Confession Time

[A Nice Cup of Tea]

Okay, I admit it. I'm terrible at this game.

 

Back in A15 and A16 my friends and I used to do quite well. We'd normally play till around day 40ish before getting a bit bored and starting again.

 

But in A17.2 I don't think we'll be able to get that far.

 

We've just done the day 28 horde night, and we got utterly trashed.

 

Our horde night base was a combination base. It was basically the usual central platform with an enclosed cage on top, surrounded by concentric alternating rings of spikes and blocks (so that the spikes were always at "ground level" to the zeds and they wouldn't avoid them). It also had an obstacle course for the zeds to entice them to keep moving and trying to get to us instead of stopping and attacking the platform directly (some would call that an "AI exploit" but I disagree).

 

This worked fine for horde nights 7, 14, and 21. But on horde night 28 it was just too much for us.

 

The problem wasn't the design of the horde night base. It was just the dozens of radiated zombies.

 

The spikes did their job, and so did the obstacle course. But by the end of the night, there were still about a dozen radiated zeds left running the obstacle course and we simply couldn't kill them. They were still there well after dawn had broken, while we were still in our cage having eventually run out of bullets and arrows.

 

In the end we had to do "suicide by zombie" by leaving the cage and going to melee them, dying repeatedly in the process. It was the only way to get rid of them.

 

So we're now stuck. A17.2 has more radiated zombies than previous versions and they appear earlier. And we just aren't FPS players so we aren't able to take them out with rapid and accurate shooting. Unless all three of us concentrate on a single radiated zombie (which we can't do in the chaos of a horde night) we just can't do enough damage quickly enough to kill them.

 

By the end of the horde "night" (which was actually about 8.30am) we're now in a position where we've no bullets, the horde night base needs major repairs that we don't have the resources to make, and we're aware that even if we don't gain any experience over the course of the week (which we will, of course) next horde night will start with us in a weaker position than this one while the horde will be bigger and tougher.

 

I think the four mistakes we made were:

 

1) We're not specced for shooting - I've got melee and crafting skills, my wife has a few ranged perks but mostly farming skills, and our friend has; well, I'm not sure what she has, but I think it's mostly crafting skills too. None of those skills do us any good on horde night. The only one of us that can pop heads with a ranged weapon (the only way we have of killing radiated) is my wife, and for her it's only a 5% chance per hit - although she did manage it three times over the course of the horde night.

 

2) We leveled too quickly - It's only day 28 and we're around level 60 already; so our gamestage is way above what we can cope with. This is partly our own fault, since we've kept doing quests (while I'm not a fan of the quest system, the others like it so I go along with them for the sake of marital harmony) - but to be honest, it seems that in A17 you can't help going up levels far too quickly. The XP "sharing" is actually a multiplier rather than a share, and when people complained that killing zeds gave too much experience the devs increased the xp for everything else rather than decreasing it for killing. Now it's very difficult to play the game and not go up[ levels too quickly since pretty much everything you do gives you XP.

 

3) We've been playing on the default level that we're used to playing on in earlier alphas, rather than the easiest level.

 

4) None of us are miners. When I look on YouTube at other people playing, it always seems that they spend all their time mining and constantly have a dozen forges making concrete and another dozen making bullets. We've never had more than a single forge at once, and we find endless mining to be tedious in the extreme (we're not minecraft players!)

 

I've heard that there's a mod called a "Rad Remover" that you can fit into a weapon to stop the radiated zeds from regenerating, but I'm guessing that it's only available as a quest reward for high tier quests because none of us have ever seen one.

 

Having just hit 60th level and level 8 in Intelligence (as I said - badly specced), I can now apparently make blade traps and electric fences, but I doubt they will make any difference. Blade traps will mop up the weaker zeds, but we have no problem with them anyway. And although I've never used an electric fence, they seem to be just an upgraded barbed wire fence.

 

Is either of those likely to help with the "we can't shoot radiated zombies quickly enough to counter their regeneration" problem?

 

Or should we just start again but on the easiest skill level this time? And this time I berate the other players (and myself) into investing most of their points into Perception and Boom Headshot?

