The Beginner's Guide to Alpha 21 - 7 Days to Die

I don't understand why Advanced Engineering would help me get the Forge sooner. The perk description doesn't mention anything about getting a higher chance of finding the magazines.

Watching this while hiding my first night

for emersion, i like to pretend that you are the only cured person by some evolusion or gods grace, if you die or restart you get reincarnated to a new close by zombie 😮

Solid video. I haven't played since 18.3. Jumped in last night and was hooked all over again. They made some serious changes. Game looks great. Figured I better get my ducks in a row with the basics. Your top 50 tips and tricks video was outstanding as well! Thank you for your content.

Ty

What about water though? I haven't played in forever & this no jars nonsense is killing me. Literally. I'm constantly dying of thirst.

Dew collector? And I buy the water filter from a trader?

Superb and well laid out. Im just getting into 7 Days to Die and this has helped me loads. You have a new sub!

Guys, when I open Joels trader menu the background is a transparent grey and so hard to read... does anyone have this problem ?

👍👍👍

just found out you can shoot through doors XD

How exactly do you nerd pole?

how to install Darkness Falls Mod in A21

I got a level 6 item on a new run as one of the first loot. Whyd that happen? It was a level 6 bone knife. Spawned into a new start and looted it from a car or near garbage by a car.

So i've put the blocks either side at the base of the stairs as shown here and on all of my tests the sombies just get caught up and obliterate the stairs >.<

not fun fact i lost my thing to do concret in a chest that i accidently put in a quest zone '-'

I get tossed out into the night from the trader every time unless I skip going there on day 1. I never know what POI to try to take over with grass clothes and a club, either, and by day 7 tend to have no real weapons (that has ammo), low/no food and water, almost no resources, low health and almost always a disease with no way to cure it. The trader never wants my grass and I'm almost always over encumbered with crap I don't know if I should sell or not. The game feels like it should let us take time on beginner mode the first couple days. If I try it again, I'll use cheats to get time to look over the skills available (it usually turns night while I'm on the road if I try looking through everything). The game looks interesting, but feels like it's more aimed at hard core players.

Just bought the game, enjoying it so far. :)

if you dont eat be respect to animals

Where can we get a guide for the base at the very end of the vid?

I was thrown off by. the fact of what's happened with glass and water, I need help understanding that Either that or when they modified it, I got a bad download and for some reason steam isn't letting me use their normal fixes.

I 100% rush maxing out daring adventurer. I usually can get 2 trader rewards by the time i get the bicycle, letting me ride and get that water purifier for the dew collector. As often as you're gonna be taking quests, you dont wanna be caught in a situation where you have 2 rewards you need and you start doing mental gymnastics trying to decide which one you need and suddenly you're booted out because Jen decided to go to bed... without you lol. It takes 10 points total, i believe, so you can have it by level 6 and then you're set for the rest of the game.

thought id have a play of this game again after not playing since 2016. i loved it back then tbf but a group i was playing with all split so i moved on. thanks for the video its just what i needed to get back in the swing of things and first thing i noticed after booting up is how much its changed graphically i feel. thanks again liked and subbed.

Nice titti*s

So you need a hoard base and a horde base?!

how wil this help newbies?

I want to thank you for helping me to avoid wasting any further time on this game. The animations and some of the physics are just awful.

so are sledgehammers still not clubs?

You did earn my subscription and def believe you have increased our potential level of enjoyment for me and my friends ps this game is hard to figure out with out this video

This is exactly what i need thanks a lot❤

As a returning player, this is super useful and is filled with excellent information. Been able to get some of my clan members to start playing this game and will be sending them to this video to get a basic 101 rundown on how the game works. I can't wait for our 8 player horde nights :D

I would agree that early in the game, pack mule isn't necessary, however later in the game when you are adventuring into other areas and doing higher tier POI's I think Pack Mule is an excellent choice. This frees up mod slots on your clothing and gear which can be extremely useful once you have the ability to make those mods.

So far not a fan of A21 as someone with a full time job there is way to much grind for stuff, played a few hours with 4 friends tonight didn't get much done with the high cost of everything, the food and water bar emptying in moments 5 beef for 1 beef and it doesn't fill your bar for anything you need like 10 steaks to be full which is 50 steak to make. No more jars or glass which is a huge disappointment. Haven't scratched the rest but the new skill system but needing hundreds of books and specific specing it has not been fun. It's nice to see the improvements and all the new stuff but honestly the game is to much now I don't have the time, or the energy to play I have 1 job in real life I gotta dedicate to that's enough.

newbie coat? i've just started playing recently and never spawned in with that! thank you for showing the dev menu stuff, i've seen a lot of yt videos with people using it but didn't know aobut how to reach it, i thought it was a mod. LOL

But how do be able to take posters from walls like he dose?

