You know that moment when winter rolls around and you realize it’s not just your heating bill that needs attention? Well, in 7 Days to Die, we’ve got a slew of patches brewing like hot cocoa on a cold night. The 1.2 Crossplay Patch, 1.3 Japanese Patch, and the intriguing 2.0 Storms Brewing Patch all come together to give us some much-needed updates.
7 Days to Die Winter Patch Notes
Winter Patch Status
As we near the holiday break and we thought we would take the time to update the community on the status of our Winter Patch plans. Read on for more information.
Version 1.2 Update
We have passed cert for the version 1.2 patch on consoles and just released it to PC experimental for further testing. The patch will go stable on PC before the Holiday Break and then pushed to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S as soon as possible assuming no critical bugs arise. See the full release notes below.
Version 1.3 Update
We have made significant progress on the Japanese PlayStation 5 version but expect it to go into certification after the holiday break and are targeting a release in January 2025 barring any critical bugs and CERO approval.
Version 2.0 Storms Brewing Update
Our earlier estimates for the timing of the Storms Brewing update were optimistic. The update is going great but we expect it to land late Q1 2025. Although it is later than anticipated the 1.2 features from it will come sooner. Storms Brewing will Include:
- Full new weather survival system that has unique environmental damage types, remedies and challenges per biome
- Cross play on Dedicated servers
- Advanced New Radiated Game staged Zombie enemies
- Updated Trees for Performance and some new biome looks
- Updated handheld Drinks and Food Item meshes
- New Sub Title System
- New belt message priority system
- New zombie spawning tool optimization for high tier POIS.
- New player Wardrobe system that allows player to keep their outfit protection but change their outfit appearance.
- New Player DLC outfits
- Twitch Drops
- A ton of bug fixes, balance, optimizations and quality of life features. Too many to list now.
V 1.2 Official Release Notes
RWG for consoles
- We have enabled usage of random world generation for consoles which will generate worlds with sizes up to 8192
Crossplay for PC and Console Peer to Peer (NO dedicated servers yet!!!)
- PC (Windows, Mac, Linux) and PS5 and Xbox Series consoles can host and join peer-to-peer multiplayer sessions with the other platforms.
- Device restrictions on player counts for hosting multiplayer sessions still apply.
- Easy Anti Cheat must be enabled for PC clients to host or join cross-play enabled sessions.
- Added support for blocking players from other platforms
- Console clients can join world sizes greater than 8k (even though they can not create or host them).
- We are currently not setting any hard player count limitations for crossplay, however the player experience will vary depending on the client/host hardware and situation. For example if you have more than 6 players all in the same area on a blood moon it can be challenging on some hardware.
Rendering performance optimizations
- Overall general rendering performance has been improved by reducing overhead due to rendering multiple cameras in the first person view which is a significant performance optimization on all platforms
Rendering quality enhancements
- First person player avatar is now influenced by environment shadows and reflections for all platforms.
Graphics options for console
- Added performance and quality graphics presets for each platform. Performance presets prioritize higher framerates and quality presets prioritize render resolution.
- AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution (FSR) up-scaling can be enabled in performance or quality mode
FSR Improvements
- Reduced blurry artifacts when looking at trees with FSR enabled
- Improved overall clarity of FSR output.
- Upgraded FSR version to 3.1.
Bug fixes
- Game will remain paused (where possible) when opening the bug report window
- Improved recovery of cases where the player falls through the world due to missing world geometry
V1.2 b24 Changelog
Added
- Cross platform block lists
- Implemented console Performance/Quality graphics modes, selectable through the video options UI.