[RipClaw]

4) None of us are miners. When I look on YouTube at other people playing, it always seems that they spend all their time mining and constantly have a dozen forges making concrete and another dozen making bullets. We've never had more than a single forge at once, and we find endless mining to be tedious in the extreme (we're not minecraft players!)

 

The reason why players have many forges running at the same time is to share the workload. I currently have 6 forges. So I can quickly produce larger quantities of what I need. I can also make different things at the same time like cement in one forge and steel in the other.

 

You don't have to spend a lot of time in the mine to collect enough raw materials but it is a good activity at night if you can't go looting anyway.

 

Personally, I like to spend a lot of time in the mine. I find it very relaxing or at least I did it until A17. But that's another topic.

I also understand when others prefer to spend their time with other activities but in general it is always wise to have someone who likes to take the job as miner and help the whole group.

 

I've heard that there's a mod called a "Rad Remover" that you can fit into a weapon to stop the radiated zeds from regenerating, but I'm guessing that it's only available as a quest reward for high tier quests because none of us have ever seen one.

 

Having just hit 60th level and level 8 in Intelligence (as I said - badly specced), I can now apparently make blade traps and electric fences, but I doubt they will make any difference. Blade traps will mop up the weaker zeds, but we have no problem with them anyway. And although I've never used an electric fence, they seem to be just an upgraded barbed wire fence.

 

The rad remover seems to be the mod that is hardest to find in the game. In my current playthrough I found it exactly once and the mod is in my shotgun. All other mods I have several times but this one mod seems to be extremely rare.

 

If you want to see what dart traps, electric fences and blade traps can do with a horde of radioactive zombies you should watch this video of Kage848:

 

 

I have a base with 14 dart traps and 7 electric fences. They don't leave much of the horde left for me anymore. They are extremely effective but you also need ammunition for the dart traps. In my base they consume about 2000 - 3000 iron darts in total per horde. The production is however very cheap since you only need iron and clay.

[n2n1]

Yes, zombie health regeneration is the peak of cool game design... How they kicked your ass! Huh? Now you will never say that it is easy to cope with this zombies!

 

Developers are happy!

 

(this is sarcasm, of course)

[AlyssaFaden]

OP, check out Kage848, the last video series he did (this is the last episode):

 

When I first staretd playing 7 days, Kage was the guy I stumbled across in trying to learn more. His bases are always "effective minimal effort, maximum results) and he a one man show, so he has to cover all roles. His last defense design was monstrous.

 

Also check out JaWoodle's 7 Days CREATIVE MODE videos where he is building different base designs: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJNeiS810mGG98ctG45M1WA There's an extremely effective ramp/ hatch trick where just having a bow will get the job done.

 

Although it does sound like at least one of you needs to get out and break surface rocks for resources; your base design isn't woefully different from the one my husband and I had at the same stage. You may just wnat to re-evaluate roles within the group to a degree. It's okay being a crafter or farmer, and shooting isn't REQUIRED, but someone - maybe all of you - need to be hitting up rocks, getting rion, getting concrete on the go etc. Someone eeds to be building the concrete mixer/forge and then the group can keep them stocked.

[Roland]

And if all of you hate it then all of you should do it so it minimizes the time spent mining for everyone.

[A Nice Cup of Tea]

The rad remover seems to be the mod that is hardest to find in the game. In my current playthrough I found it exactly once and the mod is in my shotgun. All other mods I have several times but this one mod seems to be extremely rare.

 

Okay, so I won't hold out hope for one of those.

 

If you want to see what dart traps, electric fences and blade traps can do with a horde of radioactive zombies you should watch this video of Kage848:

 

 

I have a base with 14 dart traps and 7 electric fences. They don't leave much of the horde left for me anymore. They are extremely effective but you also need ammunition for the dart traps. In my base they consume about 2000 - 3000 iron darts in total per horde. The production is however very cheap since you only need iron and clay.

 

I might have to check out dart traps. I've been able to build them for a while, but haven't tried them yet (even though the darts only need iron and clay, it seemed very much like just throwing finite resources at the zombies - it's bad enough having to keep getting more iron to repair the bars and barbed wire)

 

OP, check out Kage848, the last video series he did (this is the last episode):

 

When I first staretd playing 7 days, Kage was the guy I stumbled across in trying to learn more. His bases are always "effective minimal effort, maximum results) and he a one man show, so he has to cover all roles. His last defense design was monstrous.

