Video Game / Cataclysm

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Cataclysm is an open-world post-apocalyptic roguelike in the Zombie Apocalypse genre, although its enemy list also features killer insects, triffids, Giant Spiders, graboids, killer animals, turrets, entities from the Cthulhu Mythos, and probably lots of other things, just to be sure. You're an average person left alone in this hostile world, and your survival depends on your wits and what resources you can scavenge.

While bearing a few similarities to Rogue Survivor, Cataclysm stands out by leaning much more towards the simulation end of gaming than most roguelikes (indeed, most role-playing games, period). Your character's inventory is limited not only by weight, but by the storage volume their clothes provide. Instead of the usual Class and Level System, you learn different skills independently of each other, and they only improve through study and use. The sheer volume of different weapons, food, drinks, tools, clothing, armor, drugs, bionic implants, traps, and just plain clutter in this game is one of its proudest features. Monsters hunt by sound as well as sight, and a single non-silenced gunshot in an infested area can bring a zombie horde right to your location. Perhaps most importantly, the wound system in Cataclysm is very harsh. There are no exploding HP or easy healing in this game - characters can feel pain and be seriously impaired by wounds, and if you have no medicine or first aid skill, you'll probably be making a new character very soon. You can also abuse, get hooked on, and suffer the side effects of a wide variety of non-medical drugs.

Another unique feature is that the game's world map is randomly-generated as usual, but also permanent. New regions are generated as your current character explores farther from their starting point, but it's possible to re-discover regions where your previous characters explored and died.

The game is an open source project, and its present central fork is called Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. CDDA is a fork of Whales' now-defunct original. Unless otherwise noted, all tropes listed here refer to this version. Although Whales had designs to create a sequel, those plans have been put on indefinite hold (but her blog still exists, should that ever change).

A fork of Dark Days Ahead, known as Bright Nights, is the second-most popular fork, which reverts some of newer changes introduced in Dark Days Ahead, and puts less emphasis on realism in favor of an experience more reminiscent of the older versions of Dark Days Ahead, with a more sci-fi setting. The fork's official Discord server can be found here.

A second fork of Dark Days Ahead known as The Last Generation was released, with intent to keep some of the modern features of Dark Days Ahead, but with slightly tweaked experience more in line with the semi-sci-fi approach.

Examples:

• 20 Minutes into the Future: Bright Nights is set in the near-future. Life remains the same as in our world, with the same issues, technologies, and social media sites, but there are also mechs, power armor, robots, bionics, teleportation, dimensional travel, and energy weapons. Nuclear energy is also ubiquitous due to deregulation, to the point of being used in expensive consumer devices, such as smartphones.
• 24-Hour Armor: While it will weigh you down, you can still wear a full set of plate armor all day and still sleep like a baby with it on and with no problems at all. This is more of a case of Acceptable Breaks from Reality, as taking off your likely several layers of armor to get a more comfortable sleep would likely get annoying real quick. Downplayed in Bright Nights, where sleeping naked or in only underwear grants a small bonus to how easy it is to get to sleep, but you're still not penalized any for sleeping in heavy armor.
• Abandoned Hospital: Naturally, any hospital you find will be devoid of any friendly characters.
• Abandoned Hospital Awakening: Available as a starting scenario. Considering it's not entirely abandoned, you'd better be fast on your feet or else it's going to be a really short game.
• Abandoned Laboratory: Along with mines, abandoned laboratories dot the land and serve as the game's dungeons. Except that they're not always abandoned.
• Abnormal Ammo: Incendiary and full metal jacket in some calibers. With enough skill, you can craft more exotic rounds, like HE shotgun slugs and acid 40mm grenades.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Sewers are generally 4 spaces wide, enough for 4 people to walk side-by-side.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Vacuum-sealed and frozen food will never expire until opened or thawed - unlike in real life, where they do still expire even if at a very slowed down rate.
• Accidental Time Travel: The Temporal Anomaly scenario in Bright Nights has you play as a person who was flung from the past into the Cataclysm. The available professions so far include a medieval European peasant and knight, an 18th century American frontiersman, a Wild West prospector, and a dogsledder who was traversing a northern trail.
• Action Bomb: The zombies have multiple variants available:
  • The bloated zombie attacks by walking up to the enemy, then exploding into a cloud of poison gas. The same will occur if they're killed.
  • Killing a zombie smoker will make it dissolve into smoke, which will cause you to cough and sap your stamina if inhaled.
  • Boomers will explode into vomit, which will blind anybody without eye protection, and leave them glowing for a while in any case.
  • Gasoline zombies are particularly nasty, as they will erupt into fire upon dying, ensuring a swift death for anybody caught too close.
• Action Survivor: The player character, by default. Especially if you never acquire the rather steep medical/mechanical/electronic skills needed to install your own bionics.
• Addled Addict: Being addicted to a drug will cause withdrawals, which will tank your mood and likely cause several nasty effects (possibly leaving you bedbound for a while). Most drugs are also unhealthy, so keeping up a drug habit will cause you to suffer from bad stamina and frequent illness.
• After the End: The game takes place exactly 5 days after the end. Nice to see an apocalypse that keeps its appointments.
• Agony of the Feet:
  • A few of the game's traps include caltrops (glass or steel) and boards with protruding nails.
  • Stepping on acid will cause you feet to burn, unless you have a good pair of acid-resistant boots.
• A.K.A.-47: Bright Nights inverts this by attributing fictional guns to real manufacturers - the G80 Railgun to Heckler & Koch, the XM-P Plasma Rifle to Boeing, and the PPA-5 to Lockheed Martin.
• Alcohol Is Gasoline: In Bright Nights, most gasoline-based engines, as well as all gas turbines, can use alcohol for fuel without needing special modifications. You do need to refine it into ethanol, denatured alcohol, or methanol, though.
• The All-Seeing A.I.: Averted. Most monsters, including zombies, can track you by smell or by sound, even in the dark. The game simulates your scent so that it spreads more if you stay on a place for too long, so zombies won't detect you immediately in the dark. They might find you by sound, but you can mislead them by throwing items away.
• All Swords Are the Same: Averted for both the weapons themselves and their usage:
  • There are over a hundred different melee weapons in the game, covering a huge amount of variance (such as spears and pikes being different weapons).
  • Each melee damage type (bash, cut, pierce) demands its own specific skill in addition to the general Melee skill, and heavy bladed weapons (such as axes) demand Bashing Weapons in addition to their main one. Also, unless you're using the Brawling style, each style demands a specific category of weapons, such as Fior Di Battaglia relying on weapons that can be used for hooking.
• All There in the Manual: While a lot of the background lore behind the Cataclysm is hinted at through in-game means, the wiki and forum are the go-to sources for a breakdown of the events leading up to the start of the game.
• The Aloner: Disabling NPCs will produce such an effect, as it'll be just you facing against post-apocalyptic monsters. Even without doing so, however, random NPCs spawn extremely rarely by default (it's entirely possible to reach the endgame without ever seeing one), while locations that spawn static NPCs are rather rare to encounter.
• Ammo-Using Melee Weapon: Any kind of a blade powered by electricity or gasoline (such as a chainsaw) naturally suffers from needing to be recharged/refueled while used. Fortunately, the blade will run for a pretty long amount of time, so you can simply keep your weapon turned off between fights.
• Animorphism: Most of the mutation categories are those of animals, altering you into an anthropomorphic version of it.
• An Interior Designer Is You: There's a huge construction interface for remodeling any building you like into a somewhat secure fort, or even build your own from scratch. You can also build an array of pits, traps and furniture to decorate or entrench your home.
• Anti-Grinding: Crafting skills cannot be trained by easier recipes. Once you reach level 2 or 3, recipes start to require limited and rare items, preventing you from just crafting an item and disassembling it for its components. And books have a limit to what level they can train your skills to.
• Appropriate Animal Attire: Most of the issues related to the trope can be justifed by mutations interfering with one's clothing. Having extra arachnid limbs, for instance, doesn't play nice with torso clothes, thus forcing you to either suffer penalties or go topless.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Not here, as you can bring as many party members with you as you want. The limit is that recruitable survivors are rare, it gets increasingly harder to feed them (if NPC needs are on), most vehicles struggle to fit a lot of people, and having many NPCs will cause them to constantly get into your way or accidentally shoot you in the back.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age:
  • While firearms exist and are way more common than swords and such, the use of primitive weapons is significanlty encouraged, as it's quieter, either doesn't consume ammo or makes it reusable and/or easy to make (thus leaving you more room to carry loot and useful gear), and is effective against monsters who are Immune to Bullets. A highly trained and strong swordsman can actually do more damage than a rifle or shotgun shot, especially if they use a high-quality weapon.
  • The Magiclysm mod makes archaic weapons much more available and powerful, as they can drop from the mod's monsters, and are often enchanted to increase their damage and accuracy.
• Armor and Magic Don't Mix: A downplayed and justified trope in mods that introduce magic, as spells that use gestures will be harder to cast if your hands are encumbered. However, this encumbrance may not necessartily come from armor (kevlar gloves are fine, but unarmored mittens will make it near-impossible to cast), or even from gloves (as carried containers cause a lot of hand encumbrance).
• Artificial Animal People: As part of the backstory, American scientists were researching genetic modification in order to create Super Soldiers in case a cold war with China turned hot. Some scientists developed Super Serums that grant animal traits, although the Cataclysm prevented widespread usage of them. If you find or recreate the right kind of mutagens, you can become an example of this trope, although it's very risky.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • Justified and intentional, as most of the enemies are zombies. You can funnel zombies into a window sill and they'll just climb on top of each other trying to get to you, only to take a crowbar to the face for their troubles. They are also unable to grasp that stepping in and out of a broken glass window hurts them and causes them to bleed out. Throw down a molotov, and zombies will try to shamble through it, only to die after a few steps in.
  • NPCs and non-zombie creatures increasingly avert this trope, however, as the team continues to refine the AI.
  • While the automatic driving system is great at dodging zombies, cars and whatever else is in the road, if there is a crater in it’s path, it will careen directly into it, most likely killing you.
  • If an NPC follower is allowed to pick up items, it's likely that they will choose to wield melee weapons rather than ranged ones. This wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that they have the nasty tendency of wielding scrap that may be strong but that break easily; cue NPCs dropping their AK-47s to pick up a stick or glass shard they found lying around. If you're really unlucky, they will instead throw said items at enemies, which leads to you being Devoured by the Horde while your friend is moving about trying to find the optimal spot to lob rocks.
  • The logic for NPC throwing in Dark Days Ahead occasionally causes bandits to throw soda cans or other harmless objects to you, which wastes turns they could've spent either shooting at you or running into range.
  • NPCs occasionally struggle to navigate areas filled with traps, especially during combat. When assaulting a bandit base, as such, you may occasionally see bandits die by stepping into their own traps.
• Artistic License – Medicine: Poisons don't stack, and even the worst poison type can kill you only if you're severaly injured on the torso. Thus, you can shovel 30 poisonous mushrooms into your mouth, drink a canteen's worth of bleach, and get stung 10 times by a venomous animal, and only suffer mild injury from the poison.
• Artistic License – Pharmacology:
  • Even in Dark Days Ahead, you can cure the effects of depressants/stimulants (although not other statuses associated with what you consumed, such as being drunk) by consuming the drug of the opposite type, such as smoking weed to prevent a stimulant overdose. In real life, doing so is a great way to make things worse, nor would it prevent you from overdosing on either drug.
  • Crack and powdered cocaine are, for addiction purposes, treated as separate drugs, despite them being different forms of the same drug. To make it weirder, coca leaves and cocaine creams have the same addiction type as powdered cocaine.
• Apocalypse How: Societal Collapse, Universal Scale - the entirety of Earth has been affected so badly that humanity teeters on the brink of extinction, and strange sightings in the sky make it clear that the rest of the universe is also affected. It's also heavily suggested that it will eventually escalate to a Species Extinction as the fabric of reality unravels more and more, and the zombies keep evolving.
• Apocalyptic Log: What you find in some of the unique locations, which provides some of the sparse hard canon lore.
• The Assimilator: The Mycus, which infects the landscape, along with converting zombies and some of wildlife into fungal versions. You can also join it.
• And I Must Scream: Prototype cyborgs have implants that control their body, yet they don't keep the human mind unconscious. Thus, they're constantly screaming in fear or whimpering from the pain the implants cause, and their only hope to get out of this hell is for somebody to come by and either put them down or remove the implants.
• And Then John Was a Zombie:
  • Most living creatures that die will eventually rise as a zombie, unless the corpse is pulped. If your character dies and you make another, it's even possible to fight the zombified version of your previous character.
  • A few of the monsters include heavily mutated humans, their minds so warped that they attack you on sight. Overindulge in mutagen serums yourself, especially those related to predatory animals, and you may find out that you don't differ much from these monsters, except for being somewhat more peaceful (but still okay with murdering and devouring humans).
  • It's possible to join the Mycus, if you go through the convoluted process to do so, thus making you go from fighting it to spreading it.
• Annoying Arrows:
  • Bows and crossbows in Dark Days Ahead do little damage on shots, often struggling with even small amounts of armor. Subverted if you land a critical hit, however, as the damage will then be increased tenfold, usually causing the target to die on the spot.
  • Bright Nights averts this completely, as bows and crossbows that use professionally-crafted ammo will do a lot of damage, comparable to guns. The main issue is that they're quite poor at penetrating armor when compared to guns loaded with FMJ ammo, although bodkin arrows/bolts can compensate.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Safemode, which will refuse any input except one specific key wherever a hostile monster is found. Auto-Safemode reenables it after a set number of turns without enemies on sight. This has saved the lives of a LOT of characters which otherwise would experience "death by boredom". Both can be adjusted.
  • The game will prompt when the player is about to step on a dangerous square, such as a fire or a (known) trap.
  • If you find Rubik too hard to understand (since he's speaking in a different language, albeit related to English), you can use the Translate Complex Dialogue mod, which gives you a translation alongside the original dialogue.
  • Robots with guns fire extremely accurately and extremely quickly. To compensate, they will state that they detected a hostile upon spotting you, then wait for a second or two before firing, which gives you time to shoot first or get into cover.
  • The default scenario starts you off in an evac shelter, which is designed to be a good starting location, ensuring that newbies don't die in their first day. It has a basement that protects you from the cold and monsters outside, a terminal that provides a small amount of light to read by, benches for wood, lockers to break for metal and pipes (which are a decent starting weapon), windows with curtains to hide you from monsters (or to take down for cloth, strings, and sheets), and a decent amount of equipment — emergency jackets that protect you from rain and cold (even coming with a wide collar and hood to keep your head and face warm, and pockets to put your hands in), emergency blankets, lighters, flashlights, light batteries, first-aid kits (which come with scissors in case you lack a knife), bottles of clean water, and protein rations (though they taste awful). Bright Nights adds to it due to its electric grid mechanics, with solar panels on the roof charging a battery installed in the basement, making it immediately useful for powering any appliances the player brings home on their raids, and already comes with an installed battery charger.
• Apocalyptic Log: Some news articles detail the breakdown of public order as Blob-induced insanity turns people feral or zombified. Some of the later articles show that the writer is going insane from their infection, causing them to write blatant nonsense.
• Armor Is Useless:
  • Maybe not useless, per se, but you'll have to decide whether the protection and storage space is worth the torso encumbrance.
  • Averted with crafted armor; while expensive, a survivor suit will let you shrug off most attacks and lets you carry more than most regular items of clothing. One of the major breakpoints in protection is when the rocks thrown by ferals start being deflected instead of hurting you.
  • In Bright Nights, kevlar is oddly bad at protecting you against FMJ rounds due to the buffs that the ammo type received, with 9x19mm punching through concealable vests and empty MBR vests (which represent the standard US military vest), while 5.56 can punch through MBR vests with steel plates. Sure, some of the damage will be stopped, but not as much as one would expect.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Ranged weapons typically can ignore some amount of armor, depending on the ammo loaded into them. Some martial arts styles (such as Barbaran Montante) will also give armor penetration to your melee attacks.
• Ascended Glitch: Lab scenarios were initially intended to not allow you to leave, as there's no door outside, and the scenario's description says as much. However, as the lab still has normal walls, players found ways to get out, and the descriptions of scenarios were thus revised, telling you to find a way to escape.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Among the civilian "Monsters" present at the start of the game, there are the Futile Fighter (a person with a stick), Armed Fighter (an untrained civilian with a pistol), and the Overconfident Officer (a cop that wields a rifle or a pistol). Both will mindlessly charge enemies, even if at low health and out of ammo, and calling them out on this will have them refuse to back down.
• Atomic Superpower: Radiation and mutagenic substances can give you mutations. If you're really lucky, they might even be good.
• Autocannibalism: You can extract blood from yourself, then turn it into food. However, it will you make very unhappy, unless you have traits that make you okay with cannibalism.
• Auto-Doc: Typically used to install bionics, although they can also help with crippled limbs. While Dark Days Ahead has them be Exodii tech, Bright Nights has them as native human tech that is often encountered in hospitals and any place that installs bionics.
• Automatic Crossbows: You can use a repeating crossbow that has a 10-round internal magazine, but is less powerful than most crossbows. It's an impractical weapon in Dark Days Ahead due to the extremely low damage and the difficulty of scoring a Critical Hit with it (which are the only way for bows and crossbows to do damage). In Bright Nights, however, it's the best crossbow for general use, and you can craft a carbon fiber version that comes with additional accessory slots.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Shotguns in general, more particularly with Wandering Hordes on. They are incredibly loud and a single unsuppressed shot will draw the attention of all neighboring zombies. They also have their dedicated skill and as such they are hardly useful outside emergencies due to lack of training. Most of them also suffer from being a Short-Range Shotgun. Ironically, the most useful of them all might be the Sawed-Off Shotgun, thanks to its decreased weight and volume and its status as an emergency weapon.
    
    With hordes turned off, shotguns are more useful as you don't have to worry about zombie hordes following the noise. Instead, you have to know if there are any dangerous zombies in the area that could be drawn by your fire.
  • The P90 is a minor example of this trope. While it has the unique position of being a submachine gun with armor-piercing ammo, a fire selector switch, and high-capacity magazines, the impractical aspect comes in the form of its long magazines, which cannot fit into most magazine-stashing pouches due to their above-average length (due to said pouches being designed with either STANAG or handgun magazines in mind), thus necessitating either holster-sized pockets to hold your spare mags, or stashing them in your biggest backpack/rucksack/duffel bag compartment.
  • The coilgun is essentially the nailgun on 'roids. It has five times the range of the nailgun, fires easily-accessible nails, and it's near silent. However, it requires electronics 5 to craft, utilizes four proficiencies that penalize time and failure chances if not learned, and requires a powered UPS to fire. Unless you luck out and find one earlier, you are studying electronics to level 5 to craft yours. Each shot drains battery from the UPS, and drains a 1000 battery charge after 500 shots, requiring anywhere from 16 to 20 shots to kill a regular zombie. Moreover, a silenced .22 handgun fills the same purpose and it's about as easy to find and keep loaded, in addition to dealing more damage per shot. On the other hand, the alternate ammo in the Flechettes has non-trivial armor piercing properties, hits harder than nails, and can easily be forged in big stacks for a few chunks of steel, the weapon's attacks easily inflict bleed stacks on enemies, plus it does very little damage to the bodies of animals you hunt for better Butchering bounties. Oh, and with proper recharging infrastructure and spare batteries, the UPS requirements are a lot less of a burden since having the UPS also lets you run other hardware and you can easily keep your batteries charged with a solar or wind-powered charging station.
  • Powered Armor protects you from almost anything, but is cumbersome unless you find a UPS and the batteries/fuel cells to power it. It also blocks the use of backpacks, sheaths, or any other items that can be strapped to you, and it has very little storage space unless you find a rare lifting frame. You also need to have both the helmet and the armor with you if you intend to use it. All this means that in most cases you're better off with lighter gear.
  • Vehicle turrets. You will need to feed them ammunition personally, all but the nail gun require ammo to be specially prepared to be fired from them, and anything they can kill easily is killed just as easily by just ramming your car into them.
  • In the latest builds of Dark Days Ahead, the proficiencies system has turned mutations into this. To craft enough mutagen and mutagenic primer to meaningfully mutate, you need to acquire a lot of chemistry-related proficiencies, which means a lot of grinding. By contrast, bionics just require you to find the right NPC, or configure an autodoc yourself.
  • Any weapon that can't shoot in the semiautomatic mode, as it often wastes ammo, and a low skill level will result in most of your shots missing. This also makes the AR-15 lightning link and TEC-9 auto sear into extremely niche Gun Accessories, as they prevent you from shooting in semi-auto.
  • Bright Nights has the Chainsaw Lajatang, which consists of two chainsaws attached to a quartestaff. It's a cool concept, not to mention that it does 140 damage per swing and can use the spinning strike technique to hit everybody around you. The problem, however, is that it takes 422 moves to attack with it (you normally have 100 moves per second, unless modified by traits and status effects), meaning that enemies can easily get 4 attacks off on you, and it also breaks very easily.
  • Properly-forged Fullplate provides top-notch protection-per-encumberance for its weight, but has 0 Breathability (which affects your performance in it in hot weather) and takes a very long time to craft.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: In the latest builds, dissecting monsters can allow you to learn their biology, which translates into increased combat effectiveness.
• Awesome Personnel Carrier: Among the toughest vehicles in the game, though their limited field of view makes them Awesome, but Impractical. This is fairly easy to fix, however, for any character with a few levels in Mechanics and a welding machine, making them an excellent base for the rolling fortress of your dreams. Bright Nights also has a Bradley IFV (mainlined from Tankmod: Revived) as an alternative to basic tracked and wheeled APCs, with heavier guns to match.
• Badass Biker: One of the professions the player can start as. In addition, the Hell's Raiders are an NPC faction of biker bandits.
• Badass Bookworm: Since reading books is the most efficient way to learn new skills in Bright Nights, and a viable early game strategy is "Find a library and read the skill books until I've exhausted them", many successful characters end up evoking this trope at least a little. Many skill books also have over a dozen valuable crafting recipes, many of which will give you much easier access to rare and very difficult to find items.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: The Gangster, Assassin/Hitman, and the Mafia Boss all wear suits (the boss having a tux in particular), carry weapons, and have good combat skills.
• Badass Longcoat: All sorts of these are available, with trenchcoats and dusters being particularly favored due to their large storage capacity, as well as being upgradeable into survivor variants, which provide decent protection.
• Badass Normal: Most of the unmutated survivors without bionics will qualify as this, capable of fighting off hundreds of mutated creatures and alien monstrosities on their own.
• Bad with the Bone:
  • The bone shiv in both forks, which does a surprising amount of damage for an improvised blade. However, it's very fragile, and is more useful as a tool
  • Bright Nights has weapons made out of sharp teeth and heavy bones, harvested from the appropriate mutants and zombies (those with powerful bites for the teeth, those of exceptional strength and/or size for bones). They do damage that is comparable to actual steel weapons (with sharktooth bolts and arrows actually doing more damage than their smithed counterparts), and are just as durable:
• Bait-and-Switch: Found an awesome weapon, like a katana or broadsword, in a random house somewhere? Better double-check the damage stats before you charge into a mob of zombies, as it has a decent chance of being a useless prop. Bright Nights alleviates this, however, as the weapon's name will explicitly point out if it's a fake.
• Bandit Mook: Zombie Technicians in Bright Nights have built-in magnets that they can use to pull weapons right out of your hands, but only if it contains metal. Even if a weapon is mostly made out of wood, a single bit of metal is enough for them to disarm you.
• Base on Wheels - The end reward of many hours of scavenging and a leveling a character up in the fabrication, mechanics, and electrical skills is the ability to construct one of these from scrap metal and duct tape. The latest experimentals and bundled "official" mods have taken this even farther by adding a slew of additional mounted weapons, reinforcement options, and utility parts, making it possible to assemble massive Mobile Factories studded with turrets and armored solar panels. Maniacal cackling as your gasoline-chugging building-sized mass of steel spews forth Bullet Hell upon legions of undead before crushing them and anything else in it its path beneath roller drums and caterpillar tracks before delivering the slurry of loot and pulped remains into waiting cargo containers optional.
• Bare-Fisted Monk: There are many martial arts styles, each with its own pros and cons. They synergize well with "natural weapons", such as claws from mutations or retractable blades.
• Barefoot Cartoon Animal: Having Toe Talons, digitigrade legs, or rabbit feet will force you to go barefoot, as you're not able to make special footwear for them. Having padded feet (which is a prerequisite to the latter two mutations) will also encourage you to go barefoot, as it gives you a bonus to movement speed.
• Barrier-Busting Blow: Zombies are prone to doing this, as they receive bonuses when bashing down objects in groups, while brutes and hulks are strong enough to break down thin walls on their own.
• Batter Up!: Baseball bats are a common weapon with good damage and to-hit bonus, and are actually treated as maces in Dark Days Ahead. You can also upgrade the bat with nails or barbed wire for more damage, or swap to an aluminium bat, which is faster to swing, and can be upgraded with bolts in Bright Nights.
• Bayonet Ya: Combat knives and a few dedicated bayonets can be attached to longarms, allowing you to perform melee reach attacks with the gun. However, the weight of the gun makes it slow to use in melee, making it inferior to using the bayonet standalone.
• Bears Are Bad News: And zombie bears are even worse news. You can become a bear yourself with the Ursine Mutation branch.
• Berserk Board Barricade: Doors and windows can be boarded up, though they won't last long without being further reinforced (which requires a wood saw for doors).
• Beware the Living: Downplayed, as the monsters are absolutely the real threat, and there's a decent amount of neutral/friendly survivors around. That said, hostile NPCs are still some of the most dangerous enemies around, as they move quickly, can do a lot of damage, and have a lot of health (albeit distributed between body parts). Gun-wielding NPCs, in particular, are extremely accurate and fast-firing in comparison to ferals, all while carrying a lot of ammo.
• BFG:
  • .50 BMG guns all do obscene amounts of damage per shot, to the point that you can use them as breaching tools. The rifles, in particular, are the strongest non-launcher weapons that you can fire off your shoulder.
  • Bright Nights has the mininuke launcher, firing mininukes modified into rockets. Not only are the projectiles larger than you (97 liters, whereas an average human body is 62 liters, and an assault rifle is somewhere around 2 liters), the combined weight of the gun and loaded rocket is close to 45 kilograms. It can easily wipe out hordes of even the toughest zombies, and it's very easy to kill yourself by firing too close.
  • Bright Nights allows you to use mounted weapons without actually mounting them, at the cost of an accuracy penalty, so long as you have the Large or Huge mutations, or are wearing power armor or an exo-suit. Thus, you can hip-fire a Minigun or a 3-inch American Civil War cannon.
  • The Arcana mod has the Grand Wraithslayer, based on a heavy crossbow, whose energy bolts are far more powerful than a .50 BMG bullet, penetrating through almost any enemy's armor and usually killing them in just one shot.
• Big Badass Rig: With a little luck and some mechanics skill, the only better mobile base is an RV. More often than not they're just wrecks cluttering up bridges.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Giant insects and arachnids are some of the many enemies you will encounter in this game.
