It’s been a while since the Posse has gone zombie wrangling in 7D2D. This was no fault of the game itself – though it’s been a looooooooooong wait for the Alpha 20 they keep teasing us with on Twitter.

IRL hand/wrist injuries have kept some folks from playing, but this past weekend, we decided to give it another try with a new game. Sadly, the Nitrogen world generator we’d been using on our server was no longer in development, but thankfully, Syn found the successor and got us all set up.

This did require us to install some new prefabs, but the upside to that is that we get fine new locations like the one in this post’s header.

I haven’t been able to explore a whole lot yet as my job on the team is to get a home base established as quickly as possible before the first blood moon. This time around, we chose a church that I discovered near our original spawn spot. It has a nice little underground catacomb area that we’ve bunked down in.

It’s been a while since we’ve used an underground area as a base – this reminds me a lot of the days when caves were a great place to build. Those are sadly long gone, phased out years back, but that’s just how development goes.

This place is actually pretty atmospheric once you clear out the zombies and coffins. In-tact coffins also make good storage until you get something better. At this point, we’ve got everything all set up and organized in terms of boxes and food.

There’s also a cemetery next to the church which is slowly being transformed into our new garden. It always cracks me up when we find the headstone for Mad Mole.

We weathered the first blood moon night well enough, despite only having wood stakes around the base. Those never last very long. Things got a little hairy when a number of us got a bit too brave and decided to jump down into the horde for some hand-to-hand action – and then the horde chose that moment to ramp up on us.

Next time, though, we have at least one outer ring of iron spikes waiting. We’ll be a bit tougher on our defense… but so will the zombies as the nights get harder.

I still haven’t determined the best way to deal with Demo zombies – they can easily destroy cement blocks and blow up for terrible AOE damage. I remain not a fan of their addition to the game, mostly because it means that I then have to set up a second location as a War Fort just to be able to handle them in the later stages of the game.

I don’t mind building and having to think tactically through a War Fort design is fun. But it does boil down to the fact I rarely ever fully finish building forts before we either scrap the game, lose interest in the game, or the game has a patch that forces us to start over again.

I don’t get a lot of exploration time, which is sometimes a bummer – there’s a lot of neat places I’d like to explore. But I guess the same can be said of the Posse members who choose to mine most the time so that we have the resources we need for tools and building.

I did find an interesting location I’ll be attempting to transform into a War Fort this time around – a hotel. Every game, I pick a slightly different location as long as it meets certain specifications I have for it:

• It has to have at least two stories, or be tall enough to build a second story.
• I prefer stone/cement/iron walls if possible.
• It has to have a way to lure zombies in from multiple directions and try to filter them to a central place where we can then blast them away from above.

I feel like this hotel will probably serve our purpose, but I won’t know until I develop it a bit more and try it out. For now, our normal base will have to do for the second blood moon night as the War Fort isn’t even close to being able to see action yet.

It’s good fun to be back in 7D2D again!