Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, CDDA for short, is a turn-based survival game set after a catastrophe that left the world full of zombies, mutants and things from other dimensions. It is developed by CleverRaven and, in the README’s words, “the result of contributions from over 1000 volunteers”. Its website: “The most recent stable release is 0.I-1 Ito-1. We recommend stable for the most bug-free experience possible.”

What’s new in 0.I

Version 0.I, named “Ito” after the horror artist Junji Ito, came out in June 2026 as “The 9th post alpha stable release”, with more than 13,000 commits from 486 contributors. From its changelog:

• “Zombies can lie in wait for you, their armor can be shattered, and they’ll decay into bones over time.”
• “Trees are fully trees - they have tops and you can climb them!”
• “Items can now have fixable faults, on the road to replacing generic damage.”
• “You can now take over and loot camps, pending nobody is there to stop you.”
• A massive oil platform in the ocean, an overhaul of rivers, ASCII art for hundreds of items, and cities damaged in the riots before the Cataclysm.

The point release 0.I-1, “Ito-1”, from 20 September 2026, fixes 18 bugs, such as crashes when loading saves with zones and a scrolling item info panel. None of the fixes is specific to Android.

Playing on Android

The Android app is the graphical version with tiles, sound and translations. All 17 tilesets are included; the default is UltimateCataclysm. Before the game starts, a launcher screen offers software rendering, full screen, trapping the Back button and native Android menus. In the game, Settings › Options has an Android page with the virtual joystick, its opacity, vibration, and contextual shortcuts that appear when needed, such as examine, butcher, pick up or sleep.

Saving when you switch apps is off by default. The option, “Quicksave on app lose focus”, carries the warning “Experimental. This may result in corrupt save games”, so save before leaving the game.

Your saves are in Android/data/com.cleverraven.cataclysmdda.experimental/files/save/. Updates replace only the game data, graphics and translations, so saves survive an update, but uninstalling the app deletes that folder: copy it first. The project says the data is “backwards compatible with the desktop version”. Only the small Basic sound pack is included.

What goes online

Nothing. The app has no internet permission; it declares only storage and vibration.

About this file

• This is the official GitHub release 0.I-1, from 20 September 2026: the 64-bit ARM build, matching the SHA-256 hash GitHub publishes, signed by CleverRaven. The same release has a 32-bit ARM build with the same package name, which we don’t host; there is no x86 build. The version shown in the app is the commit 7b2efa5.
• The 168.5 MB file runs on Android 5.0 and later and declares 2 permissions: storage and vibration.
• CDDA is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licence, and its tilesets too; the fonts are Unifont, Terminus and Roboto under their own free licences. The licence text isn’t inside the APK; it is in the project’s LICENSE.txt. Two bundled items have no licence stated anywhere in the project: the LARWICK map font images and tree sprites “originally sourced from opengameart.org”.
• The screenshots are from the project’s repository and show the desktop version; we have no official Android screenshots.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017).