7 Days to Die Alpha 14 Status Update and Release Date

The Fun Pimps are working hard on Alpha 14, and it has some great new content! Here are the highlights: Navezgane has gotten a lot bigger and better with a brand new improved height map with higher mountains and deep water, a new smoothing algorithm that makes the land and water much more natural, a multitude of new locations including the largest city in the expanded plains, and a bandit like shanty town and a huge lake with islands just to name a few.

Alpha 14 also has many new perks and improvements to our skills system, a great new damage and death system where zombies feed on your corpse, an introductory basics of survival quest, repeatable quest note challenges, a radiant buried treasure quest system for infinite digging for treasure fun, many new improved world textures and block shapes, a major rebalancing of block damage, leveling and XP, some good optimizations, random gen improvements, and so many bug fixes.

Here are a couple more shots that looked amazing. The Fun Pimps have completely rebalanced the game and fix every XML bug known. They’ve renamed every block and item in the game to a standard naming convention, so as a builder or modder the creative menu is like a dream now. All related items are in order and can be easily found. All blocks have a naming convention like color material block shape and further description. They extended all blocks from a master block. This means all balancing and bug fixing is done on about 10 master blocks and the nightmare of manually editing 1000′s of blocks is finally over.

Now the juicy parts! The block upgrade path is now fully balanced and we’ve added adobe so you can build a decent fort in the desert now. Also each weapon has been rebalanced from scrach with all weapon archtypes having a unique purpose. For example the pistol might not be uber powerful but it is now quiet so it would be useful to dispatch a few zombies quietly without alerting the entire wasteland. They resolved the issues where you could do 1400 points damage with a single shotgun blast because of stacked skill bugs.

Finally, they are working on chunk occlusion. They don’t have much occlusion now only LOD and models disappear at a distance. An occluder will hide hidden chunks like caves or when you are inside most of the outside will no longer render. This could yield some serious performance gains, so I’m really excited about this. They’re fixing bugs like maniacs and Alpha 14 is the last new save you will ever have to start. We’re committed to save game support from Alpha 14 forward.  Developers said Alpha 14 would be released at the end of February, and that day has passed.  I'm thinking a release date for Late March 2016.