PC A17 Pointless base building

The point is that I come back after a year or so of no play, and I look at all those threads about 7dtd difficulty rising and that deceive me. I am a "coward player", basicaly I hate horror games, but I love 7dtd. Probably I like the feeling to be secured inside a dangerous and fearing world by building something and find some courage to explore it; mostly with strategic or tactical moves, less with action.
Finaly I go give another try to 7dtd, but for now, after 2 days I have played 1 or 2 hours and used most of time reading forums. It's like my first time ingame long time ago but without th security provided by a hole in a ground and everything new to learn. For first time I feel the need to not play solo. And youre right, I'll start a new game on easy blockdamage.

In wanna try some underground mining strategy too
Yes, some of the new options should be right up your alley and keep the game enjoyable for you. Put zombies to 25% block damage and yourself to 200% block damage and turn off blood moon hordes completely and you may be in for the best version of 7 Days to Die you remember playing. :)

 
I no longer have any problems defending my base. Granted, I am only on day 40 now but I do not lose a single block during horde night on warrior.

Reading through it looks to me like your problem here is that you are trying to build what might have worked before. Doors are a no go - end of story. They clump the zeds up and with damage bonuses that they get in numbers it makes anything no matter how many HP pointless. Wood is also useless now in any defensive position.

I build a basic pillbox to start - 5 Bricks per wall 4 bricks high and you have to have at least cobblestone even on day 7. Push 2 of those together, double thick walls on 3 sides and center poles on the 4th so you can melee through them. I place a 2 lane maze in front so I can drop some wires across them (those are massively OP - my main wall never even takes damage now). 2nd floor to flee to if things go badly and a third to store my ♥♥♥♥. We are only talking 164 blocks including the maze.

I carry a pistol to make cops easy but honestly I don't need anything past my sledge to defend this base thus far. No gimmicky pathing tricks or anything like that required. 4 dart traps for kneecapping will be added when I have found a good way to ensure iron gathering.

They do need to fix how doors work - for now simply never place a door where it can be hit - it will insta die. Other than that, base building is not much more difficult than a16. This is similar to my 16 base but a lot smaller because you cant spread them out anymore so you have to use a killbox.

 
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Same for me, and I add to this that mining was fun and is now rip. I had read many forum threads and I don't even wan't to give any ingame try. I'm quitting until I know underground mining is possible.In alpha 16 I waited the horde behind my rounded pillars with guns and sledgehammer. Under this base was my underground mine and I defended it. There was always a need to make a better design for future hordes.

If I can't mine underground or lure around the world with no idea of how to protect me from Zombies , this is not a strategic game, this is a pure bashing fps.
Underground mining is still a thing. I dig 2 lanes to the desired depth (usually 14 as it makes finding resource nodes pretty easy) and attach pathways in between the two paths. Then place wooden doors periodically. The horde will need to attack the doors and that is noisy - just saunter over to the path they are not attacking and walk on out.

Easy.

 
I'm curious. OP? In your base builds do you have a clear walking path between you and the zombies? Meaning, blocks may be in the way, but they can beat down a wall, a door, or whatever, to access stairs or a ladder or blocks that can be hopped up on, to reach you?

Or is there zero paths to for the zombies to reach you? Which typically means, you're at least 4 blocks high with some lip preventing spiders from reaching you.

One thing I've noticed is that in A17, yeah, if there's a clear path that zombies can travel to reach you, they'll do that. In a very focused way.

However if you run a platform base where they can't actually walk up to you along any path, and have to go into destroy mode, their damage spreads out. Which is a huge huge huge difference.

I suspect people who are saying zombies hardly beat their bases down are running upgraded cobblesstone/flagstone bases on platforms of a sort. Where zombies end up in destroy mode flailing at whatever. Seems to cause much less "zombies went right through my base!" issues.

 
The point is that I come back after a year or so of no play, and I look at all those threads about 7dtd difficulty rising and that deceive me. I am a "coward player", basicaly I hate horror games, but I love 7dtd. Probably I like the feeling to be secured inside a dangerous and fearing world by building something and find some courage to explore it; mostly with strategic or tactical moves, less with action.

I also want a secure base for the day but in horde night i want a base i can fight, if i want to , but don't have to if i just want peace.

So i took over a POI next to a trader as base , build a wall around it, and put Log spike (modlet to reactivate them) and normal iron spikes around it. Keeps away the screamer and wandering hordes.

