YMMV / Cataclysm

• Broken Base: With DDA's increasing focus on realism, the base has been severely split between those who like the changes and those who consider the changes to simply add tedium, such as zombies dropping filthy clothes (which require finding water and using a washboard in order to avoid a mood penalty), or proficiencies (most of which significantly penalize crafting if you don't have the necessary one). There's also the shift away from the original game's future setting to a present-day setting, which was also received badly by parts of the fanbase.
  • Both of these have eventually resulted in the creation of the Cataclysm: Bright Nights fork, which shifts the game back to sci-fi, and goes less hard on realism.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Bears and moose are fast, tough, and aggressive. They and their zombie counterparts are infamous for mauling early-game characters: moose, in particular, have a reputation among the community like that of carp in Dwarf Fortress.
  • Wolves are faster than you and attack in packs, and killing one wolf will, for a time, make any other wolves you encounter aggressive. Thankfully, grim howlers (their zombie counterparts) only come alone and are weaker.
  • Among the mutant wildlife, giant wasps, black widows, and giant trapdoor spiders are aggressive and venomous. Black widows can occasionally be found in basements, usually in a massive horde, and the player will likely be slowed by blundering into webs the instant they use the stairs. Giant wasps have a distressing tendency to Go for the Eye, and occasionally spawn in decent numbers outside a special, paper-walled house. Giant trapdoor spiders tunnel underground like giant worms, are fast and tough, and spawn in special lairs that may not be visible at first glance.
  • Most of the special undead give some players good reason to use the available mods that disable them. To wit:
    • Zombie brutes will send you flying, and shocker brutes combine this with a potentially stunning area-of-effect electric attack. Zombie wrestlers can do this and grab you like a grappler zombie then drag you around, while zombie nightstalkers are invisible in the dark and can attack from afar with their stretchy arms. Skeletal brutes combine the brute's strength with bulletproof bony armor; kevlar zombies have kevlar for skin that gives them great staying power; and ashen brawlers are shrouded in a cloud of smoke that makes your character cough, wasting valuable time and potentially injuring the torso.
    • If left alive long enough, brutes turn into zombie hulks, which combine the brute's punch with sky-high HP, immunity to .22/9mm bullets, the ability to destroy any barrier, and terrifying speed. Skeletal juggernauts trade off speed for stretching attacks and even more armor, while kevlar hulks turn all these characteristics up to eleven, being immune to all but the strongest armor-piercing shots.
    • Zombie bio-operators, while rather rare, can swiftly mangle characters with their brutal bionic martial arts attacks. They have an elite version that's even worse.
    • Zombie technicians can yank any metal-containing weapon out of your hands. Whether this is a momentary aggravation or a death sentence depends entirely on what other monsters are around.
    • Zombie necromancers can revive any unpulped or unburnt zombie corpse, and zombie masters can upgrade zombies on the spot, sometimes into other zombie masters. The PK's Reimagining Game Mod adds a third monster, the zombie lord, that combines both of these abilities into one monster.
    • Zombie predators are upgraded zombie hunters with an attack that stabs you in the torso, knocking you over and causing bleeding. They are also much faster than you and have the feral hunter's leap, meaning they can rapidly close in for the kill. Not fun enough? Consider the zombie prowler, which has the predator's leap and impaling attacks, but is also invisible in darkness, and likes to lurk in dark subway tunnels...
    • Corrosive zombies trade off the spitter zombie's Area of Effect acid spit for a rapid acid attack that piles up pain. They are also quite tough (140 HP) and spew acid around themselves when struck, making melee combat even more of a nightmare. Even worse, soldier zombies can evolve into two even stronger variants, the bilious soldier zombie and the caustic soldier zombie, both of which have milspec armor and even stronger ranged attacks.
