• 7 Days News

Brassqund Dec 14, 2016 @ 7:34pm. You MAY find Ferals spawned by a Screamer, on Day 1 - but that is totally by chance. Or bad luck, whichever the case it may be. If you are unlucky, you can even see a zombie bear in the 0, 0 city at night. For killing feral well.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/SevenDaysToDie

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In the game, so far, you're randomly placed somewhere on the map of Navezgane, having to survive on your own right. Which so far, since the game is still in Alpha, is the only thing you can really do: Survive for as long as possible. You can destroy and build terrain as you please^* , craft items, find and/or make food, repair guns and create them using gun-part molds, and prepare for when night falls, cause that's when the zombies start running for you.

You are free to customize your world setting prior to launching a new or already made world, such as whether or not zombies run, if friendly fire is on, how many zombies that spawn and if they continue to spawn, loot abundancy, loot respawn rate, looting time, and so on.

7 Days News

The game is currently in Alpha 16.x, featuring a new game engine, UI improvements, and random world generation. Updates are currently focused on bugfixing, with new content planned for the beta releases.

This game is developed by The Fun Pimps, and was financed through Kickstarter. You can buy it through the game's website or through Steam's Early Access.

As of 2019, there is a new experimental build that completely revamps many elements of the game.

Tropes found in Navezgane:

• Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
  • A few, some of which are under Anti-Frustration Features.
  • Raw Meat and foods that require it all emit a smell that notifies zombies to your presence. That said, nothing's stopping you from storing those items in containers such as your Minibike's shopping basket.
  • All vehicles as of A17 now have storage built onto them, so you no longer have to turn a potential loot location upside down to give your vehicle the ability to store items.
• After the End: All we know is that the game takes place after a Third World War, culminating in nukes being fired, and that Navezgane is one of the last places on Earth that's still intact.
• All-or-Nothing Reloads: In earlier builds when ammo was counted in full magazines or otherwise full reloads, when you reloaded a gun any bullets left in the gun would simply disappear. People who'd developed the habit of reloading constantly to ensure they always had a full coup ended up wasting a lot of ammunition by accident. It was done away with in later alphas in favor of One Bullet Clips when the ammo unit was changed into the individual bullet instead of the full reload.
• All There in the Manual: All the story that's available, as of now, can be found on the game's website, detailing various things.
• An Interior Designer Is You: It's possible to mostly create everything that can be outfitted for a house, aside for a few things. Heck, you can even chop down fridges and use them to make your own make-shift kitchen!
• Anti-Frustration Features: As mentioned below, the game is rather realistic for being voxel-based, but it still takes some nice breaks from making the game hard:
  • Adjustable settings that matches the game to your liking, be it loot speed, crafting speed, enemy damage modifiers, and so on.
  • Canned food can be consumed without the need for an opener.
  • Even though you have to take gravity into account when building something, the game is still nice enough to give you some liberty to place blocks here and there.
  • You can select whether or not zombies can run, in case you want a more nostalgic zombie experience.
  • Food never spoils.
  • When skills were first introduced in Alpha 13, the cost of upgrading a skill by one level was a number equal to said skill's current given level. This meant you had to rely on using said skill to level it up frequently. As a result, skills with uncommon or rare items attached to them such as Medicine and Science were too much trouble to use effectively. As of Alpha 15, the cost of upgrading a skill manually is only one skill point per level.
  • As of A17, aside from a couple of exceptions, all craftable gear recipes are behind the Intelligence Skill tree. While this does mean it takes longer to unlock them, this also means that players are no longer at the mercy of RNG to get their hands on one specific blueprint they've been trying to find.
  • Meat items as of the recent build no longer have stench, so there is no risk of detection due to holding resources. The Boiled Meat was also retooled so that it fits the new system.
  • Players can store up to 50 food and water to keep their max stamina and recovery up, since now hunger and thirst play a bigger role to a character's wellbeing.
