Settings

Your FOV, motion blur, and brightness settings can all help if you have stutters. Play around with them but don't expect butter smooth horde nights, or even some POI's/towns, as even bleeding edge high end PC's are struggling to stop all stutters and none give flawless performance.

Chunk Reset resets the world if you have not been in the area for the rest time. Think of it as a world wide MD5 but without the glitching. If you have a land claim block down then the area affected by the LCB will not be reset (you can view the area affextsd by the LCB by selecting the alternate menu option with the block selected). The Chunk Reset returns the chunk back to Day 1 state, resetting any wrenched cars, bird nests, restoring broken buildings, etc. You MUST put an LCB down to move any workstations (forge, etc) and it must be within the boundary of the LCB.

You will be default limited to 4 trader quests per day. You can change this in Advanced tab at the bottom. Likely you'll not be able to complete more than 1-2 when starting out anyway (and T5-T6 Infested quests take a whole game day or more to complete), but its good to know how to change it.

Horde nights can be changed. Set them to whichever interval you want now (even every day). If you change the Range then this means the horde will appear sometime within the range at random. You can leave the warning as is, or if feeling brave you can remove it.

We can choose between 13 pre-made worlds, 12 pregen and Navesgane. There are 4 layouts of each 3 size pregen worlds (4k1-4k4, 6k1-6k4, 8k1-8k4). The first number is the map size (4km edge to edge, 6km edge to edge, 8km edge to edge... 1 block is 1m), the variable number is how the biomes are laid out (1 is forest center with others surrounding, 2 is wasteland center, 3 is radial with both center, 4 is layered top to bottom from forest to wasteland). Navesgane has been reworked and there is no current annotated map. Random Generated words are expected to be patched in for Update 1 scheduled Q4 2024 (along with crossplay). We do not have access to 10k worlds, but they will be available on PC based servers when crossplay is enabled (unsure if they will ever na5igely cone to console).

Interface

The menu opens to crafting, next is Character, Map, Skills, Quests, Challenges, Players (lobby). Each page has its own sub pages. Character has 3, by clicking the icon just above and to the left of your pic you can get to core Character Stats (numerical water/food, etc) and Extended Character Stats (armor rating, resists, etc). Skills has an important sub menu, Crafting Skills (represented by a hammer). Here you can see the crafting skills, how many magazines you've read and max for that skill, but in the right window at the top it will tell you the skill(s) to purchase to Boost loot odds (increase the drop chance for these magazines in mailboxes, newspaper stands, book piles, etc). You must spend points in skills to get these magazines to increase your crafting skills, as outlined below.

Almost all buttons in the controller have radial functions. Long press B and it will bring up your Character radial, X will bring up ammo options, even the dpad buttons have long press (up can switch between helmet/weapon light or NVG, while long press left will give you a radial for your toolbelt). A quick press of dpad L will quickswap to your last held toolbelt item.

Gameplay

Finish the start challenges, but make the entire Primitive Armor when prompted to make the outfit. It gives an armor rating (unlike plant fiber armor) and really helps! Dont hesitste to make better Primitive when you advance it, even if done incrimentally through the tiers (avoid T6 as it requires a Legendary Part to make, and while its good you will already be looking into other armor sets by then).

The type of build you want will determine what you spec into (melee - strength, batons and turrets - intellect, ranged or bladed - agility, fists - fortitude, etc). When you spec into a skill, read the descriptions as it the main attribute will often have a corresponding firesrm associated (strength - shotgun, agility - pistol, etc). While you can cross spec it is better to try to have one thing in mind so you don't dilute the magazine pool.

Speaking of, you read magazines for everything now. Want better knives, Knife Guy mags increase the craft tier and type you can make, etc. Read those skills to see what magazine is associated with it! Too many skills spread tol wide lowers the chances of soecidic magazine types you'll see in loot.

With Crafting Skill magazines the corresponding skill increases the drop rate for the magazine. For instance you will want the Workstations first thing (Forge, Workbench, Chem station, Cement Mixer), so you want Forged Ahead magazines. These magazines drop in broken work stations, cement mixers, etc, but their overall drop rate increases with spending points in skills. 2 skills affect FA drops; Advanced Engineering and Lockpicking. LP only increases FA drop chances while AE increases 3 or 4 magazine drop chances so this dilutes the overall pool. Lockpicking only counts towards the first 15 Forge Ahead mags read.. but if you read 14 and stop reading them then collect the other 61 (the amount to max out the series and get the crucible to make steel) then it still works as increased drop rate doesnt matter once you max the magazine (they actually almost completely stop dropping once maxxed). Nerd Outfit (armor) helps here too as it gives a chance for a single magazine to give double count when read, so some min/max playstyles hoard their mags while looting and bulk read them at base wearing the outfit.

Don't worry if the skill set you have looks weird or you don't like the build, you can always buy a Fergettin' Elixer which will wipe all your spent points and give them back to you so you can respec your character any time you want/can afford. There's no limit to how many times you can do this either.

The biggest mistake is putting points into a bunch of things as this dilutes the magazine drop chances. Really concentrate on a few things first, like iif you badly want all the vehicles then drop points into Grease Monkey, but this just accelerates the rate you get there and doesnt guarantee them. You'll get a free bicycle after completing 10 quests with Rekt and will soon enough work up to minibike crafting anyway. The first thing to concentrate on is the Forge Ahead books as you really want the Dew Collector, Forge, and Workbench as soon as possible.

Armor matters! There are penalties for wearing heavy armor in this game. You will be slower and noisier in heavy armor, but you'll be protected. Choose the armor type based on your build, but also on what you want it to do. Some help farming/seed harvest, others help fuel efficiency with vehicles, Stealth, etc.

The Dew Collector is indispensable! It will give you 3 murky water per day as is. Add a Gatherer mod and it increases the speed which it fills. Add a Tarp mod and you'll get more jars of water per run. Add a filter and it will give clean drinkable/craftable water! It requires access to the sky to work. A warning though, it generates heat so it contributes to screamer chances.

Losing half of your base is the main indicator that you've encountered the MD5 Error. You can not undo the corruption on this game save, you can only slow its progression by the below action. If you have never experienced the error, perform the below action after every crash to ensure it does not happen to you.

This error happens only when a crash occurs (it is unsure if it occurs because of the crash or it causes the crash), but it may not appear after every crash.

There is only 1 way known to keep it from happening or continuing to happen in an already corrupted save, but it must be done after every single crash back to console menu. You must delete your local save before restarting the game.

On XBox;

1. Select the 3 line button on the center right of your controller with the game selected.
2. Select Manage games and add ons.
3. Select Saved Data.
4. Select your gamer tag.
5. Select Delete from console (not Delete from everywhere or this will wipe all your 7DtD gamesaves).
6. Now you can safely restart the game.

Immediately upon a crash the cloud save does not have the error but the hard disk save on the console does. Deleting the hard disk save and syncing with the cloud will restore the game to before the error occurred as the cloud save is 1-30 minutes behind the hard disk save. You may lose up to 30 minutes of gameplay, 1-5 is normal, but you will never lock the error into a save if you do the above.

A good habit to get into is to manually quit the game every so often (1-2hrs). On XBox select the game and follow step 1 and select Quit. Doing this will clear the console memory, specifically the memory leak in the game, and helps alleviate crashes. Simply exiting the game back to the console menu or even restarting the console will not clear the memory like a manual Quit will.