7D2D: Zombies are Testing My New Video Card

As I noted, over the weekend, I installed a pretty significant upgrade to my video card. So far, it’s been pretty painless – just needed to get an display port adapter for one of my monitors and had to fight with my Cintiq tablet’s drivers as it’s adjusting to the new setup. But as far as playing games are concerned, it’s taken to everything wonderfully.

The Posse has gotten back into 7D2D over the holidays, and we’ve been playing it almost nightly now. On our current game, we’ve worked up to night 19 again. This was after restarting the game a few times due to the desire for a better seed.

We discovered that there’s a way to view the randomly generated maps based on the seed name, and we’ve used it to glance at maps to determine which ones are best . In a few of the games we rolled, we had a hard time finding a viable city near our base.

We even have a deck with a couple chairs up there!

While I can be content sitting at home building all day, a few in our party are explorers. They need cool points of interest to explore, and the newest build of this game really places a lot of emphasis on scavenging for parts and recipes. I think our newest map has a pretty good balance of what we need, and our base sits on the merger of three or more biomes, and quite near to the trader, which is always a fun thing.

Testing the Video Card

Seeing that 7D2D is a voxel sandbox game with fairly realistic graphics and a randomly generated world that often throws hordes of zombies at you, I figured it was a good game to test out my new video card. I’ve always played this game for function rather than graphics, so I never even took notice of all the higher settings I could choose. I thought the game looked good even on the lower settings.

So I turned on all the fancy shadows, reflections, better trees, higher grass and even god rays. Gosh… I had no idea all that was there! I pushed all the textures up, and man, what a difference. I didn’t realize that all this time I was playing with anti-aliasing turned off! Oops.

The result? My team had to hear me squee about how “fluffy” the world had become.

I don’t know! Maybe it’s because the grass is fuller and the graphics have taken on a softer tone, but “fluffy” is the best word I could find for it!

And it all runs just fine. I’ve slowly adjusted the settings higher and higher to continue testing it. I’ve had no problem no matter what I’ve done with it so far, aside from some wonky water reflections (it’s alpha).

But anyhow, I don’t have any new pictures of the updated base, but we’re starting to upgrade to cement walls. I also have built some fortification around our garden after a sad setback that took out most of our seedling potatoes. Apparently, zombies can and still will destroy crops. We haven’t had that happen in a while, so I didn’t know it was a risk. Bummer.

We are way ahead of the blood-moon hordes in terms of fortifications, so I’m feeling pretty confident in starting to explore other builds and add-ons to our base. I’m thinking about some catwalks, towers and other interesting additions. Our ultimate goal of this game is to finally make a mini-bike, though!

I have no idea why, but as many times as we’ve started a new game in 7D2D over the past years, we always have fun. Clocking in at 570+ hours,  the most of any game I’ve played on Steam, this is one game I absolutely got my money’s worth from.

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