Cataclysm DDA / New Player / Evacuation Shelter Tips

greetings and welcome to the cataclysm i'm your host varmathrax and today i am here to show you how to survive the first few days of the cataclysm this is presuming an evac shelter start so it's specifically a video demonstration of how you survive an evac shelter start initially what resources you might have available in the shelter and what items you can craft or build that will help you stay alive so i'm gonna walk through the tools you can craft the furniture that might be useful where and how to get all the raw materials and skills and so on we're gonna be doing it from a zeroed start default character with no skills whatsoever no items none of that and then we're going to go ahead and survive the first day or two so i hope you find the information helpful uh this is using experimental build one one one nine two so as anybody that's played cataclysm for any amount of time knows the game progresses very rapidly gets a lot of updates on the experimental branch so if you're watching this in the future just be aware that some particular details might have changed recipes might have adjusted resources might be different things like that but the basics of at least how you can find information and how to reckon order the evac shelter or whatever location you're in for materials will work so hopefully it'll give you some ideas but let's go ahead and start into a new game so we're just going to go new game custom character in the shelter world that i've got created it's completely default world no changes to the default settings no mods or anything else added and we're just going to tab our way right to the end to the description screen we'll just call this person tester and i'm not going to choose anything else we're going to start with no skills of any kind obviously you can shortcut your way to some of these recipes and some of the things you might want to do by picking skills early game your choice but i wanted to show how you could do it without any assumptions of any kind no starting skill requirements none of that stuff now the first thing i want to talk about is on this final screen you actually have an option to choose from different starting locations these are based on the scenario you've chosen and you'll see on this list of options down in the lower left that there's one that says press forward slash to select a specific starting location so if i press forward slash that's the screen we get and the reason i bring this up is important to know if you weren't aware you do have choices sometimes you'll want to pick a specific location if there's a big list available and that can change quite a bit how your starting situation is so you have some variety there but in this particular case i wanted to point out that this first option that is the default random location three variants what the game does is it just picks one of these three other choices gives you that option then it rolls an additional set of dice to determine whether the starting shelter is going to be looted or not and it's fairly high chance that the shelter you start in will be looted meaning it's going to have broken equipment and furniture missing the curtains and such from the windows things like that if you don't want that random chance just directly pick one of these three styles when you do this you'll get that style with zero chance that the shelter will be looted it will always be a new pristine shelter with all the random materials or all the materials that it's supposed to have so if you want to have a chance for it to be looted and you don't care which kind you get pick the first one or leave it on the first one if you don't want to loot it pick directly from this list so i'm going to go ahead and pick shelter central pillar for this demonstration then we're going to go ahead and jump right into the game so yes and yes and here we go we are in the game world let's check our map first thing so there we are we've got the evac shelter kind of tucked up out of the way in the forest there we're not going to be leaving the area of the shelter other than just briefly to go out into this forest section for a very short period of time but this will do this is a good spot for us to demonstrate so we've got things we need to do if you're going to survive in the cataclysm you need to keep in mind on tools food and water shelter things like that very important to get a handle on those early game and i'm going to show you the steps you can go through and the particular items that you might find valuable very quickly with the evac shelter start so in this circumstance i don't particularly care about blocking windows or keeping light out or anything like that the first thing i'm going to do is step over this window and we are going to tear down the curtains and i'm just going to kind of make a pile of items here sort of in the middle i'm going to go ahead and pick up a stout branch and wield it that's going to be our bashing tool initially the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to step on this pile and i'm going to butcher the long string this does not require a cutting tool so you can butcher a long string into short strings without any tools whatsoever i guess you're just ripping them up but now we have instead of one long string we have six short strings and we have our big stick in our hand next we're gonna go locate some some lockers i'm gonna go ahead and open up or tear down a few more of these because we're gonna need the materials and we'll drag these down i'm gonna smash lockers now what we're after here when we're smashing these lockers is a pipe i need at least one if i get one early i might keep smashing until i get a second one but we'll just wail away we got lucky we did get a pipe it varies you won't always get one so you have to be a little cautious what i'm hoping to find with the lockers we have available are two pipes i can get a along with one but two pipes would make it a little quicker and then also later when we disassemble these i need two full sheets of sheet metal so we do have the first one there let's take a look outside real quick we do have a rock 14 to the north all right let's go get that rock real quick we don't need to smash another locker as long as we have a