Nerf Them All: The Mod That Saved 7 Days To Die For Us
First let me clarify so I don’t sound [SIZE=15.68px]judgmental;[/SIZE] mods have introduced a plethora of ways to enjoy 7 Days and all of them are valid if you are having fun. This review is from the point of view of three particular people who were in the process of looking for a new game when Robeloto’s Nerf Them All Mod was found. We are still playing 7 Days because of it.
Secondly, if you enjoyed the version of the game where the ‘search for the garden hoe’ was much like the search for the holy grail, then this may be of particular interest to you.
Lastly, if you like the feeling of ‘we’re going to die’ and eventually you do, Cthulhu style, then that can be part of it too.
We do use a few other mods which I will mention, but Robeloto’s Nerf Them All is at the heart of it. We aren’t done exploring combinations of mods either, but this is where we’re at.
You need to use Nitrogen to get the full benefit. Heck use it even if you don’t use anything else from this. It’s awesome. I’ve found that 10240 maps that are light on cities and roads seem to perform the best. We put 0 traders on our maps.
The second thing we do is that we do not spec into Advanced Engineering or Grease Monkey. Our next game we’re not spec’ing into Master Chef or Physician either for extra cruelty. Robeloto is looking into a modification that would suppress unwanted spec lines, but it was more complex than met the eye. Removing the Advanced Engineering tree also removed the ability to create a workstation if/when you were lucky enough to find the schematic. But, we’re a group of friends who can agree not to, so we don’t.
This means you have to find every schematic (did I mention the search for the garden hoe?). The outright need to loot remains for a long, long time.
Food. Ya. The gardening nerf puts a whole new spin on things. A garden becomes an investment that hopefully you can build large enough, and live long enough, to see a return from. Plus, we don’t spec beyond level 1 in Master Chef so we need those recipes too. (As previously mentioned, I want to not even use Master Chef at all. Live off cans, charred meat, snow berries, and yucca until you loot those cookbooks).
This does a few things. Some skill lines that I think aren’t often used become quite important. Like Living Off The Land since you can get three snow-berries at a time to stuff in your pie hole while you are running around trying to kill chickens and rabbits. Lucky Looter, definitely. Iron Gut to preserve the food, especially if you are burning calories trying to mine. Archery… bullets aren’t that easy to come by. Finding a level 6 blunderbuss actually is a good thing.
Red nights. We start the game with the Difficulty at 0, day timers walk, everything else sprints. After each red night we increment the difficulty in one of four ways. Difficulty, Number of Zeds per man at Red Night, AI Block Damage, and then day time Speed. When speed reaches Sprint, then night time gets bumped, then day, until everything eventually is moving at nightmare and doing a much damage to your precious hiding spot/base. You have to rethink red night defenses. Creating kill pits, being prepared to abandon ship for a back up defense location.
We run our own Linux server which gives us some extra freedom. I created a shell script (you could write it in powershell I bet, though) that will back up a player’s files then delete the original ttp and map file. So, perma-death is a thing we implemented. Currently we are allowing 2 deaths past level 5, then getting a free life every 25 levels. But, that was before the convenience of being able to trash a player via the terminal. Die, and you get wiped. Which also adds group consequences. Were you the Miner? The Chef? Someone who had those recipes the group was relying on to survive? Too bad you can’t replace those dart traps now!
As for other mods we use, it’s a matter of taste. We have one that increases (by a ton) the number of Zombies in the wilderness biome, and one that increases the wandering horde sizes. Those are from Jaxteller. The impact of those is that you fight A LOT thus you level quickly. Yay! But game stage also rises quickly. When you are running around like a fool trying not to starve and praying for a forge schematic, rising game stage makes red night more and more challenging. I have a single player game where I am level 40 and all I have is a cement mixer. I did find a usable workbench and chem station, but… no sign of a forge. I sense impending doom.
A few things I can think of that would make the survival experience more brutal than what we do; no usable workstations anywhere in the world. You have to find the schematic. Since those seem to be relative to POI’s maybe that’s not possible. The second thing is larger swarms of dogs/vultures. I’ve seen up to 6, pretty scary, but not ‘poop my pants’ scary.
Somewhere you asked if there was perhaps a better name for the mod, if I named it I would call it something like 'Survivalist'. It has a ton of upside and room to get grittier for players who want a more brutal experience.
In conclusion. Thank you Robeloto. We look forward to our game night because of your work. I’ll try to keep offering feedback as we play.
Thanks for reading. Have an awesome day.
Peace,
Bouzouki