Ever watched an old movie or television show featuring “future” technology and chuckled because, for example, they considered a phone that didn’t need to be plugged into a wall to be a big deal?
Some things like Star Trek‘s replicators or transporters remain the realm of science fiction, but other speculative fiction often falls prey to the march of time. No one’s reanimating dead tissue a la Dr. Frankenstein yet (that I know of, anyhow), but Jules Verne’s flight of fancy about massive submersible vehicles of war didn’t take long to become a reality. Speaking of reanimating tissue, though…
American fast food chain KFC has announced plans to debut 3D printed chicken nuggets made from a mix of plant matter and meat grown in a lab. In other words, basically meat cloned from chicken cells. That sort of tech is something we posited for the Zombie Ranch world seeing as livestock is mostly a memory of the past, and now here it is in the, err, flesh.
Honestly, this sort of thing makes me wonder if the replicators aren’t too far-fetched, after all? No breakthrough on those transporters, though, so figure on still getting from place to place the hard way for the foreseeable future.
I feel like this has become a 7 Days to Die blog of late, but uh… sorry not sorry? Listen, I have to tell you I started a new single player game intending to do an Uncle Chuck simulator after seeing how much the game emphasizes scavenging anything that’s not nailed down… and then there’s that old adage that it’s only nailed down if you don’t have a proper tool to remove nails. You can walk into just about any place and–given enough time and gumption–strip it down to the ground for spare parts. I mean, assuming you don’t attract a hungry horde with all the racket you’re making, but that’s why the cosmos gave us shotguns, right?
There are trailer parks in the game, but I must admit that’s not where Chuck ended up settling, not when I stumbled upon a former old-timey funeral home complete with walled-in graveyard that was conveniently close to a trading outpost. You might think this would be the last place to hole up in a zombie apocalypse, but once those graves were cleared out they made for nice, naturally nutrient rich planters in which to grow a protected herb garden.
Meanwhile the home itself needed some renovations and reinforcement, but the stairway access makes for a nice choke point against unwanted solicitations, particularly with some spiked trenching beneath. Just gotta watch that jump!
Still a work in progress, naturally, but it started out all in wood and will hopefully be concrete around the bottom by the time the exploders start showing up. Also note all the additions for gettin’ around so Chuck can shoot, throw molotovs, etc. from a relatively safe vantage point.
Meanwhile the trees I planted around the pond nearby have grown into a nice forest for wood farming, which is otherwise not so easy in the desert. What a picturesque patch of green, eh?
So that’s just a taste of all the landscaping and refurbishing you can get up to as you try to perfect your holdout. Mind you the game will do its level best to level it, but after a few horde nights survived it’s been so far, so good, even though I’m all on my own. Just gotta keep ahead of the curve. The electric fences I just got installed should help with that…
Oh and Chuck wanted me to be sure to mention the best selling point of the property, which was admittedly not even noticed until after the initial clearing and surveying because I first approached from the side opposite the sign. No modification needed, there. Perfection.
In my review of 7 Days to Die last week I talked about how the name of the game largely comes from the mechanic that, by default, the game is set so that every seven days of in-game time a “blood moon” event occurs, where as the sun goes down in a blood-red sky, hordes of frenzied zombies will stop their random shambling and instead make a full assault your safe house as you and your friends try desperately to hold them off. If you manage that, you have another seven days to repair, scavenge, explore and prep before they’ll be back again, even stronger than before. They might even bring along some new friends to mess with your battle plan. You’ll also keep respawning on death so long as your bedroll remains intact… but you may wish you didn’t.
Given the swiftness of zombies on blood moon night, it seemed appropriate for Dawn to capture and edit a video of our experiences of the fourth assault, i.e. “28 days later.” Massive spoilers of course, but now I know all-too-well what the commenter last week meant about finding a second base to avoid damage to the main one. Yikes.
A few caveats — we have some mods and adjustments in place for our server (like we don’t drop items on death, which would have led to a lot of bare-handed punching). The game is still in early access so there are some notable glitches, like Anthony ending up stuck floating his way through most of the video. Also this is VERY DEFINITELY NSFW or for any other environment sensitive to colorful language. Let’s just say panic mode doesn’t lend itself well to bowdlerized utterances like “shucks” and “dang.”
Also also: Dawn + shotgun + panic = teamkill shenanigans.
Remember not so long ago when it seemed like you couldn’t throw a digital stick without hitting some sort of zombie apocalypse video game? And that included a handful of attempts at an MMO, such as H1Z1 and Day Z. I remember not being terribly impressed with either of those efforts, and that was before they seemed to all but abandon their zombie experience in favor of jumping on the PvP Battle Royale bandwagon.
