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

whether you're new to the game or you're just getting back into it or if you're just looking for some extra tips and tricks on how to optimize your gameplay this will be the perfect video for you I'm gonna guide you through your first seven days up to and hopefully safely through your first horde night and explain all the important game mechanics along the way here's a list of topics I'm going to cover and there are timestamps in the description if you want to jump ahead or reference back in the future otherwise let's begin to start off with you're going to need to choose a map and check on your settings you have a few maps to choose from novice gain is a handmade map then there's pre-gen Maps which are pre-loaded onto your computer but they're just made using the in-game map generator or you can just generate your own which only takes a few minutes to do in terms of game options I would recommend leaving everything at default if you're a true beginner increasing the game difficulty simply reduces your damage to zombies and increases their damage to you and Blood Moon count represents the absolute maximum number of zombies that can be alive at the same time during horde night but we'll talk more on that setting later but for now let's Jump Right In and get started when you first spawn in there shouldn't be any zombies nearby so you can start preparing in safety and you'll have the Newbie coat for the first five levels which blocks XP loss when you die typically when you die your experience bar fills up to 25 and turns red this is an XP debt that you need to work off before your XP returns to where it was when you died there are indicators on what to do for the starter Quest so follow those instructions to complete them as fast as possible time is ticking on day one and you have a lot to do and once you finish you'll get four free skill points and directions to the nearest Trader so for a minute here let's talk about those skill points first I recommend that you pick one of the five skill trees to adopt as your primary build perception builds utilize Spears explosives and rifles and specialize in looting and salvaging strength builds use clubs sledgehammers and shotguns and specialize in heavy armor and Mining fortitude players will benefit from Knuckles and machine guns farming and various health and wellness Buffs agility players use knives bows and pistols they move fast and jump high and also specialize in stealth and light armor intellect players will use batons and Robotics in combat and benefit from special Trader benefits and crafting bonuses each build is effective in its own way especially once you learn the ins and outs of how to make a good hybrid character that borrows the best skill perks from multiple classes for example a strength and fortitude hybrid that turns you into a very deadly brawler but I would argue that strength alone is probably the most beginner friendly shotguns and clubs are simple and really effective and the mining perks will allow you to collect a surplus of resources that'll help you build a very strong base the most important thing to note is that whatever you spend your skill points in will influence how many magazines of that type you will find and magazines will unlock crafting recipes and increase crafted item quality for the sake of this tutorial and describing how I would spend my first skill points I'll recommend one point into a skill under the intellect tree called Advanced engineering this will help you unlock the workstations traps electrical components and repair tools more quickly another point in two clubs and one into Miner 69er you can just press W over the skill point and that'll spend it for you this will help you fight better and mine more quickly and help you find magazines to help you craft better clubs and tools as well and with your final Point there's a lot of different directions you could go in but for me I'll usually just take a point directly into the attribute and that's because that gives you increased headshot damage and increased dismemberment with the tools that are governed under that attribute how you spend your skill points is entirely up to you but a word from the wise here there are a couple that you should avoid and that includes pack mule pack mule unlocks more carrying space in your backpack here's which backpack will look like you'll have 45 slots the first two points in the pack mule will unlock three spots and the remaining three points will unlock four apiece so you could unlock the entire backpack this way but you'll also be able to craft Pocket at mods right off the bat this will give you one additional spot in your backpack and you can make three one for your pants one for your shirt and one for your coat once you have those you'll also be on the lookout for a book called needle and thread Volume 7 which will allow you to craft double clothing pocket pods double clothing pocket mods will replace the single clothing pocket mods and will unlock two backpack spots a piece for a total of six and you should be on the lookout for armor pocket mods and take them whenever you can whether that's taking them as Quest rewards finding them in loot or purchasing them outright from the trader and a combination of these should have your backpack unlocked in no time without spending any skill points the other skill point to avoid would be