Best difficulty in 7 Days to Die & how to change

7 Days to Die has a few settings that you can tweak to customize your server, and you can also select a general difficulty level for the world. 

Here’s the best difficulty to play on and how to change it, including all the advanced settings you can tweak to customize your server. 

Best difficulty in 7 Days to Die

The best difficulty to play 7 Days to Die on is Nomad. This gives you a balanced playthrough where you still have challenging fights and need to work for your resources, but it’s not so difficult that you can’t manage. 

There are six difficulties in the game: 

• Scavenger: The easiest difficulty
• Adventurer: The default setting
• Nomad: For more experienced FPS players 
• Warrior: Fights against zombies are quite difficult
• Survivalist: Extremely challenging world
• Insane: The highest difficulty setting

Although Nomad gives the best overall experience without making things too tough, it’s ultimately up to you what difficulty you’d like to play on. You can choose your setting before you start your server under General Settings.

How to change difficulty in 7 Days to Die

1. Leave your server and go back to the main menu. 
2. Click on ‘Continue Game.’
3. Select the server you want to change your settings on. 
4. Navigate to the difficulty settings on the right hand side of the screen and select your new settings. 
5. Log back into the server.

You can change the settings of your server as much as you’d like, even the Multiplayer settings if you play with friends and want to make your server a bit more friendly or PvP focused. Just follow the same steps above to change any other settings.

Advanced settings explained

There are also some advanced settings in 7 Days to Die where you can change Blood Moon frequency, zombie speed, how much loot you can find, and more to make the game more challenging. Below we’ve listed all the settings you can change to customize your server.

Basic

• Blood Moon Frequency: How often Blood Moons happen (can be disabled).
• Blood Moon Range: Sets a range of when a Blood Moon can happen. For example, if it’s set to 2 days, a Blood Moon can happen up to 2 days late.
• Blood Moon Warning: Set the time of day the Day Number changes to red.
• Blood Moon Count: The number of zombies that can be alive at any time per player.
• Zombie Day Speed: Zombie speed during the day.
• Zombie Night Speed: Zombie speed during the night.
• Zombie Feral Speed: Zombie speed while Feral.
• Zombie Blood Moon Speed: Zombie speed during the Blood Moon. 
• Zombie Feral Sense: Increase or decrease the ability for zombies to see and hear you.
• Air Drops: Sets how often air-dropped supplies happen in-game. 
• Mark Air Drops: Whether or not airdrops are shown on the map.

Advanced

• Player Block Damage: Scales player block damage.
• AI Block Damage: Scales AI block damage.
• AI Blood Moon Block Damage: Scales AI block damage during the Blood Moon. 
• Loot Abundance: How much loot spawns in containers and on zombies.
• Loot Respawn Time: Sets how often loot respawns if there are no players around.
• Chunk Reset Time: The number of in-game days that pass before a Chunk resets to its original state if not visited or protected (can be disabled).
• Death Penalty: What you lose or are penalised with when you die (can be disabled). 
• Drop on Death: What items you drop when you die. Can set to ‘delete all items’ when you die.
• Drop on Quit: What items you drop when you quit (can be disabled). 
• Enemy Spawning: Can toggle whether or not zombies spawn in the world.
• Creative mode: Sets if creative mode and tools are allowed.

Multiplayer

• Player Killing: Set whether or not PvP is active, and if allies and strangers can be killed.
• Claim Size: Adjust the size of your Land Claim. 
• Claim Deadzone: Adjust how close players can place their Land Claims to each other.
• Claim Duration: Time a player can be offline until the Claim expires.
• Claim Decay Mode: How much a Land Claim’s hardness modifier decays over time. 
• Claim Health Online: Claim hardness modifier for players who are online. 
• Claim Offline Decay: The time it takes for a Land Claim hardness to transition from online to offline. 
• Bedroll Deadzone: How big the area is around the Bedroll where zombies cannot respawn.
• Bedroll Duration: Number of days a Bedroll stays active while the owner is offline. 
• Party Shared Kill Range: The range you must be in with other players to share XP and quest kills.
• Game Port: The number others use to connect to your server. 

A hardness modifier refers to how much effort it will take to break down a certain material, so you can set it for Land Claims in Multiplayer servers to determine whether or not other players can mess with other bases.

7 Days to Die Difficulty Tiers explained

The other kind of difficulty you’ll find in 7 Days to Die is the skulls that appear at the top of your screen when you enter a new area. This determines how difficult the area is in terms of the number and type of zombies that are there. 

The lowest Tier is 0, while the highest is Tier 5. You’re likely to encounter radiated zombies in these difficult areas, so be sure that you’re prepared when you run into one.

No matter what your difficulty is, it’s important to build your base in the right location so you can survive against Blood Moon Hordes and craft the gear you need to get stronger. Once you’ve survived the first night, you’ll have a good idea of whether or not you need to change your settings to suit your playstyle.