What 7 Days to Die is
7 Days to Die is an open-world survival game that mixes first-person shooting, survival horror, tower defense and RPG character growth. You are dropped into a post-apocalyptic world full of the undead and left to figure out how long you can last. Days are spent scavenging, mining, crafting and exploring; nights and hordes are spent holding the line. The world can be either the campaign world Navezgane or a randomly generated map with cities, towns, lakes, mountains, roads, caves and over 700 unique locations, spread across 5 biomes in worlds up to 100 square kilometers.
Combat leans on nearly 60 zombie archetypes, including special infected with their own behaviors and attacks, and difficulty keeps climbing the longer you survive. Survival is genuinely harsh: nearly 50 buffs, boosts and ailments affect how you play, some helping you and some hurting you. Loot comes in 6 quality ranges with thousands of permutations, and mods let you augment what you find.
Playing it with a group
Co-op is the natural fit for a group. You can play together online or over LAN, and cross-platform multiplayer is supported, so friends on different setups can still join the same world. Picking what kind of session you want is part of the deal: work together to build settlements and defend them, or turn on each other and raid other players' bases. Zombies and outlaws run the wasteland either way.
Building is where a group really shines. There are over 1,300 building blocks and more than 800 in-game items, plus a painting system, so a shared base can become anything from a walled compound to a maze of traps, auto turrets, electric power, automated doors and defensive positions. Splitting up the work helps too: one person runs quests for Trader NPCs, another hunts or tends gardens for sustainable resources, another drives out to find schematics. Vehicles include bicycles, minibikes, motorcycles, 4x4s and gyrocopters, all built from parts you find and recipes you learn.
Before you start
Expect real survival mechanics rather than a guided experience. You handcraft and repair weapons, clothes, armor, tools and vehicles across over 500 recipes, and you learn better recipes by finding schematics and reading over 100 books on top of a perk system with 5 main attributes. Progression is slow and deliberate at first.
The world reacts to how you treat it. Buildings and terrain can collapse from structural damage or bad design because the game tracks real structural stability, so a poorly planned wall can take your base down with it. Quests from Trader NPCs offer jobs and rewards across over 700 locations, and there is a good amount of downtime between fights: farming, hunting over a dozen wild animals, and long scavenging runs.
Full controller support is included, along with Steam Achievements, and the game ships with a level editor if you want to make your own maps.