Orclover

Gyrocopter is fine, it takes practice. That being said though, on my last server we had 7 players and almost none of them except me used a gyrocopter consistently. She's a harsh mistress. But a fun and useful ride for those that can handle her.

In my games, I don't like to die. Thats the game. Staying alive while doing things that should kill me. Eat the honey. Keep looking for more cures, even honey. Find 13 honey quick enough and you cure yourself Remember that it doesnt just "cure" 5% of the infection. It rolls it back slowly a point at a time over a several minutes for 5%.. This buys you time. You are supposed to use it in the first few minutes of infection to get rid of it. But you can also use it to buy yourself an extra 5 minutes each dose to look for more cures, and the cures everywhere. Chop every stump. Check every medical cabinet and cubbard. I have cheated death many times with no cures on me when I got inffected by doing exactly this. If you have dukes ore sellables then hit every vendor you know of. DONT PANIC! you got this. Let dying be what the other guys do. On my last play through with a team. After about a month of playing I had just a few hundred less kills than the top guy. He had a hundred deaths or so. I had 2. Make staying alive your goal in a survival game. A fun challenge.

Thats the one thing I have always liked about my other favorite zombie game is that fighting 5 zombies can be a real fight. At 20 zombies you have to use real tools and strategies because they arent fast but if you HAVE to get rid of them it can be a challenge with just melee weapons. Sometimes the game throws HUNDEREDS of zombies at you. You aint fighting that with conventional means. You can make a plan and burn them all with a vehicle and enough planning and tools and time (molotovs do wonders). But just going in swinging would be suicide. In 7d2d they cant have too many zeds spawned at once. I think at most we dealt with a few hundred with more than max zed settings on a server and a half dozen players (the server of course did ok but our systems were screaming for mommy). Which is a shame as having a f'nuk-ton of zeds coming at you at once that you have to survive (especially solo) is the height of survival games like this. They have to optimize a game for minimum settings of the average single player and the limitations just get in the way. The work around for that of course is to make tougher single zombies (glowies everywhere, lil hulk like mutants). It is what it is, even if it isn't what we always want. I can't see bandits changing that honestly. Unless there is some massive leap of AI work coming down the pipe. You can't have too many bandits and working the bandits to both drive cars and use guns will be an insane challenge.

People keep forgetting they can throw their spears (until they accidentally toss the thing off a building). They are cheap to make the Tier 1's and with a bit of practice will have you fed up on chicken meat. No need to run, just practice.

Here is what is killing you most likely (besides inexperience with the game mechanics), sprinting. STOP SPRINTING! Seriously just walk unless you HAVE to escape with sprinting. Save traveling faster until you get a bicycle (easily obtained in a few hours). Getting maxed out hunger bar is not easy at the start, so stop aiming for that. Just concentrate on not starving. Raid every cabinet in a kitchen. Raid every BBQ pit you see, even the fire places. Take a shot at every critter that gives meat and be ready to fight pigs for meat, even wolves. If you can take down a bear (possible on day 1 with planning and plenty of wood) you are set for a day or two. Most importantly, find a trader and a few vending machines around a town. Traders give money for selling almost everything, they give money (and food) for quest. You gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women...... the food (from traders and vending machines). When you find the vender and start doing quest/selling its almost impossible to starve (to death). Its a huge annoying time sink that takes most of your time, but staying alive with food is not hard. If you want to stop worrying about food in the long run (and concentrate on other aspects of the game) then when you start farming, edit the config to give you the seed back whenever you grow something every time.

Play the game long enough and you WILL eat glass by accident. I have done it twice. Once from being tired and hitting A instead of D and another time with a crappy mouse that double clicked constantly instead of single clicking. Maybe don't play with dead is dead unless you can handle the "stupid deaths", nobody will look down on you for playing "normal".

We started setting up horde bases in harder areas hoping to make the horde night harder/longer. But even in the wasteland we have more exciting "events" by summoning screamers and forcing the zeds to hit max cap in any other zone compared to Horde Night (250 zeds I think is server cap which brings things to pretty low framerate but was fun for a while). We were able to make them kinda exciting on occasion by using console to spawn in an extra 25 zeds at a time but then you feel guilty for basically cheating in a harder horde. Basically after the first 60 days we kinda felt like we had "won". We kept playing for a while but we are out of content again, and waiting on A21.