Well, anyhow fast forward to this past weekend when the Steam Summer Sale coughed up the suggestion of 7 Days to Die on my store feed. $8.49, or $13.59 for a 2-copy special with an extra for a friend to play. Still marked as “early access” but what the hell, for that price I decided to buy the 2-for-1 and give it a whirl, especially since I’d recently heard an endorsement giving praise to its building features.
Now apparently this game has been in early access status since 2013, which I didn’t know at the time and sounds really bad. However, I guess in 2020 we can call that seven years to live? Because whatever it might have been before, at the moment it’s become a fairly solid experience.
Before I go on, let me digress and talk about Fallout 4 for a moment, in particular its base building features. They were an endless source of frustration for me because one of my favorite post-apoc genre things is seeing survival forts adapted out of existing buildings of the “old world.” But Fallout’s existing structures were often not easy to build off of, or unavailable for building, or also often indestructible so you couldn’t modify or remove them. Various mods attempted to address these issues but they all had to wrestle with a system that from the ground up was very limited and unfriendly to alteration. When (courtesy of mods like the excellent Sim Settlements) I was able to get some semi-good compounds going, the occasional AI raid felt lackluster, to the point I eventually would end up doing things like cheat spawning a group of Deathclaws just to see how my defenses held up against them.
So far nearly everything in 7 Days to Die I’ve run across can be built upon or destroyed, including the very ground itself which you can dig into in order to create trenches, pits and even tunnels. The exceptions would be the “land claim” area of another player (though this can be solved by allying with them) and the NPC trader compounds dotted around the map. In addition to buying and selling those NPC traders can also give various quests which felt familiar to me as a Star Wars Galaxies veteran: go to this spot and clear it out/retrieve items/dig for treasure, then come back and be rewarded with XP, loot and “Duke Coins” — casino chips which have become de facto coin of the realm.
The attribute and perks system in leveling up will be familiar to Fallout players, though instead of a global “gunsmithing” skill, for example, crafting of weapons is locked to each weapon skill tree, like brass knuckles under Brawling. Fortunately there are also skill books you can find out in the wilds, as well as just plain breaking into an abandoned gun safe to find a high-quality boomstick. The catch, of course, is that you have to explore to find those, and exploring means zombies.
Not that staying put doesn’t have its own complications. You need to constantly be on the lookout for food and water, and anything that’s not sealed in a can has a chance to make you sick, though doing things like boiling the water from that murky river first helps. Meanwhile it can get really dark at night but lighting torches and campfires, in addition to other non-subtle activities like chopping down trees can raise the invisible “heat map” of a given area. Over time if that gets over a certain threshold, the Undead Home Owner’s Association might send a shambling representative by your property, and if they find you they may call in a group of your unfriendly neighbors. On the other hand, it’s still a good idea to hole up somewhere when the sun goes down, because by default settings the slow shamblers of the daytime become sprinters at night (you can alter this for a more Romero-esque experience if you wish, it’s still plenty scary in my opinion when you can’t frickin’ see or are searching the tight corridors of a wrecked hospital).
Everything is destructible given enough time and persistence, and we all know how persistent zed can be when he’s hungry. So if he starts banging on your door or even your bricked-up wall, you’d best deal with him before he gets in or at least weakens it for the next guest. On the plus side, you can make holes and break stuff, too. Can I knock out an upstairs window and then use it as a balcony entrance for a catwalk around the upper part of the house? Yes I can! Can I bust out a flimsy doorframe and block it with cubes of solid iron (again breakable, but not at all easily)? Yep, that too. Dig pits and fill them with zombie-skewering spikes? Yep, just watch you don’t fall in yourself. You can see some of the alterations we’ve made, like part of the catwalk and also window bars and spikes in the photo at the top of the blog. A land claim also isn’t technically required to build, either. I spent a night once in a treehouse out in an abandoned town and was able to take wood from the tree it was built in to make a catwalk bridge to reach the the roof of a house across the way.
But ideally you want somewhere to return to with decent defenses in place. And boy, will they ever be tested. Even without PvP involved this game is deadly and moments of inattention or arrogance can get you killed, or worse, infected. Yes, zombies and zombie animals(!) have a chance to transfer their dread disease to your person any time they hit you. You can lessen the chance by wearing armor (styled in an appropriate Mad Max aesthetic of course) but once you contract it the slow counter starts and you got about seven in-game days before you die. Oddly enough antibiotics are a cure for this, but you can go a long time without finding any of those and meanwhile your stats will slowly get worse and worse, provided you don’t just go for suicide or your buddies decide on assisted suicide. You’ll resurrect healthy at your bedroll (minus your stuff and maybe some XP) and it doesn’t seem like your old body gets back up hungry in those cases. Of course I haven’t yet seen the results of the infection running its course completely…
Anyhow, you might think that infection time is why the game is called 7 Days to Die.
Well, uh, there’s also this thing called the Blood Moon Night.