lucky looter it might sound tempting on the surface to have five percent better loot bonus but this is a percentage of your loot stage and if you click this button here for your character stats and then go to your core character stats you can see your loot stage currently my loot stage is one so five percent of one is less than one so a point in the lucky looter on day one will do absolutely nothing for you trust me it'll be much more effective later so just hold off on it for now so now that you have your skill points spent make sure that you have the proper weapon for your class the spear club and Sledgehammer are easy enough to make and you can get a bone knife after you harvest a couple of gut piles or chickens the knuckle wraps and pipeton are a little bit trickier you can get iron from an iron node or a car or practically anything that's made out of metal the leather you can get by scrapping office chairs harvesting sofas or getting a mop of some dead animals the pipeton also takes leather but also takes pipes and you can get pipes easily from sinks or toilets or just find it in trash like dumpsters and so as you make your way to the trader you'll want to loot everything as you go and kill everything you see along the way you'll need the XP for more skill points so kill and harvest rabbits chickens and deer if you see them but probably avoid boar wolves mountain lions bear and coyotes for now you probably just don't have the Firepower quite yet to kill them and once you're there you can loot the compound you'll meet the trader and then you can sell off some things and start stockpiling Dukes which is the currency for the game and you can safely sell off books and schematics if you've read them before just check this icon here at the Top If it's open that means you've read it before and you can sell it and if it's closed it means it's unread and you should probably read it you can sell magazines if you never intend on Crafting that particular item set so for example if you're going to be using clubs you can probably just sell off all of your spear magazines and take note of any important items that you see in the Trader's inventory that you might want to save up for and buy a little bit later on here's a few books that I'm always on the lookout for pretty much all of the urban combat books but in particular Urban combat volume 6 where armor doesn't slow you down in combat I think this is probably my favorite book in the game there's also a bunch of books that give you just a flat plus 10 damage and getting the one for your weapon of choice will really help out in the long run there's also art of mining volume 3 where you can Harvest more or from mining when you're buzzed by coffee and you'll probably be drinking coffee when you're mining anyway so it's a good way to just get extra resources there's Wasteland Treasures volume 3 where you can get acid from various harvestable materials such as cars and acid barrels and medicine cabinets acid is a really important late game crafting item and so stockpiling it early on will help you out later on and then of course there's needle and thread Vol 7 which we just discussed a second ago and then there's a few powerful gear items that I really like to buy early on too like a helmet light mod or a mining helmet which improves visibility the college jacket which increases your run speed there's a cigar which gives you strength plus one and a bartering bonus and finally there's nerdy glasses which will give you an intellect bonus and an XP bonus as well and once I get all of these items I pretty much never take them off Traders will sell better quality and higher Tech items as you level up your character and as you progress through higher tier quests and speaking of quests now it's time to start doing some questing so grab your first job from the trailer if you do a buried Supply you'll have to go dig up a chest a tier 1 chest has food or drink items and a tier 2 or 3 chest will have weapons and armor to start off I usually place four blocks at each end of the circle then start in the middle and dig down four blocks make sure that you have a way to climb out easily and then start digging in any direction every 10 blocks broken there's a 25 chance to spawn between one and three zombies so count as you go along so that you're prepared with a way out and a full stamina bar for the fight and after every 10 blocks the circle will shrink so check the four blocks you place down and see where the circle is going this will help you decide what direction to dig in to find the chest and after accessing the chest you'll have time to sort your inventory but once you close it that's when the zombies will spawn fight them off or you can just Retreat back to the trader it's up to you there are also fetch jobs clear jobs and once you're into the tier twos and above you'll see Fetch and clears in infested clears and restore power quests in a fetch you just need to grab a satchel and you're done it's easy and so the reward is the lowest infested quests will send you to a location from the previous Quest tier but with double the zombies the quest reward is also quite low but you'll find valuable items in a special Supply Cache inside buried Supply missions also give low Quest rewards clear jobs and fetch and clear jobs give the best rewards and restore Powers also give good Quest rewards but only as good as a Fetch and clear so the added