7DTD – New Game, Treasure Hunt

So I’m going to write some more about 7 Days To Die since it’s all I’ve been playing lately, and there’s this weird expectation that bloggers are supposed to post things occasionally.

I gave up on Conan Exiles because I already feel like I’ve done everything in the game, or I should say I’ve seen all the game mechanics that are in the game. Those mechanics are: Gather stuff, build stuff, and kill stuff. Everything you gather is gathered the same way: Either pick it up by hand, or hit it with a tool. Everything you build is built the same way: Put the component in your hot bar and place it where you want it. (This includes thralls.) Everything you kill is killed the same way: Shoot it with a bow or crossbow, or hit it with a melee weapon. (Or hit it with a club if you want to drag it back to base and make a thrall out of it.)

What’s sorely missing from Exiles is a reason to build and kill stuff. I don’t think I’ll be back until or unless they add that in. They could start by making the environment a lot tougher to live in. The static nature of the spawns makes it very easy to survive.

Let’s compare the monsters in Conan Exiles to the zombies in 7 Days To Die, which is a far more advanced survival game even though the graphics are more primitive.

Zombies in 7DTD spawn randomly. They walk in random directions or stand still. They aren’t chained to a single spot. They walk across the landscape. They break stuff in their way. They walk in groups (usually marching in your direction, unfortunately). They will follow you forever once they sense you, until you either kill them or run far away from them. Even if they stop following you, they might still wander in your direction again. Some of them (screamers) summon other zombies. They are relentless killing machines, and come in a variety of nasty flavors, from easy to hard, and they’re all mixed up together. And when night falls, they get exponentially more difficult to deal with, because they can run forever while you can’t. You can hide with some success, but there’s never any completely safe place to stay. Even if you manage to avoid the zombies for the first 7 days, on every 7th night, waves of them will hunt you down no matter where you’re hiding.

And by the way these zombies are no pushovers. There’s a good chance they will stun you if they hit you even once. If they hit you three or four times it’s over. With a zombie dog it’s over in seconds. It’s basically impossible to fight a lot of them at once (I mean, unless there’s a machinegun or flamethrower in the game somewhere).

That’s a threatening environment in a survival game. Knowing that zombies will attack and kill you every 7th day is a fantastic incentive to gather supplies and build a base. (And/or to never carry anything important, like those early days of Ultima Online.)

In Conan Exiles your incentive to build is … curiosity?

New Game

I was getting tired of spending so much time patching up my base so I started a new 7DTD game. I wanted to try something different, and starting over in a survival game is like starting an alt. (Except in this case the new character looks exactly the same.)

I started the new game on the Navezgane map this time, which is the hand-crafted map. Apparently if you explore around this map, you can learn some backstory about the zombie apocalypse, so I thought it would be fun to try that. I’ve had the game for two years but I have yet to see much of this map. It’s big.

I started in the snow surrounded by lumberjack zombies (a particularly tough breed). I walked through the mountains, died a lot, stopped by a trader, made my way south to a subdivision (Diersville-the places have names on this map), then settled on a corn farm. I found a metal shed that looked remarkably similar to the one I’d just abandoned in my last game and built a base there in the middle of a cornfield. This time I made it much smaller so it doesn’t take so long to maintain it. So far it’s survived past day 21.

Welcome to Diersville which is apparently too poor to afford an ‘E’ for their sign.

This time I was very lucky to find a cooking pot early on in the subdivision, along with a 9mm handgun. Surprisingly, pistols don’t do that much damage to zombies. You still have to hit the tougher ones several times in the head to stop them. Seems a bit unrealistic that a hand-made bow-and-arrow does almost as well as a 9mm pistol but I guess I shouldn’t complain about realism in a zombie game.

There’s a house across the road from the metal shed, presumably the farmer’s house (I had to kill a few zombies in farmers’ coveralls when I first arrived), with a basement in it. I thought it would make a good escape route so I dug a tunnel down under my metal shed over to the farmer’s basement. It took a while and so far it’s been a pointless waste of effort, but it looks kind of cool. It’s neat when you can destroy terrain just as much as build on top of it.

Escape tunnel!

The other big adventure I’ve had in the new game is trying to follow a treasure map to a nearby cache. This is another one of the many great things about 7DTD-you occasionally find little quests to follow. I dug a hole roughly 50 miles deep in the indicated spot but didn’t find any treasure. I broke down and Googled how far down I was supposed to dig, and discovered the treausure is only supposed to be 3 or 4 blocks deep, which I was going to protest vehemently until I found there was one tiny little spot on the edge of my massive round hole that I’d missed, and sure enough there was a chest buried there about 3 blocks down.

A very big unnecessary hole in the ground.

Despite wasting 3 games days digging everywhere but the right spot, the treasure was well worth it: The chest contained a sniper rifle, ammunition, precious metals, and about seven thousand Duke’s tokens (“cash” accepted by the traders). A massive haul of loot, in other words. I sold the precious metals to a nearby trader for even more Duke’s tokens. From now on, I’ll be dropping everything to follow any treasure maps I find, and it just so happens I have a second one. I can’t wait to go dig it up.

The other great thing about digging an enormous hole is that it really improved my Mining skill. I also bought the “Mining 69er” perk which turns out to be a really useful skill for increasing your mining yield and also decreasing stamina usage, so you can sit there digging all day without having to stop to rest.

Loot Drops

This brings up the topic of loot drops. Some survival games really know how to do good loot drops. Perhaps this is one thing that attracts me to the genre. It’s something that MMORPGs have completely forgotten how to do. I almost never care about loot in MMORPGs any more. In fact, I usually find loot to be actively annoying because it just fills up my inventory with useless junk that I have to sort through later. (Guild Wars 2 is particularly offensive in this regard.) Never finding any interesting or surprising loot is a major contributor to boredom in an MMORPG.

But with a survival game like 7 Days to Die, the loot drops are almost always useful, sometimes lifesaving. There’s a little rush of excitement when you find a can of peas on a zombie while you’re starving to death. And sometimes, the drops are amazingly useful. Like a sniper rifle or a chainsaw. Those kinds of things are so precious that I almost don’t want to use them for fear of losing them. That never happens in MMORPGs any more.