Video Game / Cataclysm

Cataclysm is an open-world post-apocalyptic roguelike in the Zombie Apocalypse genre, although its enemy list also features killer insects, triffids, Giant Spiders, graboids, killer animals, turrets, entities from the Cthulhu Mythos, and probably lots of other things, just to be sure. You're an average person left alone in this hostile world, and your survival depends on your wits and what resources you can scavenge.

While bearing a few similarities to Rogue Survivor, Cataclysm stands out by leaning much more towards the simulation end of gaming than most roguelikes (indeed, most role-playing games, period). Your character's inventory is limited not only by weight, but by the storage volume their clothes provide. Instead of the usual Class and Level System, you learn different skills independently of each other, and they only improve through study and use. The sheer volume of different weapons, food, drinks, tools, clothing, armor, drugs, bionic implants, traps, and just plain clutter in this game is one of its proudest features. Monsters hunt by sound as well as sight, and a single non-silenced gunshot in an infested area can bring a zombie horde right to your location. Perhaps most importantly, the wound system in Cataclysm is very harsh. There are no exploding HP or easy healing in this game - characters can feel pain and be seriously impaired by wounds, and if you have no medicine or first aid skill, you'll probably be making a new character very soon. You can also abuse, get hooked on, and suffer the side effects of a wide variety of non-medical drugs.

Another unique feature is that the game's world map is randomly-generated as usual, but also permanent. New regions are generated as your current character explores farther from their starting point, but it's possible to re-discover regions where your previous characters explored and died.

The game as it exists today is known as Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, a fork of Whales' now-defunct original. Unless otherwise noted, all tropes listed here refer to this version. Although Whales had designs to create a sequel, those plans have been put on indefinite hold (but his blog still exists, should that ever change).

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Examples:

• Abandoned Hospital: Naturally, any hospital you find will be devoid of any friendly characters.
• Abandoned Hospital Awakening: Available as a starting scenario. Considering it's not entirely abandoned, you'd better be fast on your feet or else it's going to be a really short game.
• Abandoned Laboratory: Along with mines, abandoned laboratories dot the land and serve as the game's dungeons. Except that they're not always abandoned.
• Abnormal Ammo: Incendiary and full metal jacket in some calibers. With enough skill, you can craft more exotic rounds, like HE shotgun slugs and acid 40mm grenades.
• Absurdly-Spacious Sewer: Sewers are generally 4 spaces wide, enough for 4 people to walk side-by-side.
• Action Survivor: The player character, by default. Especially if you never acquire the rather steep medical/mechanical/electronic skills needed to install your own bionics.
• After the End: The game takes place exactly 5 days after the end. Nice to see an apocalypse that keeps its appointments.
• Alliterative Name: The I'm a Humanitarian recipes. Examples include Cooked Creep, Niño Nachos, Jerk Jerky, Hobo Helper, and Soylent Slices.
• The All-Seeing A.I.: Averted. Most monsters, including zombies, can track you by smell or by sound, even in the dark. The game simulates your scent so that it spreads more if you stay on a place for too long, so zombies won't detect you immediately in the dark. They might find you by sound, but you can mislead them by throwing items away.
• All There in the Manual: While a lot of the background lore behind the Cataclysm is hinted at through in-game means, the wiki and forum are the go-to sources for a breakdown of the events leading up to the start of the game.
• An Interior Designer Is You: There's a huge construction interface for remodeling any building you like into a somewhat secure fort, or even build your own from scratch. You can also build an array of pits, traps and furniture to decorate or entrench your home.
• Anti-Grinding: Crafting skills cannot be trained by easier recipes. Once you reach level 2 or 3, recipes start to require limited and rare items, preventing you from just crafting an item and disassembling it for its components. And books have a limit to what level they can train your skills to.
• Artificial Animal People: As part of the backstory, American scientists were researching genetic modification in order to create Super Soldiers in case a cold war with China turned hot. Some scientists developed Super Serums that grant animal traits, although the Cataclysm prevented widespread usage of them. If you find or recreate the right kind of mutagens, you can become an example of this trope, although it's very risky.
• Artificial Stupidity: Justified and intentional, as most of the enemies are zombies. You can funnel zombies into a window sill and they'll just climb on top of each other trying to get to you, only to take a crowbar to the face for their troubles. They are also unable to grasp that stepping in and out of a broken glass window hurts them and causes them to bleed out. Throw down a molotov, and zombies will try to shamble through it, only to die after a few steps in.
  • NPCs and non-zombie creatures increasingly avert this trope, however, as the team continues to refine the AI.
• Apocalyptic Log: What you find in some of the unique locations, which provides some of the sparse hard canon lore.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Safemode, which will refuse any input except one specific key wherever a hostile monster is found. Auto-Safemode reenables it after a set number of turns without enemies on sight. This has saved the lives of a LOT of characters which otherwise would experience "death by boredom". Both can be adjusted. The game will also prompt when the player is about to step on a dangerous square, such as a fire or a (known) trap.
• Atomic Superpowers: Radiation and mutagenic substances can give you mutations. If you're really lucky, they might even be good.
• Armor Is Useless: Maybe not useless, per se, but you'll have to decide whether the protection and storage space is worth the torso encumbrance.
  • Averted with crafted armor; while expensive, a survivor suit will let you shrug off most attacks and lets you carry more than most regular items of clothing.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Shotguns in general, more particularly with Wandering Hordes on. They are incredibly loud and a single unsuppressed shot will draw the attention of all neighboring zombies. They also have their dedicated skill and as such they are hardly useful outside emergencies due to lack of training. Most of them also suffer from being a Short-Range Shotgun. Ironically, the most useful of them all might be the Sawed-Off Shotgun, thanks to its decreased weight and volume and its status as an emergency weapon.
    
    With hordes turned off, shotguns are more useful as you don't have to worry about zombie hordes following the noise. Instead, you have to know if there are any dangerous zombies in the area that could be drawn by your fire.
  • The coilgun is essentially the nailgun on 'roids. It has five times the range of the nailgun, fires easily-accessible nails, and it's near silent. However, it requires electronics 5 to craft, utilizes four proficiencies that penalize time and failure chances if not learned, and requires a powered UPS to fire. Unless you luck out and find one earlier, you are studying electronics to level 5 to craft yours. Each shot drains battery from the UPS, and drains a 1000 battery charge after 500 shots, requiring anywhere from 16 to 20 shots to kill a regular zombie. Moreover, a silenced .22 handgun fills the same purpose and it's about as easy to find and keep loaded, in addition to dealing more damage per shot.
  • Powered Armor protects you from almost anything, but is cumbersome unless you find a UPS and the batteries/fuel cells to power it. It also blocks the use of backpacks, sheaths, or any other items that can be strapped to you, and it has very little storage space unless you find a rare lifting frame. You also need to have both the helmet and the armor with you if you intend to use it. All this means that in most cases you're better off with lighter gear.
  • Most advanced classes. Being a martial arts blackbelt or Cyborg assassin may sound more appealing than being a hobo or chain smoker, but these professions cost points, while the weaker ones give more points. Since these points are the only way to obtain certain traits, and any character can gain any skill or item given they overcome the Early Game Hell, picking a weaker profession will be more beneficial in the long run.
  • Vehicle turrets. You will need to feed them ammunition personally , all but the nail gun require ammo to be specially prepared to be fired from them, and anything they can kill easily is killed just as easily by just ramming your car into them.
