Ben Leskey's Blog: cdda_erik

Erik Otto #5: Gaining allies

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Exploration

Before any high-level raiding, Erik wants more allies and resources. There is no more postal service or Amazon, so he goes exploring with Alejandro Quick.

Up around the big city should be rich pickings.

There's an armored car along the side of the road with two turrets mounted on top. Erik and Alejandro pull over beside it and strip out the turrets for later.

These turret mounts are the first step in a fully-automated laser defense system mounted on top of a vehicle. Such defenses would make raiding cities almost a breeze.

Erik and Alejandro tear through a horde of zombies with 5.56 NATO rounds as they raid another evacuation shelter.

Reading a map they found on one of the zombie's body, Erik learns about another city to the north-east. This's one's smaller, but no less dense.

Erik climbs a radio tower to survey the surrounding area. There's plenty of useful stores in the city, and some interesting features in the countryside.

He and Alejandro come across a survivor's bunker surrounded by spiked pits. They don't have any way to get across, so they leave it, but maybe there was something good in there, or even a survivor!

Gertha

As they drive across a field, they come across a survivor: a scavenger. She's tough-looking, and Erik decides to recruit her into the cult.

She accepts! Gertha Solano joins the team!

Gertha is a solid combat character. She has good melee skills, and amazing ranged skills, plus the excellent Fast Learner trait which will help greatly in improving combat and non-combat skills.

Gertha packs up her makeshift camp and joins them in the back of the truck as they head to base to get Gertha geared up and settled in.

Gertha inheirits Erik's position of primary explorer, and gets decked out with gear and weapons. Unlike Erik, she doesn't care about fashion, so she sticks on a sturdy duster and Kevlar vest to be ready for any combat.

With three people in the cult now, Erik decides to set up a camp outside the bunker.

The faction camp system lets NPCs embark on longer tasks, fetch resources, and craft items. It takes a lot of resources to get faction camps up and running, so for now there's just a tent for some shelter. Alejandro Quick can chop logs from the forest, for example, while the others are out exploring.

On an exploration trip in one of the Southwick houses, Gertha finds a gun basement with plenty of guns and ammunition. She uses a heavy crowbar to smash apart the ammunition safes.

Later, Erik drives them to the refugee center, where they learn about some kind of scientific hub left after the apocalypse.

It's very far to the south, but the refugee leader wants them to deliver a packet of data.

Before that, Gertha takes their sniper rifle between the pickup seats and takes out a camp of bandits from range.

Those bandits weren't even dangerous. Not since Gertha had a rifle that powerful.

Kathy

While driving down toward the scientific hub, they spot signs of life in a little swamp shack.

It's another person! Kathy Burroughs, another survivor, agrees to join the gang. She's in excellent physical condition, even stronger than Gertha, so she'll be a valuable asset on the exploration team.

While raiding a bandit cabin, Gertha engages in close quarters rifle combat. She hides out of sign, training her aim on doorways, and when a hapless bandit charges out she guns him down with no more than a squeeze of her trigger.

Finally they reach the scientific hub, Hub 01.

There's an intercom in the main building, but nobody alive upstairs. After some back-and-forth with the person on the other side of the intercom, Erik gets enough favor to begin accepting mercenary missions and traiding.

Hub 01 trades good books, armor, weapons, and scientific items.

Domenic

Hearing cries of help from a cabin on an exploration trip, Gertha and Kathy fight through a horde of zombies to rescue Domenic Driver. He agrees to join their group without Erik even present. The cult is growing.

Domenic is not very strong, but he's an unarmed combat master. In the future, perhaps, he can teach the rest of them. For now he'll be stuck on camp duty after getting geared up.

Laser turret

One of the Hub 01 missions left the group with an hm12 dazzle rifle, a weak but cheap laser weapon that damages even robots. Erik wants to mount it on the pickup truck with automatic targetting, so he reads plenty of books to design a turret and turret controller system.

They also retrive some broken riot control turrets that Erik shot up earlier, to strip them for parts and AI cores.

Finally Erik installs the automated laser turret on the pickup truck. This will target and destroy anything hostile it sees, and greatly improves the teams offensive and defensive power.

Next stop: a top-secret scientific lab sitting in the middle of a giant ant nest to the north-west.

Erik Otto #4: Arsenal

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 12:00:00 +0000

With lockpicks in hand, Erik drives out to the wind turbines to pick their locks and survey the area.

