7 Days to Die – 100% Achievement Guide

How to get all of the achievements in 7 Days to Die, including some time-saving shortcuts!

Achievements I~V: Beginner Quest

Note: Credit goes to Mr. Von Grimmsy

Cause he’s the Ax Man, Good in the sack, Playing Doctor, Handy Man, The Homestead Act

All of these Achievements – besides Playing Doctor and The Homestead Act – will be naturally earned during the starter quest.

The former can be earned soon enough, as most zombies will/can cause bleeding when hitting an unarmored character. Just bind the wound with the First Aid Bandage that all players spawn with, and you’re good to go,

The latter is even easier, as you only need plop down the Claim Block that you also spawned in with.

Easy peasy.

Achievements VI~VIII: Crafting

Alexander Bell, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison

This set of Achievements should come somewhat quickly and naturally through normal play.

However, the process can be sped up exponentially by using fast/instant craft mods; what could take days, weeks, or months (depending on how much you play – it could boil down to hours for some) can easily be cut into mere minutes, as the player doesn’t have to wait for crafting timers.

As far as I know, crafted items are counted across all methods – be it the player’s backpack, campfire, workbench, forge, and/or chemistry station.

Pretty straightforward stuff.

Achievements IX~XII: Zombie Kills

The Grave Digger, The Embalmer, The Mortician, The Funeral Director

These should also come naturally through gameplay, as killing zombies – to most players, for certain – is the whole point of the game. Crafting and building, be damned!

However – as before – we can use mods to ease the player’s burden. Mods that increase the standard spawn rate (I usually play with x10 spawns, for example) will cut the time invested considerably; throw in increased spawns for wandering hordes, and it gets even better.

There are also mods to drastically increase blood moon spawns as well, if having loads of zombies to deal with during the day isn’t enough!

Again, straightforward stuff, and these can be achieved without much special effort.

Achievements XIII~XVI: Player Kills

Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Alexander the great

Now, these are the ones most people seem to have trouble with. It’s quite understandable, given that PVP in this game certainly doesn’t put forward its best qualities. Also, most people tend to play this game for the survival experience, and not to gun each other down.

So that said, what is the quickest way to rack up so many player kills…? EASY.

Right-click on the game in your library, select ‘BETAS’ and switch to Alpha 15.2. Why so far back, you may ask? Well, Alpha 15.2 was the proud possessor of a dirty little glitch that will alleviate the painstaking need to slaughter so many of your fellow survivors.

It’s this simple.

Load in to Navezgane on an Alpha 15.2 world. Hit F1, activate creative mode, then fly to the nearest trader. Deactivate creative mode (after landing, naturally – you don’t want to be a grease spot, after all) then enter the trading post.

Pull out your torch, and wack the trader a couple of times.

Congratulations – you’ve just killed 250 players. It sounds ridiculous, but it absolutely works, I just did it the other day myself!

Achievements XVII~XX: Distance Travelled

Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Marco Polo, Neil Armstrong

This is where the true grind begins; out of all them, the final in this series – Neil Armstrong – will likely take longer than any other achievement, save for possibly Meet Your Maker.

If you want an effortless, yet rather time-consuming method, you could do one of the following:

A) If using a controller, wrap a rubberband around it in such a way to pull the joysticks – both left and right – to one side, so your character simply walks in circles. From having used this method on the PS4 version, I can tell you – it takes forever. Not only that, you run the risk of ruining a controller, as it will always pull to one side.

…or…

B) If using a keyboard and mouse, place something with a little weight on the ‘W’ key to keep your character moving forward, while having the mouse tilted to one side or the other (and obviously, you’d want to use a wired mouse for this, so it doesn’t autosleep or run out of batteries!). Alternatively, one could easily find any number of computer macro programs to automate the process, I’d imagine…

But I didn’t use either of the above methods. If you’ve been following the pattern in this guide thus far, you likely guessed it – I used mods. Anything that permanently increases the player’s movement speed can help (usually found in skill/perk mods), and anything with faster vehicles could potentially help.

The method I used was a skill mod that added skills for increased movement speed. After maxing all these out, I enabled creative mode to give myself Steroids and Megacrush (unsure if these actually stacked, but there it is), and most importantly to give myself Rocket Boots. Also, do not neglect Parkour – if you forget this, you can easily suicide with the high jumps the boots allow.

Using Rocket Boots allows for a more interactive experience from rubberbanding your controller, and enables the player to multitask with working towards other achievements at the same time; unfortunately, this was the last achievement I needed, so I spent a few hours just hopping back and forth instead.

Another method is to activate creative mode to enable flying, then turn creative mode off. Flying then will count as actual movement, though it doesn’t seem to be terribly fast, even with speed enhancements. Just keep in mind, that vertical movement does not count at all!