• Bindle Stick: It's possible to craft as an early-game storage option, and the Hobo starts out with one.
• Bio-Augmentation: Mutagens, which were an active project before the Cataclysm, allow for this, usually via mutating the recipient into an anthropomorphic animal. However, the process is highly unreliable (as it's both random and can cause negative mutations), causes genetic instability, may alter one's personality, and depends on the Blob to function. It's for these reasons that the Exodii hate mutants, relying solely on cybernetics for augmentation.
• Bittersweet Ending: The ending of Bright Nights where you close the dimensional portal by going through it. Whatever you encountered on the other side, it killed you, but humanity will now be able to survive the Cataclysm.
• Bizarrchitecture: Individual buildings tend to be sanely designed, but the roads between towns often take completely nonsensical routes.
• Black Eyes of Evil: The zombies are stated as having jet-black eyes with a look of Unstoppable Rage.
• Blackout Basement: A common issue in underground locations, such as labs and basements. And batteries are in high demand during the apocalypse.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: The "Monomolecular Blade" bionic upgrade.
• Blinded by the Light:
  • Flashbangs will blind and deafen whoever they hit, unless they have proper flash protection.
  • Depending on your night vision range, a small light can be worse than nothing, as it negates your night vision while you're close to it, making it hard to see outside of it.
• Blinding Camera Flash: Taking a photo of a creature at close range has a small chance to blind it.
• Blob Monster: Dungeon feature. Logs left behind by scientists imply they are some sort of alien Grey Goo, and are what causes zombies to rise from the dead and mutate. You can become one yourself by crossing the Slime mutation threshold.
• Blocking Stops All Damage: Averted, as blocking stops damage based on your strength, melee skill, and then either your unarmed skill (if blocking bare-handed) or the weapon's block bonus (if blocking with a weapon). While it's technically possible to get to the point that you take no damage while blocking, doing so requires some combination of superhuman strength and absolute mastery of martial arts. As such, if you rely on blocking, it's recommended to either wear armor or use martial arts that give you flat damage reduction when blocking (usually based on strength), so that you can actually avoid all damage.
• Blood Knight: The Killer Drive trait in Bright Nights will make you one to an unhealthy extent, as while killing makes you happy, you'll lose morale if you spend too much time without killing anything. You also won't suffer any guilt for killing innocent humans or zombie children.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: According to the design docs, the mi-go actually aren't hostile to humanity. Unfortunately, to the mi-go, capturing and vivisecting humans is roughly equivalent to a friendly handshake.
• Body Horror:
  • As in most Roguelikes, mutations exist. Some are good, some are bad, some are double edged swords. You can also modify yourself with bionics, many of which are visible. After several augments and mutations, your character will barely look human. Some tilesets will even display bionics and mutations of your character, giving you a visual representation of how inhuman they appear.
  • Several of the enemy types are quite grisly in their descriptions, especially once-human enemies such as the Broken Cyborg.
• Body of Bodies:
  • Jabberwocks are titanic monsters that are described as an amalgamation of corpses. They move faster than you, can attract more enemies with their roars, and can knock you down. Fortunately, they're hostile to any other monsters, including other jabberwocks. Unfortunately for you, you'll usually encounter them in sparsely populated environments. Lucky you.
  • The Melded Task Force is a team of security guards that somehow got fused together into a massive, Kevlar-covered blob, with something else at the center.
• Booby Trap: You'll find these laying around here and there, and picking up a few levels in the Devices/Trapping skill (plus the right components) will allow you to set some of your own, from caltrops and boards with nails in them, to landmines and shotgun traps. Characters with perception below 10 are going to have a short and miserable life, unless they learn Devices/Trapping as soon as possible.
• Boogie Knights: Draco Dune can be danced with at the Refugee Center, and while novice dodgers will not be able to dance while wearing armor, those who are skilled at the skill can do well while wearing full-body armor.
• Boring, but Practical: Part of learning to survive is figuring out productive uses for all the clutter objects you find.
  • The humble Pocket Knife is the most boring of the knives, but its true potential is not in being a weapon in itself. Rather, it's one of the easiest to obtain tools that gives you the Cutting tool functionality immediately, and it can even provide some Butchering skill in a pinch.
  • Pipe-based improvised weapons like the Pipe Mace, Pipe Staff, and Pipe Spear aren't difficult to find parts for in a city and perform decently to start with, in particular the Pipe Spear with its immediate access to the skills of blocking and making reach attacks. Pipes can be acquired from air conditioner units on rooftops and in apartment blocks, and pipe fittings can be scrounged from the smashed wreckage of shower stalls, and both (plus some wire and scrap metal) can be acquired from damaged wire fences. Their lack of sturdiness is offset by how easy it is to source materials and then quickly put them together, compared to some other stronger weapons.
  • Paper is everywhere in the cities, whether in the form of books, or files, or newspapers, and so on. You can actually make improvised armor if you have enough paper and some tape, and it is also a suitable alternate ingredient for making Welding Rods instead of using precious, edible/cookable flour for the recipe.
  • The Foraging proficiency, part of the Survival skillset, is a very unglamorous thing, but if you're scrounging in the bushes and trees for edibles and useful crafting ingredients, having Foraging makes it easier to find rarer and more valuable things in the shrubbery, such as bird eggs, edible herbs, Hickory Roots (which can be processed for salt), and Winterberries (which can only be found during winter and are perfectly edible, if not as nourishing as summer fare).
  • The fire axe isn't as glamorous as a broadsword or katana, but it has decent swinging power behind it and can knock back and stun enemies. It's also easier to find than the more exotic blades, as fire stations, feral axemen, and firefighter zombies occasionally have at least one on hand. You can also attach a halligan bar to it, if you don't mind the slow swing speed (which can be mitigated by dropping the bar before combat), or use it on its own to cut trees or logs (though not as well as a wood axe), and pry windows and doors.
  • Similarly, combat knives lack the punch of the fire axe or katana, but swing quickly and accurately, and can be mounted as a bayonet onto most longarms. More importantly, though, they are easier to find than the former two: manhacks, military ferals, and soldier zombies drop them, and occasionally a military surplus store or gun basement will have one.
  • The quarterstaff is not very exciting as a weapon, but it is easily-made (a pair of two-by-fours and 2 leather patches), swings relatively quickly, and works with multiple martial arts styles. Once you have access to better tools and some oil, you can then upcraft it into a bo staff. And then you complete your forge setup and train your smithing, and can finally upgrade it into an Iron or Steel-shod Staff with reinforcing metal parts for added effectiveness. From the Bo onwards, the staves are all considered to be Durable weapons for combat, so a well-made one can last you a long time.
  • The cudgel, the quarterstaff's simpler and weaker cousin, requires very little in the way of materials, and it's accurate, quick, and can be used with almost any melee weapon martial arts style. While it now takes modest skill to craft rather than none at all, the wooden club and large wooden club fill its former niche of something you can make in 7 minutes with a cutting tool and no skills or proficiencies to speak of. If it somehow survives long enough in your stash for your survivor to start farming crops for food, it can then become a useful tool for threshing grain.
  • Spears let you attack zombies from one (or two, with some types) space away, which drastically reduces the amount of hits they can get in on you. The most easily-crafted types break very easily, but if you're lucky enough to find some rebar, you can craft a decent and sturdy spear out of it using nothing but a rock. City survivors who manage to scavenge up some sandpaper or a metal fileset and some cooking oil can instead refine their Long Stick into a proper Spear Shaft and turn it into a bonafide Spear Knife with a good sturdy Steak Knife or Bayonet as the pointy bit, and it will likely provide for a serviceable weapon until you get access to a forge and can craft a proper Steel Spear.
  • For guns, anything chambered in 9x19mm, 12 Gauge, and 5.56 qualifies. As their caliber is widely used by both civilians and the US military, their ammo (and possibly magazines) can be looted from any location that has guns, as well as being randomly dropped by zombies, especially military and police ones. As such, you can easily keep a stockpile of ammo, and even get away with regularly using it up. If you need something a little bigger than 9x19, .40 S&W is readily available from zombie police officers and derelict police station armories, and many gunstores are likely to carry a stack of it in their ammo safes.
  • Fragmentation grenades are a common drop from zombie soldiers and their variants, and can be found in large numbers in military armories. While it takes a bit of practice to use them without getting a face full of shrapnel, they require very little in-game skill to use, and are extremely strong once you get used to them. One grenade can wipe out an entire mob of basic zombies, and even late-game boss monsters go down to Grenade Spam.
  • You can learn a huge number of martial art styles, but the default combat style, Brawling, is probably the one you'll stick with for most of the game. It can be used unarmed or with any weapon, and unlocks the hugely useful Feint, Grab Break, and (in Bright Nights) counterattack abilities with decent Melee/Unarmed levels. For unarmed combat, you also get Power Hit (which makes your crits knock enemies back) and Trip (which downs enemies with a regular hit). Most importantly, you automatically learn it, so you don't have to rely on either starting with a style or raiding dojos for books.
  • Weapons aside, some of the most sought-after articles early in the game are clothes with ample storage. Cargo pants can save your life, and a backpack is worth killing for.
  • Handguns and other firearms chambered in common calibers, as it's common to find them and their ammo, and their low volume and weight make them trivial to carry. For example, many common Glocks and Berettas share the relatively easy-to-find 9x19mm handgun round, and the AR-15, M4, and other common standard rifles share the 5.56 NATO and .223 Remington rifle cartridges and even use the same STANAG magazines.
  • In Bright Nights, the repeating crossbow can be made at 3 fabrication (though it demands reading one of two specific books) out of ubiquitous materials and with tools that are easily obtained or improvised. It reloads quickly, benefits from a 10-round magazine, is surprisingly powerful (even if it struggles against armor without blacksmithed or scavenged bolts, unless you make sharktooth bolts), and trains your Rifle skill. While it's short-ranged compared to other crossbows, and slow-firing when compared to actual rifles, it's not that much of an issue because most of your enemies tend to fight exclusively in melee range, and are slow enough that you have all the time in the world to aim.
  • The humble Mobile Trashcan that you find outside many suburban houses in towns and cities is a useful starter "vehicle". It makes for a watertight container in a pinch, has more raw storage capacity that a single car trunk (normal car trunks have 200L volume, larger trunks have 300L, the Industrial Trashcan has a respectable 359L and is only second to the Cargo Space with a very generous 500L), and is often an easy source of Aluminum extra-light frame parts and Caster Wheel sets. Due to being such a minimalist vehicle, it's easy to add a Dashboard and a battery taken from a derelict car, a Battery Charger from a house's tool drawer (or a Recharging Station), a solar panel pulled out of a house-scale Solar Panel Array, and turn it into an early game source of solar power for your rechargeable batteries and infrastructure (as the Dashboard, or ECU if you used one instead, can be attached to a stationary power grid by using a Jumper Cable). If you have multiple Trashcans, an Arc Welder, some car parts, and some welding wire, you can even pull apart some of the excess trashcans and use their frames to assemble your own vehicle (or just expand one of the trashcan frames so you can turn it into a small wagon and add proper vehicle components). Another budget option if you get lucky is the humble shopping/grocery cart, which can be found at some clothes stores, grocery stores, or supermarkets, which has less carrying capacity with the wire basket (just a humble 140L), but still gives players an early way to stash their loot piles (and can lead to the creation of Foldable Carts by taking the wire basket and recrafting it into a foldable one and then mounting it on a foldable frame), or the Laundry Cart, which can be found in the laundry rooms of Mansions. As the Mobile Trashcan is also a 1x1 vehicle, you can easily dock it onto a bike rack to add external storage capacity to a larger vehicle.
  • Garbage Bags and Zipper/Gallon Zipper bags are valuable containers to players if you can find them in a house's tool drawer. The former can be upcrafted by combining ten of them into a Reinforced Garbage Bag, which has a non-trivial carrying capacity of 98L and 48kg. The latter two have a unique property that food carried inside them spoils at a slower rate and are watertight, so you can stick your pills and smartphone and E-Reader tablet inside Gallon Zipper bags and not have to worry about them dissolving or breaking in water.
  • Of the faction professions present in Arcana mod (usable as an in-repo mod in Bright Nights, or via third-party repos in Dark Days Ahead), blood mages wield devastating fire or explosive throwing axes, dark priests have lightning-spitting holy symbols and invisibility-granting robes...the standard kit of a mage hunter? An enchanted warhammer that can cast a flashbang spell, a clairvoyance-granting mask that renders them immune to said flashbang, and an armored cloak that can heal the wearer. While still flashy, it's a lot more straightforward and less destructive than the standard kit of the other arcanist professions, as basically any monster that has eyes can be blinded by flashbang weaponry and nearly anything can be stunned by it, allowing for an easy approach or getaway. This also makes them the most heavily-armored of the arcanist professions, only rivaled by variant professions like the Sanguine Shrike and Keeper Mendicant, who have leather-grade armor and an enchanted shield in the latter's case.
  • Of the three types of aircraft present in Bright Nights, blimps and other airships are this. Planes need enough speed to takeoff and need to maintain that speed to keep flying. Helis can be set to hover in place, but rotors are more fuel-hungry than propellers and thus will need to land eventually. A vehicle with enough balloons on it can stay in the air indefinitely, only requiring propellers to move horizontally. Add a rope ladder and you have a mobile base that can park over cities and be almost untouchable, aside from ranged attacks by turrets, ferals, or a few evolved zombies.
  • In Bright Nights, the Survivor profession is oriented towards being the bare minimum for early-game survival, making them a good choice if you don't have anything in mind. They come with a messenger bag for a decent amount of early storage space, a pocket knife that unlocks a lot of necessary early-game crafts (such as carving wooden weapons or cutting up clothes for rags), a bottle of clean water to store liquids in, and matches that can be used to set a fire for cooking and/or heating yourself up.
• Born in the Wrong Century: The Detective is equipped as if they were from the 1930s, with things like a trenchcoat, fedora, and revolver. This is despite the game taking place either in an alternate history of the current year (Dark Days Ahead) or in the near-future (Bright Nights).
• Bottomless Bladder: Toilets exist in the game, but you never need to use one. Instead, they provide a source of water.
• Bottomless Magazines: Very much averted, to the point that the game keeps track of individual magazines, clips, and speedloaders. In particular, the game averts the common trope of enemies having infinite ammo, as NPCs track ammo just like the player, and monsters (such as robots and ferals) can run out of ammo for their ranged attacks.
• Boulder Bludgeon:
  • Rocks and bricks can be used as melee weapons if you're desperate, and they can serve as decent throwing weapons if you don't have dedicated ones available. Many low-tier ferals will also carry rocks, which they will throw at you with unerring accuracy.
  • The Lethal Zombies mod for Bright Nights gives zombies a special supply of rocks that only do 2 points of damage, unlike the rocks thrown by ferals, but have high armor penetration. The intention is that it makes it much harder for players to kite zombies with polearms or stab them from above, as they'll slowly get whittled down by rocks.
• Boxing Battler: Boxing can be taken as a style, primarily oriented towards fighting a single opponent while staying mobile. It doesn't handle groups well, but its punches are extremely powerful.
• Breakable Weapons:
  • Melee weapons will slowly get damaged from use, losing damage with each step of lost durability until they eventually shatter. However, if you're using a weapon with the "Durable" tag (which is used for nearly every professionally-made weapon), you'll have to bash a lot of heads in before it gets damaged even a single step, and you'd have to kill hundreds of enemies to finally shatter it.
  • Guns will accumulate dirt (and fouling, if using black powder ammo), increasing the chance of jamming, and jams themselves can randomly damage a gun, with a higher chance if it's fouled or very dirty. The gun will never fully break unless you use it in melee, though, but the damage will reduce accuracy and reliability.
• Briefcase Blaster: The H&K Operational Briefcase, which allows you to fire off an MP5 while it's stored inside. However, since the gun takes a severe accuracy penalty and you don't ever have to conceal a gun, it's far better to use the gun normally.
• Bucket Helmet: Cooking pots can be turned into helmets with a bit of duct tape. They don't cover much, nor do they give good protection in comparison to proper helmets, but you can still use the pot for cooking.
• Cane Fu: Canes are usable as decent batons, while also serving as crutches if you have a crippled leg.
• Can't Catch Up: NPCs don't get better gear as time goes on, nor do they gain traits or bionics, and while Dark Days Ahead makes NPCs generate with higher skills as time goes on, it's still not enough. By the time you meet your first NPCs, your starting character will probably be much stronger than them, with companions struggling to meaningfully contribute in combat, while hostile NPCs get slaughtered by you in droves.
• Career-Apropos Empowering: Bright Nights has a profession for a helicopter pilot who gained multiple bird-type mutations, crossing the threshold in the process. In particular, they acquired wings, thus allowing them to fly without a helicopter.
• Car Fu: Anything larger than a motorcycle is good for running over enemies (and usually insta-killing them). Cars are just the beginning. Wait until you get a semi-truck. Without a suitably large vehicle, however, or a very good ram, a zombie hulk can stop your ride dead in its tracks at low speeds. And then proceed to smash it, shortly followed by smashing you.
• Car Porn: The mechanics for constructing vehicles are extremely extensive, allowing you to build nearly any ground vehicle you want, along with boats and helicopters. Many players, as such, eventually end up building deathmobiles that form a major part of their survivor's legend.
• Cassandra Truth: A random NPC backstory has them tell you about how they ran from the evac shelter after being attacked by giant bees. If your perception isn't below-average, you can ask them if they were talking about wasps, since bees aren't usually aggressive. As it turns out, however, giant bees do exist as monsters, and they're only slightly less aggressive than wasps.
• Cast from Calories: The metabolic interchange CBM works exactly this way. It replenishes bionic energy from the player's own biochemistry. Now that the game tracks actual stored body calories, not just hunger, the comparison is even more accurate.
• Cast from Stamina: The Arcana mod has Sign-based magic, which drains stamina, and causes a stacking effect that increases one's need for sleep (which is even worse with the healing spells). Casting too much, as such, can leave the player unable to run away or use melee weapons.
• Cat Girl: The Otaku starts with a Cat Girl (or Cat Boy) costume. You can become an actual Cat Girl if you get lucky with mutagens.
• Cats Are Mean: Cougars, which are a hair better than wolves stat-wise, but luckily hunt alone. Some of them have also joined the ranks of the undead.
• Chainsaw Good:
  • Averted in Dark Days Ahead, as while a startling variety of power tools with moving blades is available, from saws (circular, chain, masonry, pole) to hedge trimmers and electric meat carvers, they do barely any damage.
  • Bright Nights keeps power tools viable as weapons. All of them demand gasoline/electricity to run and have the unique "Messy" trait (which results in Ludicrous Gibs when pulping bodies), and most deal devastating damage in exchange for slow swinging and a huge to-hit penalty. Chainsaws can also be redesigned for combat (with your character apparently retooling them into chainswords, as they count as two-handed swords), making them faster and way easier to hit with.
• Challenge Run: There are various starting scenarios that make early game harder in exchange for more skill points. The best would be "Challenge: Really Bad Day", which only lets you choose from two professions: Tweaker (suffers from meth addiction) or Shower Victim (has only a wet towel and a bar of soap, and as the towel lacks storage space, they can't even hold that bar of soap until they find something better). Additionally, the starting building is on fire, surrounded by zombies, your character has the flu (penalty to all stats) and depression (cannot craft, also penalizes stats), and an infected bite wound. That last one is the nastiest, as it regularly causes nausea, so you cannot eat or drink most comestibles, and will kill you shortly if you cannot find some rare antibiotics. The best hope is to start in a house, immediately rush to the bathroom before it burns down, check if there are any antibiotics, and restart if there aren't.
• Charles Atlas Superpower:
  • Skills have more weight than raw stats for determining success, so any character can get good enough at a particular skill with enough grinding, with only Skill Rust there to stop you (and then there's the Memory Banks bionic). Throwing is probably the worst offender; at high enough levels, it's easy to one-shot turrets well beyond their firing range with a wooden spear.
  • Because the damage inflicted by melee weapons increases far more from skills and stats than the damage of ranged weapons, it's possible to get to the point that a single melee attack does more damage than a battle rifle or a shotgun.
• Chicken-and-Egg Paradox: In Dark Days Ahead, it is impossible to obtain metal without salvaging pre-Cataclysm metal items. No matter how deep you go underground, you'll never find iron ore. Bright Nights, by contrast, allows you to use a digging tool to get metal from bog iron and alluvial deposits, and also obtain various ores with a pickaxe.
• Chunky Salsa Rule: Significant overkill can pulp bodies instantly. This is good when killing zombies (as they won't be able to resurrect afterwards), but bad when hunting animals (as you'll get less meat from butchering them).
• Clickbait Gag: Playing with the Crazy Cataclysm official mod will occasionally spawn Shocker Zombies that spout "Shocking!" headlines, mostly related to the game's development on GitHub and more controversial changes approved there such as lead developer Kevin Granade's supposed preference for realism over fun or the nerfing of knife spears.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: Tobacco gives you a small mood bonus. Given how addictive it is, however, relying on cigarettes for mood management is eventually going to end with you spiraling into crippling withdrawal.
• Climbing Mechanics: You can climb onto a Z-level above you if you have furniture or walls nearby to brace against, or there's a convenient pipe to climb onto.
• Closed Circle: Lab scenarios were initially intended to be this, as the door to the outside is permanently locked. However, players found ways to breach the walls, so the scenario descriptions were revised to let you know that there is a way to escape.
• Close-Range Combatant: The Brawler trait forces you to be this, as you can't use any ranged weapons at all (except thrown ones).
• Cluster F-Bomb: If an NPC is annoyed, threatened, or aggressive towards you, you can expect them to start swearing a lot.
• Cobweb Jungle: Some parts of the forests are those, and are home to Giant Spiders.
• Coitus Uninterruptus: In Bright Nights, bullet vibrators are used by wearing them, which passively improves your mood at the cost of sleepiness. This means that it's entirely possible for you to do pretty much anything while being sexually pleasured, including combat, with no penalties.
• Combat Drugs:
  • Stimulants can be consumed to boost one's attributes and speed, and possibly also stamina recovery. While they don't really provide much of an effect in Dark Days Ahead, the Bright Nights fork retains the original stimulant bonuses, so it's possible to gain huge boosts just by taking a few cups of coffee or smoking a dose of meth.
  • Adrenaline syringes will grant you the same effect that the High Adrenaline trait gives, allowing you to move very fast with constantly regenerating stamina (and removal of the winded debuff) and huge physical attribute boosts, at the cost of suffering debiliating penalties afterwards.
• Concealment Equals Cover: Very much averted in Bright Nights — cover only reduces damage by a set amount, so if the projectile does more damage and/or armor-piercing than that, it'll penetrate through to hit the target. Fragile cover can also be destroyed by repeated shots, especially when shotguns or high-powered rifles are involved.
• Construction Is Awesome: A big part of the game's appeal is scavenging for tools and parts to build zombie-proof fortresses and Deathmobiles.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Averted. Stepping near lava pits will cause your temperature to rise, depending on how close you are. Getting too close will cause your skin to blister, and you'll take damage that can potentially turn fatal.
• Cooking Mechanics: The player can turn raw food into hundreds of different dishes, including four different kinds of pizza, a number of different dehydrated items, and multi-step recipes that combine other cooked items. Cooking can improve safety, flavor, or shelf life. There are also several different cooking books with focuses such as French cuisine, Italian cuisine, Japanese cuisine, and human flesh dishes.
• Cool Bike:
  • While rolling bases on wheels are a popular choice of vehicle, souped-up motorcycles are also common, being easier to navigate in cities. In addition, experimental builds add a version that can spawn with a beefier engine than the norm.
  • Players can easily piece together their own hauler bike made with full-sized car wheels instead of compact bike wheels, and make it a solar-powered support wagon complete with a Cargo Carrier and a mounted workshop so you can ride your welding kit up to a vehicle to repair it on the spot.
• Cool Car:
  • Raising your mechanics skill takes you beyond plain repairing your ride and allows you to turn it into a huge steel behemoth on wheels capable of speeds in excess of 150 mph, covered from top to bottom in spikes and blades, having several pairs of automated turrets and with more storage space you could ever use. Oh, and you can put a bed and a caravan-style kitchen inside.
  • Due to how vehicle mechanics work, you can easily take a simple sedan or coupe and add enough boat hull segments to its chassis to make it into a functional boat-car. Don't let the rivers bar your path, just drive over them.
• Cool, Clear Water: Averted. Boil or purify it or enjoy puking. That goes double for toilet water. The game will helpfully highlight unsafe water in your bottles with red text, and a recipe for making your own water purification tablets exists.
• Cool Plane: Planes are a feature in Bright Nights, with propellers and jet thrusters providing thrust while in the air and wings providing lift depending on how fast the vehicle's travelling. With Bright Nights also removing the hardcoded cap that limited max safe air speed to 225 MPH, it's possible to find an F-35 Lightning and rain Death from Above at very high speeds. Potentially too high a speed.
• Cool Tank: Present in Bright Nights and formerly part of a mod in experimental versions, complete with main guns comparable to the tank drone's main gun.
• Cosy Catastrophe: Almost everyone on Earth is dead or a zombie, but it's not too hard to find a safe spot the zombies can't reach, hide there, and spend your days reading books and eating junk food. And once you're ready to come out, you can use the knowledge from the books you read to grab a nice vehicle, fix it, and drive around the mostly-safe roads looking for stuff. With enough time and consistency you can also completely wipe out a town of any zombies or hostile creatures - and since unless you have the Wandering Horde option enabled (which is disabled by default), zombies don't respawn at all, leading to a perfectly safe town with loot you can live off of for in-game weeks or months on end without needing to risk your life, unless you're seeking some of the more exotic treasures or rarer recipes. If you chose instead to make a mobile home out of a truck and refitted it thoroughly, you can instead drive your new mobile home out to a safe location to set up a more permanent base.
• Crapsack World: Aside from the Zombie Apocalypse scenario, all the illegal drugs you can find laying around in the abandoned houses paint an unflattering picture of pre-apocalyptic life in this world.
• Creepy Doll: Talking dolls have a small chance of being creepy, which changes the messages when you activate them.
• Crew of One: While not usually noticeable, operating an APC or a large boat (with Bright Nights even having a Coast Guard cutter) might make you realize that your character can effectively act as a driver, commander, and gunner at the same time. Part of that comes down to turrets usually being usable from the controls (thanks to having motors built into them), part comes from being able to use cameras and mirrors to gain a 360-degree view, and part of that is that you don't tend to engage in the sort of combat that demands steering and shooting at the same time. If you use a simple turret mount, however, you'll have to constantly run between the controls and the turret, as the latter can't be fired from the vehicle's controls.
• Critical Encumbrance Failure: Averted. The Player Character's weight capacity is not a hard limit, but rather represents the break even point above which their Sprint Meter will deplete even at walking speed, in addition to incremental speed penalties. One can go over by quite a large amount as long as they don't need to go very far or are willing to stop and rest as needed.
• Critical Existence Failure:
  • Zigzagged; while you do have health points, there's a set amount of them for each body part (and losing all of your head or chest HP equals death), but the pain mechanic reduces movement speed as the character receives damage, eventually stunlocking you at high enough levels. However, once the pain is removed (or you never felt it in the first place), you can perform perfectly fine even if you have 1 HP in every body part.
