Cheating a lot, really.
Well, sort of. I started a character with stats through skills enabled, upped the trait limit and did a tweaker bad day start able to spend all 18 points on traits. The most important traits? Zui Quan and Drunken master. Character took a long time to get started, I was in bad shape on day 9 when the withdraw finally wore off. I was desperately raiding a motel, knowing I couldn’t handle even 3 zombies, when suddenly I was moving faster and hitting and dodging like I should be. I escaped with food and a decent condition truck (leaving a riot bot and ton of zombies behind me).
Life got really easy at that point. The desperate struggle to avoid aggro during that first week turns into a triumphant thrashing of anything that comes near. I cleared the city I started in of major threats early in the summer. This is a character who wears no armor and carries no weapons. The only weapon needed: a jug of cheap wine.
First year ended with my character having several companions, most skills in the 4-6 range, stats goin up, generally just walking through the apocalypse pretty much untouchable, at least when they are drunk. They spent the winter clearing a second city, and the next year they travelled to two other much more distant cities and cleared those of major threats.
But there comes a point where you just aren’t getting any better. Where you don’t need more gear, more materials, more anything. I hit that point, still able to handle anything without shocker in the name handily. I had been playing this character with no CBM or mutations, and decided to change that as I had a stash of a dozen power storage and the much loved joint torsion ratchet. Once they added the dielectric capacitance CBM, there was nothing any zombie could do to even slow me down.
So of course, since this character is so ridiculously OP already, it’s time to take it that last step. Time to savescum until I get some mutations I like. I got ridiculously lucky with this. My character went from pretty to very to beautiful, has insect wings, phelloderm, strong, very fast healing, a whole bunch of other perks (robust genetics is great). No bad mutations at all. I had high thirst for a while but got lucky with a purifier, costing me only bark in the process.
So now they have tons of good mutations, CBMs for most situations (though none of the really high end ones like teleport or time dilation or that one that lets you phase through walls), a team of… 5 npcs (was way more before one really terrible trip through a city), A swank vehicle with every crafting station and tons of guns/gear/materials of every kind. I even spent several days training my NPCs in fabrication, one of these days I’m gonna make a massive pile of switchblades for throwing. I’m not even sure what to do with them at this point, it’s not like they need anything, they have about a hundred squares of crops they aren’t harvesting so food should never be a problem again, they’ve brewed a metric shitload of vodka and now are working on beer… there’s just not much left to conquer.
