7 days to die

Games
221

I like A11. My impression is this from playing multiplayer last night - it’s more luck based than ever at the start. There is absolutely amazing quality loot to find now but you won’t find it fast. The game is much more rewarding now towards exploring but POIs in random gen are as scarce as they’ve ever been. I would say the main difficulty comes from how rare guns are now. It is no longer possible to craft guns easily by taking them apart then building molds to make more pieces. Now you need to find each piece to make the gun along with the ‘recipe’. We played all last night and only have a small amount of guns. Each player might have a recipe or two to build some but no one has access to everything. We didn’t have enough parts except to make a gun or two. The crossbow is also gated now behind leather and forge books I believe so that isn’t possible to craft within minutes of starting. The new bow replacement is fast to craft but only about 30-50% effective as the crossbow. The blunderbuss (new gun) is very easy to craft but is only useful as a emergency weapon when fighting close.

It is possible to find better quality, more effective loot randomly day 1. Leveling is required to craft high quality items yet to level combat is all but required. Some experience is gained from crafting but not enough. Levels only increase as far as I can tell so the more time played the more leveling regardless of efficiency of the character. Wellness is a huge feedback loop, play well it rewards, if dying players get trapped with a character with (50% stamina/health reminds me of Souls games). Given the drastically slower start and how wellness works the game difficulty has by my estimation at least doubled early game. Yet if players can tough it out and last long enough by late game characters should now be much stronger (2-3x as strong?). A more combat and exploration play style oriented is vastly more rewarding now.

I should also mention zombie AI has increased decently. Our base was tunneled into on day 6. That type of attack had never once happened before. A horde of ~20 dogs also attacked the base during daylight on day 6. I’m enjoying the new challenges but be prepared to die much more.

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One of the devs posted this survival guide for the new update.

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There are some cool variables exposed to control random world gen now but I either don’t quite understand them or they don’t work well (or at all?). I noticed hilly terrain seems to hugely reduce chance to spawn cities/larger POIs even if you put the chance at 100%. Not exactly sure how to limit hilliness however.

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That’s a great guide. I logged in last night & because I had read that, I knew about stats on tools and also knew that my immediate spawn area was safe.

Clay is much harder to find, and the stamina indicator is really too small to do much of anything. I dug a cave for the evening and I could only do a few scoops of dirt before I was tired. I found a nearby point of interest so I will attack that tomorrow. Got to find the forge ahead book to get going.

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Just be careful. The game is buggier in some ways. I broke my leg spawning when I put my bedroll under a slanted roof. People have been breaking legs using doors and stuff. If you get stuck in something I recommend quitting instead of trying to wiggle/jump out of it. It’s a mess in that regard. Last night I lost everything in a cave in and I could not find my backpack. I’d recommend using keep tool belt settings on death. Time for a new game!

Servers don’t crash as long as players don’t disconnect normally. Use alt-f4 as a work around until they patch if you are playing on a dedicated.

EDIT: I guess they hot fixed that issue now. I haven’t tested it myself yet.

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Historically they seem to have several hotfixes and a couple of weeks before a new revision has it together.

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In general, i’m really liking the new changes. They certainly enforce the value of finding new/better things - not all pistols are the same, and even common elements like axe’s etc need to be evaluated. I just upgraded my faulty axe(forged) with a found blue one - instead of 10 chops to cut down a tree, it’s 3. Also, seeing the values now means i know when i should be swapping a higher quality, lower tech, item for a lower quality, higher tech one.

My chief complaint now is that guns are still way to easy to find - and now that you can(or it’s now important to) salvage them for all their component pieces, it means that finding a kick ass weapon is actually much easier - since you might find a purple barrel in one pistol, parts in another, grip in a third - etc. I think they should dial down the quality of items you find (less blues/purples), and make it so that you can only retrieve one part (your choice) when you salvage a weapon…this would make the player choice of when to use/hold/salvage very meaningful and important (should i build my sniper rifle now with 3 flawless parts, or wait until i can find a replacement for the faulty part and/or the good part, so i get a better rifle). Atrophy and attrition should be serious factors in a world falling apart - but a player, playing responsibly, should be able to mitigate them.