  • Averted for weapons and armor, as they suffer from degraded performance as their condition decreases. An item that is close to breaking is likely going to be near-worthless in combat.
• Critical Hit: Critical hits happen pretty often, especially at higher skill levels, which increases your damage and allows using crit-only techniques if they're available, which are often very powerful. In Dark Days Ahead, some weapons have very large critical hit damage multipliers, like the Bow and Crossbow, that make them quickly destroy enemies whenever you hit a weakspot on them. Also in Dark Days Ahead, if you start dissecting enemies to learn their weaknesses, your ability to score critical hits increases as your knowledge of their biology improves.
• Critical Status Buff: The High Adrenaline trait (along with related mutations) will grant a buff to a survivor at low health, significantly improving stats (except Intelligence, which actually worsens), giving constant stamina regeneration and removal of the debuff for exhausting oneself, and a significant bonus to one's speed. All comes at the cost of eventually suffering a large debuff from the comedown.
• Crouch and Prone: You can crouch in both Dark Days Ahead and Bright Nights, which reduces one's chances of being hit and allows hiding behind low obstacles at the cost of being unable to see above them. Each version then has its nuances:
  • Dark Days Ahead allows laying prone as well, which is the stance you take when sleeping or knocked down. Going prone in water is dangerous because it can destroy items that are vulnerable to water, and also gets your entire body cold and wet.
  • Bright Nights increases your ranged accuracy when crouching, which also indirectly increases the damage you do.
• Crowbar Combatant: Players who find (or make) their own crowbar. And for good reason, as crowbars are not only good for bashing zombies, but they can also pry open locked doors, windows and manholes, making less noise than bashing them open.
• Cursed with Awesome:
  • The Blob. Once you die, it will take over your body and turn you into yet another mindless zombie, and there's a 25% chance of it making you go feral (and a 50% chance of it making you mildly crazy, so there's just a 25% chance of remaining normal). In the meantime, it wishes to keep its host body as strong as possible, so it grants a mild Healing Factor (hence why wounds heal faster than in real life, since the player is infected) and might add beneficial modifications to the body as a response to certain substances or radiation.
  • The Fast Metabolism negative trait increases your need for food, but gives you higher stamina (Dark Days Ahead) or resistance to cold (Bright Nights). As food is trivial to obtain even in wilderness, this is more of a benefit than a drawback.
  • Starting out with morbid obesity is a problem if you intend to immediately start scavenging and fighting, as your health will be in deep negatives. However, if you intend to start with crafting and Stat Grinding, it's more of a positive trait, as it gives you ample amounts of time before you have to search for food.
• Curtain Clothing: Taking down a curtain will give you a sheet, which can then be worn on the body. Given the high encumbrance and low warmth value, however, sheets are more useful as improvised blankets. Alternatively, you can turn them into improvised tunics or even a keffiyeh, which can serve as decent clothes until you find something better.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul:
  • Inverted by the Exodii, who augment themselves to an extreme point (up to becoming a Full-Conversion Cyborg), but are also the most pro-human extradimensional faction, with their augmentations giving them a measure of protection from the Blob and its mental effects, and behave like ordinary people, although they're willing to engage in brainwashing and enslavement of any potential liability/blob psycho. In contrast, those who rely on Bio-Augmentation via mutations will often suffer from alterations to their mind, with the most heavily mutated being barely human in mind.
  • Downplayed in the Dark Days Ahead version of the Magiclysm mod, as stored bionic energy will reduce your maximum mana. There are still no other negative effects from bionics, however.
  • One of the monsters you may encounter is a prototype cyborg, whose implants control their body, yet leave them in agony and conscious enough to talk. Fortunately, it's possible to disable the mind-controlling implant, in which case they can join your party.
  • Another monster is a broken cyborg, who is rotting alive and completely lost their human mind, to the point of counting as a robot rather than a cyborg, thus leaving them too far gone for a rescue. Despite their non-existent mind, however, they still keep screaming in agony and fear.
  • A newspaper article in Bright Nights is an editorial stating that bionics reduce your humanity, expressing worry about today's youth not having any understanding of what it's like to be a normal unaugmented human.
• Damage Over Time: Getting set on fire will do damage to the victim until they're put out. Bleeding on monsters is also modelled as a DoT effect, due to them using simplified damage mechanics.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: In-game example, the Vehicle Additions Pack changes the standard mounted weapons to be manual-only, using the ability to manually fire turrets introduced in the experimental builds. This regularly trips players up.
• Dance Battler: The Dancer profession starts off with a decent dancing skill, and some of the books for the Dodging skill are actually about dancing. For a proper martial art, meanwhile, there is the Capoeira style, which significantly buffs dodging and depends on moving around to use it properly.
• Deadly Distant Finale: Most epilogues for your companions after you die and refuse to continue will detail their death. Most will end up dying within a few years, some die within a few weeks of you, and only a rare few get to die of old age.
• Deadly Lunge: A few zombies (and animals) can pull this on the player, though a harmless "leap" ability to close the distance is far more common. In particular, there are zombie predators, an upgrade to the zombie hunter with a very nasty version that can knock the target over and inflict blood loss.
• Dead Weight: Fat zombies are common, being slower and clumsier than normal zombies, but also tougher and stronger.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts:
  • Most zombies do little damage individually (even hulks will still need an average of 10-15 regular punches to kill a starting character), but you encounter many of them very often. Dying to zombies typically involves either being incapacitated by pain and then piled up on, or being whittled down over several days as damage accumulates.
  • The Lethal Zombies mod for Bright Nights gives most low-level zombies 1-3 points of damage with high armor penetration, linked to their regular attacks (which have also been buffed), alongside a supply of rocks that do 2 points of damage with similarly high armor penetration. Thus, even if you have armor that allows you to shrug off a zombie's base melee damage, you can still slowly die as you get hundreds of rocks thrown at you while fighting a horde.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: Firing at an NPC carrying grenades with a fully automatic weapon may occasionally cause them to explode when killed, as the remaining bullets hit their grenades and cause them to trigger prematurely.
• Deus Ax Machina: While you generally find fire axes where expected (at fire stations or from firefighter zombies), the amount of feral axemen with fire axes is high enough that you'd wonder where they're getting their weapons from.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • When trying to interact with furniture and there is an object in the way, the game will say "There is an <item> in the way!". If you attempt to close a door while standing in the frame, you get "There is a buffoon in the way!".
  • If you attempt to deploy a furniture item like a brazier on the spot you're standing in, you get the message "You attempt to become one with the furniture. It doesn't work."
  • If you attempt to do the same with a trap, the message you receive is "Yeah. Place the [trap name] at your feet. Real damn smart move."
  • Similarly, if you attempt to pry the square you are standing in with a crowbar, it results in the message "You attempt to pry open your wallet, but alas. You are too miserly."
  • Everything, no matter how inconsequential, can be used for something. Take the deputy badge, for example. If you're wearing one and there's an eyebot in the area, it will recognise you as a police officer and will not summon a police/riot control robot.
  • Trying to take a photo of a hallucination will give you a message stating that you can't see anything through the camera.
  • Folding a vehicle while riding it will tell you that "As the pitiless metal bars close on your nether regions, you reconsider trying to fold the [vehicle name] while riding it."
• Devoured by the Horde: A common way for a survivor to die is to get grabbed and piled on by zombies. Dark Days Ahead, in particular, has crowd crush mechanics, wherein getting grabbed by multiple zombies makes you suffer from suffocation.
• Die, Chair, Die!: Nearly every object can be destroyed with sufficient strength and/or weapons, and zombies will often attack obstacles in their way.
• Diegetic Interface: You need to have a watch in your inventory in order to see the current time. Otherwise, you'll only be able to see the current position of the sun/moon and have to measure the time you choose to wait and pass by in heartbeats rather than seconds/minutes/hours.
• Disability Superpower: Certain "bad" mutations are not necessarily bad. Some of them can actually mutate further into useful ones. For example, you might become carnivore and able to eat only flesh; further mutation might allow you to eat tainted flesh (for example, zombie flesh).
• Disaster Scavengers: Scavenging is extremely encouraged, as crafting items can take an unreasonably long time (and a lot of skills and tools), and some useful items can only be procured by scavenging them.
• Disposable Pilot: Possibly inverted in the Helicopter Crash scenario if you start as a pilot - you barely survive the crash, but none of your passengers do.
• Disproportionate Retribution: A random NPC backstory is that of a prisoner who did time for assault. Judging by what they imply, they beat somebody up for talking during a movie.
• Dodge the Bullet: In Bright Nights, the Uncanny Dodge bionic allows you to dodge any ranged attack, so long as you have the power for it. It's entirely possible to get shot at by a turret for 10 turns and never get hit.
• Does Not Drive: The Wayfarer trait makes it impossible for you to operate a vehicle at all, even wheelchairs and bicycles. Alternatively, you can start without any driving skill or related proficiency, in which case it's possible to learn driving through experience.
• Doesn't Like Guns:
  • The Gun Shy trait in Bright Nights forbids using firearms, but does not ban any other ranged weapon.
  • The Brawler trait is a broader variant of the trope that prevents you from using any ranged weapons.
• Dog Food Diet: Cat and dog food can be eaten by survivors, though it tastes bad. However, mutants who cross the lupine or feline threshold will enjoy appropriate types of pet food.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: One random NPC backstory has them talk about how, before the end of the world, they dreamed for three weeks straight about fighting giant spiders with a stick in a forest (something that can easily happen in actual gameplay), then had a dream about their boss dying and coming back from the dead, with something similar happening tomorrow, except to the husband of that boss. The dreams might be a coincidence, but given that the Cataclysm is a supernatural event, they may have actually been predicting the Cataclysm.
• Driver Faces Passenger: You can have conversations with NPCs while driving, and even trade with them. However, if you try to ask them for advice, they will tell you to focus on the road.
• Drunken Master: One of the advantages boosts your melee skills whenever you're intoxicated.
• Dungeon Crawling: Labs, strange temples, and mines offer this, if you're in the mood for a more traditional roguelike experience.
• Dracolich: A boss in one of the experimental version's official mods. Which makes it the only one of the mod's bosses capable of getting back up after you kill it.
• Drugs Are Bad: Averted with pot— smoking a joint is good for morale, with only mild drawbacks. Fully enforced with all other recreational drugs, though. If you manage to get hooked on booze or cocaine, the withdrawal penalties will spank you hard. On the other hand, if you have a safe place and enough food, it's safer to use the hardest drugs for their boosts as the easiest and most reliable way to get rid of the withdrawal syndrome is to ride it out.
• Drugs Are Good: As Bright Nights deliberately goes with a less-realistic depiction of drugs, stimulants are an extremely good way to buff your attributes and speed, with some granting improved stamina regeneration. With the Synaptic Regeneration System CBM, it's entirely possible to go without sleep by subsisting on meth.
• Duct Tape for Everything: Other than replacing nails, adhesives or soldering in many, many recipes, you can use duct tape to reinforce windows, reload the miscallenous repair kit, and fix any part of your cars: engine, fuel tanks, turrets, frames. Truly the most versatile item in the game.
• Due to the Dead:
  • When it comes to Grave Robbing, most survivors will suffer a morale penalty, with Spiritual ones suffering more. Psychopaths will actually gain morale, however.
  • Spiritual survivors can gain a massive morale bonus by burying a dead human (including zombies). If you have a cutting tool, you can also leave an inscription on the grave.
  • For cannibalism, normal Spiritual survivors will feel like they've sinned greatly. Meanwhile, if they're okay with cannibalism, being Spiritual will increase the bonus, with psychopaths and sapiovores (the latter having a predatory mindset and not counting themselves as human) even getting a bonus for violating taboos and devouring the person's spirit.
• Early Game Hell: Depending on your starting scenario, profession, chosen disadvantages, and enemy spawns, the first few days of the Cataclysm can be the deadliest part of the game. Exaggerated by the "Really Bad Day" scenario, which grants you a whopping 10 points for character creation but spawns you in a burning building surrounded by enemies while depressed, drunk, sick with the flu, and nursing an infected wound.
• Earth Drift: Inverted in Dark Days Ahead, with it going from a near-future setting with widespread use of bionics and robots (including military ones), as well as experimental use of energy weapons, to a more grounded Alternate History set in the present day, with the sci-fi tech being severely downplayed, and bionics in particular being an extradimensional technology that is severely restricted in acquisition. The Bright Nights fork, in fact, was formed partly out of response to this, and keeps the previous setting.
• Eats Babies: You can find Mutated Fetuses. And you can also eat them if you want to. This is gross enough to give you a massive morale penalty, in addition to the penalty for eating human flesh (unless you have the cannibal trait), and will also cause you to mutate.
• Eldritch Abomination: Word of God reveals that XE-037 (The Blob) is one of these; a dispersed extradimensional intelligence that consumes entire universes over the course of millions of years.
• Elemental Crafting: Bright Nights has real-life materials (primarily wood and steel) as the middle-of-the-road materials, but advanced crafting uses superalloy primarily for the production of armor (personal or vehicular) with lower encumbrance and/or higher protection value, while carbon fiber is primarily used to make lightweight bladed weapons (which are faster to swing as the result) and vehicular parts.
• Elite Mook:
  • The Zombie Necromancer and Zombie Master. The Zombie Necromancer stays back and revives any unbutchered zombie corpse in the area. The Zombie Master "promotes" any normal zombie into a much nastier type.
  • Feral Militia in Bright Nights wield 5.56 assault rifles, firing them at full-auto with decent accuracy. If you're unlucky, a single burst can kill you on the spot.
  • NPCs obey the same rules as you, which means that they do a lot of damage, dodge frequently, and block your melee attacks. If they have a gun, they also have a lot of ammo, fire quickly and frequently (especially with a full-auto weapon), and don't give you any warning when aiming at you.
• Elite Zombie: Many types, including a few that don't quite fall into any category:
  • Acid Zombies — Zombies that have developed acidic body fluids. They will bleed acid when damaged, and some stronger variants can spit globs of acid with deceptively dangerous amounts of force. When pulped, acid will splatter all over the place. Canny players can use a Blood Drawing Kit to extract their acids to make their own acid grenades.
  • Brutes— The aptly-named zombie brute and the dreaded zombie hulk. These both have tons of variants, like the shocker brute and the Kevlar hulk, or the Wrestler Zombie.
  • Armored Zombies— Zombie cops, SWAT zombies, and zombie soldiers (and their variants), which wear synthetic armors. There's also scarred zombies and skeletal zombies, which have grown their own organic armor, and Kevlar zombies, which have grown Kevlar hides (that players can harvest for filthy Kevlar patches, ballistic Kevlar panels, and Kevlar sheets via butchering their corpses). Finally, there's the armored zombie, which is a zombie in a combat exoskeleton, and is invulnerable to all but the strongest armor-piercing shots.
  • Hazmat Zombies— The hazmat zombie. It doesn't explode, but drops items like Geiger counters and iodine pills, and sometimes it is possible to recover, clean, repair, and use their old hazmat suits.
  • Scientist Zombies — Only found in labs, these zombies have deceptively good vision, and are often likely to carry chemicals or some of their old electronic equipment.
  • Ferals/Hunters/Stalkers— The zombie runner, zombie hunter and zombie predator.
  • Undead Animals— Bears, moose, cougars, wolves, deer, dogs and pigs all have zombie counterparts.
  • Screamers— Shrieker zombies scream, drawing the attention of any nearby zombies. Survivor zombies can also do this, and an upgraded version can scream loud enough to cause disorientation.
  • Scorched — Zombies that have poor vision range, but will explode violently in a large cloud of choking smoke when they die.
  • Vomit Zombies— The Boomer and Spitter zombies, and their upgraded huge boomer and corrosive zombie forms.
  • Boomers— The bloated zombie explodes into a cloud of toxic gas if it gets too close or when it dies. Zombie burners were soldiers with flamethrowers in life, and when re-killed there's a chance that their napalm tanks explode. There's also variants that produce clouds of tear gas or relaxation gas, and the rare gasoline zombie, which goes off like a Molotov.
  • Shady Zombies — Zombies that are invisible at a distance in low light levels, they become visible when you shine a bright light at them and can also be seen with an infrared visor. Their evolved variants take on the physical power of Stalker-class zombies.
  • Smart Zombies— Zombie bio-operators still know how to use CQC. Ferals can open doors and use weapons (even guns in Bright Nights). In Bright Nights, zombie scientists and zombie grenadiers retain enough intelligence to use manhacks and explosives, and to avoid hazards like traps and fires that other zombies would blindly walk into.
  • Child Zombies— A reasonably common early-game opponent. Killing them gives you a morale debuff. Several variants of this zombie, that cross into other zombie types, exist: Ferals (sproglodyte), Boomers (snotgobbler), and Screamers (shriekling, howling waif).
  • Test Subject/"Enhanced" Zombies— The zombie bio-operator (and the even tougher elite variety) are stronger versions that, while not able to attack at range, can perform rudimentary martial arts techniques if you let them get too close.
  • Zappers — Zombies that are visible even in the dark due to their electrical powers. The more advanced shocker zombie and shocker brute are wreathed in electricity and can shoot it quite some distance. The strongest Incandescent Husks generate EMP shockwaves around them that can break electronic equipment, and are best engaged from a distance to avoid getting fried by them passively.
  • Other— The zombie hollow is a boneless-looking zombie that's hinted to be the blob wearing the skin as a suit. The slavering biter's teeth have distorted its mouth, and allows it to perform a nasty bite. The smoker zombie constantly spews a cloud of thick smoke around itself (though it lacks its Left 4 Dead counterpart's snaring tongue). Grabber and grappler zombies can catch you and hold you down or drag you off. Finally, the zombie necromancer and master have anomalous abilities no other zombie has.
  • All zombies have properties from the Regenerators and Mutating Zombies categories. If you defeat a zombie but don't destroy the body, it will eventually heal and get back up. Most zombies have "evolved" variants, and as time passes the game will start spawning evolved zombies instead of basic types to represent zombies mutating over time.
• Emergency Weapon:
  • Your fists function as this in Dark Days Ahead if you don't mutate claws, as they do little damage, but are fast and can be your last resort if you get disarmed and have no time to pull out a weapon. Gun-wielding surviors can get more use out of them, especially with the Taekwondo style, as Pistol-Whipping may sometimes be inferior to unarmed combat.
  • Many gun-wielding professions tend to start with some kind of a club or knife on their person, giving them an option for when using a firearm is wasteful or too noisy.
  • Disarmed ferals will still fight unarmed. As they only do 1-6 points of damage with a hit, however, it's mostly a nuisance.
• Emotion Suppression: The Numb mutation, which reduces the impact of anything on your morale by 75%. In fact, it actually does so by cannibalizing the parts of the brain that are responsible for personality, although it's still possible to remove the mutation.
• Empowered Badass Normal: With mutations and bionics taking a fair bit of effort to acquire, most survivors will already be great fighters by the time they get them.
• Energy Bow: The Arcana mod has Wraithslayer crossbows, which are solid, but have an Invisible Bowstring and fire essence-powered bright green bolts that stun and potentially blind whoever they hit.
• Endless Winter: You can set things up so that it's always a certain season. Setting winter as the eternal season will make it easy to scrounge for food in urban locations because spoilage a non-issue (since it's always frozen and thus fresh), but makes farming and foraging difficult (most crops don't grow in winter), and forces you to wear encumbering clothes in order to avoid freezing to death.
• Event Title: The End of the World as We Know It is referred to as the Cataclysm.
• Everybody Smokes: Bright Nights gives zombies a high chance to drop something smokable, whether it's tobacco, electronic cigarettes, weed, meth, or crack. In fact, the way the itemgroup table (which determines item generation) is set up, it implies that 40-50% of adult Americans are smokers.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: The few that work, anyway: you might want to check the damage on that gasoline tank before ramming into something.
• Everything Breaks:
  • Both you and the monsters can break through or burn down the buildings in this game with the proper armament.
  • Your clothes get damaged as zombies wail on you. Your shoes and pretty much everything else can only be destroyed by acid. Most glass items will break if you hit a zombie with them. You can find items on zombies that are invariably in tatters.
  • Acid rain is very bad for your stuff. Don't leave it in the open. Eventually acid rain was disabled, and acid damaging items was removed later on as well.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: As usual for a roguelike, Cataclysm plays this trope to the hilt.
• Everything Is 3D-Printed in the Future: A 3D printer (along with the advanced version, which can transform plastic into carbon fiber) is available in Bright Nights, capable of crafting from either plastic or weapon-grade carbon fiber, the latter of which can be used to make various items that are lighter than the steel equivalents - armor, guns, bladed weapons, gun magazines, vehicular parts, and more. 3D printing also uses your Computers skill (since you're programming it) and is faster than standard crafting.
• Exotic Weapon Supremacy: Several of the more unusual weapons can be quite effective. However, most of them are Awesome, but Impractical if you lack a martial arts style that works with them, and the weapon skills to use them effectively.
• Explosive Stupidity: There are many, many ways to suffer Yet Another Stupid Death via explosives:
  • The most common by far are the multiple ways to whiff a grenade throw. Throwing with low skill level risks catching an obstacle and causing it to fall short; a common piece of advice by experienced players is to never throw a grenade while standing next to a wall, lest it decide to take a 90-degree turn, hit the wall, and land at your feet. Grenades also don't have a prompt when activated, so an incorrect input in the activate menu can lead to an armed grenade going off in your inventory without you realizing it. And if you activate it in your inventory instead of in your hand, you'll spend a turn or so wielding it when you go to throw it, which also may lead to it going off prematurely.
  • Explosive ammo such as grenade launchers do not have any sort of minimum arming distance like they do in real life, and don't show any indication of blast radius in the aiming UI. Bonus points for switching to underbarrel launchers counting as a separate firemode. If you're used to swapping between semi and full-auto on a rifle then decide to slap an M203 on it, it's easy to overlook that you're about to point-blank an enemy with a grenade and blow yourself up with it.
  • As frequently memed about, NPCs used to sometimes just hand you an armed explosive if asked for a handout while accepting a quest. Even without this classic bug, NPCs are not very competent with explosives, and have a bad habit sometimes of tossing a grenade at someone right next to them. If the explosive is weak enough like a pipe bomb and the player is quick enough, it's possible to outmanuever a hostile NPC so they end up being the only victim of their explosive.
  • More complex explosives like C4 of course usually prevent the issue of uncontrolably blowing up in your inventory due to a mislick since they give you a text prompt to set the timer, which can be canceled out of. But then it's easy to misjudge the amount of time you have to get clear, especially when using mininukes.
  • Aerial bombs in Bright Nights. Being designed specifically to work with droppers, once armed they go off as soon as they land. But due to how bomb bays are coded, the player still has the option of hefting them into their arms to activate them manually. The item's description and the activation message both helpfully point out to the player that if they drop the bomb onto the floor while it's in this state they'll end up blowing themselves to bits. Thankfully, unlike all other explosives in the game, aerial bombs don't have any countdown and can be safely deactivated while in this state, and weighing 200 pounds means you pretty much have to be trying to kill yourself to blow up from one armed manually. More common is the risk of blowing yourself up by dropping them while flying too close to the ground. While the item description also tells you how much height you need to be safe, pairing fast aircraft with a low-flying bombing run can lead to dropping ordinance meant to land at street level on a building's roof and clipping yourself in the blast.
• Expy: Several monsters are ripped from other media, the more uncommon zombies reference Left 4 Dead, and the way zombie animals are presented recalls the T-Virus.
• Experienced Protagonist:
  • Several of the professions in Dark Days Ahead start with skills in the 6-8 range, possibly multiple ones, such as Navy SEAL ones or the Black Belt. Some backgrounds can also be taken at the "Master" level, giving you equally high skill levels.
  • A few scenarios start quite a while after the Cataclysm. Thus, a special set of professions is given, representing experienced survivors with better gear and skills than most professions.
• Extreme Omnivore: Once your food runs out, you have to switch to butchering and preparing your own meat from corpses. Zombie meat is pretty much a last ditch move until you learn how to cure it, but rat, ant, and slug meat are all fair game. Currently, the game doesn't consider where the meat came from, as long as it's not from a zombie, nether creature such as a Mi-Go or from mutants (such as gigantified animals) so your character can eat cooked slug meat and enjoy it. Even human meat is viable as a source of food (except for babies), so long as you don't mind feeling horrible for the rest of the day.
• Eye Scream:
  • Be careful around that Auto-Doc or else you might get a syringe of stem cell treatment straight to the eye.
  • Enemies will also sometimes attack your eyes, which has a chance of blinding you temporarily.
  • Some monsters in Dark Days Ahead can be struck in the eyes, which bypasses armor and has a chance to blind them.
• Failed Attempt at Drama: If an NPC tries to patch themselves up, it might be preceded by them trying to say that they ain't got time to bleed, only to stop when they realize that there's quite a lot of blood coming out of their wounds.
• Fake Ultimate Mook: While exploring basements, you might come across an Ancient Red Dragon that activates Safe Mode when seen and has its name written in dark red (a trait reserved for the most dangerous of monsters). It's actually a fake made out of paper that never moves or attacks and dies in one hit.
• Fallout Shelter Fail:
  • The evac shelters, which were supposedly meant to be used to hold out in an emergency situation (like a natural disaster or a war) until help arrives, were built cheaply due to being created for the sole purpose of alleviating public concerns about emergency preparedness. Thus, they're stocked with extremely limited supplies (a lot for one person, but not enough for a big group of people), and some of them suffered from vandalism and theft. Also, a few random NPCs mention being forced to run away from their shelters when they were attacked by monsters.
  • All the FEMA shelters you encounter have been overtaken by zombies. As some random NPCs may tell you, this is because camps were overflowing with people and none of the soldiers and emergency workers were ready to deal with that. In addition, nobody knew that zombies can be permanently put down by pulping them, with the military instead trying to bury them underground right next to the FEMA camps, which, as seen in-game, didn't work, as the mass graves are all open, implying that the zombies simply dug through their graves.
• Famed in Story: Bright Nights has the Elite Operator, who participated in missions that became the subject of War Movies.
• Fantastic Plastic: Bright Nights has carbon fiber filament, made out of plastic or pitch with the help of an advanced 3D printer. It has the same strength as steel while being noticeably lighter, making it extremely useful in the production of bladed weapons, guns, plate armor, shields, and vehicle parts.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Mutants are rather disliked, with most of them being considered ugly and thus decreasing your persuasive abilities, and the arsonist at the Refugee Center facing bigotry just because she has cat ears. It's somewhat more justified than most examples of the trope, however, as mutants look similar to some of the monsters that can be found in the wild (all of them being hostile to survivors), and mutations involve the manipulation of the Blob inside one's body, and can alter one's personality to the point of Transhuman Treachery.
  • The Exodii, in particular, despise mutants to the point of fanaticism.
  • Downplayed with the Keepers and their patron god in Arcana mod, in Bright Nights. They're the most anti-mutant of the arcanist factions, but their rationale is that mutations (the majority of which are blob-based) risk dependency on the otherworldly influences they're trying to seal off from their world. Accordingly, obtaining the Paragon of The Veil threshold from the restored ritual blade not only conflicts with gaining any regular mutation threshold, but goes one step further and renders you immune to all mutagen outright.
