You are only like a week ahead of me but seem to have done so much more. Probably just the way you are writing it. Is your character mostly melee focused? What are your stats like?
So I make my 4,748th character and lo’ and behold, I finally find my first vehicle, which was a motorcycle. In a fit of joyous rage I hopped on, pulled out of the parking lot, got it going fast and accidentally smashed into a building, killing myself instantly.
Time for another character.
(On a side-note, playing Cataclysm could probably be considered some sort of masochism. This game is poopie-hard. Just sayin’)
It can be pretty easy if you play it right. After the first 2 days if luck is on your side you can be set for a very long time.
It’s mostly the way I’ve been writing him. I’m a big thinker, so there are times when I’m writing this I’ll go off the cuff on some strange tangent related to the matter at hand. It also helps that I lucked out in a few spots, and I have backup plans depending on the situation. Did I just get wrecked and I’m in a lot of pain. I’ll toke it up and read some books while the pain subsides.
And yeah, to answer your question, he’s melee focused. It’s an issue that wasn’t exactly touched on, but out of all the three towns, there’s not a single gun shop. Anywhere. All the guns up till now were filched off of dead zombies, traps set off by the dead zombies, or drug runners, The first gun shop I found was actually in Riverside, that town he mentions south past the river, but he didn’t “see” that. Then irony would have it that as I was sifting through the notes I left on the map about important items and locations, I discovered that one of the houses in the first town actually has a basement full of guns and ammo. Completely forgot about that, but I didn’t grab any my first time around because I didn’t have any storage space on my person, and I was trying to be silent to avoid attracting Hulks.
I should mention as a disclaimer that I did turn off skill rust completely before summer began. After a certain level, your skills just cap off because the rusting eats up experience faster than you could put into it, and I’ve never found any Neural Biotics to negate it. I also read a lot of books, and my baseline intelligence is 12.
Dodge: 7 (98%)
Melee: 11 (8%)
Unarmed Combat: 4 (11%)
Bashing Weapons: 9 (3%)
Cutting Weapons: 5 (43%)
Piercing Weapons: 3 (69%)
Throwing: 4 (78%)
Firearms: 1 (85%)
Handguns: 1 (65%)
Shotguns: 0
Submachine guns: 0
Rifles: 0
Archery: 2
Grenade Launchers: 0
Computers: 2 (25%)
Mechanics: 8 (59%)
Electronics: 5 (17%)
Cooking: 10 (9%)
Construction: 8 (14%)
Survival: 3 (69%)
Traps: 4 (7%)
Tailoring: 5 (53%)
First Aid: 3 (46%)
Speech: 3
Barter: 0 (37%)
Swimming: 1
Driving: 5 (46%)
I didn’t cheat to gain any of these skills, aside from turning off skill rust (if you want to call that cheating.
ok, I was just curious what your stats were looking like since you were taking on hives and hulks with melee. I have never really used melee but need to get it up in my game to deal with skeletons (not high since they’re just skeletons) and my arrows just bounce off of them. If anyone is curious about my stats after reading my updates then Ill include them.
Dodge 1 (50%)
Melee 1 (50%)
Firearms 7 (8%)
Archery 9 (34%)
Electronics 4 (49%)
Cooking 13 (93%)
Tailoring 2 (29%)
First Aid 3 (6%)
Driving 1
Anything not listed is still level 0
I haven’t taken on a hulk with Melee. My tactic is to always separate them from the pack and open up on them with a gun; that’s why I carry one around in the first place. As for how my melee is so high, I try to make it so the first thing I do when I wake up is go fighting, so all the experience points accumulated falls into combat-related skills.
I actually always forget about the xp pool. Ive only been playing for about a week now so there is still a lot that I haven’t figured out. I’ve never had a vehicle or implants. Haven’t seen any military bunkers, beehives, ant hills, LMOE shelters, Megamarts, Hospitals, or triffid coves. Hope my character is strong enough when I do run into those things.
Started a new world with today’s commits, ran into the nearest town and managed to get a Saiga-12 with 50 rounds before the zombies caught on to me. Unfortunately there was no backpack to be found and nothing to drink, so I had to sprint a mapscreen over to another town. I spot a sporting goods store, and with Z’s all around me I sprint inside. As they start smashing the front in, I’m grabbing everything I can - backpack, baseball helmet, armguards, aspirin. I jump into the back room, and wait for them to come. I wait until I can feel their breath, pop some aspirin, and start blasting away with my auto shotty. Even with deep red recoil and 0 firearms skill, there’s no missing with a shotgun at point blank. I’m outside the store now, Z’s are still everywhere, about 20 shells left, and I still have nothing to drink.
I’m liking this round 
Well, time for the next entry.
I immediately felt something was wrong when I woke up. I clutched the Katana and backed up against the wall next to the door; I’m glad I secured it before going to sleep. Whatever was clicking was right on the other side of the door. I opened it, and the automated sliding door slid to the side with a low hiss like pressurized air being released. In the darkness right in front of me, was the enormous form of an ant the size of a German Shepherd! Ants are problematic enough small, but this… if there were more of them nearby, even I, the Grim Reaper of the Apocalypse, was going to have a problem.
And there were. I could hear the hisses and clicks echoing through the walls. The entire lab was swarming with them! What the hell was going on?! Was there a mutagen leak, or was this another one of their insane experiments?! I quickly hacked through the ant on my way out, trying not to think about the implications, but I couldn’t help it. Ants lived in colonies of millions, and if they were all that size, such a colony would be the size of Manhattan! The amount of food required to feed that kind of horde was immense, and they would probably be driven by that hunger to raid the surface world. While that would help diminish the zombie horde, it would also prevent settlements in this region.
