The 9th post alpha stable release of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead has arrived. It is named after Junji Ito, known for his ability to transform mundane occurrences into catastrophic events. As a long inspiration of many horror elements of Dark Days Ahead this namesake is well deserved. Between 0.H and 0.I there were over 13,000 commits from 486 contributors (242 of which were first-time contributors), affecting 82,000 entities, and adding more than 1 million lines of code and data.

The headline features for this cycle: Dormant zombies that have turned quiescent for a lack of nearby prey, avoid disturbing them and your travels will be easier. Trees have tops that you can climb into on separate z-levels now. Faults have expanded to items so that eventually you won’t get generic damage but each level of damage on an item will have specific ways to mend it similar to how many vehicle parts work now. Overmap specials now have different visibility levels that controls how far away you can identify what they are. We have probably now reached saturation on animal themed mutation paths and mutation gain has been reworked to eliminate the wait between mutating to avoid bad mutations. Defined outfits and tons of new mapgen including some things hidden out in the ocean. More eldritch abominations exist and finally procgenned riot damage to represent that some places got destroyed in and before the Cataclysm. Progress continues on the Imgui migration as DDA transitions to a standardized UI that allows for easier development.

In news for the in repo mods several games worth of content has been added to Aftershock: Exoplanet, Mind over Matter and Xedra Evolved. Isolation Protocol and Sky Island continue to receive work that enables them to deliver unique gameplay experiences. This has also included our focus on making more details of the game meaningfully moddable. EOC expansion has been pioneered in mods and we expect those benefits to accrue to mainline over time.

We welcome you to join us here in finding the beautiful and the horrific in the Cataclysm while we ask the question of how you will spend your final days.

For more details on what all has changed, you can take a look here (but it's still not everything, because there's just so much).
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/refs/heads/0.I-branch/data/changelog.txt