7 Days to Die Beginner Guide for noobs and people returning to the game

Introduction

Beginner Guide for noobs and people returning to the game image 1

are you constantly starving, dying of thirst, or otherwise unable to continue living? new to the game, recurring veteran, or just curious about game mechanics? then read on, and i will help!

Basic Sustenance

A good way of early game food is bird nests. apart from giving you feathers for arrows, eggs are a good source of food.

however, don't bother with boiled eggs. they're a noobkiller. they use up water, but don't give hydration, and are generally a bad food source. do eggs and bacon instead, or eat eggs raw.

try to find or get a puddle of water near your base. you can also sometimes find water in cities and suburbs and stuff, for example in ditches or canals or some POIs.

don't fear dysentery and just fill up your stomach with that sweet, rancid murkwater. it's better to "spread your contents" and stay alive than it is to keel over with a spotless behind.

later on you can make goldenrod tea which instantly cures the runs. combined with a readily available source of fresh unfresh water, you can basically cheese the game.

try to get a bone knife early on. you can get bones from looting trash, and once you have one, you can dismantle rotting carcasses, which you'll eventually develop an eye for.

bones are also good to keep on hand, because you can turn them into glue later on, which helps in a lot of crafting recipes.

don't be afraid to use ammo on animals you see. hitting them with bow and arrow requires a lot of skill, whereas guns usually one-shot them.

a standard deer will give you a lot of meat, which you can use in early game to make charred meat in a campfire.

try to get a grill as early as possible. it's an important campfire addon, together with the cooking pot.

while both can be cheaply made in a furnace, getting a furnace in the first place can be hard for beginners, so you are usually better off buying them from a trader. more on traders later.

Advanced Looting

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everyone knows how looting works: press E on a container, press R to take everything, move on. but there are a few things that even veterans miss on the regular, and some hidden mechanics that can mean life or death for a newbie.

don't be afraid to loot literally EVERYTHING. toilets, bathtubs, garbage bags - everything is useful, one way or another. even clothes are sometimes best served to either be scrapped or directly sold to the trader.

pick up potted plants and chairs too - basically everything not nailed down. you can do the same with them - either directly sell them or scrap them and sell the scrap.

leather furniture might also give some leather, which you can use in crafting.

dismantle stuff. just because you can't loot it doesn't mean it has no value. you can just about destroy everything, especially furniture.

big leather couch? hit that for some leather. bed? cloth. curtains? even more cloth!

smash some windows for glass shards, which you can use in the furnace to make glass blocks :D

especially viable once you get a wrench, because then you can dismantle appliances, cars, machinery, computers... basically way more than you think. also gives decent XP while doing so.

scrap things to keep your inventory clean. this can range from (gun) parts to clothing and outright weapons - sure, you might get a better profit selling them, and sure, you might be able to use them later, but with the way the game works, you're better of being able to reach the trader alive and well without getting torn to pieces by nighttime zombies.

Advanced Capitalism

Traders are an often overlooked feature of the game, and in recent updates they play an even more crucial role.

you should try to find one near a city, suburb or other conglomeration of POIs. also to improve your looting, try to learn the prices and sellability of most common lootstuffs.

they're also your most important early-game food source, with most traders also having vending machines that sell valuable nourishment, and hobo stews are usually quite cheap and effective.

trees are an excellent source of emergency coins. you can spend a day chopping trees with a simple stone axe, then sell the wood to the trader. sure, it's not a HUGE amount of money, but if you got nothing better to do and are running low on funds, or got a friend you can not trust with combat, then living as a lumberjack might be a good way to earn your living :D

or craft yourself a stone shovel and go dig up dirt. the trader also buys clay.

quests: your main source of great loot and tokens, aswell as replenishing loot locations. you can get twice the amount of looting from a POI if you go there with a quest. just go there, clear it, then activate the quest for it to reset the POI and loot it again - twice XP and profit :D

if you do enough of them, you might even get a vehicle as a reward. speaking of:

bicycle. try to get one ASAP! you probably won't be able to craft one for a while because you need a workbench and two wheels for it, but you can get one as a quest reward from a trader or simply buy it.

it'll make life easier, because you can get to POIs faster to loot and move at high speeds while extremely encumbered, allowing you to do multiple quests per day.

Zombie Habits And Behaviour

on first glance, zombies seem simple: they see your supple flesh, they try to bite you. but there is actually quite a lot more to zombies than just mindlessly biting you.

mindlessly biting the world for example.

when zombies can't directly get to you, they will instead attack the area around you out of frustration, leading to holes in the walls and floors, eventually even be able to topple skyscrapers. therefore simply holing up somewhere is rarely a viable long-term solution.