It takes him nearly the whole day to pick one of the locks, stopping to eat cake and drink water for lunch.

Finally! He picks the lock, and at the same time gains proficiency in picking locks, which will make the other wind turbines much faster.

After climbing to the top, he gains a wide view of the surrounding area.

Before heading to the next wind turbine, Erik decides to complete the mission given by Smokes the refugee center merchant and clear out their back bay.

Sure enough, he pulls back a locker, opens the solid door, and a flood of zombies comes stumbling at him with outstretched arms. Erik pulls back and lets the strong guards with sturdy stone spears take care of them.

The battle was bloody, but only zombies died. Erik collected his reward from Smokes: a bunch of refugee center money known as "merch" by the Free Merchants faction who ran the center.

He also received a new mission: to find and eliminate a gang of bandits preying on Free Merchants caravans. This would be extremely dangerous, if these bandits had guns.

Before that, Erik picked his way into two more wind turbines and found even more of the map.

There was a big mansion to the north of the last turbine, so Erik and Alejandro went to investigate.

While Alejandro guarded the pickup, Erik lit some fires and taunted zombies into the flames, stabbing at them with his combat knife. He didn't make it far into the mansion, but there was still some good loot.

Two hiking backpacks, some of the best packs ever sold. Erik quickly made these his and Alejandro's standard kit pack.

He converted his old rucksack into another standard kit for the next member of his team, whenever he found them.

Back at base, Erik decided he needed a fence for his cows. He had Alejandro chop down trees and cut them into planks, while he went on the hunt for nails.

Erik burned down a moonshine still through the night, and tool the nails out of the dust and rubble left afterward. He needed lots of nails for this fence.

By the end of the next day, Erik and Alejandro had built a fence for their four cows!

Erik's next move was to raid some libraries, to get enough books to craft advanced items and build better cars. The problem was combat in a city: Erik didn't want to resort to melee combat for fear of injury, and guns were too loud. However, a suppressed .22 caliber rifle was as quiet as footsteps, and powerful enough to take down even tough zombies. Erik grabbed a pocket full of ammunition and his suppressed Marlin 39A and went off library raiding.

The first library, down to the southwest of his base, yielded some useful books, though it was severely torn up. His silenced .22 rifle tore through zombies without them even noticing him.

The second library, up in the huge city, proved to be just as easy a raid, though it too had been vandalized and many of the books rendered unreadable.

Erik brought the books back to base with a good feeling in his heart. They would be very useful in the future.

He also retrieved another freezer and a refrigerator from a bunker he and Alejandro had raided on the way. He didn't turn the freezer on yet, but the fridge would be very useful for storing cow milk for him and Alejandro to drink for the calories.

During his exploration, Erik had noticed a small military outpost. It didn't look too occupied, and would have valuable ammunition, so he and Alejandro went on a raid.

They shot down a cloud of huge ovipositing wasps, then broke into the outpost with little resistance. One C-4 explosion later, and they carted home more than 2000 rounds of 5.56 NATO ammunition.

With this arsenal, Erik and Alejandro were ready to begin focusing on further goals: electric hybrid cars, automated laser turrets, and raiding top-secret science laboratories.

Erik Otto #3: Preparing for battle

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Now that the base is set up, Erik can start more organized exploration and raids. To manage having a large number of followers—when he gets them—he needs to set up stations for people to suit up and suit down.

Organizing gear

First, Erik crafts a washing kit and washes up some holsters and sheaths he took off zombie corpses while raiding light industry compounds.

Full outfits go into the clothes room. Currently there isn't much difference, but in the future there may be full hazmat outfits, melee raiding outfits, summer outfits, etc.

Weapons—including slings, holsters, sheaths, and the like—go into the weapons side of this room. Weapons racks should include a gun and a backup melee weapon. In the future there'll be sidearms and rifles in every rack.

Finally, the racks in this half of the room hold backpacks filled with supplies. The backpacks all contain vital tools, like flashlights, multitools, lighters, and prying tools. Eventually the tools will become standardized, but for now there is a little variance between the tools, though they all provide mostly the same capabilities.

Finally, the counters in the workshop are for mission packs, sets of items needed for various missions. Anyone can grab one of these and go.

Exploration

Erik takes the pickup truck out for an exploration spin to scout more of the area and collect useful loot.