  • In the latest builds, the proficiencies system has turned mutations into this. To craft enough mutagen and mutagenic primer to meaningfully mutate, you need to acquire a lot of chemistry-related proficiencies, which means a lot of grinding. By contrast, bionics just require you to find the right NPC, or configure an autodoc yourself.
  • A lot of items in the official mods, especially in the experimental versions. Vehicle Additions Pack adds a lot of parts like wildly impractical turrets, including what's effectively a vehicle-mounted mininuke launcher. Related is the Tanks and Other Vehicles mod. Yes, a direct hit from a tank's main gun will kill pretty much anything in the game, but ammo is hard to come by.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: In the latest builds, dissecting monsters can allow you to learn their biology, which translates into increased combat effectiveness.
• Awesome Personnel Carrier: Among the toughest vehicles in the game, though their limited field of view makes them Awesome, but Impractical. This is fairly easy to fix, however, for any character with a few levels in Mechanics and a welding machine, making them an excellent base for the rolling fortress of your dreams.
• Badass Biker: One of the professions the player can start as. In addition, the Hell's Raiders are an NPC faction of biker bandits.
• Badass Bookworm: Since reading books is the most efficient way to learn new skills, and a viable early game strategy is "Find a library and read the skill books until I've exhausted them", many successful characters end up evoking this trope at least a little. With the version 0.A release, this applies more than ever, where many skill books have over a dozen valuable crafting recipes, many of which will give you much easier access to rare and very difficult to find items.
• Bandit Mook: Zombie Technicians have built-in magnets that they can use to pull weapons right out of your hands, but only if it contains metal. Even if a weapon is mostly made out of wood, a single bit of metal is enough for them to disarm you.
• Base on Wheels - The end reward of many hours of scavenging and a leveling a character up in the fabrication, mechanics, and electrical skills is the ability to construct one of these from scrap metal and duct tape. The latest experimentals and bundled "official" mods have taken this even farther by adding a slew of additional mounted weapons, reinforcement options, and utility parts, making it possible to assemble massive Mobile Factories studded with turrets and armored solar panels. Maniacal cackling as your gasoline-chugging building-sized mass of steel spews forth Bullet Hell upon legions of undead before crushing them and anything else in it its path beneath roller drums and caterpillar tracks before delivering the slurry of loot and pulped remains into waiting cargo containers optional.
• Bare-Fisted Monk: There are many martial arts styles, each with its own pros and cons. They synergize well with "natural weapons", such as claws from mutations or retractable blades.
• Bears Are Bad News: And zombie bears are even worse news. You can become a bear yourself with the Ursine Mutation branch.
• Big Badass Rig: With a little luck and some mechanics skill, the only better mobile base is an RV. More often than not they're just wrecks cluttering up bridges.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Giant insects and arachnids are some of the many enemies you will encounter in this game.
• Black Eyes of Evil: The zombies are stated as having jet-black eyes with a look of Unstoppable Rage.
• Blackout Basement: And batteries are in high demand during the apocalypse.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: The "Monomolecular Blade" bionic upgrade, which the Bionic Assassin class starts with.
• Blob Monster: Dungeon feature. Logs left behind by scientists imply they are some sort of alien Grey Goo, and are what causes zombies to rise from the dead and mutate. You can become one yourself by crossing the Slime mutation threshold.
• Body Horror:
  • As in most Roguelikes, mutations exist. Some are good, some are bad, some are double edged swords. You can also modify yourself with bionics, many of which are visible. After several augments and mutations, your character will barely look human.
  • Several of the enemy types are quite grisly in their descriptions, especially once-human enemies such as the Broken Cyborg. For added fun, you can play as a broken cyborg in the experimental versions. They start with literally every faulty bionic in the game.
• Body of Bodies: Jabberwocks are titanic monsters that are described as an amalgamation of corpses. They move faster than you, can attract more enemies with their roars, and can knock you down. Fortunately, they're hostile to any other monsters, including other jabberwocks. Unfortunately for you, you'll usually encounter them in sparsely populated environments. Lucky you.
• Boring, but Practical: Part of learning to survive is figuring out productive uses for all the clutter objects you find.
  • The fire ax isn't as glamorous as a broadsword or katana, but it has decent swinging power behind it and can knock back and stun enemies. It's also easier to find than the more exotic blades, as fire stations and firefighter zombies occasionally have at least one on hand.
  • Similarly, the combat knife lacks the punch of the fire ax or katana, but swings quickly and accurately. More importantly, though, it's easier to find than the former two: manhacks and soldier zombies drop them, and occasionally a military surplus store or gun basement will have one.
  • The quarterstaff is not very exciting as a weapon, but it is easily-made (a pair of two-by-fours and 2 leather patches), swings relatively quickly, and works with multiple martial arts styles.
  • The cudgel, the quarterstaff's simpler and weaker cousin, requires very little in the way of materials, and it's accurate, quick, and can be used with almost any melee weapon martial arts style. While it now takes modest skill to craft rather than none at all, the wooden club and large wooden club fill its former niche of something you can make in 7 minutes with a cutting tool and no skills or proficiencies to speak of.
  • Spears let you attack zombies from one (or two, with some types) space away, which drastically reduces the amount of hits they can get in on you. The most easily-crafted types break very easily, but if you're lucky enough to find some rebar, you can craft a decent and sturdy spear out of it using nothing but a rock.
  • The nail gun has next to no range and does dismal damage, but it's fairly accurate, and since nails can be found literally almost anywhere, it's a cheap way to level up your handguns skill early on. Also, it can be converted into a nail rifle, which can be used to train up your rifles skill as well.
  • For guns, anything chambered in 9x19mm, 12 Gauge, and 5.56 qualifies. As their caliber is also widely used by the US military, their ammo (and possibly magazines) can be looted from any military location, as well as being randomly dropped by zombie soldiers. As such, you can easily keep a stockpile of ammo, and even get away with regularly using it up.
  • Fragmentation grenades are a common drop from zombie soldiers and their variants, and can be found in large numbers in military armories. While it takes a bit of practice to use them without getting a face full of shrapnel, they require very little in-game skill to use, and are extremely strong once you get used to them. One grenade can wipe out an entire mob of basic zombies, and even late-game boss monsters go down to Grenade Spam.
  • You can learn a huge number of martial art styles, but the default combat style, Brawling, is probably the one you'll stick with for most of the game. It can be used with any weapon, melee or otherwise, and unlocks the hugely useful Feint and Grab Break abilities at low Unarmed Combat levels.
  • Weapons aside, some of the most sought-after articles early in the game are clothes with ample storage. Cargo pants can safe your life, and a backpack is worth killing for.
• Bottomless Bladder: Toilets exist in the game, but you never need to use one. Instead, they provide a source of water.
• Car Fu: Anything larger than a motorcycle is good for running over enemies (and usually insta-killing them). Cars are just the beginning. Wait until you get a semi-truck. Without a suitably large vehicle, however, a zombie hulk can stop your ride dead in its tracks at low speeds. And then proceed to smash it, shortly followed by smashing you.
• Cat Girl: The Otaku starts with a Cat Girl (or Cat Boy) costume. You can become an actual Cat Girl if you get lucky with mutagens.
• Cats Are Mean: Cougars, which are a hair better than wolves stat-wise, but luckily hunt alone. Some of them have also joined the ranks of the undead.
