7 Days to Die’s latest update, Alpha 20.6, has been out in the wild since mid-August 2022. While the game has progressively gotten better thanks to fixes and the addition of new stuff, we’ve occasionally had to make do with smaller upgrades.

A20.6 isn’t the staggering upgrade that’ll change our 7D2D lives. However, what it brings does take the game to a higher level of maturity as we await the arrival of A21.

Standout Additions

Alpha 20.6 added four things to the 7D2D. While that doesn’t seem like a lot, they’re all welcome goodies.

New JunkDrone Toggle

The JunkDrone is arguably one of the best things you can acquire and deploy in 7D2D. With this new addition, it’s now even better. By talking to it, you’ll get the option to toggle whether the drone heals you or your allies.

This option is good for party play as it effectively allows you to heal the entire party and not just yourself. When multiple people have drones, coordinating your toggles can help maximize your healing. Overall, it’s a pretty nifty new feature.

News Window

With the launch of A20.6, 7 Days to Die finally gets a news window on its main menu screen. It’s not the most earth-shattering addition, but it’s a convenience for a lot of players nonetheless. Now, even players who aren’t regularly in the know can check out what’s new in the game. Given how updates are often quite nebulous, this is a welcome change.

One thing to note is that currently, the News window is mostly showing a few short pieces about the current and past patch notes. It’s not particularly useful from a certain point onward so hopefully, they’ll add more important posts.

Screenshot Information

Screenshots are a great way to showcase cool things that are happening in the worlds you’re generating. But, given how diverse the random factors of 7D2D are, a bit more information would be good. Enter A20.6 with a pretty good feature for this.

Screenshots you take with F11 will now show the world gen seed as a small watermark. Again, it’s nothing to write home about. However, it adds a nice layer of convenience since the information about your world seed is already in the game. Having it pasted directly in the screenshot will save you some time when sharing your adventures.

New Command

This next one is pretty big as it has been long requested by the playerbase. As of A20.6, 7 Days to Die now has a GiveXP command. Players have been asking this for ages and it’s all because characters can get corrupted. When rebuilding your world, it’s a massive hassle trying to bring your own and other players’ characters back to where they were.

With GiveXP, you can now grant experience to the characters of the people joining your world and reduce the tedium of bringing it all up to speed.

Standout Changes

On top of the extra goodies, A20.6 made a few important changes to 7D2D. We’ll cover the most important ones in detail and follow up with the rest.

Changes to Custom Prefab Location

This isn’t so much a change that the developers wanted to make. Rather, it’s a change out of necessity. Due to the way Microsoft now handles its file system, your custom prefabs can no longer be placed in the game folder directly.

Instead, they need to be saved to what MS calls a User Defined Folder. The default location is the following:

\AppData\Roaming\7DaystoDie\LocalPrefabs

This will mostly have significance for mods so if you run some regularly, this is where you need to drop custom prefabs.

Vulture Change

Vultures have always been a bit of a pain in 7D2D. They’re aggressive towards players and attack on sight. However, it gets even more annoying when you’re in a vehicle. Apart from it not making much sense for vultures to attack you in this situation, it also makes driving cumbersome.

With A20.6, vultures will no longer aggro you and other player characters while using a vehicle of any kind. This should keep those pesky buzzards at bay.

Other Changes

• Storage and Service sounds to be consistent between vehicles and the drone.
• Friends, History, and LAN tabs in the server browser now ignore filters and show all entries
• Updated repair and harvest items on gas pumps and vending machines to discourage exploits

Standout Fixes

Finally, A20.6 plays host to a ton of fixes and bug squashing. There’s too much to cover in detail so we’ll focus on a few standouts and list out the rest for you.

Drone Fixes

Drones had a fair few annoyances that needed addressing and the devs have finally delivered. For starters, their sounds and attacks will no longer affect your stealth state. Previously, it was hard to sneak around with a drone at the ready. Not a problem anymore.

