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7 Days to Die, Again
7 Days to Die (7DTD) received a new patch a few weeks ago. So I had to boot it up.
If you haven’t heard of it, or read any of my posts, 7DTD is a zombie survival-crafting game that has been in an alpha state for almost 10 years. It has survived this long because A) it’s a fun, more realistic zombie Minecraft, and B) it continues to receive updates, albeit on a more yearly cadence. I came in around Alpha 15 or so, and this most recent release is Alpha 21. Supposedly the game will go gold with Alpha 23, but the dev team never had anyone with project management skills, and it kind of shows.
Case in point: the devs have spent a majority of A21 overhauling the leveling system and mucking with the early game. Again. For the 3rd/4th Alpha in a row. When I started playing, the skill system was a “learn by doing” sort of Oblivion system, wherein you crafted hundreds of stone axes to increase the potency of future stone axes. Then they moved towards a Skill Point system, so you needed to focus on leveling up and assigning points into Skills that improved your crafting ability. With A21, you now need to find and consume skill magazines in order to level each of dozens and dozens of skills. The Skill Points are still there, but are more focused on 10% (etc) bonuses, although you will find more corresponding skill magazines by spending points in specific areas, e.g. Spears, Shotguns, etc.
Are these changes bad? Yes and no.
In principle, I am fine with devs trying to figure out their preferred method of player progression. This is what Alpha states are supposed to be about, after all. The problem with the Fun Police Pimps (their actual studio name) is that they are almost actively hostile to the way most people play their game. Over the years, the Minecraft elements have been nerfed into oblivion because they didn’t like players just basically digging into the ground and smelting iron and crafting all corresponding items (guns, etc). So, they nerfed the XP gains from digging and tied blueprints to either levels or loot (Skill books). When players still Minecrafted their way to castles, the devs started adding things like “gun parts” as uncraftable items you had to loot. Which, fine, whatever, but that also leads to ridiculous situations like how you need “baseball bat parts” to make a wooden bat, but can engineer a working gyrocopter out of scrap metal just fine.
Meanwhile, over the years the devs started adding “dungeon” Points of Interest (PoIs) into the game. Whereas existing homes and shops were set up in a logical manner, these new PoIs were designed around players going along set pathways and encountering zombies in scripted ways, with extra loot at the end. These are cool… the first time you encounter them. Unfortunately, the devs has since turned every PoI into a dungeon, making looting a bit of a slog. Until/unless you have memorized where the main loot in located and can just break through doors/walls/ceilings to bypass everything.
Meanwhile meanwhile, the devs have also been tweaking zombie AI over the years to counteract players. The eponymous 7 Days horde is a bunch of zombies who attack at a sprint, always knowing your exact location. When I started playing, they couldn’t dig straight down, so if you found or built a bunker, you were basically immune. Clearly, that was a bit too easy. Zombies were then allowed to dig, making underground bases problematic. Players then started just driving around all horde night on motorcycles, so devs made zombie vultures move at 300% speed when you’re in a vehicle. People then started making zombie mazes. Devs wildly overcorrected and gave all zombies perfect omniscience as to the block HP of everything between you and them, so that they make a direct beeline towards the weakest part of your base. Not only was this nonsensical – how does a zombie know this concrete block has 495 HP instead of that one? – but it invalided all “real-world” defense strategies like installing spiked walls everywhere. Players then made zombie obstacle courses that end in impossible-for-AI jumps, so the devs reduced zombie fall damage and made them “rage” a bit, attacking any nearby blocks (e.g. support pillars).
Oh, and new to A21: glass jars and tin cups have been removed from the game. The stated goal was to make water a more important concern in the early game, as otherwise you could craft/find tons of containers, fill them up at a nearby lake, and boil your way to eliminate thirst. I mean… sigh. Maybe being able to craft glass jars in a Forge with just sand is a bit much. But that just makes bodies of water useless, throwing out another element of rational post-apocalypsing in favor of abstract game design. Instead, we must imagine you drinking bottles of water and throwing the container away, while you desperately collect enough coins to purchase a Water Filter from vendors, which you use to craft Dew Collectors, which generously grant you 3 Water (containers!) per day… from the aether.