• Challenge Run: There are various starting scenarios that make early game harder in exchange for more skill points. The best would be "Challenge: Really Bad Day", which only lets you choose from two professions: Tweaker (suffers from meth addiction) or Shower Victim (has only a wet towel and a bar of soap, and as the towel lacks storage space, they can't even hold that bar of soap until they find something better). Additionally, the starting building is on fire, surrounded by zombies, your character has the flu (penalty to all stats) and depression (cannot craft, also penalizes stats), and an infected bite wound. That last one is the nastiest, as it regularly causes nausea, so you cannot eat or drink most comestibles, and will kill you shortly if you cannot find some rare antibiotics. The best hope is to start in a house, immediately rush to the bathroom before it burns down, check if there are any antibiotics, and restart if there aren't.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Skills have more weight than raw stats for determining success, so any character can get good enough at a particular skill with enough grinding, with only Skill Rust there to stop you (and then there's the Memory Banks bionic, or, you know, disabling Skill Rust altogether). Throwing is probably the worst offender; at high enough levels, it's easy to one-shot turrets well beyond their firing range with a wooden spear.
• Clickbait Gag: Playing with the Crazy Cataclysm official mod will occasionally spawn Shocker Zombies that spout "Shocking!" headlines, mostly related to the game's development on GitHub and more controversial changes approved there such as lead developer Kevin Granade's supposed preference for realism over fun or the nerfing of knife spears.
• Cobweb Jungle: Some parts of the forests are those, and are home to Giant Spiders.
• Construction Is Awesome: A big part of the game's appeal is scavenging for tools and parts to build zombie-proof fortresses and Deathmobiles.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Now averted. Stepping near lava pits will cause your temperature to rise, depending on how close you are. Getting too close will cause your skin to blister.
• Cooking Mechanics: The player can prepare several dishes and can learn further dushes with cooking books on French cuisine, Italian cuisine, Japanese cuisine and human flesh dishes.
• Cool Bike: While rolling bases on wheels are a popular choice of vehicle, souped-up motorcycles are also common, being easier to navigate in cities. In addition, experimental builds add a version that can spawn with a beefier engine than the norm.
• Cool Car: Raising your mechanics skill takes you beyond plain repairing your ride and allows you to turn it into a huge steel behemoth on wheels capable of speeds in excess of 150 mph, covered from top to bottom in spikes and blades, having several pairs of automated turrets and with more storage space you could ever use. Oh, and you can put a bed and a caravan-style kitchen inside.
• Cool, Clear Water: Averted. Boil it or enjoy puking. That goes double for toilet water.
• Cool Tank: Added via a mod in the experimental versions, complete with main guns comparable to the tank drone's main gun.
• Cosy Catastrophe: Almost everyone on Earth is dead or a zombie, but it's not too hard to find a safe spot the zombies can't reach, hide there, and spend your days reading books and eating junk food. And once you're ready to come out, you can use the knowledge from the books you read to grab a nice vehicle, fix it, and drive around the mostly-safe roads looking for stuff.
• Crapsack World: Aside from the Zombie Apocalypse scenario, all the illegal drugs you can find laying around in the abandoned houses paint an unflattering picture of pre-apocalyptic life in this world.
• Creepy Doll: Talking dolls have a small chance of being creepy, which changes the messages when you activate them.
• Critical Existence Failure: Zigzagged; while you do have health points, there's a set amount of them for each body part (and losing all of your head or chest HP equals death), but the pain mechanic reduces movement speed as the character receives damage, eventually stunlocking you at high enough levels.
• Crowbar Combatant: Players who find (or make) their own crowbar. And for good reason, as crowbars are not only good for bashing zombies, but they can also pry open locked doors, windows and manholes, making less noise than bashing them open.
• Cursed with Awesome: The Blob. Once you die, it will take over your body and turn you into yet another mindless zombie, and there's a 25% chance of it making you go feral (and a 50% chance of it making you mildly crazy, so there's just a 25% chance of remaining normal). In the meantime, it wishes to keep its host body as strong as possible, so it grants a mild Healing Factor (hence why wounds heal faster than in real life, since the player is infected) and might add beneficial modifications to the body as a response to certain substances or radiation.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: In-game example, the Vehicle Additions Pack changes the standard mounted weapons to be manual-only, using the ability to manually fire turrets introduced in the experimental builds. This regularly trips players up.
• A Date with Rosie Palms: Somewhat. One of the items the player can find in the world is a vibrator that can be used to get a hefty mood boost. The description calls it a "massager".
• Deadly Lunge: A few zombies (and animals) can pull this on the player, though a harmless "leap" ability to close the distance is far more common. The experimental builds add zombie predators, an upgrade to the zombie hunter with a very nasty version that can knock the target over and inflict blood loss.
• Death Trap: You'll find these laying around here and there, and picking up a few levels in traps skill (plus the right components) will allow you to set some of your own. Characters with perception below 10 are going to have a short and miserable life, however.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • When trying to interact with furniture and there is an object in the way, the game will say "There is an <item> in the way!". If you attempt to close a door while standing in the frame, you get "There is a buffoon in the way!".
  • If you attempt to deploy a furniture item like a brazier on the spot you're standing in, you get the message "You attempt to become one with the furniture. It doesn't work."
  • If you attempt to do the same with a trap, the message you receive is "Yeah. Place the [trap name] at your feet. Real damn smart move."
  • Similarly, if you attempt to pry the square you are standing in with a crowbar, it results in the message "You attempt to pry open your wallet, but alas. You are too miserly."
  • Everything, no matter how inconsequential, can be used for something. Take the deputy badge, for example. If you're wearing one and there's an eyebot in the area, it will recognise you as a police officer and will not summon a police/riot control robot.
• Disability Superpower: Certain "bad" mutations are not necessarily bad. Some of them can actually mutate further into useful ones. For example, you might become carnivore and able to eat only flesh; further mutation might allow you to eat tainted flesh (for example, zombie flesh).
• Drunken Master: One of the advantages boosts your melee skills whenever you're intoxicated.
• Dungeon Crawling: Labs, strange temples, and mines offer this, if you're in the mood for a more traditional roguelike experience.
• Dracolich: A boss in one of the experimental version's official mods. Which makes it the only one of the mod's bosses capable of getting back up after you kill it.
• Drugs Are Bad: Averted with pot— smoking a joint is good for morale, with only mild drawbacks. Fully enforced with all other recreational drugs, though. If you manage to get hooked on booze or cocaine, the withdrawal penalties will spank you hard. On the other hand, if you have a safe place and enough food, it's safer to use the hardest drugs for their boosts as the easiest and most reliable way to get rid of the withdrawal syndrome is to ride it out.
• Duct Tape for Everything: Other than replacing nails, adhesives or soldering in many, many recipes, you can use duct tape to reinforce windows and fix any part of your cars: engine, fuel tanks, turrets, frames. Truly the most versatile item in the game.
• Early Game Hell: Depending on your starting scenario, profession, chosen disadvantages, and enemy spawns, the first few days of the Cataclysm can be the deadliest part of the game. Exaggerated by the "Really Bad Day" scenario, which grants you a whopping 10 points for character creation but spawns you in a burning building surrounded by enemies while depressed, drunk, sick with the flu, and nursing an infected wound.
• Eats Babies: You can find Mutated Fetuses. And you can also eat them if you want to. This is gross enough to give you a massive morale penalty, in addition to the penalty for eating human flesh (unless you have the cannibal trait), and will also cause you to mutate.
• Elite Mook: The Zombie Necromancer and Zombie Master. The Zombie Necromancer stays back and revives any unbutchered zombie corpse in the area. The Zombie Master "promotes" any normal zombie into a much nastier type.
