7DTD – The Great Minibike Catastrophe

I’m now 56 days into my Navezgane 7 Days To Die game. I’ve built a forge and a workbench and a cement mixer and my base is getting upgraded to concrete and reinforced steel. Just in time for the bigger zombies like policemen, soldiers, and weird alien “feral” zombies.

I also found some iron veins to mine. I had a hard time finding them because I kept hearing that you’re supposed to dig where you find gravel but it’s not actually “gravel” that comes out of the ground, it’s sand and stone (which combine to make gravel).

It took a long time to assemble the parts, but I put together a minibike. The way it works is you plop down a “minibike frame” on the ground somewhere and then add the rest of the parts as you find them until you get a working machine. You need to scrounge up an engine, a battery, handlebars, tires, etc.

(I built mine inside my base but I wouldn’t recommend that because once it’s complete you have to drive it out and it’s not super easy to navigate a minibike through doors and spike traps.)

I got some of the parts by buying them from the secret stash at traders (there are two different traders in range of my base). Some of the others I scavenged from cars with a wrench. I only recently learned that you can use a wrench to “take apart” items out in the world, like cars and air conditioners and refrigerators. You get things like gasoline and springs and mechanical parts and electrical parts. I had a bunch of wrenches lying around but I never thought to use them before. That was how I got enough mechanical parts to make a workbench.

Eventually I put the last minibike part in place (the seat) and I was able to sit on it (Ayyyyyy, says The Fonz). It needed gasoline so I filled it about 30% full and then dropped all of my stacks of gasoline in the minibike storage so I’d have some in case I got stranded somewhere. (I had gotten gasoline by scavenging from gas station pumps and cars.)

It was night time when I finished the minibike so I had to wait patiently until morning before I could ride it. When morning came, I crept out of my base and around all the spike traps and hit the open road. Minibikes are really fast, compared to running. And for some reason, it switches to a third-person view while you’re driving, so you get to see yourself.

There’s some graphical clunkiness that goes with the minibikes, but it’s a small price to pay for long-distance transportation. The biggest problem with the minimike is that you can’t see the map while you’re riding. You have to stop, get off the bike, then open the map. Which was probably a contributing factor in what happened next.

I drove and drove and drove, going farther than I’d ever gone before. I wanted to do a big circuit around the map and try to find as many city centers as possible. I figured I’d be able to drive all over the map and get back before dark, because I’d gone a huge distance and it wasn’t even 9:00 AM yet.

Then suddenly I started taking damage. What? Did I hit a spike trap? Was I starving? Was somebody shooting at me?

Nope, I’d driven off the side of the map into the radiation zone, where you get killed pretty fast. When I realized what had happened, I turned around in a panic (bumping off the road and through a desert terrain filled with cactii, which in real life undoubtedly would have given me a flat tire and a a faceful of thorns) and drove back as fast as I could. But it was too late, and I died.

*headdesk*

If you haven’t played 7 Days To Die, maybe you don’t appreciate how much of a blunder that was, so I’ll try to explain.

First, when you die, you drop everything you’re carrying at the spot where you die. Nothing in my backpack was irreplaceable, but far more infuriating was the fact that the minibike I’d spent forever building also got left back there where I died.

When you die, you respawn on the last sleeping bag you set down, which means I spawned waaaaay back at my base. It had taken no time to drive out to the edge of the map on a minibike, but running back there would take most of the (game) day. And as I’ve mentioned before, generally you don’t want to be out in the open at night in 7 Days To Die.

But it gets worse because I’d died in the radiation zone. That means I would have to run out into the radiation, get my stuff, and run back (on foot) and hope I didn’t take too much damage in the process. I didn’t know how far I’d have to run or how much damage the radiation would do.

I had collected some parts of a hazard suit, which is supposed to resist radiation, so I put those on, grabbed some basic gear, and started running. I almost died of heat stroke on the way out there because it was mid-afternoon in the desert by then, but I made it. I put down a sleeping bag in a house near the radiation zone so I wouldn’t have to run so far in case I died.

Fortunately my backpack and minibike where not too far over the border into the radiation zone. Un-fortunately it was still too far. I ran out there in my hazard suit, got to my backpack, picked up everything, turned around to run back, and died before I could take a step.

So I lost my hazard suit in addition to my supplies and minibike.

Next time I ran out there I died before I even got to my backpack. I tried a couple more times but it was pretty obvious I was never going to recover the backpack or the minibike, unless I happen to find some Rad-X in this game.

So I ran all the way back to my base. (Actually to be honest, first I rage-quit* for a while.) Then, to add insult to injury, as soon as I arrived back at my base after a long run, a zombie dog got inside and killed me before I could put down a new sleeping bag. So of course I respawned alllllll the way back at the house on the edge of the map and I had to run back to base again. (After waiting through the night because it was dark by then.)

All in all it was a very depressing first minibike adventure.

The only good news is that it won’t take too long to build a new minibike, because while I was out getting killed and running back and forth, I stumbled across a “Minibikes For Dummies” book, which means I can now build the parts for a minibike, instead of hoping to find or buy them. (All but the tires, at least.)

• Rage-quitted? Raged-quit?