• Fashion Disaster: The Fashion Deficient trait in Bright Nights makes you not care about what you wear, and thus removes the morale bonus for wearing fancy items. Ironically, though, since the morale bonus works on Rainbow Pimp Gear logic (as the game doesn't check for whether your outfit makes sense), your loadout will actually be a lot more sensible.
• Fatigue Mechanic: There are two separate mechanics in CDDA that fall under this trope. First is the Player Character's general state of wakefulness, which imparts stat penalties if they are deprived of sleep for too long. Second is their anaerobic endurance, which is impacted by spending time on laborious tasks (such as construction and crafting large items) and makes further work increasingly difficult without sufficient periods of rest. This is separate from the player's aerobic endurance, which is also tracked but functions more like a conventional Sprint Meter.
• Fear-Induced Idiocy: Panicked persons, terrified parents/gawky guardians, and (in the Bright Nights mod for civilians) confused children just run around screaming, and are liable to attract a horde of zombies towards you with the noise they make. If you have the Psychopath/Uncaring trait, it's best to put them down.
• Fearless Undead: As is typical for the genre, the zombies will just mindlessly charge at you with no regard for danger. This even applies to ferals, who will evade dangers, but have their minds so warped by bloodlust that they'll never retreat.
• Feel No Pain: The Deadened mutation of the Medical tree makes you completely immune to pain, even allowing you to receive surgery without anesthesia.
• Feral Villain: The fittingly named Feral Humans and their variants (such as Deranged Axemen) are Always Chaotic Evil humans that act a bit smarter than the average zombie and generally using some form of weapon like pipes, spears, axes, machetes, etc - Zombies also explicitly ignore them and treat them as their own, and it's not uncommon to find Ferals amongst Zombie hordes.
• Fictional Disability: Multiple ones exist, all triggered by the Cataclysm:
  • Kaluptic Psychosis (the name being a bastardization of Kalupto, one half of the greek word for apocalypse) represents the hollywood depiction of schizophrenia, and can be treated with antipsychotic medication. Among static NPCs, Dino Dave (who wears a dinosaur suit and is obsessed with carboard boxes) suffers from this condition
  • The Irreparable trait will cause you to lose your natural ability to heal, even with the best mundane healthcare in the world. The only way to heal, as such, is to use fantastical means to heal - bionics, mutations, superscience drugs, or magic (if using an appropriate mod)
  • Genetic Downward Spiral means that your DNA is damaged beyond repair, causing you to gain mutations with time, always receive bad mutations regardless of cause, and suffer more and more genetic instability with time. The only way to treat it is to consume purifier to get rid of mutations, but this won't cure the underlying cause.
• Fiction as Cover-Up: One newspaper article details the story of a Japanese mi-go autopsy video that was leaked into the internet. One way in which the video is dismissed as fake is by pointing out the unusual resemblance of the creature to the writings of H. P. Lovecraft (though he probably wasn't part of any cover-ups). It makes it all the more chilling when you actually find the mi-go out in the world, even if they differ in some ways from what Lovecraft wrote about them.
• Fight Dancing: The Dodging skill is normally meant for combat, but dancing with Draco Dune at the Refugee Center depends on your effective level of Dodging. One implication of this is that you can improve your performance by choosing a martial art that makes you better at dodging.
• Fisher Kingdom: One of the rural houses you can find will transport you into an alternative version of itself made entirely out of black glass. It gives you less than an hour to solve a puzzle and escape before you join the nearby glass statues.
• Flipping the Table: Bright Nights allows you to flip tables and benches for use as barricades and/or cover. The description of the wooden table notes that you could also flip it just because you're angry.
• Food Pills: The Aftershock mod has Nutriment pills, with a single pill being able to fulfill an inactive person's calorie needs. However, it tastes like chalk, and thus gives you a noticeable morale penalty.
• Forced Transformation: Yuggs shoot at you with darts that forcibly mutate you. In Bright Nights, they irradiate you instead, but the intent is that this slowly makes you mutate, and the initial concept was for it to inject you with mutagenic toxins instead, which was dropped due to technical limitations.
• Fragile Speedster: The Avian mutation branch. You can hardly take a hit, but you can outrun anything and nothing can escape your detection.
• From Bad to Worse: Having 99% of the population zombified or dead by the time the game starts isn't good, but what you find happening to the world as you advance through the game doesn't paint a pretty picture of the biosphere's fate.
• Furniture Blockade: Your starting location will often have furniture moved by you (before the game starts) to block off windows and doors. Some other locations, such as boarded-up houses, will also be barricaded with furniture. You can also do this in gameplay by moving furniture around.
• Furry Reminder: Mutants that cross the appropriate threshold will enjoy food meant for the animal that the threshold emulates, with cattle and birds being able to eat cattle fodder and bird food (normally inedible to humans), respectively, while lupines and felines will be able to gain morale from dog and cat food (normally disgusting to humans), respectively.
• Game-Breaking Bug: Having a lot of items nearby, especially ones that don't rely on charges and ammo to represent large quantities, will cause the game to lag severely, and will also eventually cause you to hit the hard limit on how many items can be stored in a single container (with loose items stored on a tile counting as a separate container). This is particularly bad in Dark Days Ahead due to charges being slowly removed without properly doing optimization first, and the fact that certain constructions demand huge amounts of materials (basecamp upgrades, for instance, may demand over 400 thousand units of gravel).
• Game Mod: In addition to community mods, the game has a format for enabling mods when generating a world, and comes with several popular mods already ready to use, especially in the experimental builds. These range from new monsters (Animatronic Monsters, DinoMod) to vehicle additions (Boats, Vehicle Additions Pack) and item additions (Mythological Replicas, More Survival Tools), in addition to various mods that remove certain content or change other things.
  • Magiclysm (and its Bright Nights counterpart, Magical Nights) is a major content mod that not only adds bonafide spellcasting, but also adds a number of items, enemies, and unique locations into the gameworld, such as the Magic Academy.
  • Mind Over Matter is a popular mod that adds whole skill trees and some additional content revolving around psychic powers. Some of this content is also tied into the main game's lore through the XEDRA group.
  • XEDRA Evolved has its own magic and psychic powers, and adds a lot more enemies and map content, also tied to the XEDRA group.
  • Also popular are the many tilesets for the graphical version, and you can add your own if you know how to edit the graphic sets and JSON files.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Normally, digging up graves and eating human flesh without appropriate traits (such as Psychopath/Uncaring) will lead to messages noting how disgusted you are with it. If you have the Numb mutation, which reduces the morale impacts of anything that affects your mood, the text will be significantly toned down, with human flesh being noted as simply being unpalatable, while digging graves will just have you hope that you'll find something worthy.
• Game Within a Game: By using a device capable of playing games (such as a smartphone, portable game system, or a computer), you can play a few simple games — Sokoban, Snake, Minesweeper, Robot Finds Kitten, and Lights On! (A Tile-Flipping Puzzle based on Lights Out).
• Gasoline Lasts Forever: Played straight. Gasoline, diesel, and homemade biodiesel don't have a shelf-life.
• Gatling Good: The Minigun can only be fired when mounted (including on terrain and furniture) and fires incredibly quickly, making it overkill in most situations, but if you want to kill a horde of zombies incredibly fast, it's the right weapon for the job. Players can also craft the 12-gauge Gatling Shotgun, which takes 20-shell ammo belts and is hand-cranked. Bright Nights adds two more on completely different ends of the spectrum: The historical Gatling gun with a modest rate of fire, and a 25mm GAU-22 mainly used on the F-35 Lightning.
• Genre Shift:
  • Starts as your standard Zombie Apocalypse, but takes a gradual turn into Lovecraft Lite when you start encountering more advanced monsters like Mi-Gos and Shoggoths. More pronounced when using one of the various magic-themed mods, in particular with Arcana (present in Bright Nights, a third-party mod in Dark Days Ahead) which leans much harder on dark fantasy and eldritch elements lurking in the fringes of society just waiting to be dug up by a careless survivor.
  • The Innawoods mod changes the game into a more traditional survival game by removing nearly every building, with much greater emphasis on surviving the environment, building a static base, and making your own gear. Alongside that, combat, zombies, vehicles, and transhumanism become far less emphasized.
  • The Isolation Protocol mod for Dark Days Ahead shifts the game towards the classic roguelike system of Dungeon Crawling, with you going through endless levels of a fractal facility. It also uses a few staples of roguelikes, such as a system of deities and piety (the god specifically being an AI named Balthazar), and only having a limited amount of time on a level before you're hounded with bad consequences.
• Genre Throwback: The Isolation Protocol mod for Dark Days Ahead throws away many Survival Sandbox conventions in favor of shifting the game into a old-school roguelike about Dungeon Crawling. Thus, it has such elements as descending down the same dungeon that you can never leave, slowly Regenerating Health (though only out of combat, rather than always), boss fights, piety and prayer system (though you have to unlock it first), a timer on how long you can stay in one place before monsters start spawning near you (classic roguelikes use hunger for the same purpose), professions acting like classes with unique traits and equipment, and so on.
• Genuine Human Hide: In Bright Nights, human skin can be turned into leather patches.
• Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul:
  • As you slowly turn to glass at the Vitrified Farm, your mind is being altered so that you're happy about this. This even raises your Morale, with each stage making this more and more pronounced.
  • Reaching the Mycus threshold will give you an extremely high Morale bonus, as you feel happy about giving up your individuality to the Hive Mind.
• Giant Spider: One of the many categories of enemies. Along with centipedes, wasps, bees, slugs, ants, and mosquitoes.
• Glass Cannon:
  • Compared to the zombies, feral humans can do significantly more damage than comparable tiers of zombies, especially if they're wielding guns or axes. Fortunately for the player, they're vulnerable to stunning attacks, can be disarmed (leaving them effectively harmless), don't have impressive armor, and only have 84 hit points, making them easy to shut down and kill if you're halfway decent in combat.
• Go Mad from the Apocalypse: The Cataclysm being extremely devastating, insane people are plentiful:
  • In the backstory, the Blob infection has caused many people to go insane, as they stopped caring about self-preservation and/or became extremely aggressive. Luckier victims, however, manage to recover from that, though they still remember what they did.
  • The civilians seen in the first days of the game's start are either frozen in shock, running around in panic, or obsessed with fighting the monsters.
  • Feral humans have lost some of their intelligence, and permanently have their mind stuck on mindless aggression against non-zombies. The zombies ignore them in turn.
  • The player can also get in on the action, as they can start with the Kaluptic Psychosis, Cannibal, and/or Psychopath/Uncaring traits. Over the course of the game, mutations can also cause them to suffer from severe mental instability or degrade into an animalistic predator.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: Brawling is usually weaker than proper styles, due to being slow to learn and having lackluster techniques, but it benefits from lacking any weakness, being simple to use (as there's no special strategy for it), and being usable with literally anything.
• The Goomba:
  • Basic zombies do little damage, die easily, can be easily outwalked, and don't have any armor, all of which makes it trivial for an untrained and badly armed survivor to easily beat one to death. The main issue comes from the fact that there are many of them.
  • Crawler zombies are even weaker, as they have awful melee skill, are incredibly slow, and can barely see anything around them. The only way you'd lose to one is if you're badly impaired.
• Golden Ending: The ending of Bright Nights where you use a mininuke to close the dimensional portal. This avoids your death, while still ensuring that humanity will be able to survive the Cataclysm.
• Golf Clubbing: Golf clubs can be wielded as weapons, although they make for rather weak weapons due to their mediocre damage and propensity for breaking.
• Government Agency of Fiction: XEDRA, the Xenophysical Energy Defense Research Agency, formed one-and-a-half years prior to the Cataclysm to research transdimensional phenomena including portals and the Blob. Researchers working for the agency were publicly passed off as DARPA scientists or similar.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: The description for the Flammenschwert^note a two-handed sword with a gasoline douser is entirely in German.
• Gratuitous Katana: Bright Nights has the Mall Ninja, for whom it's an In-Universe example, as they possess a genuine katana despite the fact that they're otherwise equipped akin to a soldier. It's clearly meant to be a jab at wannabe soldiers and survivalists who inevitably combine a sword (usually a katana) with their military gear, but it actually makes for a great melee weapon.
• Great Bow: Greatbows are 198cm long and are useless without extremely high strength, even if you have bow proficiencies to make them easier to draw. If you are strong enough, though, you can do a lot of damage with one.
• Grenade Hot Potato: If an NPC throws a grenade at you, it's possible to pick it up and throw it back, though it's easy to accidentally blow yourself up instead.
• Grenade Tag: In earlier versions, a bug occasionally caused NPCs to give you an active explosive. Fortunately, later versions fixed this bug.
• Groin Attack: If you try to fold a vehicle while riding it, the game will tell you that you've stopped after the metal bars have closed on your groin.
• Guide Dang It!: How to win Bright Nights — you have to find a central lab within a region stretching from (0'0, 0'0) to (0'179, 0'179), which has one tile represented by a red L. Then, you have to descend down there, find the dimensional portal, and either sacrifice yourself by closing it from the other side, or use a mininuke to safely close it. Your only hint comes from the "Military Saboteur" profession, which states that your task is to close a portal experiment with a mininuke, but doesn't say where the relevant lab is or how you can identify it.
• Guilt-Based Gaming: Smoking meth or crack near an NPC will almost always make them shame you for taking hard drugs.
• Gun Accessories: A good amount of them, with guns having varying amounts of accessory slots, for your inner tacticool commando. There are even modern parts mount kits that can be applied permanently to older weapons to enable them to take modern gun parts, like making a MP40 submachine gun take modern sight accessories via a sight mount adaptor, or overhauling a M1 Garand with a modern stock conversion kit, or even partially rebuilding a Flintlock Musket with modernized ergo grips, a proper stock, a side rail laser sight, an underbarrel grenade launcher, and bleeding-edge holographic sights. Weapons that have been modified tend to have a +X number modifier representing the number of parts you've added to them, and the weapon info tab will show what accessories have been installed. Even bows, crossbows, and slingshots can be modified with things like arrow rests and bowstring stabilizers. On the other side of the scale, some weapons have such integrated components using mod slots that you can't replace them, like a Keltec shotgun's integrated second magazine.
• Guns Do Not Work That Way:
  • Bright Nights has the NTSR rifle, which is an M4A1 that has been modified (in a way that can be done with simple tools and a few bits of metal) to chamber 5.56x45mm, 6.8x51mm, 7.62x51mm, .300 Blackout, and .30-06, all without having to swap anything other than the magazine. Realistically, a gun capable of doing so would need to be made from scratch, and it's unlikely that such a design could be incorporated into an assault rifle.
  • The Medusa revolver from the Magiclysm mod can chamber several types of handgun cartridges, but it's doubly justified because it's based on a real revolver that has the exact same gimmick, and because it's explicitly described as being enchanted by a mage gunsmith to make it more reliable.
• Gun Struggle: If an NPC has a weapon and you really need it taken away, you can deliberately try to snatch it. Unlike disarming style techniques, however, it does no damage, and has a decent chance of failure, making it a risky maneuver.
• Hairpin Lockpick:
  • Hairpins can be crafted into rudimentary lockpicks. It does require a lot of skill to use them effectively, but it's better than nothing.
  • Dark Days Ahead also allows crafting wires and smaller knives into lockpicks.
  • Bright Nights, meanwhile, allows using bone skewers as extremely poor lockpicks.
• Hand Cannon:
  • Any handgun chambered in at least .44 qualifies, but the crowning examples are the S&W 500 and Magnum Research BFR, with the latter even being usable as a Sniper Pistol.
  • In Bright Nights, the Exotic Ammo Types mod has the L2037 Backup, which is a large revolver chambered in 5.56x45mm. The damage is only comparable to .357 Magnum, but it's very good at penetrating armor and functions as a Sniper Pistol.
  • Bright Nights has the RM103A Automagnum and the RM99 Revolver, chambered in the 8x40mm Caseless caliber, normally used by rifles. Thus, they do massive amount of damage, with the R99 even doing more damage than .500 S&W if you load it with HVP rounds.
• Handicapped Badass: While crippled limbs will penalize you in combat, it's not impossible to fight in such a state:
  • A single broken arm won't prevent from using weapons that can be wielded one-handed, which is the majority of them. Having both arms broken, meanwhile, still allows you to use unarmed attacks and mutated body parts, alongside bionics.
  • A single broken leg can be compensated for with crutches, and having both legs broken can still allow you to use vehicles (especially wheelchairs). Melee combat isn't really viable like that, but ranged weapons work perfectly fine.
• Handmade Is Better: The game has quite a lot of items that can only be crafted, not scavenged, and are way better than their scavenged counterparts, especially in Bright Nights. For instance, survivor clothes have higher storage and improved protection.
• Hard-Coded Hostility: NPCs associated with the Hell's Raiders faction will shoot the player on sight, regardless of what other factions they've allied with.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In-Universe, the horror novel is noted to not be the best reading material in the current situation, likely due to how horrific the Cataclysm is, with plenty of events and monsters that wouldn't be out of place in a horror story. Notably, it's one of the few non-religious non-skill books that only gives +1 morale, whereas most other books will give +2 or +3.
• Hate Plague: In the Dark Days Ahead canon, one of the things that Blob infection can cause to humans is Blob Psychosis, which makes the affected person behave in rather bizarre ways, with some becoming violent. In particular, it's mentioned that there were a lot of riots prior to the Cataclysm, all involving infected people.
• Heal Thyself: Bandages and disinfectants slowly fix damage to your body parts, stop bleeding, and prevent infections from setting in. Medications for managing pain are also available, ranging from the common aspirin to the highly-addictive oxycodone and morphine.
• Healing Factor: Several flavors at different rates are available, but the Rapid Metabolism mutation is the purest example. Broken limbs heal overnight, anything less with a short nap... at the cost of having to eat every few hours.
• Heavily Armored Mook: SWAT and soldier zombies still wear the armor they had in life, making them very resistant to bullets, and somewhat resistant to melee attacks. Kevlar zombies take it to the extreme, as the kevlar is part of their body, and it grows thicker and thicker each time they evolve, with kevlar hulks being particularly hard to damage.
• Hell Is That Noise:
  • "Heard a noise! Stop crafting/reading/eating? Y/N"
  • "The eye you're carrying lets out a tortured scream! You hear screeches from the rock above and around you!"
  • "From the west you hear a child wailing!" This is one of the random noises a Mi-go can make.
  • "You hear a terrifying roar that nearly deafens you!" A jabberwock, which can flat-out ruin your day. Or in Arcana and Magic Items mod, a dracolich.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Downplayed and justified, as mouth encumbrance makes it harder to recover stamina, while eye encumbrance hinders ranged combat. In Dark Days Ahead, head encumbrance will also make it harder for you to dodge and will make falls deadlier. That said, wearing some protection for your upper head is still recommended, as head damage can be extremely lethal.
• The Hermit:
  • The Naturalist profession is a person who spent years living in the wilderness, relying only on what nature provides. When the Cataclysm came, they struggled to notice it.
  • A few survivor holdouts have NPCs flavored as this. Of note in Arcana and Magic Items mod in Bright Nights is one outright labeled as a hermit, a friendly old man living in a rural house, who'll freely share his collection of books with the player. Selecting the right dialogue, or confronting him as one of several arcanist professions, will get him to admit to being one of the last surviving clergymen of the Keepers, and afterward can serve as a minor quest-giver for players intending to explore the mod's content.
  • Bright Nights has the Elf-A Mutant, who lives alone in a forest, in an explicit communion with nature, relying on no technology but a longbow (they don't even wear clothes).
• Heroic BSoD: One random NPC backstory is of a doctor who saw a young mother turn into a zombie soon after giving birth. The horror completely broke them, causing them to hide in an unused stairwell, eventually passing out after suffering a panic attack.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In Bright Nights, should you find the dimensional portal, you can close it on the other side if you don't have a mininuke to do it with. This will cause you to die in the Nether, but it will save the rest of humanity in the long run.
• Hero of Another Story: Backstories for random NPCs often show them to have survived in ways that could've made them the player character in another universe, such as foraging in order to avoid monsters or hiding out in a subway and buying food from the vending machines.
• Hidden Depths: Bright Nights has the Mall Ninja, who is said to have bought lots of high-end gear, relying primarily on forums for advice, which sets you up to expect them to have lots of useless junk. One look at their equipment list will change your mind, however, as they have solid mid-game equipment in the form of military clothes and armor, a customized assault rifle, night vision goggles, halligan bar, smoke bombs, and various survival gear. They also have an endgame melee weapon in the form of a genuine katana, even though you'd expect them to use an inferior replica made out of budget steel.
• Hide Your Children: Downplayed. Zombie children are common, and the player takes a hit to morale for killing them. However, living children do not exist in Dark Days Ahead, and while Bright Nights has confused children in the mod for civilians (which can be killed by you to prevent them from attracting zombies towards you), children otherwise don't appear in places where it would make sense for them to do so (such as the refugee center). Both forks have also eventually removed the elementary school student as a profession, as they don't really make sense as a playable character (since, realistically, they would lack the strength and intelligence to survive) when compared to high school students.
• Highly Specific Counterplay: Disarming techniques are good to have when you're fighting an armed enemy, but the problem is that many enemies either don't wield a weapon, or have it integrated into their body and thus impossible to take away. While the trope is downplayed in Dark Days Ahead due to ferals being susceptible to disarms, Bright Nights only allows you to disarm NPCs (which are extremely rare, with many wielding guns and thus being suicidal to take on in melee) and thus plays the trope completely straight.
• High on Homicide: With the Bright Nights-exclusive Killer Drive trait, you'll gain morale with each kill, and the description states that you crave the thrill you experience from killing. It's even possible to suffer a homicide withdrawal, with your morale decreasing.
• Hobo Gloves: The Hobo starts with fingerless gloves.
• Hollywood Darkness: Although nights and underground environments are very dark, true darkness isn't a thing. As such, even if you're several levels underground at night, you can still see to a 1-tile radius (even if you can't read or craft), which can be increased with perception and night vision traits.
• Hollywood Hacking:
  • Exaggerated to the extreme, as interacting with a terminal takes only one second, and you don't need any tools for hacking, only the Computers skill and some luck. It's entirely possible to hack a terminal while being attacked, then hit back before the enemy is able to act again.
  • Bright Nights has the control laptop/wrist computer, which is modified to send out signals in special frequencies used by robots. In practical terms, it allows you to turn robots friendly in just a few seconds of hacking.
• Hollywood Healing: Downplayed, as while your character can easily recover from a near-death experience in a week of decent rest and medical aid (in the form of bandages and disinfectant), and no injury is permanent, they'll still need several weeks of rest with splinting in order to recover from a crippled limb, and any injury to it will reset your progress. There is also a justification, as it's noted that the Blob caused everyone to heal faster than usual. Taking the Imperceptible Healer trait, however, will mostly avert the trope, as you need 10x the normal time to restore hit points, possibly resulting in you spending a month or two to heal from a severe beatdown.
• Hollywood Silencer:
  • Averted in Dark Days Ahead, as suppressors have a noise multiplier below 1. Whatever gun you use, it's still going to be noisy.
  • Zig-zagged in Bright Nights, as it all depends on what suppressor and ammo you use, due to them reducing sound by a flat amount:
    • Improvised suppressors are generally ineffective, though the homemade suppressor (the best one you can make without a gunsmith repair kit) can work well with .22 LR.
    • The compact suppressor is generally only effective with .380 ACP, .32 ACP, and .22 LR, as it otherwise doesn't mitigate much noise.
    • If a handgun's caliber is no stronger than 9x19mm or .40 S&W, the trope is exaggerated with a standard suppressor, as the noise is reduced to zero. Essentially, rather than making a fwip, the gun makes literally no sound at all.
    • For .357 SIG and standard .45 ACP, the trope is played perfectly straight with a standard suppressor, being the equivalent of a fwip that can be heard in the current room, but is hard to hear in the other one.
    • With a standard suppressor, assault rifle and high-powered handgun rounds (starting with .45 ACP +P or .44 Magnum) will still attract zombies across the street, and battle rifles will attract zombies from halfway across the reality bubble. For anything stronger, including shotguns, you may as well forget about suppression
• Homage: The main zombie types reference the Left 4 Dead series.
• Homeless Hero: The Hobo started out as one before the Cataclysm hit. Afterwards, almost everyone else starts out as one, forced to sleep in abandoned buildings or cars that aren't suited for sleep, although it's not too hard to make a Base on Wheels or modify a building into a proper base.
• Hostile Weather: Full acid rain can melt down a battle-hardened survivor in a handful of turns. Thankfully the much less lethal acid drizzle happens beforehand, which serves as a warning. Acid rain has been mercifully disabled in versions 0.C and beyond, however.
• Human Furniture Is a Pain in the Tail: A general issue of many mutations is issues when it comes to wearing human clothes, often forcing one to make custom clothes. Driving is also problematic for characters of abnormal size, which forces them to install special accomodations, and excess size may result in pain from having to squeeze into a roofed vehicle.
• Hunter of Monsters: In scenarios set long after the Cataclysm, the Monster Hunter and Monster Slayer (the latter exclusive to Bright Nights) are people who hunt monsters for food and crafting materials, while the Wasteland Ranger is somebody who kills monsters in order to give humanity a fighting chance.
• Hybrid Monster: You can become a hybrid monster yourself with the Chimera mutation.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: With a mutation of the same name, excess nutrition is converted into direct healing. Of course, this mutation also comes with the heavy price tag of requiring a lot more food even under normal circumstances.
• I Am Legion: We are the Mycus. And we can be joined.
• I Know Madden Kombat: Athletic professions for ball-based sports (Baseball, Football, Dodgeball, Basketball) have good combat skills, and the Baseball Player in particular comes with a baseball bat that serves them as a club. Sports backgrounds are also primarily oriented towards improving your combat skills.
• I Love the Smell of X in the Morning: NPCs facing extreme danger will occasionally use the original phrase with "Napalm" as the X. The same quote is also repeated by mi-go and some ferals.
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • Your mistakes are not the only source of human corpses in this game, and if you get desperate enough...
  • The Cannibal trait allows you to ignore morale penalties for butchering and eating humans, and it also gives you a huge morale penalty for cannibalism in Bright Nights.
  • One flyer is a store coupon, and while the first page seems like a normal meat ad, further pages show severed human body parts and organs. It was printed two days after the evacuation orders were sent, implying that the coupon's creator became a feral.
• Immune to Bullets:
  • Anything with a thick enough skin, at least to .22 and 9mm bullets. Some monsters are also hard to shoot, so you're more likely to miss.
  • Harshly averted for the player. Pray you don't encounter robots or other survivors with guns. If you do, and you don't have Kevlar armor or higher, you're going to have a very bad day.