• Elite Zombie: Many types, including a few that don't quite fall into any category.
  • Brutes— The aptly-named zombie brute and the dreaded zombie hulk. These both have tons of variants, like the shocker brute and the Kevlar hulk.
  • Armored Zombies— Zombie cops, SWAT zombies, and zombie soldiers (and their variants), which wear synthetic armors. There's also scarred zombies and skeletal zombies, which have grown their own organic armor, and Kevlar zombies, which have grown Kevlar hides. Finally, there's the armored zombie, which is a zombie in a combat exoskeleton, and is invulnerable to all but the strongest armor-piercing shots.
  • Hazmat Zombies— The hazmat zombie. It doesn't explode, but drops items like Geiger counters and iodine pills.
  • Ferals/Hunters/Stalkers— The zombie runner, zombie hunter and zombie predator.
  • Undead Animals— Bears, moose, cougars, wolves, deer, dogs and pigs all have zombie counterparts.
  • Screamers— Shrieker zombies scream, drawing the attention of any nearby zombies. Survivor zombies can also do this, and an upgraded version can scream loud enough to cause disorientation.
  • Vomit Zombies— The Boomer and Spitter zombies, and their upgraded huge boomer and corrosive zombie forms.
  • Boomers— The bloated zombie explodes into a cloud of toxic gas if it gets too close or when it dies. Zombie burners were soldiers with flamethrowers in life, and when re-killed there's a chance that their napalm tanks explode. There's also variants that produce clouds of tear gas or relaxation gas, and the rare gasoline zombie, which goes off like a Molotov.
  • Smart Zombies— Zombie scientists and zombie grenadiers retain enough intelligence to use manhacks and explosives. Zombie bio-operators still know how to use CQC.
  • Child Zombies— A reasonably common early-game opponent. Killing them gives you a morale debuff. Several variants of this zombie, that cross into other zombie types, exist: Ferals (sproglodyte), Boomers (snotgobbler), and Screamers (shriekling, howling waif).
  • Test Subject/"Enhanced" Zombies— The shocker zombie and shocker brute are wreathed in electricity from their bionics and can shoot electricity quite some distance. The zombie bio-operator (and the even tougher elite variety) are stronger versions that, while not able to attack at range, can perform rudimentary martial arts techniques if you let them get too close.
  • Other— The zombie hollow is a boneless-looking zombie that's hinted to be the blob wearing the skin as a suit. The slavering biter's teeth have distorted its mouth, and allows it to perform a nasty bite. The smoker zombie constantly spews a cloud of thick smoke around itself (though it lacks its Left 4 Dead counterpart's snaring tongue). Grabber and grappler zombies can catch you and hold you down or drag you off, and the shady zombie is invisible in darkness. Finally, the zombie necromancer and master have anomalous abilities no other zombie has.
  • All zombies have properties from the Regenerators and Mutating Zombies categories. If you defeat a zombie but don't destroy the body, it will eventually heal and get back up. Most zombies have "evolved" variants, and as time passes the game will start spawning evolved zombies instead of basic types to represent zombies mutating over time.
• Exotic Weapon Supremacy: Several of the more unusual weapons can be quite effective. However, most of them are Awesome, but Impractical if you lack a martial arts style that works with them, and the weapon skills to use them effectively.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: The few that work, anyway: you might want to check the damage on that gasoline tank before ramming into something. The lore says this is because nitroglycerin has been added to gasoline to lessen pollution.
• Everything Breaks:
  • Both you and the monsters can break through or burn down the buildings in this game with the proper armament.
  • Your clothes get damaged as zombies wail on you. Your shoes and pretty much everything else can only be destroyed by acid. Most glass items will break if you hit a zombie with them. You can find items on zombies that are invariably in tatters.
  • Acid rain is very bad for your stuff. Don't leave it in the open. Eventually acid rain was disabled, and acid damaging items was removed later on as well.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: As usual for a roguelike, Cataclysm plays this trope to the hilt.
• Expy: Several monsters are ripped from other media, the more uncommon zombies reference Left 4 Dead, and the way zombie animals are presented recalls the T-Virus.
• Extreme Omnivore: Once your food runs out, you have to switch to butchering and preparing your own meat from corpses. Zombie meat is pretty much a last ditch move until you learn how to cure it, but rat, ant, and slug meat are all fair game. Currently, the game doesn't consider where the meat came from, as long as it's not from a zombie, so your character can eat cooked slug meat and enjoy it. Even human meat is viable as a source of food (except for babies), so long as you don't mind feeling horrible for the rest of the day.
  • The Internal Furnace bionic allows the player to consume anything that catches fire for fuel.
• Eye Scream:
  • Be careful around that Auto Doc or else you might get a syringe of stem cell treatment straight to the eye.
  • Enemies will also sometimes attack your eyes, which has a chance of blinding you temporarily.
• Fake Ultimate Mook: While exploring basements, you might come across an Ancient Red Dragon that activates Safe Mode when seen and has its name written in dark red (a trait reserved for the most dangerous of monsters). It's actually a fake made out of paper that never moves or attack and dies in one hit.
• Fragile Speedster: The Avian mutation branch. You can hardly take a hit, but you can outrun anything and nothing can escape your detection.
• From Bad to Worse: Having 99% of the population zombified or dead by the time the game starts isn't good, but what you find happening to the world as you advance through the game doesn't paint a pretty picture of the biosphere's fate.
• Game Gourmet: There are hundreds and hundreds of different food items and recipes to match, from pizza (three kinds, even) to protein shakes to salads to cookies to soups to fruit juice to sushi to pasta (4 kinds of noodle and a few different sauces), split across several categories. Delicious food gives your character a mood boost, and healthy food increases the rate at which they regenerate hit points; conversely, raw food or food made from bad-tasting ingredients penalize mood, and unhealthy food penalizes your healing rate. (For example, junk food tastes great, but isn't healthy.) There's even an option to enable nutrition tracking, where different foods provide different nutrients and you have to make sure to get enough nutrients to avoid getting sick. A character with the Gourmand trait can eat more food at once and enjoy it more as well.
• Game Mod: In addition to community mods, the game has a format for enabling mods when generating a world, and comes with several popular mods already ready to use, especially in the experimental builds. These range from new monsters (Animatronic Monsters, DinoMod) to vehicle additions (Boats, Vehicle Additions Pack) and item additions (Mythological Replicas, More Survival Tools), in addition to various mods that remove certain content or change other things.
• Genre Shift: Starts as your standard Zombie Apocalypse, but takes a gradual turn into Lovecraft Lite when you start encountering more advanced monsters like Mi-Gos and Shoggoths.
• Giant Spider: One of the many categories of enemies. Along with centipedes, wasps, bees, slugs, ants, and mosquitoes.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: Brawling is usually weaker than proper styles, due to being slow to learn and having lackluster techniques, but it benefits from lacking any weakness, being simple to use (as there's no special strategy for it), and being usable with literally anything.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: The description for the Flammenschwert^note a two-handed sword with a gasoline douser is entirely in German.
• Great Bow: Greatbows are 198cm long and are useless without superhuman strength.
• Gun Accessories: A good amount of them, and currently you may have any amount of modifications on your gun, for your inner tacticool commando.
• Hardcoded Hostility: NPCs associated with the Hell's Raiders faction will shoot the player on sight, regardless of what other factions they've allied with.
• Heal Thyself: First aid kits, bandages, and disinfectant fix damage to your body parts, stop bleeding, and prevent infections from setting in. Medications for managing pain are also available, ranging from the common aspirin to the highly-addictive oxycodone and morphine.