This was worse than a zombie horde. Ants are much more organized than the undead, and in some ways you could say they’re also smarter. And they have numbers. It’s a diabolical combination, and if I wanted this place to be habitable to humans again, I had to deal with them.
I got into a large fight with the ants on my way back to the surface. I managed to avoid the main body, but even then, I still had to fight through several dozen of the bastards. I got quite nicked fending them off; those pincers hurt like hell! After patching myself up and making some repairs to my clothes, I got on my motorbike and drove several miles back east, trying to put as much distance as possible between myself and that science lab.
I stopped in the middle of nowhere and checked the map I printed out from the computer back at the lab. Apparently they had a bunch of surveillance systems located throughout the region that gathered random bits of data, but it also created a very detailed map of the region. There were a few points of interest, like a strange house of some sort to the northwest in the middle of the plains, an even stranger tower of fungus to the northeast, a mansion and farm to the south, just north of the town, and another science lab southwest of the farm. A lot of points of interest; I had my work cut out for me. First order of business, though, was to look into the Sewage plant just south of the lab I was currently at. Last time I went to one, I was rewarded with a flatbed. Who knows what I would find this time?
Huh… an hour later, and I’m now at an impass…
Well after my second character died in what seems to be the most hostile town in the face of the earth, I resolved to take my next character looting and run with wild abandon out of the city before the craziness started. Of course, he died too since there were only two roads out, and I chose the southern one that turned into a bridge over swamps that extended to at least the length the city covered. Yeah, that didn’t work out even with my awesome broadsword I looted out of a mansion and my Remmy 870. I learned that car-sized acid-spitting worms with giant insect support is worse than having necromancers pop up right next to your house overnight, though.
With my latest character I took the western road that ended in a military bunker I couldn’t get into, so I wandered into a field that led to a farm, that had nothing around it! I started digging pits around the windows and trying to fortify the place, then tried cooking some of the food growing there with the oven, and couldn’t figure it out. So I went out to the forests’ edge to chop down a tree and noticed a web spider, and after reading its description, assumed it would only attack things stupid enough to wander into its web. Then it webbed me and ate me.
Is there any way to use ovens in this game or am I just going to have to bring a hotplate or something with me next time? Also it’d be nice to know if faucets work on sinks, as well. I couldn’t get either to work for me. I’ve been having fun with this game since learning how to expand the window though! I wish that in the future the combat is handled more like Dwarf Fortress and in that level of detail, too. It’s very satisfying as a master swordsman in that to slice your enemies’ arms and legs before they can even throw an attack your way.
You can put sticks or paper in an oven and light it with a lighter without worrying about it burning your house down.
Lies!
Looks like house number three is going the way of the mushroom cloud. 
I’m currently trying to compile Cata from source, but cygwin is pissing me off pretty bad. Cygwin1.dll is missing, yeah right.
Going to reboot and see if the path changes fixed it, or if I messed up the syntax.
Alright, I guess that wasn’t so bad. It’s now nighttime. I arrived at the treatment plant at around 9 in the morning and found a whole semi right out in front! That’s awesome. Problem is, how do I get it back to the safehouse? I can’t reasonably drive both vehicles at the same time, and I didn’t have rope to hitch the motorbike to the back of the semi. So how do I move it to the safehouse?
My answer is the same as the guns in the science lab: I had to make a second trip.
Walking that enormous distance took all damn day. What took me half an hour to travel on motorbike took me 7 hours to walk on foot, but I have a semi now. It’s missing a wheel and the frame’s severely damaged and the engine’s been abused to hell (especially after I rammed it into some turrets near a military outpost), so I think I might just dismantle the whole thing for parts. I also threw an engine block into the passenger seat that was just randomly laying out in the middle of the road.
I’m tired as hell, so I’m heading to bed now.
New game: static spawn, there’s a pretty small town-- i.e it only has two parks, a library, too many houses and a parking lot.
CHA-CHING. flatbed truck. Town cleared by 9:32.
I have to do this more often.
Lies![/quote]
I do of course mean the brick ovens/fireplaces only found in cabins. Sorry. I’ve never tried it with the ovens in actual houses. Does that not work out well?
Well, let’s say it solves any issues with you being cold… forever.
That reminds me of my last character(in the last version!) who was walking on lava in excruciating pain and at 1 speed… he was eventually starving and dehydrated but his temperature was still cold. Possibly from his pains melting off.
Autumn Day 3:
The booming never stops, echoing through the stone walls of my cozy cave. The thunderstorm has been raging on and off for the past 4 days. My fresh meat has all spoiled, my jerrycan of clean water is emptying fast. Luckily, I thought ahead for situations like this. My stockpile of bottled water is still all in a nearby dresser. My days spent making beef jerky were time well spent. Not to mention all of the MREs I have from the Army Surplus stores that I’ve looted. I could last through this thunderstorm for the next 2 weeks and still be fine. My only concern is dealing with my crushing boredom. My pile of 2x4s are all gone from extending my floors. I have no books to pass my time and this weed will only last so long. What I wouldn’t give for some mutagen right now… if only to stop the shakes from the withdraw…
Lies![/quote]
I do of course mean the brick ovens/fireplaces only found in cabins. Sorry. I’ve never tried it with the ovens in actual houses. Does that not work out well?[/quote]
First it looked like it worked out. Lots of smoke but I just opened a window.
Then after I cooked a little bit the small flame became a raging flame and ate my house.