Looting through an office building, find a card reader, torch the door open and find a science lab right at my start city! Paydirt! Walk upstairs, fungus lots and lots of fungus and a disappointing lack of serums. Guess I’ll have to figure out how to demolish a multilevel skyrise before the whole city is consumed by the eternal fungus
The answer is fire, of course. It always is, when dealing with fungals.
So I decided to try a helicopter pilot start as a change of pace from my usual low tech, hunter/gatherer type character. LOVE IT!
Introducing Chopper Carol (yeah cheesy name, I know), a local news station’s traffic reporter pilot.
When it all hit the fan, Carol took off in her traffic copter but didn’t notice the crew hadn’t refueled it yet until she was already on her way. Too far out to turn back, she set down on a bridge before crash landing if she went any further.
With no real supplies, Carol set out for a farmhouse that she’d flown over not far away. There were a handful of undead mulling about which promptly began shambling toward her once they noticed her stumble out of the underbrush. Grabbing a nearby branch, Carol clubbed at any who got too close while trying to circle around the pack. Luckily for her, there was a pitchfork lying against the wall of a nearby shed and the new weapon gave her more confidence to actively finish off the rest of the pack.
After cleaning up and helping herself to a meal of abandoned canned goods, Carol walks out through the fields and toward a dump not far from the farmstead. Unknown to her as she entered the dump, there was a mass grave on the other side with newly risen stumbling through the landfill toward her. Thinking quick, Carol began using her surroundings to her advantage. Barbed wire fences slowed the undead enough to jab at with the pitchfork, piles of glass were great traps to lure other undead into. In no time, more than two dozen dead lay broken around the dump.
Seemingly safe for the moment, Carol is now beginning to scavenge for tools and looking for a source of fuel she can bring back to refuel her traffic copter and fly off in search of a safe place and maybe some more survivors.
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Now, this is a conundrum. After overcoming the flu, Cammy started scrambling into town to finally explore it and perhaps get to the gun stores, that her recently discovered survivor map revealed. Right on the outskirts was a bank, which seemed like as good a place as any to start exploring. A few sounds came from the inside, but Cammy had been able to take care of the zombies she had met so far, so it didn’t seem like a big deal. Only problem is … they are not zombies. They are M16A4 TALON robots.
Her immediate reaction was to run into the first room she could to break line of sight, but now she is trapped. And her backback is right outside the door, because she had dropped it to prepare for the fight. Now the only question is whether to deal with them by using her two grenades that she still has with her, or just to make a run for it and hope for the best.
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An excerpt from a dumb story I made following one of my characters Avery ‘Norjak’ Brown.
“Under the veil of the night, Norjak aimlessly walked through the abandoned streets. Its Iron husks on each side meant to oppose now-extinct ants. In the distance they could hear the crinkle of fire. A mark left by those whose vocals were extracted. within this silence orchestra of suffering, Norjak found it oddly calming; like a twisted solace”
I found an utterly massive(like it takes up multiple overmaps) city called Union and it doens’t have anything like this just a ton of houses, grocery stores, police stations, cafes, coffee shops, resturaunts, etc. but the only things in it that take multiple tiles are some of the apartment complexes.
mininukes will easily demolish buildings.
If there is one thing I’m scared to do is turn one on and then have to try to outrun a Nuke. I have no idea at all how long they take to go off so my 40 nukes will probably gather a lot of dust
you choose how long a mininuke takes to go off you could set 5 minutes or 5 hours or anywhere higher or lower or in between
Oooh didn’t know that. Should help a lot. I’m curious would destroying the lab prevent the dimensional rifts in the top from spawning stuff? Freaky dimensional nightmares are starting to somehow escape from the top floor and I think it’s more of a problem than the fungus. Worried demoing the building would just leave the flyers complete free riegn over the city though.
Well, try it and tell us! 
I think it will not destroy the portal but I may be wrong.
"Alan Grimes, Introspectionist, Backstory Part One
My name is Alan Grimes. Yes, Grimes. Don’t say anything, I’ve heard them all.