• Healing Factor: Several flavors at different rates are available, but the Rapid Metabolism mutation is the purest example. Broken limbs heal overnight, anything less with a short nap... at the cost of having to eat every few hours.
• Hell Is That Noise:
  • "Heard a noise! Stop crafting/reading/eating? Y/N"
  • "The eye you're carrying lets out a tortured scream! You hear screeches from the rock above and around you!"
  • "From the west you hear a child wailing!" This is one of the random noises a Mi-go can make.
  • "Tekeli-li!"
  • "You hear a terrifying roar that nearly deafens you!" A jabberwock, which can flat-out ruin your day. Or in Arcana and Magic Items mod, a dracolich.
• Hide Your Children: Averted. Zombie children are common, and the player takes a hit to morale for killing them.
• Hollywood Healing: Mostly averted, with the notable exception of the Fast Healer trait. Stepped on a landmine? Face half-ripped off? No problem! Just take a nap and you'll be back at full health when you wake up. Mutated characters can take this into Healing Factor territory.
• Hollywood Silencer: You'll want to use these a lot. Fortunately, they have a relatively easy crafting recipe.
• Homage: The main zombie types reference the Left 4 Dead series.
• Hostile Weather: Full acid rain can melt down a battle-hardened survivor in a handful of turns. Thankfully the much less lethal acid drizzle happens beforehand, which serves as a warning. Acid rain has been mercifully disabled in versions 0.C and beyond, however.
• Hybrid Monster: You can become a hybrid monster yourself with the Chimera mutation.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: With a mutation of the same name, excess nutrition is converted into direct healing. Of course, this mutation also comes with the heavy price tag of requiring a lot more food even under normal circumstances.
• I Am Legion: We are the Mycus. And we can be joined.
• Incendiary Exponent: The player can modify several weapons into their fiery counterparts, such as the Flammenschwert and Rising Sun.
• Infernal Retaliation: Some tough enemies if they stand in fire for long enough. For example, bears.
  Remember, only YOU can prevent forest fires!
• Inventory Management Puzzle: Not only does your character have a weight limit of loot to work with, but they are also limited by the size (volume in-game) of their loot. Each piece of clothing available may have a set amount of storage space which must be managed separately from weight. Going above your weight limit will slow you down; going above your volume limit will increase your encumbrance, which usually will slow you down as well as other penalties.
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • Your mistakes are not the only source of human corpses in this game, and if you get desperate enough...
  • There is a trait called "Strict Humanitarian", although it actually refers to the fact that you don't eat humans... you only eat mutants, aliens, and demihumans, thank you very much.
• Immune to Bullets:
  • Anything with a thick enough skin, at least to .22 and 9mm bullets. Some monsters are hard to shoot and automatically dodge 3 out of every 4 shots.
  • Harshly averted for the player. Pray you don't encounter robots or other survivors with guns. If you do, and you don't have Kevlar armor or higher, you're going to have a very bad day.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Gun-wielding ferals are hideously innacurate with guns, to the point that a completely untrained survivor can easily outshoot them with the same guns. This is all done for balance reasons, to prevent players from easily dying to gunfire.
• Improbable Weapon User: Unless able to get proper medieval weapons, you'll likely spend a decent amount of time fighting with improvised weaponry. Several styles also include improvised weapons (including several styles that specificially include bladed farming tools), and Brawling is usable with literally anything you wield.
• Improvised Weapon: Since using guns without a silencer can often be suicidal, it pays to learn which objects make good melee weapons. (Hint: smash one or two of the benches in the starting shelter, then go outside and grab a rock so you can make a nail board.)
• Item Crafting: The game's item crafting system is very robust, and gaining the proper skills to make things is highly recommended if you want to extend your character's lifespan.
• Katanas Are Just Better: The katana is one of the best melee weapons available. If you manage to find it, even at low "cutting weapons" skill you will block most of the attacks and one-hit-kill most enemies. The Nodachi takes this a step further by virtue of being the BFS of katanas, and even outclasses the diamond katana despite being easier to obtain and/or create.
• Kill It with Fire: Lighting a fire and luring zombies into it is an easy way to deal with small hordes. Just be sure to either do it outdoors and away from flammable items, or in a building you've already looted and that's far enough from someplace safe (but not too far, or the fire will leave the "reality bubble" and stop burning until you come back).
• Late to the Tragedy: The player, evidently. How exactly you ended up as one of the last people alive in the region is left to your imagination. Later on you might find dead squads of soldiers and scientists, as well as military and scientific infrastructures which are invariably overrun by the undead.
• LEGO Genetics: Mutating is as "simple" as leveling your cooking skill high enough, finding the proper instruction manual, combining bleach, ammonia, and zombie flesh, and drinking the resulting concoction. This can give you some animal-specific traits, implying that all humans already have DNA from all species in them.
• Le Parkour: Eligible trait at character creation, cuts down the speed penalty for moving through tables, windows, etc.
• Lethal Joke Character:
  • Several of the more underwhelming professions are surprisingly useful. For instance, the tailor is Boring, but Practical simply because it gives a head start on the tailoring skill, which is used for repairing and reinforcing your clothes and armor. In the experimental builds, the broken cyborg is notable for starting with every single faulty bionic, but also gains full-body alloy plating and fingertip razors. And in general, the bonus points given by weaker professions can be spent on traits that provide long-term benefits if you can survive the Early Game Hell.
  • The "Joke" monsters: the smoky bear, Thriller, and (actual cannibal) Shia LaBeouf. All of them are Shout Outs to pop culture, but they are every bit as deadly as non-joke monsters.
• Level Grinding: In the early game, expect to spend lots of time repeatedly crafting and disassembling items to improve your fabrication and tailoring skills. Later on this becomes much harder since you need higher level crafting recipes to train higher level skills, and these recipes usually require rare components and cannot be completely disassembled.
• Lovecraft Lite: Grim as the fate of humanity may seem, a well-equipped, competent character can still face the worst the game has to offer and potentially come out on top. In addition, the Nether monsters who are out-and-out Shout Outs to Lovecraft are one of the least insidious monster factions. They don't subvert the land itself or bring the alien equivalent of Gaia's Vengeance. They don't subvert and re-animate mundane wildlife. They're also regarded as different from the Unearthed Horrors that tend to reference other media. They're simply a disparate group of otherworldly creatures, with varying degrees of apparent intelligence and malevolence, with only some of them having outright anomalous abilities.
  • The mods in the experimental version take it further, allowing human ingenuity to weaponize . With Vehicle Additions pack, you can make dimensional vortices into bottomless cargo holds, and construct vehicles literally made from the blob. PK's Rebalance adds (among many other things) the forces of Hell itself, and you too can be a man-and-a-half and wipe them out. And the Arcana and Magic Items mod is all about weaponizing or otherwise exploiting otherworldly forces.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • The game is mostly fair. Your starting location and climate not necessarily so. Spawned next to a fungal bloom and a swamp? It's better to roll a new character. Spawned next to a hostile, gun-wielding NPC? Better hope they only want your stuff.
  • A very effective early game tactic consists on setting bushes on fire and bait zombies to tumble across them, which both slows them down and heavily damages them. It's great for thinning out the horde and obtaining supplies from their corpses if you can get them before they burn out. Some zombies drop alcohol or explosives.
  • "John Doe gives you a mininuke (active)."
