New player guide

Creating your first character

Points

The points system you choose doesn't make much of a difference, and in truth the points given to the various options are fairly loose. Most people stick with the default multiple pools, except for when/if they switch into freeform to make truly wacky characters (or to give themselves that little extra boost, like throwing on the Spiritual trait when they've already used their trait points up)

This guide will be made using the default points balance on 'Multiple pools'

Scenario

Scenarios provide the list of available starting map locations, amongst other effects and special attributes to the world. As such, while they are recommended to play around with for experienced users looking for a new challenge or a new way to play the game, it's recommended to stick with the basic 'Evacuee' scenario for your first playthrough (unless you have prior experience with a Cataclysm fork, such as DDA)

Profession

Professions primarily affect what items you start with, but can also grant you starting traits, skills, addictions, bionics, or even spells if you're running Magical Nights in the future. There's a wide variety of choices, and mods love to add onto them. In general, this is where a large amount of the flavor in your playthrough comes from, alongside the Scenario.

The default profession of 'Survivor' is well balanced and what we will primarily be assuming that you are using in the guide; however, unlike scenarios, it is safer to play around with professions a little even on your first playthrough. We wouldn't recommend going with something like Defective Cyborg or Tweaker, but Lumberjack or Backpacker are also safe and simple options if you want just a bit of flare (though they will change the tools immediately available to you).

Stats

Strength raises your base HP, increases your carry weight, and contributes majorly to bash damage. Strength also allows you to use higher-power bows effectively, and can sometimes help out in a pinch when working on small vehicles where you'd otherwise need a tool to lift them up.

Dexterity affects your accuracy, and can be good in almost any playthrough.

Intelligence lowers your reading times (i.e. you can read books faster), messes with skill rust if you enabled it (don't for a first playthrough, and no-body generally runs it in BN in general), and gives a straight up crafting bonus (so that you can craft quicker). It also affects your ability to fail crafts (with a low enough intelligence you can fail boiling water at low skill levels), directly acts as a threshold for many advanced books where you get an additional malus to reading if you do not meet the requirement, and with magic mods it also affects your mana capacity

Perception allows you to aim your guns and other ranged weapons better, gives you better night vision, and also is used for spotting traps before they blow you up. In general, primarily upped on ranged weapon playthroughs.

Stats, compared to skills, are a pain to increase later, especially with the default settings. The primary method is mutating, which is inherently unpredictable (although it aims for a positive net points value by default.) As such, many would put them as being more important than skills. With the Stats through Kills or Stats through Skills mods, however, stats become a lot easier to get.

For a beginner character, it's not recommended to lower any of these beyond their starting value of 8. A fairly basic stat spread would be 10 Strength, 9 Dexterity, 10 Intelligence, and 9 Perception. Strength is prioritized due to how widely applicable it is, and Intelligence is similarly prioritized due to how useful books can be (and the fact that no-one likes failing crafts).

Traits

Perhaps the most choice-paralysis-inducing menu of the character creation screen, traits can really make-or-break a playthrough. On the left we have the 'good' traits, in the middle we have the 'bad' traits, and on the right we see 'neutral' traits (usually just hair, skin, and eye color in vanilla) alongside certain profession-related traits. Due to the sheer depth that traits can provide, here we're just going to cover a recommended set for a new player.

Positive traits: Fleet footed (movement bonuses are always nice, lets you kite easier), Infection immune (As of writing, this trait is 1 point. It is an incredible trait, and likely should be higher. In general, a new player is likely to have a very tough time with any infections.), and Pain Recovery (Pain is annoying, and a new player will be going through enough as it is.) Negative traits: Addicitive Personality (practically free), High Thirst (water should not be a concern in game at the moment, just a mild annoyance), Sleepy (despite the points it gives, is pretty free and not much of a concern) Then combine with whatever cosmetic traits you want on the right side (especially recommended is some hair, because as the preview will show you in the top-right, you do NOT have any by default!)

Skills

In general, most of the time you will get crafting skills just by playing normally, most of the 'interaction' skills aren't that useful to have early on, and social skills are practically a dump for most people. Melee and ranged skills are where it's at for those initial points, though a few shine out and a few aren't too useful early on (without professions or good game knowledge already). Additionally, one interaction skill in particular heavily shines through.

Recommended skills: Bashing Weapons (the most common weapon type early on, and also somewhat considered the best out of the three in general), Dodging (Because early on you'll likely be low-enough encumbrance to take advantage of it, and it's nice to avoid damage entirely), Melee (generalist skill for all melee attacks, useful for martial arts, least useful out of these recommended skills), and the odd one out: First Aid. Unlike the other interaction skills, it is highly useful early on due to how much medical care you'll likely need after bumbling into some zombies, and it's also a PAIN to level up unless you have a book, especially early on.

