I hope you're all hyped for the console launch tonight! I figured I'd take this time to write up a semi-lengthy guide on what to expect when playing this game, for all the new players about to join our amazing community! Please feel free to add anything, ask questions, or comment. Consider this a guide and open Q&A from an avid 7 Days to Die player. I've been playing since Alpha 3, and this game has come quite a ways! It's great to see it expand to the console playerbase, and open up a whole new area of fans!
- What is 7 Days to Die?
7 Days to Die is possibly one of the most creative games inside the zombie genera. The company The Fun Pimps seems to have hit an area inside the survival genera where most others have failed, in a sense. Allow me to use the popular title DayZ and H1Z1 as examples for this.
Now we have all seen our fair share of zombie movies I hope! Ranging from movies like 28 Days Later, to George Romeros famous series of movies (Day of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, etc), to the famous TV series The Walking Dead. The one thing all these movies highlight, is how ruthless zombies are. How they will stop at nothing to get what they are after. Clawing and smashing through houses, piling up against doors and breaking through! And every game seems to want to mimic that feeling. That fear of death. That fight of flight human instinct. And a lot of them have done a pretty great job, but they all lack one aspect that 7 Days to Die tends to hit perfectly. That aspect is, the ability to smash through the world to get at you.
In games such as DayZ and H1Z1, that fear tends to stop the second you close a door on a pre-fabricated building. They don't really tend to smash through to come and get you. Well, 7 Days to Die has that perfected. These zombies are not something to take lightly! With the entire world, including the ground, being destructible, no where is safe for you to hide. If they sense you, only fighting or running will save you.
- So what does this game offer, besides insanely well done AI?
7 Days to Die seems to be completely focused on "play it your way". The way the game mechanics allow you to control your world, is something similar to the game Minecraft. With the entire world being destructible, you can do just about anything. Now some people LOVE to build, I for one sure do! This game allows you to be as creative as you'd like to be, with some players creating buildings such as Marios castles, the World Trade Center, pyramids, towns, and pretty much anything you'd like to!
Now what if you're not much of a builder? What if you're just not feeling that Minecraft-esque creative aspect? Well there are TONS of amazing buildings out in the world to choose from! From stores, cafes, oil plants, parking structures, gas stations, diners, and even run down shacks!. There are dozens of towns full of houses and apartment buildings. Major cities with tons of stores, movie theaters, massive apartment complexes, police stations. You name it, you can live in it!
Every single building can be fortified, remodeled, and changed to your liking. Nothing is off limits in this game. If you find a nice place to call home, you can reinforce the entire thing to steel and concrete, lay spikes around the outside and hold up inside. This game is entirely "play your way". Heck, you can even go from town to town, going nomad style and live off the land and what you find. The choice is yours! (Although, I'm a loot horder, so I could never play this way. So much loot, so much to stash away!)
- So you talk a lot about the building and zombies, what will I have to defend myself with?
Guns, melee weapons, tools, traps, landmines, you name it! The big focus would be the guns and traps. But let me first cover melee weapons, as you're most likely going to use those when you first start out.
Melee weapons are pretty important for your average zombie dealings. Most of the time, you'll choose melee to clear out a town or building. One of the best, and rarest being the machete. This bad boy does a considerable amount of damage, and tends to decapitate zombies fairly easy. Its pretty hard to find, but when you do, it will become a go-to weapon. The sledgehammer tends to do about the same amount of damage/decapitation as the machete, but it swings a lot slower, and may be difficult for some users in tight situations. Its great for outdoors though! The most commonly used, easy to craft melee weapon, would have to be the spiked club. This tends to do a decent amount of damage, nice and quickly. Its relatively easy to craft, and easy to find. Highly suggested for the first few days of gameplay.