• Artificial Stupidity: The pathing for the zombies is currently rather basic. Zombies will go through mines (and blow up), smash through fences, possibly even house walls, just to reach you, when they could walk around. Their pathing isn't that bad, but it's frequent to see a pile of zombies only appear near one house wall, instead of around the house. This has been somewhat alleviated by the implementation of a 'breadcrumbs' system, whereby zombies will try follow the player's trail, although this could be exploited as well.
  • Another example would be rabbits in the Desert biomes. The sound of a dying rabbit is bound to be frequently heard nearby due to their inability to tell the difference between a cactus and a road.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Rocket Launcher. Parts and schematics are very rare — rockets in particular are not only equally as scarce, but also very difficult to manufacture. Even if you somehow manage to find or put together a working Rocket Launcher, you'll still have to contend with the fact that each shot you fire is likely to attract as many zombies as you kill, if not more.
  • The AK47 and SMG are great at mowing down hordes of zombies, particularly some of the more challenging zombies, but otherwise amount to overkill in any other situation. As with the above, parts and schematics are hard to come by, though ammunition is at least not as challenging to make. The SMG was buffed in A16 by being chambered for 9mm instead of the rare-to-find and inefficient-to-produce 10mm of previous versions.
  • The chainsaw turns lumber-gathering into an easy-peasy task and can mess up zombies like there's no tomorrow. However, it is completely useless when it runs out of gas and it generates a lot of noise. You can acquire quite a bit of gasoline through various means, but it is generally a lot more efficient to chop down trees with a regular axe.
  • Sledgehammer. Big, powerful and exceedingly efficient melee weapon with a high probability of a One-Hit Kill when swung at a zombie's head, and good at smashing blocks to boot. Problem is, it swings very slowly and uses up a lot more stamina than most other melee weapons. Unless you have sufficient skills or the right items to offset the stamina loss, extensive use of the sledgehammer can leave you in a vulnerable position when you're faced with a group of zombies.
  • Downplayed with the .44 Magnum revolver. The Enforcer magazine that serves as its schematic is hard to come by, it's slow to fire and even more so to reload, but ammo is quite cheap to produce and feral walkers (common on weekly horde nights from day 21 and on) drop parts for it like there's no tomorrow.
  • Shotgun slugs deliver a nasty punch at a great distance, but they're so expensive to make (easily the costliest of the game) you're better off producing rifle rounds instead.
• Badass Longcoat: The Leather Duster.
• Bears Are Bad News: Bears are often deadlier than the zombies. They are very aggressive, they always run after you (no matter the difficulty setting) and they hit very, very hard. An unexpected bear encounter is usually lethal in the early game.
• Bee Afraid: In alphas before 16, the game featured Giant Hornets. They seemed to make the Wasteland their home (also found occasionally in other biomes as well) and would chase any survivor without mercy. However, they could be heard thanks to their loud buzzing and easily be taken down with one well aimed shot from a crossbow. Harvesting their corpses yielded Honey Jars, which provide a nice replenishment to your Hunger, Thirst, and Stamina, and can treat any infections you are currently suffering. Their hives could be found rarely in the burnt forest; approaching one will cause them to attack you en masse. A16 did away with them, and their role of airborne harasser is fullfilled by Vultures.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The wooden bow and stone arrows. You can craft them at the beginning of the game out of nothing more than wood, fiber, stones, and feathers. They provide you with the ability to silently kill things at a distance and as such, will be your go-to weapon for killing most zombies, as well as hunting animals. While the crossbow is an upgrade in most respects, it cannot be created without the appropriate schematic (which is a random drop), a forge (to provide the forged iron necessary to craft it) and leather (which has to be salvaged from furniture or created from animal furs and clothing using a perk). The compound bow that comes much later is a straight upgrade, but has to be assembled by individual parts just like a firearm, needs a schematic so you can put it together, and only accepts steel and flaming arrows as ammo.
  • Boiled Meat is one of the simplest cooked meals you can make with no real negative side-effects. It has the same hunger recovery as the other meat items unlocked at its tier, and it can recover thirst on top of that. It's even lampshaded by the crafting menu!
