7 Days to Die

• 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 and killing zombies. The higher your level, the more perk points you get, which you can spend on things like dealing more damage, increasing max HP, and better recipes.

• 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 that I'm aware of.

• Adjust difficulty, zombie spawns and all the other various settings according to how good you start getting at the game. I love 7 Days To Die, but it's still in early access, so you have to tweak the experience a bit because it's easy to get overly efficient and make the endgame fairly trivial.

• 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.

• 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, rooting around in your backpack, 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.

• If you crouch, the game will tell you if you're being stealthy or not. Undetected > Sensed (Zombies smell/hear you) > Hunted (Zombies see you/are looking for you). You can also use this to sneak attack enemies for a bonus where you're undetected. Otherwise, stealth isn't implemented very well yet, so you won't really be Solid Snake of the zombie apocalypse.

• The game gets way easier with friends, but is also way, way more fun.

• Care packages drop at 12:00 every day from a plane that flies over. It's worth trying to find these when you see them parachute down (trailed by orange smoke) as they usually have good supplies, rare gun components or rare crafting schematics. Or sometimes they're absolutely worthless. It's a gamble. You can also adjust how often the care packages drop in the game setting.

• Minerals spawn in the ground, either randomly or down in tunnels you'll run across. It's worth remembering where these are as they are the best way to get plentiful forging resources to make armor, bullets, building supplies, etc. Be careful when mining though, a cave-in can kill you and even destroy your backpack.

• The hunting rifle and the crossbow are slow, but very powerful. With some good aim you can one-shot most zombies.

• Certain tools work better on destroying certain materials. Axes rip through wood, picks rip through stone and metal. A high enough quality in either (flawless) can destroy pretty much anything with equal speed. But pounding away on a steel door with a fireaxe will take longer than using a pick-axe.