7 Days to Die: Day 2

Ok, a VERY brief glance at a couple newbie guides to 7dtd assures us that what we want to be building first is a sleeping bag, so we can respawn in one place.  That seems like a great idea.  Now, I just need a bunch of cotton.   Good news is, you can just grab up cotton plants from where-ever they are growing - no harvesting or chopping or anything.  Bad news, cotton is pretty scarce in some of the locations.

After finding enough cotton and slowly assembling cloth fragments and then sleeping bags (and then subsequently losing all that hard work by picking up the sleeping bag and dying with it in my inventory while trying to move it to a new location), the new challenge is building a real shelter.  Because just crouching down at night and hoping to not attract the attention of running, glow-eyed zombies seems like a pretty bad apocalypse plan.

We finally figure out that the stone axes are sufficient for chopping down medium-sized trees to get those wood planks the game keeps hinting at, it just takes some significant chopping to get one down.  I assembled a rudimentary... square of wood frames, but they're see-through, and zombies still rush at me at night, and several things become apparent: 1) there's no hiding from zombies? 2) wood frames are super breakable by zombies, and 3) when there's nothing supporting a wood frame, the whole lot of it falls and breaks apart!  Sucks.  Time to do some more reading up and maybe restart the server.

7 Days to Die: Day 1

Day 1, as in, the first day that I played it.  In-game, actually I think three days went by.
In the spirit of the game, neither Xian nor I read any walk throughs or guides.  It's an apocalypse simulator, and let's hurl ourselves in there and just figure it out as the apocalypse intended.

So we're just mostly-naked husks wandering around ruins and wilderness.  We have no idea where the other person is, and have to sit around experimenting with the controls just to figure out how to move around, crouch, etc.  I loot everything that can be clicked on and find.... a bunch of junk, seemingly.  Well, the thing I searched was labeled "smelly garbage" so, not like I had high expectations.

Zombies appear at the peripheries of my vision-limit, shambling around aimlessly.  When I crouch, I can see that they apparently have no interest in me, currently.  That changes quickly when I come across an empty building.  I move from 'sensed' to 'hunted' and quickly abandon the building search plan to book it back to empty wilderness.  A sign nearby proclaims it's a campground.  What a great idea.  Except it's overrun by zombie dogs.  How awful, in retrospect.

Death respawns me randomly somewhere else on the map.  It's snowing here, but I don't know if I take extra damage or what.  I hike out of the snowy area to another area and immediately start taking phantom damage and die.  Xian posits that I was standing in a poisonous swamp or something similar, but I had no warning or visual cues that it was.

All these deaths are reducing my maximum health?  Not really understood just yet.  We finally figure out that the green arrows on the compass are pointing at each other, and the blue backpacks are pointing at our corpse and dropped items, but respawning can happen in a vastly different area of the map, and it can take more than the cycle of the day to traverse the distance.  At night, the zombies really want to get you, and can now run.  There's no way to hide or survive.  Xian has fashioned a crude stone axe from some rocks and plant fibers, but it may be time to look around for some preliminary information.

Escape Rooms: General Advice

Advice for when you find yourself with nothing to do

• Go through the entire room and open/overturn everything (even if someone's already done it!)
• Big furniture?  Go ahead.  If they didn't want you to move it, they would have nailed it down
• Books: flip through every one - are there markings, notations, hidden slips of paper in the jackets, dog ears?  Is it a reference book that matches up to a code? 
• Paintings: Look behind, look inside (if nobody stops you), look at what's depicted on the painting
• Tables: Look in, on, under.  Open the drawers and then look on the underside of those drawers.  Which drawers cannot be opened?  What do they need in order to be opened? 
• Cupboards: Check in, check each shelf, check UNDER each shelf, check the very top if you can reach
• Carpets: Floor is fair game!  Peel it back where you can, look under
• Walls: look for writing, look behind objects, look low and high
• Ceilings: look up! Check the lighting, check for writing
• When doing any of the above, what am I looking for? 
• Anything that's out of place, has a handwritten clue on it, a code to decipher, anything.  If it can be picked up, take it to a place where you can consolidate all the clues

Advice for solving puzzles

• Some puzzles can be solved as they are, but a lot of them will need extra clues, and it's up to you to match the clues together, even if they're all over the room.  That's when consolidation and note taking will help.
• For example: one clue will read: "yellow house + white horse = ____".  That's not solvable as it is.  But somewhere else in the room, you can bet there's a yellow house with maybe a number written on it, you see where I'm going with this?  If a clue doesn't look solvable with the information you have at hand, you need to go out and get more.
• Ok, I have a ton of puzzles and a ton of "keys" that should go with puzzles.  How do I match them up? 
• There should be a clue in the flavor text - or at least some indicator somewhere!  Let's say you have a locked chest.  Is there anything written on the chest?  Is anything in that text emphasized, different colored, capitalized?  Maybe it's trying to give you a hint.  No words?  Maybe there's a lock that can only be unlocked with letters, or shapes, or directions.   Example: it's a directional lock, now you know what you're looking for.  A series of directional inputs.  Look through your "keys" (a pile of clues that aren't puzzles themselves).  Do any of them say something like "NEWS"?  That's a series of directional inputs!  Try it! 
• Most clues and puzzles won't be used twice.  That's not a guarantee!  But it's likely that you can set aside both the puzzles and the clues you've already used in a separate area from the ones that have yet to be used.