  While not as yummy as grilled meat, boiling is an efficient way to prepare a meal.
  • The pistol. Simple to use, simple to aim, simple to shoot. A headshot from a pistol will take down most zombies, and it is better at dealing with fast-moving targets (such as dogs, vultures, wolves, chickens and rabbits) than any other basic weapon. Complete pistols are also easier to find than most firearms, as they can be found in toilets, which are everywhere in the game. Ammo is also relatively plentiful and can be crafted relatively early on, provided that you find calipers for the casings. Can possibly veer into Simple, Yet Awesome with the Gunslinger skill introduced in A17.
  • Wood log spikes. Very resistant and deadly if you fall on them from high enough. Digging a moat as deep as you can^note and filling it with trunk tips makes for a very efficient zombie defense.
  • An underground base (be it a simple basement or a player-built/pre-existing bunker) is an excellent hideout for survivors, as digging down a sufficient distance will usually keep spawns from triggering outside of horde nights. However, it requires proper planning, as without proper support, the game physics will make it crumble on you.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: With the new skill system in the A17 build, players can make themselves possibly more powerful than the ones before, such as making powerful foods/aid items, make them immune to stunning, fall safely from heights that would normally kill/ break legs, do some massive damage with certain/all weapons, or even just mine nodes in a few quick swipes with a pick axe.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: The game color-codes items based on quality, i.e. how effective a certain item is and how long it can be used until it breaks. The sorting is unusual: growing quality order is grey, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple.
• Continuing Is Painful: Zig-zagged, and possibly invoked.
  • Alpha 12 has introduced a wellness stat that rules both the Life Meter and the Sprint Meter, and increases gradually with the consumption of clean water, good food, and meds. When a player dies, they lose 10 points of wellness, and if they die repeatedly, their max health and stamina can shrink to dangerously low levels, making it that much easier to die yet again. As a small mercy, wellness can never drop below 50, and a few perks increase that minimum value.
  • That also can for for the items. Depending on your settings, you can lose everything in your inventory upon death, what's on your toolbar, or nothing at all.
  • In A17, the wellness system was removed and in turn, replaced the penalty for dying with Near Death Trauma, which reduces your stats until it went away. The effects worsen upon each death, but gradually go away when the debuff starts to end.
• Critical Existence Failure: Varies
  • The only difference between a fully healthy player and one on death's door is a discoloration of the screen. Status effects come into play regardless of health.
  • Zombies can be knocked down more easily at lower health levels.
  • Zombie dogs and wild animals play it straight. These guys are either alive or dead.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Subverted as of Alpha 12. No matter how much you minimize the penalty via the settings for dying, your Wellness stat will drop.
• Developers' Foresight: Eating a can of chili makes you flatulent. And since zombies can detect you by sound and if you're carrying something odorous, this isn't just a crude joke, it's a real liability in the game.
• Difficulty Spike: The longer you survive and the higher you level up, the bigger and tougher the Blood Moon Hordes will get.
  • Also, the more activity performed in one area, the 'hotter' it gets for zombie spawns. So if you have a centralized base where you do most of your crafting and don't make the effort to hide from Screamers, be prepared to fight off hordes constantly.
• Drone of Dread: Nighttime is signaled by a loud droning. Every seven days, this is accompanied by the shrieking of an incoming horde.
• Dump Stat:
  • With the introduction of skills in Alpha 13, Science^note is definitely this. Compared to other skills, Science levels quite slowly, and has limited impact on the game.
  • Coming in second for this are the Tailoring^note , Leatherworking^note , and Armor Smithing^note . There's a plethora of reasons why these three skills are too difficult to be worth levelling up, and you'll most likely spend the entire game going without getting to level 10^note with these skills.
    • That said, as of Alpha 15, the way you can level skills was made easier, allowing for you to put skill points into these stats to mitigate the leveling difficulties.
  • In A17, this trope has noticably gotten more subverted, due to the new Skill and Stat system makes each Attribute equally important.
