Hi, I'm pretty new to 7dtd, and I'm not very familiar with what mods are out there. I've been spending some time browsing 7daystodiemods, nexusmods, and here, but there is a lot to go through!
My group rented a server 3 weeks ago and have been playing vanilla and having fun. But we are at a point now where we seem too strong and we are a bit disappointed that there is nothing much do to past tier-6 quests. I know it's a sandbox game, and the devs are working on more quest and story stuff for the future. I also know that we can turn up the difficulty, but we don't want "bullet sponges". We also tried turning up the bloodmoon zombie amount per player, but it made the FPS unplayable for most of us even on lowest settings.
If anyone has any suggestions I would love to hear it! Otherwise I will continue to poke around and look at mods when I have time. And if your only feedback is "if you don't like X then just don't do that" then just stop reading and move along. You and I have a fundamental disagreement about game theory and how player options and choices affect enjoyment. No hard feelings and I hope you have a nice day.
I looked at the Afterlife Overhaul and it looks very interesting, but the "unavoidable infection without a cure" mechanic is a major turn-off.
Some things I am looking for and hoping there is an existing mod:
Harder end game missions.
Progress: I have looked at some custom POI's thinking that they might show up as trader quests, but it I'm not sure how to tell if they are going to be more of a challenge or not.
Game ending mission. Something to work towards for closure so we can restart or move to another game feeling accomplished.
Progress: None yet. Currently I am just saying that the "survive 10 bloodmoons" achievement is my goal. We currently have bloodmoons disabled and manually trigger it on Sunday nights, but may start doing it more often as our current playthrough is becoming too easy and starting to get stale already.
Bloodmoon changes. Our first bloodmoon was really fun, we made walls, spikes, and vantage points. Our second bloodmoon was a complete failure, but it was still a lot of fun. However, now we have learned that defending a realistic or immersive base is almost impossible, and the game seems to revolve around making these bases that take advantage of zombie pathing AI and block types. It changed from "how can we defend against that" to "OK, now it's too easy". It just feels super cheesy. It's not a deal-breaker, but I am interested to see if other people have addressed this.
Progress: None yet, but it's not high-priority.
Perk system changes. I'm not certain, but I think the perks are the main reason the game has become too easy.
Progress: Looked at a couple overhauls, but not sure yet.
Progression system changes. We all find it strange that we get bottled into finding certain types of magazines. For example: Myself and the others that cook find cooking magazines everywhere. We were hoping there was more emphasis on player-trading or saving rare magazines/books that other players need. But currently, the fastest way is to just go looting for yourself and buy from NPC-traders.
Progress: I seen some settings related to this poking around in the XML files, might look into this more.
Darkness. I've only been in like 2 places that were actually dark. Lights seem useless outside of aesthetics.
Progress: I found a mod that fixes this but it looks like it hasn't been updated for 1.0.
More enemies (both zombies and hostile NPCs).
Progress: Need to search around more.
Other additions. I would love to see more stuff to add to the game like vehicles, tools, crafting stations, etc. But it takes a lot of research because in my experience from other games, most of these mods just make the game way too easy, silly, or break immersion. A classic example would be like a mod that adds a bunch of new weapons, but they are all available to craft right away for cheap and the mod also includes something unrelated like "ammo now stacks up to 9999".