Category: 7 Days to Die

Over the past few weekends, the Posse team has been getting together to play the newest 7 Days to Die alpha release. A18 has been on the horizon for a while, and has been something we’ve been waiting to get to try out.

Just like with every alpha release, the game has shifted and evolved in terms of how you learn skills, what skills do, the way you find and craft items, and how you build/defend your base against the horde nights. There’s way too much for me to list in terms of what’s changed.

The biggest shift for me is in terms of three things:

• Difficulty level
• How XP is distributed to folks who are builders
• The new skill trees

First of all, the game’s difficulty level has been ramped up quite a bit, even on the easiest setting. The idea is that you start out fairly weak, and work to level and strengthen your character as you earn skill points that you put into the new skill trees.

Skills have been revamped yet again, regrouped into a more RPG build type concept. You aren’t forced to specialize in any one “tree,” but its seems very beneficial to do so. This does hinge upon you deciding on a specific playstyle and weapon, then putting points in around that build. I don’t know that there’s really one wrong way to do it, but I do know that I’ve found my favorite build, quite by accident.

Let me introduce you to my steel knuckles.

The knuckle type weapons are new to this build, so when I found a set of iron knuckles early on, I was curious. I do usually enjoy a more melee approach in the game, though this is often made difficult due to the zombie’s reach and ability to stun you when you get hit.

But looking through the perk line, I saw that Fortitude did a lot to support a close-in melee style, including reducing stun chances and decreasing the damage you take. It also specialized in heavy armor which gives the build a bit more tanky-ability.

Add to that the Weather perks and the Planting/Gardening perks, as well as Health regen and Cardio… and well, this line really was calling out for me to play it!

It turns out that I’m having such a great time with the Brawler build! There’s nothing quite as satisfying as getting right in the middle of things and punching zombies. I’ve built myself up in such a way that it takes quite a few blows to damage me now — I’m not even at max rank — and I rarely get stunned when I do get hit.

Add to this the fact that the dev team has really reconsidered how XP is rewarded to builder players, such as myself. It used to be that builders who spent the majority of their time working on the base really got gimped compared to people out scavenging and taking XP from zombie kills.

It’s swung the other way now. Due to all the building I’m doing, I’m the highest level player among the group. I almost expect a nerf to building XP as it feels a bit too fast, to be honest.

I also find that cooking has been changed again – though I don’t have any points in that area. It feels a lot more fun, coupled with the new farm plot system, to find seeds, plant and harvest towards building a food supply now.

We even got a few new plants, such as pumpkins…

…which you can harvest and use to craft jack-o-lanterns (pictured in the header image), much to my delight. Oh, yeah, and you can make food with it too, which is also important, I guess. 😉

We’ve endured the first two horde nights so far, and the second one was quite a ride. Of course, I didn’t have the barbed wire defense up at that point, so the night 21 horde will be the test of those traps.

Overall, we’re having a pretty good time with this version of the game. We’ve seen several patches drop, but none that have forced us to restart our map yet. Hopefully we’ll be able to get a little further in this time before that happens.

Over the weekend, the Posse decided to fire up a new game of 7D2D. So, Syn spent Saturday afternoon setting up the server and, we gathered around to poke at zombies for the following two nights.

The game started out fairly friendly compared to some of our last few starts. All of us players spawned in pretty close to each other (compared to the times it took the first 2 days to find each other and then find a place to hole up in). And we had some pretty interesting biomes/townscapes to explore all within reach.

As a builder, I’m still experimenting with ways to deal with the fact that we no longer have large wood spikes as sturdy traps to use against the hordes. I think I kinda overcompensated with my first attempt at building a funnel system that is meant to direct incoming zombies straight into trapped areas. I have yet to really test this on a horde, so we’ll have to see how it works.

This is also the first time we’ve been able to create bicycles (as opposed to mini bikes), and everyone seems to really enjoy them as a far better method of getting around.

I know that the devs at 7D2D said they were going to focus on putting paths and stories into the different houses and POIs you explore, and this weekend was a grand example of this. I wish I’d gotten more pictures of things, but I was too caught up in the exploration than thinking to write about it.

So, someone discovered this farm. One half was a building called Bob’s Boars. The other half was marked as Carl’s Corn.

Knowing from the DogSnekPigMan house that signs can be quite literal in this game, I warned that there would be pigs inside of the boar house. Sure enough, there were.

Seeing that we were somewhat low on meat as we’d hardly seen much game in the area, and pigs at this point can be deadly if you’re solo, we rustled up a team to go inside and clear it out.

Some of the pigs were wandering about, some were attacking zombies, some were still in cages. Thankfully, pigs don’t attack you until you attack them, because there were quite a few of them. And then, when we got to the lower area, there was quite a gruesome scene.

Stripped carcasses everywhere.