Not far away i build a suspended tower (idea found here in forum), 9x9x20 hole with a 5x5 tower in the middle. The tower is "attached" at a hight of 4 blocks up to the top with plates, so you get a nearly 2x1 hole where zombies fall through. From bottom of the pit 2 ramps are digged up to ground level, so zombies can walk back up.

On one side on top of the hole i have a little tower with a ramp. The ramp is connected to the tower with 3 poles , so only 1 zombie can be infront of the kill zone at any time. So i can club them to death. From there i can jump into my save tower and close the door if zombies break through.

Can be all achieved till day 7 (the tower at least) with flagstone if you build in desert. Otherwise, start building, spend first 7 day horde in a normal POI (they don't manage to destroy it yet) and latest on day 14 your are good.

Some pictures to illustrate the horde night base, sorry for crappy quality, it's my second game on potato PC at work :D :

https://imgur.com/a/rxcMjJi

 
My current RWG game is at day 102 and the past several Blood moon Hordes hardly damaged my base. I found one of the Bomb Shelters hidden under a well on day 2 and decided to see if it could be made to stand up to the new AI without exploiting it. Here is what I did:

The well has been built into a concrete reinforced tower 8 blocks high, 2 blocks thick (Steel reinforced) with an Iron bar cage on 3 sides at the top. 4 blocks from the ground is a ring of Iron bars to stop Spiders. Around the base are 4 layers of Wood and iron spikes 2 layers high. Next are rows of Land mines, Air Filter, Hubcap and Candy tin surrounding the spikes. Surrounding that are 3 rows of Barbed wire stacked 2 high.

That sounds great, but how do you get in? Well, I have constructed a ramp that is 8 blocks high that leads to a bridge that is 20 blocks long and 3 blocks wide and has side rails to help stop zombies from falling off the side and deciding to rampage near my supports. My top cage has iron bars all around the top except for a doorway onto the bridge. During Blood Moon nights, I turn off my forges, my Chem stations and my camp fires and climb up the ladder to my Cage and close the vault and hatch doors below and blast away until morning to lower any Zombie attraction to what is below and deter their "Dig" instinct.

Because the ramp is the only clear access to get to me, 95% of the Zombies ignore all the defenses and head straight for the ramp where I chug Learnin Elixer and blast away. If I have to go afk, I flick the switch and turn on the Shotgun turrets pointed down the bridge and can be pretty positive that I will be safe even during an assault if the phone rings or I need a Bio break.

Yes, it eats ammo but for me, it works out to what I have used to clear a Tier 5 POI. So far so good and yes, the bridge supports are also protected by spikes, land mines and barbed wire.

 
Did you try the new setting AI BLOOD MOON BLOCK DAMAGE? You can make them do as little as 25%. Overall Difficulty nerfs their damage and nerfs the game stage too. hell you can turn off blood moons now entirely too, so theres enough settings in there to please most players preferences, and more to come.

 
Did you try the new setting AI BLOOD MOON BLOCK DAMAGE? You can make them do as little as 25%. Overall Difficulty nerfs their damage and nerfs the game stage too. hell you can turn off blood moons now entirely too, so theres enough settings in there to please most players preferences, and more to come.
Har har (Modded)

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And no, thats not my normal settings ;)

 
I wonder what would happen if the blockdamage was set to 0%. I imagine that the zombies are all trapped in their hiding places and everyone would scream "Let me out" :D

 
Did you try the new setting AI BLOOD MOON BLOCK DAMAGE? You can make them do as little as 25%. Overall Difficulty nerfs their damage and nerfs the game stage too. hell you can turn off blood moons now entirely too, so theres enough settings in there to please most players preferences, and more to come.
At 25% block damage, hope this makes sense, what does that add up to in terms of cumulative damage when they are in a group.? Is that also 25% of what damage they would have done.?

Also when setting the BM frequency to 14 days will the first horde on day 14 be the equivalent of your typical first horde on what used to be a seven day cycle or a typical 14 day horde, which would have been the second one.?

Last point is it going to be possible to set days to be even longer, without needing a modlet.?

Thanks

 
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Underground mining is still a thing. I dig 2 lanes to the desired depth (usually 14 as it makes finding resource nodes pretty easy) and attach pathways in between the two paths. Then place wooden doors periodically. The horde will need to attack the doors and that is noisy - just saunter over to the path they are not attacking and walk on out.
Easy.
Thanks for this I think that will help me soon.

 
Yes, some of the new options should be right up your alley and keep the game enjoyable for you. Put zombies to 25% block damage and yourself to 200% block damage and turn off blood moon hordes completely and you may be in for the best version of 7 Days to Die you remember playing. :)
I have set zombies damage to 25%, my damage at 125%. But I dont want to play without BM, BM is core of the game. Even if I am not a courageous player. Maybe one day I will try without BM.

