7 Days to Die is an open-world game that is a unique combination of first person shooter, survival horror, tower defense, and role-playing games. Game: 7 Days To Die. When logged in. Allows the conversion of Arrows to Crossbow Bolts and vice versa. Steel no longer require a workbench, in order to conform with the B221 changes to the recipe. Permissions and credits Credits and distribution permission.
Posted byWith my first two guides being such a hit, I figured I'd take the time and write up a proper guide on what to expect on your first 7 days. This guide will help you start out properly, in a game with such a steep learning curve.
If you are just joining our wonderful community, I suggest reading my guide on What to expect with 7 Days to Die and my guide on Selecting the optimal server settings for your play style and my new one Minibikes and Mines
There will be one more guide posted either tonight or tomorrow on skills/perks, how to level them efficiently, and what to spec in. I went over a few ways in this guide, but not fully in depth like I'd like to.
Quest walk through
When you first start out, you will be spawned at a random location on the map, in various biomes. Typically you will be in the forest area, but not always! Our first goal, is to get the pre-quests out of the way. This is very simple to do, and very quick.
You will notice a popup menu and quest objectives on the top right of your screen. This will be the required tasks to complete the quest. The starter one, comes in 8 stages. All very simple, and can be done with the materials all within your immediate location.
Objective 1: Craft a stone axe
This one is simple, but can leave a lot of people confused as to how to gather the materials. First you want to punch the grass around you with your bare hands. You then want to search the ground for two(2) small stones. You can punch some of the larger stones around you, but that tends to take a while. Lastly, you want to find a source of wood. There are a few to pick from. There are Trees, Burnt Twigs, Shrubs, and for desert areas, we have Deadwood.
After collecting all we need, we then open out menu and select stone axe and craft it. Quest 1 is done!
Objective 2: Crafting Plant Fiber Clothing
Now we want to go back to punching some grass. I advise using your fists, as it seems to be a little faster and saves some durability on your new axe. After you have collected 35 plant fiber, its time to craft. Locate the clothing tab on the crafting menu and craft the following set of clothing.
Objective 3: Equipping the clothing
Open your menu again, and select each piece of clothing, and press 'Wear'. This will equip it one by one. If you are in the desert biome, I HIGHLY suggest taking it off once you are done, as you may overheat. To do so, find the character menu tab and simply drag the clothing off and back into your inventory.
Objective 4: Craft a Wooden Club
For this we want to equip our Stone Axe that we made during our first objective. Then we want to find a tree to harvest a large source of wood. Its best to cut this down, so we'll have plenty for later objectives. Once we have enough, locate the weapon crafting section on your menu and craft a wooden club.
Objective 5: Craft a Bow and Arrow
This one can be a little challenging for new players. Our first goal, is to collect more grass. Then collecting more stone, however, thanks to our new axe, we can collect more from larger sources. I suggest doing this, only to make more arrows if possible. Our first source will be large stone formations seen all throughout the world. Our second, will be stone nodes which are slightly better because they contain more scrap iron that we will be collecting for later.
After you gathered a decent amount of stone, its time to look for Birds Nests. There are all over the ground out in the wild. Sometimes they can be a bit of a pain to find, but there are plenty out there. You want to find feathers in them.
Once we have the required materials, we want to go back to our weapon crafting menu and select Wooden Bow, and Arrows. Craft as many arrows as you can, because we will need plenty later on!
Objective 6: Starting a Base
We won't actually be starting a base now. We'll just get these next 3 out of the way for the sake of not having to worry about them. So for this one, we will need some wood again from trees, unless you gathered enough in our previous objectives.
Now lets locate the build menu, and select our Wooden Frames. Go ahead and craft 3 of these. Once you are done, we want to then equip them in our hotbar on any slot. Now select the slot the frames are hotbarred in, and lets place them down. Once all 3 are placed, we will then equip our Stone Axe again. This acts as a repair/upgrade tool as well. With the axe equip, we will use our secondary action(aim) button to upgrade the frames. Primary action will do damage, secondary will repair/upgrade.
