7 Days to Die Updated April 27, 2026

How to Customize Loot, XP, and Airdrops on Your 7 Days to Die Server

Dial in loot abundance, XP rates, airdrop frequency, and death penalties in serverconfig.xml to create the progression feel your community wants.

7 Days to DieLootXPAirdropsConfigurationGame Balance

All Settings in serverconfig.xml

Stop the server, edit serverconfig.xml, save, restart. Changes to loot values only apply to newly generated or respawned containers — existing chunks in the world use whatever abundance was set when they were first loaded.

Loot Settings

<property name="LootAbundance"    value="100" />
<property name="LootRespawnDays"  value="30" />
  • LootAbundance — a percentage. 100 is vanilla default. 200 doubles the loot in every container. 50 halves it. There's no hard cap but extremely high values can cause containers to overflow.
  • LootRespawnDays — how many real in-game days before looted containers refill. 0 means containers never respawn — once looted, they're empty forever. Good for hardcore servers.

Important caveat: Changing LootAbundance only affects containers in chunks that haven't been generated yet, or containers that have already respawned. If your world has been running for a while, players in already-explored areas won't see the change until those containers' timers expire.

XP Settings

<property name="XPMultiplier" value="100" />
  • 100 = vanilla XP rates
  • 200 = 2x XP (players level up twice as fast)
  • 50 = half XP (slower progression for long-term servers)

This multiplier applies to all XP sources — killing zombies, looting, crafting, building.

Airdrop Settings

<property name="AirDropFrequency" value="72" />
<property name="AirDropMarker"    value="true" />
  • AirDropFrequency — hours of in-game time between airdrops. Default 72 (every 3 in-game days). Set to 0 to disable airdrops entirely.
  • AirDropMarker — when true, players see a map marker at the airdrop location. Set to false to make airdrops require active searching.

At DayNightLength=60 (default), 72 in-game hours = 72 real minutes = one airdrop roughly every hour of real playtime.

Death Penalty Settings

<property name="DropOnDeath" value="0" />
<property name="DropOnQuit"  value="0" />

Values for both:

Value Effect
0 Drop nothing
1 Drop everything (toolbelt + backpack)
2 Drop toolbelt only
3 Drop backpack only
4 Delete everything (hardcore — items destroyed, not dropped)

DropOnQuit catches players who try to log out to avoid dying. Setting this to 1 or 3 discourages combat logging.

Casual/PvE server:

<property name="LootAbundance"   value="150" />
<property name="XPMultiplier"    value="150" />
<property name="LootRespawnDays" value="7" />
<property name="DropOnDeath"     value="0" />
<property name="AirDropFrequency" value="48" />

Vanilla survival:

<property name="LootAbundance"   value="100" />
<property name="XPMultiplier"    value="100" />
<property name="LootRespawnDays" value="30" />
<property name="DropOnDeath"     value="1" />
<property name="AirDropFrequency" value="72" />

Hardcore:

<property name="LootAbundance"   value="75" />
<property name="XPMultiplier"    value="75" />
<property name="LootRespawnDays" value="0" />
<property name="DropOnDeath"     value="4" />
<property name="AirDropFrequency" value="0" />
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