• Early Game Hell: You start off with just a can of chili, a bottle of water, a first aid bandage and a torch, and there isn't anything that actually leads you to anything. And you're wearing nothing but your underwear. Good luck.
• Endless Game: The current state of the game. Previously items and supplies were finite, but you can customize loot respawn frequency or if they happen at all. With the introduction of trader NPCs, it is now possible for a game to go on indefinitely, no matter what settings you choose.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Has already occured, due to a Third World War. Navezgane is sort of fine, but the damage of the war is pretty clear at certain areas of the map. Trying to leave the map leads to a nuclear wasteland.
• Elite Zombie: There are a fair number of unique zombie types, such that it would be easier to count which zombies are not special.
  • Spider Zombies can climb walls. Before screamers were introduced, a special variant of them investigated areas with high 'heat' and called in hordes if they saw the player.
  • Zombie Dogs and Giant Hornets (as in, the size of a chicken) are fast, deadly, and hard to shake off.
  • Added in Alpha 13 are Zombie Bears, with all the potential destruction they bring.
  • Screamers, which take the appearance of a girl in a white dress, are otherwise normal zombies whose screams will cause other zombies to spawn nearby. Failing to deal with them in a timely manner could result in a neverending horde of zombies descending on your base.
  • Though rare, Feral Walkers are not only hard to take down, but are always set to run as of Alpha 15.
  • The king of those is the Infected Police Officer. More health than the Bloated Walker, inflicts more block damage (meaning he destroys walls and blocks around him faster than most zombies), with a very long-ranged puking attack that inflicts high damage on both blocks and players... and last but not least: when he's low on health, he'll sprint towards the nearest survivor and blow himself up, which is a One-Hit Kill except with zombie damage set to the minimum (or with full health, good metal armor and high Heavy Armor skill). The kicker? He does it even if you put the zombies on the 'never run' setting.
  • Any zombie can potentially become one of these if they're Feral (faster attacks/movement, more damage and health) or Irradiated (same as Feral, but can also recover health).
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Including the game's physics! Chopping down a tree? Better not walk under it as the trunks fall to the ground!^*
• Exposed to the Elements: As of Alpha 13, with the introduction of weather, wetness, and temperature, averting this is a must for survival. No longer can you trudge through cold biomes in your underwear alone, or sport big bulky clothing in the deserts.
• Feathered Fiend: Starting on Alpha 16, zombie vultures replaced hornets as the single airborne enemy. They have an especially high chance of transmitting The Virus and are tougher than the old hornets, and when killed they don't yield honey when dressed down, but they are a good source of feathers.
• Fetch Quest: Teased during the trailer. Quests are supposed to bring you around the map, to points of interest and self-sustaining towns, but the game is still in Alpha, so it'll be a while until quests are added, probably longer until NPCs are added. As of the more recent builds, these quests are now a sizable part of the trader's tasks, either with recovering dropped supplies, stealing opposing supplies or digging them up from a location akin to the treasure maps (the difference being aside from the supplies, the other loot is food and water).
• Find the Cure!: Can result in this if you get infected. For the first stage, honey helps, but starting from stage II, only antibiotics cure it, and those are hard to both come by and craft.
• First-Person Ghost: Earlier in the game's development, you had a full model of your character, legs and arms, but Alpha 7.8 removed the legs from First Person view, to prevent the arms and legs from glitching into each other.
• Friendly Fireproof: Averted for players. Played painfully straight for the zombies and bloated police officers' acid spit attack.
• Guns Are Worthless: Downplayed. As of Alpha 13, guns no longer automatically One-Hit Kill zombies right off the bat, due to the introduction of skills, which affect how good you are with items like weapons and tools. Fully-assembled guns themselves are exceedingly rare, whereas gun parts are the norm. You need to find schematics to assemble gun parts into a functional weapon, and gathering sufficient ammunition can be difficult. Besides that, archery weapons are far more practical to craft and sustain with ammo and repairs, if a bit lacking in firepower and crowd control.