  • The Infected and Really Bad Day scenarios start you off with an infected bite wound. You will die slowly and painfully within a couple of days unless you find some antibiotics (which are rare, and aren't guaranteed to cure you) or just get really, really lucky and have the infection randomly cure itself. At any time until the infection is healed, the game can just decide "sorry, you lose" and kill you.
• Machete Mayhem: Machetes are great weapons, if you're lucky enough to find one. You can make your own with a blade from a lawnmower and some duct tape. And if you have the tools and materials for it, you can redesign a standard machete into a combat one, turning it into a proper sword.
• Michael Jackson's Thriller Parody: There's a a zombie version as a joke monster. It can turn nearby zombies into non-hostile yet Nigh-Invulnerable dancers, but killing the Thriller turns them all into hulks.
• Mighty Glacier: The Ursine mutation branch. You're gigantic, slow and extremely cumbersome with a bad temper, but strong as all hell with giant claws.
• Magikarp Power: Unarmed combat. While initially weak, the damage will quickly improve with each level, and it's the fastest melee weapon. A large variety of styles is also available, letting you easily switch attacks on the fly
• Molotov Cocktail: The most easily-improvised bomb in the game, readily available to any player who has a bottle, a rag, some gasoline/alcohol, and a lighter.
• Mooks Ate My Equipment: Whacking enemies with a cutting or piercing weapon can cause it to get stuck, which in turn can cause you to drop the weapon. Technician Zombies also have a special attack that grabs your weapon.
• Mook Medic: The Zombie Necromancer can bring back unpulped or unburnt zombies from the dead. This can make killing it first rather hard.
• Mook Promotion: The Zombie Master can transform a random zombie in its vicinity into a nastier zombie.
• Moose Are Idiots: Moose will wander straight into hordes of undead. However, they can wander out the other side covered in pulped zombie. And then charge the player.
• Muggles Do It Better: If there is one big technological advantage humanity has over monsters, it's ranged weapons, as the most damaging and longest-range enemy attacks all come from man-made robots. And when it comes to fighting all the other monsters, a survivor with a ranged weapon (even a bow or a sling) has a major advantage in range and frequency of attack.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Happens to your character if you kill a survivor in cold blood, kill a zombie child, eat human flesh, or mutilate a zombie corpse to create an undead slave. Unless you're a psychopath.
• New Skill as Reward: You can ask NPCs to teach you something in exchange for completing a mission. You can learn a martial art or increase the level of a skill by 1, but only if the NPC has that skill and it's at a higher level than yours.
• Nintendo Hard: It's a roguelike, using a gun carelessly can get you killed, your character doesn't get more max HP as they gain experience, and healing is much slower? Yes, it's hard.
• No OSHA Compliance: In the labs, rooms guarded by automated turrets are often randomly placed next to bedrooms. And dissectors are put in the middle of many rooms.
• Nothing Is Scarier: After you've survived long enough, you can go long stretches without seeing any enemies. But if you have dynamic spawn or Hordes active, you know they're still out there...
• Nobody Poops: Zig-Zagged.
  • Although digestion is realistically simulated for the player, food and drink simply disappears once it's gone through the player's body instead of turning into waste. There are no plans to implement bodily functions for the player, which is notable considering the policy of making the game as realistic as possible.
  • Averted for wildlife, which will leave dung everywhere.
• No Zombie Cannibals: The zombies in this game will chase you to the end of the world and maul you, but they never seem to have an appetite for their own kind.
• Not the Intended Use: Vehicles are obviously meant to help you travel. However, there are many utilities that can be installed in vehicles, which are powered by its car battery. Since solar panels and wind turbines make it much easier and more convenient to recharge a car battery than normal batteries, it's beneficial to build an immobile "vehicle" with a welder, forge, kitchen, and lamps inside of a building.
• Nuclear Mutant: There is a chance that your character will mutate when exposed to radiation, but it's far less common than simply dying. This can be toggled in world generation.
• Obvious Beta: The game was initially released as a candidate for a 7-day dev contest, which doesn't help much. Even after years of development and fixes, seasoned players still back up their saves regularly.
• One-Word Title
• Our Elves Are Different: Even a mostly-realistic game like this has elves. In this case, they're mutated humans with a few plant-like properties.
  "You are the tree under which humankind will shelter during these dark times."
• Our Zombies Are Different: They seem to be of the fast variety, as they move at a deceptively quick pace, and then there is the even faster zombie dog. Also, the Left 4 Dead inspired zombies.
• Painful Transformation: When gaining mutations, your character will feel a large amount of pain and often pass out. You can eventually get to enjoy the feel of it
• Panacea: Royal Jelly cures all in-game illnesses. Or at least, it did until it was nerfed, since real-life royal jelly is obviously not an example.
• Penny Shaving: The Embezzler profession (only available in Prison and Island Prison scenarios) was arrested for trying to steal fractions of a cent at a time.
• Permadeath: As usual for a roguelike.
• Piñata Enemy:
  • Triffids, at least the rank and file ones, make the ideal neighbours for your fort. They're not that tough, more tame than most enemies (as in, won't immediately charge at you on sight from 5 screens away), and unlike zombies, they leave behind raw vegetable matter that any character can safely eat without needing any preparation whatsoever. Queen triffids, on the other hand...
  • Shocker zombies have a nasty projectile attack that is just about guaranteed to hit you, and striking them bare-handed or with a metal weapon will injure you as well. However, with a high enough survival skill, butchering them can yield some very valuable bionics. Shocker brutes are similar, but can also send you flying with a punch.
  • Cop and soldier zombies also consistently hold (damaged) riot gear, armor, and military-grade weapons. They're also a bitch and a half to kill at lower levels because of said armor.
  • Scientist zombies have a wide arsenal of surprises, but yield a few rare and valuable crafting components when they die. You can also butcher them to harvest their bionics.
  • Technician zombies are a significantly easier source of bionics, lacking any special attacks save for one that pulls your weapon out of your hands. Their drops are often include a disproportionate bounty of power storage bionics as well as work clothing.
  • Survivor zombies are tougher versions of the shrieker zombie, and drop a wide array of goodies including non-perishable food and survivor gear, which is usually a step up from the average stuff you find off other zombies.
• Pipe Pain: Pipes make for rather decent weapons to start with, and can be easily obtained by smashing metal objects.
• Point Build System: Character creation involves a tabletop-style system where you select stats, skills, advantages, and disadvantages out of a pool of points.
• Post-Apocalyptic Dog: By giving a stray dog food, you can make a cataclysm friend. Or two. Or five.
• Post-Apocalyptic Traffic Jam: abandoned cars and other vehicles litter the streets and roads. Most of them are broken, but they can be repaired if you have the right skills and items. You can also loot them for fuel, parts, and whatever items are laying around in them.
• Properly Paranoid: Smashing, butchering or burning all enemies you kill will prevent them from rising back up later, and is the only way to make a zone safer.
• Pummeling the Corpse: Smashing zombie corpses is necessary, otherwise the enemies will come back to life after a while. As of the Version 0.F Experimentals, even non-undead beings need to be pulped, since everyone is infected with the Blob, which is responsible for zombification.
• Punched Across the Room: The zombie brute, shocker brute, and zombie hulk all have the ability to hit you so hard you go flying. This is obviously quite painful. For some absurd reason, moose in PK's Rebalance mod (in the experimental version) can do this too.
• Pyromaniac: Subverted and played straight. It's subverted in that there are NPC arsonists that will torch buildings (such as that sweet gun store you were casing), but in-game dialogue reveals that they do it to salvage the rebar for the fledgling post-apocalyptic economy. Played straight in that nothing is stopping you from lighting the entire game world on fire, and is a worthwhile tactic when confronted by superior enemies.