Sounds like metaljesus rocks?

TFP have taken the fun out of 7d2d with A21. The startup grind has become too based on looting and LUCK. On larger servers everyone is after the same thing Magazines. It is just stupid.

Man.. two weeks ago started this game, died 32 times in 57 days.. But from early begining i was getting very good loot. As i was doing tier 5 q i was finding tons of good lots, tiers 6 steel tools, got all mods, made car, drones, had almoust everything. Easy... Then game started to freeze, so i try every to fix it, serched on google and nothing.. I made new game play and it didn t freeze at all. Then when deliting acidentaly deleted old world.. So i started new.. Its day 10, doing tier 3 quests. Loot is terible! Only bones and rags, and usles items, and zombies are insane, got feral zombies in tier one quest, they r much harder now, groups of zombies keep spawning near base and Poi where doing q. Died only once when horde of 14 zeds spawned outside Pio first tier 3 quest and kill me. First horde night got 47 zombies, no bags..Loot is 22.. Im better in this new world, more prepared, skilled, organized..but for some reason zombies r too!! So what the hell is going on?!

In general, for your first four levels, I'm going to recommend:

[Master Chef]:

Cupboards and cabinets (incredibly common loot containers, available in most PoIs), have a higher rate of cookbooks, (you want at least five to appear for grilling meat that won't dehydrate you, and red tea cuts your hunger and thirst costs of doing things that cost stamina by 15%, meaning you keep food and water in you longer). Additionally, meat costs for grilled meat drop from 5 to 4, letting you eat the same for 20% less critters.

Lastly, and this is an underappreciated aspect of cooking--having access to Goldenrod Tea (brewed with a cooking pot, fresh water, and the yellow flowers you see in fields) lets you eat Sham Sandwiches on the run, meaning you don't need to settle down and cook, if you have a few yellow teas on hand to cure your dysentary, for those moments when you stuff a sandwich and roll that unlucky 12% chance of it proccing. Goldenrod Tea basically lets you have an entire extra food source on the run, when you don't have time to settle in for a bite, and haven't had the time or a teammate willing to cook for an army.

And if you're living on top of a (dirty) water supply? Goldenrod tea basically lets you get free water from that supply. Try camping on a water tower with a few of these. They're an early-game substitute for vitamins or the water-purifier mod.

Later down the road (after you've raided quite a few book stashes/cupboards), there's also quicker access to Bacon and Eggs (make nests a source of food as well as arrows), and Coffee (regen stamina faster, when you're continuously exerting yourself--great for miners).

[The Huntsman]:

Animals will wander in at virtually any time, unpredictably and at random, and are a good source of crafting materials, saleable leather, and most importantly--FOOD. Just because you're not a devoted fortitude specialist, doesn't mean you can't pop a cap in some rabbit's ass and scrape it off the pavement with a bone shiv--and doing so regularly will mean you won't starve and don't have to live as a professional food beggar. Needless to say, this skill synergizes /great/ with the 20% meat cost reduction of Grilled Meat, from Master Chef, be it on you or a teammate who prepares your meals. Even if you're living in the city, chickens, rabbits, and even deer, occasionally scamper around and get trapped by the local infrastucture (even impaling themselves on spikes and barbwire, sometimes), and there's also a few PoI's like the Dead Rooster that will offer you some free critters to gut. Moreover, roadkill nets you animal fat, which is itself a great source of candles for light, and can be sold or used as a cooking ingredient, and lastly--more Nitrate Powder means more gunpowder, which is virtually always useful. Lastly... dogs suck, but there are a lot of them in open parts of PoIs now, so having huntsman makes running into them more of a stroke of good fortune once they inevitably chase you down and you have to trade blows with them. So don't think this is a skill that's exclusively for forest-dwellers, or something.

Moreover, if you actually ARE a fortitude specialist, the Huntsman nets you more rotten meat and more of the aforementioned nitrate powder for crafting farm plot blocks, so cleaning corpses off your lawn makes more progress in terms of expanding your homestead, with the Huntsman.