Author's choice: Dodging and First Aid

Description

Nothing that you can change on this screen matters for gameplay, just go with what seems cool to you / fits your roleplay (Technically Gender has an effect on gameplay, but only if you want to min-max so much that you'd choose Female for the slight bit of extra armor since most professions' only gender difference is which set of underwear you get.)

Spawning in: The First Day

Welcome to the Evac Shelter, your first base for at least the next few days. Look around a little, maybe use x to look around outside of your immediate screen's worth of viewing or to look at exactly what each given tile is. Then, proceed on to the first day's activities.

The First Day: Getting the Tools

Tear down curtains from one of the windows by examining them and choosing the tear option, then wield the heavy stick that drops and use it to smash down the door leading up to the roof (you'll know which door by the fact that it is locked and informs you as much when trying to walk into it). If your character is failing to damage the door several times, their stamina might fall a decent amount. If your character's stamina is low, it can be a good idea to manually press | to "Wait a while", and in particular to wait until you catch your breath. Once you do break down the door, go up there and look around a little, but don't destroy the solar panel. Then, go back down into the evac shelter and bash up some of the lockers to get metal supplies: In particular, you want to get at least 10 scrap metal and a pipe (The pipe can be particularly troublesome sometimes, so don't be afraid to bash down the lockers!). Once you've gotten the metal supplies, go outside and grab (you can either use grab to grab the items, or you can examine the tile they're on) a couple rocks off the ground (or bash small boulders if you can't find any rocks convenient). If you started as a profession that doesn't start with a knife, you can also use rocks to make a stone knife. Use the Butcher menu while standing on the same tile as the long string from your curtain earlier to process it into small strings, then use the rocks and some wood to make a primitive/stone hammer. Then, use the metal supplies from the lockers to make a screwdriver and makeshift crowbar. Congratulations, you now have your basic set of tools!

The First Day: Gathering Supplies

Now, you can either deconstructing some of the nearby wooden benches to get some extra wood supplies and train your construction skill, or you can get right to going upstairs and deconstructing the standing tank on the roof to get some more metal stuff and in particular some 60L tanks for liquid storage. In order to deconstruct furniture, you have to go into the construction menu, which is bound to * by default, and select the 'Deconstruct Furniture' item from the list (pressing / or f to search can make finding it a lot easier). Once you've gone up and deconstructed the steel tanks, drag the tanks back downstairs (you can drag items under your feet using \), and then choose to wield one of the tanks and then go outside. Look for the nearest tile of water, and examine it to collect water into the tank. Now, tote it back to the evac shelter with a mind for keeping your eye on your stamina. If it drops too low, then just use | to rest until you catch your breath. You now have a good supply of water back at your base! (You may have to wander a bit to find the water tile, but even a single random spot of it will do)

Before doing any of the following, it is generally advisable to check whether you should craft a makeshift sling to increase your carriable volume. In the case of the default start, it usually is!

From here, you can:

• Get right to making a brazier, setting up a firewood source nearby that you put some planks on, and get to making some of the unclean water into clean water
• Go out and forage first to get some food before the brazier rather than after
• Or, if you're really brave, go out and try to raid the very edge of a nearby town (or a cabin or farm house if you can find one)

For the purposes of this guide, we will be doing the second option. Foraging in BN is very simple, you just have to find the right plant tiles. It is also very easy to feed yourself on foraging early on, so long as you have enough forest tiles to roam through. In particular, we will be looking out for three things:

• underbrush
• fruit (or nut) trees
• berry bushes

Underbrush is the most variable by far, with what you get from it being a random chance based partly on your survival skill (as well as the season, of course). Some of the things you can get aren't even food, including shards of glass, cups, and newspapers! Some of the things that are food won't be useful to us right now, namely things that can't be cooked into good food without a higher cooking level (such as wild roots). What we are looking for, primarily, is things like bird and reptile eggs or wild vegetables. These are good sources of food that are easy to cook for an early-game survivor.

Fruit and nut trees, as well as berry bushes, largely fall into the same category of usefulness. Fruits and berries are highly seasonal, and as such a decent chunk of the bushes and trees you find right now will not be harvestable in the current season. For Spring, here are some of the ones that are harvestable: Cherries, Blueberries, Strawberries, Grape leaves (but not grapes themselves)

If you're having terrible luck finding anything from the underbrush and aren't seeing fruit trees or berry bushes, then here are some additional foragables:

• dandelions
• fiddleheads (Not particularly recommended, they tend to be very low caloric value)
• pine nuts (pine trees, require further processing) Burdocks are also foragable, but the majority of their recipes are locked behind books as of writing. Sad.