rock the reason i say that is we need either a second pipe or a rock because they provide the hammering quality right here so we need a tool with hammering and it can't be the same tool we're using as a raw material for what we're going to build so we've got a rock for the hammering quality we've got a pipe now we're going to go ahead and go to the crafting menu and we're going to make a crowbar makeshift crowbar this is the first tool that we need so we're going to go ahead and say yes to that it has the hammering quality and it requires one pipe which we just found so we'll say yes i'm going to say put it down and start working and there we have our crowbar we'll pick that up and drop the branch and let's go ahead and move all this stuff over to our general pile of materials so now we have a crowbar we're gonna go next up onto the roof so we need to find the door that has access to the stairs or the ladder to the roof take that door down by smashing it apart pop up onto the roof and we're gonna smash the solar panel when you smash it you should always get three chunks of steel i've never seen this vary i've done this dozens of times and it always has had at least three chunks of steel some of the rest of the materials may vary but i've never not gotten at least three chunks of steel i'll also grab some scrap metal while we're up here and if you didn't know you can smash the rain gutter running along the outside edge for more scrap metal so we'll grab some of that as well while we're here all right let's go ahead and head back downstairs now that we have our chunks of steel we're gonna need a couple of those for a few purposes so i'll just drop them in the pile here with everything else apparently i picked up some willow bark while i was away oh yeah one other thing i wanted to mention i forgot in this particular start with uh default evacuee we start with a pocketknife and a matchbook let's go get rid of those i don't want to use those crutches we're going to assume that you are playing without those as a starting option there are other scenario starts that you can choose that have an evac shelter start but don't have the same items so i want to demonstrate that you can actually get along without starting with the matchbook and the knife there are ways to craft or to build what we're gonna need all right so we've got uh the parts here for the next thing we need we're gonna make a cutting tool so what we need for that is a spike which we needed that chunk of steel from the solar panel for so we're gonna go ahead and craft the spike then we're going to craft the knife this will be the makeshift knife right there makeshift knife needs a spike and needs two short strings which we got by taking apart that long string from the window and of course a tool with hammering which we're using that rock currently so we now have our knife now we're going to move on actually let's uh let's smash a couple of these real quick just to have some more blanks and other parts and we're gonna make a hammer next makeshift hammer so we just grabbed some planks we've still got that extra chunk of steel we've got two left we're gonna use one for this recipe and then two more of those short strings that we crafted and let's go ahead and use a stout branch that's fine all right so now we have our hammer we have our knife parts we don't need in one spot and let's go for the screwdriver next but we've got everything we need now we built our makeshift hammer we needed that in order to get hammering of two the rock would not be able to do it because it only has a hammering of one so you need to make the hammer before you make the screwdriver but again this time we just needed scrap metal which we grabbed a bunch of up on the roof and then stout branch or plank so we'll pick that and plank's fine okay now we have our screwdriver so we've got many of the initial tools we've got the crowbar we've got the knife we've got the hammer and we've got the screwdriver so next thing we need is to get some of these lockers disassembled this time we're not going to smash them it's important to understand the distinction if you smash you get different materials than if you disassemble sometimes so this time i want a different material i don't necessarily need pipes i need sheet metal and i have a better chance of getting that if i disassemble so we got a sheet metal and we got five pipes out of that all i need is the sheet metal for now we're gonna take another one of parts right next to me and again grab the sheet metal and we'll grab some pipes as well while we're here yeah or we won't ah that's fine all right let's dump some of those so what we're gonna make now is the brazier so the brazier requires fab one which you should have by this point with the other things that we've manufactured and we do use the hammering of two which is the makeshift hammer we crafted and then one sheet metal so we'll go ahead and get that crafted ignore the spider and now we have a brazier abrasion is important because it is a safe way to contain fire so if you're not already aware of that it's an important early game tool you need a way to preserve or to use fire safely without burning the building down frazier is the way you can do that i'm not going to go into the hole how that works and so on that's kind of different videos but brazier is very very important tool you do want to make sure you source as early as possible so we've got a safe fire containing ability now so the brazier is complete next up we're going to go visit the roof again so and we're gonna go to this tank this is called a standing tank which if i point at it in the upper right you can see in blue it says standing tank important thing to know about these is that they contain four 60-liter tanks so we're going to use the tools that we crafted earlier the prying and the screwdriving tool so our crowbar and our screwdriver to disassemble this so we're going to deconstruct the tank and you'll see here it now has a water faucet and four 60 liter tanks we're going to move those four 60 liter tanks oops here you back that way all right i'm gonna haul these using the hall items command cause we can't carry all four at once we're just gonna haul them downstairs and we'll scoop up these other items while we're hauling back to the main