I will go into more detailed base designs a bit later.

zombies are also attracted to playermade light sources and fires, so placing a lot of torches and having a lot of active forges and campfires in your base will lead zombies towards your base instead of them randomly wandering around nearby.

on the other hand, you can in theory sit out horde nights if you do not have any campfires, forges and light sources nearby.

afaik electrical light sources don't attract zombies, but don't quote me on that, and they're still attracted by active generators.

just keep in mind that zombies are also attracted to players who have fresh meat in their pockets, so if you are caught with your pants down after sunset, returning from a calm hunting trip, you might want to sprint back to base instead of sneaking.

horde night difficulty is dependent on loot level, which scales based on your character's level, equipment, wellness and days survived.

since you get better loot with a higher loot level, possibly leading to better gear, which in turn affects loot level, it can be a positive feedback loop that only caps out once you get max level gear.

oh, and the amount of players in a party also affects the local horde night zombies. for example, i personally recently started a new game with two friends, and on the first horde night we had a swarm of enemies under our feet (used my cheap upstairs fortress to easily survive it) as opposed to just a few zoms when playing alone.

friends are also a good survival helper in general. when in doubt, always remember: you don't need to be faster than whatever is hunting you. you just need to be faster than your friends.

if you see a diminuitive zombie in a flowing white dress, however, you need to shoot it on sight immediately.

this is basically a zombified egirl, and every time she screams, she will spawn a fresh new horde, ready to simp for her and trying to reach your brains.

of course you can also farm that specific zombie for experience, but there are better ways of grinding that.

Home Sweet Home

i remember digging and building an underground bunker with concrete walls once, with a vertical shaft leading down.

zombies simply dug it up, leaving a really big hole in the dirt down to my bunker and eventually chewing through the bunker ceiling :D

i have since resorted to a ramp down to the main entrance, which then acts as a killzone, with a central corridor flanked by concrete bars you can shoot through, where i placed shotgun turrets.

for early game, however, horde nights can relatively easily be beat by camping in a house that has an upstairs, removing the stairs leading up and replacing them with a ladder that starts 2 blocks off the ground, and replacing the floor with horizontal bar blocks (hold R and select "shapes" to get the bar shape, then hold R again to select advanced rotation to rotate them flat)

the zombies will run around below you in circles, dismantling the entire interior of the house, but usually mostly leaving the outside walls alone enough so the building doesn't immediately collapse once they dug a few holes.

this tactic however is not viable when it comes to lategame hordes, as there will be so many zombies that they just eat the walls and eventually collapsing the entire building, and certain kinds of zombies have ranged and explosive attacks.

also birds.

of course, you are free to explore other kinds of base designs for yourself. a friend of mine for example built a multilayered floor-height cage out of concrete bars that you can shoot through, and every time a zombie breaches a layer, they simply retreat one more layer inside.

just keep in mind that if your base has a big footprint, it will also have more space for zombies to attack from, meaning that while you are occupied with one side of the base, the unfriendly visitors might break and enter from another side, leaving you unable to exert your basic rights as an american homeowner over them.

XP: use "building blocks" instead of "wooden blocks" or other advanced stuff for construction, and then upgrade them with materials later on. sure, it's tedious and more expensive, but the amount of XP you get from simply upgrading a simple plywood frame all the way to a solid concrete block is well worth it, especially if you are building a bigger base.

on a side note, if you misplace a block, it's easier to fix that mistake if it is not made out of a material that will require multiple hours of hitting to get rid of.

also do not underestimate buckets: if you manage to build yourself a small pool somewhere, you cna usually use buckets to transport water inside your base. sure, it's murky, but you can drink directly from it as mentioned in an earlier chapter.

Conclusion

while the game has lost a few fun mechanics and unique playstyles over the past few years, most of the restrictions only apply in early game, and the game can still be fun in it's own way.

always keep in mind however that the early game grind can last for a while, at least until you get some good amounts of skill points, skill books and infrastructure up and about.

there might still be things you are unsure about, things i might have missed, or other incomplete things or maybe even errors, or other things you feel like needs to be added to a comprehensive guide.

that's fine, i will listen if you tell me. you can simply answer as a comment, add me on steam or contact me on discord, where i use the same profile pic and name as on steam.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3231484535

Beginner Guide for noobs and people returning to the game