Traps and landmines. These badboys are what you'll be using to fortify your parameters around your home. In early game, wood spikes are going to be your BEST choice for keeping those pesky roaming zombies at bay. They are easy to craft, easy to deploy, but they break fairly easily. So long term use isn't suggested once you get established in the game. For a good solid defense, wood log spikes are the way to go! These are nice and sturdy, and upgradable. Your first tier being treebark looking, then to a more solid wooden spike, then metal tipped, metal sheeted, and finally fully reinforced metal. (So 2 tiers of wood, 3 tiers of metal). Lastly, we have our barbed wire fence. These are pretty decent to use, as they slow zombies down, but they also tend to break quite a bit. Typically you'd want to place these somewhere around your entrance, and not around your entire base as you would wood log spikes. They tend to be rather expensive, and hard to maintain.
Onto the guns! Oh guns guns and more guns! Now unlike everything else (besides the machete), these are NOT craftable. You will find various weapon parts (sometimes even full guns) as you explore the world. Most typically, inside a gun safe commonly found in most houses. These can be pretty sturdy and hard to break into early game. Now as you explore the world, you'll notice you'll find various books to make these guns, such as the ak47, sniper rifle and all the others. In order to put these gun parts together, you need to first find the book to unlock the knowledge. But once you do, you can assemble and disassemble any weapon you find, mixing and matching different grades (we'll touch up on this in a moment). So for a list of guns, we have the crossbow and bow, pistol, blunderbuss (this gun is a default one, so you can make it as soon as you find the supplies.) the shotgun and sawed off shotgun, SMG, hunting rifle, sniper rifle, 44 Magnum, AK47, and lastly, the rocket launcher.
- What about the tools? What do we have to harvest and destroy all these buildings with?
This is probably one of the most important aspects to this game. The tools. And with this, I'll cover quality grades as well. So lets start with that before I go into tools, because it'll make more sense.
Quality grades are pretty simple. The lowest grade possible, would be 1, highest being 600. This is also done on a color scheme every 100 levels. So 1-99=Grey. 100-199=Orange. 200-299=Yellow. 300-399=Green. 400-499=Blue. 500-600=Purple. Now quality will effect a lot of things in the game. From armor and weapons, to tools you use, to even the minibike! Its obvious to state, that the better quality the item, the better it is. Higher quality guns will do more damage, higher quality armor will protect you more, and higher quality tools will harvest faster and do more damage to the world around you. You'll have a tough time getting through a gunsafe with a level 1 quality tool, but easily break through with a quality 600.
So for tools, The Fun Pimps have added something AMAZING I feel. Power tools! You have your standard run of the mill tools that you'll use the majority of your game time, so lets cover those first. When first starting out, you'll be crafting a stone axe, this won't really do that much damage/gather much when you are first starting. But the more you make, the higher your quality skill will get at making them. For higher axe tiers, we have the fireaxe and the steel fireaxe (sorry no link D: ) As you would suspect, this axe does more damage to wood based objects, then it would to metal or stone. For those types, we have items such as the iron pickaxe and steel pickaxe. Now the steel tier is a bit harder to craft when you first start out. You might get lucky and loot one, but thats up to the RNG gods. These tools are going to be your everyday gathering, and exploring tools. They'll help you enter buildings quickly, get through gun safes and metal doors faster, and gather materials efficiently to build up your home. You'll be going through them left and right, and they are very vital to the game.
Now let me cover your homestead tools. These tools are going to be your common tools you use around your base. They do various things, from upgrading and repairs, to tilling the ground for a farm, to shoveling out uneven terrain to build on. First up, we have our shovels. These are self explanatory. Used for quickly removing and gathering dirt, snow, sand, clay, basically anything soft. They also come in a stone shovel form, for early game clay gathering (you'll need a bit of this to make your first forge, and metal.) Next up, we have our garden hoes. When you use these on dirt, they will till the ground, allowing you to grow various crops on the land for food. They are more of a luxury item for established players, then a necessity like the other tools. And lastly, we have our repair tools. Now repair tools all repair at different rates. Our first and lowest, being the trusty stone axe that we'll be starting out with. This repairs/upgrades at a rate of 25% per swing. Next up, is our wrench. These will upgrade at a rate of 50% per swing. Note that this tool, can also be used to disassemble various things in the world, from refrigerators, to overs, to even the cars outside! So this is a pretty good tool to have on you when exploring for materials. Lastly, we have our claw hammer. This is the most powerful handheld repair/upgrade tool, upgrading at 100% per swing.
