Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead - Sky Islands Mod: By far and away the most interesting survival singleplayer game I have ever played. Complex? Yeah there is a lot of stuff but don’t let anyone convince you CDDA has an obtuse UI, it has easy to remember keybindings and the interface is easy to navigate. Can’t remember the key to do something? Hit “?” and type the name of the action and boom there it is.

Sky Islands turns CDDA into a run based game (sort of like tarkov I guess? idk) and it is just what CDDA always needed for me. Instead of being free to roam the procedurally generated landscape of CDDA going wherever you want, each time you venture out from your island in Sky Islands you spawn in a random place and must make it to a portal home within a couple of hours or you die. There could be any number of obstacles in your way between you and the portal including zombie infested cities, swamps, craters, mass graves, massive fungal towers with deadly spores or shudders worst of all RIVERS… (No joke, surprise rivers you get stuck on the other side of will more thoroughly doom you than anything else).

If you reach the portal home you can only take back through the portal what you can hold in your hands and on your back. Stay as long as you want on your sky island before returning for another run but don’t exhaust your critical supplies and remember that with every day that passes in CDDA the monsters grow more horrific…