 

Also check out JaWoodle's 7 Days CREATIVE MODE videos where he is building different base designs: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJNeiS810mGG98ctG45M1WA There's an extremely effective ramp/ hatch trick where just having a bow will get the job done.

 

Cheers - I'll have a look. I don't really spend time watching people play games for the sake of it, but I'll look for specific design hints.

 

The main problem I've found with seeing base designs on YouTube is that they nearly always require huge amounts of resources to build or need large numbers of powered traps like blades, electricity, and turrets (which we haven't been able to build as yet, and we don't have the power for anyway).

 

Although it does sound like at least one of you needs to get out and break surface rocks for resources; your base design isn't woefully different from the one my husband and I had at the same stage. You may just wnat to re-evaluate roles within the group to a degree. It's okay being a crafter or farmer, and shooting isn't REQUIRED, but someone - maybe all of you - need to be hitting up rocks, getting rion, getting concrete on the go etc. Someone eeds to be building the concrete mixer/forge and then the group can keep them stocked.

 

We do have concrete and iron (and all the crafting stations) and we do gather resources from the surface - the whole horde base was made of reinforced concrete with iron bars.

 

The problem is that concrete and iron are no use by themselves, since given enough time the zed will chew through them, and since we are unable to kill the zed they have all the time they need. What we need is ways to kill the zed before that happens - and the set-up of our current horde base meant that could only be done by shooting them, which none of us are any good at.

[AlyssaFaden]

Okay, so I won't hold out hope for one of those.

 

 

The problem is that concrete and iron are no use by themselves, since given enough time the zed will chew through them, and since we are unable to kill the zed they have all the time they need. What we need is ways to kill the zed before that happens - and the set-up of our current horde base meant that could only be done by shooting them, which none of us are any good at.

 

Yeah, Kage's last maze defense or JaWoodle's ramp/hatch trick will be your friend.

[A Nice Cup of Tea]

And if all of you hate it then all of you should do it so it minimizes the time spent mining for everyone.

 

We all pitch in and gather resources on the surface, but even in A15 and A16 when it was totally safe to do so none of us ever dug mines. The fact that we've got digging zombies in this version makes it even less likely that anyone's going to want to spend any time below ground.

[AlyssaFaden]

We all pitch in and gather resources on the surface, but even in A15 and A16 when it was totally safe to do so none of us ever dug mines. The fact that we've got digging zombies in this version makes it even less likely that anyone's going to want to spend any time below ground.

 

The digging zombies thing is kinda over-rated; I have a massive mine system underground that goes in all directions and # of zombies I've had dig down to me? 1

 

And that one was because I was mining around my base near forges, near the surface ... so a screamer came wandering by to see what was up.

 

Digging further away and deeper down? Not one.

[Cirion]

I personally strongly dislike tedious game mechanics. Having to make like 10 forges is one of them, I don't like micromanagement.

 

Disappoints me that there are no higher teir forges (like in say ARK). And in ARK that annoyed me to no end either, needing 10+ forges to get anything done at any reasonable pace.

 

We need electrical powered forges that smelt at fast paces.

 

For now I just mod it to make it faster. I can't be bothered to manage more than one or two forges. That's my playstyle anyway. I like to play, not micromanage =P

[RipClaw]

Okay, so I won't hold out hope for one of those.

 

Even if you have the rad remover, it doesn't work wonders. It stops the regeneration for about 90 seconds but nevertheless the radioactive zombies still have more HP than the normal or feral zombies. So it only saves a little ammunition.

 

I might have to check out dart traps. I've been able to build them for a while, but haven't tried them yet (even though the darts only need iron and clay, it seemed very much like just throwing finite resources at the zombies - it's bad enough having to keep getting more iron to repair the bars and barbed wire)

 

If you have an iron mine, you can mine iron very effectively. Much more than you get from the boulders on the surface. When I go into the iron mine I get enough raw iron to craft more than enough darts for multiple hordes.

 

It takes me only about 10-15 minutes to get 6000 raw iron. One dart costs only 3 iron and you get 5 iron from 1 raw iron. So you get 10000 darts out of 6000 raw iron.

