Previously, it was best to use the most recent, experimental versions, which changed from day to day, making the project a bit fiddly to keep up with. Get a little food together and you can instruct your fellow survivors to go out and forage, hunt, chop trees, scavenge for supplies, or build while you go out exploring, or sit back sipping your latest batch of strawberry wine.Ĭataclysm is a free game, constantly updated by a legion of volunteers over many years. But since last week's stable update, known as 0.E Ellison, you can direct any friendly NPCs you recruit to build, maintain, and expand semi-autonomous camps anywhere there's enough clear fields. You can still bum around in the woods, fight in the city, build your own fortress, or hobo from town to town in a home-made car, exploring its endless world generation for as long as you can survive. The headline changes though are based around building and interacting with NPCs, making the world bigger and more involving than it used to be. Its character creation and development is wild, as Brendy demonstrated before he fled the RPS treehouse and therefore ceased to exist. You can switch all the monsters (save for normal wildlife) off entirely, and live in its post-apocalyptic cities, remote farms, and forests (an optional desert setting is still in the early experimental stage) forever. You can play it with magical spells added, or medieval weapons, or ramped up mutated zombies.

You can replace the zombies with dinosaurs.

Now is a perfect time to give it a try, even if you, like me, find zombies boring and dislike roguelikes. Its latest big update came out last week, and already threatens to consume every hour of my days. That was over three years ago, and it's been expanded slowly but constantly since then. The last time I wrote substantially about the zombie survival sim Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, I described it as 'a roguelike you could play for the rest of your life'.

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