7 Days to Die Beginner to pro tips

Where To Set Up Camp?

On a server it might be difficult to set up camp in a house due to reset rules. But often traders are near the edge of town and if you want to be close to one of those for convenience (unless of course you’re on a PVP server) then you have several options:

Trader Rekt is a good starting trader if you plan to do farming for survival, as he has a lot of vegetables and also stocks farming books. So it’s a great start if you want to become self-reliant early.

Trader Bob is a good late game trader as he is the most likely to have Solar panels.

Jen is good for medical supplies (so not very useful unless you absolutely need to find antibiotics, which you will find in many tree stumps in the form of honey anyway). So not super useful.

Trader Joel seems to be a middle of the road trader, also sometimes stocks solar panels but not as often as Bob.

Trader Hugh has more weapons than the others, however I don’t remember being overwhelmed by choice when going to him. Kind of meh unless you really can’t find a weapon in the field and want to try your luck at Hugh’s.

Early Money Making To Late Game Money Making:

Not only do you want to make money fast, you also want to get XP while doing so. One good way in the starting region is to harvest flowers, skim off what you need yourself and sell the rest. You make a lot of XP fast in the first few hours of the game while at the same time getting a decent amount of money for hardly any effort. To harvest loot crates for money is extremely time consuming and I suggest you do that once you’re sort of settled for basic survival and are looking for stuff to do after the first horde night. By week two you should also be at least level 11 after which you’re set with finding good loot, which I’ll talk about when going over starting skills.

Good money sources:

You are most likely to find your first wrench in a car or a sink. Also check traders. Cars are okay, and a good source of brass, but if you want to make money from efficient sources, scrap everything electric, like lamps, computers, wall cables, transformer boxes, solar panels, satellite dishes and what have you. But the motherload are those block computer/machine hybrids that look like they have metal paneling with screws, sometimes control panels. With a maxed Better Barter you should be making 7200 dukes from one stack of 1000 of electrical parts and there are quite a few houses that can give you 500-1500 of those parts (with maxed out Salvage Operations), depending on their size and contents. Similarly good parts are mechanical parts and somewhat interesting are springs. If you do mining regularly you’ll end up with a lot of stone and iron you don’t really need, take 6000er stacks to the trader and sell them, they give a good money boost as well and you just have those flying around anyway, so get rid of them for money!

Don’t worry about military and steel armor. It will drop on your head more often than you can count in the form of air drops. If you have already used all the sewing kits you will ever need, their best use is to make your own military or steel armor to sell on. If you are out of sewing kits I suggest selling all the steel armor parts, military fiber and military armor parts you get.

Testosterone: after the first cigar it becomes pretty much useless, and making cigars for a tiny bit of profit is more hassle than it’s worth. Sell it after it has served its initial use.

Eventually you’ll be swimming in first aid gear. I would sell anything that is beyond two stacks of anything. No need to EVER have more than two stacks unless you’re playing with a big team of newcomers to the game. I have in my most recent playthrough been at it for 220 levels (and counting) and needed 3 first aid kits and 3 jars of honey, 2 painkillers and 1 splint. So really no need to stock that crap as if it was the apocalypse!

Regarding selling weapons: Scrap level 1 weapons, keep the parts!

Level two to six weapons: Repair, make mods, stuff them full and then sell them! That nets you multiples of the amount the weapon would have been worth without the mods! The higher the level of the weapon, the more the mods in it will pay.

Once you’re good at crafting your own weapons and you need money, use your spare weapon and tool parts to craft your own gear, stuff it full of mods, slurp some barter buffing substances and sell for good money. Buy barter buffing substances at a vending machine before selling only a handful of weapons, you’ll make the money back easily.

Regarding selling armor: Repair, sell unless it’s level 1. If it’s level 1 (and doesn’t have the cloth repair item prerequisite) don’t repair it, it’s not worth it, you get more money selling a repair kit. Put in spare mods that you find. Pro tip: Save all the headlamps you find and put them in level six headgear, as that will net you the biggest profit when selling it. I suggest you don’t stuff clothing and armor full of hand crafted mods as that will deplete your Sewing Kits pretty fast and you’ll be out, unless of course you have no use for them. But every single clothing mod will use at least one Sewing kit, so use them for what you really need them for, then waste them on clothing mods to sell in as high level clothing as you can find.

Pro tip: If you max your bartering skill and max your bartering buff you can make a handsome profit buying all mods from the traders and sticking them into the medium to high level gear you are about to sell.

