Currently Playing: 7 Days to Die

I bought myself 7 Days to Die when it was on sale on Steam a few weeks ago (for £5.60 vs a normal £20-odd). It's your typical looter-shooter survival game, but with zombies. I was surprised by just how gorgeous it looks, and that my laptop will actually run it (it takes forever to start and does keep stalling for unknown reasons, but I'm impressed it runs at all). Scattered over the map (either pre-gen or randomly generated) are Points of Interest, POIs :-  homes, shops, factories, utilities, which you need to loot your way through in pursuit of the supplies you need to survive. (And the several hundred different POIs in the game are all built using the in-game building system which has something like 1000 different building blocks - impressive). So obviously you want to find yourself a nice safe base to settle down in, and for me that was a nice semi A-frame cabin by a lake that happened to be the second POI I cleared, and is right next door to one of the traders (who buy and sell loot, and give you missions). Lakeside view, wrap-around veranda, access up a flight of stairs*, the ideal place to live, if it wasn't for the shambling neighbours.

The '7 Days to Die' element is the game's tower-attack gimmick.  Every seven days, the Blood Moon rises and hordes of zombies attack your base throughout the night (standard settings are one hour per day, and the night runs 22:00 to 04:00  - so a quarter of an hour of mayhem. As the zombies can both beat their way through walls and will do World War Z style pile-ons if they stack up in one place, you need a carefully designed 'horde base' to get through the night. Especially as each week's horde is worse than the last. Looking on youtube the standard base design, with lots of individual variations, is basically to create a path up to what's effectively an armoured serving counter for you to deal out mayhem with rifles, pistols and nail-studded baseball bats.

So I'm now seven weeks into my initial game and should, in theory, have a good horde base by now. Emphasis on the 'in theory':

Week 1:  The week 1 Blood Moon I spent huddled atop a lift car in a mine-shaft after running out of time in the POI I was clearing. Every so often a zombie would appear, try to jump to get to me and plummet down the mine-shaft. Rince and repeat until morning.

Week 2: This time I completely lost track of what day it was, never mind what time. When the first clap of thunder marked the imminent arrival of the horde I had just enough time to sprint home, ditch everything I was carrying, and on the clap of 22:00 come out of my front door like an Olympic sprinter, hurdle the horde and throw myself into the lake. This tactic would have worked perfectly if I hadn't gotten myself stuck under a dock and drowned. When I respawned, essentially naked, I went and hid on top of one of those little box-girder bridges you get in the States and never saw a zombie all night.

Week 3: I accidentally built a horde base while trying to harden my base against random wandering hordes rushing in during the night. When the actual Blood Moon rolled around I had four customers all night.

Week 4: I stumbled back to my base just ahead of the Blood Moon after an encounter gone wrong with about half hit points, a broken leg and a concussion. So it was just as well I only had four customers all night. Again.

Week 5: I completed my next step in the horde base, boxing in under the veranda. Two customers all night, but I could hear far more. When I went out in the morning it turned out the horde had beaten its way under the veranda, then gotten stuck there.

Week 6: Ditto

Week 7: I expanded the veranda with a projecting bastion on the front right corner. This let me go and have a look at what the zombies were actually doing. All through the night each new wave would come running up to the framing under the veranda and try to beat its way inside. If they succeeded, they then tried to beat their way back out again.

Reader, I broke the zombies.

Plans for next week: bastions on all four corners, then string barbed wire between them to see it that helps.

* Stairs aren't ideal for real-world wheelie me, but are good for slowing down zombies.