pile that we're creating here and i'm going to drop the crowbar i'm going to pick up one of these 60 liter tanks in my arms and we're gonna go find some water and lucky for us we actually started with some right outside the shelter pour into the container metal tank we'll drop it on the ground because it's very heavy now now that we've added the full load of water and it's got 240 units of water now we'll bring that down and don't care about the spider we'll just leave that right there for now so you can see here water metal tank and 240 units of water so we do need to clean that that's what the brazier is for we can boil the water to do that we need one other tool so we're going to go ahead and make a pot now earlier i mentioned we needed two sheet metal that's why we needed a second sheet metal for the makeshift pot that's going to give us the boiling quality containing quality and food cooking quality so this will give us everything we need to cook initial food recipes boil water to make it safe to drink into clean water and so on giant web spiders trying to come get us okay so we have crafted our pot successfully uh yes we're wielding our makeshift pot even though we can't see it so there it is we don't need to hold on to that okay so we have uh safe fire containment i could put wood in there and light a fire if i had the ability to actually light a fire i mentioned earlier that i dropped the matches so that's the next thing that we need to take care of we need some way of generating fire so it's very important to have that preferably before the sun goes down the first evening that way if you don't you don't get too cold you can start a fire you can cook you can boil your water things like that uh we do have a spider the npc will likely deal with that we're gonna go about our business though so here's what we need to do next we need a couple of skill levels in survival skill currently we have zero survival skill right here well we got 32 progress the reason for that is because i have turned on this option here for auto features i turned it on true and then i set auto foraging to everything meaning i'm gonna forage bushes and trees while we walk along the forest automatically i don't have to press buttons i don't have to do anything else this does it for me still takes time it doesn't save anything except for key presses on the keyboard but this will speed things up so what we're going to do is we're going to avoid that spider we're going to go out the far side and all i have to do is walk near trees and bushes so that bush you'll notice just change color because we just searched it that bush changed color those two change color we're also peeling bark like that peeling bark off of trees willow trees and so on it should only take a very short stroll through the forest and you want to look for these kinds of bushes mainly and then trees pine trees are also good harvest pine cones and such and then just every once in a while come back and check your progress we're still at 77 so we need to spend just a little more time out here no we don't want to step on that there's some more bushes up here it's easier for my brain to see uh certain of the bushes and we are at survival one that's all we need for now so let's go ahead and head back in i'm gonna turn this off because i don't want it to be passing time picking things up now that i've gotten the skill level i needed you can get useful items that way for food and general utility but i'm not concerned about that for the moment for this demonstration now that we have survival level one we have an additional thing we can do we're going to craft and i'm going to use the search feature to go q colon and uh no not quality sorry i want p colon survival so what that does is that shows me all the recipes that use the survival skill and i'm looking for something we can make that's going to help us level up digging stick is a good one we'll just go ahead and do a digging stick takes one hour to complete and it's the level that we are currently and it will help us go to level two fairly quickly might do it in one might take two digging sticks we'll find out so we'll pick digging stick and we'll just use a stout branch we'll ignore the spider some more time we'll pass and we have our digging stick what is our skill level we are now at uh survival one and fifty four percent so one more hopefully we'll get us there so we'll repeat the recipe did we make it we did make it we are at survival 2 now that's all there is to it we'll go ahead and ditch our digging stick and haul the other one onto our general resources pile now that we're at survival two we're going to go ahead and create a fire drill you can do either ore campfire drill or fire drill uh five minutes ten minutes fifty five hundred ah rock oh that's why i've got it for this one so a rock ceramic shard you can also get down in the basement which i'm going to show you in a second and it's going to take a couple long strings so you might need to take down some more of the the curtains in order to get the long strings but i'm going to go with just the standard fire drill uses less materials and it will work for me for plenty long all right so we have our fire drill now right there in our hands we also picked up this bark while we were out and about let's ditch those okay and let's go ahead and set up a firewood source there then i'm going to say from where i'm at all right from where i'm at to that firewood spot sort by category please go ahead and move these planks over and i put them in the wrong spot because of course i did let's try this again there we go now we got the firewood in the right spot so with the fire drill in my inventory it doesn't have to be in my hands just has to be in my inventory it can't be laying on the ground we can just examine the brazier say start a fire and there you go we have the ability to make fire and we can contain it safely in the brazier it will occasionally put out a puff of smoke which isn't really a big deal unless you've got some pretty serious problems going on already so that gets us the uh the light we've got the fire drill from our survival skill next thing i want to show you is down in the basement we're gonna go ahead and get our crowbar go ahead and drop the fire drill let's go uh turn this