Multiplayer on 7 Days to Die

[-budd-]

^And that's why I'm going to stay on single player for a while longer. Guns and minibikes!?  :o

come on in....I'll outfit you, you can hang your hat at my place im pretty stocked up.

So after my last post i jump back into the game and i'm immediately hunted. So i scurry thru one of my tunnels and come out the garage where i store my mini bike.
Yup wandering horde hitting my place. You can see them coming out of the woods on the left.



Again, no problem for mister 44 mag.






And we're clear


After clearing the horde i managed to finish my tunnel to my water source. As luck would have it my tunnel came up in the bathroom of the pool house with a bathtub of water right behind the hatch, easy fill up.   Added a couple more spot lights for night illumination and built another mini bike, there both in the garage. One of the mini's doesn't have a shopping basket so if anyone comes across one i could use it. The trick with the mini's is try not to outrun the map pop in, usually that works although one time i gliched into the landscape and had to dig the mini out. think i'm done tunneling for awhile going back to exploring the map some more up north.

[JasonPratt]

I've glitched into the landscape twice on the mini, and I wasn't trying to rush the map pop-in at all. Sometimes the bike works fine, other times it doesn't matter how slow (but faster than running or else what's the point) I'm trying to go, the bike will pop back in time a few second on a regular basis.

Both times I worried I'd have to dig it out (or it would be just gone), but both times the bike zipped ahead to ground level.

I never put anything into the basket anymore anyway. The server is a little too unstable, and I've lost almost everything I've ever put in a shopping basket. A total wipe three times at least, maybe four (but after a point I learned never to risk putting anything in the shopping basket).

You're tempting me hard on that magnum, man. Doesn't help that I saw an ad yesterday in the Sunday paper for a commemorative edition 25 unit run of a 24 karat gold-plated 44 mag longbarrel revolver, fully functional, decorated with Jackson, TN memorablia in a 19th century style. Super gorgeous. Dad asked how much, I laughed and said if you have to ask you can't afford it, but they'll work with payment plans!

[ArizonaTank]

Both times I worried I'd have to dig it out (or it would be just gone), but both times the bike zipped ahead to ground level.

I never put anything into the basket anymore anyway. The server is a little too unstable, and I've lost almost everything I've ever put in a shopping basket. A total wipe three times at least, maybe four (but after a point I learned never to risk putting anything in the shopping basket).

It would be interesting to see if this happens in solo-play

[JasonPratt]

True. BBmike, you're doing solo right now, are you seeing any world-glitches? Places the world hasn't popped into place yet, only skybox beyond? Times when you suddenly can't use-key things until you quit and reload?

If not, getting a minibike might trigger it; but if so, I'm betting a minibike makes it worse in single-play, too.

[Bison]

I've had terrain glitches in solo play.  I think it's tied more to the randomized world generation then anything else.

[JasonPratt]

If so, it would only affect areas that hadn't been generated yet. Which admittedly I think I've seen more serious problems in, but I haven't been near a non-generated area in a long while.

On the other hand, maybe other players are entering such areas and causing problems for everyone. But I suspect it's some kind of difficulty for the code in keeping track of players and what we're carrying. Whatever is happening, what we use from our pack or our belt we use, but we can't use-key anything -- so when we quit and respawn, we're back at the last 'physical' place the game was able to fully track us, in the state of whatever 'usage' we used since then but with nothing gained from anything we used. (Ah, that's a wrinkle I had forgotten: it isn't that we can't use-key anything and so gain anything; we can't permanently gain anything at all, only permanently lose it by menu-using it.)

[Bison]

I think the game is continually rendering.  I'm not sure, but it doesn't happen too often and a exit/enter the game fixes it.

[JasonPratt]

Rendering yes, generating no. But as multiple players expand into new areas (including by digging), the server code may have trouble keeping up with the generation.

It just occurred to me that the planetary features on Akua, the Earth-like planet in Empyrion, have already been generated and given a light rendering, since they can be seen from the surface of Omicron! Presumably the same is true, but less noticeable, for the other planets in the solar system.

