How to Install 7 Days to Die and Join a Server

Every seventh night the music changes and the zombies stop shambling. That is the whole game compressed into one sentence: six days of scavenging, mining, crafting and reinforcing, then a blood moon horde that arrives to find out whether your walls were a good idea. Whatever you built either holds or it comes down on your head.

Doing that alone is a good game. Doing it on a server, where nineteen other people have their own bases, their own land claims and their own strong opinions about the mine shaft you dug under the trader's compound, is a different one. 24 servers are listed here, and no two of them are set up the same way.

This covers buying it, getting onto one of those servers, and the three or four things that go wrong on a first join.

What you need

• A Steam account
• 7 Days to Die, which is a paid game
• Somewhere in the region of 15 GB free, more once mods arrive
• An hour to spend alone before you inflict yourself on strangers

If Steam itself is new to you, the Steam install guide covers making an account and locking it down before you own anything worth stealing.

It is heavier than it looks

The screenshots suggest a modest game. The engine underneath is doing something unusual: the world is made of destructible voxels, and it recalculates whether structures are still standing every time you remove a block. Shoot a support pillar and the floor above it works out that it has nothing to rest on.

That costs memory. It costs more memory on a server with twenty players in twenty different places, because the world has to stay loaded around all of them. Systems that run modern shooters comfortably sometimes stutter here, and the culprit is almost always RAM or a slow drive rather than the graphics card.

An SSD changes the experience more than any settings menu will. Load times on a mechanical drive are genuinely unpleasant.

Install it, then leave multiplayer alone for an hour

Buy it on Steam, install from the Library, and let it finish. The files land under your Steam library folder in steamapps/common, in a directory named after the game.

Now start a single-player world and stay there for an hour.

This is not padding. 7 Days to Die has a long list of things that are obvious to everyone who plays it and invisible to everyone who does not, and learning them in public is miserable. In one offline hour you will find out that you need a bedroll placed before you die, that the land claim block is what stops other people dismantling your house, that wooden frames upgrade in stages rather than being built finished, and that a structure with nothing underneath it falls down.

You will also learn the progression, which is not the one the genre trained you to expect. You do not simply grind materials into better tools. Recipes come from what you read — the crafting magazines scattered through bookcases, mailboxes and loot containers — so a player who searches every shelf in a town outpaces a player who fights everything in it. That reshapes how you spend daylight.

Finding a server worth joining

The in-game browser is under the multiplayer option on the main menu. It lists public servers with player counts, ping and a set of filters, and it is fine. It sorts poorly, it shows a great many empty servers, and it tells you very little about how a server is actually configured.

The server list here exists for the second problem. Each listing is queried directly rather than trusting whatever the server claims about itself, and the description tells you what you are walking into before you spend forty minutes downloading it. If you want the general version of that argument, how to find a server worth staying on makes it at length.

What to look for in a listing, in rough order of how much it will affect your evening:

• PvE or PvP. These are not variations. They are two games.
• Wipe schedule. Most servers reset the map periodically, and joining four days before a wipe is a waste of four days.
• Modded or vanilla. Overhaul mods change everything, including whether you can join at all.
• Region. A server three thousand kilometres away is playable and unpleasant. Where a server is hosted matters more in a game with this much melee combat than it does in most.

Connecting directly

The multiplayer menu has an option to join by address, sitting alongside the browser. Paste the full address, including the port, and add the password if the listing gives one.

The port is the part people miss. A host running eight servers on one machine cannot give all eight the default, so copy the whole address:port string rather than the numbers before the colon. If a server refuses to appear, a wrong port is the first thing to check and the easiest to fix.

Once you are through, the game syncs the world state to you. On a server that has been running for weeks with a heavily built map, that first join is slow. It is faster afterwards.

Server settings matter more than mods do

This is the section that saves you from concluding that the game is broken when it is merely configured differently from the one you played offline.

Almost everything is adjustable by whoever runs the box, and the differences between two vanilla servers can be enormous:

Day length. The default gives you a fairly generous daylight period. Servers that shorten it turn every day into a scramble and every night into a siege. Servers that lengthen it make the game gentler and the blood moon further apart in real hours.