The First Day: Cooking

Once you have an inventory or two of foragables collected back at your base, it is time to make a brazier and set up cooking! A brazier can be crafted at Fabrication 1 from a single sheet metal with a hammer, and it allows you to cook safely with fire. Once you've crafted it, you must activate the item to deploy it. We recommend putting it close to your ingredients pile and your water tank. Once you've deployed your brazier, it's time to mark down a firewood source for it in the construction menu. This is a helpful marker for where the game should draw valid fuel from when lighting or maintaining a fire in the brazier. We recommend you put a few planks on the marker from your bench deconstruction earlier, but you can also go pick a wide variety of trees for some long sticks to use.

Once you have the brazier deployed and the firewood source marked, you can examine the brazier to start a fire! When you have a fire going, you can also examine it to put out the fire. You now have most of the requirements to cook food, so now you just need to get a pot or pan of some kind to cook with. A makeshift pot is just another sheet metal and 20 minutes away in the crafting menu, which will allow you to cook!

The first thing to "cook" will actually be a batch of clean water. It's what you want to drink, and it will also get you the first cooking level that you'll need to cook some of your foragables from earlier. You can make batches of a recipe by hovering over it and hitting b. For now, let's make 20x clean water. Once you've finished making the clean water (and put it away), you should have gained a cooking level and thus be able to try out some more advanced cooking recipes! Your eggs and your veggies will serve you well here, for making items such as scrambled eggs, wild vegetable omelettes, and normal cooked wild vegetables. Your fruits, for the moment, will be best put to use in making cooked fruit (although they, unlike most of your other foragables, can also be eaten raw just fine!) You'll want to pay attention to your ingredients and see which ones are going to spoil the fastest. For example, if you foraged some dandelions then you best find a way to cook them quickly, because they spoil in about one day! Most fruit spoils in two days, so that can be another concern.

The End of the First Day

Once you've cooked up some tasty food, it's probably about time you invested in making a makeshift bed. Once night falls, it will be much more annoying to get the light to be able to see what you're doing, and thus it's a good idea to build a bed now rather than later. A makeshift bed requires Fabrication 2 and some materials that it is easy to get around your evac shelter. Disassembling benches won't get you beyond Fabrication 1 on its own, so you need to do something that requires Fabrication 1, either in crafting or in construction. Crafting tends to be a bit easier to find things to do in early on, so we'll look there. While you can choose among a lot of things, we suggest crafting a few wooden needles for the moment since they're cheap and effective. Once you do have Fabrication 2, you should gather the materials and make yourself a makeshift bed. Once you've made your bed, you can place down a sheet or unfold an emergency blanket on it to help you get comfy later!

Now that you have a bed, food, and the basic tools, you can take a look at your clock and the map and see what you want to do. The two main options are either crafting or exploring, with a particular favorite of a lot of people being to do some basic tailoring to end off their first day (which the wooden needle from earlier can help with!). Exploring can be a fun option, as can looting a house on the edge of a nearby town if there is one. Given that where I happened to spawn in where writing this had no town in immediate view, but did have wasps nearby, I elected to do some tailoring.

Tailoring in your evac shelter is fairly straightforward. You either salvage some of the sheets from the curtains in the Butchery menu, or you diassemble them (either from Butchery or from the dedicated diassembly menu on (). Salvaging them is quicker but gives less rags and doesn't give any thread directly. You can also get thread by turning long strings into short strings and then short strings into thread. Some recipes will also let you use short strings directly! Once you have some rags and some thread, it's time to consider your options for 0 Tailoring. One of the most popular options is to make a turban, a long patchwork scarf, a pouch, and a bandana to be turned into a blindfold. The turban and scarf help keep your head warm in early spring, the pouch is a useful crafting component much later, and a blindfold can help if you ever need to sleep while it's still light outside but can't or don't want to actually remove the light from the room. From there, the next items on the list would be some more warmth-management items: arm warmers, stockings, light gloves, and tights. Tailoring 2 is where options really start to open up, and you can likely end up crafting some of the progression to Tailoring 3 simply by crafting items fitting for roleplaying.

Once your character is tired and night is starting to fall (about 8 or 9PM), it's time to go to sleep. Walk over to your bed, Wear your emergency blanket or sheet to cuddle it, and then press $ to sleep. Usually, I like to set an alarm for 9 hours unless I have a particular reason to want to wake up earlier than that or to leave it up to my character. This will conclude your first day in the Cataclysm.