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7 Days to Die gets another huge overhaul in Alpha 21

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7 Days to Die has surged in popularity thanks to a huge new upgrade coming amount, with developer The Fun Pimps bringing some pretty surprising stuff to the game.

Rated Steam Deck Playable and it has Native Linux support, it's good to see development on it still going well. Thanks to this update it has shot up the Steam charts once again going from ~30K players to over 80K putting it on par with the likes of Modern Warfare 2 for player counts on Steam in the Top 10.

As for what they've added some of it includes:

  • Lots of visual improvements.
  • New types of Doors.
  • A respawn near backpack option.
  • Many locations expanded and overhauled.
  • Points of interest now show you their name and difficulty tier on screen
  • A better intro for new players

Pictured - 7 Days to Die Alpha 21 on Fedora KDE, click to enlarge.

Even more:

  • Perk system overhaul.
  • The Spear now has a power-attack rather than being thrown.
  • Recipe tracker so you don't lose sight of what you're gathering.
  • A HUD-less mode.
  • Lots of performance optimization work.

All of which can be read in detail here. Safe to say it really is a massive update!

Check out a quick Steam Deck video below where it works quite well:

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For desktop Linux with NVIDIA, I was not able to get it to run with Vulkan with this release. The game just crashes and quits when swapping to Vulkan in the launcher. Hopefully they will eventually get that sorted with their gradual Unity game engine upgrades so we're not stuck with OpenGL. Seems the Steam Overlay was also not working on desktop Linux for with 7 Days to Die right now.

Have you been playing the new Alpha? Be sure to comment and let me know what you think.

You can pick it up on Humble Store and Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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g000h Jul 7, 2023
Quoting: foobrewWith the latest update to A21, the game is pretty much unplayable for me now. I have a GeForce RTX 2070 Super running on Xubuntu 22.04 with most game settings at medium or low and I'm lucky to get 40FPS standing still. Average is probably around 20FPS. -force-vulcan doesn't seem to make a difference either.

It's a bummer since I have about 800 hrs accumulated over the last 4-5 major updates. This is the first one that's been a show stopper for me.

Strange that you're getting those results. Your PC isn't too different to mine, and I'm getting over 100 fps. (I just ran the game, checked that the resolution was set to 2560x1440, checked that most of the graphics options were set to "High", pressed the F8 key to enable the game's FPS counter and inspected the results. My average was 140 fps.)

Mine is this: Ryzen 5-5500 with 32GB RAM, Nvidia GTX1080ti graphics.
foobrew Jul 7, 2023
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Quoting: g000hStrange that you're getting those results. Your PC isn't too different to mine, and I'm getting over 100 fps.

Wow, that's quite a difference. I'm also running a Ryzen 5 (2600) and only 16GB RAM but I have plenty available when the game starts (~10GB). Also running at 2560x1440. I'm just trying to run the standard Navazgane map also so nothing special there. No mods either.

I think I might try forcing it to use Proton instead of the native client just to see if it makes any difference. Not sure what else to try.
Kithop Jul 21, 2023
Quoting: foobrew
Quoting: g000hStrange that you're getting those results. Your PC isn't too different to mine, and I'm getting over 100 fps.

Wow, that's quite a difference. I'm also running a Ryzen 5 (2600) and only 16GB RAM but I have plenty available when the game starts (~10GB). Also running at 2560x1440. I'm just trying to run the standard Navazgane map also so nothing special there. No mods either.

I think I might try forcing it to use Proton instead of the native client just to see if it makes any difference. Not sure what else to try.

Having recently done some upgrades to my wife's desktop (RX 580 -> Radeon 7600), a couple ideas to try:

* First, run the game with something like MangoHud with all the options on, and keep an eye on what's being loaded. Is your CPU constantly maxing out a thread, or is your GPU running at 100% load?
* Double check how much VRAM your card has vs how much MangoHud reports it using. If it's within ~1GB of max, try knocking your texture quality setting down one tick (if this makes a huge difference, your GPU was 'swapping' with much slower system RAM)
* If your CPU seems to be the limiting factor, the biggest performance impact I've found here is with the Shadow detail. I actually turned them completely off on my wife's desktop and it made a *massive* performance difference, as those are super CPU intensive.
* Of course, triple check your kernel & drivers are as up to date as possible, maybe check some other games or benchmarks to make sure something else there hasn't regressed recently.

Best of luck!
CraigH Jul 27, 2023
So, question here: Are any of you playing multiplayer?

Since a21 came out I cannot use proton at all (for this game) or I'll get kicked for an EAC violation for a file that seems to get updated periodically in the proton path. I can do opengl, it's a bit crap framerate on a 1080 + 3700x / 32GB. Last couple times I tried Vulkan directly, crashes were pretty random from 5-30 min never more -in multiplayer. Solo was better, but hardly crashproof

I should say it was fine under a20, with proton.
Ehvis Jul 27, 2023
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Quoting: CraigHSo, question here: Are any of you playing multiplayer?

Since a21 came out I cannot use proton at all (for this game) or I'll get kicked for an EAC violation for a file that seems to get updated periodically in the proton path. I can do opengl, it's a bit crap framerate on a 1080 + 3700x / 32GB. Last couple times I tried Vulkan directly, crashes were pretty random from 5-30 min never more -in multiplayer. Solo was better, but hardly crashproof

I should say it was fine under a20, with proton.

Not playing multiplayer at the moment, but playing solo with the native version using Vulkan. Haven't had any crashes.

Assuming you need EAC for your multiplayer server (I've never played on public servers, so I've always had it disabled), what file is it tripping on?
Kithop Jul 27, 2023
Quoting: CraigHSo, question here: Are any of you playing multiplayer?

Since a21 came out I cannot use proton at all (for this game) or I'll get kicked for an EAC violation for a file that seems to get updated periodically in the proton path. I can do opengl, it's a bit crap framerate on a 1080 + 3700x / 32GB. Last couple times I tried Vulkan directly, crashes were pretty random from 5-30 min never more -in multiplayer. Solo was better, but hardly crashproof

I should say it was fine under a20, with proton.

It has a native build, and I vaguely remember reading somewhere that EAC is supported only in that native build; honestly I'd just try running that without Proton and see if that works for you.

Side note - I host my own private multiplayer server for my friends and I have EAC just disabled on it entirely. Works (mostly) fine, aside from the odd Mono threading related Unity crashes for some clients, but again - my wife and I run the Linux native builds with Vulkan and have AMD GPUs, so I'm not sure if there might be an nVidia-related regression or not.
Kithop Jul 27, 2023
Yeah - other people are reporting you need to use the native version for EAC support now: https://www.protondb.com/app/251570#ef6II47171

For what it's worth, at least on AMD, we're both easily pushing 60-120 fps at 1080p on her Radeon 7600 and 1440p on my 6800M using Vulkan on Medium-ish settings.

Turning down/off Shadows helps *immensely* as those burn CPU time; again, would recommend running with MangoHud and eyeing your GPU load vs CPU load, RAM and VRAM usage, etc. and using that to inform you where to tweak settings until you break through whatever bottleneck(s) you have.

The game *is* a big open world dynamic voxel thing, remember, so it'll never reach the same kind of performance as something with statically baked maps, so temper expectations accordingly. Dips to the mid-20s FPS on blood moons in multiplayer are normal regardless of how beefy of a rig you're on - even on Windows. The MP server's CPU & network make a big impact there too.
Smellymangames Jul 31, 2023
Nvidia 1060 with Vulkan working for me. I guess YMMV
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