Objective 7: Crafting a Bedroll
Back to punching grass!. Once we have enough, we will be locating our build menu again, and selecting our bedroll. Same as our frames, you want to equip this into your hotbar, and deploy it on the ground. After the quest is complete, look directly at the bag and pick it back up so we can use it for later.
Objective 8: Crafting a Campfire
This is the last objective! So for this one, we will be collecting some stone again. Either source of stone works fine. After you collect enough, we will be locating our build menu again, and selecting campfire. After this is done, go ahead to equip it in your hotbar and deploy it. And you're done! Now you can begin your journey!
Finally! We are done with the quest and onto our way of starting the game! Hopefully you're all still with me here! I apologize for the lengthy walk through of the quests, but some players get confused as to where to get all the required materials. With all those sources outlined now, it'll make the next parts a lot easier to understand.
DAY 1: Finding a road
Now that we are done with the quests, its time to get our bearings. For that, we'll need to pull up our map. You will notice two locations at the top of the map. The first one, being our Current Location. This is where we are in the world. The second thing we will notice, is the Mouse Over Location. This is the current location of where we have our courser. We want to find 0, 0 on the map using our courser. Every random gen map, will have a hub city at 0,0. We want to live on the ourskirts of that city, not directly inside. Once you find 0,0 on the map, create a quick waypoint to that location. After you exit out of the map, you will notice a red flag marking on your compass at the top of your screen. You may have to move around a bit to find the correct direction. Once you locate it, start heading that way.
We are not trying to get to the hub city just yet, but this will help us locate a road much easier. As the hub city normally tends to have atleast 4 roads connecting to it. Finding a road is important right now, as it'll lead you to plenty of POI (Point of Interests) and therefore, loot!
Sometimes, you will find a dirt road before you find a gravel road. If you do find one, follow it. They will always lead to either a premade house, a small lake, POI, or the main road. If you hit a POI, turn around and follow it the other direction to find the gravel road.
The entire time you are searching for the roads, you need to do three(3) things that will help you out GREATLY. The first being, collecting feathers from birds nests. This will help you mass produce arrows. The second, gathering more grass. Grass is going to help us a little later on with mass producing various things to get our crafting skills up. The final thing you need to be on the lookout for, is Animals. Deer(Stags) can be quite a challenge early game, so its best to try and hunt Pigs as they are much slower and easier to chase down on foot. Avoid the bears, as they will royally mess you up. Once we kill our first animal, we will harvest it with our stone axe. You will receive a Large Bone at the end, this we will be using to create a Bone Shiv to collect animal parts better. Locate your Weapon crafting menu and select Bone Shiv and craft one. Now you will get slightly more materials out of each animal.
So we found our road, and we've been collecting grass, feathers, and animal parts. Now what?
Finding your first home
There are two major types of towns/cities in this game. The first being the hub city at 0,0. This is a very large area, full of zombies that can be fairly hard for new players. I suggest not going there until you have a gun or two, and some good tools. What we'll be looking for right now, is either a smaller sized town that looks like this on the map, or a smaller house located off of a dirt road. If you are up to the challenge, I'd go for the smaller town. If you're new to FPS games, and haven't collected a decent amount of arrows or gotten the hang of it yet, the house is better for you.
If you do enter a town, try to immediately find a suitable place to live. This will be your first goal, as we're probably close to night right now. Don't bother with looting just yet.
Once you have found a suitable home, you want to craft a Secure Storage Chest which can be located under our Building Menu. Organize your loot as you see fit. I for one am OCD, so I typically make 6 storage containers. But to each their own :). Now we are closing in on our first night. We are no where near ready to fight night time zombies, so this is a perfect chance for us to use all that grass we collected and craft a few doors.
