Undead Legacy is a complete overhaul mod for 7 Days to Die (7DTD) that got a massive update after about four years of radio silence. Much like with Darkness Falls or Rebirth, the goal of overhaul mods is to take the very solid (zombie) bones from the base game and actually do something worthwhile with them. In the case of Undead Legacy though… well, I’m not exactly certain what is worthwhile here.

If you have never heard of it, Undead Legacy’s schtick is greatly slowing down the rate of progression within the game. That’s… basically it. This is achieved in a number of ways, including the introduction of a lot of intermediate crafting steps and additional item pieces and so on. For example, it took me six in-game days before I was able to craft a wooden cube. This does add a layer of immersion, as you can’t immediately go from punching trees to scaling the sides of buildings with wood frames you hand-crafted out of raw wood in your backpack like in vanilla. Doors also needing hinges to craft, etc.

The problem is that this feeds into the overcorrection The Fun Pimps have been taking for years.

Once upon a time, 7 Days to Die is/was a survival crafting game. At some point though, the devs decided they wanted the game to be more of a looter shooter. This is why almost 100% of the Points of Interest (POIs) are no longer just buildings or houses, but micro-dungeons with defined paths and invisible triggers that spawn in zombies. In the past, you could be almost entirely self-sufficient in the forest somewhere, digging for Iron ore and building a castle out of cobblestones. Today, you have to find enough magazines from active looting to unlock any technology at all. It is technically possible to find a balance in the craft vs loot debate, but it is a fine line to walk.

Unfortunately, Undead Legacy’s principle design of “slowing progression” specifically pushes it even more into looter shooter territory. Making crafting the most basic wooden house a painful grind simply means you are encouraged to take over an existing POI instead. Is crafting anything beyond a Primitive Bow too difficult? Don’t worry, just randomly loot an AK-47 in any of the several dozen POIs you are raiding. Being able to repair these weapons may be a challenge, but you almost don’t care, because by spending 100% of your time looting, the crafting progression will almost passively take care of itself.

Was this the intention? Did the overhaul’s author really just have it out for players being able to turn cars into machetes instead of praying for RNG loot gods to smile upon them instead? There is indeed less cheese in the game, such as nerd-poling and throwing hatches in doorways to confuse the zombie AI. On the other hand, there is still plenty of cheese, like being able to pick up most every object, including cardboard boxes… that you can nerd-pole with instead.

Anyway, there are other changes Undead Legacy brings, but they are largely irrelevant. Level-ups let you select nodes in a Path of Exile-esque skill bush, but almost all of them are extremely boring +5% to whatever. “Learn by Doing is back!” If by “learn” you mean eventually unlocking +5% to whatever by using Polearms a bunch. Research looks like a tech tree now, but it just hides the fact that instead of reading magazines, you scrap them for Research Points that you spend – along with a bunch of other resources! – to individually unlock recipes.

Undead Legacy just feels like a giant drag. Which, I guess is what the author was going for?

Give it a whirl if you want, but this overhaul is a 0/10 for me. Play Darkness Falls or Rebirth instead.