All Difficulty Settings in 7 Days To Die, Explained

Surviving the brain-eating hordes of 7 Days to Die is already tough, and the challenge only increases when you ratchet up the difficulty settings. If you’re looking for an easier experience, of course, that’s an option too. Like Project Zomboid, 7 Days to Die gives players a lot of ways to customize their experience. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t do a great job of explaining what its various difficulty settings do. How much harder is Survivalist than Scavenger? What changes? If you want to survive to see your first Blood Moon, you’re going to need some details. Here’s everything you need to know about how difficulty settings work in 7 Days to Die.

7 Days to Die Difficulty Guide

(Updated on July 26th, 2024 – updated images and explanation for 1.0 release)

How difficulty settings work is pretty straightforward in 7 Days to Die, but the game doesn’t tell you that. Instead of giving you a straightforward breakdown of pros and cons, all you get is the name of the difficulty level and a bit of flavor text. The truth is that difficulty settings only change two things in 7 Days to Die: how much damage you deal to zombies and how much damage zombies deal to you. You can see how both types of damage are affected in the following table:

Nomad is intended as the standard difficulty mode. On Nomad, you and the zombies deal normal, unmodified damage. Adventurer, by contrast, makes this easier by buffing the damage you deal and nerfing the damage you take. For example, if your attack would deal 20 damage on Nomad, it instead deals 30 (+50%) damage on Adventurer. Meanwhile, if you would receive 20 damage on Nomad, you instead receive 15 (-25%) damage on Adventurer.

Difficulty Pros and Cons

The big advantage of the way 7 Days to Die handles difficulty is its simplicity. If you play on Scavenger, you know all incoming damage is getting cut in half. Meanwhile, if you play on Survivalist, you know all incoming damage is getting doubled. Unless you’re busting out the console commands, that could mean a quick and bloody death.

Thanks to this system, it’s easy to tell how hard it will be to kill two zombies if you change the difficulty. The main disadvantage of this difficulty system is it doesn’t tweak other factors that also impact how hard the game is, such as loot spawn RNG. The odds that a given item will spawn are the same on the highest and lowest difficulties. If you want to change that, you’ll need to tinker with custom settings.