Meanwhile, if you use bows, you will get more feathers for arrows from chickens and vultures. Enough so to arm several archers, if that's your thing. As a note, stealth sneak-attack arrows one shot a large majority of the random zombies wandering and in low-threat PoIs with just a bodyshot, and can get you a few more easy levels right off the bat, and the Huntsman will help you not to run out of those arrows.

[Healing Factor]:

1 HP every 30 seconds will not save you in the middle of a fight--but that's not what this is for. What Healing Factor accomplishes, is to start you off in good health, 'between' encounters. This means you don't end up dying to the first random unexpected feral that knocks on your door, because you were thirty hp a couple hours ago and haven't eaten anything or splurged on first-aid bandages. Healing Factor essentially stops you from dying of HP starvation from repeated encounters gradually wearing you down.

and lastly, an underappreciated gem:

[Deep Cuts]

So, here's the problem with melee weapons in 7 Days:

Zombies have an inexhaustible number of attempts to swing at you and give you every nasty status effect in the book, from bleeding (an immediate killer, for which you should always have bandages prepared), to ability-score impairing, perpetually worsening infection, to broken arms and legs, to just randomly getting a concussion because that zombie dog bit you once on the ass.

YOU, the player, have a 'severely limited' pool of stamina, to both attack and to get away from things, meaning low stamina puts you at risk of all of the above, on top of just running out of hp from being mauled by an unending onslaught of melee (remember, they don't have to obey a stamina system, you do).

Knives solve this problem, in that, they both cost very little stamina to swing, and can apply damage-over-time. This means you can hit an enemy, use your precious stamina to escape, and the bad thing, whatever it is, still takes eventually-lethal damage even when you're not in melee range.

The normal weakness with this, is that you can only apply one layer of bleed at a time, it is random, and you may not proc repeated bleeds--and one stab plus one stack of bleed is probably not enough to kill by itself, meaning you need to gamble for repeat applications, to reset your damage-over-time. Sounds kinda bad, right?

But for the cost of just one level, Deep Cuts, in addition to making your power attacks less expensive, making your knife hits in general more damaging, AND allowing you to apply up to 3 simultaneous stacks of bleed (increasing your overall damage output tremendously)--you now 'refresh' your bleed damage-over-time stacks, on ANY consecutive hit with the knife. Not just a hit that applies a new bleed--ANY hit with the knife will reset any existing bleed timers you put on that bad thing.

What this means, is that you can jab a zombie in the face a couple of times, back up, listen to it make pain sounds, and repeat, until it is dead, without ever worrying about bottoming out your stamina or having a lack of it to run the fuck away.

Moreover, it means that if someone knocks a zombie down or stuns it, you are going to have the chance to absolutely 'maul', even the tankiest, highest hp, most armored zombie.

And this perk gets even more absurd: in addition to the increase in both raw damage output and number of max DOTs you can apply, a discount in stamina used for power attacks, and an insane ability to reset your bleeds on any given knife hit--an enemy suffering with your bleed debuff now suffers a 10% movement speed penalty.

AND THIS APPLIES ON PLAYERS, too, keep in mind--making knives a frightening source of damage in a PvP scenario--even when you don't consider their ridiculous 5.5x sneak-attack crit on PvE enemies.

And you don't even need a good knife. Not even any mods. Just a quality 1 bone shiv made on your first hour of your first day, out of the first roadkill carcass you harvest with a stone axe (again, the Huntsman helps makes sure you get enough bones with just one corpse).

Please, PLEASE, I implore you, consider Deep Cuts over Pummel Pete, if your interest is in quickly, safely killing things with melee. The difference in effectiveness is night and day. If you are just looking to knock things over, consider crafting a stone sledgehammer and using its power attack to the head of an enemy, to supplement your bone shiv, until you get something better like a stun baton or a modded baseball bat. Remember: you don't always have to incapacitate an enemy, you just need to be able to hit it and still be able to get away from its retaliatory attacks, long enough for it to bleed to death. A knife to the face and three stacks of refreshable bleed does this far more effectively than repeatedly clubbing a thing and praying for a knockdown.

This is in response to the segments, "Spending your first Skill Points", and "Magazines Explained". In this post, I'll be talking about whether you actually want to bother with Advanced Engineering, right off the bat.

With regard to Advanced Engineering, I'm going to first break down the overall benefits, so that you can understand the wide appeal of the skill, and then I will address the immediate, early day one benefits, that you'd actually be immediately concerned with.

Long term, Advanced Engineering is highly desirable for any party, as it leads to a greater overall yield in useful materials, and a reduced amount of heat generation from forge operating due to more productive forge operating (basically, less frequency of zombies checking out your base, because you don't need to keep the fires burning as long in order to get what you need).

