Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is an open source apocalyptic survival roguelike with the ability to craft items, scavenge, forage, fight, and build both homes and vehicles.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is an open source apocalyptic survival roguelike with the ability to craft items, scavenge, forage, fight, and build both homes and vehicles. Originally created by Zachary "Whales" Jenkins, Cataclysm built up a decent following before the project was abandoned. The community never gave up on the game - a small group of dedicated modders, hackers, and contributors kept hacking a way at the code, even knowing it was never going to be mainlined, working instead on a myriad of mods played by the few players still lingering around slowly emptying forums.
Eventually, they were contacted by a web developer with some space to spare, who was saddened by how a game with such great potential was dwindling, and saw an opportunity to truly breathe life back into the game. Darkling Wolf and Kevin Granade seized on the idea of spinning off a full-fledged branch project, as if they'd been waiting for the moment. The subtitle Dark Days Ahead was added to the end of the original name, a website was thrown together, and the word was sent out that, like the undead abominations that lurk it's street, Cataclysm was back on its feet and hungry for flesh blood.
Since then, the team of active developers has grown. A number of developers have joined the project, and, with the aid of Let's Players like jefmajor, the fanbase has increased steadily, well past it's previous highs, and things are only looking up from here. There are some great new features in the pipeline, and the game is getting better every day. Hopefully, someday soon, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead will be as well known the giants of the genre, like Dungeon Crawl, ADOM and Unreal World. But we can't get there alone, so if you want to contribute, there's no time to start like now.
A list of developers who actively maintain or have contributed significantly to the project can be found on the wiki
Where do I begin...
You emerge from the shelter into the dim light of an overcast day, and look around for the first time since the disaster.
The world as you knew it is gone and in it's place, a twisted mockery of all that was once familiar.
Everything was cast aside in that frantic race for the shelter. You have no food, nothing to drink, no weapons. Nothing but your ingenuity and the fierce determination to survive against appalling odds.
A grim prospect faces you. Perhaps worse even than the nightmares of last night, when you were tortured by dreams of the dead themselves rising to jealously tear life from the living.
You cast your eyes up the road and begin to walk towards a house in the far distance. Things may be bad right now, but you've got a sinking feeling that there are darker days ahead.
What is Cataclysm?
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is a roguelike set in a post-apocalyptic world. Surviving is difficult: you have been thrown, ill-equipped, into a landscape now riddled with monstrosities of which flesh eating zombies are neither the strangest nor the deadliest.
Yet with care and a little luck, many things are possible. You may try to eke out an existence in the forests silently executing threats and providing sustenance with your longbow. You can ride into town in a jerry-rigged vehicle, all guns blazing, to settle matters in a fug of smoke from your molotovs. You could take a more measured approach and construct an impregnable fortress, surrounded by traps to protect you from the horrors without. The longer you survive, the more skilled and adapted you will get and the better equipped and armed to deal with the threats you are presented with.
In the course of your ordeal there will be opportunities and temptations to improve or change your very nature. There are tales of survivors fitted with extraordinary cybernetics giving great power and stories too of gravely mutated survivors who, warped by their ingestion of exotic substances or radiation, now more closely resemble insects, birds or fish than their original form.
Featuring a huge generative overland area to explore and improvise and learn from as well as a variety of procedurally generated dungeon crawls to attempt, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is an open-source roguelike that requires creativity and risk in order to survive a future where everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.
http://en.cataclysmdda.com/
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