YMMV / 7 Days to Die

• Broken Base: Alpha 17 seems to have kicked off a Casual-Competitive Conflict between the experienced veterans and the casual base-builders. Alpha 16 was oriented more towards casual gameplay, with smooth progression at all levels that let casual players level up at a fair pace but let experienced players blast through the levels and skill trees in no time at all. Alpha 17 has swung the other way, favoring mechanics that experienced players enjoy but feel too restrictive, needy, and tedious to the casual group. The reasons for this are many, ranging from the changes to the Stamina system to the altered map generation to the revamped experience and perk system resulting in notable cases of You Have Researched Breathing ^* You know how to weave clothing out of grass and craft a shortbow right off the bat but need a perk to be able to boil food, for instance and Arbitrary Equipment Restriction ^* Iron and steel, along with other highly-desired items, have both a minimum stat and minimum level requirement before you can make them. The game got a large number and wide variety of negative reviews once Alpha 17 became the official version and the next revision, Alpha 17.1, was focused primarily on addressing these complaints.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • In Alpha 16 the most common types of bases either featured large pits full of log spikes for zombies to plummet into and break their legs or were hidden completely underground where zombies couldn't path to them, which trivialized hordes.
  • When Alpha 17 rolled around the developers removed log spikes from the game and rewrote the zombie AI, allowing zombies to dig and giving them perfect information, which meant that neither of the A16 strategies worked anymore. It turned zombies into player-seeking homing missiles that always take the easiest available path. This was immediately exploited by players making the 'easiest' path the most time-consuming one, leading to the creation of 'maze bases.'
• Difficulty Spike:
  • The longer you survive and the higher you level up, the bigger and tougher the Blood Moon Hordes will get.
  • The more activity performed in one area, the "hotter" it gets for zombie spawns. So if you have a centralized base where you do most of your crafting and don't make the effort to hide from Screamers, be prepared to fight off hordes constantly.
• Goddamned Bats: ZU Football Players. They're football zombies. They have somewhat more health than a normal zombie. Oh, and they're set to Always Run, even during the day. And believe us, they run fast. After all, they played football in life! Expect to get stunlocked a lot by these guys.
  • Zombie dogs. Like the football players, they can always run. While this can be excused by their being animals, the difference they have from the above is that their hitbox is significantly smaller. Not to mention if you wanna get any loot off of these guys, you have to use a blade weapon to slice them open. Oh, and just in case it wasn't obvious, they don't give edible meat either.
  • Hornets, on top of being really annoying, are Airborne Mooks. They like to divebomb unsuspecting players, usually during hordes. What's especially egregious about these guys is that there's zero indicator of them even being related to the zombies, sans for their honey curing the early stages of infection.
    • The Hornet's replacement, Zombie Vultures, are even worse. They will follow you relentlessly across the map, hovering high overhead and circling, so they are extremely hard to hit, even with scoped weapons.
• Good Bad Bugs: Prior to Alpha 13, the crafting menu would allow you to keep items stored inside of it so long as all of the items in said menu produced the same thing. For example, placing a bunch of steel/iron things inside of it would all yield a collective amount of scrap iron, effectively doubling the inventory space.
  • Bacon & Eggs is a very good food item. It restores 15% of your hunger, and increases your Wellness. Normally, a cooked meal like this would emit a strong odor. Well, not before Alpha 14! As long as you had eggs, you could keep your food supply healthy and stealthy.
• Misaimed "Realism": The body temperature system used to be this. If you get too hot, wearing heavy clothes, you get heatstroke, which can kill you. If you get too cold, such as being bare in the arctic, you will freeze and die. Great concept, right? Only problem is that in alphas before 15, the system was ludicrously spontaneous and uneven: you could find yourself somehow getting heatstroke while swimming naked in an arctic pool, or find yourself sweltering at 110 degrees wearing only a shirt and pants in a temperate zone rainstorm. The algorithm was later completely reworked so that temperature management is more plausible, and in the recent build, the system was changed entirely, with clothing providing a set amount of cold and hot resist rather than increasing or decreasing a general insulation.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The healthy-sounding heartbeat and upbeat chime of a gain in wellness.
  • The chime of a quest being started or completed.