off first down into the basements all right so this is a new addition to the game so people playing earlier versions of than the experimental i'm currently on will not see this option but if you smash toilets and maybe disassemble i actually haven't tried disassembling a toilet with this but you notice that item that's listed on top that is a wax a piece of wax we're gonna go ahead and grab that large chunk of beeswax go up to the other toilets smash those and no i don't care about the water that's in the toilets we have infinite water from that little pool so trying to grab this water is pretty irrelevant all right we've got four pieces of wax let's also go grab another one of these brad get up with us all right and we're to butcher another long string we're going to start the fire back up again oops i need my fire drill in my inventory to do that there we go and we're going to craft candles batch craft or candles all right there we go we now have four candles these are great early game light sources you just light them up and they light the space that you're in you can read you can craft it's nice bright light doesn't cause any slowdowns anything like that so smash up some toilets grab the wax and you can be making candles and they actually last a very long time so you'll be surprised how long they'll last if you've never used the candles before you can also find candles in kitchen cabinets when you're going to loot houses so if you happen to see candles i very much recommend you grab those if you're still in the early game and you don't have easier light sources already sourced it's cumbersome to keep fire going in abrasion it both heats the area up which you might have a problem with depending on the season plus it burns valuable resources these planks and it puts out the occasional puff of smoke there are other things you can make that don't do that but not this early in the game not for our purposes for this demonstration all right so we've got now light sources we've got fire we've got water we've got a pot that we can boil the water in we've got extra 6 liter tanks that we can dump the clean water into so we can hydrate ourselves whenever we need to um let's talk next about weapons so early game weapons i recommend one would be the cudgel cudgel is an awesome early game blunt weapon like a fancy club it's got a lot of good techniques when you wield it it's a quick weapon um just all around a very good very very cheap and easy weapon to make so we'll make a couple cudgel for us first out of a plank there's that puff of smoke i talked about and now we're coughing heavily because it got into our lungs let's wait till we get our breath back so we have a cudgel now so we'll go ahead and grab that up instead of the crowbar another thing now that we've managed to get to survival 2 you can do a wooden spear the wooden spear takes a bit of time and it does take some items long stout branch which we can get outside it's going to take leather or a rag which we can get and it's going to take some thread or some fiber i'm not gonna make this one in this demonstration but i just wanted to bring it up it is a reach attack weapon that you can use to hit zombies when they're two spaces away so you can stab them back up stab them back up stab them back up i recommend this over the knife spear that you might have gotten information on previously the knife spears are pretty flimsy they break very quickly this is the earliest thing you can get to that's a decent reach attack weapon that you can get too simply just by following the steps that i just mentioned so you can get a rag by disassembling or butchering the um the sheets and such that we are doing earlier same with thread you can get thread by taking apart the strings so as an example we can just butcher a short string that gets you 50 thread and we'll butcher one hour to butcher a sheet huh um we're just going to cut up a sheet and we got 19 rags by doing that so spear what are we oh we're still missing the long stout branch all right let's take uh our cudgel we'll just pop outside you get long stout branches from young trees that's these things in this graphics pack so that's a young tree so we're just gonna smash it with our cudgel until it breaks and we didn't get one that time didn't get one that time uh come on young trees there we go there's our three long stout branches we'll go ahead and drag all three of them back with us all right now we can do the spear again wooden spear put it down and start working now we actually hurt ourselves we uh hurt our torso slightly from the smoke you can stand away you don't have to stand adjacent to the fire by the way you can stand further away as long as you don't need the light from the fire so no need for me to stand right next to it and get the smoke inhalation uh but we have a wooden spear now so there we go so now we have a reach attack weapon that we can use and we have the cudgel for the up close and personal work so we're at uh 6 30 in the afternoon uh early evening and the other thing i'll point out now in experimental we have this weariness system we're moderately weary so things we're trying to do we're going to start slowing down the last couple things that i'd like to try to point out or demonstrate are sleeping um a couple things you can do in addition that we haven't done yet that i don't think i'm actually going to build here but um if you go to the construction menu one other thing you might want to put together is a table you can see you need fabrication one a hammering tool a wood sawing tool which i'll show you in a moment planks and then a large wooden sheet or wooden panel now if we go down to let's see let's do the tool first so if you need wood sawing you can make an adds stone adds it takes survival 2 which we've already acquired through the other means that i showed you fab 2 which we've already got and then we can craft that it takes an hour yeah go ahead we're going to be running out of some daylight here pretty soon and we're going to get pretty tired but there we have a stone adds so now we've added another tool the wood sawing ability and with that we can go ahead and make a few things i'm gonna for demonstration purposes take out this door as well so we're going to use the deconstruct furniture that is a way to