danger really isn't quite worth it however I do find that just getting a good variety of quests is more fun than just taking the same one over and over trying to optimize my rewards completing seven quests will unlock the next Quest tier but you can always choose jobs from the previous tier if you want after completing a tier you'll get a special reward bonus the level 1 completion bonus will contain a water filter and a bicycle and I'd recommend going for the bike when you're out questing look around for a house to squat in for a few days most players including myself will take up residence somewhere nearby where they can sort of stockpile their resources for a big base build later on your ideal candidate would be a brick or concrete building with a flat rooftop just something to get you up and off the ground you can always see the difficulty of the POI you're entering the red skulls correlate to the tier of the POI which represents both difficulty and the main loot chest located within you'll find vending machines both at the trader and out in the wild this is where you can pick up some special consumables I usually look out for sugar butts which increases your bartering skill but just FYI it costs 300 dukes and gives a 10 bartering bonus so in order for it to pay for itself you'll have to buy or sell at least three thousand Dukes worth of items I'll also keep an eye out for eye candy which will increase your loot stage and increase chances for better loot but just like looter this is relative to your current level so its impact on day one in the Pine Forest will be insignificant whereas its impact later on or if you're in like the Wasteland or in a high tier POI could be profound I suggest that you watch my latest loot explanation video because that topic is deep and complex and I'll have it all broken down for you over there once you arrive at your quest location you can either start the quest or do the dirty the double loot trick all that means is that you clear out and loot the POI before you start the quest which will then reset everything and then you can do it all over again once active you can't stray too far away or else you'll fail the quest and if you die you will also fail the quest make sure you're checking toolboxes and sinks which are good places to find our wrench a wrench will allow you to break down items for essential resources like forged iron and forged steel as well as cars for all sorts of goodies wrenching cars and selling off the scrap is a great way to earn money but if you find brass items like radiators brass trophies and doorknobs don't sell them scrap them first then sell the raw brass for almost twice as much but eventually you'll probably just want to stockpile the brass for future ammo production oh and check all purses and toilets because you might find a level one pistol I usually carry a bow with me even into the late game but I prefer crossbows if you can find one if you move slow and watch out for trash and broken glass on the floor you can generally sneak up on most zombies and get that 3.5 times sneak damage bonus along with a well-aimed headshot and that is usually enough to kill most zombies even with just the Primitive gear and I sometimes use this trick here in a sticky situation it's just two frames on top of each other and I upgrade the top block I can then attack and shoot down on multiple zombies while conducting periodic repairs you can also block zombies and doorways and place hatches and doorways to make an improvised fighting position and I always have a set of frames on my hot bar if anything just to do a quick nerd poll and while you're out and about keep an eye out for some first aid items that you should keep handy on your toolbar there are a whole bunch of critical injuries and debuffs and you should have a general sense of what they are what they do and how they're treated critical injuries are more common when you're at very low health and your susceptibility to them increases the more you're getting hit by zombies first off we have the stun this blurs your vision and slows your speed for a few seconds there's nothing you can really do except for brace yourself and wait but then there's the concussion same as the stun at first but then can randomly reoccur as long as you have it it reduces your max Health by 25 and all attributes by one and it's cured with painkillers then there's the abrasion probably the most common of all this just slightly lowers your maximum health and it's treated best with first aid kits than first aid bandages and then aloe cream in that order then we have bleeding which rapidly reduces your health for 20 seconds you can stem the bleeding with a regular bandage which is the only thing that it's good for a first State bandage or first aid kits and then we have the Deep laceration really just a worse version of bleeding with negative 25 hit points and a higher chance to get more bleeding debuffs if you get hit subsequently it's treated the same way as bleeding but it's cured by first aid kits or sewing kits moving on to sprains you can have sprained arms which lower your maximum health and will slow your reload and Swinging speed and power attacks will actually hurt you then you have sprained legs which will lower your run speed and running and jumping can actually hurt you and extend the timer these can be treated with steroids but they cannot be cured that is unless you have one