• The Immune: In a downplayed variant, some of the human population is immune to being turned feral or directly killed by the Blob. They can still spread the infection, heal unnaturally quickly, mutate, and zombify after dying. In Dark Days Ahead specifically, the statistic is that 25% of humans are completely immune to the mental effects, 50% will suffer from Blob Psychosis (which makes them much more aggressive and reckless, and may persist in a milder form after the primary phase ends), and 25% will go feral.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy:
  • Bright Nights has gun-wielding ferals, which are hideously innacurate with guns, to the point that a completely untrained survivor can easily outshoot them with the same guns. This is all done for balance reasons, to prevent players from easily dying to gunfire.
  • Unskilled survivors will tend to miss with ranged weapons, unless they take a long time to aim.
• Improbable Weapon User: Unless able to get proper medieval weapons, you'll likely spend a decent amount of time fighting with improvised weaponry. Several styles also include improvised weapons, and Brawling is usable with literally anything you wield.
• Impromptu Campfire Cookout: As many cooking recipes use a nearby fire, it's possible to invoke it at any time, whether you're using the corpse of a zombie you burnt to death, a housefire, or an open lava fissure.
• Improvised Armour:
  • A wide variety of armors is craftable, from simply attaching a few chunks of steel to a leather jacket or making a pot wearable, to professionally creating a suit of plate out of scavenged metal. Granted, there is a very measurable difference between just "tying together some hammered metal sheets with leather and sinew" and straight-up recasting scrap steel into proper carbon-graded metal to forge your own tempered steel brigandine and chainmail.
  • Most traders in the game don't have spare armor pieces up for trade, so you'll either need to loot an abandoned police or military stockpile for their ballistic vests and plate inserts, or craft your own. There are recipes for making your own replacement ESAPI and ESBI plates for ballistic vests, but they are entirely made out of steel and explicitly state that they are still less efficient than the original ceramic composite plate inserts.
  • Survivor clothes particularly stand out, which are standard articles of clothing reinforced with layers of plastic sheeting, kevlar, and canvas, along with a few pouches. All of this made by a professional tailor, so it effectively serves as a replacement for pre-Cataclysm clothes.
  • Bright Nights adds several more options, from filling a life vest with sand for low-level ballistic resistance, to welding handles to steel vehicle plating to use as a makeshift shield (which can be quite effective if using hardened steel or military composite plates), to options that straddle the line between this and legitimate armor such as shaping already-hardened steel plates into armor evocative of Ned Kelly's boilerplate protection.
• Improvised Bandage:
  • Cotton rags can be turned into makeshift bandages. You can also use bleach or boiling to improve them.
  • Cotton balls can be used as low-quality bandages.
• Improvised Clothes: If you have neither tailoring skills nor any tools, you can still make some clothes, such as wrapping rags/leather/fur/wool around your head, limbs, extremities, chest, belly, and groin, tying a t-shirt's sleeves together to wear it as a mask, pinning a blanket in place to wear as a cloak, poking holes in socks to wear them on your hands, or wearing shopping bags as socks or gloves.
• Improvised Lockpick: Until you get a proper lockpicking set (or a bionic lockpick), your standard lockpicks are going to be pieces of scrap metal hammered into shape.
• Improvised Weapon: Since using guns without a silencer can often be suicidal, it pays to learn which objects make good melee weapons. (Hint: smash one or two of the benches in the starting shelter, then go outside and grab a rock so you can make a nail board.)
• Incendiary Exponent: In Bright Nights, the player can modify several weapons into their fiery counterparts, such as the Flammenschwert and Rising Sun.
• Indestructible Edible: MREs are sealed so perfectly that they won't go bad until you open them. Even if 10 years pass after the Cataclysm, you can still loot perfectly edible rations from zombie soldiers.
• Infernal Retaliation: Some tough enemies if they stand in fire for long enough. For example, bears.
  Remember, only YOU can prevent forest fires!
• Infinite Flashlight: Bright Nights has the nuclear nightlight, lamp, smartphone, and headlamp, which will never run out of power.
• Infinity -1 Sword:
  • The Glock 22 is one of the most useful handguns in general. Between using the strong and relatively easy to loot .40 S&W ammunition type often found on police zombies and police stations/prisons, and its ability to take all the common handgun modifcation parts (like the grips, sights, and match trigger), it's already a solid contender for a handcannon. If you learn some Gunsmithing skills and then craft the unique Glock Sear Plate mod for it, it also becomes a powerful machine pistol that can dump a lot of lead into strong enemies in short order.
  • In the case of armors: When it comes to a balance between weight, encumbrance and defense, there are few armors better than the Cataphract set: very light and unencumbering despite being a heavy armor, covers a good chunk of the body, is extremely difficult to damage and has a defense rating high enough to shrug off most regular attacks with ease - the one problem is that it doesn't have a lot of ballistic defense compared to kevlar armor.
  • When it comes to non-metallic armor/clothes, the Kevlar Firesuit, while requiring most of the sewing tools that goes into the full Tailoring Kit (things like the Curved Needle, to begin with) and very expensive in Kevlar, Nomex, and the requisite threads, often demanding prospective crafters to raid multiple fire stations and butcher several Kevlar zombies to get the needed parts (and ransack a number of dressmaker caches in basements or loot clothes stores with refitting tools in the backrooms), has some of the most well-rounded stats with excellent coverage and relatively low encumberance for the amount of protection it offers, boasts high durability and resistance to item damage from attacks, and due to being made partially of kevlar, can easily be mended using all those kevlar patches the Kevlar Zombies yielded after you harvested them for the materials to craft it. Since it's also made of Nomex, the Kevlar Firesuit also gives you environmental protection against the heat from fires and is very breathable.
• In Harm's Way: A few random NPCs will talk about how life post-Cataclysm is actually better, as the danger made them feel alive and important.
• Invisible Bowstring: The Wraithslayer crossbows in the Arcana mod are stated to lack a bowstring, with the Grand Wraithslayer also lacking a winch. As Energy Bows, they don't need one.
• I Have Your Wife: Pat Dionne, who is featured in a few entries in lab terminals and is the writer of a report about mutations you can find in labs, had her children kidnapped by the government in order to force her to work on Blob research.
• Innocent Bystanders: Civilian "monsters" represent people who are wholly unprepared for the Cataclysm or have their minds burned out by the Blob infection, as they just stand there in shock, slowly die from their injuries, run around aimlessly, or attack every monster they see without any sense of self-preservation. There's no way for you to snap them out of this state, and they'll eventually die and turn into zombies after a few days.
• In the Hood: Several types of clothes come with hoods, which will keep one's head warm if nothing else is worn on it. The use of a hood to hide one's identity is also implied with several criminal professions starting off wearing a hoodie.
• Intimidating Revenue Service: Bright Nights includes a profession for playing an IRS-CI (Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation) Special Agent, whose associated scenario involves hunting down the (now feral) Corrupt Corporate Executive they were tracking before the Cataclysm started.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: Not only does your character have a weight limit of loot to work with, but they are also limited by the size of their loot. Each piece of clothing available only fits a certain amount of volume. Going above your weight limit will slow you down; filling up your volume, meanwhile, increases the encumbrance of clothes and containers that you wear, which will usually slow you down in addition to other effects.
  • In Dark Days Ahead, items also have length. In addition, clothing has a set amount of pockets, which fit items only of appropriate weight, volume, and length.
• Invulnerable Knuckles: Averted in Dark Days Ahead, as smashing objects uses your most armored body part, and if you still lack sufficient protection there, you'll suffer injury with each blow. Even if you make or wear gloves, brass knuckles, or a cestus to protect your hands, hand-to-hand combat will still inflict wear and tear (and eventually damage) to your hand protection.
• Improvised Armour:
  • A wide variety of armors is craftable, from simply attaching a few chunks of steel to a leather jacket or making a pot wearable, to professionally creating a suit of plate out of scavenged metal. Granted, there is a very measurable difference between just "tying together some hammered metal sheets with leather and sinew" and straight-up recasting scrap steel into proper carbon-graded metal to forge your own tempered steel brigandine and chainmail.
  • Most traders in the game don't have spare armor pieces up for trade, so you'll either need to loot an abandoned police or military stockpile for their ballistic vests and plate inserts, or craft your own. There are recipes for making your own replacement ESAPI and ESBI plates for ballistic vests, but they are entirely made out of steel and explicitly state that they are still less efficient than the original ceramic composite plate inserts.
  • Survivor clothes particularly stand out, which are standard articles of clothing reinforced with layers of plastic sheeting, kevlar, and canvas, along with a few pouches. All of this made by a professional tailor, so it effectively serves as a replacement for pre-Cataclysm clothes.
  • Bright Nights adds several more options, from filling a life vest with sand for low-level ballistic resistance, to welding handles to steel vehicle plating to use as a makeshift shield (which can be quite effective if using hardened steel or military composite plates), to options that straddle the line between this and legitimate armor such as shaping already-hardened steel plates into armor evocative of Ned Kelly's boilerplate protection.
• Improvised Bandage:
  • Cotton rags can be turned into makeshift bandages. You can also use bleach or boiling to improve them.
  • Cotton balls can be used as low-quality bandages.
• Improvised Lockpick: Until you get a proper lockpicking set (or a bionic lockpick), your standard lockpicks are going to be pieces of scrap metal hammered into shape.
• Improvised Weapon: Since using guns without a silencer can often be suicidal, it pays to learn which objects make good melee weapons. (Hint: smash one or two of the benches in the starting shelter, then go outside and grab a rock so you can make a nail board.)
• Item Crafting: The game's item crafting system is very robust, and gaining the proper skills to make things is highly recommended if you want to extend your character's lifespan. It also makes it necessary to collect as much spare parts as you can for crafting ingredients, so you'd better start harvesting all that poor-fitting Leather, Canvas, and Synthetic Fabric if you want to start making custom pouches.
• It's a Small World, After All: If you get lucky with random NPCs, you might meet an old friend of Pat Dionne, who is the scientist that wrote a mutagen-related report you may find in labs, as well as multiple entries within the terminals there. Even within the confines of New England, it's a very unlikely coincidence.
• The Jaywalking Dead: One of the more effective ways to kill hordes of common zombies is to ram them with an armored vehicle. Caution should be taken, however, as doing so will damage the vehicle.
• Joke Attack: In a Lethal Joke Attack variation, the Magiclysm has the Cause Bear spell, which is a misspelled Cause Fear spell, found on a smudged scroll. Casting it will actually cause a bear to appear, which is friendly to you. Given that Bears Are Bad News, it actually makes for solid support in combat.
• Just Plane Wrong: Aerodynamics are not modeled for aircraft, and helicopters only need a single main rotor to fly, with tail rotors (or systems that dispense with one) not being modeled. This is particularly noticeable in Bright Nights, which puts no restrictions on the player's ability to construct aircraft, to the point that you can easily turn a tank into a helicopter just by outfitting it with a rotor and a gas turbine or two.
• Katana Superiority: The katana is one of the best melee weapons available. If you manage to find it, even at low "cutting weapons" skill you will block most of the attacks and one-hit-kill most enemies. The Nodachi takes this a step further by virtue of being the BFS of katanas.
• Kick Them While They Are Down: Downing a foe is an extremely effective and common technique due to rendering the target unable to fight back while you beat on them. A few techniques also demand a downed target to work, such as brutal Bonebreaker of Krav Maga, which does a lot of damage and breaks a humanoid enemy's arm.
• Kid Hero: You can play as a high school student, and you can set your character's age as low as 16. It doesn't affect your interactions with other survivors in any way, as kids have to grow up fast in the post-apocalypse.
• Kidnapped for Experimentation: XEDRA has used a combination of prisoners, political dissidents, and homeless people for their mutagenic experiments. You can even play as an unwilling mutant
• Kill It with Fire:
  • Most non-robotic creatures lack any kind of armor against heat damage, which is part of what makes incendiary weapons (such as flamethrowers) really powerful.
  • Lighting a fire and luring zombies into it is an easy way to deal with small hordes. Just be sure to either do it outdoors and away from flammable items, or in a building you've already looted and that's far enough from someplace safe (but not too far, or the fire will leave the "reality bubble" and stop burning until you come back). Especially effective when you cause prolonged fires by setting a leaking fuel tank for a vehicle or a a gas station alight, as large volumes of stored fuel will also explode violently to further attract zombies with the light and noise.
  • The best way to deal with the fungal corruption that threatens to swallow entire towns if not dealt with? A simple lit match, and you can watch it all burn away. This can also expose the Fungal Towers that normally surround themselves with protective walls of fungus, as fire destroys them almost instantly when they form. Similar things can be done to eradicate mutant wasp nests, as they are made of paper and are thus very flammable. Mutant Bee Hives are also flammable due to their beeswax construction, but it is a double edged sword as players might want to harvest their honey instead. The only fungus-based lifeforms that are resistant to fire are the Fungal Flowers.
• Klatchian Coffee: Atomic coffee, which is 2.5x stronger than regular coffee, with half a liter causing you to suffer a stimulant overdose. While in Dark Days Ahead it simply has obscene amounts of caffeine, Bright Nights instead makes it normal coffee that has been deliberately irradiated with an atomic coffeemaker.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: If you give an NPC follower the option to pick up objects on their own, they will start making a beeline for almost any object in the nearby area, from useful items like weapons and medical equipment to random litter like newspaper pages and bullet casings.
• Kung Fu-Proof Mook: In Dark Days Ahead, many techniques can't be used against enemies who are larger than the player or aren't humanoid. Also, zombies are immune to stuns, which makes it impossible to use techniques that only work on stunned targets.
• Laser Blade: Bright Nights has the radiant blade, made by integrating a radiant triffid's core with a blade that is forged for just such an upgrade. Besides being easy to hit with and having lots of good techniques, it has the unique ability to inflict light damage, which bypasses the armor of all vanilla enemies
• Late to the Tragedy: The player, evidently. How exactly you ended up as one of the last people alive in the region is left to your imagination. Later on you might find dead squads of soldiers and scientists, as well as military and scientific infrastructures which are invariably overrun by the undead.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In Bright Nights, if you switch control to another party member by talking to them, your current character will say "If I were in your shoes..."
• LEGO Genetics: Mutating is as "simple" as leveling your cooking skill high enough, finding the proper instruction manual, combining bleach, ammonia, and zombie flesh, and drinking the resulting concoction. This can give you some animal-specific traits, implying that all humans already have DNA from all species in them.
• Le Parkour: Eligible trait at character creation, which cuts down the speed penalty for moving through tables, windows, etc.
• Lethal Joke Character:
  • Several of the more underwhelming professions are surprisingly useful. For instance, the tailor is Boring, but Practical simply because it gives a head start on the tailoring skill, which is used for repairing and reinforcing your clothes and armor. In the experimental builds, the broken cyborg is notable for starting with every single faulty bionic, but also gains full-body alloy plating and fingertip razors. And in general, if you're using pool-based character creation, the bonus points given by weaker professions can be spent on traits that provide long-term benefits if you can survive the Early Game Hell.
  • The Landscaper profession seems like yet another gimmicky Action Survivor profession... until you notice that they have a machete, which is a great mid-game weapon that gives you an early start on swordsmanship.
  • The "Joke" monsters: the smoky bear, Thriller, and (actual cannibal) Shia LaBeouf. All of them are Shout Outs to pop culture, but they are every bit as deadly as non-joke monsters.
• Level Grinding: In the early game, expect to spend lots of time repeatedly crafting and disassembling items to improve your fabrication and tailoring skills. Later on this becomes much harder since you need higher level crafting recipes to train higher level skills, and these recipes usually require rare components and cannot be completely disassembled.
• Lightning Bruiser: The Bright Nights Elf-A Mutant is very fast and good at dodging, capable of teleporting around by tunneling through the ground, incredibly good with their longbow (which is loaded with armor-piercing bodkin arrows), so good at knife fighting that they'll gut you much faster than a zombie hulk can beat you to death, and somewhat tougher than most common enemies.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Such a dynamic is present in the Magical Nights mod (a variant of Magiclysm for Dark Days Ahead) for Bright Nights. Warriors, using physical attacks (whether ranged or melee) start out strong and stay so for the rest of the game. Mages, meanwhile, start out with weak spells, high chance of failure when casting, and spend a lot of mana per spell. However, spells scale very well with Intelligence, and you can get yourself down to 10% of the normal cost and casting time by becoming a genius. At this point, you become incredibly powerful, as you spend practically no mana for spells that can be cast multiple times per second and do a lot of damage.
• Little Useless Gun: Calibers like .22 LR are incredibly weak in Dark Days Ahead, to the point that you'll usually do more damage by beating your target with the gun itself, and .22 CB can fail to penetrate the hides of even fat and tough zombies. Bright Nights downplays this, however, as .22 actually does pretty decently against low-tier enemies, doing more damage than low-tier melee weapons, and loading it with birdshot will allow you to wipe out entire hordes of civilian zombies with several shots, especially if you're using the American-180. That being said, the lower-powered round is pretty good for dropping wild animals with less damage to their corpse for the purposes of butchering for meat, fat, sinew, and hides. On top of that, a Suppressor easily brings the noise level of most .22 LR guns down to zero, making them a great stealth weapon for night expeditions.
• Lives in a Van: As it takes quite a bit of skill to install proper living facilities, and RVs are rare, early-game survivors will often be forced to sleep on the seats of their vehicles, unless they're capable of taking over a building and squatting there.
• Lobotomy: A rare self-inflicted/accidental variant appears with the Numb mutation, which is stated on Github to remove parts of the brain that are responsible for personality. It's not a full personality destruction, but it does severely reduce impacts on one's morale.
• Lord British Postulate: The strongest monster in the game is the Yrax Apeirohedron, which can appear in the Level -10 void of a physics lab. You're not supposed to be able to defeat it, as it disappears after 1-2 minutes, is not hostile unless you attack it, and has 100-1000 armor (making it immune to most weapons), a million HP, 500 speed (allowing it to act 5 times as fast as a player with unmodified speed and no encumbrance), and an attack that kills you in one hit. However, Magiclysm has a spell that halves the target's HP, along with a multitude of spells that deal fixed damage regardless of the target's armor. If you manage to avoid getting chased down and blown apart, you can use these spells to defeat it.
• Lovecraft Country: The game takes place in New England. With the default settings, the world generation results in small towns separated by stretches of untamed wilderness, which gives the map a rural feel.
• Lovecraft Lite: Grim as the fate of humanity may seem, a well-equipped, competent character can still face the worst the game has to offer and potentially come out on top. In addition, the Nether monsters who are out-and-out Shout Outs to Lovecraft are one of the least insidious monster factions. They don't subvert the land itself or bring the alien equivalent of Gaia's Vengeance. They don't subvert and re-animate mundane wildlife. They're also regarded as different from the Unearthed Horrors that tend to reference other media. They're simply a disparate group of otherworldly creatures, with varying degrees of apparent intelligence and malevolence, with only some of them having outright anomalous abilities.
  • The mods in the experimental version take it further, allowing human ingenuity to weaponize . With Vehicle Additions pack, you can make dimensional vortices into bottomless cargo holds, and construct vehicles literally made from the blob. PK's Rebalance adds (among many other things) the forces of Hell itself, and you too can be a man-and-a-half and wipe them out. And the Arcana and Magic Items mod is all about weaponizing or otherwise exploiting otherworldly forces.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • The game is mostly fair. Your starting location and climate not necessarily so. Spawned next to a fungal bloom and a swamp? It's better to roll a new character. Spawned next to a hostile, gun-wielding NPC? Better hope they only want your stuff.
  • A very effective early game tactic consists on setting bushes on fire and bait zombies to tumble across them, which both slows them down and heavily damages them. It's great for thinning out the horde and obtaining supplies from their corpses if you can get them before they burn out. However, some zombies drop alcohol or explosives, which can be set off by the fire.
  • "John Doe gives you a mininuke (active)."
  • The Infected and Really Bad Day scenarios start you off with an infected bite wound. You will die slowly and painfully within a couple of days unless you find some antibiotics (which are rare, and aren't guaranteed to cure you) or just get really, really lucky and have the infection randomly cure itself. At any time until the infection is healed, the game can just decide "sorry, you lose" and kill you.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Bright Nights has shields, which technically count as armor that covers the arms, with non-buckler shield also covering the hands. They prevent you from wielding anything that demands two hands, but allow you to block melee attacks even with weapons and martial arts that don't allow blocking. If you're hit, even in ranged combat, they will also apply as armor if the coverage roll succeeds.
• Ludicrous Gibs: While normally averted, sufficient overkill can result in the enemy spraying a long line of blood, along with butchery refuse and meat scraps flying everywhere.
• Machete Mayhem: Machetes are great weapons, if you're lucky enough to find one. You can make a makeshift one with a blade from a lawnmower and some duct tape. If you have the tools and materials for it, you can also redesign a standard machete into a combat one, turning it into a proper sword.
• Mad Libs Dialogue: NPC dialogue during gameplay (especially combat) is frequently composed of stringed-together words or phrases. It normally works fine, since it's all in text, but sometimes you get less natural dialogue such as "[Oh sugar!], [I'm doomed!] There's a [freaking] [god-forsaken] [maniac] [south], [just close enough to worry about]."
• The Mafia: The Gangster and Mafia Boss professions embody this, combined with the male mafiosos being dressed like they came out of the 1920's, fedoras and all.
• Mail-Order Novelty: One flyer is an advertisement for a pre-made emergency supply kit. Your experience with surviving the Cataclysm makes it clear that the kit is very impractical.
• Mage Marksman: A viable playstyle in the Magiclysm mod, since ammo is easier to get than mana potions (and you run out of mana fast), and most spells have a shorter range than weapons.
• The Magic Comes Back: In the lore of the Magical Nights mod for Bright Nights, magic always existed, but became much weaker after the middle ages due to mages being driven underground by Muggles. When the Cataclysm happened, however, magic became extremely powerful, to the point that spelling mistakes can create new spells (as shown with the Cause Bear scroll) and a highly intelligent wizard has no need for weapons.
• Magic Knight: An encouraged playstyle in the Magiclysm mod, as stamina is far faster to recover than mana, and melee weapons can swing faster than you can cast spells. You're also more likely to fail a spell than to miss with a weapon.
• Magical Weapon: A variety of them is available in the Magiclysm mod, the majority being +1/+2 variants of mundane weapons that simply get bonuses to their accuracy, swing speed, and damage.
• Magic Pants:
  • Averted for players whose mutated anatomy causes issues with clothing, as your clothes will be pushed off (Bright Nights) or destroyed (Dark Days Ahead).
  • Downplayed for zombie hulks — despite being stated to be swollen to the size of six men, they still have a chance to drop some clothes when killed. However, they will always drop damaged rags, presumably coming from whatever was destroyed by their excess growth, and they also drop less clothes than common zombies.
• Magikarp Power:
  • Melee combat in general, as you start off with weak weapons, suck at defending yourself against enemies, and guns tend to do much better damage. As you improve your attribute and skill levels, however, your chance of dodging/blocking attacks increases, you unlock several powerful martial arts techniques, and the damage of melee attacks improves greatly, to the point that you can do far more damage than any gun can do, and are much better at penetrating armor.
  • If you get the Ki Strike trait from the Mythical Martial Arts mod, pure unarmed combat becomes this, as while it's initially weak, the damage will quickly improve with each level, with the scaling getting rather absurd. A large variety of styles is also available, letting you easily switch attacks on the fly. Some of the mutations and bionics can add up to it by adding new attacks (which happen concurrently with your normal attack), enhancing the standard unarmed strike, or giving special effects. Bright Nights makes unarmed combat even more powerful, as scaling is already built-in, and while it's not as strong, it applies to unarmed weapons as well.
  • Full-auto guns start out as the epitome of Awesome, but Impractical, as your shots will go wide even with good aim. Once you raise your gun skills sufficiently high and/or install recoil-reducing accessories, however, you'll be able to land all shots in the burst, allowing you to rapidly take down enemies without wasting time with semi-auto shots.
• Magnetic Weapons: As of Version 0.H, the Coilgun. It requires substantial knowledge of Electronics and a Vacuum Mold to assemble, as well as a substantial amount of Copper Wire, and runs off UPS-based power, but in exchange, it has very high-capacity magazines at 50 shots per full load, can use both nails and fletchettes as ammo, and once you've fired the first shot to charge it up, it can fire all subsequent shots extremely rapidly. It also has the benefit of being very quiet with a Noise rating of 6 (which makes it just about as noisy as a Crossbow without Dampening kit parts in operation), has absolutely no recoil, and both the magazines and fletchettes can be crafted by the player. While single fletchettes do not do very much damage, the Coilgun is extremely accurate and can apply Bleeding stacks to zombies, and the ammo has a few points of innate Piercing, allowing it to overcome soft armor, in addition to being less damaging to the bodies of wild game that you can hunt for meat, making for more bountiful Butchering as a result. The UPS power requirements of the coilgun become less of a burden if you remember to upcraft excess batteries into Heavy Batteries for the UPS unit and make a solar-powered Charging station by installing a battery charger or recharging station into a container vehicle and add a battery/capacitor, solar panel, and an ECU or Dashboard to toggle the charger on, or if you're a cyborg with a UPS module, you just power it off your personal power cell(s).
• Manual Leader, A.I. Party: You can only control one party member directly. The rest will act autonomously, usually following the current Player Character, though you can talk to them in order to alter their behavior.
• Master Archer: The Bright Nights Elf-A Mutant wields their longbow with the equivalent of Archery 8 and Marksmanship 8 (which would take the player a very long time to reach), ensuring that they're near-guaranteed to land shots on you.
• A Master Makes Their Own Tools:
  • Unless playing with mods, most high-tier melee weapons (such as proper swords) are incredibly rare to obtain. As such, you'll usually have to forge them.
  • Forging tools on their own fall into the trope, as forging demands a high level of Fabrication, and the tools themselves are incredibly rare to obtain by looting. Thus, most aspiring blacksmiths will have to start by making their own tools.
• Marathon Level: Several locations can take a while to explore fully. To wit:
  • Labs of basically all types. Regular science labs have a randomly-generated size that can frequently be immense (though this has been toned down to a more sensible range in Bright Nights), and their sheer scale is part of why the Lab Challenge scenario exists. Central labs in particular tend to be absolutely enormous. The Trans-Coast Logistics facility is also gigantic, though it's more consistent due to using a more premade layout like normal locations, instead of the Procedural Generation labs use. Finally regarding mods, Arcana and Magic Items mod in Bright Nights has the Project Kairos Magitech lab, which is similarily long and difficult but more structured in design.
  • The Necropolis, a vanilla location in Bright Nights and part of the No Hope mod in Dark Days Ahead. The outside starts off as a ruined city with several ways to sneak into and get lost in underground tunnels connected to basements, then navigating a maze of sewers, then finally the vault underneath has two massive, sprawling levels.
  • The military base and aircraft carrier meanwhile are both massive installations chock full of hostile undead, plus hostile robots stalking the indoors sections in its Bright Nights incarnation.
• Master of All: It's entirely possible to max out all skills with enough time and practice, leading to your character becoming a master crafter, mechanic, cook, electrician, programmer, chemist and tailor that can also cleave through a zombie horde single-handedly.
• Melee Disarming: Many styles intended for combat will have a disarming technique. While most monsters don't have a weapon to disarm, ferals and NPCs rely on weapons to do damage, and can be rendered mostly harmless by disarming them. NPCs, in particular, can be disarmed even without using a style, via a special interaction to grab at their weapon, although it has a decent chance of failing.
