Definitely do, as I said before Project Zomboid is a perfect compliment to Cataclysm DDA because they optimize for opposite experiences, one realtime, multiplayer and set on a high quality human handcrafted landscape the other turn-based, incredibly deep, singleplayer only and set in an astoundingly varied procedurally generated landscape.

One last thing, CDDA definitely feels intimidating at first but I have to say I actually think the interface is wonderful once you start to get the hang of it. Remember you can always press ? and search for commands by what they do! (i.e. if you forget what button is for throw you can press ? and type “throw” and see the keybinding is t).

The advanced inventory management system opened with / is the best inventory management system I have ever used in any game ever, I wish I had it for real life…

CDDA does not deserve its reputation as having an overwhelming and obscure interface, yes it is different than most games you have played if you haven’t played a game like Caves Of Qud, but wait a second why haven’t you played Caves Of Qud???!?!

Cool, thanks for your detailed reply! I can totally imagine that the less graphical approach would have that effect on the imagination. Is it multiplayer too, or single player?

No the reason Project Zomboid is a nice compliment to CDDA is that CDDA plays like a true “Rogue” type game. It is turn based where every time you take an action everything else moves too, it isn’t suited to multiplayer really.

Could it not having much graphics perhaps help your imagination in a way similar to how books can sometimes immerse us more than movies can?

Oh absolutely! I am a firm believer that a book is one of the most intense virtual reality experiences you can immerse yourself in, it just takes a bit of effort.

What makes CDDA so immersive for me is that it has reached a critical mass of richness where most of the things you would think about being in environments are there. Looting thus doesn’t feel contrived, for example the windows on most homes have curtains, you can ALWAYS tear down those curtains and use them as a crafting material. How many survival games have you played where you need cloth to craft something and you keep looting 3d objects that clearly have cloth animated on their 3d model but the game mechanics say you found no cloth? I am fine with this to a certain extent, I get it, game balance is far more important to me than silly things like having a problem with this, but because CDDA goes so far the other way you really do start to see the environments you are moving through like you would envision them while reading a book about a character moving through them. I am not someone that usually values games that are a million miles wide and only an inch deep, but the diversity of systems in CDDA has a quality all of its own that is difficult to put into words precisely. I guess what I would say is that simple survival tasks feel so much more meaningful when they are in such a rich context, it makes the experience of interacting with the systems feel much more alive.

Also there are just SOOOO many monsters in CDDA, just zombies is… cool I get it as a design choice but CDDA is WAYYY more terrifying of a universe to me and that helps immerse me too.

Lastly I do want to shout out the Sky Islands mod in CDDA, it now comes as part of the base game because it is so good. Sky Islands turns CDDA into a run based survival game where you are stuck on an empty island in the sky and have to do “runs” to get materials, food and water by entering a portal that teleports you to a random point on the map and you have to reach a portal placed randomly a certain distance away in a certain amount of time to get back to your island or you die and respawn on the island having lost everything you had on you.

https://github.com/TGWeaver/CDDA-Sky-Islands

This mod addresses one of my major problems with open world survival games, I love open world games but after a certain point of developing a bubble of safety around your base survival becomes too easy unless survival mechanisms are onerously difficult, Sky Islands places a consistent pressure on you to survive in a way that immerses me further and doesn’t put me into the dead end of realizing the safest thing to do in an open world survival game is sit in your safe base and do boring safe things and NEVER take risks. Sky Islands forces you to take risks but ALSO encourages you to take risks by making death a severe penalty to your longterm survival rather than an immediate, discontinuous abrupt end to a potentially very long saved game you have invested lots of time into.

I know Cataclysm DDA is a different type of game but the richness of the environments in CDDA makes it really hard for me to sink my teeth into Project Zomboid in comparison when I have tried it in the past. CDDA immerses me in a way Project Zomboid never has even though CDDA is turn-based and almost doesn’t have graphics at all lol, there is just so much more going on in every way that it feels more like a choose your own adventure story than an action game.

hmmm… maybe it is time for me to check out Project Zomboid again though? It isn’t that I don’t think the idea of Project Zomboid is awesome!

I would like to think that Wobbledogs and Dogpile are set in the same universe.

Also small little point of critique here, but isn’t that a dogpit not a dogpile?

We all strive to be seegulls and transcend our meager thinkgull existence.

Ready Player One and Three Body Problem stick out to me as regularly recommended scifi slop.

There is far more to gain making bots on larger corporate social media networks, lemmy/the fediverse is by no means immune but it is a waste of time for the vast majority of people that would specialize in that kind of thing.

You get the most power/profit potential from controlling a social network by creating the biggest lightbulbs possible (influencers) and attracting as many moths (users) to the smallest number of super lightbulbs as you can because it makes manipulating narratives and pushing high value ads easier. For the same reason this is the most lucrative environment to flood with bots.

Corporate social media optimizes for creating these leverage points, the fediverse on the otherhand is if anything loosely alligned against those kinds of extreme concentrations of popularity and social capital. Why bother gaming the fediverse then?

