Collect 12 cotton plants, craft them into cloth (2 cotton plants = cloth) and craft those six cloths into a sleeping bag. Put this on your toolbelt and when you feel threatened, place the sleeping bag down. This way when you die, you will respawn on it instead of spawning randomly and having to hoof it back to your backpack.
You can place beds / sleeping bags whenever you want. You will always spawn on the last one you placed and it will become a house icon on your map and your compass.
And here’s where I lose all desire to play 7 Days To Die. :)
That whole Minecraft template can be such an obstacle for me, even in a really polished personality-driven game like Don’t Starve. Isn’t there some way to play with an accelerated start, to get right to the zombie killing and survivaling? Or should I just stick with State of Decay?
Minecraft influence is very heavy. So if you can’t get past that, you won’t get far. You have to know recipes and have a plan for what you need to survive before you can thrive. When I don’t play for several months then come back, the first play is very hard as I have to relearn / adjust to the fundamental survival changes.
But it is an awesome game for those that like it.
There are some server mods which can give you items and such at the start. and of course if you have buddies that have forged a path ahead of you they can give you stuff. But most servers that you blindly venture onto start you at a normal and it is even worse if you enter them right before nightfall. On many servers you see people log to let night pass and then the come back in 15 minutes later when daylight comes.
7D2D is goal-driven: Every 7 days a horde comes and it’s bigger every time. So you have to build bigger a bigger & stronger fortress, you need to scavenge for gun parts, make ammo because you’re going to need a lot.
To build bigger & stronger fortress, you’re going to need iron, cement & a whole lot of wood. These require scavenging & mining. And then there is that pesky need for food & water, which you better not forget.
There is a reward system to scavenging: You get loot in the form of new clothing, new weapon parts, new books to learn new recipes, seeds to grow plants, and lots of scrap that you can shape into a variety of things that go boom.
Minecraft really didn’t have a goal other than exploring and seeing how self-sufficient you could get so you could do more exploring (*disclaimer, I haven’t played MC in 2+ years). With 7D2D, every 7 days you are measured on your ability to prepare & survive the onslaught.
As far as a quick start - you will be killing zombies within 5 minutes of starting the game. Hence the brutal learning curve.
I did end up buying this during the sale. I haven’t been disappointed with it despite my misgivings but I haven’t be overly thrilled either. My main problem is I haven’t found anyone to play it with regularly. I have played a bit on the reddit server which is just PVE and friendly. They recently put up a map which is badass:
Zombie killing and survival happens immediately whether you’re ready for it or not.
Having said that, crafting gear is sort of an integral component of the game so you can’t skip it entirely but try this on your next run:
in the world map settings, switch Looting and Crafting times to NONE/INSTANT.
scavenge your gear! Instead of punching grass when you wake on Day 1, just start looting everything in sight: trash piles, car wrecks, lockers, sports bags, EVERYTHING. Look for a town for best results but be ready for lots of zombies following you. With luck you’ll find some clothes, food, water, tools and weapons to get you rolling. Sooner or later you will need to build a forge and do some smelting if you want a steady, more reliable source of metal goods but it’s not entirely necessary to survive since you can potentially scavenge everything you need to survive but it’s gonna be ROUGH!
I got the two-fer deal over the sale and gave one to my son. It has pulled him away from DayZ at least for the moment. :-) We’ve been enjoying some coop LAN play and learning as we go. We’ve made it past the 2nd wave (day 14) and are working on a real base of operations. Lots of fun. I still enjoy playing it solo now that I know more what I’m doing but playing it with a coop mate is much more satifying. I think I’d enjoy the risks of a PvP scenario on a public server as well but I understand there is a hell of a lot of hacking there.
The coop-no pk server run by these guys is quite pleasant. Well maintained and pretty vanilla. It just went white list with the new alpha due to a Chinese Hacker invasion, but I would think “mature” players could get an entrance pretty quick.
I might try looking for some established PVP servers soon (if there is such a thing). I tried some of the public PVP and they weren’t too bad but they were pretty barren. Random map + PVP + public server = never see anyone. PVP in this game would greatly benefit from some sort of team mechanic. Otherwise it seems to come down to whoever has more friends on the server and/or whoever is willing to put in loads of time.
Two things make bases completely immune to zombies:
Overhangs on walls (stop climbing spider zombies).
Log spikes in a 4-5 deep or deeper trench.
