Announcing Cataclysm: The Last Generation (Patreon)

The world didn't end overnight.

Looking back, it's easy to see that something's been wrong all our lives. Every day, it got a little worse. The corruption, the economy, the pandemic, the violence, the xenophobia, the environment. Wars all over the other side of the world. Espionage. Mass murder. Chaos.

The headlines flew by so fast that we just got numb to the fact that the whole world was slowly losing its mind.

A few years back, winter came and went, but a lot of the trees stayed bare. There were crop failures; Some sort of pesticide had ruined the soil, they said. It sure didn't help with the invasive locusts. The weather got worse, the bugs got bigger, and things got weirder. People posting online about missing family members, cryptids, lights in the sky. They say a whole town disappeared out west. Some guys in unmarked vans cordoned it off. It was in the news one day, and the next it wasn't.

By then, store shelves were already empty. Utilities were going out all over the country. The news - when we could get any - stopped making sense.

The riots were bad, and they got worse really fast. At first it was cops against rioters, then militia against military, then the dead started walking and it was every man for himself.

The sky lit up the night the bombs started falling, like they'd knocked the stars loose. There's a week...a week or two I don't remember, but when I woke up, I was the only one left.

So how about you? What's your story?

Cataclysm:TLG is a fork split from a March 2024 version of the game that aims to take things in a direction both new and old: Gone are the Exodii and portal storms. Returned are the earth-made bionics and backyard sci-fi elements. More black helicopters, less Slenderman.

TLG's primary focus will be gameplay innovation and streamlining and refining what Cataclysm has always done well. DDA is in my opinion the finest survival simulator ever made, however, this simulation is often totally unnecessary as your character has 24/7 access to more food than they could ever eat and top-tier gear from NPCs. TLG's world is much more hostile - food is a constant concern, and if you want gear, you're going to have to make it or go out and scavenge it.

So far, I've implemented a grappling/throwing system, I've overhauled and rebalanced armor, I've removed Exodii and portal storms, I've brought back survivor mode, I've removed or reworked some of the more overpowered Hub 01 gear, and I've completely reworked how acid and bile attacks and fields work, as well as a lot of other minor improvements.

TLG is under the same license as DDA, meaning all of its content and code will be freely available for anyone to use or mess with. I hope other forks like DDA and Bright Nights can find something useful in my work, and I'll be looking to them for innovations that would make sense to port over.

Our beta release will be this weekend for Patreon subs only, I'll post it here once it's ready. If you'd like to learn more or join the discussion, hop on over to the Patreon discord!