As with many survival games, success in7 Days to Dieis determined not only by your skills with combat but by how skillful you are when it comes to scavenging and looting. After all, without some dedicated resource and item gathering, you won’t be able to survive blood moons, hordes, and the most brutal POIs you discover.
Something that determines the quality of the loot you get is a stat called Loot Stage, which will increase as you progress through the game and where you go. This isn’t incredibly well-explained in-game, but understanding how it works will help you decide how much effort you want to put into scouring loot containers and the like.
How Does Loot Stage Work?
Loot Stage is a simple integer that is influenced by a number of factors and determines thetypes and quality of lootyou obtain when opening a container. You can check your Loot Stage on theCore Character Statstab of the Statistics menu.
Your Loot Stage will affect lootspecificallywhen you opena container or loot drop.
The table below explains themain factorsthat go into calculating Loot Stage:
Player Level
The simplest factor: Loot Stage willscale linearly with your player level. This means that you’ll obtain better items simply by surviving a long time and playing the game normally.
Biome
Thebiomethat you’re currently in will increase your Loot Stage based on difficulty.
Location
When you approach a POI, you’ll notice that they all have’difficulty' levels, rated in zombie faces. The higher the difficulty of a POI, the more Loot Stage
Container
Certaincontainersin the game will provide an arbitrary boost to your Loot Stage very temporarily when you open them. These includeall containers that must be unlockedwith Lockpicks (or destroyed) and the containersfound at the end of a POI’sintended route.
There are other ways to boost your Loot Stage, such as with theLucky Looter skilland any food or mods that purport toincrease your loot.
This does mean thatyou will reliably encounter better loot with a higher Loot Stage, and you’ll stop encountering very weak or useless equipment as you progress in the game.