Up near the huge city, Erik finds a ranch with a gas station nearby. The city filled with zombies is uncomfortably close, but he makes sure to stay out of dead earshot.

There's a steam-powered tractor in the barn. Not really useful, but perhaps a time will come when coal is more plentiful than gas?

Not yet, however. Erik fills up his pickup truck with gasoline from the pump. It's still working.

The van he and Alejandro found back when the first left the evac shelter still has gas in it. Erik takes the gas.

Back home, Erik installs a new standing lamp to light up the rest of the storage areas, then heads out for more exploration.

A zapper zombie guards a fire lookout tower. Erik guns it down with a single bullet, then goes up into the tower to survey the land.

Nothing much that's interesting.

Weaponry

With the guns and ammunition that he has, Erik decides it's time to take on the military helipad to the east, looking for more fuel, ammunition, and explosives.

The helipad itself is a small military base, very accessible.

It's also got plenty of fuel, for when Erik converts some of his vehicles to be diesel/electric hybrids.

A zombie dog attacks Erik from within an abandoned cabin. It bites his leg deeply before he shoots it to pieces.

Not a problem; Erik uses some alcohol wipes to disinfect his wound and keeps going. He can't wait to gather more followers so he doesn't have to do this himself.

The military roadblocks with automated turrets are goldmines for ammunition and magazines, but the problem is the turrets. Erik devises a method shooting the turrets before they can even see him. He crouches in his truck to avoid line of sight and drives right next to the turret...

...then he pops up to check where it is, ducks down again, pokes his rifle out the window...

...and BLAM, there's a dead turret. Rinse and repeat for the other turret, and for the other roadblocks in the area. Erik picks up 9mm pistol rounds as well as 5.56 NATO rifle rounds.

Erik scouts still more of the area. He spots another Last Man On Earth bunker to the north, and investigates.

This one had a hidden passage behind a bookcase. Erik slides the bookcase out of the way and finds a cache of guns and ammunition.

The full bunker had a decent amount of supplies. Erik throws them all into his truck. Every little bit helps.

The military roadblock near the original evac shelter is the next nut to crack. Erik approaches with a full rifle as the zombie soldiers are distracted by the turrets.

One battle later, and everything but Erik is dead. He might not want to get his hands dirty, but there is no fury like the wrath of a lazy man.

He returns with a haul of guns and ammunition to base, ready to sort it out with Alejandro.

Return to base

The next step in the scouting phase is to break into some of the wind turbines to get an even broader view of the area. For this, Erik could either cut through the metal doors with an acetylene torch, which would be expensive, or he could craft some lockpicks and just spend a little time.

Some sturdy workbenches looted from the helipad will make this easier.

Erik crafts a set of lockpicks with Alejandro's help. It's time for phase two of the scouting plan: wind turbine breaking and entering.

Erik Otto #2: Base building and car collecting

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Erik and Alejandro have established a base, but now they need supplies, food, weapons, and vehicles. It's time to go exploring and looting. They purchase ammunition from the refugee center by trading novels—apparently the refugees love reading—and hit the road in their RV. Tools are the first priority, so they can get vehicles working and build up their base.

The light industry scattered around the map are too valuable a target, with all the tools that can be found there. Erik and Alejandro move in guns blazing, Erik with his Uzi and Alejandro with his Glock 19. The battle is bloody and brutal, but they conquer the zombies and pack tools and resources into the RV to take back to the base.

One of the zombies was carrying a map, revealing a huge city just to the north. This interior of this huge city won't be raidable for a while, but the outskirts could provide valuable loot if Erik finds suitable peons to do the dirty work for him. Raiding is just too risky for the king himself, and Alejandro is really flimsy.

This world is using bigger cities with larger city spacing, so exploring one city could take a very long time, but there's more stuff between cities.

At a dairy farm, Erik finds a working ATV and a working cube van. He and Alejandro shuffle the vehicles back home. They also take four cows, and tie them up just outside the base for milk and, perhaps, meat.

Having the debug ability to swap between characters makes getting new vehicles much easier. Before, the only way would be to use a folding vehicle to go back and forth, or just walk. I really like this multi-character playstyle, and I think it should become an officially supported mode.

The collection of vehicles outside the bunker is steadily growing. Erik is pleased with his options.

He and Alejandro go out on a wild ATV exploration trip.

They get chased by a huge underground worm, churning up the dirt, but they survive.

