PotatoeTater

I've noticed that too on my end, I believe it's just because it's and experimental build. Also, try this tool out for editing XMLs: https://www.nexusmods.com/7daystodie/mods/754 It's meant for making mods, but you can use it to just adjust your server XMLs without adding any mods yourself, for example, we made it so rockets and zombies can't damage roads and the only thing that can dig up the road blocks are picks.

Better off with a dedicated, you can have more zombies that way. Also, 8gb is alright, but I honestly recommend 12gb, its about the best for doing zombies. Our server uses about 10 to 11 during horde with 20 being the highest I've seen, this of course depends on how big of a map you use.

It's under serverconfig.xml. It's location will vary depending on service provider. With 64GB of ram, you should be doing fine with multiple people, we have 8-12 of us playing with 600 alive zombies at once on hoard night and it only uses about 10-11GB of memory for us on a 10K map. If you are having problems with connecting to a dedicated one, you might be doing something wrong with your connection to the server.

You need to adjust your server setting, by default, lots of dedicated servers reset to the MAX cap for loading buildings, you really want it set to only 4 chunks. The difference between them is almost 40fps if you are playing on a decent computer. Right now, my dedicated server has 12 people playing with 600 max active zombies and I get a solid 60FPS on my rig, and our potato-computer players get around 20 to 25.

In prefabs.xml you can modify the trader_area and create custom safezones that have the same protection as the traders. You can also disable the teleporting ability for this; however, it will remove it from the traders inside the world as well unless you make another trader_area copy for your uses.

We've done 24 with 18gb of ram and it worked pretty well on a 10K map.

Best idea for this is changing your gamestages.xml to increase the amount of zombies you get per game stage. We made it go up faster on our coop server with 10 people, and we regularly lose 2 to 3 people on horde nights even behind 4 to 8 layers of steel. You can also increase the amount of block damage zombies do during horde nights, so we have it at 500% on horde nights, 50% during regular days. You can also change your WHZombiesMin and max to increase how many zombies are in wandering hoards. We have it set that all horde have a minimum of 60 zombies, to a max of 180. We also updated our CPU and memory on the server box, so we run with 600 max zombies at once, uses about 20gb of memory.

I never said make zombies harder, I said you can adjust the loot quality and amount to reduce what you find through the map. Additionally, the Navesgane map is a story based map, certain loot locations have higher loot values than if the POI was in a random gen map, so your issue with the update is flawed. Play on a Random Gen and you will have more trouble rushing ahead to end game stuff.

You can adjust the settings and make the game harder or easier as suits your play style. The server I have setup for my friends and I uses custom settings that include unique loot spawning such as most stuff is only 25% of what you normally would find; however, I've changed the config to allow books to be found in stacks of 4 to 5. You can also change out the zombie wandering horde xml, and make it where you get more scouts, and more zombies coming at you at once. We are using a 10K random gen map with max zombies at 300 and 64 zombies per person on horde night with 3/5 on zombie hardness with 180 min. days. It is a struggle every day to survive that way.