Starting Skills And Leveling:

If you want to be a good looter you want Lucky Looter. It takes you exactly ten levels to get straight to that point (if you spend your first free skill points on it too), though I have to admit the last 3-4 levels up to ten usually feel like a bit of a grind, but if you don’t look at every XP you bring in as if you’re watching the seconds of a clock it's okay and after that you’re set, knowing you’ll be getting the best gear possible for your loot level and region. However, as tempting as Lucky Looter is as the first skill to max there is one that I highly suggest you get first, as soon as you’ve done the starting quests, which is level 1 of Healing Factor. Why? I don’t hear you asking. You are going to be pretty dependent on drinking puddle water for the first week or two as you make cash to buy your first few water filters. The puddle water depletes your health quite a lot and without level one of HF it takes AGES or a lot of food to bring you back to health. With level one of HF it will tick back up on its own in a relatively short while.

Any trader will have Grandpas Learnin’ Elixir in the vending machine and those seem to restock daily. Pick up three per week and drink them at 9:59 pm every horde night. More than three buffs don’t stack in time, so don’t even bother drinking four. You’ll get 18 min of buff time which is just enough to last you through horde night anyway.

Mid Game Skills For Fast Leveling And Mining Tips:

Mining is my suggestion, max it out, all of it. Go for Miner 69er first, as that decreases your stamina usage. Once you’re equipped with a well modded steel pickaxe you'll be flying through the ground like butter, gobbling up those sweet minerals and XP like a god! And if you’re anything like me, you’ll want a lot of potassium nitrate and coal for ammo production. I recommend NOT going with the iron pickaxe early game, it might do way more damage than the stone axe, but you can swing the stone axe all week before needing a recharge in stamina and in the end you are waiting more for stamina with the iron pickaxe than you do breaking rocks. Into mid game the stone axe is more productive. Also, always add an ergonomic grip to the tool you are using. Especially in mining it saves you lots of stamina. Don’t forget to coffee up, if available.

For safe and secure mining here is a pro tip: Don’t dig from the top of the ground! It is nothing but annoying to get visitors stomping around the whole time while you mine. Walk at least 50 blocks away from the mineral at the top, build an entrance there (with a hatch) and go at least 12 blocks down before you dig to the minerals (forming a 10 block lid on the mineral field). Once you hit the minerals, go in a straight line through the entire mineral field until you hit rock again (don’t stop at gravel as that still indicates minerals nearby.) Start by digging side tunnels all the way through in 5 block increments, all the way to to the end of the mineral field in both directions from your first tunnel. Branch out into the minerals as needed. Often the fields are asymmetric and you might have to dig tunnels in unexpected directions to cover the whole field.

When done you should have a net of tunnels going through the entire mineral field. Next you start securing your tunnels: start from the furthest ends of each dead end, count five blocks in from the dead end and dig straight down to the next pure stone layer or bedrock and then fill that hole back up with frames to form a pillar of frames that comes up, finish by placing two more frame blocks to go to the ceiling (basically blocking the tunnel in front of you). You have now built your first support column.

Keep going, building support columns in 5 block intervals inside the tunnels you dug, all while retreating back from every dead end to the main tunnel. Lastly, do the same with the main tunnel. Now you’re set to completely harvest the mineral field without any risk of the ceiling collapse; it even works in the desert. It’s safe, secure, and nets you the whole harvest, except for the 10 block top layer.

If you dig farther away from there to find more minerals and you want to know if you are deep enough to dig safely (because you don’t want to dig a huge mine if you’re only 2 blocks underground) place a temporary flag (the red one) on the map exactly where you are underground and look up. The flag marker will be right above you and tell you how far you are from the surface. That’s a good way of gauging how deep you are underground without having to dig up and counting blocks.

Another pro tip: You can dig diagonal tunnels: Most players will dig only in 90 degree angles, and dig in endless zigzag patterns when building tunnels, but it’s well possible to dig 45 degree tunnels. You still have to dig the same amount of material, but the route you’ll be creating is way shorter than 90 degree zigzag, so it’s better for travelling.