• Michael Jackson's Thriller Parody: There's a a zombie version as a joke monster. It can turn nearby zombies into non-hostile yet Nigh-Invulnerable dancers, but killing the Thriller turns them all into hulks.
• Mighty Glacier: The Ursine mutation branch. You're gigantic, slow and extremely cumbersome with a bad temper, but strong as all hell with giant claws.
• Mighty Lumberjack: The lumberjack profession starts with a wood axe (which is a good weapon on it's own, if overshadowed by the fire axe), as well as decent skills for wielding it in combat.
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: Mutations, especially after crossing the post-threshold, may affect a character's personality. This is particularly pronounced when mutating into a predatory animal, as you eventually acquire the animal's mindset and stop considering yourself human.
• Misidentified Weapons: The game's Static Stun Gun is called a taser in Bright Nights. However, the term is only applicable to ranged stunners. Since you can't use the item on enemies that aren't adjacent to you, it would be more appropriate to call it a stun gun (a melee weapon, despite the name).
• Modesty Towel: You can wear a towel to slightly protect your torso and legs from cold, and the Shower Victim starts off wearing a wet towel.
• Molotov Cocktail: The most easily-improvised bomb in the game, readily available to any player who has a bottle, a rag, some gasoline/alcohol, and a lighter. It can be further modified so you can sling it further using a grenade-adapted Staff Sling.
• Money Is Not Power: The description of the Bright Nights-exclusive Crypto Millionaire profession notes how your fortune means nothing nowadays. And, sure enough, while you have over 21 million dollars in your bank account, which allows you to buy anything from vending machines, it doesn't really mean much, as trading with NPCs relies on bartering or post-Cataclysm currencies.
• Monsters as Cuisine: In general, any organic monster can be butchered and eaten, though some are poisonous.
  • The plant marrow of triffids is technically vegan, and can substitute for vegetables in most recipes.
  • Fungaloids produce fluid sacks, which can be consumed raw for hydration and a few calories, or used in recipes that call for vegetables.
  • Mutated animals and humans produce very disgusting meat, but it can be safely eaten in small quantities. In large quantities, however, it either poisons you (Dark Days Ahead) or mutates you (Bright Nights).
  • If you have particularly disturbing tastes, feral humans are just as good of a meal as normal humans.
  • With the Eater of the Dead mutation, anything that produces tainted flesh (such as zombies and mi-gos) can be safely eaten, providing for a very convenient source of nutrition.
• Mooks Ate My Equipment:
  • In Dark Days Ahead, whacking enemies with a cutting or piercing weapon can cause it to get stuck, which in turn can cause you to drop the weapon.
  • Technician Zombies in Bright Nights have a special attack that uses a magnet to grab metallic weapons.
  • In Dark Days Ahead, parrying with a weapon against zombies can result in it being snatched from your grasp.
• Mook Medic: The Zombie Necromancer can bring back unpulped or unburnt zombies from the dead. This can make killing it first rather hard.
• Mook Promotion: The Zombie Master can transform a random zombie in its vicinity into a nastier zombie.
• Moose Are Idiots: Moose will wander straight into hordes of undead. However, they can wander out the other side covered in pulped zombie. And then charge the player.
• More than Mind Control: Consuming the marloss foods (gelatin, berry, seeds) causes you to have a strong desire to consume the other foods, although you don't actually take penalties for not doing so. This is how the Mycus manipulates you into transforming yourself into a local guide, losing your identity in the process.
• Muggles Do It Better: If there is one big technological advantage humanity has over monsters, it's ranged weapons, as the most damaging and longest-range enemy attacks all come from man-made robots. And when it comes to fighting all the other monsters with ranged attacks, a survivor with a ranged weapon (even a bow or a sling) has a major advantage in range and frequency of attack.
• Multiple Endings: Bright Nights has two such endings. In both of them, you close the dimensional portal, ensuring that humanity will be able to survive the Cataclysm.
  • Bittersweet Ending — you had to enter the portal yourself in order to close it from the other side. Whatever you encountered in the Nether, it killed you.
  • Golden Ending — you've brought a mininuke and threw it through the portal, with the explosion closing it. You, meanwhile, managed to survive, and can now do whatever you want.
• Multiple Life Bars: One of the monsters in Bright Nights is the zombie shieldbearer, who has a lot of armor due to their shield. However, once they receive any damage past their defenses (technically, they have 1 HP), they will become a normal zombie soldier, with the remains of the shield (usually completely wrecked, but sometimes still usable) falling at their feet.
• Mundane Luxury: Many of the common bulk items, such as food, drugs, and female hygiene products, have their prices inflated in comparison to more useful gear, such as weapons and armor. As written in the notes in the code, this is intentional, as the average survivor is not a scavenger, and thus values such items (especially those that can't be replaced) much more than they value weapons and survival gear.
• Mundane Utility: The Dodging skill is extremely useful in avoiding injury, and mutations that improve it are highly valued as the result. However, it also governs your dancing skills, so you can use your mutated tails and whiskers, as well as battle-hardened expertise, just to impress Draco Dune with your agility.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Some playable ferals in Bright Nights think that the best solution to many problems in life is to kill the cause, whether it's panicked civilians in need of assistance (Feral Soldier, people who commited the crime of living (Feral Cop), or anybody touching your bike (Feral Biker).
• Murder Simulators: One news article is an editorial claiming that Blob-induced riots are actually gamer riots, with the writer's son, who played violent video games (including Dwarf Fortress), being arrested for rioting a day before the article was written.
• Mutagenic Food: In Bright Nights, eating mutants will infect one with mutagenic toxins. A high amount of toxins will eventually cause one to start mutating.
• My Car Hates Me: Damaged cars may fail to start if you try to turn on the engine, which can be potentially lethal if you have monsters on your tail.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Happens to your character if you kill a survivor in cold blood, kill a zombie child, or eat human flesh, unless you have the Psychopath/Uncaring traits.
• Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight: Most of the monsters only have melee attacks, which allows a gun-wielding survivor to easily kite them to death. NPCs and robots with guns can also easily kill anybody who tries to attack them with a melee weapon, unless clever tactics are used.
• New Media Are Evil: Some news articles try to blame social media for Blob-induced rioting, with Chinese propaganda being blamed particularly heavily.
• New Skill as Reward: You can ask NPCs to teach you something in exchange for completing a mission. You can learn a martial art or increase the level of a skill by 1, but only if the NPC has that skill and it's at a higher level than yours.
• Nightmare Fetishist: To Serve Man, which pertains to cooking human flesh, gives most characters a huge penalty to morale, due to how gross the subject is. Those with Cannibal or Psychopath/Uncaring traits, however, get a massive morale boost for it.
• Nobody Poops: Zig-Zagged.
  • Although digestion is realistically simulated for the player, food and drink simply disappears once it's gone through the player's body instead of turning into waste. There are no plans to implement bodily functions for the player, which is notable considering the policy of making the game as realistic as possible.
  • Averted for wildlife, which will leave dung everywhere.
• Noble Wolf: The Dark Days Ahead version of the Wolf mutation line in is distinguished from other predator lines by having the Pack Hunter mutation, which makes you recognize the value of cooperating with humans.
• No Conservation of Energy: In Bright Nights filling a pit with 500-1000 liters of water will create a water tile. The resulting tile will be treated as an infinite source of water, and you can use it to create even more water tiles.
• Nondescript, Nasty, Nutritious:
  • Evac shelters have protein rations in them, which have a decent amount of calories in them and never spoil. According to the description, they were created as part of a crowdfunding campaign, but the final product turned out to taste so badly, customers would rather starve. The manufacturer went bankrupt, so FEMA bought entire warehouses of this stuff to stock shelters with. Now you may find yourself forced to eat them, suffering a noticeable morale penalty and a special debuff to your own mood if you eat them too much.
  • One of the MREs in Bright Nights is the infamous Cheese Omelette entry (often called the Vomelette by real US soldiers). It gives -12 morale, comparable to some of the more foul-tasting foods you can find. If you want to keep up your morale, you may want to ratfuck the ration by leaving the Vomelette behind.
• No OSHA Compliance:
  • In the labs, rooms guarded by automated turrets are often randomly placed next to bedrooms. And dissectors are put in the middle of many rooms.
  • In Bright Nights, crafting plutonium fuel cells involves you handling nuclear fuel pellets or plutonium slurry (both of which will irradiate you if you have them in your inventory) with your hands, which don't even have to be gloved. Due to game mechanics not allowing for radiation to spread onto tiles, this is perfectly safe, so long as you dump the pellets/slurry on the floor beforehand.
• Non-Standard Game Over:
  • The mi-go slaver can abduct you if you're really tired and have an extremely low strength stat (such as from getting hit with its beam). You're not dead (and can be rescued, if you have a recruited NPC to switch to), but the difficulty of escape means that it is treated the same as dying, and can result in a game over if you don't have anybody in your faction to take over.
  • Staying too long at the vitrified farm will turn you into an immobile black glass sculpture that is completely devoid of thoughts. This is considered death for all purposes, as there's no way to be brought back from this state.
• No Party Given: Presidents Toffer (the former president) and Oswald (the current president) aren't given any party affiliations. A newspaper editorial accuses Oswald of giving in to the demands of far-right groups, implying that he might be a Republican, but the biased nature of the article makes it an unreliable source.
• No Party Like a Donner Party: Non-cannibal survivors may face such a dilemma, as feral humans are much easier to catch than animals. It does, however, cause a huge morale penalty.
• No Product Safety Standards:
  • Atomic light sources, as well as the atomic coffeemaker, the last of which is banned in many countries. Should you break them, they will start leaking radiation, eventually killing you if you don't throw them away.
  • Bright Nights allows you to make atomic coffee with the atomic coffeemaker, which is deliberately irradiated by using water from the generator's containment area, and is 2.5x stronger than normal coffee. Judging by the description of both items, this is an intentional feature of the coffeemaker.
  • The atomic energy drink is apparently loaded with radiation, and has a very strong kick, comparable to atomic coffee. Bright Nights allows you to make it, revealing that while the syrup is just loaded full of caffeine (to the point that it's unsafe to consume undiluted), the drink itself can only be made with the atomic soda machine, heavily implying that it's deliberately irradiated.
• Nothing Is Scarier: After you've survived long enough, you can go long stretches without seeing any enemies. But if you have dynamic spawn or Hordes active, you know they're still out there...
• Not the Intended Use:
  • Vehicles are obviously meant to help you travel. However, there are many utilities that can be installed in vehicles, which are powered by its car battery. Since solar panels and wind turbines make it much easier and more convenient to recharge a car battery than normal batteries, it's beneficial to build an immobile "vehicle" with a welder, forge, kitchen, and lamps inside of a building.
  • Wood cutting tools are normally used to, well, get wood. However, because falling trees inflict a lot of damage to anything they fall onto, players have used axes as a way to breach into laboratories, gun stores, and other secure buildings.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: A Zig-Zagged example occurs in regards to zombies, as while the game calls them what they are, and followers will also call them zombies when reporting to you about an enemy they see, NPCs are otherwise prone to randomly picking a different name when referring to zombies in general, calling them goo-pukers, revenants, shamblers, walkers, and so on. However, there is a chance for NPCs to use the word "Zombies" anyway.
• No Zombie Cannibals: The zombies in this game will chase you to the end of the world and maul you, but they never seem to have an appetite for their own kind, though this is justified by the fact that they don't need food. Ferals, however, do need food, but they also won't attack zombies and each other.
  • However, Bright Nights averts this for the playable feral character, as they can kill other ferals in order to satisfy their bloodlust. Doing so, however, has a chance of making zombies hostile to you for several hours.
• Nuclear Mutant: There is a chance that your character will mutate when exposed to radiation, but it's far less common than simply dying. This can be toggled in world generation.
• Nutritional Nightmare: Bright Nights has blinkies (a Bland-Name Product of Twinkies), which give a -4 health modifier penalty when consumed (for comparison, morphine is -3 and heroin is -5). Deep-frying them doubles the health penalty, making them more harmful than smoking meth (which gives -7 to your health modifier).
• Occidental Otaku: The Urban Samurai profession, representing a person excessively obsessed with Japanese culture. They start with a low-quality bokken and Japanese clothes, and they get a quest in Dark Days Ahead to find a real katana.
• Oh, Crap!: NPCs will often scream in fear if they feel like they're in extreme danger or want to run away. They will also tell everybody to run away or take cover if there's an active explosive near them (such as if you threw a grenade at them).
• Once Is Not Enough: Zombies and some other creatures have to be pulped upon death to prevent resurrection, and NPCs are smart enough to do this. Monsters, however, aren't capable of doing so, often causing them to slowly lose the battle of attrition.
• One Bullet Clips: Averted for the most part, as the game keeps track of magazines, clips, and speeloaders. If you want to reload a weapon that uses detachable magazines without actually replacing the magazine, you'll reload slower than when using weapons intended to be loaded with loose rounds, since you have to take out the magazine, load rounds in it, then reinsert it. NPCs also obey the same reloading rules, and while monsters don't reload, the gun-wielding ferals of Bright Nights carry little ammo (far less than what their guns can fit) and robots can easily justify it, so it only becomes apparent with modded monsters. However, the game does not keep track of chambered rounds, so reloading a gun with detachable magazines will proceed at the same speed regardless of whether you had 1 or 0 rounds loaded, and you can't get one more round loaded than your magazine's capacity.
• One-Hit Polykill: In Bright Nights, bullets fired at creatures will penetrate through them, doing reduced damage to the next target, and this continues until the bullet's damage is brought down to zero. Given that zombies tend to group up in hordes, this allows for extremely efficient crowd-clearing, especially with a machine gun.
• One-Man Army: Most characters will have to be this, as many locations are swarmed with anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of monsters, while NPCs tend to be rare to recruit, and often suffer from Artificial Stupidity.
• One Size Fits All: Very much averted, as looted equipment will often not fit, causing you to suffer extra encumbrance until you refit it. If you're abnormally large or small, you'll also have to make equipment of appropriate size, as human clothes won't fit you at all.
• One Stat to Rule Them All:
  • Strength determines your Hit Points, carrying capacity, melee damage, and bashing ability. Although the other attributes are also useful, strength tends to consistently give you the most utility if you focus on melee combat (which eventually start doing more damage than guns, especially in Bright Nights), so you'll usually want to prioritize it for such a build.
  • Speed and move cost are some of the most valuable non-attribute stats to optimize. Speed makes you do every combat action faster, as well as a few non-combat ones (such as crafting), while reduced move cost allows you to kite enemies or simply run away from them.
• One-Word Title: The original game by Whales had this title.
• "Open!" Says Me: One of the ways of dealing with a locked door, if you don't have the prying/lockpicking tools (or they're not usable), is to simply destroy it with a sufficiently damaging weapon.
• Organ Drops: Butchering tends to give logical bounties depending on the carcass you work on. You'll get hide or pelts, bones, meat chunks, meat scraps, fatty tissue, organs like lungs or brains or sweetbread or liver or bone marrow, and sinew, among other things.
  • Non-infected humans (survivors or bandits) will logically drop Human Meat, which counts towards cannibalism.
  • Giant creatures will drop Mutant-tagged meat drops, which can sometimes be used for making Mutagen, but is not entirely safe to eat due to toxins.
  • Undead enemies will drop Tainted-tagged meat drops, which are unsafe to eat (Tainted or Mutant Fat is still safe to process into Biodiesel or Crude Lamp Oil and used as fuel, or rendered into Tallow and used for non-food purposes, Tainted Hides can still be cured and tanned into usable leather, and Tainted Bones are safe to render into Bone Glue or Superglue).
  • Most cyborg enemies will drop mechnical parts, and when butchered, will give up filthy Bionic Modules that must be cleaned, reset, and then packed for sterilization in an autoclave before you can use them. Sometimes all you get are Burnt-out Bionic Modules, which are useless except for breaking down for plastic chunks.
  • Robotic enemies like turrets, searchlights, and robots will drop their damaged chassis, metal pieces (scrap metal, springs and the like), and sometimes Electronic Scrap and batteries. Dismantling their chassis will give more parts but that takes time and might require dedicated tools and a crane to support the heavy chassis.
  • Invertebrates like insects and spiders will drop more insectoid bits like Chitin chunks and strands of Endochitin. The former can be used to make Chitin armor, while the latter is mostly good for milling into Chitin Powder for some crafting recipes. Some bugs like Giant Centipedes will drop very large amounts of Sinew, which is very useful for sewing or spinning into Heavy Duty Thread for crafting. Wasps, Ants, and Bees might drop their stingers, which can be used to make arrow shafts or processed to extract Formic Acid for chemistry. Pregnant (or fertile) bugs can also drop eggs when butchered, which can eventually hatch into larvae (which are a great source of chitin, sinew, and Mutant Fats). You can also use Blood Drawing Kits to extract acidic blood from giant acidic ants to use either for chemistry or making acid bombs.
  • Plant and fungal enemies like the Triffids and Mycus will drop plant and fungal byproducts, with the Triffid fibers being useable as an ingredient for crafting Plant Fibers for sewing and spinning, while the edible Mycus parts will induce mutation into becoming more like them.
• Our Elves Are Different: Even a mostly-realistic game like this has elves. In this case, they're mutated humans with a few plant-like properties.
  "You are the tree under which humankind will shelter during these dark times."
• Our Zombies Are Different: They seem to be of the fast variety, as they move at a deceptively quick pace, and then there is the even faster zombie dog. Also, the Left 4 Dead inspired zombies.
• Overworked Sleep: Suffering from severe Sleep Deprivation will eventually cause you to suffer from microsleeps (already awful normally, but potentially fatal while driving), until it ends with your character properly falling asleep on the spot
• Painful Transformation: When gaining mutations, your character will feel a large amount of pain and often pass out. You can eventually get to enjoy the feel of it
• Painting the Medium: Messages indicating bad things are red, while those for good things are in green. Your slow transformation into glass at the Vitrified Farm, however, uses green text to indicate your progress towards a Non-Standard Game Over, as your mind is being altered so that you see this as positive.
• Paint the Town Red: An intense fight against zombies often results in the entire room getting splattered with blood, due to how messy pulping the bodies can be. It's even more pronounced if you use a messy weapon while pulping.
• Panacea: Panaceus functions as this, curing nearly every negative effect. Bright Nights also allows royal jelly to function as this, though it contains mutagenic toxins.
• Parodies for Dummies:
  • Self-Esteem For Dummies, which trains your Speaking skill. Of course, if you're reading it, that means you consider yourself a dummy, and thus probably have a self-esteem problem.
  • The real books also appear, specifically the ones for chemistry, computers, and business.
• Penny Shaving: The Embezzler (a profession only available in Prison and Island Prison scenarios) was arrested for trying to steal fractions of a cent at a time.
• Permadeath: As usual for a roguelike.
• Picky Eater: A number of starting traits cause you to suffer from allergies to certain food types, causing you to take severe morale penalties for eating them and not be able to benefit from their vitamins. You can also mutate into a herbivore or carnivore, in which case you can't eat the wrong food at all.
• Piñata Enemy:
  • Triffids, at least the rank and file ones, make the ideal neighbours for your fort. They're not that tough, more tame than most enemies (as in, won't immediately charge at you on sight from 5 screens away), and unlike zombies, they leave behind raw vegetable matter that any character can safely eat without needing any preparation whatsoever. Queen triffids, on the other hand...
  • Cop and soldier zombies also consistently hold (damaged) riot gear, armor, and military-grade weapons. They're also a bitch and a half to kill at lower levels because of said armor.
  • Scientist zombies are easy to kill, but yield a few rare and valuable crafting components when they die.
  • Survivor zombies are tougher versions of the shrieker zombie, and drop a wide array of goodies including non-perishable food and survivor gear, which is usually a step up from the average stuff you find off other zombies.
  • Gun-wielding NPCs drop their gun and any ammo (typically 50-100 rounds) they didn't expend. The main issue is that they'll use that same gun against you.
• Pipe Pain: Pipes make for rather decent weapons to start with, and can be easily obtained by smashing metal objects. Standard feral humans will also often wield them in combat. You can also upgrade them into maces, spears, or staves.
• Pistol-Whipping: All guns do a small amount of melee damage, though they suck due to slow swinging speed, low to-hit, and being prone to breaking when used like that.
  • The Krav Maga style has the gimmick of being usable with automatic rifles and pistols (or nearly every gun, in Bright Nights), thus making them suitable in melee combat to finish off an injured foe.
  • Gun-wielding ferals in Bright Nights will try to hit the player with their guns if they run out of ammo or are engaged in melee combat, doing the same damage as a standard zombie.
• Plague Zombie: The zombies are created when a Blob-infected creature of sufficient size dies, so long as the corpse is relatively intact. Since the Blob itself is extremely infectious, however, everybody is infected by it.
• Playable Epilogue: In Bright Nights, Getting the Golden Ending where you throw a mininuke through the dimensional portal will allow you to keep playing the game as normal, free to do whatever you want.
• Player Nudge:
  • Survivor notes occasionally contain hints on certain gameplay mechanics. In Bright Nights, for instance, one note tells the reader that they shouldn't kill prototype cyborgs, but should instead non-lethally disable them (no method is listed, but a EMP weapon can do it), then use an autodoc to take out the implant that controls their body.
  • Bright Nights has a hint on how to win the game via the Military Saboteur profession, only available in the Locked Lab scenario. As it states, in the event of things going wrong, you're supposed to use a mininuke to close a portal experiment. Unfortunately, the lab you spawn in is not the right place. Listening to a radio can also let you pick up a station broadcasted by the location in question, which gets progressively more garbled the farther away from it you are, hinting at how to locate it.
  • Arcana mod includes several notes separate from the usual survivor notes that reference events that happened in the mod's backstory, and accordingly hint at several plot-critical locations with unique items. Early missions for Sofia at the rural church and for The Hermit also function as a Justified Tutorial that introduce the player to some basic concepts of the mod's gameplay and walking you through how to obtain and restore the ritual blade used to become a Paragon of The Veil respectively.
• Point Build System: Pool-based character creation involves a tabletop-style system where you select stats, skills, advantages, and disadvantages out of a pool of points.
• Politically Correct History: An in-universe example is the Ahistorical Reenactor profession, who reenacts the American Revolution with the opposite gender role — the male reenactor is a housewife/camp follower (complete with a dress) while the female one is a soldier.
• Post-Apunkalyptic Armor: With armor being valuable, and the conditions of the Cataclysm making it hard to get proper armor, your armor sets may end up as a wild mix of Improvised Armour, riot gear, industrial/sports safety gear, and modern military armors.
• Post-Apocalyptic Dog: By giving a stray dog food, you can make a cataclysm friend. Or two. Or five.
• Post-Apocalyptic Traffic Jam: abandoned cars and other vehicles litter the streets and roads. Most of them are broken, but they can be repaired if you have the right skills and items. You can also loot them for fuel, parts, and whatever items are laying around in them.
• Posthuman Nudism:
  • A downplayed and justified variation happens with mutations, as many of them outright prevent you from wearing clothes on the affected body parts. Others, meanwhile, either produce lots of warmth (making it hard to wear most clothes outside of winter), or make it encumbering to wear clothes on a certain layer, thus encouraging you to dress lightly. Quite a few of these mutations, in particular, will cause major issues with torso clothes.
  • The Exodii, with their fully robotic bodies, tend to not wear anything. Rubik's humanoid body, in particular, is fully compatible with human clothes and armor, yet he prefers to go naked.
  • Bright Nights has the Elf-A Mutant boss, who lives naked in a forest.
• Poverty Food:
  • Wastebread, made out of bone meal or splintered wood, along with a few unappetizing ingredients (such as pet food). Not very tasty, but it helps when you're low on flour and need to stretch it out. Wasteland Sausages can also be made, where you add similarly unappetizing fillers to your sausages to make your meat stretch out.
  • Mutated animals can be eaten, but the meat is incredibly foul. In Dark Days Ahead, it will eventually poison you, while in Bright Nights, it can make you mutate uncontrollably.
  • Bright Nights has "Shimmer!" brand floor wax, which contains a lot of calories and often comes in large quantities if you find it, but also plays havoc on your health, tastes awful, and gives you a large dose of mutagenic toxins.
• Power Fist: Various unarmed weapons exist, from nail knuckles (chunks of wood with nails hammered through them) to katars. The main benefit comes from the ability to use them with unarmed styles, with the restriction that kicks and throws tend not to benefit from the damage they provide.
• Powerful, but Inaccurate: Bright Nights has feral chainsaw maniacs, which do a lot of damage with their weapon, but have a low hit chance.
• Power Harness: Exo-suits, when activated, give you a considerable boost to strength and speed at the cost of constantly draining the battery. Unlike power armor, they don't block you from wearing normal clothes or conventional armor.
• Power of Trust: The Trust meter is the most important one in your companions, as it determines their ability to trust your judgement and ability as a leader. In particular, a high Trust value allows you to apply mutagens on them.
• Power-Up Food: Since Bright Nights retains stimulants being quite powerful, it's possible to prepare for a difficult fight by drinking several cups of coffee, thus gaining speed and attribute boosts.
• Precautionary Corpse Disposal: Any creature the size of a dog or larger will rise up zombified after some time if its corpse is left unattended (including creatures struck down after zombification). Smashing corpses until 'thoroughly pulped' is the go-to method for preventing this. Methodical butchery or dismemberment will also work, as will (sufficient) burning.
• Pro-Human Transhuman:
  • The Exodii might be a group of extensively modified cyborgs (many only having the brain be organic), but they're firmly against the Blob, and are eager to take recruits who prove themselves. Or so they seem, anyway - the reality is that they're quite willing to paralyse, lobotomize, and enslave any prospective recruit who is a potential liability or blob psycho.
  • Among the mutations, the Pack Hunter mutation of the Wolf line will make you one, as while you still have an animalistic mindset, you do recognize the value of cooperation with humans.
  • In the Arcana mod, any character that crosses the Paragon of The Veil threshold is encouraged to be this, as their patron otherworldly deity is specifically antagonistic towards other extradimensional entities and to the Blob, and gains several spells specifically geared towards dealing with the more esoteric threats you encounter.
• Promoted to Playable: Recruiting an NPC allows you to play as them. While Dark Days Ahead puts limitations on this, Bright Nights allows switching to any party member at any time.
• Psycho Serum: Mutagens are a great way to empower yourself if taken carefully. Side effects, however, include Painful Transformation, a chance for bad mutations (especially at higher levels of genetic instability), a monstrous appearance, and even Transhuman Treachery.
• Pummeling the Corpse: Smashing zombie corpses is necessary, otherwise the enemies will come back to life after a while. As of the Version 0.F Experimentals, even non-undead beings need to be pulped, since everyone is infected with the Blob, which is responsible for zombification.
• Punched Across the Room:
  • The zombie brute, shocker brute, and zombie hulk all have the ability to hit you so hard you go flying. This is obviously quite painful. For some absurd reason, moose in PK's Rebalance mod (in the experimental version) can do this too.
