Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is a turn-based survival game set in a post-apocalyptic world. Struggle to survive in a harsh, persistent, procedurally generated world. Scavenge the remnants of a dead civilization for food, equipment, or, if you are lucky, a vehicle with a full tank of gas to get you the hell out of Dodge. Fight to defeat or escape from a wide variety of powerful monstrosities, from zombies to giant insects to killer robots and things far stranger and deadlier, and against the others like yourself, that want what you have…

Showcase image. Tileset: UltiCa
Tileset: UltiCa

Gameplay

As your game begins, you awaken with hazy memories of violence and terror from when the world suddenly unravelled around you. Now you need to explore your surroundings, and secure food, water and safety. After that, who knows? Long term survival will mean tapping abilities you haven’t used before, learning to survive in this new environment, and developing new skills.

Project Managed Resources

These sites are owned and managed by the project directly.

Community Managed Resources

These are resources provided by third parties, or managed by some members of the development team. The project does not provide support for these directly.

System Requirements

Minimum

“I played catadda 0.B on Lego EV3 brick through ssh about a year ago. Every simple move took a noticeable fraction of a second (like 0.3-0.5 second), crafting and such was very slow as well. The specs were - 300 MhZ CPU, 64 Mb Ram (+ another 64 Mb swap on microsd flash) running ev3dev (stripped ubuntu basically), ssh over USB CDC connection.” -burgerpro

“I used to test the game on an Asus EEE 700. That’s a 900MHz mobile cpu with 500MB of ram.” -Kevin Granade

Tilesets increase the amount of RAM required dramatically. I recommend at least 1GB of ram for tilesets, and there are reports of instability due to RAM exhaustion when certain tilesets are used. (The larger the size of the individual tiles, the more RAM is used)

“I regularly test the game now on a Windows netbook with a sub 2GHz single core CPU, 1GB of ram, and no graphics acceleration.” -Kevin Granade

Graphical builds run much faster with some kind of graphics acceleration. 2GB of RAM pretty much guarantees you will never have trouble with memory shortages.

Downloads

Cataclysm has official builds for Windows, Linux, OSX and Android.
The Linux and OSX builds are available in both terminal and graphical flavors.
Windows and Android builds are graphical only, though there is a “text rendering” mode in the graphical build.
There is a very old and unsupported fork for iOS.

Latest Stable

The most recent stable release is 0.H-RELEASE Herbert. We recommend stable for the most bug-free experience available. You can download it from the Releases Page.

Latest Experimental

Cataclysm: DDA is under constant development. As such, stable can lag behind with features. If you would like access to the bleeding edge of features and any bugs that may come along with them, you can download the latest experimental builds.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a tutorial?

Yes, you can find the tutorial in the Special menu at the main menu. You can also access documentation in-game via the ? key.

How can I change the key bindings?

Press the ? key, followed by the 1 key to see the full list of key commands. Press the + key to add a key binding, select which action with the corresponding letter key a-w, and then the key you wish to assign to that action.

How can I start a new world?

World on the main menu will generate a fresh world for you. Select Create World.

I’ve found a bug / I would like to make a suggestion. What should I do?

Please submit an issue on our GitHub page. If you’re not able to, send an email to [email protected]. In either case, please consider reading our issue guidelines first.

I’d like to contribute financially to Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

Check out our donations page for ways to donate.