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Let's Play Cataclysm! Be the first to be eaten alive

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areyoua:
Cataclysm is a wonderful zombie-survival roguelike made by Whale, but there is no Let's play of it even though there are almost 200 pages in its thread, which is http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=87501.0, so here I go.

It has been an awful few days for Thomas Crowder. First, he discovers that he has lost his job as a messenger in the city, then he finally gets thrown out of his apartment for not paying his rent, and then almost the entire world is eaten alive by marauding zombies. He's got simply incredibly bad luck, or so it seems. Not many people survived the initial outbreak, and even less managed to not have their brains "reappropriated" as zombie-chowder, but he did. Fleeing the metropolis in a stolen car, he found a town just as the gas ran out and broke into a home to find some supplies to carry him through the next few days. If there will be a next few days...

Initial Stats

As a messenger, Tom had to learn how to traverse a city with the speed of a "cheetah on crack", as his boss told you, so he developed a quickness unrivaled by any in the business. Additionally, he was used to carrying large quantities of stuff on his back giving him a above-average strength. He had taken the job as a messenger after graduating college with a degree in business, but not getting a job even though he had graduated near the top of his class with his intellect. He ascribed it to bad luck and the sight of him sucking on his inhaler for his asthma during the interview, but he always suspected that the real reason was that he regularly tripped on unavoidable and invisible obstacles others would call chairs due to his unperceptive nature and pretty average dexterity. This combination of a low-paying job and expensive college tuition led to his being unable to sleep, but his insomnia in turn led him to read books by the millions, so he was was quite the fast reader through the sights of his trusty eyeglasses for nearsightedness.

Starting Conditions

? - Books
# - Bed
[ - different articles of clothing
= -the one on the left is a battery and the one on the bottom-right is ammunition for a BB gun
. - floor
+ - Doors
, - small items, in this case a sewing kit
> - stairs down
the lines are walls
" - windows
anything with a backpack represents a stack of items, but you can only see one of the stack by using the look key

Thomas found himself in the bedroom of some victim of the apocalypse and thought about what he was to do. His car was broken down, so that was not an option, but he did see a backpack to use. He decided that he could either:
A. Explore the house for any useful tools
B. Leave the house and look outside for something helpful
C. Some other decision that suddenly came to him in an epiphany from the community what gods there are left in the apocalypse

Frumple:
Loot house. Get biggest hammer equivalent. Go smash zombies until you die :P

Die or find a lab, that is. If the latter, load up on purifiers and make stats better. Then go hunting for dead scientists and getcher cyborg on. I wouldn't bother with mutagens, really. Robust genetics hasn't helped me out much in th'past :-\

The Merchant Of Menace:
Beat down a door or that dresser and grab a 2x4.
Then, grab any crafting tools and skillbooks

GlyphGryph:
Check out that basement! It's probably chock full of goodies! Maybe the guy who lived here was some sort of survivalist fella!

areyoua:
Right then, here we go, first update.

Looting the house


Thomas first grabbed the backpack and put it on, giving him to ability to carry much more than he could with just his hands, he then moved around the room picking up the books, hoping that some of them would be useful, but to his disgust, all he saw was not one but two copies of "Self-Esteem for Dummies," a "How to succeed in Business," and a "Under the Hood," so the owner of the house must have been a mechanic with his own garage and serious self-esteem problems. He also ignored the the three pairs of sneakers in the room, and the pair of jeans in the dresser which implied that this mechanic was obsessed with shoes and went around bare-chested. He opened the door to the south and saw a hallway, to the east was what he thought was the kitchen, but there was nothing in the fridge, and only a plastic bottle with bleach, a plastic bottle, and a butter knife lying on the ground. To the west, he saw what amounted to an empty room with clothes just laying around. Specifically, he saw a rain coat and some leather gloves, but thought that they weren't important enough to merit getting into his backpack. Taken all together, the man living here before Tom must have been in some serious financial trouble, which makes sense when you saw his basement.



Solid rock. Really. So instead of putting perhaps drywall around the basement, this man had simply told the builders to dig a rectangular area out of the earth under his house, and left it that way. Perhaps even scarier though was the complete lack of light in the basement, but Tom screamed like a little girl was brave and made his way due north hoping to find some stuff, and he did. North of the stairs were a few rows of shelves from which Tom grabbed a hammer, a baseball bat (of which there were two), and nothing more. It seemed like this mechanic loved playing baseball, but without a ball. Tom was then dejectedly made his way up the stairs with his new possessions after an apparently fruitless search for some goodies with a very poor opinion of the mechanic when he saw a map of the surrounding area just hanging from the wall of the basement. It was too dark to see inside the basement, so he took it upstairs and unfurled it to see the following



0(or is it an O?) - parking lots
. - fields
lines- roads
yellow crosses - intersections with manholes
H - Highways
F - green are forest blue are swamps
v, <, >, ^ (various colors) - buildings of various types, I won't list them here as there are simply too many, but it seems that the only people here are ones that know what they're doing.
Also, there's more to the map, but nothing terribly interesting, which is interesting in and of itself.

What to do next? Decisions, Decisions.

A. Loot stores for supplies
B. Flee the city for the forest
C. Epiphany time

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