  • On the player side, the Stinger Kick technique of Scorpion Kung Fu (part of Mythical Martial Arts mod in Dark Days Ahead, or part of vanilla in Bright Nights) knocks back enemies 3 tiles back. Since it also has the "Powerful Knockback" tag, the flying enemy will take damage if they slam into any obstacle, and any other enemy hit by them will also take damage.
• Pyromaniac: Subverted and played straight. It's subverted in that there are NPC arsonists that will torch buildings (such as that sweet gun store you were casing), but in-game dialogue reveals that they do it to salvage the rebar for the fledgling post-apocalyptic economy. Played straight in that you can take the Pyromaniac trait, which gives you a morale penalty for not setting fires or standing near them for a while, but gives a morale bonus when you do so or wield an incendiary weapon.
• Quick Draw: Your combat skills determine your ability to draw appropriate weapons from their sheaths/holsters (or similar methods of storage), and you can make fast-draw holsters. With a sufficiently high skill level, it's entirely possible to draw in less than a second.
• Rainbow Pimp Gear: Having to balance encumbrance, protection, storage, and morale can easily result in you wearing completely ridiculous clothing combinations
  • As an example, an endgame character may end up wearing a trenchcoat, nomad gear, thermal shirt, leggings, boots, drop leg pouches, two hip flasks, hand wraps, fingerless leather gloves, a wrist watch, elbow pads, a knit scarf, stylish sunglasses worn under fit-over sunglasses, a cotton hat, a ballistic helmet, a headlamp, a survivor belt, and a MOLLE pack.
  • Fursuits provide full coverage and are rather warm (as any fursuiter can tell you). As such, despite their high encumbrance, players may end up wearing them in order to survive winter or ice labs, even if the idea of fursuiting in the post-apocalypse is hard to take seriously.
  • The whole trope gets particularly ridiculous in Bright Nights:
    • Any item that fits and has less than 10 average encumbrance will not grant you layering penalties. Thus, you can end up wearing a lot of items for armor, doubling up on them, yet suffer no penalties if they give zero encumbrance.
    • Wearing anything fancy will grant you morale buffs, unless you have the Fashion Deficient trait. Since small jewelry does not give any encumbrance or warmth, you can end up wearing a ridiculous number (10 for maximum gain, unless you use Very Fancy jewelry) of cufflinks, (ear)rings, tiaras, medals, dental grills, bracelets, necklaces, and so on. It looks absolutely ridiculous when you visualize it (or, better yet, draw it), and only the limitation of tilesets prevent you from having to stare at such a crime of fashion, but the game considers you to be extremely fancy, so you get a +10 bonus to your morale.
• Raising the Steaks: Most notably, Antlered Horrors (zombie moose, named so for good reason) and Zombears, though essentially anything (formerly) living thing from the size of dogs on up can be infected.
• Ranged Emergency Weapon:
  • Carrying a handgun is a good idea in general, as it can be drawn and aimed quickly, and is handy against monsters that are extremely dangerous in close combat, have bad effects if you hit them with melee weapons (such as shocking you or spraying acid all over the place), or explode upon dying.
  • While a character with the Brawler trait can't shoot a ranged weapon, they're not prohibited from throwing items at enemies, even grenades, making it a good idea to carry a few thrown weapons. They can also use spells, if using mods that allow for them, and any mutations that grant a ranged attack.
• Randomized Transformation: Mutations randomly occur, whether provoked by the player or by events.
• Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: Centipede Kung Fu (either a part of the mainline Mythical Martial Arts mod for Dark Days Ahead, or vanilla in Bright Nights) is all about this - the standard technique is rapid, the critical technique is also rapid with extra damage, and the on-hit buff makes your punches faster. With the proper stats and buffs, it's possible to unleash 4-6 punches in a single second.
• Rasputinian Death: Unless the enemy has a gun or an explosive weapon, you generally tend to die pretty slowly as you get whittled down by dozens of hits, with the damage accumulating and your limbs breaking, until you finally stop struggling.
• Rat King: Rat Kings are enemies in caves. They can inflict the player with a disease called "Ratting" which reduces stats, can cause vomiting, or, in especially bad cases, cause the player to mutate slowly into a rat.
• Razor Floss: Bright Nights has the Monofilament Whip CBM, which allows the player to extend a powerful whip from their arm.
• Recoil Boost: Vehicles can be slowed or even pushed around by recoil in Bright Nights, the intensity of which can be adjusted in options. During the April Fools' Day update when it was first added, it was intentionally exaggerated so that firing a machinegun while sitting in a rolling chair would send you careening down the street, with the feature being turned back down to more sensible levels in subsequent nightlies. At its default setting it's only really a concern when flying a plane, as enough sustained recoil can slow the vehicle down, and if you're flying close to stall speed...
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: The Zombie Necromancer has glowing red eyes.
• Reduced to Ratburgers:
  • Possible in the older versions, but much less viable nowadays. Rats only give a few scraps of meat that won't be enough to sustain a character for a day. Insects and other mutated creatures have toxic flesh that can be eaten safely in small amounts, but will cause problems if you depend mostly on it (poisoning in Dark Days Ahead, random mutation in Bright Nights).
  • Desperate survivors can also try to make wastebread, which includes bone meal/splintered wood, and also allows for a few other nasty ingredients to be put in. It tastes bad, but it's easier to make than normal bread.
  • Bright Nights allows you to upturn boulders to look for various mundane, unmutated bugs. They don't provide much nutrition, and are disgusting to eat raw, but frying them in oil makes them pretty palatable.
• Reforged into a Minion: A semi-consensual variant can occur with the player as the victim, as consuming marloss food gives them a desire to consume the other two foods. Once this is done, the player will become a local guide of the Mycus, with their mind being incorporated into the Hive Mind, while their body starts mutating to fit the needs of the Mycus.
• Regenerating Health:
  • You have an extremely weak version of this, somewhat sped up by sleeping, but it's insignifcant unless you use bandages and disinfectant to treat your wounds. The Rapid Metabolism and Extreme Metabolism mutations, however, will noticeably speed up your healing, with the latter allowing you to quickly convert calories to HP. The Repair Nanobots bionic will also spend your calories and bionic power in exchange for restoring 1 HP per minute.
  • The Isolation Protocol mod for Dark Days Ahead makes your health regenerate over the next few minutes when you're away from any hostiles, with your pain and bleeding also rapidly reducing. This is done to both shift the game towards a more classic roguelike structure, and to compensate for the fact that you can only spend a few hours on each level before monsters spawn in to attack you.
• Relationship Values: Three stats are tracked for your relationships with NPCs:
  • The Trust meter determines their ability to trust your judgement, your words, and your ability to act in their best interests. It's generally raised by completing missions and having them in your party. Being high and wielding a weapon tend to reduce it.
  • The Value meter determines how much they personally care about you. Similar to Trust, it's raised by completing missions and having them as your companions.
  • The Fear meter determines how powerful the NPC perceives you as, and how much they respect you, and it's generally improved by being visibly dangerous (high strength, armor, weapons, no injuries). A low Fear value can make them attack you when they otherwise wouldn't, though an excessively high value can cause them to flee from you.
• The Remnant: With static Non Player Characters turned on, you can find representatives of what's left of the US government, which is stated to be based out of the US Navy's 2nd Fleet^note Responsible for the Atlantic from the North Pole to the Carribean, and from the US East Coast to the middle of the Atlantic, which has been expanded to include a large number of civilian vessels and a few ships from other NATO nations.
• Removed Achilles' Heel: Many weapons and styles in Bright Nights lack defensive techniques, making you somewhat of a Glass Cannon. A shield, however, allows you to block attacks while worn, negating such a weakness.
• Rescue Equipment Attack: Fire axes, rescue axes, and halligan bars all make for great weapons, and the former two are also wielded by some feral axemen.
• Returning War Vet: Two of the professions include the War Veteran and the Old Veteran. The former compensates for their lacking gear by retaining all of their military skills, while the latter is rustier, but has a chest rig and an M1A1 rifle.
• Reviving Enemy: Zombies in general. Butcher the corpse, smash it, or simply kill it so hard there's no corpse left. This also applies to almost any creature given everything is infected by the Blob..
• Rewarding Vandalism: Destroying an object will leave behind its components, which can often be used as crafting materials or used as-is. It's slightly downplayed in that you get better returns on dismantling objects rather than just Smashing them, for example, certain parts of a fridge will never survive the player taking a crowbar and giving it a few good whacks, and glass or ceramic objects will shatter when you start smashing things.
• Road Rage: One map special is Road Mayhem, described as a car crash that erupted into violence. If you check it out, you'll find multiple human corpses with casings nearby.
• Robbing the Dead: Of course. Most of your early-game (and mid-game, and late-game...) strategy will be taking everything from nearby houses and their (un)dead occupants.
• Robinsonade: The Innawoods mod throws you into Wild Wilderness with almost no signs of human civilization (with the main ones being trash and (un)dead humans that you can occasionally find), forcing you to survive in a scenario where you can't just scavenge for what you need.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Combat against gun-toting NPCs in Bright Nights has this dynamic, as both the player and the NPC are quite fast and very accurate, with the guns themselves doing a lot of damage that can't normally be dodged or blocked, but become incapacitated by pain after getting shot a few times (though, unlike NPCs, the player can cheat with painkillers or mutations that make you ignore pain). Unless you have really good armor, it thus comes down to who shoots first.
• Room Full of Zombies: A common occurence. The Refugee Center, in particular, has the backroom sealed due to a zombie outbreak, and one of the early quests you receive tasks you with killing all the zombies in there.
• Rule of Fun: The main design philosophy of Bright Nights. Yes, it may not make sense that you can easily wade into a horde and come out unharmed, or pilot helicopters with your only prior experience being that of driving a car, but these Acceptable Breaks from Reality are the point of the fork.
• Safecracking: Safes are a common sight in some location, and if you want to get the loot, you'll have to crack them. You can use the normal slow method with a stethoscope (or, in Bright Nights, very good hearing or a sufficiently high Mechanics skill) if you got an hour or two to spare (or possibly half a day in Dark Days Ahead, if you lack the proficiency), smash it open with a bashing weapon (which can destroy the contents), apply an acetylene torch to destroy it, or, in Bright Nights, pry it open with a halligan bar if you don't mind the risk of jamming the lock.
• Sand Worm: The giant worm, Graboid, dark wyrm, and yugg. Luckily they cannot break concrete.
• Savage Wolves:
  • Wolves are fast, hit hard, and come in packs. They're one of the worst non-zombie enemies, at least in the beginning. It gets even worse when you encounter their zombified friends.
  • The Bright Nights version of the Lupine mutation line comes with the Killer Drive trait (in fact, it's the only way to obtain the trait after game start), which gives you an intense bloodlust akin to that of a serial killer, and prevents you from suffering guilt for killing.
• "Save the World" Climax: Bright Nights escalates into this if you win the game. Starting off with the simple goal of surviving, you eventually end up stumbling upon the central lab that started it all. After finding the dimensional portal, you either sacrifice yourself by going through the portal and closing it on the side, or throw a mininuke through it. This saves humanity in the long run, and makes it viable to actually rebuild civilization.
• Scavenger World: You'd be hard pressed to find a vehicle that isn't severely rusted or beat up (let alone a working one). Many components are more easy to retrieve from broken vehicles or appliances than crafted from scrap, so in either case the player character tends to invoke this a bit.
• Schizo Tech:
  • Exodii equipment is a chaotic mix of whatever they manage to scavenge from the dimensions they pass through. While advanced cybernetics are a carefully guarded resource, their preferred weapons hover around World War II-era technology due to ease of maintenance.
  • The majority of technology of Bright Nights corresponds to the present day, and most guns you can find are the ones that exist in real life. At the same time, you have sci-fi technologies like autonomous robots (with eyebots and kamikaze manhacks appearing to take the place of the remote-controlled drones increasingly common in modern warfare), cloning vats that can create an adult organism in a few days, teleportation, energy weapons (from low-powered laser pistols to plasma guns that act like incendiary grenade launchers), Mini Mechas, power armor and exo-suits, cybernetics that can turn somebody into a Super-Soldier, practical railguns, caseless weapons, 3D printers that can create weapons-grade carbon fiber that is superior to steel, medicines that can treat wounds instantly, Auto Docs, dimensional travel, Bio-Augmentation via mutagens, and more. The caveat is that sci-fi tech tends to be expensive, and some of it is also kept secret from the public, which is why most people stick to real-life technologies.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • That marloss food that has high nutrition, quench, and fun values? Not only does it tank your health, it's also addictive and helps spread the Mycus around. The trait given from it also notes that you have strong desires for the other marloss foods, which can lead to a nasty surprise, as doing so will make you part of the Mycus, possibly leading you down an undesirable mutation path that you can't escape from.
  • If you try to go up/down a Z level, and are told that it got really hot halfway down, with the game asking if you want to go back, that's because there's lava or a fire on the other side. Continuing will probably lead to a swift death.
• Science Fantasy: The game has Powered Armor, robots, Mini Mechas and bionics, and they all co-exist with several supernatural entities, such as the strange happenings in the mines and the reality disruption caused by the Blob. Magiclysm adds additional fantasy elements with magic and fantasy races having existed for thousands of years. Bright Nights, meanwhile, has more sci-fi elements, with things like energy weapons having already been understood and put into military use, even if many of them aren't something a normal person is likely to encounter in person.
• Sci-Fi Kitchen Sink: You have cybernetics, zombies, aliens and Powered Armor all in the same game.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: What you can find in certain labs and mines. You know, in case all the zombies and other horrors infesting the land aren't enough for you.
• Secret A.I. Moves: NPCs can mug the player, but the player can't mug NPCs.
• Self-Made Superpowers:
  • Mutagens can be made by a player who is highly skilled at chemistry, avoiding the unreliability of looting labs for mutagen.
  • Bright Nights has the Elf-A Mutant, who is implied to have transformed themselves into the being they are now, as they drop the book that has the recipe for the Elf-A mutagen and serum.
• Self-Surgery: CBM installation generally involves doing so, albeit typically using an Auto-Doc (programmed by you) and anesthetics. There's still a decent chance for the surgery to go terribly wrong, however.
• Serial Killer: The Death Row Convict profession is stated to have been a serial killer before the Cataclysm. Now that the Cataclysm has come, they're unleashed onto the world once again.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook:
  • Monsters from different 'factions' will fight each other. Exploiting this is critical to surviving easily. Zombie horde on your ass? Lure them to that wasp hive you found earlier and let the wasps do your dirty work. Found a triffid grove? Lure a triffid army to the nearby town and watch them go on a rampage and wipe out the zombies. Low on ammo in a science lab? Let the mutants out and hide in a closet while they fight it out with the zombies.
  • Many items and abilities let you change monster factions to better exploit this:
    • You can find strange artifacts inside temples that will turn any nearby monster into a temporary ally.
    • EMP and scrambler grenades will mess with a robot's IFF system, causing them to briefly defend you against other threats.
    • Zombie pheromones in Bright Nights, which turn nearby zeds friendly for a handful of turns, and cause them to attack enemies. Can buy you a lot of time and is the primary reason you raise cooking to 3.
    • Psions, especially Telepaths, in the Mind over Matter mod can turn living creatures into allies, so can Vampires in Xedra Evolved, and wizards in the Magiclysm Mod.
    • Because in this game bullets know no friends, with some footwork you can get a hostile turret to shoot anything standing between you and the turret. This is as risky as it sounds, but it works and will eventually cause the turret to run out of ammo.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: If an NPC feels like the danger they're facing is overwhelming (such as if they're heavily injured and have a horde of zombies descending onto them), they will try to flee, complete with either an Oh, Crap! response or telling their allies to run as well.
• Shed Armor, Gain Speed: Because most types of encumbrance will reduce your speed (movement, aiming, melee attacks, or a combination of these), anybody who wants to be as fast as possible will have to go unarmored.
• Shields Are Useless: Although shields are very useful in melee combat and against primitive weapons, wooden shields offer little protection against gunfire, with FMJ bullets easily tearing through them, while bucklers often fail to provide protection. Ballistic and metal shields are capable of protecting you against bullets, but they greatly encumber your arm and hand, which makes it difficult for you to hit anything and causes increased stamina loss in melee combat. The carbon fiber shield is the only full aversion, as it can protect you from handgun bullets and doesn't encumber you much, but it's rather difficult to acquire.
• Shipwreck Start: The Helicopter Crash scenario starts you off heavily injured and alone in the wilderness, having crawled out of the wreckage.
• Shock and Awe: The shocker zombie and shocker brute. A middle game weapon is a taser/stun gun which isn't that useful against zombies.
• Shoot Out the Lock: An unusual variant appears due to game limitations - rather than destroying the lock, you're actually destroying the entire door. Shotguns are good for this due to their high damage (especially in Bright Nights), while .50 BMG rifles are one of the few ways to get past metal doors.
• Shopping Cart of Homelessness: The Bright Nights-exclusive Dumpster Diver starts out with a shopping cart.
• Shovel Strike:
  • Entrenching tools only make for mediocre melee weapons in Dark Days Ahead, but Bright Nights actually makes them pretty good as clubs.
  • Similarly, full-sized metal shovels are pretty bad in Dark Days Ahead, but in Bright Nights, they're very powerful for an improvised weapon, and you can easily use to put the undead back where they belong.
• Shoplift and Die:
  • Don't barge into banks or pawn shops at the earliest opportunity. An alarm will sound, drawing the attention of every zombie in a two mile radius. If that didn't kill you, an eyebot will shortly appear to take your picture. If it succeeds, a copbot will follow to tase you to death. Fortunately, the zombies are also vulnerable to this trope.
  • Stealing from your fellow survivors will eventually make any witnesses attack you if you refuse to give back the items. Justified due to the fact that theft can be a matter of life and death in the post-apocalypse, and with there being no law enforcement, your victims are forced to take justice into their own hands.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Averted, as even shot shells will have a better range than pistols and some SMGs. Played straight with birdshot rounds in Bright Nights, however, as they shoot in a cone 8 tiles long.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Powerful, especially in Bright Nights, but also among the noisiest weapons. Still usable in a pinch if you run like hell afterward, or if you intend to clear out every hostile in the area.
• Shout-Out:
  • Several zombie types are based on Left 4 Dead: grabbers, boomers, smokers, spitters, and hulks (tanks).
  • The ethanol burner, which allows you to fuel your bionics with booze, references Futurama.
  • One Defense mode variant, which has you defending a bar from zeds, is based on and named after Shaun of the Dead.
  • To The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    • The description of the towel says: "Any person who can hitch the length and breadth of the apocalypse, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a force to be reckoned with."
    • One of the books is the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Cataclysm, which has the words "DON'T PANIC" written on the front cover.
    • One of the professions is the Hitchhiker, who wears a bathrobe and has the aforementioned towel and guide.
  • While exploring, one can stumble on a Triffid grove.
  • In some labs, you have the option to trigger a Resonance Cascade.
  • There are also various shout outs to Half-Life 2, Fallout, Dawn of the Dead (1978), Deus Ex, Doom, Mad Max, Dune, RIFT, I Am Legend, and Tremors.
  • The description of the pickaxe ends with "Strike the earth!". Vertical planes, while simply "levels" in game, are often called "Z-levels" in the official forums. Crafting (specially drug and weapons crafting) is sometimes referred to as !!SCIENCE!!. The "A Shadow?" enemy has a description that ends with "Now you will know why you fear the night". And Urist is an eligible name for random NPCs.
  • A cookbook for survivors looking to emulate the zombies is called "To Serve Man".
  • Mines occasionally end in a spiral cavern filled with human-faced snails and twisted mutants, a rift that forces you to approach it and summons freakishly elongated creatures, or a friendly dog... that turns into a tentacled horror.
  • Many of the official mods add even more references, especially in experimental builds. The Animatronic Monsters; DeadLeaves' Fictional Guns is outright focused on referencing fictional firearms; the Arcana and Magic Items mod references everything from the Magnum Opus to Strife; the Mythological Replicas mod focuses on Norse Mythology; and so on.
  • Talking dolls have a small chance of being creepy, which changes the messages when you activate them. Among these messages are references to Shin Megami Tensei ("Die for me!") and Jonathan Coulton's Trope Namer for Creepy Doll ("Do you really need that much honey?").
  • The Debug menu includes an infamous rant regarding a journalist who used cheats to win Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.
  Debug functions - Using these will cheat not only the game, but yourself. You won't grow. You won't improve. Taking this shortcut will gain you nothing. Your victory will be hollow. Nothing will be risked and nothing will be gained.
  • The description of the Bright Nights-exclusive MK 23 MOD 0 pistol says that someone could probably take out a nuclear equipped walking tank with this in their holster.
  • The Aftershock mod includes a Skull Gun bionic, which implants a .40 S&W single-shot pistol in your head.
  • Bright Nights has the Infolink bionic (which acts as a communicator among other things), explicitly stated on Github to be inspired by Deus Ex
  • Bright Nights allows you to retool a chainsaw into a combat one. Judging by the fact that it becomes capable of parrying and counts as a two-handed sword, your character apparently made a chainsword.
  • To Star Wars:
    • One article of clothing is a Jedi cloak.
    • The Mythical Martial Arts mod has the Shii-Cho form of lightsaber combat, adapted for use with normal swords (which makes it a recursive adaptation, as Shii-Cho is based on conventional swordsmanship).
    • If you possess a mininuke and an NPC asks why they should give you an item or join your party, you can respond with "Because I'm holding a thermal detonator!"
  • The Lonesome Drifter profession in Bright Nights is a reference to Columbus of Zombieland as a person with a double-barreled shotgun and a set of rules. They also have Twinkies (or, rather, Blinkies) in their inventory, referencing Tallahassee's obsession with them.
  • The description of the Veteran Bandit profession mentions how the first days of the Cataclysm were a white line nightmare as people started looting and killing each other.
  • The description of the Wasteland Ranger profession states that if it's hostile, you kill it.
  • The Archaeologist profession references Indiana Jones, as the description says that they were going to a temple on a clue from their dead grandfather's journal, their clothes include a leather jacket, fedora, and messenger bag, and their weapons consist of a revolver (a modern one, unfortunately) and a bullwhip.
  • The Bright Nights-exclusive Bionic Police Officer profession states, after being mortally wounded in the line of duty, you were resurrected as part of the Cybercop program. To further the reference, they have a machine pistol (not a Beretta 93R, unfortunately) and a full helmet, and their bionics include full-body alloy plating and a targeting system.
  • One variant of the crime novel in Dark Days Ahead is a novelization of Grand Theft Auto V.
  • Some of the creatures you may encounter include mi-go and shoggoths. To make matters more confusing, a newspaper article confirms that H. P. Lovecraft still existed in the game's universe, and he still wrote about the mi-go.
  • A flyer advertising an industrial exoskeleton calls it Ripley-9k.
  • The Mythical Martial Arts has martial disciplines as styles, originating from the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition supplement Tome of Battle — The Book of Nine Swords.
  • A hostile NPC targeting you may say "Is this Reno? Because I need to watch you die!"
  • An NPC trying to patch themselves up will try to say "I ain't got time to bleed", although they will suddenly stop after realizing that they're bleeding too much.
  • One of the professions is Road Warrior, available in scenarios taking place a few months after the Cataclysm. They're basically Mad Max, as they ride around in a Wasteland Interceptor, have an Australian cattle dog as their pet, carry a Sawed-Off Shotgun in a holster, and wear leather pants and an armored leather jacket.
  • The Bright Nights-exclusive Mortician profession mentions in its description that there is no more room in hell, which is why you're forced to put down bodies instead of burying them.
• Shown Their Work:
  • Temperature affects the player's body parts individually and uniquely (a head that gets too hot results in a pounding headache, for example). When the player's torso gets too cold, the game will advise them that maybe they should remove some layers. This may not make sense until one realizes it is characteristic of severe hypothermia for people to remove their clothes, speeding up heat loss.
  • In the same vein, most food items found in the open during periods of cold weather will be frozen solid, especially liquids, making them unable to be consumed unless defrosted. However, alcoholic beverages will only be "cold" - chilly but still liquid and drinkable. This is because alcohol has a noticeably lower freezing point than water, with beers of higher alcohol content able to survive up to -3º Celsius (27º Fahrenheit), pure ethanol having a freezing point of -114º Celsius (-173º Fahrenheit).
• Smoking Is Not Cool: Tobacco is extremely addictive, with withdrawal giving you significant morale penalties, and bad for your health. Cigarettes also only provide a small morale boost, while cigars are pretty rare.
• Sinister Shiv: You can make shivs out of glass shards (by wrapping some soft material around the shard to use as a handle) or bones (by hammering them with, say, a rock), and Bright Nights also allows you to wrap material around a piece of mi-go resin to use as a surprisingly sharp shiv. All of them are rather fragile and suffer from lackluster to-hit, but they can make for a decent improvised tool. Most prisoners will also start with a glass shiv.
• Sinister Switchblade: Several criminal professions will start with switchblades as their melee weapons.
• Skip the Anesthetic: Being unable to feel pain (such as from the Deadened mutation) allows you to install bionics without anesthesia, although the message for doing so notes that the surgery is rather boring.
• Sleazy Politician: Implied by the Career Politician profession starting off with the Accomplished Liar trait.
• Slice-and-Dice Swordsmanship: Bladed melee weapons can only ever do cutting or piercing damage, even if they're realistically intended to do both types of damage. Thus, you can only thrust with most knives, most non-fencing swords only slash, and halberds and fire axes can only chop. Making things weirder, several of the books pertaining to the Cutting Weapons skill are about knife-fighting, even though you typically use Piercing Weapons with knives.
• Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism: Animal-related mutations can take you all the way down to Civilized Animal, depending on how many mutations you have and whether you crossed the threshold.
• Sliding Scale of Undead Regeneration: Type IV, healing and no rotting. The Zombies don't rot, so even after several years of game time, you can just travel to a new city and find it full of fresh new undead to kill. And once you kill them, you need to further damage the corpse, or they will just keep coming back.
• Smart People Know Latin: The Priest's Diary, written in Latin, requires a whopping 15 intelligence to read without difficulty. For comparison, most lab texts, which pertain to secret technology and demand extremely high skill levels to read them in the first place, only demand a 13 in intelligence.
• Snake People: Serpent is a mutation category unique to Bright Nights that revolves around becoming more serpentine, most notably developing a tail in place of legs. While lacking DDA's work in progress limb mechanics, it's still handled fairly with the same consistency that wings and tails are handled using the older body mechanics, in that it locks you out of wearing most leg and foot wear except items that are appropriate for a character whose legs have been replaced by a long tail. It even goes beyond the normal restrictions of most mutations and prevents wearing overside or resized gear that isn't specifically compatible with snake tails, such as skirts or purpose-made tail stockings.
• Sniper Pistol: Normally, handguns have a range of 14-16 tiles due to using a pistol caliber. However, handguns chambered in rifle calibers are very long-ranged.
  • The Magnum Research BFR, due to its use of the .45-70 caliber, has a range of 50 tiles.
  • Bright Nights has the L2037 Backup in the Exotic Ammo Types mod, which is a revolver chambered in 5.56x45mm, thus inheriting the caliber's range of 36 tiles.