Blood moon frequency. Seven days is the name of the game, not a law. Servers run it at five, at three, or on a random cycle so nobody can plan for it.

Zombie speed. Whether the dead walk, jog or sprint, and whether that changes at night, is a setting. A server with sprinters at all hours is a horror game. A server with walkers is a building game.

Loot abundance and XP rate. A server at boosted rates gets you to the good tools in an evening. A server at reduced rates makes a stone axe feel like an achievement, which is the point for some people.

Airdrops, land claim size, offline durability. The last one decides whether your base can be broken into while you are asleep, and on a PvP server it is the single number most worth knowing before you invest a week in a compound.

Read the server's own description. The people running these boxes almost always publish their settings, and the ones who do not are telling you something.

Mods, overhauls and EasyAntiCheat

The 7 Days to Die modding scene is unusually ambitious. Overhaul projects rebuild the skill trees, add classes, add enemies and rewrite progression from the ground up — Darkness Falls is the best known of them, and playing it after a hundred hours of the base game is disorienting in a good way.

Two practical points.

Some mods are server-side only. The server runs them, your client does not need anything, and you connect normally. Others require the same files installed locally, and joining without them fails or produces a world full of missing objects. The server's own instructions are the authority here, and any server running a large overhaul will have written them down somewhere.

The second point is anti-cheat. Overhaul mods change game code, and EasyAntiCheat objects to that on principle. Servers running them will tell you to start the game with anti-cheat disabled, and the game's own launcher window carries that option — you do not need to edit anything to do it. If a modded server rejects you with no explanation, this is the likely reason.

Do not disable it out of habit. Vanilla servers will refuse you for it.

Living on somebody else's map

A shared world changes the game in ways the settings screen does not describe.

Land claim blocks are the social contract. Yours protects a radius around it, reduces what other players can do inside that radius, and marks the area as spoken for. Placing one on top of a trader route, across the only bridge, or immediately beside somebody's existing base is how you acquire enemies on a PvE server, where there is no mechanical punishment and a very real social one.

Traders are shared. On a busy server the good quest rewards are gone by the time you arrive, and the quest chains reset on a timer that the server controls.

Horde night is shared too, up to a point. Each player draws their own horde, and the server has a ceiling on how many zombies can exist at once. On a full server that ceiling is divided rather than multiplied, which means a blood moon can feel thinner than the one you fought alone — right up until three players end up in the same base and the whole allocation arrives in one place.

Mining under someone's base is the classic new-player mistake. Structural integrity does not care that you meant well.

Problems you will actually hit

The server does not appear, or refuses you instantly. Version mismatch. Your client and the server must be on the same build, and Steam updates you automatically while server owners update on their own schedule. If a server is stuck on an older build, Steam's beta branch selector in the game's properties is where you would go to match it — the server's description normally says which build it wants. Our overview of the current experimental release is a reasonable way to check what has changed recently and why a server might be waiting.

You join and everything is missing or misnamed. Mod mismatch. You have some of the server's mods and not all of them, or a different version.

The first join takes an eternity. Normal on an established map. It is transferring world state, not sulking.

You are put back to the menu after a minute of loading. Frequently a memory ceiling on your own machine rather than anything the server did. Close whatever else is running and try again before blaming the host.

Everyone else has vehicles and you have a stone axe. Not a bug. You joined a server that has been running for three weeks. Ask about the wipe date.

If this game clicks, these are next door

7 Days to Die sits at an odd junction of genres, and the games either side of it are all listed here. Rust takes the base-building and the raiding and removes almost all of the mercy, and its server culture split into modded and vanilla camps for reasons that will be familiar by the time you have played a week of this. Project Zomboid is the same fantasy played much slower and much crueller. DayZ takes the paranoid half and drops the building almost entirely.

If what you liked was specifically the building, Empyrion does it in space with ships you fly, and Soulmask does it with recruited villagers who keep working while you are away.

The thing all of them share with this one is that the server you pick determines the game you get. Read the description, ask in the community's chat, and give a place two evenings before deciding it is not for you.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. 7 Days to Die servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page, and 7 Days to Die's own numbers — servers online, players now, activity by hour — are on its statistics page.