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Yeah balance was greatly improved but it definitely should be tweaked more. In general I find this to be a very challenging game right now to start out. It is probably the best cooperative game I’ve been playing lately. It is great for small groups of players to survive together. The best thing to do is rent a cheap server from someone like https://www.bluefangsolutions.com/ and play there.

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A12 is out now. This is a big update. The game is now using Unity 5.

http://7daystodie.com/mini-bikes-physics-bears-a12/

Bears, minibikes, new skies, new weather system, alternate ammo, and more.

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So yeah, 3 bears within 3 minutes…what happened to my safe zone?

The graphics look horrible. It defaults to 640x480, so when you first load in, you’re having to guess at the words because it is so bad. After you get your graphics set up, I’m left wondering WTF did they do with the beautiful world? Mine looks like it was painted with tin foil. It’s all shiny. I think it was just dawn after a rain, but what a backwards step in the graphics department.

You can’t do the “dance” with zombies anymore where you can hit & back up quickly. You’ll get clobbered.

They change the inventory screen to TAB instead of “i”…it still feels off.

And the inventory, they took away the right click takes 1/2 the stack…which is useful for crafting cloth with two cotton plants needed.

For a release that was suppposed to have all this stuff, I’m just shelving it. I played 5 minutes (maybe) and I have zero desire to play more. And I’ve clocked 390 hours according to steam.

Cya later A12.

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I’ve spent a little more time in A12 - various thoughts:

Good:
The new terrain map is fantastic. Terrain types blend into each other now(no more river boundaries - at least in what i’ve seen so far), and there’s a much better road system (including primary roads and tertiary roads) that lead to far more realistic points of interest (for instance, tertiary roads more often end in houses/cabins)

New learning slows progression nicely: looks like a lot more books are required, making bookshelves a priority for me now. I’ve noticed books on cement and augers

New items: as more items/components are added and recipes flushed out, it’s making collection more fun and challenging because goods are spread out more and its harder to get the items you want.

Aggro: aggro radius appears to be good - you can walk around a lot now without triggering aggro, and if you’re careful and crouch, you can walk around just about anything (including bears)

Indifferent:
right click: Not sure why they fuddled with the right click. you can still break apart stacks, but its another couple clicks now. However, you can now adjust the split size directly through right click instead. So before where you could click a stack and take half, now you click it, go to the split submenu, and can then select 7(the split, by default is still set to half)…benefit is a bit dubious, but maybe i’ve just gotten good at figuring out my /2 math.

Weather: still needs some work. The areas are too small and prone to be overly dark and shifts cycle way too quickly. Additionally, you get some radically inconsistent draws - particularly evident with snow, where you can look around and all is green and fine, and walk forward 5 feet and the same area radically transforms to snow-covered.

Bears: nice to have an alpha predator, but they are way too abundant. However, they’re generally easy to avoid, and i’ve yet to be killed by one

Bad:
Graphics: I’ll agree with tman - the palette is now a lot darker/muddy. Lot of it is due to weather/lighting, but it needs tweaking. Often now, it seems easier to see at night than in the day.

Item durability/usefulness: With 10 shots (or more) needed to kill a common zed from a (faulty) bow, it’s very hard to make any headway in the game. This is particularly true when your faulty items might have a durability of 40 - so you might be crafting a bow for every 2-4 zeds you kill. Similar type issues with all the faulty items - they just all need to be a little more effective

Spawning: ugh…this might be my worst complaint. This just appears to be all over the map…sometimes its good, other times you can get packs of zeds spawning 6 feet from you immediately after you’re detected. Coupled with the weapon ineffectiveness, this makes it particularly challenging as you start out because you cant really clear an area like you could, and you can easily find yourself trapped in a building with a newly spawned zed blocking your only exit. I’m now on day 3 or 4, and i’m holed up in my shelter for the night, and immediately a swarm spawns at my location and I’m ‘hunted’ without me moving a step? And as they start tearing down my shelter, i’m wondering wtf am i supposed to do? I cant kill them with my ineffective weapons. I can’t run from them in the dark. Finally, the dog packs are just malicious. Running into 6-8 dogs in the wild is pretty much a respawn ticket…