  • As of Alpha 17, this trope has increasingly been Subverted to an extent, since the introduction of the new skills system gives each class of firearms a unique ability that gives them value once more (Pistols do more damage with successive shots, Machine guns recover stamina, to name a few), and they are all tied under the Perception Skill, so they all get additional damage. The update did give arrows a chance of being recoverable and they are also improved with Perception, so they aren't rendered useless due to the guns getting improved.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Eating canned goods can heal a minor amount of health, but some, if not all, self-made food can give you status buffs, such as heal regen for a limited time, to restoring a good amount of heal per consumption.
• Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Downplayed.
  • Trash cans can sometimes provide valuable loot, but they're nowhere near as likely to do so as, say, a Shotgun Messiah or Working Stiff crate.
  • Treasure chests are part of quests, but you have to read the map and note of the survivor that buried them first, and digging them out can range between a few shovel strikes and a day-long chore because the map marker is so imprecise.
• Infinite Flashlight: Currently (as of A16), this applies to practically all light sources in the game, excepting campfires and forges. Torches, electric lamps, flashlights, the minibike's and mining helmet's headlamp, all of these stay lit indefinitely, in the lights' case without a power source. According to Word of God, aversions are expected in the future^note .
• IKEA Weaponry: Due to the new crafting system, each gun can be split into one of either 3 or 4 (depending on the gun) parts. As of Alpha 11.x, most gun parts can no longer be molded and forged, but must be looted. Since each part has its own quality, they also no longer stack like they once did. Firearms can be broken back down into all their individual components, which sometimes means an average quality weapon can be broken down to reveal one very high quality part mixed with mediocre or faulty parts. The same goes for the compund bow introduced in Alpha 16.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: Although every item goes into one single slot in your inventory grid, it can become this easily, because everything is usable and can become important eventually. It becomes frequent to deal with this, since food of different kinds occupy different slots, and items that only become metal based items after they've been crafted with, occupying even more slots.
• Item Crafting:
  • It used to be very basic and very Minecraft-like until the Alpha 6 update that added the forge. More recent versions have introduced various 'tech gates', requiring specific knowledge (in the form of schematics or perks) before unlocking crafting recipes (e.g., leather armor, various weapons and firearms, tools, etc.). This forces the player to create low end starter gear just to survive and provides enormous incentive to explore and loot.
  • You can craft your own guns from gun-parts or break down pre-existing looted guns into their component gun-parts (and any loaded ammo), which can be retained (if high quality), recycled or kept for repairing better ones at the workbench (if poor quality).
• Jerkass: Traders Rekt (in the Burnt Forest), Hugh (in the Snowy Forest) and Jimmy (in the Wasteland).
  • The worst offender is easily Trader Rekt. At best he complains about you not tipping him after he insults your intelligence, your looks, or your smell. At worst? He threatens to shoot you.
• Just Add Water: Played straight prior to Alpha 6. Campfires needed just a log of wood and paper. Now it requires more than that. This syndrome seemed to be the same with a few old recipes, before they were revamped into requiring more advanced recipes.
• Kevlard: Fat zombies can take noticeably more damage than regular zombies, with the Disturbed Tourists being especially tough, and the zombie police officers being almost Boss in Mook's Clothing tough.
• Land Mine Goes 'Click!': Air Filter, Candy Tin and Hub Cap Landmines can be crafted for defensive or offensive purposes. The area surrounding a military camp and the inside of a strip club will most likely be stuffed with them. Not that it helped against the zombies, but they're still dumb enough to walk into them. A previous version of the game set them as friendly entities, making them not damage the player if the game had no friendly fire, but this was changed in Alpha 7.9.
• Law of Cartographical Elegance: Everything outside of the map of Navezgane (or randomly-generated map) is a nuclear wasteland.