First our door. Open up your build menu and locate our secured wooden door. Craft it, then place it down where you see fit inside your new house. Typically in the same spot you chopped down the original door. Now upgrade it the same way we upgraded our wooden frames during the quests. If you have scrap iron, upgrade the door all the way. Now onto using our grass.
Hopefully you have enough small stone and wood. If you don't, quickly gather some from outside before nightfall hits. Now we want to craft as many Stone Axes as we can. The point of doing this, is to get your tool crafting skill higher. The higher the skill, the better quality our tools will be, and the better the damage will be overall. This is a lot of metagame for some people, but it is how it is I guess. Its better to do it this way, then to invest points into tool crafting that can be best used elsewhere. Especially early game.
Once we are out of plant fiber, we will then be doing the same thing to Wooden Clubs. Find the club under your Weapon Crafting Menu and craft as many as you can.
Hopefully by the time you are done with this, daylight will be here, and we can reduce the amount of metagaming we're doing and actually play! Day 1 is short, so its best to get the quests, shelter, and a few skills out of the way while we have the chance. Its killing several birds with one stone, so to say. And its possibly the best strategy for early game. As you now have better melee weapons, a better bow, and better tools. You also have a decent amount of arrows, and a home to come back to to drop off loot. Your chances of survival have gone significantly up.
DAY 2: Looting
By now you have the basics of the game down, and hopefully have a decent stone axe to help you get into buildings better. Now the fun can begin! Day 2 we are going to be after some important items to help you advance faster for Day 7. The most important item being Short Iron Pipe. This is a vital item to crafting our Forge, which will lead to better tools for us.
The objective on this day is simple. Loot loot and more loot! If you happened to have set up inside of a home off the dirt road your objective will differ a bit, but not to much. Your goal will be to try and locate a small town as shown here on the map. If you've set up inside a town like this, its time to go door to door and see what goodies await you.
Kitchens will be the most important right now, as they will contain Food, Water, your highest chance to get Short Iron Pipes, and Cooking Pots. But we want to basically loot every house inside and out. Open every container, as the more you loot, the higher you Scavenging Skill will be, leading you to loot faster and faster, and find better quality items.
As you fill up, remember to head back home and drop off. Being a packrat is a good thing in this game. Almost everything you find will have a value at some point in the game. So hording is good!
Once you have found your Short Iron Pipes its time to make your first forge. For the sake of the length of this post, I'll refer you to my previous guide. Near the bottom is the details on the forge, marked in the segment 'How do I make metal for tools, melee weapons, and building upgrades?'
NIGHT 2
Now that we've looted a fair amount, its time to go over our stash, and see what we can scrap for raw materials, and what we can craft to further advance our skills. Much like night 1, we'll be doing the majority of our crafting at night. This is a great time to attend to our forge, craft some Wood Spikes for defense, and maybe even some new tools out of the metal in our forge. Its safe to venture outside your home, if you cleared the zombies out of your town/surrounding area. This is a great time to set up the beginning stages of your defense. The Wood Spikes are great to set up. You should also take a moment and break down any windows inside your home, as they are fairly week and easy for zombies to get through. For now, we'll cover them with Wood Frames to protect us a bit better. But later on we'll replace some of them with Iron Bars so we can shoot the zombies outside our home easily.
Basically, night time in this game is a chance for us to tend to our homes, craft, and fortify. Day time should be spent looting, exploring, and gather materials.
DAY 3-5: More looting and Gathering
These days, you basically want to repeat the following Day 2 steps. Loot during the day, build, craft, and fortify at night time. You want to mix in some gathering when materials are needed. Day time is a great point to keep those forges burning, as screamer zombies will be easily dealt with. Most of the time, they'll just die on your spikes outside, so they don't require a lot of attention. Its best to stay out of sight when they arrive and let the spikes take care of them. Because if they sense you, they'll spawn more zombies. If you're out during the day, and burning your forges, then it won't matter to much anyways. You might return to a block or two missing, but thats easily fixable.
