7 Days to Die Griefing

So 7 Days to Die is basically my quintessential zombie apocalypse sim game at the moment. It does everything DayZ and all of its spin-off mods do without the jank, and has the features of Minecraft to boot. It also makes for some amazing griefing.


Buried Alive 1000 Leagues Under The Sea Lake:

So on the currently released map there's a fairly large body of water called the Spillway Lake. The rivers drain into it, so there's a fairly titanic amount of water in there. If you've ever played a game that uses fluid physics like Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft, you can probably imagine how this could backfire on a careless player if they wanted to build around there. This would be the part where I mention that 7 Days to Die has a rudimentary fluid physics system as well.

http://i.imgur.com/CZDN3HS.jpg

You might think most people would look at this and think to themselves "Wow, maybe I shouldn't build anything important below the elevation of the lake near here!". Especially in a game where you can drop your loot when you die, and buildings beyond a ramshackle wooden shack actually take a fairly dedicated amount of effort to create. You might also think that people aren't idiots too. You'd be wrong.

You see there's a commonly held belief among pubbies that the safest place to set up shop is below ground. This is because zombies will relentlessly siege and attempt to rip through walls and blocks to get to you if they find your location and it's dark out. So the zombies have to slowly tunnel downwards and eventually hit bedrock and come to a near complete halt due to how thick and strong it is. So, despite the fact that there's much more time efficient and resource efficient ways of setting up a secure base, lots of people like pretending they're dwarves.

Now on a 64 player server you're bound to find a few assholes. The usual bandits that want your loot, or just some hooligan who wants to blow up the little civilization all the people playing the game like it's a co-op experience have created aren't that uncommon. In fact, the game accounts for this as a gameplay mechanic by having the respawn system work through safehouses. You have to have a certain item placed to respawn at an area, otherwise you spawn at the edge of the map and have to work your way in. As a result, in a game like this blowing up someone's house is kind of like inscribing a penis into someone's backyard in Minecraft.

Some people turn the experience into a legitimate art form with the sheer havoc they create, though. This is one of those stories.

So someone got the idea to build a little Bayou-esque shack in the middle of the lake. Not a bad idea by itself. But then they figured they'd get crafty (Zombies can't get out of the water and into the house, due to how it's elevated slightly above it.) and created a tunnel down into the earth from the shack so that they'd have a secure way to get all the ores that let people make iron en-mass, get the resources for ammo so they don't have to scavenge, etc, etc.

http://i.imgur.com/PKBtJD4.jpg

Well, more and more people liked the idea on the server I was playing on. Time went on, and the place started to resemble a more civilized version of the Underdark. Vast caverns were mined out, structural supports were installed to keep the thing from collapsing in a tide of water and rock, burying everyone alive, houses were set up, vaults full of loot were established, lighting was installed so any undesirables couldn't sneak up on anyone. It was basically an underground city. Everyone in this clique thought their mining operation was utterly secure given all the planning they did to keep the thing from collapsing on them.

http://i.imgur.com/TJTiTmc.jpg

Cue a player coming along. We'll call him "Rob the Bandit". Rob was apparently a dickhead, but a hilariously clever one. He had somehow gotten his hands on a rocket launcher and a shit-ton of high explosives. Both of these are very rare, and the rocket launcher in particular is so rare that most players would never use it for fear of never finding more ammo for it. Especially on a large server like that. Not Rob. Rob was a dick. Rob was an entrepreneur of jackassery. He proceeded to assault every safehouse in range of the Spillway Mine and destroyed them using the explosives, blowing huge holes in them that would let zombies in and shutting down all the respawns on the surface save for the entrance to Spillway Mine.

At this point he ventured to the original safehouse and started looting it. I know this because he noticed the same thing I did, that everyone online near there was underground near a newly placed respawn point (They had ridiculous amounts of loot.) deep in the mine. As such I was looting their above ground storage chests before anyone noticed I was there, since some of them had a bad habit of shooting at people they didn't like. He sees me, realizes after a few bullets are exchanged that i'm not with the mining clique, and tells me to stop. He then picks up the last bed on the surface, whips out the fucking rocket launcher, and says "Watch this.", before firing a rocket straight down the original shaft.

Turns out they only had a few dirt walls lining it. Because the rocket went off at the bottom and blew the dirt keeping the water out. Cue a tidal wave of water slowly flowing down to fill the place up. Cue screams of horror starting to occur as everyone realized shortly afterwards that the place was rapidly flooding with the equivalent of the game's primary source of water for players. Then somehow, in the chaos, someone must have also knocked a support for the caverns out. Because a huge chunk of the lake suddenly sunk into itself as players buried themselves alive, trapping themselves inside. Everything must have gone dark down there too, since people started bitching about not being able to see. I guess the water extinguished the torches.

Then they realized that all of the respawns were gone. People started scrambling to get all of their loot out of the tunnels before they were killed and all of it was lost forever. Or until someone could spend an entire day dredging the place out.

Did I mention that they had moved a huge portion of their storage down there to get away from the zombies, and that if you die everything in your toolbar is dropped and can despawn shortly afterwards? And that the server was set up so that scavenged loot taken from searching objects does not respawn in the object later on? This meant that these people basically lived like kings while everyone else scrounged for basic materials up until this very moment.

The "Civilized Underdark" became something out of an undersea horror movie. People tried to claw their way out with their fists, others with pickaxes frantically tried to hack a path to the surface. Others were stuck inside closed off caverns with no way to see due to the darkness, randomly running at then punching a wall in the hopes that they were going up instead of down or sideways.

A few people realized how fucked the situation was and tried to suicide and respawn at the surface, only to find that they had to treck back from the edge of the map in the middle of the pitch black night while being hounded by hyper-aggressive zombies. More casualties mounted as a result of people hurrying to get back, more loot was lost, more tears were shed.

About an hour later, someone logged on and posted this.

http://i.imgur.com/wZ7vqC3.jpg

I wish I had gotten a picture of the lake afterwards. It looked like a swamp. There's probably a fortune in loot buried down there now. At least the house fits a lot better now. :V