Maxwar

I could reproduce that problem with a stone axe but interestingly I am able to hit them just fine with a pipe baton.

Just yesterday I was starting a new playthrough on permadeath/insane and got an infection and day 1.... I ran to the woods and spend about 6 in game hours chopping stumps and found about 3-4 honey and was able to stop my infection. Something seems off with Op's numbers. I am playing the latest Exp. build.

I hoard shotgun ammo as I will eventually end up building a shotgun auto turret and this will eat all my unused ammo. In early game I might use diverse ammo types depending on what guns I loot, but I wont go out of my way to use them. Otherwise I typically just sell ammo I do not need. Scrapping them can be ok if you are short on brass but I am never short on brass.

I agree that most base designs you see nowadays tend to always work kind of the same and that is a bit of a shame. However I'd still say that what we have now is an improvement over what we had back in A16. Before the zombie AI update, all my horde base designs were pretty much big fortifications with multi layered 360 degree defenses and some kind of platforms for me to move around and attack the zombies wherever they were. You could make some variations on the theme but the overall principle was still always the same, just tank the night and then repair the damage. IIrc There was not much else that worked reliably, barring maybe some quirky cheese builds that used specific exploits. Zombie AI had some exploitable characteristics like iirc they were attracted to doors so you could use that but it was not super reliable and they always ended up swarming a bit everywhere and punched whatever was in front of them. I am sometimes nostalgic of the chaos and destruction that such hordes made but overall I would not go back. Bunker style bases can still work nowadays but tend to be less efficient than pathing bases so have fallen out of fashion, but some players still like to use them. This being said I feel like pathing bases allow for more flavour and creativity than straight up bunker bases. You can make some tower defense trap labyrinth, some kind of basic funnel and kill zone. You can make a setup using drawbridges and swtiches to make the zombies change directions and waste time. You can make a setup that make zombies fall in pits. You can make pits shallow for easy kill or alternatively make the pits deep for added fall damage. You can make base designs that make melee a viable option for killing the horde. You can put robotic sledges at clever places to make funnies happen etc. I typically try to vary from run to run. I see suggestions to add more diversity to zombies AI. Like some take the path of least resistance like they do now, but some others just swarm, some other go around etc. While this seem to be a good idea at first glance, I suspect it would just make all the pathing designs unreliables and usher their disapperances and because of unpredictible AI we would just be back to big bunkers like before. By the way, zombies do still make some random damage here and there so there is still a little bit of the old AI that lives on. But if you add too much of this randomness I suspect you will eventually hit a threshold where pathing base designs are kind of not really worth it anymore.

Any fix for this yet ? A mod or something ? I tweak a lot of settings and play permadeath, having to manually redo everything each times is extremely annoying.

You have no specific goals beside survival. That is why I call it a Sandbox survival, rather than Sandbox crafting or whatever. The sandbox aspect is not limited to the default gameplay, the variety of settings and the modability is a huge part of it.

You make it go where you want with house rules, role play, settings and mods. That is how I always played it. If you ask me, In the simplest of words 7dtd is a Sandbox survival game. Those are the two core things that it has always been.

In case TFP never implement your suggestion, here is what I do to "get around" that issue without going into the settings in mid-game, which as you said is clunky and immersion breaking. If my horde base is not ready for the first BM. And it usually isn't, I just do the blood moon in a sacrificial POI. Some POI are super easy to adapt into an improvised horde base. Like... stupidly easy. You can do this for a surprisingly long time before the BM gets too hard for your average Horde adapted POI. I could give you some more pointers but if you'd prefer no spoilers I think i've said enough already.

like others have said, it is just a lucky roll on the loot dice that made your early days easier regarding how you manage thirst. But it quickly becomes irrelevant. Edit : But I do agree that getting it too early can kill the mood a little bit. My favourite early games are always the ones where I struggle.

How long do you typically play the same map ?

I've been playing this game since A12. Played every Alpha versions since and it is the same story every time. I can't remember an Alpha release that did not have a vocal minority complaining how this or that change is ruining the game.

I don't know how we could get reliable stats. Admittedly I said that without actual backing numbers but I would bet you a mega crush that 7DTD have significantly more mod users than most games. Maybe not as much as Skyrim though. The catch here is that what I meant by "active players" are the people who play it regularly on PC. As opposed to people who have it sitting in their steam library but did not play it very much or at all. And let's not talk about the console players, poor folks.

That is close to my take on it. They made the game highly customizable and moddable. A large portion of the active players use mods. I see vanilla as a base platform that players can tweak and if all the settings are not enough, then mod. The game was designed to be like this and I think it the reason it is so good. TFP continually improve the hard coded aspects of the game that cannot be modded easily, making the platform better with each new release. The game comes with a default flavor (vanilla) that if you don't like or get tired of you can just mod. I play Vanilla a bit with each new release and appreciate it for what it is, I always felt that Vanilla was fun and well balanced but it only has so much content. So after I am done exploring the latest vanilla I will typically play overhaul mods until the next alpha. Currently I have not gotten into A21 more than superficially as I want to finish a A20 Undead legacy playthrough first.

Hmm sounds like challenge !! Play out there in the woods and never go to a trader or cities. I like that. The new map generation tools of A21 should help with that. Make a wilderness friendly map. Maybe you are only allowed to loot POI outside of towns because the towns are contaminated and literally everyone else is dead. You could tweak some other settings to compensate, maybe boost loot abundance or make the blood moons more frequent and/or have more zombies to have a chance at looting more backpacks.

But they don't want to loot buildings. They want to stay as far away as as possible from any signs of civilization. They want to chop wood, quarry rocks, harvest leather. Then Invent and build rocket launchers from scratch. /s