    • Grenadier zombies deploy explosive variants of the ever-annoying manhacks, ranging from EMP bombs and tear gas to lethal grenades and C4 charges. Elite grenadier zombies are even worse, as they deploy much deadlier 'hack variants— if you're unlucky enough, they can send out a mininuke manhack. In older experimentals, they spawned more often, making them an incredibly deadly threat. Both Grenadiers and Elite Grenadiers have the nasty tendency to activate the last of their explosives upon being killed, resulting in several explosives going off in quick succession. Later game versions replace them with robots that do the same thing: the NR-031 Dispatch for the grenadier zombie, and the NR-V05-M Dispatch for the elite grenadier zombie.
  • Blobs are merely a self-replicating annoyance. Fungal monsters are rapidly self-replicating and potentially lethal, mostly through the indirect hazard of unearthly fungal infection. And if you see even one Fungaloid, that surely means there must be a huge patch of fungal terrain nearby that's rapidly spreading.
  • For Nether monsters, there's the fast and aggressive mi-go, and the regenerating Mighty Glacier that is the shoggoth. The flaming eye is a more passive version, as its stare can inflict a variety of nasty status effects ranging from getting slimed with ectoplasm to spontaneous mutation or fungal infections. It was even nastier in older versions where the flaming eye had terrain-destroying Eye Beams, as it could blow up your car or collapse the building you're in on top of you.
  • Anything with a gun, from bandits to military robots. Most characters can't take more than a couple of 9mm shots even with decent armor, and a burst from a milspec turret will cripple (limbs) or one-shot you (torso, head) unless— or even if— you're in Powered Armor. Turrets in particular are the main reason to be careful around abandoned laboratories.
  • Unseen hunters. They're invisible (and regenerate) in darkness, camouflaged (read: almost invisible) in light, faster than you, jump around like fleas on crack, hit like a runaway train, and can grab and drag you around with their basic attacks. They're the reason you stay out of subway tunnels unless you've got a good reason to be there.
  • NPCs with flamethrowers, even friendly ones, tend to indiscriminately fire them at anything they deem an enemy, even inside buildings. Even outside, the blast of the flamethrower can end up catching a building in its radius and burning it down; this denies you of the spoils and can attract zombies as the building collapses with a deafeningly loud smash. Fire also tends to destroy clothes and cause huge amounts of pain if you're caught in it, meaning almost-certain death.
  • Tank Drones are one of the deadliest robots in the game. They have half as much health as a zombie hulk, very strong armor, a variety of deadly weapons built into them (Taser and flamethrower for close range, automatic rifle and grenade launcher for medium range, and a rocket launcher for long range), and the ability to chase you down. Generally, your only option is to run.
  • The 0.D experimentals added a bunch of mi-go variants, some of which have ranged attacks. The worst, however, is the mi-go slaver. Its slaver beam, as a magical spell, can pass through any block of see-through terrain; it drains stamina and inflicts pain, which lowers your stats and makes it harder to fight or flee. Mi-go slavers also have night vision, making night raids with them around a crapshoot, and can instantly abduct you if you're badly fatigued and suffered enough pain to lower your strength below 3. All these traits are bad enough on their own... but a bug briefly turned them into the most dangerous enemy in the game, when it made their slaver beam completely drain your stamina while inflicting enough pain to bring all your stats to 0, which was a death sentence. After a well-deserved nerf adjusted the pain and stat/stamina drain inflicted, they're still much more dangerous than their vanilla mi-go brothers, but no longer the walking game-overs that they were.
  • The official Magiclysm mod, which adds magical items, abilities, and monsters to the game, also adds demon spiders as a deadly encounter. Often found on the outskirts of towns, they deal enough damage to instantly destroy a character's limbs 4 times over and can cast explosions in the player's location. The strongest variant, the demon spider queen, has the highest difficulty rating in the game at 25663 points, according to the game files: for comparison, the most powerful monster in the base game only has a difficulty rating of 500. While it is possible to kill them, it would require some of the heaviest firepower available to even have a chance of survival.
