Welcome back to Save State, where we have peanut butter, jelly, and a baseball bat.
Me and my friends have been on a pretty big 7 Days to Die kick since the game released 3.0 to the public, and this has been probably the most fun we’ve had with this for years due to the sheer number of amusing options and many different settings the developers added for players to mess around with. 7 Days to Die has been a game that has pretty consistently grown in popularity, but it’s had as many steps backwards as it has gone forward. So, it’s been nice to come back to its updated version with renewed vigor because all of our guns say “pew pew” now.
I’ve played 7 Days to Die with friends consistently since 2013 or 2014 and have gotten well north of 1,200 hours on it just because it’s a fun experience with others. Now that version 3.0 is out, it seemed like a better time than ever to revisit the title with friends for a good and chaotic experience. Joining me for this adventure is fellow columnist Neal Sayatovich, who decided to strike off on his own to build his horde base. Is this what a parent feels like when their child goes off to college?
For 7 Days to Die 3.0, I started up a new world since developer The Fun Pimps added a bunch of new points of interest (POIs) to explore and loot. While you can port existing saves from 2.0 to the new version, you won’t get any of the newly added locations in your world unless you generate a new one, so we decided to start over and see how quickly we could get back to flying gyrocopters and packing robotic drones full of ill-gotten gains.
I may have also accidentally shot a wall out of my base during the blood moon horde attack because shotguns deal insane damage to walls. I left all of the concrete for doing repairs in our newer incomplete base on accident, and zombies are really good at killing my friends once they can quickly bypass basically all of our defenses.
7 Days to Die 3.0 brings in some fun new features, but the core gameplay of Voxel Minecraft has basically stayed the same. You fight zombies, loot everything you can find to feed and clothe yourself, and prepare a base against a horde that will accost you every seven days (or run around like a crazy person punching zombies if you spec into brawling). Typically, you find materials and books that teach you how to craft better and better gear with the fourth technology level usually being where the gameplay ends since there’s not really any more advancement that can be made. Interestingly, The Fun Pimps added a new system to let you continue advancing beyond that point now.
The new Magnitude system allows you to find gear with gold stars on them, which can have enhanced stats like increased fire rate on a machinegun or a higher capacity magazine. With the new combine station, you can merge like tools and weapons together to combine their stat bonuses, allowing you to have a tier 3 weapon like a Pump Shotgun that out-damages a tier 4 Auto Shotgun of the highest quality! This actually makes a fun little end game loop where you’re happy to find duplicate weapons and tools because maybe you can make your primary gun just a pinch better at defending you each time when combining weaponry, which gives a reason to continue playing after reaching the highest tech tier.
The Fun Pimps even let you change the forge back to how it worked when I first started playing in alpha 10 or 11! For the last probably 13 years, players have needed to stick materials in their forge, wait for them to smelt into the forge’s storage, and only after smelting enough could start crafting forged iron, forged steel, cement, and other necessary items. In 3.0, you’re given the option to smelt materials in a forge, craft directly in it like any other workstation, or a combination of both, which is entirely up to your whims.
For the last decade or more, forging has basically been a draining time vampire, requiring me to never be that far from the base at any given point in case the forge ran dry of materials to smelt. My friends could run out and be doing quests or foraging for 2-3 days at a time, and I couldn’t go with them since I’d need to babysit the forge and keep feeding it iron and clay to make the steel necessary for their weapons and vehicles. I just didn’t realize how much I missed how the forge used to work until now!
That’s really what 3.0 is all about. They added some new POIs, but The Fun Pimps went out of their way to give players a choice with loads of new sandbox options. These sandbox options include things like adjusting how much damage you and zombies deal, and how many skill points you receive on level up. But there are also considerably more involved options like disabling zombie rage mode (zombies when they fall or take damage will often go into a sprint and start beating on anything they can find), disabling zombie abilities to dig, crafting speeds, and amounts, and whether or not traders are open at nighttime.
The favorite new options of my friends and I are the funny options located in the final tab. One of them causes zombies to burst into confetti like the Grunt Birthday Party modifier from Halo, and another causes almost all guns, tools, and vehicles to emit funny sounds, like a shotgun sound effect just being a man shouting, “Kaplow!” There are other things that can be enabled like low gravity, tiny zombies, big head mode, and a lot more.
We even invited a friend who doesn’t play with us very often to join us in 7 Days to Die 3.0, but we didn’t tell them that we enabled funny sounds or that headshots would cause zombies to explode into confetti. They spent the entire play session asking what was up with the sounds, so we kept asking her if maybe they had enabled something client-side or downloaded a virus connected to software for a device on their computer. They accused us of gaslighting them, but I told them rest assured that we could never do that because they’re too smart for that.
This worked well for several hours until I drove the minibike over to Neal’s base, mashing the horn button while driving in circles around them, which resulted in a laughing fit so hard that we each started crying because when funny sounds are enabled, the horn on the minibike is just a man saying the words “beep beep.”
So, really, 7 Days to Die 3.0 is just more 7 Days, but now you’re given a good deal more control over how you play. If you hated traders and wanted to return to the days of alphas when traders weren’t in it, you can do that now and have way more control over how much of each loot type you get. You can dramatically reduce found ammunition and medical supplies, but increase the magazine and book drop rates so that you can still craft better tools assuming you’re able to find the resources with more limited loot gains.
Conversely, you can leave traders on and basically force yourself to rely on bartering to get higher tiered weapons, armor, and vehicles by dropping books to 0% and have a completely different experience playing. It’s an interesting approach though, and to a degree it does kind of feel like The Fun Pimps are saying, “We don’t know what you want, balance it yourselves!”
I’ve been playing 7 Days for so incredibly long that I actually think it’s fine that I’m allowed to do some basic rebalancing of it on my own without editing the XML files for the game because by this point I’ve developed a better taste for what I, personally, want out of the title. Honestly, if they introduced options to just completely replace the jerk Trader Rekt with Jen or Hugh, I would basically have no need to edit the XML files before starting a new world ever again.
Actually, options to ensure more of specific high-tier POIs would be nice because I wouldn’t say no to a way to guarantee more Army Outpost 7 or Crack-a-Book HQs during world generation. This is because I currently edit these in over existing POIs because I can never get enough of these locations for the highest tiered quests, but I’m not sure if asking for such a feature would delay bandits for another couple years.
That being said, my friends and I have developed our bases, gotten our gyrocopters, and are on the hunt for better weapons to see the damage number really crank upwards. We will probably be playing 7 Days to Die 3.0 for a good while still because that end game loop is a ton of fun thanks to the magnitude system. That being said, it’s probably time to bring this entry of Save State to a close because we’re going to be playing more tonight. Remember to turn off your chemistry stations and forges when you’re done working in them if you don’t want solicitors beating down your door. See you in two weeks!
