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What are the best 7 Days to Die mods? Over the last decade, 7 Days to Die has made a name for itself as one of the best survival games out there, but there’s always some room for improvement. That’s where mods come in, user-created creations designed to enhance the gameplay for hardcore fans.
That said, if you’ve been playing since day one, you might be looking for ways to change up your 7 Days to Die experience. Thankfully, inventive new 7 Days to Die mods continue to flood in thick and fast from the community, and they’re showing no signs of slowing down. Amplify your survival game experience with the best 7 Days to Die mods, all compatible with 1.1.
Here are the best mods for 7 Days to Die:
Melee Weapons
Hardcore players will know that the stock melee weapons simply don’t hold up when fighting against the toughest zombies. To improve the weapon variety in the mid to late game, Josefpatch has added 22 additional melee weapons to 7 Days to Die with their Weapons of Some Destruction mod.
You can disable any of the new melee weapons before you enable the mod, and they can be found and crafted to ensure you can get your hands on them. Here are some of the melee weapons you can add to your game with this mod: Halberd, Battle Axe, Claymore, Mace, Spears, Knives, and Swords.
HUD Plus
Yes, it’s another HUD mod, this time from AuroraGiggleFairy, but we think this one is definitely worth highlighting. We aren’t criticizing the stock HUD by any means, but HUD Plus gives you the freedom to customize each element to your liking. It also includes a lot of quality of life tweaks like expanding the compass, the chat box won’t block parts of the screen, and there’s even a fifth crafting slot to make life slightly easier.
The Walking Dead POIs
Take your 7 Days to Die role-playing to the next level using The Walking Dead POI Pack from Mackenziix, providing you with access to seven locations inspired by the iconic zombie series. It’s important to note that these places of interest aren’t 1:1 recreations of the locations, they are merely inspired by The Walking Dead. Here’s a list of the POIs included in the pack: Alexandria, CDC, Woodbury, The Prison, Hilltop, The Hospital, and Hershel’s Farm.
Horn Opens Doors
Here’s a useful quality of life tweak that you’ll wonder how you ever lived without. The Horns Open Doors mod does exactly what it says, it allows you to open the doors to your using your vehicle’s horn. This might not seem like a game-changer on paper, but you need to think about the scenarios where this could help. Imagine you’re being chased by countless zombies – having the ability to open your base’s doors is bound to save your life countless times in the future.
TheMeanOne’s Loot Indicators
If you’re ever worried you’re going to walk right on by some valuable loot, then TheMeanOne’s Loot Indicators mod is an essential addition to 7 Days to Die. This simple mod adds a brightly-colored indicator to your screen, letting you know when you’re near loot, and how far away it is. What’s more, there are different colored indicators for different types of loot, such as vehicle loot containers and boss loot, so you won’t need to venture out of your way for something you don’t need.
Knightlock’s WMDs
If anything’s going to make the apocalypse a little easier to deal with, it’s weapons of mass description. These explosive new weapons, courtesy of Knightlock’s WMDs mod, do incredibly satisfying damage to groups of foes. The mod introduces five new weapons, including a sniper rifle with explosive ammo and a sawn-off shotgun with an incendiary slug.
Dryzler’s Sort Everything Into Chests
Getting back to your base after a loot run usually means you’ll have to spend some time sorting your ill-gotten gains into your little cubby holes. With the Dryzler’s Sort Everything Into Chests mod (descriptive, isn’t it?) you can simply press Left Alt and Numpad 0 to sort everything in your inventory into whatever chests are nearby. Neat!
World Lighting Tuned
As we discuss a little further down with the HDHQ Overhaul mod, graphics aren’t exactly 7 Days to Die’s strong suit, but that’s why we have mods, right? While HDHQ gives a more overall overhaul to the game’s appearance, World Lighting Tuned concentrates on lighting and shadows. You can see the difference from the image above as the sun casts brighter rays across the world and shadows become darker and more defined.
Script’s Vanilla Extended – The Gourmet
According to the Nexus page for this mod, its goal is to make 7 Days to Die into a cooking simulator. Even if turning the survival game into a cooking game isn’t your primary goal, Script’s The Gourmet mod adds an incredible amount of new content to the cooking aspect of 7 Days to Die. There are new ingredients, new recipes, and new items including a chicken coop, animal traps, and a butcher table. It may be the apocalypse, but who said you can’t still eat like a king?
HDHQ Overhaul
There are many things 7 Days to Die can brag about, but, uhh, the graphics aren’t necessarily its strong suit. Thankfully, DUST2DEATH has put together HDHQ Overhaul, a massive visual mod that drastically changes the grass and water textures, in addition to altering the lighting system to make the game look fantastic during the day and night. It doesn’t end there, as there are new vehicles, terrain textures, and weapon skins to check out too. If you have a powerful enough computer, this should be one of the first mods you download.
Lockpick Any Door
This mod is only recommended if you don’t consider this cheating, and you’re happy with the mega boost to your natural capabilities. But, as you might expect, Lockpick Any Door allows you to, well, lockpick any door.
Firearms Expansion
As you might expect from the name, the Firearms Expansion 5 mod for 1.0 adds multiple new weapons for you to build, and all are compatible with existing ammo and mods. This mod adds a whopping 28 new weapons schematics, so there’s plenty of choice as you build out your arsenal.
Loot all the Things!