Now onto the fun part. The power tools! No one likes swinging a pick for hours down in the mines, now do they? Well this is going to highly appeal to you! First up, we have the auger! This badboy will chew through stone like its butter. This is an AMAZING tool for gathering, remodeling, trench digging, and making nifty bunkers. When you finally find one of these, you'll have A LOT of fun with the game. And just like our tools, the higher quality parts, the better it'll be. This takes gas to operate, so make sure you loot plenty of gas stations to keep this running! Next, we have the favorite, and no zombie game could be complete without one, the CHAINSAW!!!!!! Just like the auger, this amazing tool uses gas to operate. It will quickly do away with trees for fast gather, and just about any zombie in your path! It is really fun to use on zombies, but beware, it is a melee tool, so this means exposing yourself to damage! Lastly, we have the best upgrade/repair tool in the game, the nailgun. And yes, you can literally shoot nails at zombies if you'd like to. But this hand home repair device upgrades at an extremely quick pace. VERY quickly actually. Its great for big builds and fast upgrading.
Now do beware. When you use power tools, they are LOUD. They will attract screamer zombies to your location that'll come and check out what all the hubbub is about. So using them around your base is best left for daylight. They also tend to be pretty loud sound wise, so I suggest turning your volume down a bit before using it. Hopefully TFP will make it a bit softer for us in the future.
- This all sounds great! But what about character progression?
Character progression in this game is really well done. We use an experience system to level, and with each level, we receive skill points to invest into better aspects of our character.
Experience: With everything you do, you'll earn experience towards a skill. So lets say I'm mining away, I'll earn skill experience towards Mining Tools. For repairs/upgrade, I'll earn exp in Construction Tools. For smashing zombies with my club, I'll get exp towards Blunt Weapons. Etc etc. Now after my skills get high enough, I'll level. Each level will grant me 5 total skill points to invest into my character. I can choose to progress those skills listed above even higher, OR I can choose to invest it into a Perk.
Perks are bonuses to certain things. Lets take the best one for early game, called Quality Joe. Quality Joe will cost me 5 skill points to upgrade once. With each upgrade, I have a better chance to find higher quality items. It'll give me a +25/50/100 quality upgrade automatically. Quicker Crafting perk, will allow me to craft items faster (10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%). Skills like Concrete Mixing, Steel Smithing, and Workbench, will unlock the ability for me to craft Concrete, Steel, and Workbenches. So be wise about where you invest your points when you level. Sometimes its best to let the natural skills progress on their own, and invest into the perks as you level up. Pick and choose wisely. Go over your options before you commit, because there is no turning back!
I think that about sums up a lot of the basics about this game. I covered what the game is about, the mechanics and concept behind the game, guns, tools, building and houses, xp and progression... I'll go ahead and write up a guide in a little bit for those just starting out. A play by play of your first few days, and what to do/avoid. I wanted to basically upsell the game a bit and fully explain some of the aspects to anyone who may still be considering purchasing this game, or those going in kinda blind.
I'd like to thank some youtubers that I linked for the great videos they've posted here on reddit in the past. All these guys are great loyal players, and if you'd like to see them in action, please head over to their channels. Thankyou Survival Buddies for the amazing Mario castles! Corion82 for your amazing WTC build. And Z-Nation FFS for your amazing build that I've personally been addicted to watching the past few days. Seriously that place is insane! And also Indie for getting overrun and slaughtered by zombies in the power plant ;)
Thankyou for taking the time to read my breakdown. If you have any questions, comments, or wish to talk more, please don't hesitate to chime in in the comments below!
Submitted June 28, 2016 at 07:02AM by Jayick http://ift.tt/29ixGmU 7daystodie
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