Games change over the course of Alphas, especially when they have gone on for ten years. But at a certain point, you have to question whether the devs even want to finishing make the game they started. One of the leads once admitted on the forums that if they could go back in time, they would not have allowed players to dig into the ground. Which… is kind of a big deal for a voxel-based game.
All of the changes mentioned above though make digging immaterial to begin with. There used to be a tension between looting buildings and still saving enough time to build your own base to survive horde night. Now the optimal, dev-directed course is to spam quests from vendors – oh yeah, quests were introduced a few Alphas ago – to get PoI loot + quest loot, and just camp on the roof of a bank or whatever for the hordes. The zombies will eventually tear down the building after a few weeks of hordes, but by that time you will have enough high-level loot to kill them with ease, especially after creating a little obstacle course.
The good news is that 7 Days to Die has already attracted some quality mod authors over the years that have put out some transformative overhauls. So even if the Fun Pimps continue to go all-in on making the game just a series of scripted zombie encounters, there is still hope for an experience more akin to the game it used to be. Which is more than can be said for many titles out there.
Mod: Darkness Falls
If it seems as though I fell into a hole… I kinda did. Specifically, in the form a mod for 7 Days to Die called “Darkness Falls.”
I have mentioned it before, but 7 Days to Die (7DTD) is a game that somehow pushes all the right buttons for me. It has zombies, crafting, loot progression, skill points and XP, base building, a sort of tower defense angle (during the 7th day Blood moon), resource gathering, scavenging post-apocalypse buildings, and so on. A lot of those mechanics synergize with each other in interesting ways too. For example, you have to weigh the costs/benefits of clearing buildings of supplies versus mining for resources to build out your base to survive the Blood moon every 7 days. And knowing that a horde of strong zombies will be able to hone in on your position on a regular schedule gives meaning and structure around your day-to-day decisions.
The base game has been really good over the years, despite it still being in Alpha, but after 200+ hours the novelty wore off. Updates are more often on a yearly cadence, and sometimes the improvements are a step backwards in some respects. In Alpha 19, for example, loot progression has been tied to one’s “game stage.” What this means is that if you end up clearing out the Shotgun Messiah weapons factory early on – a sort of Tier 5 (the highest) dungeon – the big loot at the special chamber will include… Stone Axes and maybe a Blunderbuss. This was done to prevent people from potentially cheesing hard buildings and walking away with an AK-47 within the first two days, but come on.
In any case, Darkness Falls is one of the many (!) complete overhaul mods available for 7DTD. It takes the current game (A19.4) and rolls back some of changes made over the years while adding new enemies, new resources, dozens of new dungeons, and an actual endgame. The core gameplay loop is still there, including the Blood moon. But now you can choose two classes (out of 8) when you roll a character, and each class has exclusive access to some of the new (or old) mechanics. If you max those classes out, you can collect Skill Notes to build another class book and start unlock additional perks.
I have played so much in the last two weeks that I have perhaps burned myself out on it. Also, sometimes the mod just trolls you a bit. In some of the “custom” added dungeons, for example, they will have a full room of zombies just pop out of a wall and mob your face within seconds. Under default settings, you drop all your loot on death, and thus be extra boned from such maliciousness. I have tweaked my own settings so that I get to keep whatever is in my toolbar, so I don’t accidentally get stranded 2 km from my body, naked and alone.
So, yeah, that is what I have been up to. Like I said, I may be on the tail end of being burned out from playing the mod for so long. At the moment, I am stalling before heading into the endgame biome because I know that’s where the demons are and I don’t exactly have the proper endgame weapons/armor to take them on in a straight-up fight. But I am also getting concerned that the “surprise room of demons” gimmick is in my near-future and I don’t like it. That sort of thing would work better in co-op or something. When it’s just you, there is every incentive to cheese the zombie AI as much as possible to survive. Which… works, but also kinda sucks.
Valheimed
Like the rest of the world, I too succumbed to the call of Odin and bought Valheim.
But unlike the rest of the world, here’s my hot take: Valheim ain’t special.
