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The first thing I do pass the first few hours, is look for a small building with rooftop access, then knock down the bottom ladder bits. The Pass N Gas is a good place to start. So the only way to get up is to run and jump onto the ladder. Then I wait out the night. The next morning, I immediately go around and scavenge stuff I need. I go into buildings and retrieve what I can. When I attack zombies, I 'ping pong' back and forth and hit their heads. Most of the time, I run away, because I'm not geared enough or levelled enough to kill most.
I build the Dew Collector as soon as I get stuff, and also at least one storage crate. I make Golden Rod and Chrysanthemum tea as soon as I can.
I can make a workbench within the first 2 in-game weeks, and the forge within the first in-game week. No need for anvils and crucibles until way later. Also, found out that machetes are awesome! Even tier 1.
For food, just need to find food in the kitchen or diners, and small animals. Use a bone knife to carve them up.
That was my 6th death in over 800 hours.
So, yes. It's entirely possible to survive past a few days and more. My super low death count is a testament to that.
The early days are meant to be a struggle its a balance between aquiring supplies and making preparation for the first few horde nights. Will you make a kill base, bunker up in a building removing way up to you, Maybe you found a mega drink or coffee and just want to run around all night.
2 Always carry a few wooden spike traps you can put them down to slow zombies (run around them and the zombie will run onto them.
3 Also carry some wooden building blocks if you meet an early feral, run away place one, jump on it, then jump and place another below you, stab or shoot the zombies from a safe spot and make sure to watch the block to repair it.
4 Always carry the stuff you need to repair your weapons.
Edit
Also focus the easy early challenges (y) to get some exp and choose a melee weapon (I like spears) and focus getting that melee skill up asap.
While you can do this, it just feels like ridiculous cheesing of the system. The trader shouldn't be paying you hundreds of bucks for some common plants you literally pulled out of the ground right outside their trading post.
A couple days at most once you understand how the game works, but it can take a week or more when you're new.
Does anyone actually make it through the first couple of days before dying due to...starvation...thirst...infection...animal and/or zombie attacks?
Yes, most of us do. I have started 5 games in v1.0 with fresh characters on random maps and have had no issues with this at all.
How am I expected to 'survive' if I can't even boil water until day 10?
You should be able to find a pot within the first couple days but if you can't find one then you will have to either make one or buy one. You should be able to do that before the end of the first week. In the meantime focus on looting to find water, drinks, and a pot and if necessary simply buy water or other drinks at the vendor.
If I didn't use the cheat mode...I'd be dead...MULTIPLE times before nightfall, day 1.
Come on.... WTF?
I really enjoy the building aspect of the game, but it's too slow if I turn off the zombie spawns, so I play on low levels (and I STILL have to cheat).
Ah, there's the issue. You're relying on that mode instead of learning to play properly.
7DTD has a very harsh learning curve. It's not unusual for it to seem impossible for a new player. It's easy for those of us who've played it a lot to forget what it was like to begin with.
If you look around these forums (or online with content creators who focus on 7DTD) you'll find players who can breeze through on maximum difficulty. You can also find overhaul mods that make 7DTD much, much harder and that those mods are popular. "Darkness Falls" is the best known. I think that War3zUK has the hardest start of any overhaul mod, but Darkness Falls scales higher as you progress.
I've played them all. I stroll through vanilla sometimes, just for some fun in an easy game and usually only when a new alpha comes out and I want to do the first run vanilla.
When I started playing, I died all the time. Over and over and over again. On my first game, I didn't last a minute after the initial very brief tutorial (which in those days was just gathering some nearby stones and wood and plant fibres and making a crude axe, club and clothing and a primitive bow with 1 arrow). Literally didn't last a minute. Didn't make it 50 metres towards the first trader. I must have died a dozen times before making it a week. Maybe more than a dozen. Everything killed me. Everything and its dog. Especially its dog. Dogs are probably the biggest player-killer in the early game.
So what I'm saying is essentially "It's not just you". What you're experiencing is normal for a new player. The learning curve is steep...but it can be climbed.
Yes. It becomes trivial with experience playing the game. If I die in the early game now, I'm either playing War3zUK or I'm not paying any attention at all and doing all the dumb.
In vanilla, a couple of game days maybe. But there's no period in which any problem is significant unless I get infected on day 1 before I've obtained honey. Which is still fixable, but that's a challenge.
I learned to play better by dying a lot, but cheating works too and might be more efficient.
