7 Days to Die

It is a voxel survival crafting game in a zombie apocalypse, and it is also a tower defence game with a timer you cannot pause. Six days of scavenging, building, mining and questing, and then on the seventh night every zombie in the region walks straight at you.

That rhythm is what makes it different from every other zombie survival game. You are never aimlessly surviving, you are always building toward the next blood moon, and your base is judged by whether it holds.

• The world is fully destructible and structurally simulated. Cut the supports and the building falls, including yours.
• Points of interest are hand-designed dungeons: houses, factories and skyscrapers with loot rooms at the end.
• Traders give quests, sell gear, and are safe zones. They are the closest thing to a questline.
• Difficulty rises with your gamestage, which tracks your level and days survived, so the horde scales with you.

1. 1

   Day one: tools and shelter

   Stone axe, then a bedroll and a base claim. Loot the nearest houses for food, water, cloth and duct tape.

2. 2

   Find the trader

   The starting quest chain points at one. Traders are safety, income and a steady supply of quests that pay far better than looting alone.

3. 3

   Read everything

   Since 1.0, crafting tiers are unlocked by reading magazines rather than by repetition. Every magazine you skip is a recipe you do not get.

4. 4

   Sort water and food

   Murky water plus a cooking pot, or dew collectors later. Dysentery from drinking dirty water is a classic day-two mistake.

5. 5

   Pick a base and reinforce it

   Wood into cobblestone into concrete. Elevation, a single approach and a fallback exit are worth more than thickness.

6. 6

   Be somewhere defensible by night seven

   The first blood moon is survivable in a reinforced house with a spiked corridor. Do not be caught in the open.

Every seventh day, at nightfall, the sky turns red and the horde spawns and pathfinds directly to the players. They dig, they climb and they break through walls. This is the exam.

• Zombies path toward the easiest route to you, which means you can DESIGN the route they take.
• A killing corridor, spike traps, elevated firing positions and a fallback room is the standard shape.
• Do not fight on the ground. Height plus a gap they have to funnel across is what wins nights.
• Repair between waves. Blocks degrade fast and a wall at half health is a wall about to fail.
• Every seventh night is bigger than the last, because gamestage scales with you.

• Magazines and schematics unlock crafting tiers. Looting the right POIs and buying from traders is now the fastest path to better gear.
• Perks are bought with skill points at level up, and they gate weapon tiers, harvesting speed and utility.
• Loot quality scales with gamestage, so patience is rewarded and rushing a hard POI early is not.
• Vehicles progress from bicycle to motorbike to 4x4 to gyrocopter, and each one changes how big the map feels.
• Mining and farming are full systems for people who prefer building to raiding.

The setting is deliberately thin: a nuclear exchange, a plague, and a county in Arizona left to rot. What story exists is environmental, and the POIs carry it.

• Each hand-built location tells a small story: a barricaded hospital, a cult compound, a family that did not make it out.
• The wasteland biome is the ruin of whatever the military tried.
• Traders are the only living humans you meet, and their radio chatter is the whole of the world outside.
• The tone is pulp apocalypse rather than tragedy, and it is fine with that.

• Co-op is the default way to play it. Blood moons with four people and a well-built base are the highlight of the game.
• Split by perk: one person specs into looting, one into mining, one into building, one into combat.
• Shared bases need a shared plan, especially for horde night pathing. Two people patching different holes is a collapse waiting to happen.
• Server settings (day length, horde frequency, loot abundance) are all adjustable and most groups tune them.

• Never build your horde base and your living base as the same building.
• Keep a stock of repair materials at the fighting position, not in a chest downstairs.
• Wear the right armour for your playstyle and keep it repaired.
• Loot POIs from the top down where you can. The designers expect you to come from the bottom.
• Do quests. Trader quests are the fastest gear and money in the game by a wide margin.
• Check your gamestage before you get cocky. The horde is scaling even when you are not.

• The official site and 1.0-era patch notes, since older guides teach the retired progression system.
• The community wiki for magazine tiers, block hitpoints and horde night mechanics.
• Ask in our Discord. Horde night with a full group is one of the best co-op experiences on this list.