The existence of compactly supported global minimisers for continuum models of particles interacting through a potential is shown under almost optimal hypotheses. The main assumption on the potential is that it is catastrophic, or not H-stable, which is the complementary assumption to that in classical results on thermodynamic limits in statistical mechanics. The proof is based on a uniform control on the local mass around each point of the support of a global minimiser, together with an estimate on the size of the "gaps" it may have. The class of potentials for which we prove the existence of global minimisers includes power-law potentials and, for some range of parameters, Morse potentials, widely used in applications. We also show that the support of local minimisers is compact under suitable assumptions.