This isn’t to say it’s bad. Valheim is indeed clever in many ways… assuming that it’s austere design is intentional, and not a result of it being an Early Access game built by two dudes. Part of that cleverness is the fact that Valheim put a tutorial inside an otherwise open-world survival game. Just think about all the other survival games out there, and how they all proudly lean into their cold opens and lack of direction. I have spawned into ARK with a level 1 character on what was supposed to be a safe(ish) beach and was immediately eaten by a raptor. That may be par for the course for survival games, but it doesn’t have to be. And so it’s no wonder that Valheim with its exclamation mark raven has hooked millions of people into an experience they don’t quite realize is about to get very survivalish.
By which I mean the tedium of resource gathering.
After killing the first boss, the player unlocks the ability to craft a pickaxe with hard, deer god antlers and otherwise move on to the Bronze Age. Which requires the exploration of the Black Forest biome to find Copper and Tin deposits, which can be smelted into Bronze that can then be crafted into better armor and weapons. It is at this stage that I realized I could have been playing ARK, Conan, No Man’s Sky, Subnautica, The Long Dark, The Forest, 7 Days to Die, State of Decay, or Fallout 76. And probably should have instead, because Valheim is incredibly basic at this level. Whereas I could tame dinosaurs to speed up resource gathering in ARK, I’m stuck sloooooooooowly collecting 20 Copper Ore at a time, bringing it back to the Smelter, and eventually turning it into Bronze. Meanwhile, you get attacked by Greydwarves every minute and a half, punctuating the tedium with a different kind of tedium. Oh, and make sure you scour every hillside on your gathering missions so you can find instanced crypts and collect enough red cubes to create your Smelter and stuff.
Seriously though, I’m reading these other bloggers and then looking at my game and wondering if they have never played a survival game before. And maybe they really haven’t. There is nothing particularly approachable about ARK (etc), especially in comparison to Valheim. But thus far, it appears all the really interesting genre innovation died with Eikthyr.
For example, a lot of hay has been made regarding how Valheim is a survival game in which you don’t actually die to starvation/thirst. Supreme innovation! But what really happens is that you trade off ignoring food at the front end to becoming obsessed with it for the rest of the game, when the opposite is true in every other survival experience. In Valheim, both your HP and Stamina meters are dictated by what food you eat, and you must eat three different varieties to keep them topped off. You can get by with just cooked meat from boars and deer in the beginning, but later generic enemies can almost one-shot you if you aren’t eating cooked meat, neck tails, and then something else like Honey or Mushrooms. That is a lot more varied farming for food than I would need in ARK or 7 Days to Die once I’m past initial hump.
I will continue on playing for a bit and see if anything fundamentally changes after defeating the second boss. Based on writings of people who have already logged 60+ hours though, it sounds like it will be more of the same with a slightly new resource. Which is literally the formula for survival games, I know. Thing is, other survival games typically have an X factor that sets them apart from one another.
As of yet, I don’t see what that is with Valheim.
7D2D: Alpha 18, Asinine Developer Edition
Let’s play a game. Taking this Perk, would you expect to be able to craft a Wooden Bow?
If you answered No… you’re wrong! You can actually craft a Wooden Bow after taking that Perk. Trouble is, a Wooden Bow requires:
That’s right, Bow/Crossbow parts. Can you craft those parts? Nope! You can only find them from looting, purchasing from vendors, and/or dismantling already-constructed bows/crossbows.
My first reaction to this was shock. I have been playing 7D2D for a number of years now, and this was perhaps one of the most unintuitive things ever added to the game. In prior Alphas, you could not just construct guns or compound bows from nothing, which made some sense. But as updates have progressed, the amount of things you can otherwise craft, and their complexity, has increased.
This all might have just been whatever. But when I started searching forums to see if I was missing something, I came across this series of Roland (one of the Fun Pimps) posts pushing back on someone complaining about Bow parts:
Even beginners should know that crafting involves both the knowledge and also a recipe. What craftable item in the game can be made with knowledge only and no recipe? None. There is nothing disingenuous about it. You gain the knowledge and then gather the mats to craft. You cannot craft wood or stone or feathers– you go out and find them. You also cannot craft bow parts– you go out and find them. There is nothing different about this than any other part of the game.