get the wooden panel that we need for the recipe so we'll just grab grab that drag it down to our pile of stuff and now we can do a table the reason you would make a table is because sometimes you need it depending on what traits you've taken if you have to eat a meal at a table for example there's a trait for that but you also get a crafting benefit so it's faster to craft at a table surface than it is to just craft on the ground or in your hands and it also removes one of the extra menu choices you have to make every time you craft something it'll automatically assume the table is where you want to do it and it'll craft it faster at that location we'll go ahead and say build table and right there's fine i guess there's our table so we've got that complete now we've got a crafting surface we could grab it and drag it around move it wherever we want to you can see the sun is going down we are very weary now so anything we try to do from here is going to take even longer period of time but the last thing i really wanted to mention in this particular tip video is a place to sleep it's not hard to do basically just like the table that we looked at you just want to bring up the list type in bed and you can see makeshift bed all we need is a few more planks if i just smash up a few of these benches next to me okay we get a few more planks there's one there's two three there's four and then what we'll do is we'll go ahead and get the fire going again uh i've got nothing in my my firewood source so we need to fix that so let's go ahead and do this and that's move move move all right now we've got planks and we've got stuff for the firewood though earth our fire build makeshift bed right there yeah yeah all right we have a bed it's not a good place for the bed but this is just a demonstration obviously you want to position it wherever it's best for you a lot of times i would recommend actually building these things down in the basement so there are tactical reasons for that or you can build them up here your choice i just wanted to demonstrate what could be done in an evac shelter's start very quickly so we're not even to the end of the first day yet we've only been in game for 14 hours we started at 8 a.m so 14 hours we've achieved all of the basic tools we've got the the knife the crowbar the hammer the screwdriver we have a way of making fire whenever and wherever we want we've secured our water source we can boil up clean water anytime that we desire uh we haven't gotten anything for food that's a different topic different conversation and the evac shelters usually start with a bunch of protein rations uh in the various shelter cabinets and lockers but those are obvious you'll find those yourself as you go through things so i think that's it we've got weapons we've got water we've got fire we've got all the basic tools we've got a bed to sleep on oh the last thing i wanted to mention temperature is a very important thing to deal with and the bed is nice but you want to have a blanket for the bed ideally you may not get all this done as fast as i have or before the night goes by and we're also very weary but the last thing that i would recommend that you want to pay attention to is also getting a blanket put together wrong menu warthorax blankets so you can see here blanket tailoring zero you need a sewing tool and you need some more rags so we'll go ahead and just do a needle which you should have the information or the skills for already wooden needle that satisfies the tool requirement and then we need to get some more rags we're just going to cut up a bunch of sheets for now i'll leave it to you to figure out what the most efficient way to do things is blanket there we go we've got the thing we need for the blanket hour and 20 modified by whatever it's going to modify by and we might inhale some more smoke while we do this you're tiring out continue working okay there is uh the blankets uh on the ground i'm hoping yes there it is blankets where are the blankets blankets on the bed all right there we go we now have a place that we can sleep safely by safely what i mean is the blanket auto regulates your temperature if you're ever in doubt of uh cold damage that you might take while you're sleeping if these temperatures are any numbers in uh below 30 minus 30 then you have a potential chance for actually damaging yourself while you sleep pay special attention if you have damaged limbs because what is normal temperature while your limbs are at full strength might be a lot colder when they take damage damaged limbs are more susceptible to cold so you gotta check this before you go to sleep but as long as you sleep on a surface with a blanket the blanket will auto regulate your heat or your your temperature while you sleep so you won't have to worry about taking cold damage while you sleep so always try to make sure you can do that if possible all right there we go it's 2 30 in the morning and we have secured pretty much everything that i would like to recommend the the wax and the toilets is a pretty good one those candles are going to be very very helpful for you uh and that's a very non-obvious thing to know about so i wanted to be sure to point that one out but otherwise we've pretty much secured everything we need for early game survival we've got weapons we've got all the basic tools water food is the only thing next and i'll let you figure that part out so i hope you found this demonstration tutorial of the early game evac shelter start and what you can accomplish with the local materials helpful as always if you have any suggestions for future videos that might help folks out let me know in the comments down below or if you have any other tips for an evac shelter start that are different from the ones i offered feel free to post those as well you can always visit me on my discord channel if you have thoughts suggestions for future content other than that hope you enjoyed the video thanks for watching stay safe out there

Channel: Vormithrax

Views: 22,633

Keywords: cataclysm dark days ahead, cataclysm dda, cdda, zombie survival, roguelike, lets play, tutorial, lets learn, gameplay, zombie, survival, vormithrax, beginner guide

Id: OetlPqxcO1Y

Length: 32min 26sec (1946 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 26 2020