It is! Every playthroughout generates a new map, with new items and NPC (although NPC are quite rare by default). Its a really cool game honestly, unlike anything else imo (closest thing is project zomboid but CDDA is soooo much more complex), it really blew my mind initially that an open source and free game this good exists.

You can play through the terminal too since tilesets aren't required (thus you an play in complete ASCII mode).

What I like about the game is that its so realistic that in most cases you can pretty much just think "okay what would I do in real life in this situation?" And go from there, for example the crafting system is incredibly vast and you can build most things you can imagine.

I agree, I'm gonna add some info from the CDDA wiki for people starting out as the game can be kinda difficult at first, as well as write a little overview going over some good tutorial series and other useful stuff.

Edit: Aw rip looks like there's already a cataclysm community over at lemmy.ml, but I'll keep this one up for redundancy and post to it anyway! I'll try to be active over at the Lemmy.ml community too though.