To dig a 45 degree tunnel face half way on the compass from any main direction (“cardinal direction”), for example north-west, also called “inter-cardinal direction”, (again, make sure you face straight toward the north-west/whatever compass marker) look straight ahead (!) and dig the first 4-6 blocks in the two layers ahead of you. You’ll see the result better if you dig 6 blocks if you’ve never done this before. Trust the process and make sure to dig both blocks (top and bottom) right ahead of you. It looks weird at first, but you’ll get the hang of it. Once you’ve dug all six blocks, take a step back and look at it. You will have dug a full 2 block high tunnel with a flat top and bottom, shaped like an oblong hexagon. Compared to a 2 block tunnel in the four cardinal directions, you can actually stand up in it. To keep going in the same direction you can use a vertical line for reference that appears in front of you when you have dug the two blocks ahead. Again, looking at the compass, position yourself straight in line with the inter-cardinal direction and look at the wall ahead of you. You’ll see a straight line appearing slightly off centre from where you are looking. Every second step it’s going to be to the left of your centre line, and the rest of the time on the right of your centre line. Never hit that line you see directly, but keep your aim true to the inter-cardinal direction. If you are hitting that vertical line you’re doing it wrong, you always have to aim at the side of it, whether it’s left or right of your centre line. Once you’ve dug a 20 block tunnel like that you’ll get the hang of it. It will look weird if you have only removed the top or bottom block in your path, but as I said, trust the process and once both blocks ahead of you are removed you will see the hexagonal pattern.

Lots Of Water And Cotton:

If you want to mass produce anything, you will need a lot of water and cloth. In one extremely long game I played I ended up with 72 dew collectors (water production) and a cotton field of 850 squares (cloth production). Cloth is needed to make duct tape which you need 5 of in most recipes for mods. For the duct tape you also need glue, which uses a lot of water in its production. Glue is made from bone, and the easiest way to harvest that is in the snow region, preferably with the hunter skill maxed, as that will show you pretty much every animal around. With a vehicle and a decent gun you can easily collect 1000 - 2000 bones in a day. That’ll last you for a heap of glue, which will then suddenly disappear once you start crafting with it. If your farm is a bit away from your base, make a single farm plot block in your base and plant the last seed you have in that. If you want to know if your crops are ready for harvesting just check out that farm block’s crop, saves you all the time you’d need to get to and from your farm every 10 minutes for check-ups.

Useful Mid Game Skills:

You’ll be thanking me later if you haven’t tried this, but at least level your Parkour up to 2 block jump height. 4 block jump height is really cool as well, but can be extremely annoying to use in buildings as your character often hits the ceiling and if it’s at all slanted he will be thrown to the side. So I prefer to leave that at 2 blocks for the rest of the game. 2 block jumping is also very good for making z-inaccessible ladder entrances for your base.

Best Weapons:

All depends of course on your playstyle.

Here are my favorites:

Sniper, because no other weapon does its job, silenced. It is good beyond the obvious because even in POIs you can snipe sleeping zombies through tiny openings and the gun is surprisingly quiet if you max out your sneak skill. I regularly kill unnoticed with other zombies sleeping only a few blocks away.

Machine gun:

I use that when I get close to the loot room in POIs, where I usually can expect a big horde to wake up. It’s not really that silent, even with a silencer, so don’t expect to be unnoticed for long when firing that thing. In the wasteland at night I have zombies run at me from pretty far away even though I make sneak attacks with it. A single shot here and there might pass them by, but a salvo is sure to get the attention from the surrounding area.

Desert Vulture:

Especially with AP ammo this thing is a beast! Silenced it’s quiet enough to not wake up zombies right next to you in POIs so it’s perfect for room cleaning. Even stacked zombies are no problem with AP ammo as it will easily go through 3-4 of them with maxed out AP skill. Can one-shot a radiated sleeper if you max out your pistol skill.

Guns I don’t really like much:

Rocket launcher is more of a gimmick, can be dangerous to you, creates a lot of attention and doesn’t really do much beyond stressing other players in PVP.

SMG-5: Yeah it’s cool, but doesn’t quite have enough ammo capacity for my taste (max 60) neither is it quiet enough, as I’ve sometimes had zombies wake up on me while using it, neither does it do really good damage. So where do I use it? I usually blow all that spare 9mm ammo I find on horde nights. It’s not super effective (my favorites are of course what I would prefer to use) but it does an okay job and unless I melt the ammo to recycle the brass for when I want to go out and have fun with real guns instead. Though in the endgame you’re going to be swimming in brass and shell casings anyway, so this is more of a mid game thing.

Close combat weapons:

Good early game, later kind of a waste of inventory space. You’ll be stocked with ammo and guns later anyway. Late game I use a machete for harvesting plus a steel axe, and if I really had to I could use those for combat.

Auto shotgun:

It’s devastating! Especially with a high skill and good mods… but it’s equally devastating to all the walls that are in the path of the bullets. If you want to clear houses like the Hulk, go for that. You’ll probably have a lot of fun and nothing will touch you. But the houses are going to look like swiss cheese once you’re done with them. If you want to be a little bit more careful I’d suggest the Desert Vulture.

