Best Skill in Apocalypse: Dark Days Ahead

summary

• Prioritize dodging, health care, and melee weapon skills to enhance survivability and combat capabilities. Choose wisely!
• Tailoring skills help long-term characters craft powerful armor, while Devices skills allow doors to be opened and traps to be disarmed.
• Health care speeds up healing after wound healing, which is crucial for survival in the early game.

Catastrophe: Dark Days Ahead (CDDA) is a turn-based survival horror. Released in 2013, CDDA It receives regular community updates to this day and can be freely downloaded from GitHub. The game sees players simultaneously thrust into a world destroyed by apocalypses. From aliens to zombie hordes to eldritch horrors, all kinds of monstrosities can be found in this terrifying world. The only goal is survival, and death is guaranteed.

Skills are needed to help players survive the apocalypse, enhancing their combat abilities, crafting knowledge, and interacting with the world. Choose carefully when creating a character. It can literally be the difference between life and death.

8 Dudding

No hit, no damage

• Increases chance to stun.

A character's dodging skill determines their ability to dodge damage from enemy attacks, traps, or environmental hazards. This skill also increases the success rate and effectiveness of acrobatic tasks such as parkour.

Need to start with some levels in dodging. Even basic zombies pose a significant existential threat to new characters, as many have weak weapons and little or no armor. Remember, pain can quickly become disabling! Dodging will allow new characters to withstand more common enemies by significantly reducing incoming damage. Late-game, superior dodging will allow players to stand toe-to-toe with evolved monsters while helping them avoid their deadly hits.

7 Food handling

Food efficiency, now and always

• Gives more and better recipes to craft.

Food Handling increases the number and complexity of food recipes players can create. This makes butchering more efficient and, at a higher level, allows for food preservation.

While not essential for new characters, assigning it a level or two at character creation will help make early game exploration more efficient, allowing players to craft more nutritious and satisfying meals from looted resources. In long games, almost all naturally grown foods are rotten, making this an important skill. Food conservation is also important to help athletes avoid starvation during the winter when natural food is scarce.

6 A melee weapon skill

Kill them first

• Increases skill with a specific weapon type.

In character generation, players have three different melee weapon skills to choose from: Bashing, Cutting and Piercing. Each weapon type has its strengths and weaknesses, and increasing these skills will increase the character's accuracy and damage with its respective weapon type.

Starting with a few levels in one of these skills is recommended, as new players tend to be weak and struggle to land hits, especially when using makeshift weapons like kitchen knives. In the long run, having high skills in a chosen weapon type dramatically improves a player's survival – especially against evolved enemies.

5 Health care

Heal faster, live longer

• The healing rate increases after wound treatment.
• Low medical procedure failure rate.

Health care increases the effectiveness of medical treatments such as bandages and antiseptics, and it reduces the failure rate of procedures such as compact bionic module (CBM) insertion.

In the early game, the level of health care will heal wounds faster even when using poor healing items. For poorly equipped and armored new characters who take frequent hits, increased healing significantly increases their chances of survival. This allows players to stockpile high-quality healing items for when they really need them. Long-term, high-quality health care will allow athletes to return to action quickly. It also makes the use of CBM less lethal.

4 devices

Customize survival

• Speeds up lock picking.
• Better chance of successful trap disarmament.

The Devices skill dictates the speed and success with which a player can interact with security devices and traps, including lockpicking and disarming traps. While not essential to survival in the early game, a higher device level will improve a new character's chances of survival, giving players access to high-quality loot found behind locked doors, display cases, and more.

Behind these locks can be a whole host of powerful weapons and armor. Being able to reliably disarm traps is also a powerful boon, whether it's a character's first or fifth year. Such traps often have riches behind them, and failure to disarm the trap often results in death.

3 Computers

Robots are not (as such) deadly

• Greater access to terminals.
• High probability of successful hacking.

Computer skills measure a character's ability to navigate computers and technology, allowing players to hack terminals and robots at higher levels. Like tool skills, computer skills are optional for new or long-term survival characters. However, it provides a significant increase in survival.

For new characters, successfully hacking a terminal can give access to otherwise impenetrable metal doors and the plentiful loot inside. Long-term, reliably hacking terminals allows players to disable security systems, making access to robot-infested scientific facilities significantly less dangerous. Even high-level characters can hack robots!

2 Tailoring

Survival through crafting

• Gives access to more and better clothing recipes.

Tailoring is a skill that measures a character's ability to craft and repair various garments and fabrics. A high tailoring skill is directly related to the amount and variety of clothing a character can craft, although they require a separate proficiency to craft high-level items.

In the early game, characters must have certain levels of tailoring to ensure they can keep their clothing and armor in good repair. Especially during battle, breaking armor can lead to instant death. For longer games, superior tailoring is critical to producing and maintaining defensive armor in a world full of evolved monsters. Strong armor can be looted, but doing so is often fatal.

1 A handgun or rifle skill

Get an edge on the Apocalypse

• Increases skill with a specific gun type.

Handgun and rifle skills provide players with greater accuracy, faster aiming and better gun customization. Depending on availability, location and enemy type, early-game players are recommended to specialize in a single gun type.

While not essential to survival, it's useful to start or train a few levels on handguns or rifles during the first weeks of the apocalypse — if players want to rely on such weapons in combat. While new characters can die quickly if left to fight enemies up close and personal, guns make poor melee weapons. In the long run, handguns and rifles are important tools to help players fight more powerful developments.