point into physician in which case you can use a splint or cast to cure your sprain instantly fractures are basically the same as sprains but they're quite a bit worse they're treated with splints or even better with casts and then there's fatigue which reduces your maximum health and actually increases the damage that you take by 10 percent and this is cured with vitamins and then we're on to infection infections are common and at level one infection will not really affect you it increases with time and by getting hit by zombies but at level 2 infections reduce stamina regeneration and at level three it will additionally reduce your attributes infections are treated using honey herbal antibiotics or regular antibiotics and are cured when the counter reaches zero and you have a 20 chance to obtain honey from destroying these stumps here and last but not least we have dysentery there's a chance to acquire this from certain foods and from murky water and it periodically will reduce your food and water until it's treated with Goldenrod tea if you're looking for first aid Trader Jen has the highest probability of carrying first aid supplies but all Traders should have at least a little bit and early on you should definitely have some bandages around you can either use cloth that you find or you can even pick cotton craft the cotton into cloth and then make the cloth into bandages after you've done some questing and looting and you've found a place to call home it's time to think about setting up a defense most houses can be converted into some kind of a defensible or at least safe base probably the most tried and true and easy way to fortify a house is to place a hatch in the doorway and better yet even place two this will be your window to fight through when the zombies come up but living in an elevated area is definitely the way to go I usually set up shop on the second floor or the rooftop so that my belongings are safe and then I tear down any stairs or ladders and make my own way up usually just a ladder two blocks off the ground so that I can jump on but the zombies cannot this is where you'll want to set up some storages and at least have a campfire going you'll aim to either craft or purchase all of the workstations the cement mixer Forge workbench chemistry station and finally the new Dew collector the Dew collector and Forge will probably be first I recommend just buying the water filter from the trader the Dew collector needs to go outside or have an open space above it but you can seal off the Gap with bars or something like a trussing shape if you want and if you took that point into advanced engineering I'm sure you'll have the forge unlocked in no time the rest will take a little while but you might get close to having a workbench in the first seven to ten days I'd say at night time the zombies will be faster and stronger I usually spend the night cooking and crafting and getting organized for the next day sometimes I do a little bit of mining under my base just to stay busy just be careful that you're not doing too much because you can actually collapse your building if you're tunneling underneath important supports and here's what you need to know about structural stability this here is stability mode a developer option all of the green blocks have full support they're connected to the ground and the ground is connected to bedrock the indestructible bottom layer of the world and this is what US veterans will call the Bedrock connection knock out a block and everything else above it loses the connection and turns yellow do this long enough and things can start turning red or even black and start collapsing and even if you knock out some blocks below the structural pillar the same thing will happen and if there's no Bedrock connection blocks will borrow what is called horizontal support from whatever it's connected to let's just look at an example the wood frame has a mass of five and a horizontal support of 40. 40 divided by five is eight so you could build a pillar that has Bedrock connection and attach eight blocks horizontally before the ninth one will cause an overload to the pillar and everything will collapse notice this yellow outline as the low load increases and the pink outline indicating imminent collapse all blocks have different mass and horizontal support So as you upgrade blocks the mass might change so you can overload and otherwise stable structure and cause a collapse without warning simply by upgrading blocks pay attention to which block is the load bearing block the one that the horizontal blocks are attached to and upgrade this one first if you have a solid pillar with multiple block planes extending out that don't have a Bedrock connection the pillar block that they connect to is the one that's supporting that line so this row here is supported by this block and this row here is supported by this block and so on Down the Line I've had a bunch of severe bass collapses before and I think if you play long enough you will too especially early on you just got to learn from your mistakes and rebuild another thing to touch on real quick is heat fires and noise will generate a percentage of heat if the heat Cooks up to 100 event it'll spawn in a screamer zombie and if a screamer sees you she'll scream in reinforcements which will possibly include even more screamers that can kind of spiral out of control heat also cools down over time