  • Bright Nights, in vanilla, has the RM99 Revolver and the RM103A Automagnum. Due to using the 8x40mm Caseless caliber, they have a range of 42 tiles, making them pretty long-ranged as handguns.
• The Sociopath: The Psychopath/Uncaring trait, which is considered beneficial due to removing guilt for killing innocent NPCs and certain monsters, and allowing you to eat human flesh without morale loss.
• Socketed Equipment: One advantage to using a gun is all the nice upgrades you can give them.
• Sock It to Them: If you're really desperate, you can put a rock in a sock as an improvised weapon. It's as bad of a weapon as you'd expect, and you might be better off using the rock on its own.
• Some Dexterity Required: Vehicle operation is turn-based, with you setting the vehicle's target speed and what direction it should go in, then passing turns while your character drives the car. This can be rather awkward, and will trip up everybody used to real-time vehicle operation in other games.
• Son of an Ape: The Sapiovore mutation, which makes you okay with eating humans, refers to humans as hairless apes.
• Soul Eating: In Bright Nights, if you're Spiritual and are also a Sapiovore or a Cannibal + Psychopath, your messages for eating human flesh note that you also devour the human's spirit, granting you a large bonus to morale.
• Space Compression: The Massachusetts mod has real-life settlements, but they're significantly smaller than the real ones. The distance between them, however, is unaltered, which can result in you having to drive for hours in order to find a town.
• Speed Blitz: Eskrima is the fastest of the game's martial arts, allowing a proficient player to absolutely obliterate most basic enemy types with a large variety of Improvised Weapons (basically anything remotely knife- or club-shaped). Though its low base damage means eskrima's effectiveness falls off fast against armor; one would be lucky to do even Scratch Damage to a Heavily Armored Mook.
• Spy Speak: One of the backstories for random NPCs has them talk about how receiving an email from Pat Dionne, an old friend of theirs who they haven't met in a very long time, with the email talking about a Dungeons & Dragons game they never had. It turns out to be a hidden message talking about how Dionne's children are being held hostage in order to force them to research the Blob, with the recipient being told to flee for safety because the Blob has escaped.
• Square-Cube Law: The enormous, mutated flying insects infesting the cataclysm, as noted in the creature description for the cow-sized 'frigate fly', are bizarrely capable of staying airborne despite their proportionally massive weight. Sure enough, their yields from butchery include a number of large gas sacs that definitely weren't part of the pre-mutation anatomy.
• Stance System: Combat styles can be switched at any moment, letting you benefit from different bonuses, weapons, and techniques as appropriate.
• Static Stun Gun: The stun gun/taser, which temporarily stuns any enemy struck by it. Unlike other melee weapons, it's used from the inventory instead of being wielded, thus allowing you to use it together with another weapon.
• Steel Eardrums: Averted, as loud sounds can temporarily deafen you. While gunfire and explosions are the standard cause, a cacophony of bashing and roofs collapsing can also damage your hearing.
• Stock Animal Diet: Mouse mutagen (not to be confused with rat mutagen) is made with regular mutagen and cheese. You can also use candy (the "main attraction" to being a mouse mutant is being able to eat as much junk food as you like with no health penalty), but cheese was also included as an alternative ingredient specifically due to this trope, according to the comments in the data files.
  fun fact: mice don't like cheese as much as sugar! we include it in the recipe because most people correlate the two, and as a fun poke at it
• The Straight and Arrow Path: While firearms are the easiest ranged weapon to use, bows and crossbows are perfectly viable for stealthy players or those who can't consistently procure ammo. While each shot in Dark Days Ahead does little damage, they have an x10 critical damage multiplier, often resulting in a One-Hit Kill if you land a crit. In Bright Nights, meanwhile, arrows and bolts do as much damage as firearms, and the repeating crossbow can easily serve as a substitute to a gun.
• Strong Enemies, Low Rewards: Some of the toughest enemies in the game (such as shoggoths) are extradimensional invaders, who thus only drop their corpse (or nothing) upon dying, which usually doesn't even produce edible meat when butchered. Zombie loot drops also don't improve with their evolution, and hulks actually have less clothing than normal zombies, as they're too large to fit normal clothes. Unlike most examples of the trope, however, this reflects realism rather than being a way to deter the player from fighting them. That being said, some zombie variants, primarily in the 'military' line, can drop good and rare items when killed or act as Beef Gates in zones with highly valuable items such as military bunkers and bases.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Houses are remarkably flammable. Gas stations and labs, strangely, even more so.
• Subsystem Damage: Torso, head, and left and right arms and legs. Hits to the former two may kill you (and sometimes blind you), while damage to the latter will make you clumsier or slower. If any extremity is damaged below 0, it's broken and requires a splint and lots of downtime (or special machines in hospitals) to fix.
• Suffer the Slings:
  • They are very easy to craft; ammunition is everywhere (mash rocks). Standard pebbles are weak, but as your character becomes more skilled a greenie can be downed in as low as 3-4 shots with very little noise to attract attention. Then you craft metal bearings, or collect marbles and metal RPG Dice. Because the Sling uses the Throwing skill, this can also affect your skill and accuracy in tossing grenades (or other explosives) and other throwing weapons.
  • Alternatives in the same vein are the Slingshot (which uses the Archery skill instead and can fit into Holsters and clip onto belt loops) and the Staff Sling (which can fire full-sized rocks and even explosives modified to be sling-friendly if you upgrade the sling cradle).
• Super-Persistent Predator: The relentless hulk, which shows up in the Hunted scenario. It's a unique zombie hulk that always knows where you are, but thankfully lacks the vanilla hulk's speed.
• Superpower Russian Roulette: Mutation in a nutshell. Sprout super-sensitive cat ears and a fluffy tail, develop digestive problems, gain the ability to see the infrared spectrum, become a freakishly huge hulk that can't fit in a car but can benchpress one, degenerate into a Blob Monster... it's an endless series of surprises.
• Super Weapon, Average Joe: The Mall Ninja in Bright Nights bought lots of gear, but never trained with any of it. Fortunately, they chose their equipment surprisingly well for a mall ninja, as it includes military clothes and armor, a customized assault rifle, a genuine katana (as befits a mall ninja), night vision goggles, a halligan bar, various survival gear (including a premium survival kit), and some other stuff. All of that allows you to safely and easily grow from a wannabe survivalist to a real survivalist.
• Surplus Damage Bonus: Doing a lot of damage to an enemy can pulp the corpse instantly, preventing any resurrection from taking place. Inverted if you want to butcher the body, however, as this will reduce the yield.
• Survivalist Stash: What you can find in a house's basement, if you're lucky. And of course, you can make your own stash, and loot the stashes of your previously deceased characters!
• Swamps Are Evil:
  "Swamp - AVOID THESE. IT IS AN INSECT INFESTED HELL WITH ABSOLUTELY NOTHING OF VALUE"

  /vg/'s Cataclysm FAQ on swamps
  • They are however a great source of salt water for cooking. Just watch out for the giant dragonflies. If you have the Dinosaurs mod on, dinosaurs can spawn in swamps in addition to wildlife field offices.
• Sweet Tooth: One of the traits available at character creation, increasing the morale you gain from junk food. It's also a mutation available in the Insect and Mouse line, and the latter also has a stronger version of the trait that improves the morale gain even further.
• Sword Cane: Sword canes are somewhat uncommon, but can serve as a decent fencing weapon. They're noticeably easier to find than other swords, too
• Take Cover!: Bright Nights has a proper cover mechanic - an object that doesn't block your view has a chance of getting hit (thus reducing damage) when a projectile passes through it, unless the attacker is standing within one tile of it.
• Take That!:
  • In earlier versions, Dianetics, a religious text of Scientology, was the only religious book in the game to reduce your morale when read.
  • Bright Nights has the infamous MRE Cheese Omelette entry. The entry wastes no time calling it the Vomelette and insulting it, and it gives -12 morale when consumed, comparable to some of the more foul-tasting foods in the game.
• Tanks, but No Tanks: Bright Nights averts this trope, but one survivor note is written by a person who is tired of their IFV being mistaken for a tank:
  "Next person to call this infantry fighting vehicle a 'tank' is walking home."
• Technically Living Zombie: Ferals, which are humans that weren't killed by the Blob, but were driven homicidally insane by it. Even the baseline ferals are smart enough to talk, throw rocks, and open doors, and more dangerous variants are even capable of using guns. Ferals are also allied with the zombies, and will work together to bring down the survivors.
  • Bright Nights, in particular, makes it possible to play as a feral, in which case you're just as smart as non-feral survivors.
• Technology Marches On: Interestingly, the game being constantly updated means that this is invoked in a meta way, as the developers try to keep up with the times.
  • While soldiers used to have the Beretta M9 as their standard pistol, they now use the SIG Sauer M17 pistol.
  • Phones were limited to basic cellphones that are only useful as improvised flashlights and were a bit rare, but now smartphones are ubiquitous, which can be used to take photos, play games, and listen to music, with most professions starting with one.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Dealing far more damage than the total HP of the victim will cause it to turn into a big puddle of blood instead of a corpse, which denies you of any drops. Against zombies, this is a viable alternative to smashing or butchering the corpse.
• The Wall Around the World: The Bordered scenario has you start out within an area that had a tall, thick stone wall form around it. It's not impossible to breach through the wall, but gathering all the tools will take quite a while.
• Throwing the Distraction: Monsters that track sound will follow the source of said sounds (usually your footsteps). Talking dolls, active radios, firecrackers; All of them make excellent decoys, although rocks can work in a pinch if you can reliably hit a window far away.
• Title Drop: One flyer from the CDC has a link to www.cdc.gov/cdda-advisory (a non-existent page), with CDDA standing for "Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead".
• Token Good Teammate: Bright Nights has the Elf-A Mutant, who is the only mutant that isn't hostile to the player. For this reason, killing them will cause you to suffer guilt-related morale penalties.
• Tomato in the Mirror: In Dark Days Ahead, the Player Character is a blob psycho (meaning that their Blob infection has affected their mind without turning them feral), which explains the way that players often act extremely reckless, violent, and callous.
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • Rocket launchers are the most powerful man-portable weapons, with a single rocket being capable of wiping out a horde or putting out a lot of hurt on one big enemy. However, rockets are extremely rare to find even in military locations, making it hard to justify wasting a rocket on enemies when a grenade launcher works just as well. The crude rocket launcher is a downplayed example, however, as its rockets can be crafted (with the explosive warhead even accepting smokeless gunpowder, unlike other explosive weapons), with the main hurdle being the production of rocket candy or improvised rocket fuel.
  • The tank guns and the howitzer all do damage in the thousands, ensuring that whatever you hit will die, and have access to ammo types that create large explosions (the howitzer can even use mininuke shells). However, ammo is extremely rare, while crafting it demands an absurd amount of gunpowder and explosives.
• Too Dumb to Live: In Dark Days Ahead, people affected with Blob Psychosis have weakened self-preservation instincts, which is why the civilian monsters you find in the first days of the game's start are prone to charging at every zombie, getting themselves stuck while running away, or ignoring obvious dangers. Since the player character is also suffering from the psychosis, it justifies the way that players often tend to engage in extremely risky actions.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Most of the skill books you can find are decidedly not combat-related. But then there's the Spetsnaz Knife Techniques book...
  • The player will start off struggling to kill one zombie. As you level up, and as you as a player get smarter figuring out better and more efficient tactics, your character will be able to take on larger and larger hordes or deadlier foes.
  • Zombies will also take levels in badass as you play, transforming into nastier types. The zombie master has a skill that turns one zombie into a nastier version of itself.
• Too Kinky to Torture: While the Masochist trait is a more realistic depiction (as being in too much pain will negate the morale bonus), the Pain Junkie and Cenobite mutations in the Medical tree play this completely straight. The latter, in particular, gives you no cap on how much morale you can gain from pain.
• To Serve Man:
  • The Sapiovore mutation will make you be perfectly okay with eating humans, if you weren't a cannibal already, since you're no longer human by the time you get the mutation.
  • Can be inverted by a human survivor butchering and eating extradimensional beings. Triffids and fungaloids, in particular, can be cooked into tasty vegan-friendly food.
  • While most characters will be disgusted by the thought of eating demihumans due to how human-like they are, those with Strict Humanitarian will be fine with it (and will still detest true cannibalism).
• Totally Not a Werewolf: A random NPC backstory has them talk about getting into a fight with a demon. Judging by the description, however, they actually fought a mi-go, which is an alien from another dimension.
• Too Upset to Create: If morale gets too far in the negatives, you are locked out of crafting or repairing items until you get it back up.
• Tragic Monster: You may end up becoming one by crossing a mutation threshold, as some post-threshold mutations warp your mindset into that of a monster, and it's heavily implied that you don't consider yourself a human in any case. You do keep control over your own actions, and aren't forbidden from interacting peacefully with NPCs, but your interactions with humans may suffer greatly.
  • It's particularly bad with the Mycus mutations, which strip away your individuality and assimilates you into the Hive Mind. While you don't lose personality-related traits, and can still be affected by the Morale system, you no longer consider yourself an individual.
• Transhuman Treachery: Go far enough into the predation-related mutations, and your character will eventually stop counting themselves as part of humanity, nor will they care about it, to the point that they suffer no issues with murdering and eating humans. This is justified by the mutations altering one's personality.
• Trauma Inn: Downplayed, as while sleeping will speed up your healing, you'll need to treat your wounds first for that to have a significant effect, and you'll usually still need several days to recover from severe wounds.
• 2xFore: While weak, wooden planks are better than your bare hands and can easily be found. It's possible to add nails to it via crafting to improve its damage output.
• Ultimate Life Form: The Alpha mutation branch is effectively this. You require a bit more food than normal and you're less tolerant of drugs and alcohol, but you require almost no sleep, you have heightened senses, and your base stats gain a pretty nice boost.
• Undead Child: Zombie children, of course. Killing them results in a morale penalty, unless you have the Psychopath/Uncaring trait. Additionally, the penalty per kill gradually lowers the more of them the player kills. Certain mutated variants of zombie children do not grant this morale penalty, because they've been so mutated they no longer resemble a child at all.
• The Undertaker: Bright Nights has the Mortician, wearing a suit as all pop-culture undertakers do, who is more than capable of using their shovel to put zombies back in the ground, but also starts off with a scalpel and a syringe for embalming purposes (though you can't embalm bodies in-game).
• Universal Driver's License:
  • Downplayed in Dark Days Ahead in that you have to separately learn proficiencies for land and water vehicles to avoid constantly losing control, while aerial ones can't be operated at all without the proficiency, which can't be obtained after character creation. Other than that, however, your proficiencies and driving skill apply to any vehicle of the appropriate type, from bicycles to APCs.
  • Bright Nights plays this fully straight for the sake of the Rule of Fun - so long as your Driving skill isn't terribly low, you can operate anything with little trouble.
• Unorthodox Holstering: Longarms can be carried in a back holster instead of simply being slung on the shoulder. Depending on the gun, it might be far less encumbering than using a shoulder strap.
• Unorthodox Sheathing: Back scabbards can be used to store a BFS (Such as a zweihänder or nodachi), but are otherwise impractical due to their encumbrance.
• Unstable Equilibrium: Gameplay changes drastically the moment the player character becomes competent enough to defeat zombies one-on-one with little risk (read: either managed to get a silenced gun or became dextrous enough to avoid melee hits).
• Unstable Genetic Code: Mutation in the Slime, Medical, or especially Chimera categories can give a character the Genetically Unstable or Genetic Chaos traits, which will cause them to suffer involuntary new mutations on an unpredictable basis. The latter trait can cause mutation up to twice a day.
• Untouchable Until Tagged: The player (and NPCs in Bright Nights), by default, operates like this, as while they can survive quite a lot of hits, each one will inflict pain, which decreases speed and all attributes and eventually renders them incapable of fighting or running away. However, being high on painkillers or having traits like Deadened or Cenobite will prevent pain from affecting your combat ability, in which case you can keep fighting until you die.
• Up Through the Ranks: The Major-General profession states that you started your military career as a lowly private.
• Urban Fantasy: The Magiclysm turns the game into this, with the world mostly being the same as in vanilla, but adding enchanted items, fantasy monsters and races, magic-related locations (such as wizard towers), and the ability to learn spells.
• Use Your Head: In Dark Days Ahead, smashing an object unarmed will make you headbutt the target if your head is the most armored body part. If you specifically use the face (likely due to wearing a gas mask or something like that), the message log will call the action EXTREME.
• Utility Weapon:
  • Items that serve well as Improvised Weapons also tend to be usable for their original purpose.
  • Many powerful bashing weapons can also serve as a crude hammering tool, if you're desperate. More practically, you can use them to destroy highly durable furniture and walls
  • Cutting weapons are usable for cutting and butchering, knives serving particularly well here, and battle axes can serve for woodcutting if you don't have a proper wood axe.
• Vague Hit Points: Unless you have the Self-Aware trait (which allows seeing your exact HP), your health on each body part is displayed via five segments of health, which are normally composed of vertical bars. As they get depleted, they turn into slashes, then into colored dots, and then into grey dots, indicating that the segment is fully depleted. The health of enemies is also described vaguely with various descriptions cluing you in as to how hurt they are.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Prototype cyborgs may seem like another enemy that you kill on sight, but the game actually allows you to non-lethally disable them, then remove the body-hijacking implant by taking them to the Exodii (in Dark Days Ahead) or an autodoc (in Bright Nights).
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • You can call for help to the factions in the game. Most of the time, they will send an armed NPC to help you. You can blow his head off and take his gear with little consequence.
  • Due to a programming oversight in the earlier versions, some explosives still had trade value while lit. So yes, you could trade someone your armed C4 for their medkits and his gun and run like hell.
  • The wandering NPC's can be killed, their corpses butchered and eaten. With Internal Furnace installed, you can also eat all their clothes and set whatever is left ablaze with a lighter.
• Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Not because they're too weak, but because they destroy loot, risk setting your immediate surroundings on fire, and can cause you to choke on smoke and/or take damage from superheated air. They can still be worth using if you can account for these issues (for instance, you can wear a gas mask to ignore smoke), but they still remain a bit niche. It also helps if you use napalm and a factory-made flamethrower, as the increased range will allow you to keep your distance.
• Villain Protagonist: The Bright Nights fork allows one to play as a feral human. Like all other ferals, you're a psychopath, and suffer from an intense need to kill humans.
• Violation of Common Sense: In Bright Nights, creating an artificial pond is a viable fishing technique, even if you don't populate it with anything, as any body of water composing 100+ tiles will have fish in it.
• Virtual Paper Doll: Clothes are modeled down to each individual article, with a huge amount of variety available. With certain tilesets, outfits can then be displayed, though the low resolution doesn't leave much room for detail.
• The Virus: While the Mycus usually prefers to just spread itself around, it does have the ability to convert other beings into it's servants:
  • Zombies might be taken over, turning them into fungal variants that are loyal to the Mycus and hostile to Blob-based zombies.
  • The player might be converted into a local guide if they consume all the marloss foods, with their mind being twisted to be loyal to the Mycus, while their body is modified to better serve it.
• Walking the Earth:
  • The Nomad trait gives you morale penalties if you stay in a single overmap tile for too long, thus forcing you to wander around the world.
  • The Vagabond spent their pre-Cataclysm life wandering the world without anybody else to rely on.
• Was Once a Man: Go far enough in some mutation categories, and it will apply to you, as you stop resembling a human both mentally and physically.
• Weapons of Their Trade: Many blue-collar professions (and a few others) tend to start off with heavy/sharp tools, which can be used as starter weapons. A few of these tools can even stay relevant into the mid-game.
• Wearing a Flag on Your Head: The player can wear flags as cloaks.
• We Cannot Go On Without You: Averted in newer versions of Dark Days Ahead and Bright Nights, as the game will give you a prompt to switch to one of your companions if you die. You can, however, simply give up and accept a Game Over, resulting in a "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue
• Wedding Smashers: If you start as a Groom/Bride, this happened before the game started, with your character being lucky just to escape from their own wedding.
• Weld the Lock: In Bright Nights, metal doors can be welded shut. This makes them impossible to open and significantly harder to break down.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The "Strict Humanitarian" trait in Dark Days Ahead puts such a loophole in one's taboo against cannibalism — it only counts as cannibalism if you're eating literal humans. It's otherwise perfectly okay to eat extremely human-like beings, such as Magiclysm's elves and dwarves.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: If you die and refuse to switch to one of your companions, the game will give you an epilogue for each of them. Many are bleak, with the companion going insane or dying within a few years (and sometimes only after a few weeks), and only a few are relatively happy.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: The map keeps expanding and generating new regions as you explore it. There is no win condition, other than simply surviving for as long as possible and/or killing as many enemies as you can.
• Widowed at the Wedding: Strongly implied to have happened if you start as a Groom/Bride, as your spouse is nowhere to be found, and the description of the "profession" states that you were lucky just to have your feet attached.
• Wild Wilderness: The Innawoods mod turns the whole world into this, as it removes nearly every sign of civilization from the game. Rather than primarily fighting zombies, you'll instead spend most of the game fighting against wilderness-specific monsters, along with all the usual consequences of being stranded in the wild — animals, cold, thirst, and hunger.
• Winged Humanoid: Some mutation categories can provide wings.
• Wings Do Nothing: Zig-zagged with the wing mutations, as you're too heavy (even with hollow bones) to fly, but some benefits can still be derived from them - bird wings help you with falls, and insect limbs speed you up (though it's very tiring to flap them), but buttefly wings simply encumber you, make it harder to wear equipment on the torso, and reduce your dodge and movement speed. Further details depend on the fork:
  • Bright Nights handles bat wings are a negative mutation that reduces your dodge. Bird wings, however, avert the trope, as you can actually fly with them for a short period of time.
  • Dark Days Ahead allows you to glide with bird and bat wings, but this requires you to go lightweight, and you have the downside of being unable to glide in narrow spaces, since you'll fall after colliding with an obstacle.
• Winter of Starvation: Winter makes it impossible to forage for food or grow crops, so your only source of food is scavenging or hunting. It can also make your food and beverages too cold to consume, forcing you to thaw them.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Many mutation categories tend to contain at least one mental negative mutation, and several others will grant you the mindset of a predator as a positive mutation. Mutating in the Medical category, in particular, is quite likely to make you insane due to most of the negative mutations being mental ones (up to a full-blown psychosis), and even the positive ones can leave you extremely masochistic and emotionally numb.
• With This Herring: May be played straight or subverted depending on what profession you pick at the start - the professions that give points rather than costing them usually have nothing but clothes, or even have negative effects like addiction. However, even these professions may have useful equipment - the "Crackhead" profession in Bright Nights starts with a refillable lighter, for example. The Naked and Afraid "profession", however, plays this as straight as it can be - you start off with literally nothing, not even underwear.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: The game's nutrition system includes both hunger and thirst, as well as taste (affects morale, which affects focus, which affects experience gained) and healthiness (affects how quickly you heal). It also tracks calories and stomach fullness separately, so eating until you're full doesn't necessarily mean you're not going to starve to death if your food has low calories. In the early game, finding lots of snacks and canned food is easy, but finding water is a bit harder. In the mid game, it's easier to get water (set up a funnel and large tank, or find a river), but you'll have eaten most food already (and most of what you didn't eat will have rotted), so staying full requires more effort.
• Word-Salad Horror:
  • Mi-gos tend to mindlessly parrot speech that they heard, including one commenting on their parroting.
  • Some of the ferals tend to repeatedly say phrases related to their former life, even as they're fighting you.
• Working-Class Hero: Many of the professions represent blue-collar jobs. As they come with their work tools and have decent levels of survival and/or crafting skills, they tend to have an easier time surviving than most of the higher-class professions.
• Workplace-Acquired Abilities: Most of the professions will grant you skills, proficiencies, and/or traits. All of them may well make a difference between life and death.
• World of Badass: Every survivor counts. Even a completely unskilled survivor with a halfway decent weapon can defeat a dozen zombies before dying, and anybody with a decent amount of actual training and/or a gun can clean up a village or a city block on their own.
• Wormsign: Mounds of dirt often indicate that a giant worm is nearby.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: A few random NPC backstories talk about people assuming that zombification is spread via bites. That may have made sense in a conventional Zombie Apocalypse where infection spreads via bites, but the thing with the Blob is that everybody's infected with it. The worst thing a zombie bite can cause is entirely ordinary gangrene.
  • A person who escaped to an evac shelter talks about how they used to be part of a group with a leader who destroyed it by insisting on killing a woman who was bitten, which caused her husband to kill him in return. With the group down to two people, the husband eventually got beaten to death by zombies, leaving the Sole Survivor to relay the story to you.
  • A survivor who was in the FEMA camp mentions how, during their bus ride, somebody started a frenzy by talking about how people who got bitten should be killed for the good of everybody else. While the bus guard managed to keep things in check, the pro-killing group acted up once again in the camp, at which they were taken away by soldiers and, implicitly, either given a summary execution or kicked out of the camp.
• Yellow Peril: Pre-Cataclysm, China was the biggest enemy of USA, with many news articles showing either government's actions against China or common citizens being worried about the foreign threat. Some propaganda articles also try to cover up monster sightings and Blob-induced attacks by blaming them on China.
• Yet Another Stupid Death: Like most classic roguelikes, part of the fun in Cataclysm is seeing all the inventive ways that you can get killed. Be prepared to die a lot starting off while you fumble around, decide the best tactics to killing a horde, what weapons are best, what to carry, what to eat and drink, where to sleep, etc. There's even a lore justification in the form of Blob Psychosis, a side-effect of the Blob responsible for the zombie infection trying to take control of your body while it's still alive.
• Zeppelins from Another World: Some of the professions that show up in the Temporal Anomaly scenario in Bright Nights include airship pilots whose profession descriptions imply they're from an alternate universe, whereas most professions in the scenario are flavored as more historical professions.
• Zerg Rush: The main threat in mid-to-late game is not a zombie, but rather zombies. Fighting one zombie can become easy enough eventually, but you'll still get minor painful injuries. Multiple zombies mean that while you're fighting one zombie, the others are still hurting you, and the penalties from pain accumulate quickly. On top of that, you won't have the time to recover stamina between killing each zombie. According to the design notes of ''Dark Days Ahead'', at no point should a player become powerful enough to defeat a horde of zombies on foot.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The zombies in all their variants aren't the only type of enemy you'll face in this game, but they're the majority.
• Zombie Apocalypse Hero: Any player character who survives for a decent amount of time counts, capable of outfighting and/or outmaneuvering the zombies.
• Zombie Gait: The majority of low-tier zombies are much slower than humans, to the point that you can outwalk them. Even high-tier zombies are generally too slow to chase down a running human.
• Zombie Puke Attack: In both blinding yet harmless and damaging acidic varieties, both referencing Left 4 Dead.
  • Boomers can vomit all over you, limiting your vision to one tile away unless you use a towel or eye drops.
  • Huge Boomers are like their regular counterpart, but their bile glows, attracting zombies at night.
  • Acidic Zombies can puke acid onto your limbs to quickly break them.
  • Spitter Zombies can vomit large puddles of acid at a distance.
  • Corrosive Zombies can snipe you with their acid vomit.

"You are forgotten among the billions lost in the cataclysm..."