Together both of these if done well will enable you to ignore even the biggest horde attack on your base. Other than not using these I’m not sure if the devs are going to balance them which is a bit disappointing. See this dev post:
I’ve been playing a long term game for once. I think the game is pretty balanced as is. I have to leave my base and go hunting every so often, I need to hit several biomes to get all the resources I need, and I am forced to go on loot runs as well. Nothing seems too abundant. Some craft timers are too slow I want to tweak. I’m building an epic castle, but the zombies come and try to mess it up, as well as hunger and resources needed getting in my way all the time. Overall it feels about right to me.
If we made the game get harder as you get better it would defy the laws of nature. If we made it too easy to survive, people would lose interest quickly and have no feeling of reward. Honestly I think the game is decent now and will only get better. We do have some ideas to introduce challenges to more advanced players and I do want to shuffle resources a bit more so players might be forced to travel a little more, but there is no huge change coming. We want to add sleeper zombies inside buildings to help guard the loot and surprise a player. NPC survivors with guns could introduce that “end game challenge” a lot of people might want. We want to track players achievements and wellness and maybe give the poor SOB who has 30 wellness a break and possibly give him less chance of hordes and easier spawns for a bit, if its not too hard to do.
The only issues I see are people have 1000 hours playing the game and want more. That is called a sequel, not balance. Maybe mod authors will give you what your after, but I think we’ve done our job pretty well balancing this huge beast. I’m not saying its perfect, but the only time people end up with 30 wellness is because they are doing stuff they wouldn’t do in real life, like go after a backpack after they died 5x. Go into a radiated wasteland full of zombies, or stay here in my little cabin in the woods and eat rabbit? Hmmm yeah I’m bored with good food and shelter, I’m going to the wasteland. Right. Your not the hero, stay in your cabin and get well before taking any risks.
Lots of survival games end up like this and require of a bit “role-play” to keep things interesting/challenging.
I literally force myself to play 7 Days like The Walking Dead. IOW, never really get too comfortable in one place (semi-nomadic), take risks periodically (e.g. get stuck outside my shelter at night), never build impervious defenses or take advantage of exploits that eliminate all threat.
It works but again, it does require a bit of imagination and it’s not a playstyle that everyone enjoys. Lots of people just want to play optimally and WIN and then… quit? or request more challenge on the forums?
I run an 8 slot 7dtd server and would like to find 1 or 2 dedicated players. The server is password protected and set up to be pretty hard core. It is PvE only with additional recipe books, new item recipes and modified recipes and loot tables. I update the server from time to time with new content and am very active on it. The ability to use TS3 or Raidcall is also required. The goal is to have fun while maintaining a hard core game environment. It will take time to reach the end game items on the server, but you can survive just fine. Send me a PM if you are interested.
GuildBoss: Yeah, our group has stopped using log spikes for the moment as they seem the most over powered.
Hrnac: I’d take you up on that if I wasn’t already playing with friends a lot. We restart the server frequently and are now messing with the XML files to mod stuff.
I feel they could “fix” this pretty quick simply by have the zombies get frustrated when they cannot find a decent path to the human. then they begin to destroy every thing around them after they get as close as they can.
We have also stopped using the log spikes as they are another game breaker. The little wood spikes are they only thing we use around the perimeter of our bases. They break quick, but a couple of rows will usually take out a few zeds when the big hordes roll in.
Hrnac: What are your favorite mod changes? Mine so far has to be that we added dogs and cops to every biome with a low spawn chance. So even in forest you can run into dogs and cops (3% and 1%). Having dogs possibly appear everywhere makes the beginning tense.
I want to stop using overhangs on walls too but the problem is how many spiders there can be and how glitchy the netcode is. Zombies move fast at night and I just can’t trust the netcode to always hold up. Same reason I would never play this game with permadeath there’s too many issues still. I don’t even use melee much online because of lag, it’s too dangerous. I’m wondering if we can mod melee weapons to be like 2-3x long so we can use them online.
I have added 10 new recipe books and 2 weapon schematics. I also added Dogs back to the burnt biome. I have modified numerous recipes and revised many of the loot groups and their probabilities. I can post some of our recipes if you are interested.
There aren’t very many focused on balance or making the game harder on the forums yet. I haven’t tried that mod yet but it doesn’t seem designed with multiplayer in mind. We’ll probably get around to trying that one eventually however just because there isn’t much else.
