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UPDATE October 31st- The Halloween Update has been released which is a major revamp of 7 DayZ to Mine and more in tune with the theme.  Get it on the Technic platform.  Downloadable server has been released as well.

It has been more than four months since the last update to 7 DayZ to Mine.  After watching many video reviews, taking feedback from players and doing a lot of thinking; I finally sat down and planned a major revamp of the entire gaming experience.  It is time to take 7 DayZ to Mine out of development (alpha) and into beta, which is a fancy way of saying that this new version will be much closer to the final version of the product.

Wooden Palisades and many other wall types spawn in various biomes. Some walls have chests filled with loot and are protected by special zombies and other monsters.

I wanted to create an experience unlike anything done with Minecraft before; in a genre that always seems to be popular with audiences- Zombies.  The popular games 7 Days to Die, DayZ and Fallout were inspirations; but I don’t have a big team of artists, unlimited time and/or developers to create static cities, AI and structures.  I loved games like Diablo II in the past that had random maps and were different each time.

Mutant creatures evolve from their vanilla and modded counterparts.

In 7 DayZ to Mine cities, fortifications and walled structures generate automatically and randomly and are populated with monsters and loot that are tiered by difficulty and rarity of item drops.  Pre-apocalypse items such as guns, ammo, household items and technologies such as computer components are found while exploring; as there would be no factories to produce these specialized and machined materials and plastics.  In general, loot found in surface structures is limited to pistols, knifes, ammunition and household items.  Underground cities and the nether contain the best loot, but require you to manage air quality as well as body temperature and hydration to explore there.  Beware of poisonous and explosive gasses so craft a Davy Lamp at your earliest conveinance.  Torches light things on fire, so try to use non-flammable sources of illumination or place torches on stone surfaces!

That doesn’t mean that I don’t want people to be able to craft things and progress up a technology tree, which is provided for with the tech mods Applied Energistics, Railcraft, ProjectRed, HarvestCraft and Tinker’s Construct; whose mods have a more realistic tech tree than let’s say Flans or ComputerCraft.

This is one of the many cities that generate above and below ground and are filled with monsters who defend chests filled with guns, ammo and other loot.

These were some of my goals for the Halloween Update:

• Polish up the gaming menus, interfaces and guides to be more clean and sharp.
• Better performance on slower computers and better compatibility on Macs.  Don’t worry I will still have an ultra version available with shaders and sound filters/cave reverb.
• Update all the mods to their latest and most stable code.
• Add interesting and themed content to the world generation such as special zombie spawners and modded blocks to city generation.  Modify existing ruins, wall and cities so that they are more theme appropriate and dangerous.
• Populate all the walls, towers and structures of the world with chances to find guns, ammo and household items.
• Items found in chests can be salvaged down to more basic components using a crafting table, such as salvaging a wine rack to get wooden planks or a fish bowl into a glass bottle.  Also decorative items can be used as fuel in a furnace if you have duplicates or just want to get rid of clutter.
• Better performance on slower computers and better compatibility on Macs.
• Remove physics which was causing issues with world generation and replace with an air quality mechanic that makes underground and nether exploration more challenging.  Also using the new enviromine code with much better hypothermia, heat stroke and other effects than the old version.

On October 30th, the day before Halloween, I will make the BETA pre-release available for download on Technic.  Please check back on this post for status or the Technic page directly at http://www.technicpack.net/modpack/7-dayz-to-mine.621982