• Raising the Steaks: Most notably, Antlered Horrors (zombie moose, named so for good reason) and Zombears, though essentially anything (formerly) living thing from the size of dogs on up can be infected.
• Randomized Transformation: Mutations randomly occur, whether provoked by the player or by events.
• Rat King: Rat Kings are enemies in caves. They can inflict the player with a disease called "Ratting" which reduces stats, can cause vomiting, or, in especially bad cases, cause the player to mutate slowly into a rat.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: The Zombie Necromancer has glowing red eyes.
• Reduced to Ratburgers: Possible in the older versions, but much less viable in the 0.E experimental versions. Rats only give a few scraps of meat that won't be enough to sustain a character for a day. Insects and other mutated creatures have toxic flesh that can be eaten safely in small amounts, but will cause problems if you depend mostly on it.
• The Remnant: With static Non Player Characters turned on, you can find representatives of what's left of the US government, which is stated to be based out of the US Navy's 2nd Fleet, which has been expanded to include a large number of civilian vessels and a few ships from other NATO nations.
• Reviving Enemy: Zombies in general. Butcher the corpse, smash it, or simply kill it so hard there's no corpse left. As of 0.F experimental, this applies to almost any creature given everything is infected by the Blob.
• Robbing the Dead: Of course. Most of your early-game (and mid-game, and late-game...) strategy will be taking everything from nearby houses and their (un)dead occupants.
• Sand Worm: The giant worm, Graboid, dark wyrm, and yugg. Luckily they cannot break concrete.
• Savage Wolves: Wolves are fast, hit hard, and come in packs. They're one of the worst non-zombie enemies, at least in the beginning. It gets worse when you encounter their zombified friends.
• Scavenger World: You'd be hard pressed to find a vehicle that isn't severely rusted or beat up (let alone a working one). Many components are more easy to retrieve from broken vehicles or appliances than crafted from scrap, so in either case the player character tends to invoke this a bit.
• Schizo Tech: Exodii equipment is a chaotic mix of whatever they manage to scavenge from the dimensions they pass through. While advanced cybernetics are a carefully guarded resource, their preferred weapons hover around World War II-era technology due to ease of maintenance.
• Schmuck Bait: A stockpile of food in the middle of the road, just sitting there? Of course it's safe!
• Sci-Fi Kitchen Sink: You have cybernetics, zombies, aliens and Powered Armor all in the same game.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: What you can find in certain labs and mines. You know, in case all the zombies and other horrors infesting the land aren't enough for you.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Zombie pheromone, which turns nearby zeds friendly for a handful of turns, and causes them to attack enemies. Can buy you a lot of time and is the primary reason you raise cooking to 3.
  • Because in this game bullets know no friends, with some footwork you can get a hostile turret to shoot anything standing between you and the turret. This is as risky as it sounds, but it works.
  • Monsters from different 'factions' will fight each other. Exploiting this is critical to surviving easily. Zombie horde on your ass? Lure them to that wasp hive you found earlier and let the wasps do your dirty work. Found a triffid grove? Lure a triffid army to the nearby town and watch them go on a rampage and wipe out the zombies. Low on ammo in a science lab? Let the mutants out and hide in a closet while they fight it out with the zombies.
• Shock and Awe: The shocker zombie and shocker brute. A middle game weapon is a taser which isn't that useful against zombies.
• Shoplift and Die: Don't barge into banks or pawn shops at the earliest opportunity. An alarm will sound, drawing the attention of every zombie in a two mile radius. If that didn't kill you, an eyebot will shortly appear to take your picture. If it succeeds, a copbot will follow to tase you to death. Fortunately, the zombies are also vulnerable to this trope.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Powerful, but also among the noisiest weapons. Still usable in a pinch if you run like hell afterward, or if you intend to clear out every hostile in the area.
• Shout-Out:
  • Several zombie types are based on Left 4 Dead: grabbers, boomers, smokers, spitters, and hulks (tanks).
  • The ethanol burner, which allows you to fuel your bionics with booze, references Futurama.
  • One Defense mode variant, which has you defending a bar from zeds, is based on and named after Shaun of the Dead.
  • The description of the towel says: "Any person who can hitch the length and breadth of the apocalypse, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a force to be reckoned with."
  • While exploring, one can stumble on a Triffid grove.
  • In some labs, you have the option to trigger a Resonance Cascade.
  • There are also various shout outs to Half-Life 2, Fallout, Dawn of the Dead (1978), Deus Ex, Doom, Mad Max, Dune, RIFT, I Am Legend, and Tremors.
  • The description of the pickaxe ends with "Strike the earth!". Vertical planes, while simply "levels" in game, are often called "Z-levels" in the official forums. Crafting (specially drug and weapons crafting) is sometimes referred to as !!SCIENCE!!. And Urist is an eligible name for random NPCs.
  • A cookbook for survivors looking to emulate the zombies is called "To Serve Man".
  • Mines occasionally end in a spiral cavern filled with human-faced snails and twisted mutants, a rift that forces you to approach it and summons freakishly elongated creatures, or a friendly dog... that turns into a tentacled horror.
  • Many of the official mods add even more references, especially in experimental builds. The Animatronic Monsters mod is Exactly What It Says on the Tin; DeadLeaves' Fictional Guns is outright focused on referencing fictional firearms; the Arcana and Magic Items mod references everything from the Magnum Opus to Strife; the Mythological Replicas mod focuses on Norse Mythology; and so on.
  • Talking dolls have a small chance of being creepy, which changes the messages when you activate them. Among these messages are references to Shin Megami Tensei ("Die for me!") and Jonathan Coulton's Trope Namer for Creepy Doll ("Do you really need that much honey?").
  • The Debug menu includes an infamous rant regarding a journalist who used cheats to win Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.
  Debug functions - Using these will cheat not only the game, but yourself. You won't grow. You won't improve. Taking this shortcut will gain you nothing. Your victory will be hollow. Nothing will be risked and nothing will be gained.
• Shown Their Work: Temperature affects the player's body parts individually and uniquely (a head that gets too hot results in a pounding headache, for example). When the player's torso gets too cold, the game will advise them that maybe they should remove some layers. This may not make sense until one realizes it is characteristic of severe hypothermia for people to remove their clothes, speeding up heat loss.
  • In the same vein, most food items found in the open during periods of cold weather will be frozen solid, especially liquids, making them unable to be consumed unless defrosted. However, alcoholic beverages will only be "cold" - chilly but still liquid and drinkable. This is because alcohol has a noticeably lower freezing point than water, with beers of higher alcohol content able to survive up to -3º Celsius (27º Fahrenheit), pure ethanol having a freezing point of -114º Celsius (-173º Fahrenheit).
• Sliding Scale of Undead Regeneration: Type IV, healing and no rotting. The Zombies don't rot, so even after several years of game time, you can just travel to a new city and find it full of fresh new undead to kill. And once you kill them, you need to further damage the corpse, or they will just keep coming back.
• Socketed Equipment: One advantage to using a gun is all the nice upgrades you can give them.
• Stance System: Combat styles can be switched at any moment, letting you benefit from different bonuses, weapons, and techniques as appropriate
• Stock Animal Diet: Mouse mutagen (not to be confused with rat mutagen) is made with regular mutagen and cheese. You can also use candy (the "main attraction" to being a mouse mutant is being able to eat as much junk food as you like with no health penalty), but cheese was also included as an alternative ingredient specifically due to this trope, according to the comments in the data files.
  fun fact: mice don't like cheese as much as sugar! we include it in the recipe because most people correlate the two, and as a fun poke at it
• Stuff Blowing Up: Houses are remarkably flammable. Gas stations and labs, strangely, even more so.