Eventually, it lets you gain XP from electrical trap kills, but that's out of reach until you have the means to make and wire those, which will require a significant amount of looting, and a guide all its own--so put that temptation aside for the moment, when investing your precious levels. It's not going to matter day 1, barring some speedrunning shenanigans.

Advanced Engineering basically conserves resources for working with metal, while making you, and only you personally, order shorter duration crafting of items, in a forge--so you need to be prepared to be in the Forge GUI, operating it, fairly regularly, to get significant benefits from this aspect of the perk.

Lastly, and the reason people typically take it and recommend it--Advanced Engineering will weight your rate of looting the "Forge Ahead" magazines, that advance your technological state, in the long-term, to be higher--these magazines unlock your critical crafting recipes for GUI devices like workbenches, cement mixers, and chemistry stations, which all make various useful things for survival.

In the immediate term, however, what looting these magazines means, is you get to find enough Forge Ahead to make a Forge, and MAYBE a workbench, just a little bit sooner (having access to a day 1 workbench is a fair bit of a feat of time-consuming looting, let alone being able to make anything particularly useful in it).

But, DISCLAIMER, reader: this skill only makes a difference for this purpose of looting more magazines, /IF/ you have loot pools those magazines might normally spawn in--i.e., mailboxes, book stashes, Working Stiffs trucks and crates, etc.

Firstly: Advanced Engineering or no Advanced Engineering, you get 2 assured "Forge Ahead" magazines as loot, from a broken forge and a cement mixer, in any given trader installment, assuming those have not already been looted by other players. If you are playing alone, this basically means, don't even bother with the rank, you're already 50% to being able to use a forge, without any RNG manipulation, and just need to find two cement mixers, somewhere out in the wild, or get lucky with Working Stiffs vans, and then you have yourself access to the Forge crafting recipe.

There is then, moreover, a small chance to loot these magazines from any broken workbench or chemistry station, in any given trader (or for that matter, from other PoIs)--and Advanced Engineering will help with those ones popping up--a little. Don't count on it. You'll still probably miss them, but there's the extremely lucky chance that you somehow loot a full 4 Forge Aheads from all of the broken crafting stations in your very first trader, and can then, immediately begin assembling mats for the Forge, without the need for any further risky looting. As someone who's pregenned over a hundred worlds already... your odds are good you're just going to get the two from the forge and mixer, and the other stations will contain some herbs or wood or something, even if you take Advanced Engineering--so don't do take the skill just for the sake of experiencing that exceedingly rare good fortune of finding all four mags right away. It's probably not going to work out like that, as nice as it is.

Further disincentivizing this decision, any given, unlooted broken cement mixer you find in your world, in any PoI, is assured to contain a single forge-ahead magazine, 100% of the time. There are several PoIs--mainly under-construction ones, that have these mixers in them, usually on the exterior of the property where you can sneak up and grab them without alerting any sleeper zombies. Since you already get one mixer at your trader, you'll already know what one looks like--so just saunter on over to some construction area and see if the site's been looted, and if not, congrats, you're already another 25% of the way toward having a forge.

What this means is that, assuming you're willing to look for cement mixers, you can go without the Forge Ahead right off the bat, for a few levels, unless you're specifically banking on pulling the books out of RNG-determined pools, like at a Crack-a-Book. While finding more Forge Aheads is definitely still a good thing in the long-term, you really don't need many on day 1--you don't have the time to get half the components you would need to put the advanced crafting recipes to use, until you've looted about half a dozen other specific magazines.

Anyways, the first thing you'll be aiming for with Advanced Engineering is crafting a Forge, so let's break down what that even gets you, right off the bat: Making a forge has three immediately practical applications, without any further skill investments, so consider this non-exhaustive list when deciding whether you'll want to sink a level into Advanced Engineering Day 1:

NGL, YOU RESEMBLE CHRIS "CAPTAIN AMERICA" EVANS

such a great game but the stamina system need so so much work, one of the worst iv ever played, everything else is great fun.

Oh snap, so reading every skill magazine will now make the other magazine loot pool even more chaotic…that will be a hard habit to break of just spamming every closed book icon I see to clear inventory space….

What an excellent video. Subscribed and watching more.

havent touched this game since like alpha 10. looks like lots has changed

Is it normal to reach the trader during day two? When I spawned the trader was over 2.5km away, which took all night to get to