  • The synthetic sound that signals the morning arriving.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Blood Moon hordes really make an entrance when they come. It begins to rain, soaking you and your clothes before thunder starts rumbling every now and then. "Just another thunderstorm" is what the unwary player would think when first encountering this. And then the blood-red haze cloaks the horizons, prompting the arrival of the upcoming horde. And the zombies keep spawning all night, with only about a few seconds between each wave.
  • Feral Walkers have a really Ironic Name, given that they're set to always run. Imagine a hulking, lanky ghoul of sorts that looks like it could pounce on you. And it's sprinting at you, full speed. Pair this with the fact that your bullets only do a fraction of the damage to these guys that they did to any other normal zombie. It's safe to say getting these monsters on the ground is a big sigh of relief.
  • Due to the still-in-development Procedural Generation of Random-Gen worlds, and certain prefab structures being set as universal to all biomes, you can get completely intact shacks and homes in the Wasteland Biomes, which are otherwise covered in rubble and ruins, as well as littered with Hub Cap Landmines. The way they spawn in like that almost makes it feel like these homes are haunted.
• Paranoia Fuel: Depending on your location in a biome, you may hear voices. The voices range from telling you to commit suicide and murdering other people.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Along the course of the game, a number of mechanics had teething problems, such as:
    • The recipe system, and to an extend, the crafting system. It's supposed to assist you for making craftables, but only does it with the items you have at hand. They've fixed a majority of the bugs with it, as of now, but if you played Minecraft, God forbid if you want plywood and place all your wood on the grid. Have fun with 120 plywood and say goodbye to all your wood.
    • The updated crafting system. They seem to both play it straight and avert it at the same time. On one hand, there's a timer, which makes most craftables take time. On the other, you can put in multiple items in the crafting grid that yield the same results, such as cans and candy-tins which become iron.
    • The looting system. When you search something, be it cupboard or a car, a timer starts. You're open for attacks when it happens. Also, your search cancels when you take damage, be it from a zombie or sometihing else. They fixed it for when you take damage from hunger, so it no longer causes you to be in a Cycle of Hurting.
    • Alpha 9.1 allows certain game mechanics (looting timer, crafting timer, etc.) to be modified or turned off entirely. Don't want to spend 30 seconds opening a gun safe? Just tweak the game settings before starting a new game or continuing your current game. Starting on Alpha 13, timers are mandatory, but mitigated in that they decrease the higher your Scavenging or corresponding Crafting skill is.
  • Certain enemies having the ability to always run regardless of conditions oftentimes discourage players who prefer non-running zombies from playing.
  • A more recent addition is the stun system, where a smack from a zombie has a chance of leaving you helplessly slow and with muted audio. It's intended to discourage bold players from just swooping into a horde with their melee arm drawn.
  • The way the zombies bob their heads in animations makes their heads extremely difficult to hit, even when they're only walking.
    • Special mention goes to any crawling zombie, who, on top of being closer to the ground and able to hide in grass, flails their head left and right while moving.
  • The Snow Biome sometimes makes an extra layer of snow accumulate on the ground, which does nothing but obscure your view of anything on the ground.
• Scrappy Weapon: The MP5 SMG. Parts are hard to come by, the integrated silencer does nothing outside of PvP, damage is subpar, and the ammo it uses (10mm) needs more gunpowder than a 9mm, and exactly the same mount that a .44 Magnum round requires, to craft.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: The devs have announced that they plan on simply making the SMG use 9mm ammo, completely cutting out the 10mm aspect and making it a lot cheaper to use now.
• Tainted by the Preview: Due to the game being Early Access on Steam, it's probably easy to see this happen, as this is the case with a lot of Early Access games. The very first recommendation for the game is negative, but the review was based around the game prior to Alpha 7 which overhauled the game. Doesn't help that the review is the first one you see and that the reviewer changes his opinion based on each update now, which seems to be nitpicking on several aspects rather than the lack of promises that was the core reason behind the negative review.
• That One Component: Getting mechanical parts is difficult in the early game due to a Chicken-and-Egg Paradox. The primary source of mechanical parts is disassembling machinery using a wrench. However, wrenches themselves require Mechanical Parts to craft. This means the player is likely to randomly loot an entire wrench before finding enough mechanical parts to craft one. Once the player has a wrench though, the plentiful number of things to disassemble means they'll never want for mechanical parts again.