A Backrooms-themed mod for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.
Where are you? How did you get here? Will you ever get out? Welcome to the Backrooms, an infinite sprawl of faded yellow carpeting, harshly buzzing fluorescents, and dismal scenery. This is an indoor only conversion for Cataclysm. The entire worldgen is replaced with the winding Backrooms. No cities, no farms, no forests, no wilderness. Just dingy interiors that go on forever, empty meeting halls, and desolate breakrooms.
As the Backrooms are the only location in the entire world, characters trying to start in other locations will fail to spawn. Turning city size to 0 is recommended just to avoid strangeness in map labeling.
Right now the mod should be in functional form -- no bugs, proper worldgen, more or less working as intended. What still needs work is the balance of item and room spawning. Do supply rooms not show up often enough? Are bathrooms too common? Are breakroom counters too generous with items? Are crates not generous enough? Do you wind up with too many guns and grenades? Not enough food and water? These are balance issues that playtesting will hopefully help resolve over time, but other than that, the mod should be fully playable.
Yes absolutely! Most players will probably get bored quickly. If you don't like wilderness-only challenges, this has many of the same problems (no midgame/endgame progression, no high challenge locations, little difference from one area to the next, far fewer points of interest than a standard game, etc). If that's your cup of tea, though, then please, enjoy! I mostly just made this because I was caught up in the idea and saw no one else had done any map/worldgen total conversions like this.
It should! Other than requiring access to worldgen and necessitating the "Backrooms" scenario, it works with most other mods. If Magiclysm is on, you can even find spellbooks on the bookshelves!
Because of the dynamic/procedural generation of these rooms, some will naturally overlap. There are occasionally odd consequences here, but most often it'll be things like items dumped onto the floor, or even somehow sitting in a closed doorway. These are harmless artifacts of the way Cataclysm's mapgen works.
Map extras still exist in the Backrooms! This is an intentional design decision for the sake of variety. You may find spiders, wasps, dogs, craters, portals, and so on. Even crashed helicopters and sinkhole lakes might show up!
Red Rooms are for fast travel, since there's not much hope for vehicles here. Examine the waycircle at the room's center and give it a name to activate it. You can then activate the waystone beside it (you do not need to pick it up and really shouldn't) to teleport to any other activated Red Room.
The first few minutes are the hardest! Use corners to your advantage to break line of sight, find a safe room with doors you can hide in to catch your breath, and try not to engage until you have a weapon when you can avoid it. For an easy early weapon, most characters will be able to break chairs with their bare hands, using the planks as a weapon or to bash stronger furniture down. With a cutting tool, the planks can be whittled into cudgels, which are very useful early game weapons. The walls of the Backrooms are just thin drywall! With a plank or decent blunt weapon you should be able to bash through them pretty easily, good for breaking into sealed rooms, making shortcuts, or just finding your way out of a jam.
-TGW