When the sun goes down on the seventh day, a terrifying horde will descend upon you and you’d best be prepared. I don’t want to spoil the experience too much but trust me when I say it’s some white-knuckle shit. Survive that and you’ve got another seven days to repair and prepare, but unless you (and maybe others on the server) have been dying a lot the “gamestage” level will likely have risen and it’ll be worse. Let’s just say on Day 7 they didn’t even get in to our safehouse. On Day 14 I was fighting the last wave off in our living room with the benefit of pain drugs and a set of bloody brass knuckles, and that was after running my AK-47 dry and using two out of three grenades that I had not intended to have to use.
The days go by frighteningly fast once you realize the cycle of doom you’re locked into. In the aftermath of Day 14 we have plans for dealing with Day 21 but if we can’t get our hands on more ammo — like, a lot more ammo — we’re gonna have a bad time.
But we’re also having a great time, because this is probably the closest we’ve ever come to having the immersion of an all-around zombie apocalypse experience in game form. It’s been well worth that Steam Sale price tag and the sale is still on through tomorrow (July 9) if any of this tickles your fancy. I highly recommend buying the 2-for-1 deal so you can gift one to a friend who can watch your back.
Oh and did I mention the abandoned Wild West town that’s part of the default map (representing the fictional Navezgane County, Arizona)? It’s like they know me…
One of American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin’s more famous quotes goes as such:
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
I’ve often heard the first part paraphrased as “a little liberty” which doesn’t leave much wriggle room versus “essential liberty.” Then you end up looking into it further and find out we mostly use it way out of its original context.
I can’t help but wonder if Franklin ever had to live through a global pandemic? Then again, now that I’ve looked up the quote again for this blog it seems that we mostly use it out of its intended context, anyhow. It sounds great as an anti-tyranny statement but was originally mostly about making sure certain rich people paid their taxes.
And even if we apply it to its 20th/21st Century context, well, there’s still some room for soul-searching as to why being asked to wear a face mask is giving up an “essential Liberty.” Especially now that the worst is (predictably) coming true and America’s laissez-faire attitude towards Covid-19 is causing its resurgence in a big way.
We shouldn’t have rushed to reopen so soon, and it’s perhaps even more tragic that here in California all signs were that we were getting it under control and then we had to go and screw it up right along with the administrations that never seemed to take it seriously at all. Now everything’s getting shut down again but according to the CDC, it’s too late.
At very least I don’t honestly know how anyone thought reopening bars was a workable idea. We still know comparatively little about how the disease operates but we do know that the most surefire scenario for contracting it is to be in an enclosed area with a lot of people for an an hour or two, particularly if they’re doing something like singing or shouting and aren’t wearing masks so that their exhalations flow free. That humid feeling you get in crowded nightclubs and bars? That’s human breath and sweat in the air. And the whole “be cautious and observe social distancing” protocol? That’s not going to survive much past a few drinks.
I’m not laying all the blame at the door of the far right, either. They might be the most vocal figurehead for denial and you’ve got some really fringe elements that apparently consider not spitting on the produce aisle in the supermarket an unforgivable affront to their freedom, but there has been plenty of stupid to go around on all points of the political spectrum. People in my own family that I would hardly describe as ragingly conservative have been getting manicures and haircuts. It’s more than disappointing to me, it legitimately terrifies me for their safety, no matter how otherwise careful they assure me they’re being.
I get it, to a point. I’ve always hated wearing a mask, even though I’ve suffered from allergies all my life. They’re uncomfortable and they tend to fog up my glasses. But you can breathe in them. Wearing one isn’t going to weaken your immune system from “disuse,” which is an actual statement I’ve heard people say in all seriousness. Trust me, we’re filthy creatures, our immune systems are constantly getting a workout whether or not we’re letting people cough in our faces. It’s such a little thing, and yet we can’t even do that much? If ever there was a time to give up a little liberty for some temporary safety, this was it. I’m past done with anyone downplaying the threat or insisting the “cure is worse than the disease” or any of that hogwash.
Anyhow, if ever I found the trope far-fetched of the guy hiding his zombie bite from the other survivors, putting everyone at risk because he figured nah, he won’t really be affected despite all observation to the contrary… here we are with a scenario where the worst that happens isn’t that you get shot in the head or exiled, you just get asked to leave the store.
Well, the worst that happens is you contribute to the spread of a deadly pandemic America could have stopped in its tracks like New Zealand, South Korea, and other countries managed to. As the ICU beds fill up, are we ready to admit we have a problem, and that the curve has not, in fact, flattened? Or will this weekend’s 4th of July celebrations be Memorial Day all over again?
For my part, I’ll be celebrating my liberty to turn down the BBQ invites. And I’m pretty sure that in these circumstances, Franklin would’ve worn a mask.
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