7 Days to Die - Traps and Turrets (Everything a Survivor Needs to Know)

This guide describes in detail the damage, range and capabilities of the various traps and turrets added in B16. Intended as a ‘quick reference’ so you can more precisely build your perfect base! This is NOT a guide to build/design specific traps – just info related to the various blocks.

Other 7DTD Guides:

Contents

Land Mines
Power Generation
Electric Fences
Turrets

Land Mines

All credit goes to Evilreaver!

[CT] Candy Tin Mine: 42 damage.
[PP] Pressure Plate Mine: 70 damage.
[CP] Cooking Pot Mine: 73 damage.
[HC] Hubcap Mine: 86 damage.
[AF] Air Filter Mine: 174 damage.

For defending against zombies, CTs will kill any non-feral non-fat that steps on them and can “sometimes” kill nearby zombies as well. PPs will kill anything including some ferals and can regularly kill nearby zombies. AFs will kill anything except high level players, and will absolutely kill everything within 1 meter of the blast.

If you place a mine on a gas barrel (even CTs), it will chain-explode. Nothing can survive the double-blast, not even a 250-wellness, 600-military-armor-wearing player– but it’s worth noting that there is a tiny delay between the mine going off and the gas barrel exploding, meaning that sprinting players/zombies might not get the full effect. This works best with PP mines near a door that players might want to break into or that zombies will cluster around.

Gas barrels on their own at point blank do about 70 damage. A chain-explosion is *much* stronger.

Remember to paint your PP mines!

Power Generation

Each power generator ‘piece’ adds a flat amount of wattage at 1 quality, and double that amount at 600 quality, with a linear progression for everything 2-599.

Solar Panels – 15W base, plus another 15W at 600 (Max 30 each, 180 per bank).
Batteries – 25W base, plus another 25W at 600 (Max 50 each, 300 ber bank).
Generators – 50W base, plus another 50W at 600 (Max 100 each, 600 per bank).

Batteries in use will drain durability from the top-right-most battery based on usage, and ‘burn them down’ one at a time until empty. Better quality batteries have a larger capacity. Similarly, batteries will ‘repair themselves’ while there is spare power in the network to charge them.

An ideal power setup has Solar and/or Generator blocks connected to a battery (in series), then the battery to an optional Switch (as a ‘main circuit breaker’), then to the rest of your network.

One final note, Generators have 1000 health, Solars and Batteries have 100, which means that a gen can take a bullet or two, solars/batteries cannot. Ideally these things are nowhere near combat, but it may be worth keeping in mind.

Electric Fences

Fence poles can be thirteen spaces apart at maximum. That is to say on a grid, you can place one at “One” and one at “Fifteen” and wire them together.

This can be tricky, since the ‘wire’ that follows you doesn’t go further than about 10– but if you get close to that limit and rightclick to connect from long distance, the wire will reach. In addition, the wires will easily go through any blocks, and thus the poles can be hidden behind as many layers of concrete and steel as you like.

Fences are NOT stand-alone defenses. Each shock deals about 30 damage which won’t kill anything. Players/zombies that have been shocked have about a one-second immunity to shocks afterwards, meaning that having a dense grid of wires isn’t as effective as you’d hope. However, it keeps them in place for 2-3 seconds, which means:

If they’re standing on steel log spikes, they’ll take a TON of damage.
They’re very easy to pick off with your weapon of choice.
They’re not currently chewing on your door/wall, dramatically ‘improving’ its longevity.
They’re easy to hit with Dart Traps.

Players are pretty smart (sometimes) and can usually avoid electric fences. Your best bet is to put wire across a hallway to prevent them, briefly, from running through. Consider pairing this with trap floors or PP-Gas Barrel mines (as described in the first section) since zapped players can’t jump.

Lastly, pairing the fence with a motion sensor allows the trap to be off, and thus safe for you, when there’s no enemies nearby. This can also save on your power bill, which is nice.

Turrets

Shotgun turrets have a four-round mag and will engage targets 14 meters away.
Auto turrets have a short mag (10? look for updates) and will engage targets 30 meters away.

Turrets reload very quickly from their inventory, but it’s worth noting that they don’t have 100% uptime, and crafty players can bait out some shots if needed, or after a fight a turret might just sit on one round in the mag and not reload until the start of the next fight.

Rest assured, however, that turrets are very good at their jobs– the shotguns are even very effective at their maximum range. They can and will fire through blocks such as Iron Bars. I have not been able to get them to cause friendly fire (that doesn’t mean its impossible, but it’s not something you probably have to worry about too much).

Turrets hit their targets semi-randomly, but focus on one target at a time. It is possible for a shotgun turret to fire one shell at max range, headshot a zombie and kill it, then move on to the next immediately. It is also possible for (either flavor of) turret to fire its whole mag into a zombie, blow off all its limbs, reload, and drop another mag into it before scoring a kill, wasting a ton of time and ammo. Against players they are equally unreliable; sometimes they will chain headshots and drop your foe in a second, sometimes they’ll just thump rounds into that guy’s armor. But even in the worst case, they are really, really good at their jobs… just not very ammo-efficient.

On the other hand, Dart Traps are kinda lousy. They have, as far as I can tell, infinite range, but lose one ‘elevation’ per 26 blocks, and deal about 40 damage with a chance to bleed. They DO NOT fire through any sort of block– not through iron bars, not through even glass, dealing a full zero damage to blocks. The darts travel fairly slowly so if you use a pressure plate to trigger them, you’ll miss unless the target is moving straight towards/away from the dart. They can be paired with 1×5 Pressure Plates with electric fencing over them as a pretty good anti-zombie defense… just expect to make a lot of darts for them and reload often.