By learning how to get to that stage by day 1. It's a bit harder in A22/1.0 than in earlier alphas, but it's still definitely doable. Every trader always has a cooking pot in stock. 600 dukes. You can get 600 dukes from at most 2 L1 trader jobs in A22/1.0. Or even from raiding tier 0 POIs (easy right from the start, they're not even tier 1 POIs, so they're even easier than the trader jobs) and selling everything you can find to the trader. To begin with, sell it all. You need potable water before pretty much anything else. Potable water is the first hurdle to overcome. You can get murky water from looting toilets, water dispensers, soft drinks dispensers, the big blue water bottles, boxes of alcohol, coffee makers. Plenty of it about. Once you get a cooking pot, you'll be OK for water. You can buy a cooking grill the same way if you don't find one, but that's a much lower priority.
Food can be obtained from looting POIs. It's not great food, but it'll do. Tins of dogfood, yum! You can also buy food from the trader and from one of the trader's vending machines. The other is for drinks. Air drops can be outstanding for food. The first air drop (day 4, IIRC) can set you up for food for days. One food bundle will open to 10 high quality meals.
Scour kitchens in POIs. As well as some food, you'll probably find some cooking magazines. Finding enough to learn how to make bacon and eggs is a common crossover point. You'll probably have killed some uninfected animals (snakes, for example) even if you haven't been hunting them. Search all the bird nests you find. You can use the feathers to make arrows, but the main point is that some of them contain eggs. Meat and eggs will cook to bacon and eggs. Snake bacon, chicken bacon...it's all bacon somehow.
Searching everything searchable is a good idea in the early game. Even if you don't find anything you can use, you might find something you can sell and you will get experience.
You can craft some of the most basic items without anything, not even a workbench or a forge. You just need the materials. A forge will work without bellows, anvil or crucible, although you won't be able to make steel.
In A21 and earlier, you can make cloth armour from the start and can get the materials for it quite easily. In A22/1.0, you can make primitive armour from the start and get the materials for it very easily and it's far better than cloth armour.
Melee combat takes some learning in 7DTD. The key factor is measure, the distance within which an attack can be made. One method of learning that is to cheat - spawn in a zombie with the AI turned off and beat on it to learn your measure with different melee weapons. It's usually further than a new player expects it to be. Once you've learned that (either in normal play or with the above cheating), the key factor is learning the zombie's measure and their fighting style. They're very stupid and therefore usually very predictable. With practice, you'll become able to anticipate their attacks, step out of their measure as they attack, then step into your measure to attack them. This works just fine for normal zombies in most circumstances. They do sometimes attack in an less predictable way, e.g. dropping to the ground and attacking you low, but generally you can anticipate, move out of their attack, move in and attack them. As long as you have space. You need to maintain awareness of your surroundings, where you can back up to, what doors lead to where. Getting stuck with your back to a wall and no way out will usually get you killed. Be very wary of POIs that lead you into dropping down into a room. It can be better to smash a door in or even chop a hole in a wall rather than dropping down into an unknown room.
In the early game, a pipe machinegun is a very good idea. Easy to make and it's a full auto rifle. It's a crap full auto rifle and you won't have much ammo for it, but when it's all gone wrong and they're in your face, a full auto rifle can make all the difference.
Going out and about at night in the early game is a chancy business. I usually just hide in the dark for the first few nights. Two effective ways to do that - find a POI with several stories, clear it and hide on the top floor or slap together a crude shelter from simple building blocks and spend all night crouched inside it, not moving. As long as the zombies can't see you and you don't make any noise, they'll ignore you unless you have feral sense turned on. Don't turn feral sense on unless you want the game to be much, much harder.
Some players tend to spend the nights mining under their base, to get soil and stone and maybe other materials if they're lucky.
Only during horde night or if you have feral sense turned on. Otherwise, they won't know you're there unless they can see or hear you. Or you have stuff burning, like campfires and forges and torches. Or more than a couple of dew collectors, which attract zombies because reasons.
You could turn off horde night. That would stop the "blood moon" thing during which every zombie within a million miles knows exactly where you are through magic and will come to kill you. I prefer to do that and increase the size of wandering hordes that can turn up anywhere, anytime. I'm not a fan of tower defence games.
One of the good things about 7DTD is the extent to which players can change it to suit their own preferences, even without mods or editing text files.
EDIT: A couple more things occurred to me. Try to minimise running early on. The game doesn't tell you, but regenerating stamina uses up the food and drink you've consumed. So the more you run, the more food and drink you'll need. Putting a point into the Iron Gut skill helps out with food and drink usage too.
It's really not hard once you know the order of operation upon starting the game. The game kind of depends on constant looting at the beginning. Looting for water and food
To me personally, this game failed its playerbase and should just let the modders handle it, you know, like they've BEEN doing?
Shame the looting is so wonky because man this game is one of a kind when it comes to PoI design. Love it and hate it so much its unreal.
But since 1.0 left the alpha/beta the pregen maps seemed effed up usually with nothing to quest around in, so you can't really quest anymore.
So bird nests and toilets are the key for infinite survival while the game offers no quests besides from the stupid digging quests.