and generally you'll be fine at home up to a point where you have multiple forages and campfires and chem stations and torches all running at once then you'll probably start seeing them but mining also generates a lot of heat but one little hot tip for you here is that if you sneak while you're mining you'll generate a little bit less Heat so now you have a beginner home base and you could probably fight your first horde here since they're usually on the kind of lighter side of things but a beginner should definitely separate their home base from their dedicated horde base and that's just because you really don't want to lose all of your crafting materials your loot workstations your money and some kind of a horde night disaster and so for my most up-to-date comprehensive look at how to build horde bases and how that all works you can check out this video right here but I'll show you an incredibly effective cheap and simple horde base that you can make for day 7 and beyond all you're going to do is create a platform five or six blocks above the ground and remember the Four Corners that you see right here are the ones that are stabilizing the whole structure so make some more pillars or maybe don't make the platform too big and definitely don't upgrade the blocks in the middle of the platform before you're upgrading the ones in the corner that are the load-bearing blocks then you're going to create a front wall and a doorway and opposite that you'll want to make a staircase then connect the two the can connection is important because without a way up to you zombies will just simply Target your supports and bring down the building and so for this connection some shapes are going to work better than others you could use regular cubes and that'll work fine but zombies will be able to stack up a little bit at the front fighting position so I prefer to use very skinny shapes for this like a centered security gate over time you can explore new shapes to use for your walkways for your stairs for your fighting position and ideally you'll want something that you can shoot and melee through this overall design I think will work quite well for you because it's modular you can build upward and outward if you want to expand your base you can even dig a pit underneath the walkway for the zombies to fall down into you can fill that up with spikes just be aware that you don't get any XP for Spike kills eventually you'll probably want to beef up the supports for added stability you can create grenade shoots so that you can fight the zombies that are down below and you can even Place spikes Up on the Rooftop to fend off the vultures and always make sure you have a storage box inside somewhere to hold some of your extra supplies some of the commonly forgotten items when The Horde finally arrives on day 7 at 2200 you can expect multiple waves of zombies wave size and difficulty depends on your game stage but it cannot exceed the number that you set in the options when you first started out for my most up-to-date video on how exactly horde Knight Works check out this link right here and make sure that you bring the following I developed a mnemonic bar to help you remember Buffs such as Skull Crushers learning Elixir and recog ammo including throwables repair materials to repair your base and also repair kits or supplies to repair your weapons and finally food and drink and first aid for all the stamina bonuses and HP regeneration that you'll get from those so good luck with your first horde night battle and once you kill all the zombies it should be all quiet and you can safely head outside if you die it's really no big deal The Horde will end all of the zombies will be killed off and you can safely go and pick up your gear again and you should probably find a few loot bags to search and as you progress you'll get more and more this leads many players including myself to usually build their base in the more difficult biomes like the Wasteland where you can then benefit from loot stage bonuses this biome bonus is indicated by the yellow skulls in the top right corner of your screen just take note that every biome has a game stage modifier and with every increase in your game Sage there's an increase in the difficulty of zombies as well as the quality of loot this is the built-in risk reward mechanic of the game and now you've made it full circle through your first seven days and seven days to die all that's left to do is now rinse and repeat expand your base explore deeper into the world complete more difficult quests unlock better equipment and fight bigger and better zombies that's the beauty of the game there is no story other than that which you make for yourself so just continue on until you get bored then start all over again applying the Lessons Learned in an entirely fresh playthrough and if you're feeling like you've mastered the basics you might want to check out my top 50 tips tricks for seven days to die and I'll link that for you right here now you might get to a point where you encounter some kind of a game bug these things happen or you see some kind of a decoration that you want but you can't seem to buy it or craft it or there's just some game mechanic that drives you insane and for that you have two options cheats and mods I'll cover cheats here first so this is your cue to pause the video and Skip ahead to the next section just check the timestamps below if you