Day/night cycle: just isn’t right now. I think the server i’m on is a 50 minute day, which basically makes it a 40 minute ‘daylight’ server, which barely gives me enough time to get to the area i want to go to, hit a house or two, and then i have to hightail it back before dark.

Trees: Probably half of my deaths so far is due to treefall. It’s great that trees now fall over - but bad that it’s random, and sometimes will kill you, and sometimes won’t leave any wood. Best bet for now is only chop down small trees…

So in general, it needs some work - but hopefully, it’s just a quick tweak to a few things…

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It has been in Unity 5 since A11. That was the big graphics jump. This update again changed graphics up a lot. I think they look better but performance was increased a lot. I used to run 1280800 now I’m running 19201200 (560 ti). There are still weird FPS slow downs and drops but average is way higher generally. I tested the minibike and the map can now render as fast as you can drive which is a big improvement. Before just running you could sometimes out pace the map rendering.

Sound is improved with lots of new ones added. It is still a bit unidirectional however and it is hard to tell where or how far sounds are. That has been a weak spot of this game for a long time. For a game which encourages and often can require stealth play it is disappointing to see this problem remain.

Bears don’t seem too aggressive as long as you keep your space. I’m not sure if there is a safe zone anymore. You can also use bears to fight zombies for you. Bears seem to 2-3 hit zombies which is pretty impressive.

Yeah, the default settings being so damn low is odd. I agree the everything is a bit shiny but that is because it rains all the fucking time. It is overcast and raining constantly, hence all the shiny wet ground and objects. If anything it needs to rain less and there needs to be some sun shine. Weather can be a bit random and changes fast as do biomes. The blend together well when you look but as you move through the barriers it flips them fast (weather included).

You can, in fact it seems better than ever because I am pretty sure you have more stamina now by default. Melee weapons seem to have gotten a buff, even a shitty wood club is much more useful than stone arrows. Arrows seemed to have been nerfed hard. It was taking me 4-5 head shots to down a zombie where a terrible club was doing the same in 2-4 hits. The new arrow types seem good but you need probably steel tipped arrows to be about as effective with them as previously. On top of all that feathers and bird nests are much rarer now. You might wander around for 30mins without finding one or you might find one in 5 seconds that has 14 feathers in it. Bird nests feel like jack pots now and a lot are near empty but occasionally you’ll find one with a bunch of feathers.

Yeah, that is a random WTF change. Probably someone’s personal settings leaked into release.

I haven’t learned all the exact controls yet but splitting isn’t too hard. All you do is either right click and select split via the menu or do shift+right click to split.

I think you should give it another go. It is essentially the same game but the start has been made brutally hard for some reason. With a bit of luck to get a base settled you’ll probably be back to normal. What works best is finding a small town with many POIs. Downtown is too dangerous now due to the arrow nerf (and more aggressive bees/dogs) and most of the wilderness POIs are too well defended by zombies to be worth while. A small town you can train the zombies off then find some decent loot to get a foothold going.

I’ve been playing on a PVP server and the reactions have been similar. Even guys used to getting murdered are finding the game rough going. I think just the nerf to arrows isn’t that fun even if there are ways around it. Shooting stuff with arrows is good times. Now it is hardly worth the trouble due to how weak they are and how rare feathers are. Your best bet early on is melee and thankfully you naturally heal over time as long as you are fed well enough.

The new random gen is great but still has wonky issues at times with height or road connections. I had a whole Poppin’ Pills collapse on me cause it was over hanging a cliff. I somehow survived. Rubble is a nice touch but it is real laggy and takes forever for a building to collapse.