• Subsystem Damage: Torso, head, and left and right arms and legs. Hits to the former two may kill you (and sometimes blind you), while damage to the latter will make you clumsier or slower. If any extremity is damaged below 0, it's broken and requires a splint and lots of downtime or special machines in hospitals to fix.
• Suffer the Slings: They are very easy to craft; ammunition is everywhere (mash rocks). Standard pebbles are weak, but as your character becomes more skilled a greenie can be downed in as low as 3-4 shots. Then you craft metal bearings.
• Super Serum: The mutation-causing compound that you can find in labs or near dead scientists.
  • In 0.A, mutation serums are the only way to cross mutation thresholds, which give you exclusive, special mutations.
• Super-Persistent Predator: The relentless hulk, which shows up in the Hunted scenario. It's a unique zombie hulk that always knows where you are, but thankfully lacks the vanilla hulk's speed.
• Superpower Russian Roulette: Mutation in a nutshell. Sprout super-sensitive cat ears and a fluffy tail, develop digestive problems, gain the ability to see the infrared spectrum, become a freakishly huge hulk that can't fit in a car but can benchpress one, degenerate into a Blob Monster... it's an endless series of surprises.
• Survivalist Stash: What you can find in a house's basement, if you're lucky. And of course, you can make your own stash, and loot the stashes of your previously deceased characters!
• Swamps Are Evil:
  "Swamp - AVOID THESE. IT IS AN INSECT INFESTED HELL WITH ABSOLUTELY NOTHING OF VALUE"

  /vg/'s Cataclysm FAQ on swamps
  • They are however a great source of salt water for cooking. Just watch out for the giant dragonflies. If you have the Dinosaurs mod on, dinosaurs can spawn in swamps in addition to wildlife field offices.
• Technically Living Zombie: Ferals, which are humans that weren't killed by the Blob, but were driven homicidally insane by it. Even the baseline ferals are smart enough to talk, throw rocks, and open doors, and more dangerous variants are even capable of using guns. Ferals are also allied with the zombies, and will work together to bring down the survivors.
• There Is No Kill like Overkill: Dealing far more damage than the total HP of the victim will cause it to turn into a big puddle of blood instead of a corpse, which denies you of any drops. Against zombies, this is a viable alternative to smashing or butchering the corpse.
• Throwing the Distraction: Monsters that track sound will follow the source of said sounds (usually your footsteps). Talking dolls, active radios, firecrackers; All of them make excellent decoys, although rocks can work in a pinch if you can reliably hit a window far away.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Most of the skill books you can find are decidedly not combat-related. But then there's the Spetsnaz Knife Techniques book...
  • The player will start off struggling to kill one zombie. As you level up, and as you as a player get smarter figuring out better and more efficient tactics, your character will be able to take on larger and larger hordes or deadlier foes.
  • Zombies will also take levels in badass as you play, transforming into nastier types. The zombie master has a skill that turns one zombie into a nastier version of itself.
• Too Upset to Create: If morale gets too far in the negatives, you are locked out of crafting or repairing items until you get it back up.
• 2xFore: While weak, wooden planks are better than your bare hands and can easily be found. It's possible to add nails to it via crafting to improve its damage output.
• Ultimate Life Form: The Alpha mutation branch is effectively this. You require a bit more food than normal and you're less tolerant of drugs and alcohol, but you require almost no sleep, you have heightened senses, and your base stats gain a pretty nice boost.
• Undead Child: Zombie children, of course. Killing them results in a morale penalty. Unless you have the Psychopath trait. Additionally, the penalty per kill gradually lowers the more of them the player kills. Certain mutated variants of zombie children do not grant this morale penalty, because they've been so mutated they no longer resemble a child at all.
• Unstable Equilibrium: Gameplay changes drastically the moment the player character becomes competent enough to defeat zombies one-on-one with little risk (read: either managed to get a silenced gun or became dextrous enough to avoid melee hits).
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • You can call for help to the factions in the game. Most of the time, they will send an armed NPC to help you. You can blow his head off and take his gear with little consequence.
  • Due to a programming oversight, some explosives still had trade value while lit. So yes, you could trade someone your armed C4 for their medkits and his gun and run like hell.
  • The wandering NPC's can be killed, their corpses butchered and eaten. With Internal Furnace installed, you can also eat all their clothes and set whatever is left ablaze with a lighter.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: The map keeps expanding and generating new regions as you explore it. There is no win condition, other than simply surviving for as long as possible and/or killing as many enemies as you can.
• With This Herring: The default character begins with a pocket knife, a matchbook, a bottle of water, and the clothes on his/her back. Subverted, though, as the knife and matchbook are valuable tools in an apocalypse.
  • May be played straight or subverted depending on what profession you pick at the start - the professions that give points rather than costing them usually have nothing but clothes, or even have negative effects like addiction. However, even these professions may have useful equipment - the "Crackhead" profession starts with a refillable lighter, for example.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: The game's nutrition system includes both hunger and thirst, as well as taste (affects morale, which affects focus, which affects experience gained) and healthiness (affects how quickly you heal). It also tracks calories and stomach fullness separately, so eating until you're full doesn't necessarily mean you're not going to starve to death if your food has low calories. In the early game, finding lots of snacks and canned food is easy, but finding water is a bit harder. In the mid game, it's easier to get water (set up a funnel and large tank, or find a river), but you'll have eaten most food already (and most of what you didn't eat will have rotted), so staying full requires more effort.
• Wormsign: Mounds of dirt often indicate that a giant worm is nearby.
• Yet Another Stupid Death: Like most classic roguelikes, part of the fun in Cataclysm is seeing all the inventive ways that you can get killed. Be prepared to die a lot starting off while you fumble around, decide the best tactics to killing a horde, what weapons are best, what to carry, what to eat and drink, where to sleep, etc. There's even a lore justification in the form of Blob Psychosis, a side-effect of the Blob responsible for the zombie infection trying to take control of your body while it's still alive.
• Zerg Rush: The main threat in mid-to-late game is not a zombie, but rather zombies. Fighting one zombie can become easy enough eventually, but you'll still get minor painful injuries. Multiple zombies mean that while you're fighting one zombie, the others are still hurting you, and the penalties from pain accumulate quickly. On top of that, you won't have the time to recover stamina between killing each zombie. According to the design notes, at no point should a player become powerful enough to defeat a horde of zombies on foot.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The zombies in all their variants aren't the only type of enemy you'll face in this game, but they're the majority.
• Zombie Infectee: "The bite wound feels pretty deep..." Averted; Zombification takes over only after you die. Ihe bite is just a mundane sepsis infection and can be treated with antibiotics, or with prompt treatment of the wound with disinfectant or cauterization.
• Zombie Puke Attack: In both blinding yet harmless and damaging acidic varieties, both referencing Left 4 Dead.
  • Boomers can vomit all over you, limiting your vision to one tile away unless you use a towel or eye drops.
  • Huge Boomers are like their regular counterpart, but their bile glows, attracting zombies at night.
  • Acidic Zombies can puke acid onto your limbs to quickly break them.
  • Spitter Zombies can vomit large puddles of acid at a distance.
  • Corrosive Zombies can snipe you with their acid vomit.

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