Which makes me want to pee a little. 

[JasonPratt]

Since I've been praising Empy by contrast with 7DtD to some degree, allow me to weigh the scale back the other way a moment: one of the (many) great things about 7DtD (although really it's true about many such survival games, from Minecraft and Don't Starve onward), is that from the very first moment you're on a ticking clock with literally nothing to start with other than what you can pick up (or punch) with your bare hands. And your foraging has to be somewhat widespread, often under great hardship, in order to make it through one night with any plausible chance. And the next day after that, and the next week for a while.

By its nature, even on the Mars-like Omicron where you will definitely smother not long after sundown, Empy isn't like that. I hiked for two minutes to where I could easily set up my oxygen extraction device, which has to add an implausible complication to increase resource tension (i.e. the oxy bottles generated have to be converted to other oxy bottles in order to be used by the suit), and I've moved more than 50 steps away for an actual purpose maybe once so far. And the other times I got even 20ish steps out, if that far, it was simply to set up snapshots for the AAR. The game not only gives me literally everything I need to survive 5 days, aside from oxygen (and that's only a problem on an Omicron start), but trying to gather any significant amount of anything else on the way to start my first base is practically counterproductive, since I can barely use any of it for a long time. Letting it rot by accident allows me to make antibiotics (later), but there are somewhat easier ways to deal with that, even! Nor, even on Omicron, are the indigenous life-forms a pressure-threat for a while; and the suit gives you warning when the raider drones launch, with time to get ready at the base -- but for the first days some half-smart FPS tactics and your opening pistol are good enough to use them to pretty safely level up and scavenge some parts you won't have to spend time and resources building.

7DtD is much more constantly edge-of-your-seat from the word go. 120ish days into the game, and I'm still bolting up in a hole at night because I can't deal with the threats the game escalates at me. (Admittedly other players are doing somewhat better about that, but they're also dying a little more often, so... ;) )

[ArizonaTank]

Since I've been praising Empy by contrast with 7DtD to some degree, allow me to weigh the scale back the other way a moment: one of the (many) great things about 7DtD (although really it's true about many such survival games, from Minecraft and Don't Starve onward), is that from the very first moment you're on a ticking clock with literally nothing to start with other than what you can pick up (or punch) with your bare hands. And your foraging has to be somewhat widespread, often under great hardship, in order to make it through one night with any plausible chance. And the next day after that, and the next week for a while.

By its nature, even on the Mars-like Omicron where you will definitely smother not long after sundown, Empy isn't like that. I hiked for two minutes to where I could easily set up my oxygen extraction device, which has to add an implausible complication to increase resource tension (i.e. the oxy bottles generated have to be converted to other oxy bottles in order to be used by the suit), and I've moved more than 50 steps away for an actual purpose maybe once so far. And the other times I got even 20ish steps out, if that far, it was simply to set up snapshots for the AAR. The game not only gives me literally everything I need to survive 5 days, aside from oxygen (and that's only a problem on an Omicron start), but trying to gather any significant amount of anything else on the way to start my first base is practically counterproductive, since I can barely use any of it for a long time. Letting it rot by accident allows me to make antibiotics (later), but there are somewhat easier ways to deal with that, even! Nor, even on Omicron, are the indigenous life-forms a pressure-threat for a while; and the suit gives you warning when the raider drones launch, with time to get ready at the base -- but for the first days some half-smart FPS tactics and your opening pistol are good enough to use them to pretty safely level up and scavenge some parts you won't have to spend time and resources building.

7DtD is much more constantly edge-of-your-seat from the word go. 120ish days into the game, and I'm still bolting up in a hole at night because I can't deal with the threats the game escalates at me. (Admittedly other players are doing somewhat better about that, but they're also dying a little more often, so... ;) )

True, I never feel safe in 7DtD

[-budd-]

i feel better since i got the 44 mag  :D  I've been being a little more careful to try to get my health and wellness up....hey i'm up to 120. I do like to wander at night though.