- New vulture model
- New rabbit model
- New chicken model
- Biome spawner delays have a 10% random variation
- CRT TV emergency broadcast sound (*enables with light)
- Sleeper volumes reset the available spawn points when finding one if they have all been used
- Deco manager tree grouping with async loading and work spread out more evenly
- Additional flame prefabs to burning Zombies
- SFX for nerd outfit extra crafting skill point perk
- Missing spark textures for mines
- Blood moon party maximum active enemy count with increased game stage scaling based on the full count
Changed
- Revised first person rendering to use a single camera
- Disabled the old resolution scaling and enabled FSR in Performance mode on all console platforms
- Enable RWG menu items for console
- Allow opening of chat window when communication blocked
- Implement show user profile for PS5
- Optimized entity effect groups by removing duplicate setters from ancestors
- Improved biome entity spawners to run timers independently of counts and better track counts so they can’t spawn over the limit
- Re-balanced biome entity spawner counts and delays
- Removed sleeper spawning at farthest position ground check if using min script
- Improved active sleeper despawning rules to allow more distance and time
- Optimized material cleanup
- Optimized object pooling and containers
- Optimized chunk wall volume containers
- Video brightness setting darkens interiors and night when set below 50%
- Decreased darkest range of moon light slightly
- Helmet light mod to have less range
- Optimized FindInChildren
- Optimized entity spawning model type lookup
- Updated Screamer sounds
- Solar Cells can no longer be scrapped
- Grace is no longer zombie food
- Optimized vehicles to not use a container object
- Increased blood moon party distance to add players
Fixed
- Iron Gut does not apply on login
- Xbox/PS5 Friends not working in Server Browser
- RWG previewer not removing some of the button handlers on close
- Server doesn’t log chat sender names
- NRE and loss of controls when sign or storage crate is destroyed while writing in it
- Copy+paste kills tabs/linebreaks
- Error loading prefabs with ExcludePOICulling=true due to outdated ins files
- Effect groups do not extend from ancestors in the correct order in entityclasses xml
- Vehicle manager respawns vehicles repeatedly if a non vehicle entity has the same id
- A biome zombie type spawner could have a permanently disabled timer if they aged out before a player ever killed one (old data is removed and they will start spawning again)
- Biome spawners could conflict and use the same status data
- Arrow LOD issue zooming in and out while bow is pulled back
- No respawn on min script sleeper volumes if entity despawned
- Player drop time delay was affected by frame rate
- Simple prefabs like part_streetlight_single generated an empty imposter mesh
- Chunks being copied to Unity could rarely have the wrong object and block all copying
- Primitive outfit has a read/write issue
- Occasional Exception and NRE when exiting to Main Menu
- Wall volumes were added to chunks they did not overlap and had unneeded padding
- Sleeper and trigger volumes were added to chunks they did not overlap
- Battery and solar banks beep when relogging
- Player placed torches had a duplicate Audio Player
- Audio sources with doppler could make squeaks or dropouts on player teleport or world origin shifts
- Audio manager would still track many sounds after they were destroyed
- Loot abundance settings below 100% would give less loot than it should
- Hordestone Twitch Event should not auto respawn.
- Tactical Assault Rifle missing reflex sight model
- Headgear morphs won’t spawn in when in first person view now.
- Drone inventory can roll back as client while using drone healing mod
- Drone can’t heal player while on vehicle
- First time the drone heals the player after a debuff has been healed, it fails to heal the player
- Invisible character when being transported out of trader on vehicle
- Vehicle camera position glitches when origin shift happens
- EntityFactory GetEntityType warnings from missing types
Players are excited about crossplay capabilities, finally opening up avenues for teaming up with friends across platforms without those pesky restrictions getting in the way. Remember those days when you’d have to convince your buddy on Xbox to switch over so that you could survive another night against hordes of zombies? Yeah, no more of that nonsense!
The Japanese patch is also generating excitement. It’s like adding mochi ice cream to your gaming experience, a delightful treat that improves everything! This broadens accessibility and reminds us how global our community really is.
A little reflection here: I remember when I first dove into 7 Days to Die. Surviving my first horde was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time! Are you ever barricaded in a house full of supplies only to realize you forgot about crafting essential items? Yeah… lessons learned the hard way.
The upcoming Storms Brewing patch intrigues me as it sounds like something out of an epic fantasy novel! Weather mechanics can dramatically shift gameplay dynamics; visibility issues during storms could lead players into unexpected confrontations or even strategic retreats.