• Level Grinding: In A17, the skills system was completely revamped: in the past, using the skill enough would raise it. Now, skills can only be raised when you spend points when you level up (like in Fallout). But you get only one point to spend per level up, and the cost for each point gets more expensive as you advance. Plus you have to buy perks separately, they are not earned at a threshold. So if you want a particular perk, you may have to build 10-15 levels just to get it.
• Lightning Bruiser:
  • The Feral Zombie used to be this. A tier stronger than the police zombie, a fast runner, could take quite the punishment and dealt just as much punishment as the player would do; they were often accused of being boring damage sponges until their HP was dropped to more manageable levels in Alpha 15, in exchange for them being on 'always run'.
  • Bears also count to this, but these are 'less' aggressive to the player.
  • The minibike itself also counts as this, as a well-built bike is capable of ramming about a dozen bears on its own before breaking.
• Loading Screen: The only two in the whole game, comes up when you load up a saved game or respawn from a death.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Navezgane means 'Killer Of Monsters' in Apache.
  • A 'Super Horde' will spawn every 7 days near your exact location. New or unprepared players are unlikely to survive it.
  • If infected, a player has 7 days to cure it before they start losing health and dying.
• Money Spider: Human zombies can be killed and looted, and they seem to contain quite a large range of items. Some ranges from cans of food to weapons and Vendor Trash, while specialized zombies like hazmat workers and miners are more likely to drop tools, and soldiers often have ammo or some gun part. Feral walkers almost always drop .44 revolver parts.
  • In A17, this has been changed where you can't loot zombies directly, but now they have a chance of dropping a yellow bag with a Z on it, which contains various loot that ranges from canned stuff to high end tools/mods.
• Nail 'Em: There's a nailgun in the game, and it can be used as a ranged weapon... except it has low firepower, poor accuracy, and generally isn't indicated to be used that way. The real way to use it is for block repair/upgrading, at which it is by far superior to any other tool.
• Nice Day, Deadly Night: ZigZagged. Traditionally, zombies run at night and are reduced to walking during the daytime, so they're much more difficult to deal with when it's dark. Alpha 15 introduced the option to tweak their gait, so you can have the standard, or zombies that always walk, zeds that always run, or outright invert the trope with walkers that run in daylight but walk when the sun is gone.
• Nice Hat: The armor system contains quite a lot of them, such as a mining helmet (complete with headlamp), a cowboy hat (useful for cooling off in hot weather) and more. Craftables include a hood, a leather mask giving a nice Mad Max vibe, and several helmets.
• Nice Guy: Traders Joel and Bob. Compared to the other 3, they're completely affable, welcome you wholeheartedly inside, are patient with your wares and tell you to be safe when you leave.
• No Bikes in the Apocalypse: Pre-apocalypse Navezgane didn't care at all for cycling, it seems. You can't find remnants of bicycles anywhere, and the minibike you can craft as your personal vehicle is a motorized gas guzzler.
  • As of Alpha 17, though, this trope has been finally Averted, with the introduction of the Bicycle, unlocked at the first rank of Grease Monkey. The vehicle is very simple to make (doesn't even need a workbench to assemble, makes less noise than the other vehicles and doesn't need fuel (it uses stamina) at the cost of being slower than the other build able vehicles.
• No Plot? No Problem!: As of now, there's no story in the game. This haven't prevented people from playing it and enjoying it. Trying to survive day after day, scavenging for supplies with enemies around every corner and constructing your own base of operations is really fun, even when there's no purpose to it. Of course, this is a zombie apocalypse game, so you don't really NEED a plot. Your objective is clear: survive.
• North Is Cold, South Is Hot: Zigzagged with Navezgane. The only snow biome on the map covers the entire northeast corner of it, while deserts and burned forests claim the southern half. However, at the same time, there's a moderately hot plains biome covering the northwest of the map, and a cooler Wasteland biome south of it.
