i’ve been a big fan of classic roguelikes since around 2007 when i first played vulture’s eye(a gui replacement for nethack which makes it isometric) to try and break through the daunting difficulty curve of learning to play roguelikes
I am not sure how many of you are into traditional style roguelikes but I thought I would share some of what i’ve enjoyed over the years and if any of you have any to share in kind, or if you want to talk about roguelikes in general or want advice for one in particular this would be a cool place for it
the definition for a traditional roguelike is very subjective but i know them when i see them (ADOM, ToMe, Dredmor, nethack, doomrl, etc), im going to post one recommendation at a time so i dont info dump too hard
cataclysm: dark days ahead
I’ve probably catacylsm for longer than most of the rls ive played combined and i could probably make a thead about this game alone. this game really stretches the limits of what i would consider traditional, it’s hard to say even in several paragraphs the depths of content and activities available to do in this game but here’s a few of the most notable (in the current stable build):
crafting, assembling and disassembling items and resources
an example of this would be this flashlight recipe, a lot of recipes allow you to use one of several different items to satisfy a requirement, and afterward you can disassemble them to reobtain the materials
character development through training skills (morrowind style) or reading books, made a new character to take some of these pics
upgradable attributes, item encumbrance , protection and temperature
positive and negative traits, bionics and mutations, with several stages of evolution and multiple paths to choose
tailoring, i’m not sure how op it is in current builds but you can disassemble all the clothing you find when raiding houses into their base materials to make new pieces of clothing, you can learn recipes from books, levels, or from repeatedly disassembling items, all clothing can be modified to add more protection or less encumbrance (removing sleeves), adding more pockets to store items in (only in experimental)
here’s some base level recipes in the menu
fully customizable vehicles
every vehicle in game is made of tiles connected together, each tile represents a section of the car and consists of several parts which can be interchanged w/ some mechanical skill and the right tools, in this screenshot im examining a vehicles driver seat tile
(you can also see damage to the batteries and the storage tank)
npc factions, trading, quests, player owned factions and party members
custom base building and npc deployment
entirely customizable user experience, there are many hundreds of mods and more than a dozen actively maintained graphics tilesets for the game, most of them are included with the launcher and stable release of the game
adjustable difficulty per world, i don’t play on the default settings typically, its worth looking through to change things like speed / toughness of zombies, disabling mutations for monsters, classic zombies mod, no monsters mod, worlds are procedurally generated and nearly infinite, all areas are persistent and any changes made are stored
full feature survival gameplay
the game can be played entirely outside of city environments, harvesting plants and animals and other natural features to produce clothing, tools, and shelter, this also includes seasonal farming and food preservation such as canning and drying
now here’s the catch,
the controls are quite a lot to understand at first, nearly every button on the keyboard is mapped to a function in game, there is a context menu available to access certain commands but eventually you will have to look less and less at references and be able to rely on muscle memory to know what you need to press (here’s a cheat sheet of the keybinds)
the game is somewhat obtuse at the start, and there are not a lot of long term structural goals for a new player, this has changed somewhat with the addition of achievements in recent experimental releases you have to be willing to make your own goals for what to accomplish in game
theres still more i could say but ill save it for now, if any of you give it a try i would love to give you a hand!
this launcher is the recommended way to play if you want to keep track of your files and stay up to date with experimental builds, and here’s one of the most popular tilesets, removed from the builds bc the current maintainer is a jerk on line)
