Beginner Character Build Tips

Guide created using 0.6 (Samedi) of Cataclysm DDA.
Some of the information present here might not apply to future versions. Note that professions were not as advanced in 0.6 (Samedi) as they are now.

Here's some advice on decent beginner character builds.

Choosing stats

You have four primary character statistics: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence & Perception. These require mutations or bionic enhancements to raise once you're in-game, so for long-term characters, most of your development points should go here.

1. Strength: If you plan on fighting in melee, you should set a reasonable Strength (10 will do, but 11 helps avoid being unable to recover stuck weapons). It affects your melee combat damage-output, your maximum health, and your maximum safe carry-weight. If you want to use bows, strength 10 is required to use most of them, with strength 12 only necessary for the best bow in the game (which you could also achieve with mutations or bionics).
2. Dexterity: An universal stat which affects both melee and ranged to-hit chance, increases your dodging chance and improves your trap detecting and avoiding skill. It also improves throwing accuracy. 8-10 pts should work. For melee characters, this stat is especially useful, increasing survival in combat.
3. Intelligence: Affects your social abilities (currently negligible, given that NPCs are disabled by default). However, it also affects your ability to read books, by allowing you to read faster, and to read more complex books. It is also the base stat for nifty things like hacking computers and implanting bionics. If you don't want to do those things now, consider that you might change your mind once you're in the game. Setting intelligence to 10-12 will probably suffice; 13 is the maximum needed for two rare, high-end skill books (and you can read these books without the required intelligence, it's just slow).
4. Perception: Decreases ranged combat penalty and helps your character to detect and disarm traps. 10 points will enable you to see any trap in the game, provided that your eyes aren't encumbered. If you're OK with not being able to reliably spot land mines, 8-9 will suffice.

Choosing traits

There are positive and negative traits: positive traits cost development points, whilst negative traits provide more points.

Positive

• Quick: Smaller bonus than Fleet-Footed, but applies to everything. Sometimes retreat is better than combat.
• Light Step: Noise can attract critters, so less of it is a Good Thing. On balance, though, this is probably a low-priority trait.
• Parkour Expert: Quickly navigate difficult terrain, then turn around and take a few swings at the clumsy zeds who need 2-3 times as long.
• You might consider a protective or regenerative trait like Poison Resistant or Fast Healing.
• Night Vision can greatly help after dark.
• Pack Mule: Being able to carry more (volume) is never a bad thing, especially now that the invlet limit's gone.
• Tough: More HP! Guaranteed to make you live longer!

Negative

• Ugly: No one minds your appearance after the Apocalypse.
• Truth Teller: Chances are nobody's around to notice!
• Heavy Sleeper: If you sleep in safe spots (evac shelter basement, subway-sewer connecting hallways, etc) it doesn't matter who comes looking for you. If that doesn't work, a few beartraps and pits can go a long way toward making your life easier.

More advanced traits

• Robust Genetics: Don't mutate without it!
• Trigger Happy: It makes military rifles less-controllable, but if you're not planning on using them that's not a problem.
• Martial Arts Training: Hand-to-hand starts weak but can be one of the strongest weapons in the game. These basic styles are likely to stay available even after NPCs get fixed.
• Self-Defense Classes / Shaolin Adept / Venom Mob Protege: These are stopgaps for the buggy NPC martial-art trainers. Don't over-rely on them, but if you want a nifty advanced style, they're the way to go right now. They can greatly simplify your early-game inventory needs, and is always a useful backup. Feel free to check Choosing Martial Arts Styles if you're curious. The Venom Mob Protege style requires the Mythical Martial Arts Mod per 0.E (Ellison).
• Addictive personality: You'll be OK as long as you don't go crazy (as in more than five in a row) with addictive substances, such as hard and soft drugs and sleeping pill variants (that includes Cough syrup).
• Glass Jaw: Once you get a helmet of some sorts this negative trait becomes mostly irrelevant.
• Insomniac: It makes your character have difficulty getting to sleep, but the effect is fairly minor. A bed or makeshift bed and being at least Tired will generally suffice.

Professions

These provide a little different starting inventory, and sometimes character traits (such as the nicotine addiction from Chain Smoker). You can probably get along well enough without them, but feel free to experiment. Professions which cost points are mostly notable for skill point sets which might be useful for specific builds. Negative professions can be useful, as the addiction they give can easily be rid of with some patience, while they give some usable points.

Tweaker's addiction is very crippling- While you are in amphetamine withdrawal (about 3 days), roaming Zombie Dogs make it impossible to travel during the day. Survival is very much dependent on getting lucky- finding some dead bodies to loot, getting a lucky basement, or finding drugs in the first hour or so. You can't read during the withdrawal (your INT will be negative), so the best thing to do is to find some very small space like the entrance to a basement or a closet, and use the wait command until dusk. Wearing a Filter Mask will prevent illness (If you don't have a Filter Mask or similar, you should not spend your wait time aboveground- zombie dogs will hear you cough and break in), and you should have some food and especially water ready, since it'll do you little good to replace your withdrawal with starvation & dehydration penalties. Once you've survived the first few days, though, you keep the 2 extra stat points forever!

Skills

Spending a development point here translates into two levels of skill. Since much of the game involves building skills, spending irreplaceable development points on them may seem wasteful--and in many cases it is--but a small investment at the start may make the difference between survival and early-game death.

Useful skills to start with may include:

• Archery: This and a few ranks of Fabrication will let you do fairly well for yourself even without cities
• Survival: Butchering corpses and foraging will train this up, but you may want to start getting berries and meat from the start
• Dodge: Most dangerous part of combat training: learning not to get hit
• Fabrication: the generic "build personal-scale gear" skill
• Tailoring: Repair, reinforce, and remake clothing, surprisingly useful for long-term survivors! As you can craft better gear, and gear that is in good repair offers more protection.