Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

About this game

An apocalyptic cataclysm has happened… more precisely, all of them did, all at once. Within the last few years, riots and wars shook the Earth, devastating its population, and finally, the grid has completely collapsed. As if that weren't enough, there are zombies?! Evil mushrooms!? Giant hornets?! You'll need to make the best of things and figure out a way to survive. In this expansive survival RPG, you'll have to find or craft tools, kill monsters, gather allies, build your home base, grow crops, and survive a world that grows ever harsher around you. Find a working vehicle and use that to explore the wasteland of New England! Who was the mysterious "XEDRA" that left artifacts around the dying world, and how are they connected to the cataclysm?

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is the epitome of a modern roguelike: with turn-based play and a RPG-like skill progression system, it hearkens back to the classics of the genre while building on them in unexpected ways. The depth of this game will surprise you, with a cleverly-designed inventory system, the ability to drive vehicles on land or water, well-written NPCs with their individual stories, and more. The scope of Cataclysm is unparalleled in the genre, thanks to a dedicated community that works to create this game collaboratively, as we have for over ten years.

• Complex and diverse enemies from ever-mutating legions of the undead, to giant insects, to existential horrors from between worlds.
  
• Unparalleled vehicle building and customization system.
  
• Immersive, exquisitely detailed crafting system covering everything from smithing and soldering to keeping your sourdough starter fed.
  
• Build almost anything you can imagine, from a wattle-and-daub shelter in the woods to a tower of reinforced concrete and living alien resin.
  
• Populate your base with NPC allies that help you craft and keep you company.
  
• Explore one of the most detailed and immersive skill and proficiency systems in any RPG.
  
• Ever expanding content, with new major updates released regularly.
  
• Challenging, rewarding game balance that forces you to evaluate every step, or pay the price. You'll soon see why most of the world's population is dead!

• …want to feel like you might actually be able to survive against an incredibly harsh and unforgiving apocalypse.
  
• …have ever wandered through a hardware store thinking "This would be a great place to hole up when the zombies come."
  
• …love survival RPGs but get frustrated when you can't hotwire one of the nearby broken-down cars, weld a makeshift ram to the front, and plow it through the gates of the next story-important area.
  
• …enjoy detailed simulation-style games, but also want to mutate into a bizarre cat-girl slime mold creature with a cybernetic gun arm in one.

What do you get for purchasing the Steam Edition of CDDA?

• Steam cloud support for save games.
  
• Graphical achievements.
  
• A chance to help the CleverRaven team in supporting one of our long-term developers, working on one of the best open-source games on the internet.
  
• More planned… check back soon!

Latest news

• Announcements·24 Aug 2026Official

  0.I (Ito) has come to Steam!

  It has been a rocky few months for me, but I have finally made some changes in my own life for the better, and have found my way back to developing. I apologize for the delay; the stable itself took a long while, and my own updates also took over 2 1/2 months to come to fruition. But! It's here! And! With the help of a colleague who may choose to be named later, the Linux build is available again! You can read our specific release notes here but if you're like me, you might just jump into the game itself and see all of the new changes!I feel it necessary to again mention here, in this update, that I do not intend for experimental to be available on steam. The growing number of commits that are required for the steam interfaces make it so that it is not feasible to automate, and I would not want to automate a nightly build anyway on steam due to instability of the experimental. The steam release was never intended to be a bleeding edge release, and once again I thank everyone for their support.
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• Patch Notes·26 Dec 2024Official

  Fix - add sounds back

  The update deleted CC-sounds, so I added it again from the public repo. If you started the game without it, it would have reverted, and you'll need to go to the options menu and select CC-sounds again.
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• Announcements·26 Dec 2024Official

  0.H Herbert Stable Release is HERE!

  It's here! a month after 0.H Herbert has released fully on GitHub, I have had the chance to sit down and add all of the steam code necessary to run workshop and other things that have already been integrated before. I'm not a very wordy person, so I won't really go on and on here in the steam release announcement, but Kevin has written up a very nice 0.H release announcement HERE. I'm still working on my Master's degree, so I haven't really had much development time either here on the steam release or on the main branch. That will be finishing up hopefully this semester, where I will have more time to work on projects that are not school related. I definitely have a lot of ideas for Magiclysm specifically, and even am excited already for the features that will make it in to 0.I such as the new UI features and the work that's being done on the savefile sizes, which should allow me to fix the steam cloud issues for large saves for the 0.I release. I will look into perhaps porting it, but I won't promise it because I don't want to let you guys down. In the meantime, I'm doing my due diligence and serving up the stable release as promised back when I started the Steam releases. A warning about saves and workshop content: This is a major release, so some workshop content may have errors if it is for the previous version. Some workshop content may function despite the errors, but there is not a guarantee. Additionally, I recommend starting new saves with new major version, but the development team has spent a large amount of time making sure that you could load a save from the previous stable version (0.G) in this version (0.H). You may get some red errors that you can ignore. There is a small possibility of odd things happening, like items getting deleted, so I recommend backing up your save if you are attached to it, and if this version does not play nice, you may have to download a previous version from the GitHub (you can find it via the previous link) in order to fin...
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• Patch Notes·19 Jan 2024Official

  Workshop mod loading hotfix

  - fixed folder path for steam workshop mods - fixed workshop id for in-repo mods so they don't show up in workshop upload list
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• Announcements·18 Jan 2024Official

  Workshop is live!

  You can now upload and download mods via Steam Workshop! I made it as simple as possible - you create a mod that the game can see as a mod (see the documentation on creating mods on the repo) and you press "Upload"! It's as simple as that! To play a mod from the workshop, all you need to do is subscribe, and the mod becomes installed. Then you create a new world with that mod enabled as normal! I hope to see much use of the workshop now that it is available publicly! I will note that the Linux build will lag behind the Windows build. Hopefully it's out within a couple days. It's been a really long road, much longer than expected. I first was very optimistic about the Steam Workshop nearly a year ago, but I ran into some significant roadblocks with development, and then ran into Real Life (TM). Not to put too fine a point on things, but I had to go to my day job in addition to going back to school for a Master's degree, which didn't leave much room for much else outside of that. I'll still be doing that for about a year, so I don't want to promise too much still, but I have permanently overcome one of the most important roadblocks (at least for me): The debugger. Now that I can use the debugger properly (admittedly it was a simple fix, but not extremely well explained) I can go into other steam-specific things such as tracking down the achievement bugs. The Stable 0.H version is just around the corner, but I do not plan to release it on steam until after it is officially released on the repo as well.
  Read full article on Community Announcements (KorGgenT)