• One Bullet Clips: Come Alpha 6, ammo is counted in individual bullets as opposed to the old 'full reload' unit. This means that some ammo types are rarer than others. Shotgun ammo for a while still seemed to avert this, using the old 'full reload' mechanic for a while, until it was finally changed to the One Bullet Clips rule, making shotgun ammo just as rare as SMG ammo.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: Two words: Miscellaneous Crafting. Introduced with skills in Alpha 13, this is the skill that essentially covers everything outside of medicine, armor, weapons, guns, etc. In other words, all things that you're going to be dealing with far, far,FAR more frequently than medicine, clothes, or armor. The best part? It also includes minibike parts. Once maxed out, you can easily craft purple-rated minibike parts with ease. Once you have a maxed-out Misc. Crafting skill, half of your minibike's parts will be rated 500+, all the better for ramming zombies or speeding off with.
• Perpetual Beta: The game's been in alpha for almost half a decade as of May 2018 (Alpha 1 debuted in October 2013), and so far there's been sixteen stable alpha builds released in a constant stream, with little to no talk of entering the beta stage.
• Power Equals Rarity:
  • Pistols, Shotguns (short and long), and SMGs. The only weapon to be a bit uncommon is the Hunting Rifle, whereas the Sniper Rifle and Rocket Launcher are pretty rare. They're both rare to the point that you may not see them at all.
  • With the introduction of more weapon-specific looting locations (e.g., military camps, police stations, Shotgun Messiah stores, etc.), parts for higher powered weapons (including sniper rifles and SMGs) is more common. However, since part quality can vary greatly and the the overall quality (durability and damage) of a weapon is the average of its component parts, putting together a high quality weapon remains fairly difficult.
  • The weapon with the highest DPS in the game, an AK-47 that fires full-sized 7.62mm NATO rounds, is without question the hardest to obtain. Parts for it are only rarely found on Fallen Soldiers, Feral Walkers, airdrop crates and extremely rarely on Shotgun Messiah gun crates. To compensate, it works more like a general-purpose machine gun than the assault rifle it's supposed to be, and even single shots are still devastating.
• Procedural Generation: While earlier versions limited players to only the relatively small Navezgane map, Alpha 9 introduced random world generation with a wide variety of biomes (e.g., alpine, forest, desert, wasteland, burnt forest, etc.), structures (includingmassivecities), and terrain (e.g., lakes, mountains, cliffs, etc.), as well a massive increase in explorable world size.
• Reality Ensues:
  • 'Ah it's a block-based game like Minecraft! I'll just build a house in the air. Why is it- OH GOD IT'S FALLING!'
  • Wearing a Leather Duster because it looks cool? Unless you're in a cold biome or it's raining outside, it will likely lead to overheating. It should be noted, though, that leather dusters were worn commonly in deserts out west largely to keep people cool during the day by helping one sweat, and insulated and warm at night.
  • Falling from too great of a height (Unless you have Parkour maxed out) will lead to a broken leg, which will take a while to recover from, with a speed and star penalty, unless you use a Plaster Cast.
  • A17 introduces some drugs that you can use to get powerful buffs, but using them dehydrates your character and runs the risk of withdrawal, and while the symptoms are short, they're unpleasant if you decide to go cold turkey.
  • Explosives are dangerous, regardless of your character's level and/or equipment. Even in Steel armor that has the Steel Plating mod installed, you'll still take a significant amount of damage from land mines, let alone the Rocket Launcher.
• Respawn Point: Beds and sleeping bags that have been placed by the player will act as their respawn point in case of an untimely death.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • See that little military camp, which probably has a stash of guns, ammunition, and other goodies? I wonder why it's so empt-BOOM.
  • That city (with all those great gun stores, tool stores, bookstores, and other buildings) looks like a great place to explore and loot. Just watch out for unending packs of dogs, hordes of regular zombies, and the constant spawning of policeman zombies and feral variants of the usual zeds.
• Shout-Out: The can of 'Stash' chili every starting character gets looks nearly identical to real-life canned chili brand Stagg.
• Simple, yet Awesome: The Wooden Spikes. They only require wood to make, and are remarkably efficient at eliminating zombies. You can place them around your base to stop zombies before they even reach your walls, or plonk them down between you and an approaching zombie.