Later on, he says:
[…]Sounds like the frustration comes from not getting an immediate payoff for spending the point. You wanted to spend the point and then make your better bow and you couldn’t because you were missing some recipe items. So what? That should give you purpose. It is like an emergent quest for you and you alone.
Guess what? When you perk into the Workbench you aren’t going to immediately be able to make everything on the list. You’re going to have to go out and gather mats.
This line of reasoning is incredibly asinine. Instead of actually offering up the real reason Bow parts are a thing now, e.g. for balance/time-gate reasons, Roland here is getting all sanctimonious over shit that doesn’t even make sense in the rest of the game. Here is a non-exhaustive list of shit you can craft in this game from basic materials:
- Gyrocopter
- 4×4 Truck
- Radiation Removal mod
- Laser sight mod
- Lead Car Batteries
- etc
Do those require a found schematic or Perk? Yes. Do they require “Gyrocopter Parts” found via RNG? No. The fact that I can make a functioning laser from Scrap Plastic and other debris I can wrench out of a car on Day 1 – nevermind what science-fiction a “Radiation Remover” is attached to a spear – but can’t actually craft a baseball bat without a Perk AND baseball bat parts is ridiculous.
Thought I was joking, did you? “Baseball Bat parts.” Meanwhile…
For context, Irradiated Zombies are a class of special zombie you can encounter that otherwise rapidly heals itself. This can make them all but immune to traps, as they out-heal the damage. Adding this mod to a weapon though, disables their healing for like 60 seconds. Just some steel, glue, springs, and “mechanical parts.” Meanwhile, you are physically incapable of crafting a baseball bat without special parts found in the world.
Look, I understand the actual reason for these changes from a game design standpoint. The devs are worried about the game being “solved” before Day 14 as veterans craft all the endgame goodies from the debris around their starting location. Why leave your spider-hole when everything you want is within reach?
The tension of the 7th day Blood Moon comes not just from the zombies themselves, but whether you can find enough materials within the six days to outlast the night. Forcing people to go out and loot buildings lets you treat each house like a mini-dungeon (which they are these days) plus adding the time element to things. Do you spend the morning of the 7th day reinforcing everything, or do you roll the dice and loot one more place?
The issue is when the devs won’t just say that. Is it because that would be too “gamey”? Or do they not actually know themselves? There will be complaints whether the devs are straight-forward or not, but at least telling the truth will save them from embarrassing themselves on the forums and insulting their fans besides.
Too Much Cheese
I have always had mixed feelings when it comes to Early Access games, but not always for the same reasons as everyone else. For example, one of the biggest dangers is getting hooked on a game that just never gets completed. Money dries up, development stops, you never get any sort of conclusion. I’ve never been too worried about that – either the game was fun when you played it, or it wasn’t.
No, my biggest concern is when the game gets better or more balanced… but I’m already done.
Oxygen Not Included (ONI) is a colony-management game from Klei that I started playing last year and it has gotten significant updates on the regular. Some new buildings, some new creatures, a sort of end-goal to strive for, and so on. Other things have not changed over the year, and it’s questionable whether they ever will. And that bothers me because some of the things that haven’t changed are broken mechanics.
One of the mid-to-late game threats in ONI is heat. In the beginning, you’re worried about Oxygen (hence the name), so you burn algae for air. Then you run out of algae. Switching to an Electrolyser allows you to turn water into Oxygen + Hydrogen, so you focus on getting clean water to burn, while finding a use for all the unbreathable Hydrogen (generally via Hydrogen Generator to power to the Electrolyser). This is another trap though, because the “free” Oxygen getting piped out is hot, and as your base heats up, your crops will fail. Thus, cooling things becomes a top priority.