In my experience Rocket Boots racked up distance much faster than any other method; and I tried all the vanilla vehicles and flying as well. Yet personal preference will dictate the player’s individual method, obviously.

At the chance of making a cringe-worthy pun, I’ll just say… that your mileage may vary!

Achievements XXI~XXIV: Number of Deaths

Bite the dust, Knock em Dead, Your Number’s Up, Meet Your Maker

In standard gameplay, these will likely be the last Achievements a player would ever receive; we play the game to survive, after all, not to die!

There are ways of making this grind extremely easy, however. Certainly easier than the Neil Armstrong achievement, as we can easily automate this task, through… who guessed it…? MODS.

Now, what we are looking for is a particular mod. One that affects respawn times…

• I downloaded this one: Hardcore Respawn

Next comes a little .xml chicanery. What we’re going to do first is open the entityclasses.xml, and change it to remove respawn wait period, as well as death animations and ragdolling on death as follows: (looking for HasDeathAnim, HasRagdoll, TimeStayAfterDeath)

After that, we’ll look in to buffs.xml – within the same folder – and make a few tweaks. Essentially, we’ve removed the lines that were there – from CarryCapacity to RunSpeed – and increased the HealthMax and StaminaMax to 500 (which will be subtracted).

Now – full disclosure, here – I used the same method before, but I’m pretty sure I used a different way of subtracting health from the player. Yet the result we’re going for should be pretty obvious; once the player dies, they will respawn quickly, die again, respawn, die… And so on. It works very well, and is much quicker than any other method you’ll likely find elsewhere.

One caveat, however, is to do this trick on a random gen map. When I tried it on Navezgane, it would crash every 20 deaths or so; I assume this is due to trying to respawn the player in random places, while random gen seems to have a static spawn point outside of bedrolls.

Achievements XXV~XXVIII: Fortitude

Alive and Kicking. Fit as a Fiddle, Healthy as a Horse, The Picture of Good Health

These are some of the most easily-attained Achievements, barring those for the starter quest. They used to be much harder when the Wellness system was still a thing, as that stat could fluctuate through damage received and/or not eating often enough.

Easily gained through play if the player is a Fortitude-centrict build.

As straightforward as can be!

Achievements XXIX~XXXIII: Gamestage

Scavenger, Adventurer, Nomad, Warrior, Survivalist

(Yes, two of these Achievements share an icon; maybe they could’ve just made one of them bronze-colored…?)

Another set of Achievements that are pretty easy to gain through normal gameplay, the key here is to remember that gamestage is limited by the selected difficulty in addition to the player’s current level; in short, Insane difficulty with a high-level character is the only way to get the last of these!

Alternatively… if the player doesn’t care about gameplay, and just wants these as fast as possible, it’s as easy as hitting F1, giveselfxp some massive number, then setday 999999999. This should easily unlock the lot of them in one swoop. It will be pretty obvious if you use this method, however, as they’d all unlock at the same time…

Achievements XXXIV~XXXVIII: Hidden Achievements

On top of the world, Dig Deep, The polar bare club, Dirty Larry, Evil Knievel

The hidden Achievements in this game are perhaps more interesting than all the others, simply due to the fact that they each require particular conditions to unlock. None of them are difficult to achieve, but they are at least each unique.

For the first, On top of the world, you need to achieve a height of 255 meters. Your current height can be found on the Map screen, and some custom HUDs include it right next to the player’s health, etc. This one is quite easy to attain, as you merely need to nerdpole straight up; starting from a building top can make this quicker, and turning enemy spawns off can help avoid a deadly fall.

Next, Dig Deep, is as simple as digging straight down until hitting bedrock. An auger or pickaxe will speed things up greatly, but isn’t required. Again, creative mode can help here if the player is feeling particularly lazy…

For The polar bare club, it’s as simple as being naked and jumping into a body of water in a snow biome. I’ve seen other people have trouble with this for some reason; I got it on literally the first body of water I jumped in to. So if the first one doesn’t work, keep trying!

Lastly is Evil Knievel, which many players will get through the common practice of jumping from rooftops while avoiding zombies. Another method is to simply nerdpole oneself to a height of 20 frames, and jump – the Achievement should pop right after, assuming you survive!

Achievements XXXIX~XLIII: Time Survived

Brush with Death, Near Death Experience, Cheated Death, Nearly Immortal

These Achievements are also gained through normal gameplay; that is, assuming you don’t die!

To completely circumvent any challenge involved, these Achievements can be earned through zero effort by simply turning enemy spawns off… Then just waiting, and keeping fed/hydrated.

They aren’t terribly hard to earn legitimately, in all honesty. As long as you’re careful…