The real horror is the trend. Between 2009 and 2023, pedestrian deaths rose a staggering 80%, while all other traffic fatalities increased just 13%. In a decade-plus span, pedestrians have been dying at a rate nearly seven times faster than population growth. This isn’t random. It’s the intentional outcome of systems designed to prioritize vehicles over people.

Shameful and pathetic, what a material abandonment of the social contract.

This is a major reason why forward thinking public transit investment is so crucial for the PNW.

edit I added some thoughts I see these future climate migrants as an opportunity for the PNW to start building out mass transit infrastructure that can accommodate them, this is an opportunity because the PNW is uniquely positioned in the US to pursue genuine regional mass transit infrastructure and more thoroughly erase the crimes of building this country upon the template of the car than almost anywhere else in the US.

At the end of the day the high rainfall and lushness of the region along with a proximity to a temperature moderating ocean means that we have a responsibility to make room for people who are forced to flee from places that cannot support humans as sustainably, this is just part of what being a good person is about. It will be hard, there will be plenty of growing pains but the PNW can absolutely support a LOT more people and the beauty, natural spaces and identity that people love in the PNW right now doesn’t have to be violated in order to accommodate all of those people IF we invest in mass transit and allow density to develop without suffocating the region in suburban sprawl and traffic clogged stroads. It is absolutely possible to accommodate many more people in the PNW while also improving environmental protections and habitat quality, it will be hard and take many many headache inducing balancing processes but it is absolutely possible and if we do it then think of how strong we will be with that many people who love nature as much as we do all living together?

The more interesting question to me isn’t whether the PNW is ready for a wave of climate migration, it is whether the rest of the US is ready for that version of the PNW that leaps ahead of the rest of the US in terms of quality of life because it took advantage of this climate migration as an opportunity rather than a burden.

By the time Florida will be able to fix all the problems locked in right now by their willful ignorance the state will be largely underwater from sea level rise. I wish this was hyperbole but depressingly it isn’t. Whoever may read this that lives in Florida, leave Florida if you can I implore you. Florida, much like Texas, is a multi-layered multidimensional Death Cult, except Florida will collapse from being submerged under water rather than from running out of water as Texas will.

remember the principle of “sooner than expected” here for climate change too, we are absolutely underestimating these things

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Florida-base-map-showing-extent-of-submergence-associated-with-an-atmospheric-temperature_fig1_269420499

It also speaks to how quietly powerful Ukraine has become as an international military power, which might seem like an exaggeration to say but you have to step back and think about how deep of a problem littoral security has been for naval empires in the 20th and 21st century. The US really didn’t ever figure it out, the Littorial Combat Ship class was an utter failure and if it weren’t for helicopters basically being a cheat code for many dynamic situations there likely would have been a lot more blowback against the US Navy during the height of its unipolar global power for failing to extend the power projection of naval power to atomized littoral contexts or account for the true degree of vulnerability in littoral environments that large open ocean vessels inherently have.

Any economic trading power in the world that isn’t laser focused on how unmanned vehicles are being used to successfully stabilize and destablize maritime shipping littoral security in the Ukraine war is being foolish and there really isn’t anything to learn from the Russian side here, just the Ukrainian side…

Yes the international community can just watch Ukraine and copy their tactics and technology, but undeniably Ukraine has become at least the temporary center of littoral naval power going into the 21st century. In a modern context no other nation’s military has been subjected to such granular mass infiltration attacks along its littoral borders and managed to so effectively turn the tables with drones and new tactics and the implications for establishing security in littoral environments will echo throughout the rest of this century.

TL;DR Don’t underestimate how valuable Ukraine’s knowledge of how to defend ports and waterways from small unit infiltration and sabotage attacks is, it is a stupendously valuable knowledge skillset that Ukraine has honed both sides of the coin of, both as the defender and the attacker. It wasn’t a given this would happen and Ukraine deserves an immense amount of credit for achieving such a high degree of proficiency at it.

Honestly the Ukraine war might be one of the most decisively lost naval conflicts in modern history given how much more time and resources Russia had to build a threatening navy than Ukraine had. Ukraine is literally chasing Russia out of the sea, it is wild to see happen and it is majorly underreported evolution of war especially when compared to extensive coverage about how networked drones are changing land and air warfare.

*Second time

The first wish the doggo made was to be the Genie’s friend which the dog made abruptly after digging up the genie lamp and spilling it open after chewing on it for a bit.

Good point!

As someone from the US, do it, rip the bandaid off, this is going to get much much worse before things have the chance to get better and good people here have all been rejected from having meaningful power.

edit this news source is questionable

Corn is probably one of the most political vegetables tho

I learned one thing from poker- when they act strong, they are weak, when they act weak, they are strong.

It is mystifying to me how english speaking media reports on obvious desperate bluffing from Russia as if it was a sign of strength. You are absolutely right, the only reason for Russia to bluff and bluster this hard is if it is trying to disguise an unsustainable weakness and loudly convey such an indefinite comfort with the status quo that it somehow distracts from the fact that the Russian military is crumbling to pieces.

do Perfect Darks come next?

the real chain rule