• Fandom Rivalry: The Dark Days Ahead fork has one with all the other main forks (Bright Nights; Era of Decay; There is Still Hope), as fans of the latter tend to intensely dislike DDA's focus on realism (with opinions that the realism is inserted only to make the game harder), the shift towards a less sci-fi setting that resembles the real world in nearly every regard, and/or certain other design decisions (such as not allowing the player to turn off mechanics like skill rust or portal storms). On the DDA side, several players prefer the increased difficulty of DDA and the intense realism focus. There is also a dislike based on the perception of DDA's main devs as being rude to other contributors and intensely hostile to the players, whereas the developers of other forks are considered much more approachable.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Archery. It's easy to get started (smash a fridge to get a tube and craft a slingshot), and you can make arrows out of almost anything, and pull off headshots most of the time. Archery also trains, and benefits from, the Firearms skill, which represent the general proficiency of the character with ranged weapons. Until the Fabrication skill was introduced, it also determined success when hand-loading ammunition. That's right: your post-apoc Legolas cosplayer could also prepare ammo, even if they had never held a gun in their life.
  • Sewing thread. Weightless, easy to find (smash a window, disassemble the curtain's string) yet a single unit of it burns like kindling. In earlier versions the same unit was enough to start a raging fire.
  • Krav Maga is the second most damaging martial arts style there is, with nifty bonuses to boot.
  • Combined with Niten-Ichi-Ryu, the already-good katana/nodachi becomes a force of destruction. A character so armed can 2-3-shot zombie hulks and one-shot any others.
  • In 0.C, Really Bad Day was much easier if you took one of the martial arts traits, high strength, pumped as many of the bonus skill points the scenario gives you into unarmed combat as possible, and picked a military surplus store as your starting location (first-aid kits can spawn there, and they used to be able to cure infected wounds instantly). You didn't have to worry about finding a weapon, which meant starting unarmed and being forced to flee the burning building into a horde of zombies wasn't as bad. As a bonus, once you recovered from the starting handicaps you were capable of taking on some of the worst Demonic Spiders the game has to offer head-on and win. 0.D made it much harder to heal infected wounds, nerfing this significantly.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Giant jumping spiders. They only exist to bite you for negligible damage, but poisoning and slowing you down enough for regular zombies being able to outrun you.
  • Boomers are fragile and only as fast as a regular zombie, but they spew goop at you, blinding you and making you easy prey for other zombies unless you have some sort of protection for your eyes. If you engage them in close-range combat, they explode, potentially doing the same thing as if they'd spit at you. The huge boomer is much the same, but are a bit tougher and spew glowing sludge that lights you up, making you stand out in darkness.
  • Spitter zombies. Their acid attack almost always does some damage to you, and while it may look like nothing at first, repeated attacks will cause more pain, which will slow you down. Get too much, and you might find yourself unable to run from one of the stronger enemies...
  • Giant dragonflies are the most aggressive creature you'll find in swamps, and are annoying hard to hit for characters with low melee skill. Assuming you aren't swamped (heh) by the more dangerous creatures in the area, they'll remain a persistent annoyance for survivors trying to live near waterways.
  • Blobs are self-replicating and tend to crowd out other wild animals. And unlike fungaloids or triffids, the only way to decrease their spawn rate is to search and kill the bigger blobs, as slime pits can't be burnt down.
  • Any enemy that's small, fast, and tends to run away after attacking. Examples include krecks and manhacks.
  • Sewer rats do negligible (if any) damage, but practically require you to strip nude just so you have a chance at hitting them. Zombie children are the same, with only slightly more damage and a mood debuff inflicted when you kill them.
  • Shady Zombies aren't that dangerous, but they're invisible in the dark and usually travel in groups, so you never know if you're done with them unless you have a flashlight handy.
  • Acidic Zombies lack the Spitters' ranged acid spit, but can still apply corrosion when attacked in melee. Additionally, preventing them from getting back up is more annoying since pulping, the fastest method, has a risk of splashing acid onto your legs, meaning you need to butcher them, which is slower. Spitter zombies share this problem.