[Rekim]

I do like to wander at night though.

your first night with running zombies will put an end to that 

[-budd-]

its why i like them to walk, otherwise not much going out at night.

[JasonPratt]

Well, today I had the pleasure of watching my minibike randomly teleport, after I disembarked, into my little wooden fort over Deepbase1.

So, after getting its things out of the basket (I was on my way back from looting around shotgun messiah, not in it yet still, and I made sure to put only somewhat expendable items in case I lost them), I hopped back on it to try to finagle it out the door.

In the process of trying to get on it, I accidentally opened the hatch beneath it.

It dropped straight down into the secondary stairs of the tunnel. The ones I couldn't feasibly drive back out.

Now my minibike is sitting in the tunnel.

{smh}

At which point I suddenly realize how addicted I've become to the minibike despite its buggy quirks. I should have been thinking of finishing my stack of bricks and some forged iron doors and scrap hatches and ladder pieces, so I could build a safety tower near Shotgun Messiah.

Instead I was thinking of digging back up through the snow at an angle, filling it with stairs as I go, to get the bike out.

And then filling the corridor with bricks, to keep anything from getting back in that way.

But I wasn't going to try that at night, which was falling, although I ran out and chopped some trees (and found a nice second-deer to shoot and chop up -- found the first one semi-trapped in a small cul-de-sac in the city near ShotMess) for putting this plan into action later. Got back tucked in safe and sound, a quiet night, so I decide to try excavating some iron, and maybe digging a deeper tunnel-hole to hide in on another night to come.

Whereupon, instead of digging at an angle like a sane man might, so I could easily stair back up, I accidentally dig a hole too deep to climb out of, and fall in.

Fortunately, I had plenty of wood to build ladder pieces with.

Unfortunately, my hole was too narrow for ladders to work right, and at too much of a corner to the surrounding voxels for them to be placed right.

So I spent the rest of the night frantically digging my way out of that hole. I never did get any ladders I placed to work right, but I did excavate enough to make some stairs to get out.

The next day I didn't spend carefully digging out the bike and blocking up the hole; I spent it starting a hike to budd's, and then feeling bad that I might be taking his only remaining bike (because he wasn't there to ask), even temporarily, and then hiking back. Into two minor hordes.

Fortunately, I did pick up quite a bit of canned food this way. And some infections. And I got back safely before sundown, and got my cooking and forging done for the night.

Unfortunately, I had the bright idea to harvest some clay for more bricks, since things seemed quiet again, rather than hiding back down in my deeper hole (and maybe expanding that, this time safely.) By the time I realized dogs had found me, it was too late.

But fortunately, I could go hide in the deeper hole anyway, far enough away from my fort that I didn't have to worry much about them tearing at it to get me. From past experience, I know it's entirely possible for them to get into the fort (I ought to damn well make that a brick tower first, like I have on the ridge-edge leading down into the forest, north of there), and then to dig through the snow around my scrap hatches! So the tunnel is meant to help keep them away by luring them off if they smell me. In my experience they can't dig through dirt, even though they can smell me sometimes.

Unfortunately, this was one of the times they could smell me, thanks to a zombie dog pack (at least). So I had the charming prospect of waiting the night out listening to their horrible growls, or signing out. But I wasn't sure if I signed out there that the computer would know to drop me underground. In past experiences, the only safe place to sign out is on my bedroll where there's enough vertical room to drop me -- signing out in the tunnel can be a death sentence, if it drops me above ground in the middle of a problem!

So I put everything safely in my backpack, crept as quickly as I could over to my bedroll, and signed out. But not before I could hear the horde banging at my fort, having followed me over thanks to the dogs. sigh.

Hopefully they'll be gone by the time I sign back in tomorrow (or whenever). How much damage they'll have done, who knows? Going back to ShotMess before someone else loots it, seems more distant than ever...

[OJsDad]

In my solo game, I need to build a forge.  But to do that I need a bellow.  And for that I need leather.  How do I get leather.  I killed a deer, but didn't get any.

Thanks.