7 Days to Die is my second most played game on Steam sitting at just under 150 hours. Late one night me and a friend, Jay, were looking through multiplayer games and just happened to find this one. It also just happened to be on sale for under $10. Neither of us having played a survival sandbox decided to try it out. And we haven’t stopped playing since.
We get together at least once a week to fight off zombie hordes, scavange for crafting materials, and chop down trees for hours on end. Believe it or not , that gameplay loop was pretty satisfying until recently. We’ve gone through 2 maps. The first one we played for almost 100 days and our most recent one we’ve played for about 40 days. The material grind is immense sometimes and after learning how to effectively dispatch zombies, there isn’t much of a challenge there anymore either.
So I had the bright idea this weekend to turn on “cheat mode” aka creative mode. This gives you access to the creative menu in a standard game offering every block and item in the game. I never liked building in the normal game mode because the blocks take so much materials to made and if you misplace one you have to destroy it. Plus, how can you have time to build when there’s so much foraging and gathering to do.
We set out to build a giant underground bunker because why not? Having access to everything makes building so much more enjoyable. Unfortunately, to make an underground bunker we had to first dig underground and hollow out a big enough space. . Once we hollowed everything out we got to work building the structure. I had a vision of a giant steril looking vault, complete with a ridiculous amount of ammo, weapons, tools and materials. A place that would have been amazing to stumble upon when we were actually playing. I must say, it tuned out quite nicely.
I’ve been experimenting with the console commands much to Jay’s ire. Apparently filling our underground bunker with zombie vultures was not ideal.
Creative mode isn’t just great for building it’s also great for trying things you would never get to in the base game. For example, I wanted to find out if, given enough gas barrels, I could bring down a sky scraper. What followed was the longest explosion ever because setting off that many barrels at once destroyed the frame rate. I was almost certain the game was going to crash. After all of that, the building remained standing.
Creative mode has given me a much needed break from the core game play loop while still playing 7 Days to Die. The plan for right now is to continue building and experimenting with creative until the next patch comes out. Maybe then I’ll feel like jumping back in to standard mode.
Many Welps 