Bow and crossbow:

Mixed bag, really. I obviously use the bow a lot in the early game and once you’re good with it you’ll have no real problem hitting a zombie 30 blocks away while it’s walking, and ammo is limitless. The crossbow shoots at a nearly flat arch and can be used for early sniping. But once you get into gun territory those weapons become sort of useless. The flaming variants of projectiles are pretty but not very effective and the explosive ones… if you like attention, go for it! Maybe if you craft them for horde night, but by the time you can craft them yourself (instead of getting them as rewards from a trader) you’ll be stocked with other, better weapons with a much higher kill rate.

The OG of weapons:

I have never seen this being used a lot, but here is my pro tip for clearing out POIs: Always have a stack of Molotov cocktails on you when exploring buildings. Often you will find the house you’re in attacked by outside zombies as soon as they hear you rummaging around in there, and since they are awake they will hear almost anything you do. So usually your option is to find a window, a gap to shoot through or to go outside to take care of it (because you don’t want to hear all the distracting sounds of an outside zombie while trying to clear a house and listening for breathing noises). So what do you do? Go to the wall or door the zombie is pounding on, back a few blocks away from it and throw a mollie at the wall. The fire has a radius of 2+ blocks and not only will it hit the Z through the wall but it will most likely burn to death unless it’s one of the heavy zombies with double or triple hit points from the regular ones. It saves you a lot of work and a ton of worry, plus you can hit sleeping zombies around corners or behind walls, or trigger a surprise horde trap once you throw them from a favorable position.

Some General Advice, Unsorted Tips And Tricks Part 1

Pack mule… Either never put a point in it or go up to level four if you want to late-power-game. Level 5 is absolutely useless. Level five means you will never need the double clothing pocket mods you can put in your three clothing items. Save yourself the level five and put the mods in your clothing, they are not good for anything else anyway. However, if you want to either put zero or four levels into Pack Mule depends on what you want: zero points obviously means you need triple pocket mods in all of your armor to not be encumbered ever. However, eventually, when you have points to spare, you can put four points into it and max out your armor with extra armor plating, plus stamina plus advanced muffled connectors. That will aid in being quiet and getting maximum stamina buffs. But since we’re talking really minute values that change depending on what you chose, it’s really more a matter of taste than anything.

What glasses to use:

There are two obvious ones, one is the lucky goggles, as it gives you a looting bonus, the second the nerdy glasses as they give you +10% xp plus raise intelligence by one point. Early game I start using whatever comes first. Then mid game I likely have both on me and use the lucky goggles when I clear a house and start looting it, or when I loot the post horde night backpacks. The rest of the time I wear nerdy glasses. But late game, once you have to start thinking about what skill would be better to raise and it’s between option D and E since everything from A-C is already maxed out I ditch the nerdy glasses and only use the lucky goggles, since then I don’t have to check all the time what glasses I have on me right now.

All the others are good for when you want to buy a skillpoint in something specific and need the extra boost of +1 on that particular skill tree. But that happens only in 3% of my playtime really. The two above are my standard glasses.

Electricity:

Don’t underestimate the benefits of an early warning system in the form of a motion sensor and a speaker to tell you that a zombie is approaching your base. If you want to spend the extra ammo and power you can of course also couple that with a few well placed turrets, but just the alarm in itself is a nice thing to have.

And if something in your electrical system doesn’t work, that most likely means you don’t have enough juice. Keep adding solar panels of higher qualities or engines, or split your circuit in two with two power sources if your machines just don’t wanna do the job and stay grayed out.

Food:

It’s not really necessary to invest points too highly in food. First of all you can give yourself a skill where you don’t get as hungry and thirsty, secondly, once you get going you’ll be swimming in food anyway. But if you want to be a master chef, then I suggest you buy every can of peas you come across, especially in vending machines, as there are three high level meals that need those.

Blocks you can shoot through:

Especially in “horde base” areas of your fortress or house you will be well served building whatever you can with blocks you can fire through, like grates or railings with a few places for cover against cops and puking vultures. Those blocks will have the same stability as solid blocks but you won’t damage them yourself, plus you can fire unhindered at anything that approaches that spot. You can even go so far as to build the walls of your base with those types of blocks, unless of course you have peeping Tom neighbors. Though I would most likely still build a solid core around my gear.

AP ammo:

Pretty much the most useful ammo in the game. Once you have the materials at hand I would melt in anything that is not AP ammo and recraft it into AP.

