7 Days to Die

• Adjust difficulty, zombie spawns and all the other various settings according to how good you start getting at the game. For your first game, you probably want to start on Easy. Once you've survived Day 28, you're probably ready for Normal. Also turn on the setting that marks airdrops on the map, it sucks to be so focused on what you're doing that you don't notice the sound of the plane until it's already gone.

• You have about eight in-game hours from when you start where no zombies will spawn in the area around you. Use that to gather resources and complete the starter quests as quickly as possible.

• Stone axes serve as a cheap and effective omnitool throughout most of the game, able to do everything from break trees and rocks to repair your base to kill zombies and butcher animal corpses. Specialized tools will always do the job better, but there's no real reason to not have a stone ax on your hotbar at all times, just in case.

• Certain tools work better on destroying certain materials. Axes rip through wood, picks rip through stone and metal. Pounding away on a steel door with a fireaxe will take longer than using a pickaxe.

• Depending on how you have your game setup, when you die you'll either lose just your quick slots, just your inventory, or both. Those items will be left in a backpack on the ground for you to go back and get where you died. Look for a little blue backpack marker on your compass to lead you back to where you died. It is possible, due to cave-ins or explosions, for your backpack to get destroyed after you die. This sucks, as all the stuff is permanently gone.

• You can level up by crafting, looting, and killing zombies. The higher your level, the more perk points you get, which you can spend on things like dealing more damage, increased based stats, and better recipes.

• If you're not sure where to put your perk points, focus on Strength, especially Pack Mule and Sexual Tyrannosaurus. Most of the good crafting perks have a minimum character level requirement, so start looking into Intellect (especially Hammer and Forge) once you're about level 20, and work on making iron tools and building a bicycle.

• Play around with the crafting system. Almost everything in the game has some sort of use and can be used to craft various items and building materials. Once you play for a while, you'll start learning what to hang on to and what to dump off somewhere, but if you don't know what something does, you can always look at what recipe it's eventually used for.

• If you're playing on the Navezgane map, rather than a random gen world, there are radiation zones that mark the edges of the world. The ground and air are tinted sickly green. They kill you if you wander into them. Randomly generated worlds have no radiation zones, but there are certain points of interest exclusive to Navezgane.

• Hordes of zombies typically spawn every 7 days, but mini-hordes spawn at any time if you create enough of a "heat" signature. Things like crafting, gunfire, using a forge, using a campfire and setting off explosions can attract some friends. This usually happens if you're doing several of these at once. Torches and other firelight also passively generates heat, but electric lights don't.

• If you crouch, the game will tell you how stealthy you're being, and will make every action you do less noisy at the cost of lower movement speed. You can also use this to sneak attack enemies for a bonus where you're undetected.