Day 6: Fortification and Preparation
Now this is an important day for you. This day you want to really spend gathering. By now you should have the entire town looted, so you can really focus heavily on fortifying your home in preparation to the horde. Its ideal to have atleast 3 layers of Wood Spikes surrounding your base, along with the first 3 levels of blocks fortified as high as you can go. For some, you may already be on the concrete stage. For others you may be stuck on metal. Just make sure you have a reserve of Scrap Iron ready to go for quick repairs if needed. It is also wise at this point, to set up some Iron Bars where some of the windows once stood, so you can shoot outside easily.
Now you may be lacking on ammo right now, or guns all together. Unless you got loot lucky and found yourself some Calipers, guns may not be an option for you. So you are going to be relying heavily on your bow and melee weapons for Day 7. So to advance those skills even more, I suggest you craft a lot of Wooden Clubs again, while searching the forest for more Feathers in Birds Nests to make more arrows.
If you managed to find the Spike Club blueprint book, I HIGHLY suggest making it. A Sledgehammer is also a great choice of melee, but swings slower, and its quality is dependent on Tool Smithing which may not be as high.
Recipe For Crossbow
This day is all about finishing your fortifications, and preparing your weapons. Its important to get your skills as high as possible to get the best quality before nighttime on Day 7. The horde will not be that hard, but if you are unprepared, it could mean death and the loss of your home.
Day 7: Making sure you got what you need
This is it. Our final chance to prepare for our first horde. By now you should have a decently fortified base, a nice defense outside, some good quality weapons, plenty of food and water. The last thing we should prepare are medication. We're going to need some cloth for this. If you don't have any, you can go outside and pick some Cotton in the wild. 2 Cotton Plants=1 Cloth.
We have various Medicine to pick from here. Our go-to to stop the bleeding, will be Simple Bandage. Hopefully you chased down a few Air Drops during the first 7 Days, and found some First Aid Kits because those will be helpful! It is also wise to have some Grain Alcohol, Coffee, or Beer. These will regain your stamina very quickly, and its great to have for almost preeminent sprinting incase you need to hightail it out of there if things get bad. Hopefully you have prepared enough that it won't be necessary. But its always good to have a backup plan!
During the day, you want to go ahead and make backups for all your weapons and meds incase you die and can't retrieve your backpack. This way you won't be completely out of the fight and struggling.
THE HORDE!!!
Its finally among us. The very first Day 7 Horde. Nervous yet? Because they're coming! You'll notice the moon is reddish orange now. This is a symbol that they're coming on this night. The blood moon is among us, and here is the moment of truth. Can you survive the 7th day?
I'm not giving you any hints, tips or tricks to how to beat them. That would be taking the fun and excitement away from you. Its up to you now to fight and survive this. Do what you can with the information I provided you to prepare for this. If you followed this guide, you should stand a very good fighting chance.
Just remember everything I told you. Your weapons should be at a good quality. You should have plenty of arrows, hopefully a gun or two. You should have meds, food, water, beer/coffee/alcohol. You should have a good defense and fortification.
Will you survive?
Thankyou all for reading my guides. I enjoyed writing them up for all the new console players, and PC players that we have among us. I hope you found them helpful, and I'm grateful to have the opportunity to share all this information about the game with you all. I've been playing since Alpha 3, and this game just keeps sucking you back in with so many amazing changes, new content, and better gameplay with each update! I'm glad to see so many people take an interest in this game.
I am going to release one more guide after this, a guide on skills and the best way to spec in them. I wanted to fit it in here, but this one is already long enough with the rundown of the quests at the beginning. I had to cut out the details a little bit for the sake of length for days 3-5, as the majority of it is just rinse and repeat of day 2, but with more gather focusing along with looting.
If you have any questions, or wish for me to go further into detail about any aspects, please don't hesitate to comment below! Thankyou all for reading!
~Mayic