Also, drones can now get buffed from Charismatic Nature, granting them +1 HP per hit at level 3. Your drone will also trigger when a motion sensor is set to be tripped by zombies and strangers. Perfect for turning them into a security measure.

Finally, drones will no longer heal abrasions when a bandage or first aid kit is used.

Workstations with Motion Sensors

An annoying bug in 7D2D was that any workstations that had motion sensors attached would randomly disappear. They would still be in the environment, but you just couldn’t see them. This was due to a problem with the game’s chunks.

The devs have now fixed it so that none of your base’s stuff becomes randomly invisible when you simply wanted to have some sensors set up.

User Profile Fix

Yet another tedious bug was related to user profiles in your Windows operating system. If they contained non-Latin characters, you couldn’t run the game from the launcher. That has now been fixed so you no longer need to worry about how you’ve set up your OS’s profile.

Other Fixes

• Localization needed for drone ally healing
• ModRoboticDroneModCooldown and Desc needs localization
• Vehicles storage access not playing sounds or adding to player stealth.
• Localization needed for drone ally healing
• ModRoboticDroneModCooldown and Desc needs localization
• Error with the drone with multiple cargo mods on a dedi, after a long play session.
• EAC crashing the game on macOS Monterey
• Key rack in diner_03 triggers a shutter in the poi next to it.
• Seeds cannot spawn in trader loot.
• Imposter blocks for poi abandoned_house_03.
• Workbench crafting tool mod dupe
• Can’t pickup nonsquare frames if inventory is full
• Store_grocery_03: On/off button on a forge becomes unresponsive
• Clients in playtest games receive an NRE after selecting the given LCB
• Harvested farm plots vanish when player inventory full
• Molotovs are always lit once you light the first one in the stack
• Accessing an aimable electrical component after doing a melee attack will make you repeat the attack
• BuffPerkGunSlingerBonus cvar doesn’t clear during automatic fire if triggered with single shots
• Urban Combat Vol. 7 no longer works due to unlinked IsIndoors cvar
• Iron and steel spears disappear when thrown too far
• Underground crouching and sprinting can result in teleportation to surface
• Harvesting animals with full inventory results in lost items
• Damage mitigation buffs only give a HP refund to players, not actual damage mitigation
• Double XP killing a zombie while it is on fire using torch or any explosives.
• Using auger or chainsaw right before they’re done repairing breaks item/hand placement and hand animation
• Vehicles collide with Sticky Projectiles
• Can not save prefabs on MS Store build Saved prefabs now always go to the LocalPrefabs folder in the UDF
• Can not create new worlds on MS Store build New worlds now always go to the GeneratedWorlds folder in the UDF
• “Show light performance” setting in the editor carries over to normal game
• Mod code being initialized twice if both legacy and new mod location exist and code mod being in the latter
• Saving during imposter creation kills POIs
• Creative menu stack size number decreases by right clicking single quantities of a grabbed stack into inventory
• Not trying to load mods twice if UserDataFolder is set to the game folder
• Typo on special infected group GS1 and GS50 zombieWightRadiated probability
• As client on a dedi, buried supplies are always in the South West Quadrant of the circle.
• Buried supplies/treasure chests can spawn below bedrock.
• Breaking weapon sound is not happening anymore.
• “NO TRADER” appears on starter quest if no forest biomes exist or no trader in nearby forest.
• ZombieSoldier backpack collision issue
• Fixed industrial light 2 lens flare being blocked at moderately low angles
• Fixed crawler and spider ragdolls shift back when blending out.
• Fixed street lamp LOD group thresholds being too low.
• Going from vehicle mod slot to clothing mod slot causes NRE
• Switching from drone’s mod window to another mod window will transform the drone to the other item
• Iron and steel spears disappear when thrown too far.
• On/off button on a forge becomes unresponsive
• Knife harvest can easily hurt other players if they are standing near you
• Accepting invites / joining through friends list is not blocked while game is still initializing
• XBL invite creates new launcher and game instance if already running
• Unable to join servers with some player names