At an incomplete cabin, abandoned during construction, they find a cordless drill. This is the missing piece they needed to replace vehicle fuel tanks, letting them collect a pickup truck that Erik had been wanting for a couple days.

The number of vehicles grows still more. Eventually they'll probably build custom vehicles, but for now whatever they can salvage will have to do.

With all these tools, Erik reads an electronics book to research how to hook up his solar panels to his appliances and get electricity off the grid.

He takes apart an electric jackhammer for the high-capacity battery and mounts it in his utility room.

Then Erik takes all of his solar panels that he salvaged from that solar car and places them up on top of the bunker hill. This will provide a lot of power during the day, even though many of the the panels are somewhat damaged. He hooks the solar panels with a long extension cord down to the battery in the bunker, to collect the power and then provide it for his appliances.

He drags all the appliances into the workshop room for now. He'd crafted a standing lamp from flashlight parts, and built a battery recharging locker that he put by the workshop chair. He hooked up the oven, freezer, and water purifier too: food storage, cooking, and water access were no longer issues.

The battery fills up. The core of the base is now complete. It's time for Erik to look toward the future of his cult, and to build his kingdom's organization, defensive weapons, and offensive power.

Erik Otto #1: Used car cult salesman

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Intro

It's time for a new Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead let's play!

Erik Otto is a former used car salesman shunted away to one of the many FEMA evacuation shelters during the end of the world. He's extremely intelligent, very sociable, and attractive. If he hadn't been a used car salesman, he always thought that he'd make a good cult leader. Well, now that the apocalypse has arrived, now is the chance for the Cult of Erik to arise.

This character is designed to attract NPCs and become a sort of hub for an NPC enclave. Using a "debug" menu feature, I can take control of any NPC follower that Erik Otto gains and pilot that NPC just like a player. Ideally, Erik will have to adventure less and less and will become a crafting king and source of knowledge for the NPC peons that follow him. The starting scenario, Evacuee, gives us one NPC right away, which Erik will easily be able to win over. Random NPC spawning is also increased, so there will be more friends out there as Erik explores the world.

Another key advantage to having NPC followers is that, in the event the player character dies, the game continues with any of the NPC followers. This is—essentially—extra lives, although training up a character is a time and resource intense process, and NPCs are decently rare. We start out with one extra life in the form of our first NPC ally, but ideally Erik Otto will survive to stop adventuring simply because his proteges are capable of doing the dirty work.

The game starts with a view of the overmap. Only a small radius is viewable at the start of the game. In the top left corner we can see that there is an NPC here too, Alejandro Quick. There's a regional dump south of us, far too dangerous to be approached during the day early on, and there's a research facility to the southeast, which is an end-game location. The mound of dirt a little ways to the east is a more immediate threat—it's a dermatik nest.

It's just Erik Otto and Alejandro Quick in this evacuation shelter. Erik is dressed fine in his suit and dress shoes, sporting a gold watch. Alejandro, on the other hand, is wielding an SKS rifle and wearing explorer's gear. He was a little more prepared when they got shunted off to the FEMA evacuation shelters. After a night of regaining their senses, they came upstairs. The shelter is no place to stay; clearly no help is coming. Erik decides to persuade Alejandro to come with him. It might be good to have someone like Alejandro escorting him to safer territory.

Erik is a smooth talker, and his looks don't hurt his chances. He easily convinces Alejandro to keep him safe. Now Alejandro is his loyal follower until one of them dies. Hopefully not Erik.

Our friend has a range of stats. He's rather fragile, but he's got Robust Genetics. He's also amazing at health care, good at mechanics, and a smooth talker. For combat, he's got high rifles and submachine guns skills, and he's wielding a 10 round rifle to boot. He's got a leather backpack, but Erik takes for himself right away.

Leaving shelter

Erik uses the evac shelter console to figure out the route to the regional refugee center. That place should have a lot more people, survivors of the end of the world. It's not even that far by road.

We set Alejandro's NPC rules to make him a little less likely to run off into a crowd of zombies. We have him stick close to us and not smash zombie corpses to prevent them from rising again.

Erik and Alejandro hit the road. They plan to walk all the way to the refugee center, avoiding any trouble along the way. If they do have difficulty, Alejandro can just shoot it.

Erik grabbed up a bunch of useful food, supplies, and medicine from the evac shelter. He's got a lacking inventory heading into this hike: no weapon, but at least he has an emergency blanket!