 

If you want to shorten this part of the game there are a few modlets from Donovan that are helpful like the LessGrind modlet.

 

https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?110305-Donovan-s-Modlets

 

This increases the harvest count and should give you enough resources so that you can concentrate more on fighting and looting and less on grinding.

[RipClaw]

I personally strongly dislike tedious game mechanics. Having to make like 10 forges is one of them, I don't like micromanagement.

 

It's not that much micromanagement at all.

 

For example, I just put a stack of raw iron and a stack of clay in each forge and let it burn for 100 minutes. Then I have 6000 iron and clay in the forge and can make what I need from it quickly and in large quantities.

 

With cement it is even easier. 3000 cement per shaft and let it burn for 250 minutes. So I have 30000 stone in the forge and can get 6000 cement per forge.

 

In addition, micromanagement can also be a lot of fun. There are games that only consist of micromanagement. You can spend hours optimizing production processes.

[meganoth]

You don't need to restart. Ways to improve your situation:

 

1) in your serverconfig you can change the difficulty even in mid game, You can also change the days until the next horde arrives to 10 or 14 days so you have more time to rebuild.

 

2) We got 4 or 5 rad removers in our game (around day 70), but I assume a high lucky looter skill (3 or 4) for at least the person opening the high value containers is important if you don't want to wait too long on average. I never have seen the rad remover (or mods in general?) offered as a quest reward, but quest pois have the high value containers that give you a good chance finding them. Also if you have int-heavy builds anyway, book shop looting might get you the schematic.

 

3) weapon perks are overrated, but getting perception to 3 or 5 is a good investment (either for all or the person assigned the job to kill irradiated), and the headshot perk too! More is helpful but not essential.

 

What is as important and what you should be able to find or buy easily is one or more AK47s or marksman rifles (quality 5 or 6) and the mods so that at least 4 mods are installed. Buy ammo at the trader and find or craft as much as you can. Use this weapon ONLY to kill irradiated (as long as ammo is scarce and you don't have a rad remover), and always try to concentrate on one specific irradiated at a time.

 

Regeneration isn't super fast, but if you change target before it is dead you are wasting ammo. Irradiated have a lot of hitpoints though, on the order of 500-800. So you already need about 6 to 12 body hits (much less for headshots) with your AK even without regen, and only half to one hit more because of the regen (rough estimate)

 

What weapons with how many mods do you use? You surely know that filled mod slots increases the damage, the actual mod is just sugar on top, right?

 

4) electric wires and blade traps work very well, but yes, you still need to shoot at the zombies to finish them off. I found it very effective to have blade trap vertically hanging on the front wall of a 2 block wide passage so the blade cuts anyone entering the passage on head and torso simultaneously (will post a picture in the evening to make it clear). I put barbed wire underneath so zombies have to kiss the blades a long time. Kills even irradiated if they get pinned by it.

[Gazz]

Or should we just start again but on the easiest skill level this time? And this time I berate the other players (and myself) into investing most of their points into Perception and Boom Headshot?

If you lower the difficulty level now then your gamestage will drop immediately.

 

If you guys hate mining and decide that boulders will be "it" in your game, you can use the console command

buff buffHarvest

 

Can also stack it multiple times.

Don't need a mod for that one. =)

[Weazelsun]

I agree with setting up the electric fences, I used them in A17.1 and have participated in horde nights at another player's base that utilized electric fences + barbed wire combinatation. Depending on the way your horde base is set up, having them could help you. I saw in your post that you are specced into perception and boom headshot, with the electric fences slowing down the zombies that should help in slowing them down enough to get several headshots in.

 

You could also redesign the base so the zombies also have a considerable drop distance. On the server I play on with a group, our horde tower itself is I believe 10 blocks tall and the ramp to it is alse the same height. Although, they won't take much damage from falling it can help.

[Cirion]

It's not that much micromanagement at all.

 

For example, I just put a stack of raw iron and a stack of clay in each forge and let it burn for 100 minutes. Then I have 6000 iron and clay in the forge and can make what I need from it quickly and in large quantities.

 

With cement it is even easier. 3000 cement per shaft and let it burn for 250 minutes. So I have 30000 stone in the forge and can get 6000 cement per forge.