While there are a number of “legit” ways to cool things down, the Water Sieve method is straight-up broken. Water Sieves are used to turn Polluted Water into normal Water, for use in bathrooms and such. The supposed downside of this is that the Sieve itself outputs relatively hot water at 40°C, which will gradually heat up your base and ruin your crops (which typically stop growing at 30-35°C). The real issue though is that the Water Sieve always outputs 40°C water… even if the Polluted Water was at a much higher temperature. Thus you get physics-bending/game-breaking (IMO) solutions like piping your clean water out of a Water Sieve and into an Aquatuner (which cools liquid down at the expense of heating itself up)… which is being liquid-cooled in a tank of Polluted Water… that you are piping to the Water Sieve.
Clever use of game mechanics, indeed.
Along the same lines, I have a 100% zombie-proof base in 7 Days to Die. It’s a tower with a nearby ramp and fence, along with a half-block on the other side of the fence. To the zombie AI, this half-block would allow them to jump again and land on the tower and start eating my face. In reality, once they hop over the fence, they miss the half-block, and plummet to the ground, taking damage. From there, they run back up the ramp and try again until they die again. I still try and kill them myself for the XP, but I have all the time in the world to line up the shots or try again if I miss. The devs have added a “tantrum” mechanic whenever a zombie tries to run a path and fails, but that just means the zombie will wail on a bunch of iron spikes.
There are two “easy” solutions to my “problems”:
- Don’t use these mechanics, and/or
- Don’t play these games yet
To which I would say:
- Handicapping myself via willpower alone isn’t fun, and
- These are precisely the type of games I want to be playing at the moment
If you have a list of non-Early Access survival/crafting games that I haven’t already played, by all means, let me know. Otherwise, I’m going to be over here stuffing my face with delicious cheese, and paying for it later.
Zombie Smarts
I have been playing some more 7 Days to Die (7DTD) now that the Alpha 17.1 patch came around. There have been a lot of tweaks to the progression mechanics and Perk system, including some level-gating on Iron/Steel tool recipes. The biggest change, however, was to zombie AI.
In short, zombies are now impossibly smart… and impossibly dumb.
It’s been long enough that I don’t even remember how zombies behaved in prior patches. What zombies do now though, is behave in perfect tower defense intelligence: the shortest distance between them and you, with walls adding a virtual number of steps. Zombie are also perfectly prescient, knowing exactly which wall blocks have the lowest remaining health, and will attack that spot en mass to get to you. At the same time, zombies prefer not attacking walls to X extent, if they can walk there instead.
The result? Cue the Benny Hill theme:
Essentially, the current 7DTD meta is to not create bases at all, but rather mazes that funnel zombies into kill zones and/or large drops that loop them around until they die of fall damage. The devs have added a “zombie tantrum” mechanic to try and get some damage on looped mazes – zombies will attack anything nearby when they fall, possibly weakening your support pillars – but that will be metagamed away with multiple platforms or deeper holes.
To be clear, the prior zombie meta was solved by simply building an underground bunker. At that time, zombies could not dig into the ground, and disregarded the Z axis entirely – it was possible to hang out in the middle of a bridge and often have a nice grouped pile of zombies directly below you to hit with a Molotov. I played the game enough to recognize which Point of Interest had a pre-built bunker located underneath it, and often sought it out immediately after spawning so I could all but ignore the titular 7th day horde attack.
That said, how smart should zombies be?
The only way to answer that question is to ask what the game you’re making is supposed to be about. When you add tower defense mechanics, you get a tower defense game. This will preclude people from building nice little houses in the woods, and instead opt for mazes and obstacles and drops. It becomes a much more technical game, solvable with very specific configurations. Having dumber zombies frees up a lot more base designs, on top of possibly requiring a lot more attention to one’s base after an attack, as a single “dumb” zombie could be weakening a support in an unused corner.
My initial “solution” would be to mix and match, but I think that’s actually the worst of all possible worlds. Instead, I think zombies work best as environmental hazards. Bunkers might make you invulnerable to nightly attacks… but you have to leave sometime. Shouldn’t the punishment for hiding underground be the simple lack of information of what’s going on, combined with having to spend your morning hours slaying the zombie hordes milling about outside?
I guess we’ll see what the devs eventually decide. At present, there simply seems to be a maze-based arms race at the expense of any sort of satisfying nesting. If the 7DTD devs want to double-down, well… thank god for mods.