don't want to hear about how this works and when I say cheating I don't really mean that to sound derogatory there's a lot of things that you can do both in developer mode and in the creative menu that can really enhance the player experience whereas cheats like God mode would kind of more take away from it so let me review how to navigate these tools first open the console with F1 then type in DM which stands for developer mode you can also type in cm which stands for creative menu then close the console again with F1 for developer mode you'll want to press Q to enter god mode mode with fly mode and you can kind of fly all around or you can just use H if you want to use fly mode alone without god mode while flying you can hit shift which will increase your speed C and spacebar will change your elevation and while holding shift you can press Q to do these big leaps forward in the map you can hold Ctrl and then right click where you want to teleport to instantly appear in that location F5 will actually enter third person which is kind of buggy F6 will pull in the spawn menu so you can spawn in some zombies or even Vehicles f8 will allow you to view your frames per second and if you hit it again it'll toggle the current heat percentage of the area and if you hit Escape there's a whole bunch more options you can see the POI teleporter over here if you go into this you can search your current map for a specific location and then just teleport there on the right hand side you can see various options such as setting the day time and the time speed and this over here is where the stability Vision option is that I was you using earlier you can hit slash on the number pad specifically to become invisible you can also hit the asterisk again specifically on the number pad to turn off zombie Ai and there are many many more random keyboard commands but these should be enough to get you started okay now on to the creative menu to open this you'll want to press U from here you can search through the menus for all of the items and the blocks that are within the game and then just drag them into your inventory you can tick this developer block icon here and search for Dev and this will pull up all of these specific developer tools most of them are colored like a pink purple color a couple of cool ones include the Dig tool here and the dev pistol the Dig tool just lets you One-Shot blocks and the dev pistol lets you One-Shot zombies okay so now I'd like to go over a couple of helpful console commands but you could also just type help and this will list all of the console commands for you a few that I often use include the set time basically it's set time space day space hour space minute the next one is weather space Sim Rand that's s-i-m-r-a-n-d space zero which will reset the weather back to its default so it's useful if there's a rainstorm or a snowstorm or it's foggy to just kind of set it back to default and skip over the storm of course there's kill all which will kill all spawned zombies and finally there's giveself XP space and then whatever number of XP you want to give yourself so you know 99999 just substitute the amount of XP that you want to level your character up a little bit or a lot a bit alright so enough about that stuff and welcome back if you skipped that section now let's talk about mods because there's a mod for everything from basic mods that change the HUD or increase your backpack size to massive overhaul mods with new enemies Vehicles weapons and story lines my current top three overhaul mods are rebirth mod made by Furious Ramsay thank you paid by sub quake and Darkness Falls which is made by Kane [Music] they've added hundreds and hundreds of extra hours of enjoyment for me and if you want to find some mods that you should go to mod Nexus or you can go to seven days to dive mods.com or you can check out the mod launcher here's my most up-to-date video on how to find and install and use all these types of mods in the mod launcher and sometimes really the best way to learn is by observation so if you want to watch me play and learn a little bit from me just by checking out one of my gameplay series I'll link one for you right here otherwise that will do it for my beginner's guide for seven days to die if you have any questions just join my Discord server and the invite is waiting for you down in the description as well I hope that I've done enough to earn your subscription today and thank you very much for watching and I'll see you hopefully in the next video I just want to say thank you for watching for leaving a like but most of all thank you to the long list of amazing supporters that you see right here I hope this episode has earned your subscription and I can't wait to show you the next one best wishes to all and goodbye [Music]

Channel: Guns, Nerds, and Steel

Views: 175,480

Keywords: 7 days to die, 7 days to die gameplay, 7 days to die tutorial, 7 days to die horde night, 7 days to die base building, 7 days to die horde base, 7 days to die series, 7 days to die a20, 7 days to die mods, 7 days to die modded, 7 days to die playthough, 7 days to die ep 1, 7 days to die episode 1, guns nerds and steel, gns, 7 days to die bedrock, 7 days to die alpha 21, alpha 21, 7 days to die base building alpha 21, 7 days to die beginners guide, beginners guide

Id: XtPjAi_Syd8

Length: 29min 35sec (1775 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 12 2023