Books and schematics being broken up a lot more is similar to most of what the harder mods were doing for 7D2D already. It seems the game is moving more and more towards what the harder mods are doing. That said book drop rates are pretty damn high while the mods are usually really low. I’m curious to learn if rates are adjusted per book/schematic or it is just equal.

There seems to be way more zombies and roaming hordes now. I’ve been getting them before day 7 which is unusual. Given the plentiful bears, dogs, and aggressive bees things are way harder without a solid way to fight back yet.

Haven’t broken any legs yet! I even spawned mid air on the server I joined and only got a sprain which was quickly fixed. Overall it seems like a big improvement but the start is just uber harsh now.

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Books and schematics being broken up a lot more is similar to most of what the harder mods were doing for 7D2D already. It seems the game is moving more and more towards what the harder mods are doing.

I liked this game when it gave beginning players a little breathing space. Again, I think that the devs are pandering to the folks who have already been playing this game too long already, instead of folks who might be interested in it when it finally enters release.

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Now on about day 24 and I’m generally liking the things they’ve done. The graphical effects of weather is the biggest single complaint I have. There are definitely issues they can improve on, like the durability of faulty items, or the number of bears that spawn, but there are a lot of things they got right.

The biggest is the sense of balance in the game. In earlier versions, day 24 would be boring - i would have 3 of everything, a super fortress, and have no fear of anything. As it stands now. I’ve got some weapons, and can defend myself - but in general, i’m avoiding combat if i can. Packs of zeds are still a challenge (that i prefer avoid), and a pack of dogs requires an immediate response or i die. However, fighting isn’t the only response, and I’ve escaped many scenarios by running frantically (even at night, with feral zombies in pursuit). I don’t have any ‘epic’ gear, and the world is still interesting because there’s a ton of stuff i still need. I still haven’t found all the books I need (and just found forging like 2 game days ago).

All that said, i’m pretty hardcore in my approach to the game. i’m experienced, and I know what to do. How’s it going to be for a beginner? I dunno…it’ll probably be pretty tough and the learning curve, pretty steep, but i think it’ll be a more satisfying game experience for those that stick with it.

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bah, you guys are wanting me to open this up again, and I can’t afford the time right now.

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They went from one extreme to the other. It was too easy for a long time (assuming you found a Forge book, ever). Now it’s just ridiculously hard, imho. Learn balance.

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Been playing more and got my base established on a PVP server. The start is hard but once you get a foothold it isn’t that much worse. Leveling up some helps a lot cause then you can make a bow which will fire more shots. Just make a lot of stone arrows so you don’t get infected even if melee is tempting. The biggest change I’ve noticed now that I’ve played a lot more is the zombies no longer seem a hivemind. Fighting one zombie won’t necessarily alert any others. That makes stealth and sneaking around a lot more viable because even if one finds you there is a good chance you can take him out before others are alerted. However city areas seem to have more dogs, cops and aggressive bees than previously to counter this. Dogs will give up chasing now and play a unique sound when they do. Just run for 10-20s and they will turn tail.

The worse change is zombies dropping from the air literally on top of me. That has always been an issue but it seems much worse in A12. Also there seems to be some weird horde mechanic where if you fight too much and vs too many zombies at once they all spawn in around you. Not quite sure what causes it. There are also more wandering hordes which are annoying because they like to go in straight lines even through buildings (even if they don’t detect you). I was hiding on top of a big apartment building undetected and a wandering horde basically shredded a hallway for themselves out of the building.

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OK, if you guys didn’t like the hard start it is gone now. In fact the game is easier than A11 now. Stone arrows went back to their old killing power and bows have minimum 100 durability. Coupled with the AI changes and auto heal at half+ food the game is substantially easier. Just be careful when you are cutting down trees.

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Anyone still playing this game? If so, I have been running an 8 slot server for almost a year and am looking for a few new players. I have modded the server quite a bit to add better balance as well as a few custom items to fill in the gaps. The game is both fun and a bit challenging, but not too hard.

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I’m game.