FNS’s Loot all the Things mod is a great way to give yourself a helping hand as everything is lootable. Cardboard boxes? Lootable. Computers? Lootable. Pianos? Lootable. Don’t worry, though, while this mod does make things easier, it’s not completely OP, as the creator recognizes the need for balance. They have recently nerfed the loot tables for cardboard boxes as they were considered too generous, and even go so far as to recommend a slightly less powerful alternative…
FPS Lootables
FlufferNutterSandwich themselves, creator of the Loot all the Things! mod, recommends this very similar mod if you want to be able to loot everything, but not quite so readily. Much like the above mod, FPS Lootables allows you to loot vehicles and other previously unlootable containers. Inside, you’ll find items related to the location you’re searching, such as seeds in tractors, and in very low quantities so as not to make things too easy.
More Skill Points
Leveling up can be a tedious task, but with the Skill Points mod by Knightly19, you can alter the way skill points are distributed per level up. You have the option to choose between 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, and 10x the skill points earned per level, making it easy to become significantly stronger in considerably less time.
SteelUI
We removed a few mods from this list as they haven’t been updated to the latest version yet, and one of them was the super popular SMX UI mod, which hasn’t been updated since August 2023. While we’ll be sure to the fan-favorite mod back if and when it comes to 1.0, we’ve included a couple of other modders you can support instead.
One of those is 0xSteel who created the SteelUI mod, perhaps the most similar UI mod we’ve found to SMX so far. This dark theme changes the look of the existing HUD and UI as well as adding some beneficial features such as vehicle bars, hunger and water levels, ammo count, and more.
Jakmeister999’s Enhanced HUD
Similar to SteelUI, Jakmeister999’s Enhanced HUD adds a bunch of quality of life changes, only this one’s got a lighter look to it, so it’s up to you to decide which aesthetic you prefer.
Jakmeister’s mod adds food and water bars under the health and stamina bars, numbers to toolbelt slots, and the player’s level, core temperature, air temperature, and elevation to the compass, as well as much more. You can also add an enemy health bar if you want, but this add-on is optional. We’ve also shared another mod for that below.
Enemy Health
While you can add enemy health with Jakmeister’s Enhanced HUD, you might want a different UI mod, or you might simply be happy with enemy health bars and the game’s vanilla HUD. In that case, kreedyk’s Enemy Health mod can help, giving you the ability to see how close to death your target foes are. This is always helpful for deciding which weapon to tackle them or simply if you’d survive the fight.
Craft from Containers
Another almost essential quality of life change, the Craft from Containers mod, as you’d expect, allows you to bring up the crafting menu from any container item. We all know crafting games can get a bit tiresome when you have to keep trudging back to a specific workbench, so the ability to access the crafting screen from any container is a game-changer. While some of the mods in this list work for older versions of the game, please note that Craft from Containers has been made specifically for 1.0, an older version can be found here.
Really Dead Corn color-blind mod
We love it when game developers incorporate lots of accessibility features and consider the needs of certain groups when making their games, but sometimes these things slip through the cracks.
Color-blind gamer usHallgrim noticed that, in 7 Days to Die, dead corn looks a lot like harvestable corn without the ability to see the subtle color changes, so they made this fantastic mod to clear that up. Now, thanks to the Really Dead Corn mod, dead corn looks like a dead bush, so you won’t waste any time trying to harvest something that is no longer viable.
Shared Reading
The Shared Reading mod is indispensable to those who play the zombie game with friends. When one person picks up and reads a book or magazine, thus learning the skills associated with it, everyone in your party now unlocks the skill at the same time. This makes everything so much easier, as you no longer all have to find the same magazines or get that one person with that skill to do all the work. The same goes for crafting schematics.
Bicycle Speed Boost
As you can from the rather self-explanatory name, the Bicycle Speed Boost mod boosts the speed of the in-game bike. That’s not to detract from just how useful this mod is though, as the standard speed can get pretty frustrating. You’ll be pleased to hear that the mod doesn’t mean you’re peddling at unrealistic rates, instead, the difference offers a noticeable increase in travel speed while remaining realistic to suit the nature of 7 Days to Die.
Increase All Stack Sizes
While there are a lot of stack size mods for 7 Days to Die, and some are more configurable than Increase All Stack Sizes, this is one of the best and most functional we’ve found so far for 1.0. The only downside is that this mod automatically just increases the inventory stack maximum to 30,000 as standard. However, we’ve not seen any issues with this so far.
Fast Tree Growth
One of the first mods we look for with any survival crafting game speeds up the growth of trees. Naturally, wood is one of the most crucial and valuable resources you can find in 7 Days to Die, and is required for several crafting and building recipes, so running out is a bit of a bummer. You can sit around and wait for those trees to grow at the standard rate, or you can speed things up a bit with this Fast Tree Growth mod, and be back at your workstation in no time.
No Enemy Indicators
No, we’re not wording that wrong. That is no enemy indicators – and we love this mod. Let’s face it, we’re playing a zombie survival game for the challenge, and entering a quest to be shown where enemies are around you doesn’t really replicate the real-life implications of a zombie apocalypse. We don’t want to know where they’re hiding, we want to be surprised, to have to think fast to survive. With the No Enemy Indicators mod from Byteblazar, you can do just that. You might just die more.
Less Wasteland Rubble
This one is just a general quality-of-life mod, making drive and cycling through the wasteland a much smoother ride. Unfortunately, Less Wasteland Rubble only works on new maps, so you can’t use this on your existing worlds, but if it’s something you’ve found bugs you, it might be worth considering.
Snow to Water
This simple mod from the creator of Fast Tree Growth and Less Wasteland Rubble is a similar godsend, giving you the recipe option to turn snow into water – essential when you’re stuck and running low in a frozen wasteland.
So, there you have it, the best 7 Days to Die mods for you to try out. With the release of the 1.1 update, there has never been a better time to play the apocalypse game and try to survive the night. If you’re searching for something different, head over to our multiplayer games list to find a new experience.