• Stripperiffic: It is highly doubtful that some of the zombie nurses used to actually be nurses, and now there are actual stripper zombies.
• Survival Sandbox: Your hunger and hydration are always decreasing over time, and decreases even more, the more stamina you use. Both meters supply your health and stamina, so having low hydration yields slower stamina regen, while eating heals a small amount of health, for food consumed. Staying fed and hydrated isn't your only problem; There're the zombies too. They spawn in dark unlit areas, they sprint and get better eyesight/hearing/smell when it's dark.
• The Croc Is Ticking: You can tell Spider Zombies are nearby because of their high-pitched screams. Giant Hornets' buzzing was quite loud too when they were in the game.
• Useless Useful Stealth: Not so much useless as hard to achieve. Zombies can't detect you if they can't see you (meaning, if you are not in their line of sight or if something hides you from them), but they are attracted by odours (such as cooked or raw meat). They're also highly sensitive to sounds, and practically any action beyond creeping around or standing still will attract their attention.
• Vendor Trash:
  • Averted. Iron Scrap, Lead Scrap, Brass fixtures, Empty Cans, Feathers, Lead Batteries, Scrap Plastics and such may seem worthless but they aren't. Every item you find can be crafted into something, if not used, even if there hasn't been a function implemented yet, it most likely will have a use. That said, Painkillers can sell for quite the pretty penny when fully stacked, and while extremely common on zombies, is nowhere near as potent as the more advanced methods of healing you acquire later on.
  • As of Alpha 16, there are now 'rare ores' such as diamond, gold, and silver. These can be found in treasure chests or rarely when digging. They serve no purpose other than to be sold to traders for a huge sum of money (even though they would have essentially no use in a post-apocalyptic setting).
• Violation of Common Sense: Using a wrench to dismantle a filled shopping basket (as in, the kind that's made from plastic) will allow you to loot a fully-usable shopping basket for your Minibike.
• Weakened by the Light: If you go by the default zombie settings, this is how they act. They will be your standard zombies with the normal shambling walk. Unless it becomes night. Then they run. Really, really fast. You can also subvert this trope by making the zombies classic zombies, in which they never run, or by making them always run, regardless of daylight conditions, or even invert it entirely, with zombies that walk when it's night and sprint when the sun is out.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer...: While specialized tools are the best option for building tasks (shovels for digging, pickaxes for breaking rocks, etc.), nothing stops you from using something woefully inadapted for the task at the cost of taking much longer to do so. Broke your pickaxe and you're in dire need of removing a rock or stocking on coal or iron ores? Break out the stone axe!
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: You have both a hydration and a hunger meter, as well as a health and stamina meter. Food slightly heals you, as well as recover your hunger meter, while water regains your hydration and stamina (which regens over time) much faster.
• You All Look Familiar: The zombie models are pretty few, but the player character models used to an even smaller selection. Averted now for the players as there are basic body and face customization and the new equipment screen has been implemented, that seems to function as a way to customize yourself with clothing and armor. Word of God says that the zombie models are placeholders purchased from an asset store until they get their own procedurally-generated zombie appearance system eventually implemented. This actually caused Fun Pimps some legal problems, as one of the models they used was (unbeknownst to them) stolen from Killing Floor, which resulted in Tripwire getting 7DTD removed from Steam until they replaced the model^note .
• Your Days Are Numbered: The feel that the title is aiming for. So far, the title seems to be an Artifact Title down the line, but mobs and items seem to react to the amount of days that have passed.
  • Taken quite literally. Rarely, zombies can inflict a debuff on you known as an infection (Stage 1). For new players, they might not think much about it, and aside from a loss of stamina, they might just forget they had it at all. 3 days later, it goes into Stage 2. And thenon the 7th day of infection, the health lossbegins...
  • As of Alpha 11, zombie spawns at night now have a cycle where they slowly escalate as time passes, reaching their assuredly-fatal-for-the-unprepared peak every... you guessed it, seven days.