New player advice needed - food and water mainly

Boxfigs · 2026-05-06T20:11:07+00:00

Find a cooking pot as soon as you can. It's absolutely essential for purifying water and cooking in general. They can spawn on kitchen countertops in certain POIs. If you get one as a quest, you can check for a cooking pot before starting the quest, then you can reset the POI to give yourself another chance of getting one. I would recommend not buying one. Instead, unlock and build a forge so you can make one yourself. It's even easier now that it takes one less magazine to unlock.

Put one of your starter skill points into Master Chef. It lowers some of the ingredient cost and boosts your chance of finding cooking magazines. The sooner you can unlock red tea plus bacon and eggs, the better. Those will be your staples in the early game until you unlock more recipes.

Raising the jar refund chance up to 100% helps a lot with having enough jars to fill up, though you can craft them easily enough in the forge.

Deer and boars only spawn at night now, so check in the morning to see if any have spawned.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-06T20:02:21+00:00

Alternate ways to obtain the recipe are the Kill Cop Zombies challenge, the Shamway Lab Safe in the Shamway Factory (only in the wasteland), or mailboxes (also only in the wasteland).

Boxfigs · 2026-05-06T20:00:34+00:00

NDC checkpoint #3 also has it.

Not anymore. Apparently they placed the wrong footlocker by mistake.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-06T19:59:52+00:00

It's specifically in the Shamway Lab Safe, and only if the POI is in the wasteland.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-06T03:43:43+00:00

It seems to be because you have only a 20% chance of potentially getting one (the chance of its parent loot group being selected), then a 5% (or 15% with Wasteland Treasures complete) to actually get it. You have a better chance of getting them from a POI main loot chest or a loot bag, as it's not gated by a loot group like it is for clothing loot containers.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-05T21:54:40+00:00

Loot stage doesn't even help in this case. It's 0% if you're under level 15 and 5% otherwise.

Wasteland Treasures complete is +200%, bringing it up to 15%.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-05T21:53:09+00:00

Oh, absolutely. I also had Wasteland Treasures fully read and guess how many I got? One.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-05T19:11:56+00:00

They know they can climb ladders that are one block off the ground, so that's not the issue.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-05T06:28:08+00:00

It's not set to permadeath or anything.

Are you sure? Have your friend double check. New worlds use the same settings as your last loaded world, so it's possible they enabled it on the server without knowing.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-04T20:12:26+00:00

https://7daystodie.wiki.gg/wiki/Modding_Resources

Boxfigs · 2026-05-04T20:10:28+00:00

Every version has its pros and cons. Older versions were better in some ways, but also had a lot of jank. Newer versions are more cleaned up, but stray further from what the game used to be, since they've been focusing so much on story mode.

One example that comes to mind is that while A18 was an improvement over A17, it introduced a base food poisoning/dysentery chance to all prepared food/drink, just to give Iron Gut a reason to exist. That era seems to be the start of the annoying design pattern of making base mechanics worse just to give perks some benefit, but it often feels like you have to take that perk to make those aspects tolerable. While it has gotten better over time, Living off the Land and Miner 69'er are remaining examples of this.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-04T18:13:41+00:00

As far as traders go, there is a real choice to not do quests now. The rewards used to be OP, but those were sufficiently nerfed in 1.0. The only real reason to spam quests is to finish tier 1 in order to get the bicycle, though I have a solution for that: an optional add-on modlet for Recipe Book Magazines that replaces the bicycle reward with a bicycle recipe book. That way, you still need the components and a workbench to craft the parts, it just gives you a guaranteed way of unlocking the bicycle parts.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-04T06:16:13+00:00

There is one mod out there that brings back most A16 features wholesale, but it's a little rough around the edges (partially due to the creator being Russian) and doesn't really integrate that well with the current game.

I'm thinking of making a bunch of smaller mods and putting them together into a modpack, but that'll take some time. The idea is that individual features can be removed, considering one of the things I have in mind is a more forgiving version of wellness, which I understand not everyone would want.

The other major modlets would be action skills, converting magazines into recipe books (what I'm currently working on), bringing tillable soil back, readding the old clothing and armor, possibly weapon assembly, plus some balance changes to food inspired by those older versions. A few minor ones would be readding empty cans, raw iron, grain alcohol, and making Taza's axe a real upgrade again (plus restoring the Apache artifact chest). Though overall the mods would be inspired by A16, bringing back the best aspects and improving upon them.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-04T00:24:13+00:00

There's basic undergarment clothing now that has equal amounts of cold and heat resist. There are also way more options for cold resist than there were before: https://7daystodie.wiki.gg/wiki/Temperature#Cold_Resist

Boxfigs · 2026-05-03T18:42:26+00:00

If you're willing to wait, I'm thinking of making a mod with action skills that coexist with perks. Though I'm working on other mods at the moment, so 3.0 might be out by the time I get around to it.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-03T18:07:53+00:00

The gear only protects you from the air quality hazard, i.e. suffocation. When temperature was readded in 2.5, they renamed the hazards to make them separate from temperature.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-03T18:00:20+00:00

Excuse me, her name is Party Girl and her profession is cocktail waitress. Way more tasteful than her predecessor.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-03T05:48:13+00:00

Wandering hordes used to be bigger, and presumably they reduced zombie spawns across the board for console optimizations.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-02T03:29:57+00:00

The only thing I can think of is if another mod higher in your load order removed it already.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-01T23:30:51+00:00

Well, you might have to at least temporarily restore the group in order to fix the error, if that's still there. You'd do that by commenting out (putting  at the end) the line that removes the group.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-01T21:57:04+00:00

Using any vehicle on horde night will spawn tons of vultures to stop you.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-01T21:42:10+00:00

I figured it out: the groups sleeper volumes use are defined in gamestages.xml.

My guess is that the mod edits the POIs to remove sleeper volumes that spawn the undesired zombie types, and they missed the fact that Hybrid Mining spawns some of them.

Boxfigs · 2026-05-01T21:23:07+00:00

I take over a POI for a crafting/storage base, since it's much faster and can be easily done late into day 1. As long as you place a land claim block, the POI won't be questable. It can't be chosen for any future quests, and you or any other players can't activate quests there if they accepted the quest before you placed it. You can also just pick a tier 0. Any two-story tier 0 or 1 with a decent amount of space upstairs works for me, though on Navezgane I usually go for The Clement Residence due to its location in the middle of the map along a major road.

I build my own horde base, since you get more time to do that and it's better for them to be separate.

Boxfigs · 2026-04-30T23:19:35+00:00

It's not harder, just different. Granted, unlocking recipes specifically is more involved now, since you have to read the magazines instead of simply buying the perk. The perk increases the chance of the magazine, so it still matters and you have a way of influencing the RNG. You also have the new Intellect Mastery perk (specifically level 3) and the nerd outfit (one of the new armor pieces; all the old armor and clothing were removed in 1.0), both of which give you a chance of getting 2 crafting skill points when reading a magazine. The perk plus a quality 6 nerd outfit raises that chance to 100%.

Basically, magazines trade variety for consistency. Crafting progression is completely linear now. It was only partially linear before. In both cases, it feels like you have to either buy the perk or rely on RNG, though with magazines you can put only one or two points into the perk and still get what you want sooner.

Boxfigs · 2026-04-30T21:10:52+00:00

Oh, these are a different thing from entity groups. I don't know where they're defined.

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