Customizable Settings: Weather and Infection

 

Customizable Settings: Weather and Infection 

One of the things I like about 7 Days is the option to customize my playthroughs by tweaking the settings to add new challenges. I play with more frequent horde nights (every 3 days, 60 zombies), delete gear/backpack on death, and insane base difficulty. To compensate for the sense of urgency this creates, and to keep the game moving, I turn up XP gain (300%) and loot (200%). I enjoy the challenge of playing on these settings but the majority of folks I’ve played with hate, hate, hate losing everything if they die, like having ample time to build sick horde bases, and generally just wanna’ loot and shred zombies. That’s fine, there’s settings for that, just as there are mods for more and terrifying zombies. Without going down “mod overhaul” road though there’s still a few vanilla version settings that could be added to make the game more immersive.

Weather:

It’s afternoon of day 2 in the snow biome and I’m running pretty much bare bones. I’m suffering from lack of food but decide to spend my dukes on a bicycle. “Bicycle makes food get easy,” I think to myself as I take a buried supplies mission. I battle through reduced stamina in the cold while avoiding a lumberjack and make it to the dig site. “What sort of jerk buries their supplies in the side of a mountain.” I’m trying to jump up and brace myself on the side of the cliff all while using my level 2 stone shovel to find the loot. “Ignore the blinking red snowflake. I’m outta’ here with a full belly once I get this.”

More cold, more hunger, less stamina, no loot, and it’s about to be night. I think I’m narrowing down where the drop is but it’s before the Treasure Hunter rework so it really could be anywhere on the side of this damn mountain. I run out of the stamina required to keep myself balanced on the cliff-face and hear the “crack” when I hit the ground. “This is fine, everything’s fine. I’m completing this mission damnit.” “No you’re not,” says the lumberjack come to inspect all the ruckus.

Sadly, this is the only story I can tell you about the weather in 7 Days. I’ve never died to dehydration in the desert and past day three or four cold and heat debuffs are nonissues. I just had to look up the name of the perk for environmental resilience because I never spec into it (Well Insulated, by the way). With the biome rework coming in alpha 20 I hope they add a slider setting for how impactful weather will be. If you find wasteland landmines, desert vultures, or winter cougars already annoying enough you could leave weather on a normal setting, but it’d be nice to crank it up too. Having to double check I’ve got coffee and food or bring extra gear could be annoying but also makes those things more valuable. Who knows, maybe I’ll have to roll this back and beg for mercy since the clothing system is changing too.

 

Infection:

            *Insert similar story about getting an infection in early game and desperately searching for antibiotics and honey* Early game infections suck but later on I get more worried about whether honey goes in the meds storage box or the food box, or maybe the drinks box cause it’s in a jar, I dunno. Point is, getting an infection in the game isn’t all that scary, eventually. Since 7 Days is a game about surviving in a world where humans and animals have their behavior changed after becoming infected (i.e. turning into zombies) there could be more emphasis on this aspect of the game. In a reaaaalllll zombie apocalypse one bite and you’re toast. That wouldn’t make for much fun in gameplay so sure, have a cure, but make it so you have to spend substantial resources on it.

I’m not sure if the setting would be specific to “contracting rate” such that you could make it so almost any hit by a zombie would cause an infection or “infection rate” such that infections progress quicker. Both would be interesting in their own right. Either way having a slider setting on infections could add another challenge even if it’s just making sure I have more cures. I can’t remember the last time I made an antibiotic or said, “Hey, this is useful,” when I found the recipe for herbals.

             

Alpha 20:

        In some of the intro videos to alpha 20 the devs note that they’re likely implementing a slider for loot. Something like loot being completely random to gamestage driven (like it is in alpha 19) so it sounds like sliders for other settings in the game might not be all that far-fetched. High hopes here. Doing sliders for weather and infections, and maybe other settings, could be a good work around if they’re also considering reworks of these game systems. It would give the devs the ability to exercise their creative muscle and players could still customize it to their enjoyment.