You know you can just edit the xml file to make farming whatever you want right? It's not even hard.

They are honestly comical now instead of scary. At times they whack at your ankles until you notice them but all the zeds do that. Its funny on horde nights because there is always a couple spiders jumping around in the background, sometimes over and over as they can't get their pathing right so they just just spam leap and we start laughing at them. Honestly a mod needs to make them look like kangaroo zeds, be more accurate, and change the noise. Before they would crawl up everything and screw up your base plans unless you knew they were a thing and remember to build it into your plans. They were an actual threat. Not sure why the devs decided to turn them into something so silly.

Seems about right, although we are well past a month in our wasteland area and still have not seen zomdogs or zombears respawn. Weird that zed respawn is tied to loot respawn. We turned off loot respawn to not make it easy but the zeds going away made it even easier. Wish it was a separate setting.

But I have gone through 3 stacks of food a night of playing, not average mind you. Why is that so hard to believe? Ya know what i honestly don't care if you believe. Had no idea it was worthless. Will pass the info along.

A stack is 10, a stack and a half is 15 veggie/beef stews. Thats 15 per play session, not 90 minutes. On average. If we were eating a stack of food every 90 minutes we would edit the XML file again because that would be insane. But yea about 7 beef and 7 veggie stews in a 6-7 hour game is about right with red tea or mineral water before every meal (honestly thats probably a conservative estimate). Every tier 5 poi ends up taking a couple stews due to damage taken and all the running around. I was kinda disgusted by how much stew and spaghetti I was going through last night but we were running mini-horde nights in wastland hitting the max zombie caps (250) in buildings over and over again by triggering screamers and then clearing them all out (one player in particular was going nuts with it). We blew a lot of them up of course but I in particular melee a lot of my kills which leads to a lot of damage taken. Soo much food.

Out of 6 players, nobody ever touches that skill. Matter of principal really.

Yea fortitude build with max punching and heavy armor sprinting at full speed (perked out for stamina regen!), doing horde night in the street at times with fist only. I may be burning a few calories.

Oh man that game turned eating into a full time job. I think we are all just very thankful that you made the game in a way that is incredibly easy for us to edit it to our taste. Fine tuning is always important.

Ya know, if there wasnt a warning message that popped up until much later, like the orange warning took twice as long to even activate, then our group probably wouldnt even notice the loss of hp/stamina. Its the message that drives them crazy. Like they HAVE To fix the hunger pains right then and there, they hear a groan after all so they think they have to fix it. And blinking red message sends them into a panic, hell a few of them were sure they would starve to death (never happened, ever). Tone those two messages back a bit (and change nothing of the effects, just temper the warning) and a lot of the freaking out some players do over the hunger system might abate. You probably wouldnt even need to change anything other than the warning.

Were each going through a stack and a half of beef stew/veggie stew per play session on average. Some (like me) go through 3 stacks easily (melee build at pretty high game stage) a night. Everyone is using vehicles so they are only sprinting around poi's. Food bars are generally kept replenished whenever the first warning message was popping up. The first couple weeks everyone was kept in a state of near starving and it was really irritating the players, they assumed we would never get it under control and were going to quit to head to other games if we didnt nerf the hunger system itself. We made changes to crops instead (which we were already getting up and running but converting all food to seeds). They still complain about how quickly hunger hits (thirst strangely is never a problem) just going about their days but at least now they can keep eating. If this was RL we would probably all look like a bunch of sumo-wrestlers. Days are set to 90 minutes (I know it screws up everything), most of us play 6-9 hours a night. It was worse on the first server we set up. We were eating every living critter in 2 bioms and were all still starving with health loss.

For 3 people how many farm plots did you need? Were running around 130'ish I think for 6.

The other option for sustainable crop usage for a group is to make about 10 times the number of crops as you normally would have per item. For our group we have 2 farms with about 80 farm plots covering almost all seed types. Obviously more corn and potatoes than anything else really. If we just contineud to grind potassium and rotting meat for several RL weeks we could make 300 farm plots of just potatoes and 300 farm plots of just corn and it would have about the same effect (easily returning the seeds needed to self sustain with LoTl3 and providing needed veggies). Then we could undo the changes to the xml file. We would also quit playing, nobody in our group wants to do that. Its 7 Days to Die, not 7 Weeks to Get a Sustainable Ecosystem in place for a Small Group. Easier to just make a simple edit and go back to zed killing for fun, not profit.