Don’t worry about screamers:

Put up as many workbenches and forges as you like. Even with a very high amount you will only occasionally get screamers to visit you (I think the most often I have experienced is about every 5-10 minutes) and if your base is only somewhat solid you’ll be fine. Especially if you have an alarm setup and maybe a robotic sledge at a strategic place. Good in that case to have solid walls around the core of your base where you are spending the most time so that you are not seen by the screamer every single time they approach, because then it WILL get a little tedious after a while. So what now, first I told you to use see through blocks, now I tell you to build solid… You’ll figure it out. ;)

Horde night:

If you want to make sure the zombies don’t smash your base to pieces then invite them in. At least far enough to make them enter a defined kill zone. So build them a path they can follow to you and make sure they could run or climb to you if they wanted to. As soon as you are somewhere where they can’t reach you physically they will start bashing the walls and try to bring you down rather than coming to you. Designing a good kill zone is going to be the challenge. It will save you not only repair time but also ammo in the end. I myself have a design where I basically don’t need more than 300 rounds of 7.62 AP ammo for a 12 zombie horde night late game (normal difficulty) and I don’t even need to repair my weapon once, IF I run my base as it was designed. And all I use besides my gun is a robotic sledge close to myself as a last resort, but it usually doesn’t get any work. (But as I said earlier, for the time being I’m using the SMG, and it’s not as effective, so sometimes the sledge gets to work, and I use about 3500 rounds of 9 mm ammo with it (regular, not AP. So the first example is for when I use my good gear and use my base to full effectiveness.)

But at the end of the day of course everything can be solved with enough turrets if you’re so inclined. SMG-turrets have a range of 30 blocks if you want good coverage.

Scrapping loot:

If you are strapped for certain resources and you have a bundle of materials that you can scrap into the resource you want, scrap them one by one by hand if you want to spend the time. The reason is that if you scrap the entire pile at once you might only get a fraction of the resources compared to doing it one by one. This works for example in regard to scrapping bandages into cloth or money into paper.

When to ditch the stone axe? Once you have a nail gun and a steel axe. By that time you probably have a pickaxe on you as well at all times or an auger, so by then ditch it. As useful of a multitool it is, it wastes a lot of time with the little block damage it does.

Unsorted Tips And Tricks Part 2

Easy POI searching:

If you want to break the system and have an easier time looting POIs go look for the entrance (usually shown by a light source) and then think about where the opposite end of the “maze” could be. If the entrance is at the top, most often the loot room is in the basement and vice versa. That is not 100% true, as some POIs have the start and finish on the same level but it’s true for about 75% of POIs. A strong locked door that is easily accessible from the beginning often shows the exit. You can choose to go through that instead of the proper entrance if you want an easier and faster experience as often the zombies will be in plain sight of you when going through the POI in reverse rather than the intended path. Of course that will also take some of the fun out of it, so I usually use this method if I already know the POI well, just to save some time and effort.

Sneaking:

Of course sprinting while sneaking will make more noise. Having light on while sneaking will negate some of the sneak effect. If you really need to be silent, loot containers one object at a time rather than grabbing all at once. If you don’t have a silencer yet, the bow and crossbow are your weapons of choice, they are pretty silent. With the bow, always aim for the head. With the crossbow you can get away with a body shot if you have good bolts.

Material harvesting:

Don’t disregard stacks of bricks/stones, piles of wood. For the effort it takes to harvest those, they give a lot of materials. Always harvest corpses and animals where you can, at least for the bones. You’ll thank me later.

Before quitting the game, always put your vehicles and drone into your inventory. Sometimes when quitting they glitch out and disappear, or at least they did some patches ago, but this will ensure you still have them. Sometimes the robotic turrets will glitch out and disappear. Most often they fall through the block they are standing on, so sometimes they can be saved by being picked up at the block surface that is straight below them. If they were standing on the lowest block possible already, they fell through the ground and are gone. It happens rarely though. I don’t bother picking those up at every save.

If you have a laser attached to a weapon it’s finicky to turn on/off your headlamp while that weapon is chosen as you have to stop, hold your function button (usually F) and then with the mouse choose the option you want. It’s way faster to switch to another gear slot where there is no laser, press F and then switch back to the lasered weapon, because doing it that way you can still move around.

Wishing for a lawn mower in order to harvest your 20.000 acre field efficiently? Use a bone or regular knife with an ergonomics mod (and a sip of coffee), that should be about the fastest harvesting out there, especially with a maxed knife skill. Sadly the chainsaw or auger don’t work for harvesting plants.

Got batteries that aren't fully charge but which you want to sell? Connect a generator to a battery bank, turn the generator on, turn the battery bank on, put in the batteries that need charging and voila. Come back a day later and they're charged. You only need one engine in the generator for that.

Hope this helps!

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Beginner to pro tips