Waiting Games
The Alpha 17 patch for 7 Days to Die has been pushed back from “late July” to August. There are some sweeping changes being done to guns and weapon mods in general, in addition to introducing new vehicles and such. It will remain to be seen if these changes are enough to make the game feel fresh, but honestly, it won’t take much to bring me back anyway.
Fallout 76’s release date is November 14th. I was hoping that “beta access” actually meant beta access, but it’s more like the now-current industry standard of pre-release. Evidence? Beta will take place in October, starting with a small group and then getting larger, and XBox users will be first.
Battlefield 5 will be released on October 19th, or slightly earlier if you’re subscribed to Origin Access. There should be an open beta sometimes in September, which I suppose matches the “beta” of Fallout 76. Hopefully the “open beta” is actually open, e.g. free.
WoW’s latest expansion will be hitting August 14th, of course.
In the meantime, I’m mostly playing the waiting game. I log into WoW, check the Emissary quest, WQs, and Order Hall mission lists to see if there are any easy reputation gains, for Allied Races purposes. I recently upgraded all of my heirlooms to level 110, and equipped them on all my alts. I have recently discovered how lucrative the Invasions can be from an XP standpoint – with 55% bonus XP, clearing the map is basically an entire level – but the quests are account-wide, so I’m kinda cycling through my characters. If there is time/interest leftover, I do some mog runs.
Honestly, I should probably be spending this time playing something else entirely. But, as always, it’s tough to play something else when you really want to be playing something in particular that you can’t. In my case, since they have not be released/updated yet.
Impressions: The Long Dark
I first played The Long Dark ages ago back when it was in Early Access. It was back then, and still is today, a survival game of another kind: a true Player versus Environment. Your primary foe is hunger, thirst, and a cold Canadian wilderness hostile to your continued existence.
Welcome to the middle of nowhere. Population: You.
Having played it for a dozen or more hours now, I can safely say that I am pining for some zombies.
When I said your primary opponent is the environment, I meant it. Outside of the story mode (broken down into Episodes), there are no NPCs. Fauna consists of rabbits, deer, wolves, and bears. I have heard there might be moose involved, and I guess you can technically fish up, er, fish. But that’s really it. While you can eventually craft a bow or loot a rifle, this is not an action survival game by any means.
Given the above, the fundamental gameplay tension is food and warmth. The Canadian tundra is cold, the windchill is colder, and blizzards are colder still. Keeping warm is a challenge, and just finding shelter is not necessarily good enough. That’s when The Long Dark’s thumbscrews come out.
Don’t do this by hand. Or in a Blizzard. Or, really, ever.
See, picking up sticks is easy. Come across a branch that can be broken down into sticks? That’s going to take 10 minutes by hand. Which the game fast-forwards through, but your warmth meter is depleting rapidly all the while (depending on weather and your gear), and now you’re at risk for hypothermia. And those three sticks you got from breaking said branch? That’s maybe 22 minutes of heat in the campfire, which might not be long enough to regain the Warmth you lost breaking the branch outside, nevermind the other firestarting materials. Oh, and it took 42 calories.
The Long Dark takes counting calories to a whole new level. Sleeping takes 75 calories per hour. Breaking down a crate for wood for a fire takes ~62 calories. Walking around for an hour takes 270 calories. Harvesting meat from an animal, so you can cook it to regain calories, takes X calories. Hopefully less than the amount it took you to kill said animal, but not always.
What ends up happening is that you never really feel safe, anywhere. Sure, finding a sufficiently warm shelter is nice. But necessity will drive you from that place eventually. Water is abundant, but needs fire to be produced. Which needs fuel to be collected. Which needs calories to burned. Which needs food to be scavenged or hunted. Which needs you to be outside, in the cold, taking risks.
Being naturally driven from your comfort zone in a quest for survival is brilliant game design. But it is also dissatisfying. Instead of feeling like I have agency, I instead feel despondent. In 7 Days to Die, I forage for supplies so that I can construct defenses capable of outlasting next week’s Blood Moon. In The Long Dark, I forage supplies so I can… stave off the inevitable for another 24 hours. Technically they might be the same in principle, but one feels a hell of a lot better than the other.
