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April 30th, 2023:

"No, the riots were cool at first. I mean it was scary but people have a right to free speech, you know? But you could feel something change, like people stopped bringing signs and started bringing guns. They weren't looting anymore, they were just burning shit, and they stopped going home at night. I quit going and I told my friends to stay home, but they were still so mad about that FEMA video.

I don't know if you still had TV when the army got here. It was crazy, they had one of those robot suit guys out in front of the convoy and I guess they figured people would get out of the way, but the crowd just dogpiled the guy and all the soldiers opened up on them. The internet was down but people were going around the neighborhood talking about zombies and shit. They had half of one in a dog crate to prove it. That was right before we got the evac order. Right before China started bombing us.

So how did you make it out here all on your own?"

For this LP, we'll be sticking to the newest (or nearly so) experimental branch of the game. CDDA does periodically put out stable releases, but stable does not mean bug-free and the experimentals generally run just fine with lots of new fun content to boot. Saves are usually forward-compatible so we can update as needed.



Here are our world gen parameters. I've enabled wandering hordes, set the world to save if we die, and increased the city size - by default it's quite small. The game also comes packed with several mods, but we'll look at those on another run.



Character creation is a point-buy system, and there are a lot of options. There are even options for which kind of point buy you want! For our first character we'll be sticking with the default Evacuee scenario and the Survivor profession. Survivor is a completely blank slate but doesn't start with much in the way of gear, and Evacuee is the recommended scenario for anyone who's new to the game.

Our four stats are:

Strength: Strength mostly represents muscle, but also affects our HP and overall health and fitness. Strength adds to our melee damage, especially with bashing weapons, and helps us carry things, drag stuff around, and break free of enemies who try to grab us. Strength is great for characters who use bows, bashing weapons, or anything really heavy.
Dexterity: Dexterity affects our accuracy, attack speed, ranged aim speed, crit chance and ability to dodge, but not our move speed. It has a lot of minor effects as well, such as reducing the likelyhood that we'll damage our melee weapons when using them. Dexterity is great for characters who use cutting or stabbing weapons.
Intelligence: Intelligence affects our learning speed, our reading speed, our social skills, and our success rate when crafting things that are above our skill level. Like dexterity, it also has a lot of minor effects sprinkled throughout the game's systems. Intelligence is great for characters who want to be versatile.
Perception: Perception affects our ranged accuracy, crit chance, night vision, hearing, trap detection, and helps us spot hidden enemies. Perception is great for characters who want to use bows, guns, or stealth.

Stats can be dumped as low as four or raised as high as fourteen. All four stats are useful for nearly every character, and having a low stat usually doesn't totally lock you out of any playstyle. The one important thing to note is that in an unmodded playthrough, stats are mostly permanent! There are late-game methods for adjusting our stats, but these generally come at a cost, so we must choose wisely.



Here are our skill choices. There are a lot! Most are self-explanatory, though it is worth pointing out that Melee and Marksmanship represent general competence in those areas and greatly affect our accuracy, while more specific skills such as Cutting Weapons and Rifles are more about damage and crit rate. Devices means traps, Survival means bushcraft, and Fabrication is a big generic catch-all skill for everything from bricklaying to blacksmithing. Skills are usually pretty easy to pick up during gameplay.





Traits, Jesus Christ the traits.

The left column is good traits, the middle column is bad traits, the right column is our appearance. Our skin can also be light brown or rose but I'm not making another screenshot, so use your imagination. Appearance is entirely cosmetic.

The game assigns point values to these in an attempt to balance them, but a lot of the traits are useless or can be trivialized while others are so good or bad that they can be run-defining. I am absolutely not going to go over all of these, we'll discuss them individually as they come up.



And here we are, staring at a blank character sheet. We can pick a few more options here. Gender is cosmetic, though age, height, and weight affect your metabolism.

For our first character, we will need a name, one stat to raise, one stat to dump and two skills. Feel free to include any biographical details and if you really want to show off a trait or two, let me know. Otherwise I'll fill in the blanks to keep things moving. We will probably die horribly at some point, so don't be too upset if your pick doesn't make it.