7 Days to Die Difficulty Settings Explained

Difficulty Is Part of the Sandbox Code

There is no GameDifficulty setting on your server. The gameplay settings that used to be individual entries - difficulty, blood moon frequency and size, loot abundance, XP multiplier, day length, death penalty, drop-on-death - are encoded together in one string called the Sandbox Code.

You will find it in Settings under the World category, as "Sandbox Code". It is a text field: you paste a code into it.

Leaving it blank is a valid setting and is what a new server ships with. Blank means Nomad - normal difficulty with every sandbox option at its default.

Sandbox Code is marked restart-required. When you save it on a running server the panel restarts the server for you, so the new rules are live as soon as it comes back up.

The Six Difficulty Presets

These are The Fun Pimps' own difficulty presets: Scavenger (Beginner), Adventurer (Default), Nomad (Normal, all defaults - the field left empty), Warrior (Hard), True Survivalist (Brutal) and Insane.

Their codes are listed once, in the SandboxCode System Guide, so there is one place to keep them right. Paste a code into the Sandbox Code field exactly as written - they are case-sensitive.

If a code turns out not to be what you wanted, clear the field or paste a different one and restart. Nothing about your world is damaged by changing it.

Themed Codes

The Fun Pimps also publish themed presets, which change many settings at once rather than being simply harder or easier: Almost Creative, Chibi Mode, Dumpster Diver, Legacy Survival, Disaster Film, Caveman Life, Dying World, Undead Matinee, Seven Days Later, Madmole's Mayhem and Bite Club.

Almost Creative is the shortest of them; its code is in the SandboxCode System Guide with the others.

The rest are long strings. Copy them from the in-game Sandbox Options screen (see below) rather than typing them out.

Making Your Own Code

Start a single-player game, open Sandbox Options, set everything the way you want it, and copy the code the game shows you.

Paste that string into the Sandbox Code field in Settings, save, and restart.

A code is used exactly as given - the platform does not validate it. If the server comes up with settings you did not expect, the code is the first thing to re-check.

Full detail: SandboxCode System Guide.

What Is Still a Separate Setting

A handful of things that feel like difficulty are still their own settings in the panel, and the Sandbox Code does not touch them:

Max Spawned Zombies (Performance, default 64, range 0-500) - the server-wide cap on zombies alive at once. This is the setting to lower when blood moons cause lag.

Max Spawned Animals (Performance, default 50, range 0-200).

Player Killing Mode (Gameplay, default 3 - kill everyone) - 0 no PvP, 1 kill allies only, 2 kill strangers only, 3 kill everyone.

Creative Mode / Build Create (Gameplay, default off) - if enabled, everyone on the server can cheat. This is not a difficulty tier, it is creative mode.

Player Safe Zone Level (default 5, range 1-100) and Player Safe Zone Hours (default 5, range 0-24) - how long a new low-level player spawns without opponents.

Max Allowed View Distance (Performance, default 12, range 4-20) - a cap on how far clients may render. A performance control rather than a difficulty one.

None of these six are marked restart-required, which means the panel will NOT restart the server when you save them. They are written to the config file and the game picks them up the next time it starts, so restart the server yourself once you have finished changing them.

Game Stage

7 Days to Die scales its own difficulty with a per-player "game stage" that rises as players survive, level and gear up. Higher game stage means tougher spawns and better loot.

There is no server setting for game stage. It is not in the settings catalog, and the Sandbox Code does not set it directly - what the code changes are the multipliers game stage feeds into.

In a group, players' game stages combine, so a party faces harder spawns than a solo player would. That is the game's own balancing and there is nothing to configure.