I suppose you could call me a mage, though I’m not a very good one. I first learned about magic when I was eight or nine, studying in history class. I was amazed when I learned that many people used to be capable of amazing feats- magicians could channel lightning, teleport themselves, shield themselves from all harm, and start a fire with a snap of their fingertips. In addition, although some were more talented than others, anyone could learn it! At that point, I spoke up and asked: “But if magic was so amazing, why don’t we use it anymore?” The teacher laughed and said, “Who needs magic anymore? We can do all the same things with technology now, but better! Just look at all the progress we’ve been making in the last few years…” before digressing into all the recent technological marvels that scientists had been creating. I was shocked and dismayed. Why wouldn’t anyone want to learn magic?
Sure, there were technologies now that could do almost the same things, such as railguns and teleporters, but they were notoriously unreliable and likely to break down. In addition, they were extremely expensive to manufacture and were only for the privileged few.
Obviously, the average citizen probably didn’t need to be able to teleport, but I wanted to learn for the sake of being able to do something nobody else could if for no other reason- up to that point, I was mostly an average eight-year-old student- sure, my grades were some of the best in my school, but there were plenty of good academics out there, and that alone wouldn’t take me far. Perhaps I wanted to prove myself- who knows? All you need to know is that from that day onwards, I was obsessed with magic. Every free hour of my day was spent studying old books detailing how magic used to work. The more I learned about magic, the more I became determined to learn magic one day.
However, I knew it would be extremely difficult to find a tutor- if my parents would even agree. Magic had mostly fallen out of use, due to the fact that casting even the simplest spell was highly tiring and extremely difficult to pull off without years of study. Magic was too esoteric for the average citizen to take interest and too inconvenient to be put in use for the army or the elite. Who needed fireballs when you had a flamethrower? Who needed to be able to shoot magical missiles from their fingertips when you had a machine gun? Over time, magic became more and more fringe. Many of the few remaining mages formed an elite group and shunned newcomers, devoting themselves only to their study- I suspect they thought that if they made a groundbreaking enough discovery, they would be welcomed once more into society.
Of course, they didn’t have a chance- now and then, technology progressed far too quickly for them to catch up. Magical tomes gathered dust in old antique shops and museums. There were still a few magic academies in existence, but due to the fact that most of the people interested in magic were academic failures and rejects who thought they might be able to make a living for themselves another way, the academies accepted none but those true students of magic, the best of the best, which were far and few between. It certainly didn’t help that you needed to already know some magic to get in. One might have told those old mages to see sense and accept anyone they could, but I suppose they were bound by their professional pride.
Because of this, I knew that I didn’t have a chance at learning any magic anytime soon, at least before I graduated from college- as strange as it sounds, you needed to have an academic degree to get into a magic academy as well. In addition, my parents were starting to notice my unhealthy obsession with magic, and weren’t exactly keen to have a magician for a son. So I devoted my attention back to my academics, determined to be the best in my school to make my parents proud. In time, most thoughts about magic faded from my mind, but I never forgot the promise I had made to myself. One day, I would learn magic.
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Currently working on slowly clearing out a large town for loot, gathering companions, and working on making a good vehicle to move to a new location later on. I currently have a crap ton of stuff I want to bring with and two trunks is very much not gonna cut it.
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Aand my character died… Lol should really get better before trying to write again.
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My vehicle currently has no seatbelts, and despite that and going at 50 mph I decided to risk ramming into a giant mutated spider. I didn’t know how giant it was exactly and had no clue if I’d end up flying off my vehicle with my followers and having our faces shaved off by the road.
I say it was pretty successful
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11 mininukes in the bottom floor of a skyscraper is whats happening in my apocalypse. So much for that skyscraper, one hell of a crater and piles of blasted stone now. Dunno if I’ll ever get my hearing back though. Goodbye fungus and rift lab, hopefully.
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While looting some houses, I stumbled upon a locked bathroom. Not usually a big deal, but inside there was a bloody body holding a single-shell shotgun and a shotgun hull on the ground. This person had committed suicide. Upon further investigation of the house I found two wedding rings in the dresser and no other bodies nearby.
On the one hand I’m in awe at the level of detail for this particular scene. On the other hand, damn… that’s dark.
But anyway, back to what I did. I pulled the body out of the bathroom. Grabbed the two wedding rings, and buried her with her shotgun and the rings. (the body was wearing panties, a bra and a dress so I’m assuming it was a her)
The epitaph reads “A loving wife, killed not by the dead - but by grief”.
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Yes, there’s a few scenes (or random findings) that really are touching like this one.
