve encountered in any mod (5000 health alone is enough to make any survivor nervous), being the only one that can tank a direct hit from a LAW to the face and live to tell the tale. They aren’t too shabby in the offense department either, even if they can’t oneshot you in heavy power armor.
5000!?
You know, it’s times like this I’m glad I don’t code dive cos I doubt I would of even dared try tbh. The fact it can even hurt something in Heavy power armour is mildly terrifying.
Usually I don’t look at the details of stuff I haven’t personally encountered, but I wanted to see some monsters Magiclysm added, and then, well…
By the way, your playthrough has convinced me to finally use Magiclysm in my next world. 
Cool
It really has been an interesting mod to play with and it’s always nice to find new things and places!
On the heels of defeating the Queen Demon Spider found herself facing a more familiar enemy, while not common Dragons did exist in her world and this one looked like a young one…
Don’t be fooled by the name, young black dragons are terrifing.
Triffids, why did it have to be triffids?
Edit - And one if these days Alpha will give me a beneficial mutation. Already to deterioroating….
So, I’m new to Cataclysm. I just made this account because I have become mildly obsessed with the game. Decided to share my own experience at having a fresh start with very little context.
My world is heavily modded. I chose to just slap as much as possible onto the world and see what I could get away with. Took a while to limit the errors down to a single instance about a missing item or something but, it’s like a tie and so not a huge deal in my mind. However, I didn’t quite look over any other option. Especially in regards to World handling. Having left it on Keep instead of Reset which I assumed was the default way it was handled.
my first character died within an hour game time but, it was a trial and error process of attempting to make a hammer without a hammer tool. Only to rush into a city in frustration at not finding a level one hammer item and then dying to zombies. When I remade the character though, I kept the same overall design and start and ended up right back where I was in the last life. I kept the same name due to not knowing what the world handling was at first and it was likely a shocking moment both for myself and my character when they stumbled upon their dead body with the same name as them.
I laughed at first about it. Looked up the system online and watched a few videos to get a better grasp of things. Lurked the board as well. in the end, I returned to the heavily modded world and had started a third character fresh by forcing the second to bite their tongue off and end themselves.
Now I am somewhat roleplaying the idea of this character. Freya Valentine, the name I used here and her strange magical adventure of reincarnation. my headcanon for it is that she remembers each death and her experiences in her life that led to all her deaths. She slowly gets more skilled at things as she dies over and over and has even taken to trying to gather up her previous corpses and preserve them as a kind of memorial. I only got the first two so far as I’ve tried a variety of other starts with the character so she’s been everywhere from the prison (dying three times to the sentry bots) to her most recent life as an Archeologist at the bottom of a mine.
So that’s what’s going on in my crazed world. A world where one person keeps reliving the same cataclysm over and over until maybe they survive longer than a week.
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When my @ relives and re-dies the cataclysm again and again I think this is the game showing the fate of the general populace through various unsuccessful survivors.
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Oh yeah I understand the idea behind the choice after experiencing the game more. I just like sticking with the same overall character until I understand it as much as possible and maybe somehow survive for a month. Thus I just keep remaking the same character and it’s left that idea of the character continually respawning I suppose. I like to imagine that if this were to happen she would eventually become some next level survivor, remembering all her skills gained from hundreds of deaths as her personality becomes more and more pragmatic and dark until she’s completely unrecognizable from her original self in nearly all aspects.
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Groundhog Day was an excellent movie.
My first char of my first dive into the experimental builds has just escaped the lab he was trapped in and found himself a nice lumber mill to make a base out of. I am liking it so far but boy that escape wasn’t easy.
Vine, male, slow-healer, psychopath, phelloderm, robust genetics, tough, and an assortment of basic skills. He started out in the bottom of the lab, a nanofabricator room of all things with a nano recipe for basic power armour staring him in the face and a tripod menacingly pointing its flamethrower at him. He was an almost naked unwilling plant mutant, so you can only guess his psychological torment at staring down a firestarter(By the way, I never understood why bark gives you fire resistance if you have it, maybe in actually catching fire but once you’re on fire you should be done for).
He and the tripod played ring-around-the-rosy for a minute or two before he tried to outrun the pod in one of the side rooms. RIght there was a starting npc sargent-guy who unloaded an uzi into its face the moment he was out of the way. Talk about luck! The shots deafened him so he couldn’t talk to the sargent and thank him properly so looting ensued. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough nano material to do anything with the fabricator, even the other 3 recipies, so I just proceeded to make my way through the lab. There wasn’t anything special other than the fabricator on the floor I started. I was hoping an ID card would just be lying there but I guess fate wouldn’t have it for me.
A single floor up I found a room full of fetusses and mutated limbs and did what any sane person would do… smash all the vats and gobble up all the meaty bits. Luckily I got most of what I wanted, night vision, bark, thorns, leaves, and long fingernails for some reason, all with the only downside being thin-skinned and terrifying. I know some of you might want terrifying, but I’d at least like to have an easy time taming creatures. Not a bad batch I’d say. A bit later I found a syringe next to trog serum. Yep, straight up pumped it into my veins. Went straight to full night vision and IR vision. Lucky me.
Another floor up I found an exit through an underground train system. Wanting to loot the place some more I chose not to step into the long darkness and instead went up and up and up. Cleared out the entire lab except for the specimens in contained areas and the turrets but found not a single ID card, and the moment I reached the top floor I knew that I’ll have to go through the railway tunnels to escape, or so I thought. The tracks simply led to another lab, no other place, just another lab. With a sigh I knew that I had to clear the final room of this second lab in order to get my ID card.
I got down to the lowest floor and with flashlight in hand and an opened door I saw my prize, the ID card. I did not have the computer skill to hack anything at this point, so the purifier smart shot sitting behind the reinforced glass wasn’t within my reach. It was a grueling battle of plantman vs machine, not brawn but brain. There were several doors leading into the final room and a nice long hallway encircling the entire thing. Eventually their wit ran out and I lured the bots outside of the final room on the other side of where I intended to enter. I had a contingency plan for the turrets but it seemed that they were of the short-range variety, so I merrily walked over without a care in the world to claim what is rightfully mine.
At this point I had two choices, take out the remaining unexplored upper floors and exit there or walk back to the cleared lab and exit there. The lazy in me decided to not fight through the upper floors. Another breezy walk later the more familiar lab greeted my eyes and a few short flights of stairs later my little plant mutant swiped his card, and saw sunlight for the first time in ages. It was warm and comforting. The woodland creatures scurried away as he walked onto the road, but this didn’t matter at this point, mostly because he wasn’t hungry due to having feasted on the human corpses strewn throughout his lab ventures.
There was a single point of interest on my map just down the road, a lumber mill, only guarded by a tough zombie and a skeleton. A treasure trove of tools and materials. It is here that he made camp, it is here that he rested, and it is here that he will build a veritable wooden fortress out of the sheer number of wood and nails that he found in the mill.
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