A Complete Guide to Skills

In this tutorial we’re going to cover everything that has to do with Skill Points.

Basic understanding of skill points

Let’s start with the basic understanding of Skills. Pretty much everything you do in 7 Days to Die gets you closer to achieving a skill point, which you can then use to buy Skills. Whether you’re building, hunting, looting or smashing zombie heads, you’re collecting XP. The XP progress bar can be located at the top of your toolbelt. When that bar fills up to 100%, you increase your Character Level and are also rewarded with 1 Skill point. The higher the character level, the more XP it will take to achieve the next Skill point. We created 2 XP charts in the Leveling section, that shows the exact amount of XP you need to acquire a Skill point.

The maximum Character level you can reach is 300, since we start the game from a character level 1, it gives us 299 skill points + 4 additional skill points you start with at the beginning of the game. So the grand total being 303 Skill points we can spend!

It’s important to know that there are more Skills than points available. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it basically means that there are many ways to build your character.

There are a total of 5 attributes in other words, groups which hold their own respective Skills.

• Perception
  Mainly focuses on your character’s hearing and seeing senses, for example finding better loot, faster lock picking, quicker at finding treasures, getting more from salvaging, better at tracking animals and more.
• Strength
  Which focuses more on endurance, such as stronger melee weapon hits, reduced stamina consumption, increased carrying capacity, overall better mining and more.
• Fortitude
  Focuses more on the ability to handle weather conditions, increased pain tolerance, health regeneration, slows down metabolism, increases stamina regeneration and more.
• Agility
  Focuses more on your archery skills, being able to run and shoot, increased melee attack rates, increased parkour, overall stealth and more.
• Intellect
  This is one of the most popular skill trees and focuses more on your character’s crafting abilities, such as crafting medicine, means of transportation like a Minibike, advanced electrical devices and traps, robotics and more.

Each Attribute has 10 levels. Some  Skills require their parent Attribute to be upgraded to a certain level before being able to unlock them.

Leveling

Bellow are two charts explaining how much XP you need to gain in order to level up. The required XP per level increases as the player levels up. The starting level of a player is 1 with 0 XP.

At level 60 to 300, the experience required growth becomes linear, meaning the required amount of experience to reach the next level from levels 60 – 300 is 186,791.

What Skills to buy

There isn’t really a right or wrong way to spend your Skill points. It really depends on the level of experience you have in 7 Days to Die, type of Character you want to build and the style of game you want to play.

Generally most players will tend to disperse their points evenly but more experienced players will focus on specific skill sets. For example, if I was just starting the game for the first time, I would focus on Skills that provide more stamina, cardio, healing factor and pain tolerance, because when you are first starting out, you are less likely to jump straight into battle, more likely to avoid conflict and let’s be honest getting smacked around by zombies. But there’s nothing wrong with having to run away, do so when you can, and live to fight another day.

Combine Skills efficiently

There are ways to buy Skills that benefit and compliment each other. For example, in my situation, I really like to preserve ammo and kill zombies with a club instead, in that case, I would focus on the:

• Strength Attribute
  Which increases the headshot damage and chances of dismemberment.
• Pummel Pete
  Which gives lots of benefits such as crafting stronger Clubs, increases damage per hit and increases chances of knocking enemies down
• Sexual Tyrannosaurus
  Which reduces stamina used per hit and rewards stamina for killing blows.
• Flurry of Blows
  Which increases melee weapon swing movement speed and also grants stamina for killing blows. All those combined makes swinging your club effortless with a tremendous amount of damage. It pretty much sends a zombie flying with a simple power attack.

Quickest way to level up

As I previously mentioned, pretty much anything you do in 7 Days to Die makes you gain XP, however some actions provide more XP than others. For example, if you make your day all about Hunting for animals, it won’t give you as much XP as raiding or killing zombies. So the whole point is to do as many combined actions as possible during a full day / night cycle.

For instance, here’s an example of what I do during a whole day/night cycle:

• Complete a quest from a Trader
• Raid and Loot
• Kill Zombies
• Dismantle with a Wrench
• Mine and Build during the night

Notice how the first 4 actions in this list relate to almost the same thing. All happen in the same area. I asked the Trader for a quest, which led me to a Place of Interest (POI) that I ended up clearing from zombies, cleaning out from loot and finally dismantling everything I can with my Wrench. It’s all about how much you can accomplish in a short amount of time. So instead of dedicating a whole day to hunt for animals, I would simply do it while I am on the way to my destination. A little bit of everything each day is the secret sauce to quicker XP gains.

Skills you can live without

Let me be clear about something first, there’s no useless skill. Again it really depends on the player and the style of game they want to play. But there are some skill I personally think you can survive without:

• Animal Tracker
  The fact that we can craft a vegetable stew alone should tell you that there’s no need to hunt those poor animals, yes even though you might be an omnivore in real life, lol. Besides, there’s plenty of chickens and rabbits all over the map.
• Javelin Master
  I don’t know about you, but after day 2 I don’t see myself running around with a Stick, and it’s not something I would want to really master especially if there’s so many other melee weapon choices.
• Pack Mule
  This may shock some more than others but I have never used this skill. With the ability to craft or find clothing pocket mods or armor pocket mods, there’s really no reason for why you should invest your points in this skillset. You can also use additional storage space when you build your first mode of transportation such as a Minibike.
• Well Insulated
  This one strongly depends on the area you first spawned in when starting the game. There’s no need for this skill set if you’re in a warm area. If you’re surrounded by snow, then it’s a different story. In general you can find warm clothing fairly early in the game.
• Iron Gut
  Once you upgrade your Master Chef skill set, and get started with farming, you’ll have an infinite abundance of food so there’s really no need to put too many points on that skill set.
• Charismatic Nature
  This skill is pointless in single player, but very useful in multiplayer and it pretty much depends on that as it provides health and stamina to your allies when you’re near them.

How to reset Skills

Fortunately there is a way to reset all your Skills and that’s by purchasing the Grandpa’s Fergit’n Elixir from any Trader for a hefty price of 40,000 Dukes. Yes, it’s expensive but in all honesty the only time you’ll want to buy this is most likely when you have fully used up all your Skill points, by then you’re probably already swimming in Duke Coins. When used, all your Skills will be reset, however you get to keep your Skill Points. This allows you to purchase different Skills and rebuild your character in one shot.

That pretty much wraps up the Guide to Skill Points. Hopefully I covered enough ground to give you a better understanding on what Skills are and how you can use them.