I don’t know if this was for decoration or if these had once been living pigs (in the gameplay sense). But following the path outside, I emerged next to a very very large open cage with the name GRACE over top of it. Inside, there were mattresses and hay bales – things that indicated that this Grace was a prized pig (I assumed).

I was a little disturbed by this, but we didn’t see anything else in the area, so we went about our business for a few more in game days. That’s when one of the guys went and started exploring the Carl’s Corn area of the buildings.

He went through what he described as a dungeon of sorts, and discovered at the bottom in a cave, a giant green pig:

Note the mattress next to her is man-sized. And those are the bones of either people or zombies scattered around.

He started exclaiming about the giant green pig he’d found over voice chat. And while it took me a little bit, it suddenly all clicked.

“That must be Grace!” I exclaimed, thinking back to the giant cage with her name printed over it. I wasn’t sure about it, but later on, we confirmed that this was indeed, Grace.

The guys went back and took her out – the image above was taken by Amoon before they fought her. They said she provided something like 90+ pieces of meat. Good eating. Someone joked that “we’ll be full of grace” pretty soon.

Apparently, Grace has been in game since fall of last year. This is just the first time we’ve run across her. Makes me excited to see what all else we’ve never discovered about the new betas of 7D2D!

A few weeks back, 7D2D dropped Alpha 17 for PC users. This was a HUGE patch that we’ve been waiting for since… well sometime during the summer. It kept getting pushed back, but it’s available now to opt into as an experimental build.

Our Zombie Team has put some hours into the new build over the past couple of weekends. While I’ve hardly scratched the surface of what’s there, and haven’t seen anything that constitutes as end game (we had to start over twice — once because of a patch incompatibility), I think I’ve got a feel for it enough to write some stuff.

Welcome to Fort DogSnekPigMan

See that picture above? This is Fort DogSnekPigMan, our newest digs. In the past, we usually made a beeline to find a forge house to reinforce as a fort. But with changes to the game (they removed my beloved Log Spikes), this just isn’t as feasible to do by the first blood moon anymore. 

So when we had to restart the last time, we decided to go the route of finding a pre-existing building with a roof we could hold up at. Fort DogSnekPigMan became it. 

And actually, it did a pretty good job! 

The first blood moon horde was nothing to sneeze at. It even had a couple of cops… which you traditionally don’t see to later in the game. But Fort DogSnekPigMan already had some traps (spikes and mines) in place before we got there, and it had this spiffy little side yard area that helped a lot with defenses. 

So, in the end, it was a good pick. 

I don’t think we’ll use this forever, but for a place to start, it was a good one. 

Lots of Changes

There are so many changes to the game with Alpha 17, I just can’t even begin to remember to talk about them all. Everything from how battle works to how you earn XP was completely overhauled. I don’t agree with all the changes (zombies should not be able to jump like they do!), but it does make for an interesting time. 

Here’s some things I can think of off the top of my head:

• Grouping and shared experience (builder lifesaver!)
• More RPG elements – NPC quests, skill “trees”, etc
• Stamina cap is based on hunger, so food is important
• Stamina useage – you use more, but regain it back faster
• Houses that act as dungeons – there’s a specific path through a house to find a “treasure” at the end
• Lots and lots of traps and tricks – don’t just rush into any building anymore, use the intended path for better results
• New melee combat system – power swings!
• Retrieve arrows from zombies (yay!) 
• New vehicles (though I haven’t seen any yet)
• Zombies no longer drop loot (but they also don’t leave bodies behind)
• Updated graphics (it seems)
• …other stuff I’ve probably forgotten… 

Most of this is pretty fun. But some things still need a lot of tweaks. 

For example, if you’re a builder, you’re out of luck when it comes to earning experience for leveling. Zombie kills are the prime means of XP, and unless your buddies are sharing experience and racking up kills around you, you’re going to get left in the dust. Syn helped to offset this by tweaking building experience so that it’s a bit better in the .XML files. But really, this shouldn’t have to be a player tweak. 

7D2D was such a fun game because it allowed players of all interests to work together to overcome the threat. If you liked to build, you could create the safe house. If you liked to explore, you could bring back supplies. If you like to fight, you could fend of hordes. 

But the way that it’s balanced now, this isn’t true anymore. Not to mention, a number of items were taken away (log spikes) and zombies that jump… make builders have to rethink their approach to designing a place that’s safe for the team during a horde night. 

The jury is still out on how progression moves in the long run. We’ve only just cleared the first Day 7 horde. And I have a feeling there will be other patches that come along for fixes to this alpha… likely to ask us to start over again, I wouldn’t doubt. 

7D2D still remains my favorite zombie survival game — I’ve put more hours into it than any other game on Steam. I’m interested to know where it’s going and how it’s going to develop now there’s a much more RPG slant to it. I guess only time will tell!