So, I made myself a challenge - deserted island escape in spring (after some tries I get to know that in spring without ‘camper’ proffesion is nearly impossible to do (or if you are lucky enough and get sleeping bag on island)). After 13 days, and many dragonflies killed, I got quite cozy place - only a lot of ropes to make a raft and we can escape, yay! (need only to cut EVERY SINGLE TILE OF GRASS TO MAKE IT) I have a lot of food cause of naiads (70 fish fillets and 500 cattails) but I had also little of plant matter (some seeds, fiddles ect.) - so I think, let’s eat it, it should’t go uneaten 
So… I eat… A little of dandelions… A little of burdocks… A little of datura seeds… Yes… Datura seeds… I didn’t remember about it after sth like a year break from CDDA and didn’t look at description… I ate sth like 15 seeds of this drug. 2 days later my brave camper died cause of heart attack.
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Oof, I’ve noticed some pretty good scenes here and there but nothing quite like that. Just overall feeling more lived in since I last played which before this game was just about when NPC camps were first starting to get added to the game.
As for my situation… (hopefully not too long)
Playing on 0.E Stable. This is a picture of Charlotte Hall (my character) who would have been starting HS soon pre-cataclysm. You can’t see it but she has mid length red hair and blue eyes. She started out with no skills at all. Standing next to her is Tobie Sheppard who is a former hospital employee, which is about 30 tiles away from the shelter and also, surprisingly to me, her actual in game backstory. She has very short blond hair and green eyes. Also a cross tattoo only visible in a two piece swimsuit. She started out with decent first aid as well as pretty good rifle skill, plus basic knowledge on shotguns, handguns, and SMGs.
I am impressed by the improvements to the NPCs (among several other things). Charlotte is a tinkerer and for at least the first year her only combat skill was throwing. Sometimes if her focus was up she could toss a few spells off to deal with weaker skeletal threats. Big if though. Tobie has been the muscle but also often the person tearing down cars or fixing them or building/tearing down structures for materials. Often studying different books at night by floodlight. There have been some hickups but also pleasant surprises like one night when Charlotte, who at the time barely had any first aid knowledge, came home bruised by a few zombies, really beat up, and Tobie steps over and does first aid. A little thought to how to divide up the labor has kept things pretty smooth and there are signs that some tasks can proceed when the NPC is out of the RB. The current project is building a stone walled enclosure to keep animals in and zombies out. That takes a lot of limestone for the mortar and Charlotte usually just gets enough mined and resources prepped for another series of wall segments before Tobie is done with the last.
I could probably write up several paragraphs with certain close calls or interesting moments but lets focus on the picture and what got them there. They are standing just outside a Mi-Go encampment now having just finished getting their raid equipment in order. At the start of summer, year 2, Charlotte noticed this camp through her binoculars from on top of a radio tower and they spent the next 3-ish months trying to forge a path here, clearing the roads to drive quickly through. Not all roads mind, just a single main path in, through, and out of the city. There were quite a few close calls which recently prompted Charlotte to put together Tobie’s current gear, minus the space for spare clips as they are usually geared for quiet. Especially recently situations which Tobie’s trusty M1 Garand didn’t or couldn’t help unlike earlier days like the day a kevlar brute visited the shelter and Charlotte kept the brute chasing her while Tobie prepared to fire after having been thrown back. Charlotte’s not great with rifles but she’s studied a lot recently and done some practicing as well as a little help from Tobie. Expecting Tobie is going to pull most of the weight but at least Charlotte isn’t going to be useless.
So after the streets clogged with undead and new horrors the likes they hadn’t even imagined before. The mall beside the road which they needed to follow, where they couldn’t keep the turrets reloaded fast enough as monstrous horrors poured out of the place. Hours and hours in the aftermath pulping or dismembering corpses in the dark, the odd straggler quietly picked off. After easily a week of prep work getting the guns and outfits ready, magazines loaded and stowed. Tense minutes making sure all their gear was in order, putting trust in the automatic systems on the car as a hail of fire dealt with the alien things rushing up to harm them. They are ready to raid the place Charlotte spied at the start of summer, now the end of summer. There will be blood, hopefully mostly alien, and hopefully on the other side of the fight some of the rescued people will join up with Charlotte and Tobie, assuming they live. I think they are prepared. If this ends up being the end it was a pretty good run and it will be an exciting end.
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