On my work break today I decided to go into the .xml files for 7 Days to Die and find out why exactly the game favors certain character types. To start, let's look at armor. Here's the XML for different armor types:

Now, when you play the game you *never* get light armor found in loot boxes. Light armor is Leather and Military armor, so everyone just grabs Scrap and Iron armor. I've found so much scrap and iron armor I mostly sell it. Why is that? Why, a bug in the XML:

Do you see "leatherArmor" or "militaryArmor" in that list? No. Steel armor is found very late in the game, around Level 60 for one of my games, but I can't recall *ever* finding leather or military. Well, that's because it's not configured to be found.

The significance of this is the kind of character you build determines what armor and weapons you're good with. If you only ever get heavy armor, then you can't build anything but a strength character. Another snippet relates to the SMG:

I've played this game on multiple levels and never one received an SMG, but found AK47's and nearly everything else like they're candy. I suspect that part of the XML interacts with this part to make it nearly impossible to get an SMG. I think I know what happened.

It looks like the devs were adding testing setup to this XML file, and in the process of adjusting the loot you get, messed up how you receive armor and accidentally made it very hard to find grade B weapons compared to higher grade C weapons.

Very interesting. I think you could probably just fix some of these things in the XML and test it. Overall I've never found an SMG, and I've watched tons of youtube streams and they've never found on either. The only one I had in the game I built it myself.

So, I'm not crazy. The game is poorly designed such that if you play anything but a character that can wear heavy armor then you're at a huge disadvantage. You'll never find armor and always have to craft it while weight lifters are tripping over Iron armor.

Next up, sneaking around while carrying food wakes up zombies but *only* two foods: raw meat, and bacon and eggs. Since everyone else plays as a brawler they like cooking bacon and eggs since it's low cost and high food, but if you're agile it's the *only* food zombies smell.

I'm playing a sneaking character and couldn't figure out how I was being discovered by zombies, turns out I had the only two foods they smell on me 'cause that's what I saw other players do. This game really penalizes people who sneak around.

I can see why mod creators eventually get into game development. You can easily see quite a lot of high level game design thoughts through just a few simple files. It's also an easy way to confirm suspicions about the games. I suspected they threw in disfeatures like this.

This is fascinating and I would have never figured it out without the XML, but it looks like carrying meat or bacon means you can't sneak at all. Here's when you are detected, and both items put you right in the detection range up to 15 meters away.

This brings up two questions that I'd probably have to test in-game:

1. If I filled a chest with tons of raw meat, would zombies come check it out, or is it only when I'm holding it?
2. Is this per piece of meat? So if you carry 50 raw meats your smell is *50?

Now the final mystery is the weapons an agility character gets. Agility characters only have access to knives, and there's only 3: bone knife, hunting knife, and machete. I've never found a machete but hunting knives are everywhere. Meanwhile, you can find clubs/bats/etc.