PART 2

PART 2

Looting

You're looking for clothing with high volume and/or low encumbrance, disinfectant, drugs, water, food, books, and assorted tools like sewing kits/thread/batteries/duct tape, in that order. You're also looking for a bedroom on the fringes of town with all the windows and doors intact, with the bed a reasonable distance from any windows, and with a toilet in the same house. Use this as a home base and dumping ground for all your stuff. If you find a place with lots of good stuff that you can't carry just yet, mark it on your map by pressing N in the map screen and come back later. You should also mark places you've finished looting so you don't waste your time, your home base so you don't forget where it is, and large clusters of monsters so you don't accidentally die. You only need one of each skill book. You’ll be hard-pressed to find an upgrade to your switchblade; it’s one of the best weapons that can also be used in Eskrima. The combat knife and machete are both better, but you're not likely to find one of those for a while. Your best bet for finding one quickly, though, is to head into the city at night and search a sporting goods store.

If one of the windows in your bedroom gets smashed by you or by zombies, you can board it up. You’ll need some sort of hammer, 4 two-by-fours, and 8 nails. Boarded up windows are sturdier than regular windows, but can’t be opened anymore.

House basements often contain much better loot than what you’ll find outside. Basements can be full of non-perishable food, guns and ammo, chemistry and crafting components, massive amounts of weed, or massive amounts of spiders. It’s always worth exploring a house basement, and if you find a basement with a bed, you should move all your stuff there post-haste. Zombies won’t wander into basements on their own, so you can sleep there without worrying about getting attacked. Enemies can follow you down stairs, but won’t come down if they’re not actively chasing you.

Get renewable food by killing animals, butchering them, and cooking the meat. Cooking meat requires a fire, something with at least 1 food cooking quality like a frying pan or a pointy stick, and uncooked meat. Eating uncooked meat can give you parasites, so don’t do it. You can find tons of pots and pans inside houses, on top of the ovens. Ovens are the grey # next to refrigerators. Set fires by activating a matchbook or lighter and selecting a square with some kindling on it, like a two-by-four or some splintered wood. You can safely set fires outside of the house, in an oven, or on a rock floor in a basement. It’s preferable to set fires outside, so the smoke will dissipate. Inside fires make smoke, which can damage your torso from smoke inhalation if you’re not wearing a filter mask. You can also build a wood stove or stone fireplace, which won't let fires spread and won't produce smoke. If you have to set a fire inside, make sure it’s on a fire-safe tile, otherwise you'll burn the house down and kill yourself.

If you accidentally set a fire in your house that isn't on a fire-safe tile, you'll need to extinguish it quickly or the entire house will go up like a box of tissue paper. If you've found a fire extinguisher, you can apply that to the tile with fire on it, and that will be that. If you don't have a fire extinguisher, you'll need to unload a container of water onto the fire; bigger fires will require more water than smaller fires, so if you've let the fire burn for a while you'll want to put more water on it even if it's still described as a "small fire". If the fire is yellow it can still be put out. If the fire turns red, you're fucked.

Get water by (e)xamining the toilet, filling up a watertight container like a plastic bottle or gallon jug, boiling the water from the crafting menu, and putting it into a different container. Or, if the toilet is close to a window, you can just set a fire outside the window and boil the water without having to put it into a container first. Boiling, like cooking, requires a fire, something with at least 1 boiling quality like a frying pan or a tin can, and the unboiled water, but also requires water-tight container to put the clean water in. Drinking regular water runs the risk of getting poisoned, food poisoning, and/or parasites, so only drink clean water.

Your toilet will run out of water eventually, so you'll want to go on occasional scavenging runs with a few gallon jugs to get more water to boil. Get gallon jugs from fridges; they'll be full of rotten milk, vinegar, or other crap which you can just unload on the ground from the inventory screen. You can also find gallon just full of ammonia and bleach; you can unload those for the jug, but I'd recommend saving the chemicals. There's plenty of gallon jugs that aren't full of valuable crafting components.

Encumbrance

Encumbrance is very, very bad. Going over your volume limit causes high amounts of encumbrance. Only go over your volume limit if you're totally sure you're safe, and preferably not even then. Wearing more than one layer of clothing on a body part increases encumbrance, so check to see which parts of the body a given clothing item encumbers and take off clothing that you don't need to be wearing. Torso encumbrance is very bad for your melee effectiveness, so don't melee fight with Torso encumbrance.

Clothing

There are three kinds of clothing in Cataclysm. Clothing you wear for volume, clothing you wear for warmth, and clothing you wear for protection. Some clothing items fulfill multiple roles, like trenchcoats. Trenchcoats are warm, protective, and have a lot of volume, so you want to get a fitted one as soon as possible. Leather vests are very protective, have 0 torso encumbrance when fitted, and can be made as soon as you find a leather jacket, so be on the lookout for leather jackets.

Wearing more than one item on one "slot" can cause extra encumbrance because of a layering penalty. The more clothes you have on one body part, the more encumbrance layering the clothes causes. For example, wearing two pairs of fitted cargo pants will cause 1 leg encumbrance, even though fitted cargo pants have 0 base encumbrance. Fitted items that have 0 base encumbrance have a reduced layering penalty; you can wear a pair of fitted cargo pants and one pair of fitted cargo shorts without causing encumbrance, but not two pairs of fitted cargo shorts. If you're unsure about a piece of clothing, just try it on and see what it does to your stats.

Clothing can cover one of three layers; the outer layer, the normal layer, or the belted layer. When you are attacked, clothing on the outer layer will always be checked for damage first, protecting more fragile clothing items. Clothing on separate layers will calculate layering encumbrance separately. For example, you will not suffer layering encumbrance from wearing two items with 0 encumbrance on different layers of one body part.

You want something to prevent you from getting wet so you don't get negative morale every time you go out in the rain. Umbrellas work great, but take up your wielded slot. Raincoats also work, but cause encumbrance. Folding ponchos take up less volume and encumber less than raincoats, but do still encumber you. The best way to avoid negative morale from getting wet is warmth. Having lots of warmth on your torso lots will reduce the morale penalty from getting wet. You should also make or find a towel; applying a towel will instantly remove the “wet” morale penalty.

With 3 tailoring, you can craft basically everything you need in the early-game. You can get all the rags and thread you'll need by breaking windows, then cutting up the sheets into rags and disassembling the string into thread. Leather is slightly harder to find, but you can get a lot by just cutting up the leather items that zombies drop. Cut up fabric by activating your switchblade or any other knife, selecting "cut fabric", then selecting the thing you want to cut up. Disassemble items by selecting them in the inventory screen, then pressing D. Get 3 tailoring by reading the book "Sew What? Clothing!" or just by practicing tailoring a lot with reasonable focus levels.

To practice tailoring or to make any clothing, you need a sewing kit, thread, and rags. To practice tailoring, activate your sewing kit and select an item made of cloth; this will consume thread, and if the item is repaired or reinforced, a rag. You'll need some rags to practice tailoring up to 3, but not a whole lot. This will also repair, reinforce, or make items fitted at high skill; around 3 skill is sufficient to do all of that. You can also reinforce/repair leather items by doing the same with leather patches. Repairing plastic or kevlar items is possible, but requires a soldering iron with charges and plastic chunks/kevlar plates, whic