  • Feral hunters are faster than you, can see in the dark, and can leap, allowing them to move into squares behind you— annoying when they're alone, potentially deadly if you're facing multiple enemies. Fortunately, they do only slightly more damage than a regular zombie, lacking their upgrade's deadly stab attack. They can also be baited into going on far ahead of their zombie allies, letting you fight them off on your own terms.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • It was once possible to salvage rotten food by cooking it, which was most obvious with meat gathered from hunting. Even now you can cook safely with rotten ingredients so long as the end product is non-perishable, although non-perishable food has its own inconveniences.
  • The game has little to no measure about the quantities of stackable items laying on the ground as far as fire is concerned, so 1 unit of paper burns as long as 500. This was gamebreaking back when cooked ammunition could damage walls - a box of .22 ratshot served much better as breaching charges, one bullet into the fire at a time.
  • Until the summer of 2018, it was impossible for a vehicle to break into two parts. A side effect of this was that building a spiral pattern of frames around a vehicle would make it essentially indestructible, since any frame breaking would result in some frames falling off. The introduction of bike racks provided for a way to split vehicles into multiple pieces, and now trying to create to use a spiral of frames around the vehicle as a ramplate will cause them to fall off, followed by the vehicle crashing into them.
  • The game considers traits to be mutations that (usually) cannot be gained through mutations or removed via purifier. When cosmetic traits were added to change your character's hairstyle, they weren't set as non-mutatable, leading to characters suddenly gaining mohawks and afros after drinking mutagen or being exposed to radiation. People were sad when this was fixed◊.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: The removal of some sci-fi elements and the addition of punishing realism-focused mechanics to Dark Days Ahead has resulted in arguments about the devs simply making the game harder, with several players moving away to other forks due to that.
• Minmaxer's Delight: Cataclysm's Point Build System gives you a choice of advantages and disadvantages while making a character, with advantages taking points and disadvantages giving them. Some of these traits are better than others.
  • Disadvantages:
    • Ugly and Truth Teller both only affect NPC interactions. Since NPCs are turned off by default, they're basically free points, and the effect of the traits are negligible even if you do have NPCs enabled.
    • Poor Hearing is almost advantageous to take, since you can still hear nearby monsters, which is the main use of hearing, and you are less likely to be woken up by noises while sleeping.
    • Trigger Happy gives you a small chance to randomly activate burst fire when shooting an automatic weapon. If you don't plan on using automatic weapons, it's a free point, and even if you do the chance of it activating is quite small (1/30), making it quite manageable.
    • Far-sighted prevents you from reading books and gives a penalty to melee accuracy and crafting when you're not wearing glasses. However, glasses are quite common, and you're guaranteed to start with a pair, so you should be fine as long as you carry a spare pair of glasses in case they break.
    • Thin Skin increases the cutting damage you take by 1, which is trivial.
    • Lactose Intolerance is self-explanatory, preventing you from eating dairy. Most dairy products will be rotten a week into the game, and once those rot away, you'll probably never see any more unless you actively look for them.
    • Squeamish prevents you from wearing filthy clothing, AKA clothing looted directly from zombies. Even if you start without any clothes, you still shouldn't wear filthy clothing, since it incurs morale penalties and increases the chance of getting a bite. The only other downside is that it blocks you from wearing one specific late-game armor, but by that point you'll have plenty of alternatives.
  • Advantages:
    • Night Vision is one of the most popular traits to take. It increases your vision range in total darkness by 2 tiles, making it much easier to go scavenging at night, where zombies can't see you as easily. Without the trait, you'd only be able to see things one tile away from you unless you use a light, which risks drawing attention to yourself. It can also be upgraded through mutation if you're lucky, eventually becoming Full Night Vision.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Some of the Mi-gos' parroted speech can be quite creepy, especially if you hear them above ground where they're less likely to be behind glass. The most unnerving would have to be the "little girl wailing".