Like another one commented here I liked in a16 to come back on ground to fight the BM and kill screamers and eventually to loot some blueprint. In a large cage of concrete pillars surrounded by metal pikes and barbed wires, with a sledgehamer, where I could reach loots, difficulty easy, no courage here. And after testing hundred of strategy for bases in creative mode lol.

Now after reading so much forums and patchnotes from a17 I changed my mind an be very impressed by all the work realised by devs. This is a very huge and smart update to the game I feel. And I thank them alot for that. For now I'm on day 3 night with some weapons, amo and metal tools and I don't really know what to choose to do an where to go. I even discovered how quest is working, but died with no bed close = quest loose. But I like to have some pressure with BM coming. I think I have to build my base close to a trader like other players I suppose. With stuff allready everywhere and I still cant transport evrything.

I love this game so much and I can't wait to try everything I have in mind and what is new but, this time, my start is really slow :) .

 
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Did you try the new setting AI BLOOD MOON BLOCK DAMAGE? You can make them do as little as 25%. Overall Difficulty nerfs their damage and nerfs the game stage too. hell you can turn off blood moons now entirely too, so theres enough settings in there to please most players preferences, and more to come.
Hey Madmole. I was kinda wondering. When I first picked up 7D2D, I thought I read that you guys were envisioning The Walking Dead kind of zombies. Now... That kind of requires a horde of zombies I'd think. As opposed to the max limit of zombies that can be in the world currently.

So I'm wondering, what kind of zombies are you guys looking to mimic or do you see the most similar to your own vision of how zombies can behave and function.

I get the feeling, totally could be wrong, but I get the feeling you guys have had to perhaps trade off some original vision of how zombies should be to what zombies are today. Be it technical limitations or maybe just game play experience with zombies in 7D2D versus the original version of 7D2D zombies didn't really work out as well as you guys may have hoped.

So what is the zombie experience you guys are shooting for now and what movie, tv, or whatever most resembles what you guys are looking to build?

 
Guys, the problem isn't in zombies block damage. Even if it is unnatural. The problem is in the bloodmoon hordes spawns infinitely, that doesn't looks realistic at all. Interesting thing is in it's doesn't matter what level of difficulty u had chosen. At moment you got 200+ level, you will be attacked by infinite hordes of radiated zombies, that will be everywhere. A more interesting thing is that u can run all the night with the shotgun and can have a base with 10-50++ turrets - you will have same result, but with turrets u will spend arround of 1200 ammo per turret (it's really doesn't matters how many turrets you have - as fast you kill zeds, faster they will spawn) will give you the same result as if you will run to the jungle with about 700 shells in your shotgun, but also, you will have EXP from dyings zeds.

So +1 for base is being useless at late game. The buildings / builders are being useless.

I can hope adjusting horde cap (i mean maximum amount of zombies spawned per player level for BM night / total cap) settings can save the game, but really i am waiting for some random behaviour - I am waiting for a really nightmare horde, that will knock destroy all i have and just a bunch of trash, that will run and die on my very basic traps.

At my opinion, BM hordes spawning needs serious rebalance. It's not challenging at all right now - it's just a infinite radiated horde with alternative to run all the night on your bike, then by morning, kill them all with just 100-200 bullets instead of 1k per turret on your base.

p.s. Sorry for my broken english, i hope you got what i mean by reading all this mess :(

 
At my opinion, BM hordes spawning needs serious rebalance. It's not challenging at all right now - it's just a infinite radiated horde with alternative to run all the night on your bike, then by morning, kill them all with just 100-200 bullets instead of 1k per turret on your base.
There are many more ways to fight the horde than the two you mentioned. With good planning and well placed traps you can fight the horde effectively even with few resources.

I fight the horde in my base using a combination of dart traps, electric fences, blade traps and an SMG. The dart traps only consume iron darts that don't need gunpowder to make them, only iron. I need about 1500-2000 iron darts per horde.

The repair costs for the blade traps and the electric fences are negligible.

I consume about 500-1000 rounds of 9mm ammunition for one horde night. Up to now I never had to produce ammunition myself because I can buy sufficient quantities at the traders and I also find a lot of 9mm ammunition. I use the SMG only in the horde night. Otherwise I preferably fight the zombies with the iron club and the crossbow. Therefore I consume only very little ammunition between the hordes.

 
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