Category: 7 Days to Die

So, while the Posse is fidgeting and waiting for Stormblood to drop, 7D2D released Alpha 16 last weekend… just in time to give us a little taste of it before FFXIV whisks us away. This update upped the stakes and increased the difficulty of the game, which was something we could tell instantly (even though we play on lower settings).

I say this as a positive thing. A16 keeps you on your toes, even if you’ve been playing the game for years, like we have. Sleeper zombies are a new thing — they lay there until you get close and just wake up out of nowhere. You can put them down if you sneak up on them before they wake, but man, do these things make exploring new locations a startle-fest.

Also, new wildlife, such as wolves and buzzards are in. Wolves (and dire wolves) are almost everywhere, and attack much the same as the zombie dogs used to. At first, I thought this would be annoying, but then, when I realized you could harvest them for meat, fat and hide, they’ve become more of a good thing. Instead of running after pigs and deer, you can let dinner come to you!

It looks like the old roaming zombie hoards are back. I missed hearing the frightening sounds of running zombies at night. And these hordes are pretty sizable, giving a good challenge no matter the time of day.

Despite all these things, we were able to reinforce a starting location in time for the first blood moon. The 7 day hordes are now adjustable in size — we left ours at 8 zombies (per person, I believe), but you can make them bigger. With five of us playing, we had quite a lot of zombies rushing our base.

We found a few bugs (zombies and wolves running in circles but hardly doing damage, short weapon range, falling through the world, way too many screamers), and a few changes… but overall, we had a good time with the new build. I’m looking forward to exploring the new painting tools and making our base look faaaabulous!

But, first… who’s going to clean this all up??

While I’ve mostly been writing about adventures in FFXIV, the Posse has also spent a good deal of time in 7D2D over the past few weeks. We’ve gotten further than we have in a while — we survived the Night 36 horde last time we played.

Tales of a Greenhouse

Now that we’ve put this much time into one location, we’ve been able to experiment with building things we don’t normally get to in a shorter game. Much of this is trial and error based on how zombies respond to things that I build.

For example, I noticed that zombies could trash our garden if they got caught on the plants during a horde. So, I started fencing it in. But that hardly did anything to stop them. So I built a wood wall around the garden.

Well, for some reason, that prompted zombies to spawn on top of my garden wall! And because I connected the garden wall to the base wall with a catwalk, they were strolling right on in. Sometimes they fell down inside of the garden instead. Not good.

I decided to put a roof on the garden. But this has to still let light through, so it became a greenhouse.

To stop zombies from strolling along the catwalk into our base, I destroyed its connection to our walls. I decided to experiment with the fancy new metal hatch. It looks really awesome!

So I put one hatch in the garden…

Then I dug an underground tunnel to the base and put another hatch inside. We now have a secret passage from the base to the garden, and no more zombies seem to have spawned on top of the greenhouse.

Minibike Chronicles

Another thing that the Posse wanted to experiment with that we never have before was building minibikes. Until this game, we never had the books and the resources, and just didn’t play the game long enough on one map to build a minibike. So, we made it a goal to make them, and we were successful!

But the thing about minibikes is that you have to store them somewhere safe. Since we use ladders to get in and out of our base, I had to devise a sort of protected garage for our new bikes.

I decided to be flamboyant and learn about drawbridges. That’s right. I built a garage with a drawbridge that spans over a pit of spikes for the curious zombies that come our way.

If you look, you can see the cement ramp located just under the hammer there. The drawbridge’s footprint is such that you can stand on the ramp and still open and close it. So you just drive your bike up, open the door, and ride inside the little garage to park!

The minibikes are a bit buggy and difficult to learn to drive at first, but they sure do speed up travel time. Of course, to ride the bikes, you have to have gas. So, Syn did her research and learned how to mine oil shale. She also learned how to make the chemistry station, which in turn, creates the gas.

From there, we started getting gas production going. I think we’re pretty set on this…

Against the Horde

Our base is slowly being upgraded to the first level of steel. But with the hordes we’ve been getting lately, we need everything we can get!

Even the screamer zombie hordes are getting harder. The last one spawned a zombie bear, which is the first we’ve ever seen. Syn discovered quickly that going 1v1 with a zombie bear with just a crossbow was not a good idea.

The bear then learned the superior power of our spikes and firearms.

The night 36 horde was massive. We had zombie corpses littering everywhere when it was done.

The base held up just fine under all this. A major success!