Thats why we ended up editing the xml file to keep the seed in the ground. I had fully perked out LoTL and we were all contributing to scavaging farm plot materials (that I would craft), and we were barely keeping our food supplies up enough to not starve for our group. It just took too much to keep seeds going into the ground to keep a group fed. We were spreading task around and even just the farming portion was too much for one skilled person to do to feed 5 -6 people, along with somebody else harvesting animals constantly and everybody trying to sustain off of their own found food as well. The vending machines turned into argument makers as starving people would try to rush the traders every morning to keep their food meters out of the red. Animals on the map had a life expectancy measured in seconds. Recipe drops were the most important loot item in the game for 2 weeks. The group hated the changes the devs made to hunger/farming, not fans at all. Some almost quit playing over it. But a quick XML file edit to just keep the seeds in the ground after harvest like A19 (thats it) and feeding all of us with a 3 people doing the farming/hunting/cooking became possible without it being a full time job. No other changes needed to be made to the xml for hunger/growing or anything else for this issue and nobody else had to take skills in perks not related to their preferred stat. We hated it, and it was an easy fix. Now in single player it probably would have been a non-issue. Even if we had half the players, it might have been manageable. But get more than a handful of people playing several hours a day and tearing apart the landscape looking for food, and it becomes a headache. If those players were not cooperating though, man oh nelly, yea that's not a game any more, its a job. Everybody would just be starving constantly. Nobody would care about the zeds since they can't be eaten.

Yea solo it was meaningless to have farming unless you wanted to spend all your seeds for extra food instead of a actual food source. But with groups of people hitting the environment at once then suddenly a cooperative farm plan became a massive necessity. We ran out of food FAST. Not enough meat to go around, not enough canned goods to go around and with the revamped insanity hunger system we had people screaming about starving every hour. Thankfully it also meant we could cooperate to get a farm up faster and make it BIG. I got delegated to farmer since I was going punch build anyways, everybody kicked in every seed they found and all the spoiled meat they could find. We had guys digging already for clay. So by the end of the first week we had 30 or so farm plots all growing something. Hunger was mostly gone for all of us by then with the designated cook just cranking out stews from the hunter and my farm. But those first few days were rough with all of us eating everything, had to keep disciplined to not eat the veggies till we had enough seeds. Thank god we edited the xml for seeds staying in the ground or we would have to devote even more time to keeping the fridges full. None of our players want to spend all night doing that. They want to do their pet projects or run Tier 5 POI's over and over, not play the hunger mini-game.

Honestly adjusting the xml file to leave the seedling in the ground after harvest has been a sanity saver. We frankly don't even care what they do to farming any more since its a meaningless part of the game for our group. Sure we will happily go out and kill literally hundreds of animals weekly to feed 5 people to make stews, not for the meat. Oh no. But for the lopsided fat drop rate that is required for any food that is worth 2 spits. We are tossing meat out the window half the time and just want the fat to make stuff. And yes, harvesting skills are maxed. So use a mod or just edit the xml file to adjust the game to something a bit closer to sanity, like keeping the crop in the ground. Then the devs can do whatever they want with future patches and it won't matter to you.

We have 0 big cities in the wasteland on our ginormous map (max size random). Because of this we have 0 Tier 5 POI's and 0 Tier 5 quest in the wasteland. They all point to the forest and a couple in the desert. The entire map is explored with helicopters. We simply have crappy RNG luck that took us a few weeks to find out about. Its made end game kinda disappointing to say the least.

Save your hate till you test it. Give a few weeks of testing and then you can come here (and steams opinion grading) to voice your opinion. If its like we suspect then there wont be much to surprise us. But for the life of me I can't fathom why they chose to go this route.

I like that the heat generation eventually creates "mini-horde-night" in the wasteland at night if you fire guns. We did a power quest and eventually spent the night in the street killing the zeds that kept rushing us for 20 minutes.