  • Seeing a cloud of smoke ominously approaching your position and knowing a smoker zombie has sighted you.
  • Fungaloids. They can easily infect you with a nasty disease that starts off with symptoms of a regular disease (coughing, nausea) before progressing onto full-on horror, which includes vomiting a thick, gray, goop, spasming occasionally, coughing up live spores, and having fungal stalks bursting through your hands.
  • Seeing a trail of dirt mounds approaching your position is also nightmarish, as that means that a Giant Worm or a Graboid has spotted you, and is now rapidly digging its way towards you.
  • The zombie hulk. A gigantic, nigh-unstoppable monster that is much faster than a sober survivor and kills by smashing their targets into paste with fists the size of trash cans. Players will learn to consider the white-on-purple Z as a warning sign to run away quick.
• Popular with Furries: Some of the mutations make your survivor into a human-animal hybrid. Because the art style leaves most details to the player's imagination, many people mutate their character and then draw what they imagine them to look like.
• Quicksand Box: Part of the fun resides in just trying to survive for the first days. After securing a safe house, players might stumble around the game world for (ingame) days on end before finding neat stuff like science labs or bunkers.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Among some segments of DDA players, portal storms are this. Beginning suddenly with no warning, they force you to get indoors (preferably underground) in order to avoid getting swarmed with bad effects and mostly-unkillable enemies. As there's little reason to go outside (except for a few quests or to visit a special dungeon), and you're forced to drop everything you do and run to shelter (especially in wilderness), several fans wish for there to be an option to simply toggle them off.
  • Even more controversial is skill rust, which forces you to gain XP in a skill in order to avoid losing levels in it (up to 3 levels below what you originally had). While you do catch up quickly with lost XP after practice, detractors point out the Misaimed "Realism" (as it begins too quickly), the tedium involved in having to train lots of skills, as well as the fact that it's not possible to turn it off (in fact, the option was removed after the mechanic was reworked).
• Self-Fanservice: Most fanart of mutated characters tends to depict them as Little Bit Beastly or Beast Men rather than hideously deformed monsters. Parodied in this image◊.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • A popular one was "innawoods", where city size is set to zero, meaning the entire world consists only of field and forest and many items that only spawn in cities are unavailable or much harder to obtain. This eventually led to the creation of the official Innawoods mod, which makes the world even less settled, removes several high-tech items, and alters the map generation and item crafting to be more conductive to such survival.
  • "Megacity", where city spacing is removed so the entire world is covered by cities, which means no safe places in the countryside.
• Squick:
  • You can find mutant fetuses if you know where to look, and you can get mutations by eating them. You can also eat mutated arms and legs to get the same effect.
  • Don't read the descriptions of mutant meat unless you want to feel nauseous.
• That One Attack:
  • Most zombies have a random chance to deliver a deep bite wound if they're grabbing you. This requires it to be swiftly cleaned before it becomes infected, a status that kills you in 24 hours unless you can find some rare medications.
  • The zombie brute, shocker brute, skeletal brute, zombie wrestler, zombie nightstalker, kevlar zombie, zombie hulk, skeletal juggernaut, and kevlar hulk can all punch you so hard that it flings you away, causing some damage plus pain.
  • The shocker zombie and shocker brute can fire a burst of electricity that deals damage and pain while lighting up the attack's area of effect. The last can attract other zombies at night, turning a one-on-one fight into a battle against a horde.
  • The feral predator has a Deadly Lunge that knocks you over and stabs you in the torso, causing you to bleed.
  • The corrosive zombie's rapid-fire acid shot builds up pain quickly and deals damage to your legs, eventually crippling you if not stopped.
  • The mi-go slaver's beam passes through any see-through terrain, inflicts pain, and drains your stamina. Prior to nerfs, it completely wiped out your stamina and inflicted enough pain to bring down all your stats to 0, completely paralyzing you and all but guaranteeing your death.