Having said all that, I am currently working through Episode 2 of the Story mode and having a plot to follow makes things a bit better. Plus, the locations where the story NPCs live have a fire going 24/7, which makes things considerably easier. Not having the ability to unlock schematics and such as one does in the regular Sandbox version can be a bit stifling (e.g. not being able to craft a bow), but the overall experience is quite good, if a bit linear and directed.
Regression Towards the Mean
I’m sure that 7 Days to Die (7DTD) is a rather niche topic of interest to most people here, much less discussion about experimental Alpha builds of an Early Access titles, but I feel like the things going on with its development are applicable more generally.
When the first Alpha 16 (A16) experimental build arrived, it was transformative. Sleeper zombies seems like a minor change, but it fundamentally changed how you interacted with buildings. Prior to A16, you knew pretty much instantly how many zombies were inside a given structure, and once you killed all of them banging on the doors trying to get out, you were free to loot the place in peace. That is no longer the case – now you must actively sweep each room, and double-tap each body on the floor to ensure it stays where it is. There are still some bugs with these Sleepers suddenly spawning right behind you, but the overall effect is that nowhere is safe until you make it so.
Then came the balance changes.
First, since the Sleeper zombie system necessarily increases the amount of zombies one faces, zombie loot was decreased across the board. This makes sense, as if prior loot rates stayed the same, you might end up getting more loot from the zombies inside a building than the building itself.
In practice though, reducing zombie loot makes fighting zombies considerably less fun, especially on Horde nights. Zombies essentially become resource drains, to be avoided if possible. Which… maybe makes sense. Games like Dying Light featured that model, with zombies that functioned as speed bumps and possible death traps, nothing else. The problem is that Dying Light also featured impenetrable home bases, whereas even a few ignored zombies in 7DTD can bring down the strongest base in time.
Another change? Resource gains were reduced significantly. Up to this point, there was a “last hit” bonus drop of resources when you finally cut down a tree or smashed a boulder. Not only were the bonus resources great, but it was also viscerally satisfying getting that last burst of stuff concurrent with destroying the object you were mining. Apparently it made the early game too easy for the devs’ tastes however, so they got rid of it. Now when you fell a tree, you get the same 2-3 pieces of wood you got from whacking it the first 30 times.
More recently, the devs have also messed around with Stamina gains and losses. Stamina has always been a bit weird in 7DTD. There are a lot of Perks that correspond with Stamina gains – from making Sprinting cost less, to making Stamina recharge faster, and everything inbetween – but none of them really felt necessary. There was even Coffee and Beer items one could craft to recharge Stamina faster, but why bother? You could get into trouble being chased by a bear after cutting down a tree, but Stamina otherwise served the purpose of preventing you from Sprinting across the map 24/7.
Now? Iron/Steel tools will pretty much instantly drain all of your Stamina. Setting aside the more realistic concern of whether a steel shovel would make digging a hole easier than a stone shovel, the change seems rather ham-fisted. Yes, by making it virtually impossible to complete any tasks without Stamina Perks, the devs have made Stamina Perks relevant. But I’m not sure any thought was spared regarding whether Stamina Perks were a good idea to begin with.
Waiting around for Stamina to recharge is boring gameplay. It is literally no gameplay. Even if the idea is for the early game to be more “dangerous” or difficult, even if the goal is to tangibly demonstrate how improved your character gets over time, this is NOT the way to do it. Having Sleeper zombies haunt every house already shoots the difficulty of the early game through the roof. Reduced Wood gain has made crafting your own base impractical for the first few in-game weeks. Making early lucky finds like an Iron Pickaxe practically pointless until well after the point at which you could create one yourself? Mind-bogglingly stupid.
Experimental builds are experimental, and all this could be reverted tomorrow. Still, it remains concerning to me that the devs are placing such a high premium on “older” ideas rather than iterating on what actually feels fun about the game currently. Half a dozen Stamina Perks do not feel fun, nor does funneling skill points into them. They seem committed to keeping them simply because they had them already, in some weird Sunk Cost Fallacy manner.