 

In addition, micromanagement can also be a lot of fun. There are games that only consist of micromanagement. You can spend hours optimizing production processes.

 

Micromanagement I'm sure is fun for some people. I'm not one of those people though lol. Anything that remotely resembles micromanagement becomes painful for me.

 

The only game I like that has micromanagement that is tolerable (to a degree) is dungeon defenders. After some runs you end up with so much loot that just checking the loot takes a painful amount of time. I still hate it in that game though even though it's the game I have clocked the most hrs on that's not an mmorpg (I have like 1,200 hrs logged on that game... not impressive to some people but I've never logged over 1,000 hr on ANY other game except FFXI or WoW).

[Guppycur]

I'm by far the worst player of our group, so I understand where you're coming from... it's best to use poi's as horde bases while you're working on your concrete super bunker elsewhere, imo.

[meganoth]

As promised here 3 pictures to explain the blade trap setup.

 

First picture shows the base (and in the background an older base that was only used for 3 early game horde nights and didn't really work well). The upper block is just an emergency base if we get overrun on the ground floor. Oh and the spike traps all around are total overkill, someone had too much iron to spend. Double-block walls and maybe two spikes on the wall are totally sufficient to lure the zombies into the funnel

 

 

Next is the entrance with the blade traps. You can see that a zombie will get doube damage from the blades because of torso and HEAD hits while entering. There should be barbed wire below the blades, the spike trap underneath the right blade trap a mistake by whoever repaired this. The right one should be set one block higher, there was no opportunity to correct this. The funnel itself is full of barbed wire, plus 4 electric wires and 4 dart traps as a last line of defense before the inner cage.

 

At the inner cage there is an iron door (missing in this picture) by the way so we can open it and give the zombies a clear path to us.

 

I originally had more spike traps inside the funnel to save ammo, but my co-players preferred barbed wire.

 

 

The last pic is from the entrance on the other side where I tried out a more conventional placing of the blade traps. I think it made less damage to the zombies but the blades might have lasted longer. Generally they last much much longer than spike traps.

 

[A Nice Cup of Tea]

You don't need to restart. Ways to improve your situation:

 

1) in your serverconfig you can change the difficulty even in mid game, You can also change the days until the next horde arrives to 10 or 14 days so you have more time to rebuild.

 

If it were up to me, I'd probably turn horde nights off completely - it's just a chore, rather than something enjoyable, as far as I'm concerned. I don't think the others would agree to that, though.

 

What is as important and what you should be able to find or buy easily is one or more AK47s or marksman rifles (quality 5 or 6) and the mods so that at least 4 mods are installed. Buy ammo at the trader and find or craft as much as you can. Use this weapon ONLY to kill irradiated (as long as ammo is scarce and you don't have a rad remover), and always try to concentrate on one specific irradiated at a time.

 

Regeneration isn't super fast, but if you change target before it is dead you are wasting ammo. Irradiated have a lot of hitpoints though, on the order of 500-800. So you already need about 6 to 12 body hits (much less for headshots) with your AK even without regen, and only half to one hit more because of the regen (rough estimate)

 

What weapons with how many mods do you use? You surely know that filled mod slots increases the damage, the actual mod is just sugar on top, right?

 

We were using pistols, because we generally don't like the automatic weapons - they waste far too much ammo (one or two shots will hit the zed and then the rest will go over their head due to the recoil). I think part of our problem is that with so many zombies running at us and circling round the obstacle course, we didn't have chance to concentrate on any single one of them before it was out of sight and running back around for another go.

 

I don't think any of our pistols had any mods on them at all. My bow had dye and a grip, and one of the others had dye on their bow too, and we had a couple on our melee weapons (which weren't any use) but that's about it. We really haven't found many mods at all - certainly not enough to have four on each of our guns.

 

4) electric wires and blade traps work very well, but yes, you still need to shoot at the zombies to finish them off. I found it very effective to have blade trap vertically hanging on the front wall of a 2 block wide passage so the blade cuts anyone entering the passage on head and torso simultaneously (will post a picture in the evening to make it clear). I put barbed wire underneath so zombies have to kiss the blades a long time. Kills even irradiated if they get pinned by it.

 

Our current base doesn't have any entrances (it's all open-air except the cage that we hide in), but I'm looking into an alternate design and that does have an entrance.