• That One Boss:
  • The Thriller zombie is the reason most players will advise you to turn off joke monsters entirely (or as of 0.D, leaving them off). Thriller comes with a pack of zombie dancers and converts any nearby zombie into a zombie dancer. These dancers have 10,000 HP and regenerate, and while they destroy terrain they aren't particularly aggressive, making them somewhat less dangerous than regular zombies... unless the Thriller dies, at which point the dancers transform into zombie hulks^note with the regular hulk HP of 480, mind. And Thriller is only somewhat more durable than a regular zombie. As you can imagine, suddenly facing a bunch of the deadliest zombies in the game because you killed off a rather weak monster is a very bad thing.
  • The Amigara Horrors, which only show up deep underground in certain locations. They are fast, quite lethal in melee, and spawn in a pack. What makes them downright nasty is their ability to Mind Rape you and inflict mental paralysis, giving them ample time to gang up on you. Unlike the few other monsters with this ability, they are the only ones that reliably occur in groups, allowing them to stunlock you. A tinfoil hat works wonders for resisting the effect.
  • The official mods, most appearing in the 0.C Experimental builds, add a few examples:
    • The Arcana and Magic Items mod has the Spirit of Fire and Dracolich. Both involve ample amounts of fire to immolate players, and the Dracolich is the toughest of the four enemies unique to the mod.
    • Dinomod adds plenty of dinosaurs, but the classic Tyrannosaurus rex is by far the most threatening, with Spinosaurus being a close second. Both can randomly show up in the swamps.
    • PK's Reimagining mod adds a number of monsters in addition to making existing ones nastier. Special mention goes to the array of references to the Doom series, with the Cyberdemon being a classic and deadly threat, or the Archdemon being essentially the Icon of Sin. However, the Archvile becomes especially nasty due to not only being able to revive zombies, but also having the Zombie Master's upgrade ability.
• That One Disadvantage:
  • Illiterate makes you completely incapable of using any book, which makes it much harder to train your skills and impossible to learn advanced crafting recipes. The only reason to pick it is as a Self-Imposed Challenge or if you're playing as the Churl; which, as a medieval serf, starts out with Illiterate.
  • Fragile gives your body 75% less HP and makes it heal at 1/4 speed, making it much likelier to get one-shot-killed by a stray blow to the torso or just get worn down by attrition. Taking it with Glass Jaw (-30% head HP) turns your character into the closest thing in-game to a One-Hit-Point Wonder. This is great for a Self-Imposed Challenge, but for those jut trying to min-max, there are better alternatives.
  • Pain Sensitive makes you take 25% more pain from attacks. As damage incapacitates your character much sooner than it kills you, this makes you easier to take down and puts you closer to the nasty mutation Hyperalgesia, which increases your pain gain by 50%.
  • Savant halves the rate of skill learning save for your best skill; essentially a more brutal version of Slow Learner that requires you to micromanage your skill gain further than is normally necessary.
  • Schizophrenia/Kaluptic Psychosis causes hallucinations and occasional Interface Screw, which can only be temporarily stopped by taking Thorazine. Unfortunately, Thorazine is rather rare and raiding pharmacies— the most reliable source of Thorazine— can be dangerous, especially on Static Spawn.
• That One Level: Remember the Tower of Eternal Flames? Imagine if it was full of poison gas and Demonic Spiders. Welcome to the mi-go towers. If you're wearing any kind of armor, you will almost certainly start overheating and suffering stat penalties, and if you're not wearing a gas mask, the toxic air will also give you stat penalties. That's before you factor in the incredibly dangerous mi-go variants you will inevitably face.
• Unconventional Learning Experience: While the lack of graphics and detailed explanations leaves a lot to imagination, you can still learn some basic facts about survival (whether in cities or wilderness) just by playing the game, such as getting water from water heaters, or what sorts of things you can pull out of random furniture. The crafting recipes also give some idea on the things you can improvise in an emergency situation, and some players have replicated them in real life.

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