Hopefully, things will change – if not soon, then by the beta.
In An Age 
7 Days to More Money
Apr 24
Posted by Azuriel
In a completely unexpected turn of events, 7 Days to Die is actually coming out of Early Access. Soon!
I say “completely unexpected” because, well, it is. The game has indeed been in Early Access for 12 years already, with Alpha 22 (now “1.0”) slated to come out in a few months. However, the Early Access period has been so long due to the dev team having no project manager – each major release has radically redesigned the scope of the game, changing progression mechanics, and otherwise putzed around art assets without actually making forward progress on systems or endgame.
But now they are, so… why aren’t I happy? Take a gander at the roadmap:
I don’t think you really even need to know anything about the base game to intuit that the stuff in the 2025 columns would, in fact, be a more appropriate 1.0 experience. In particular, Bandits have been promised for literal ages, and are still nowhere to be found. Do I believe we will get a UI/Main Menu Overhaul? Yes I do. Will there also be Bandits? Not falling for it this time, Lucy.
What is really going on with this 1.0 release is the increase in base pricing.
Look, my intent is not necessarily to paint The Fun Pimps as capitalistic assholes. I bought the game 7 (!) years ago for $10, and even now you can still purchase it this week for $5.99 ahead of the $44.99 (!!) price increase. In those years, I have played for over 327 hours. And regardless of any price increases, my copy will be upgraded for free, I’ll get all the updates for free, and so on.
It’s just that this “release” is clearly a business decision first.
This is especially true in terms of the console re-release. The history is that the game was released on consoles back in 2017 but had been stuck in Alpha 15 ever since then because porting company went bankrupt. We’re in Alpha 21 on PC, for reference. The Fun Pimps reacquired the rights a few years ago, but financially it never made sense for them to hire out another porting team. Until now.
Again, good on them for trying to get console fans a discount, assuming such a thing materializes. It also makes sense that you may have to cut your losses and start fresh with a new version given all the difficulties up to this point.
I just… I dunno. It’s complicated. As I mentioned last year, each Alpha has included a seemingly pointless overhaul of the progression system, although each iteration has taken it further and further away from zombie MineCraft and more towards something generic. Once upon a time, you would come across a small town and break into houses to scavenge for supplies and hope a big wandering mob of zombies didn’t stroll in after you. Now, 100% of the Points of Interest are mini-dungeons with traps, blocked corridors, zombies popping into existence when you cross thresholds, and a loot chest at the end. Which is cute the first time you come across the PoI, but later you just stack wooden frames and hack your way through the roof to get the loot chest and skip the mini-dungeon part.
Assuming you aren’t just spam-completing quests from the Traders, since that is actually the best way to get gear; crafting shit with resources you gather is sooooo 2017. Oh, and base-building? Yawn. Despite the fact the entire game is premised on a wave of zombies attacking you every 7 days, the devs have decided that the zombies are omniscient structural engineers who know both the shortest distance to your brains and which specific wall cubes in the way have the least amount of HP. Which, of course, means “traditional” structures like bunkers or buildings with a bunch of traps surrounding it are pointless. Instead, you need to construct Ninja Warrior obstacle courses for zombies to tight-rope walk towards you single-file for anything you build to have meaning.
Or just sit on top of a roof for a couple of weeks before moving to a different building. Whichever.
In fairness, all of this nonsense was introduced in patches, and it’s entirely possible to remove it in the same way. Given the consistency in which the devs have moved backwards though, I don’t have much faith in them spontaneously understanding why their game was popular to begin with and to stop undermining it. So while the business decisions they are making with 1.0 are rational and the last-chance deals magnanimous, I still don’t like it.
About the only bright side to all this is that, perhaps, having a firmer foundational codebase will encourage more modders to fix all the bullshit. Darkness Falls is already a transformational mod that improves the game in about every way, and I know of others (Undead Legacy). That last Q4 2025 slide does says “Steam Workshop Support” so that may be the golden ticket. We’ll just have to see.
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Tags: 7 Days to Die, Early Access, It's Just Business, Release, The Fun Pimps