There's a military roadblock set up on the road outside the evac shelter. Zombie soldiers are attacking a riot controll turret. It's shooting them, and they can't bash through its military-grade steel armor, so they're keeping themselves busy.

Erik and Alejandro sneak to the south of the roadblock. Neither the zombies nor the turrets notice them. Erik does plan to return here eventually, when he can kill those zombies and evade the turret, because the soldiers dropped a bunch of guns and ammo on the ground when they were... turned.

There's a little cabin in the woods by the road, the first signs of residence they've found so far. Erik decides to check it out.

The cabin is completely abandoned, nothing useful here.

A little further down the road the two travelers come across a van stalled in the middle of the road. Erik checks it out, but its interior is trashed. There's some gas in there, which they can siphon off when they get a working vehicle.

In a crashed police SUV, Erik collects a claw bar. This is a useful tool that he can use to pry open doors and break into windows, as well as just swing to defend himself if necessary. He doesn't want to get that messy though. A spear would be the nicest thing to have on his back.

There's a huge wasp hovering by a ruined shed. The two travelers go around; that thing looks really dangerous.

A light industrial compound connected to the road above them but they didn't stop there. Maybe later, once they've stocked up on supplies and weapons, but for now they just want to get to safety.

Some kind of deal went down here, and there's a bunch of bodies. Erik spots a gun on the ground.

This Uzi submachine gun is decent, and uses the common 9x19mm ammunition. Erik takes this gun as his own.

There's more corpses in a field by the road. When the end of the world hit, too many people were caught out in the open.

Erik takes a pair of binoculars from a dead man's pack. These will be useful for surveying the land as they travel.

There's a lonely grave in the field. They stop and look at it for a moment.

A high-tech solar car is parked on the road. It's motor is completely shot, but the panels are still operational and so is the internal recharging station. Erik notes where it is on his scrawled map.

They come down to a little hump in the land, a Last Man On Earth shelter bunker. It doesn't look like anyone lives here, and its really close to the refugee center.

Erik and Alejandro head down inside. The cool underground air and earth scent wafts up to meet them.

This is a lovely place! There were some survival supplies and tools, plus random clothing. Erik likes it so much he decides that this will be their permanent base. With some solar panels and batteries it could be a pretty good house for his future plans!

Refugee center

It's now time to visit the refugee center. Erik sets out on foot and the journey is uneventful.

The forest and fields give way to a fenced-in overgrown road leading to a huge brick building.

Here at the entrance to the refugee center, Erik approaches the reinforced wood doors. Vehicles scatter the parking area surrounding the refugee center, and the place is lit up with electric lights.

Erik steps into the refugee center lobby, the center of trading and life in the post-apocalyptic world.

The refugee center is one of the primary mission hubs in the world of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. Here we find Smokes, the tough leader figure who trades useful tools and raw materials. We also can find the doctor. There are plenty of other NPCs here too, some who can be persuaded to join us, and some with missions of their own.

Smokes offers Erik a wide array of bartering options.

Smokes and the doctor both offer Erik some missions. Smokes wants Erik's group to help clear out the back bay of zombies. The doctor wants Erik to analyze some zombie blood.

The nearest hospital is a ways to the south, according to the doctor, but now at least Erik knows where a city is.

After returning from the refugee center, Erik and Alejandro strip the solar car of panels. They'll set up a solar-powerered base soon.

A cabin visible in the forest nearby draws Erik's attention, so he and Alejandro go check it out.

There's a strange man with hooves and fur keeping rabbits living there. He'd like them to bring him logs, so maybe Erik will curry favor with the rabbit man that way.

He also wants Erik's crew to contact a farm family a long way to the south east.

After that, Erik decides to check out some campgrounds nearby, looking for vehicles and supplies.

At one of them Erik hotwires a diesel hatchback and drives it home.

There's a motel to the west. Erik and Alejandro checks it out.

Erik sneaks past zombies to steal an RV parked in the motel lot.

It makes a nice view, parked in front of his bunker.

He just installs a makeshift drive belt for the alternator, and it's a solid vehicle, if very fuel inefficient due to the damaged engine.

Part of every serious base is setting up sort zones. These zones let loot be automatically sorted all over the base. Here we have most loot in the workshop room, but food goes into the kitchen.

Now that Erik and Alejandro have moved in to their new base and made contact with their neighbors, it's time for them to build an electrical grid and get started collecting supplies, weapons, and friends.