 

If you lower the difficulty level now then your gamestage will drop immediately.

 

If you guys hate mining and decide that boulders will be "it" in your game, you can use the console command

buff buffHarvest

 

Can also stack it multiple times.

Don't need a mod for that one. =)

 

I might be able to convince the others to change the difficulty level, but if we do that it will probably be "call this game lost and start a new game at a lower difficulty" rather than changing it mid-game.

 

The "buffHarvest" thing sounds like cheating to me - if we were doing that we might as well just enable Creative Mode and give ourselves free resources.

 

I agree with setting up the electric fences, I used them in A17.1 and have participated in horde nights at another player's base that utilized electric fences + barbed wire combinatation. Depending on the way your horde base is set up, having them could help you. I saw in your post that you are specced into perception and boom headshot, with the electric fences slowing down the zombies that should help in slowing them down enough to get several headshots in.

 

You could also redesign the base so the zombies also have a considerable drop distance. On the server I play on with a group, our horde tower itself is I believe 10 blocks tall and the ramp to it is alse the same height. Although, they won't take much damage from falling it can help.

 

I'm not the one with perception and headshot - that's my wife. Well, I think I have one point in each, but nothing significant.

 

I think we are going to need a base redesign (assuming we can get the resources together to build a new one - it might need a restart for that!)

 

As promised here 3 pictures to explain the blade trap setup.

 

Thanks! While the new base won't look exactly like that (we'd never have the resources for something so huge), I should be able to do that with blade traps in the doorway.

[A Nice Cup of Tea]

My Plan-B is to hope that A17.3 drops before the next horde night, so we'll have to restart anyway and won't need to wimp out!

[JCrook1028]

Just a note - as a rule pistols ain't gonna do much for you. They are semi ok for emergency "I got jumped" scare moments out in a POI but that's about it. Learn to not hold the trigger on the AK and use that and the Marksman if you wanna even make a dent on zombies hp on horde night.

[meganoth]

We were using pistols, because we generally don't like the automatic weapons - they waste far too much ammo (one or two shots will hit the zed and then the rest will go over their head due to the recoil). I think part of our problem is that with so many zombies running at us and circling round the obstacle course, we didn't have chance to concentrate on any single one of them before it was out of sight and running back around for another go.

 

I don't think any of our pistols had any mods on them at all. My bow had dye and a grip, and one of the others had dye on their bow too, and we had a couple on our melee weapons (which weren't any use) but that's about it. We really haven't found many mods at all - certainly not enough to have four on each of our guns.

 

There is a mod to make the automatic weapons semi-automatic called Trigger Group Semi. Excellent mod for the AK.

 

As I said book stores and book towers probably are the best bet if someone of your group can craft mods. And it is better to have one gun stuffed with mods than distributing the mods to all guns, because one person can easier concentrate his fire on one zombies, coordinating three people to shoot the same zombie isn't as easy. A pistol can get quite good with the pistol perk (and I like the pistol for its handling or "feel"), but an AK or marksman rifle does enough damage per second for irradiated zombies (and cops before they explode and destroy all the traps and barbed wires) even without perks.

[A Nice Cup of Tea]

Well, we played again last night. Since we have lives and families we only get to play for an hour or so a couple of times per week - that's why our A17.2 game that started when it was released is only just past day 28.

 

I suggested starting a new game, and my wife suggested turning down the difficulty, but our friend wanted to continue as we are quite strongly, because she wants us to get to see the higher level perks and items for once, so we acquiesed and that's what we're doing. We've abandoned our old horde base and we're building a new one with a different design inspired by ones we've seen on videos (one that will let us use both melee and traps, including meganoth's two-blade-traps-by-the-entrance idea, not just all shooting all the time).

 

Since there's quite a short time limit on this one - we're having to build it from scratch before the next horde night - we've agreed to put quests on hold while we all gather resources for it.

[RipClaw]

I wish you much success with the new base and hope that it fulfills your expectations.

[Roland]

Use your old one for the next Horde night. It’s okay if it gets destroyed. That will give you more time for the new one. In the morning just run away. You are faster than any of the enemies and will be able to ditch them once the bloodmoon gps ability is gone.