The Blood Moon is the recurring 7-day horde event in 7 Days to Die. By default it starts at 22:00 in-game time, lasts 6 hours (ending at 04:00), and recurs every 7 in-game days. The number, type, and aggression of zombies scale with each player's Game Stage. On a multiplayer server the default settings become either trivial for small high-stage groups or unplayable for large communities - this guide walks through every server-side knob that affects the horde and how they interact.
Three layered limits govern how many zombies are alive at once during a Blood Moon. They all apply - the actual cap is whichever fires first.
BloodMoonEnemyCount) - the maximum alive at once per player. Default 8.MaxSpawnedZombies) - the total simultaneous zombies anywhere on the map. Default 64. Per the in-XML comment: "MaxSpawnedZombies overrides this number in multiplayer games."gamestages.xml. Low Game Stage parties get fewer zombies than the per-player cap would suggest. Higher Game Stages get larger and more frequent waves with feral and special variants.So on an 8-player server with all defaults: BloodMoonEnemyCount × players = 64, which exactly matches the default MaxSpawnedZombies. Any larger party - or any boost to per-player count - hits the map cap before per-player. Raising the per-player count without also raising the map cap does nothing on a busy server.
All defaults below are taken from our serverconfig.xml reference; the in-line tooltips quote the live game's official descriptions.
| Property | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|
BloodMoonFrequency | 7 | In-game days between Blood Moons. Set to 0 to disable horde nights entirely. |
BloodMoonRange | 0 | How many days the actual horde day can deviate randomly from the frequency. 0 = exact every Nth day. |
BloodMoonWarning | 8 | Hour number on a horde day when the red number warning starts showing. −1 hides the warning entirely. |
BloodMoonEnemyCount | 8 | Per-player simultaneous zombie cap during the horde. Multiply by player count to get the theoretical concurrent total - but the map cap below still applies. |
MaxSpawnedZombies | 64 | Hard cap across the entire map at any moment. The single biggest server-load lever; raising this needs CPU and RAM headroom. |
EnemyDifficulty | 0 | 0 = Normal damage/HP scaling, 1 = Feral (zombies hit harder and have more HP). |
LootAbundance | 100 | Loot drop multiplier (percentage). Default 100 = 1×. Raise it on busy servers if loot scarcity becomes the bottleneck for surviving repeat hordes. |
There's no universally correct setting - it depends on the host's hardware and the average Game Stage of your group. The principle is: keep the simultaneous concurrent zombie load below what your CPU can simulate without the AI tick-rate dropping. Test, watch your server console for "long simulation" warnings, then adjust.
| Player count | Conservative (smooth) | Aggressive (challenging) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 - 4 players | EnemyCount 8, MaxSpawned 64 (defaults) | EnemyCount 12, MaxSpawned 80 |
| 5 - 8 players | EnemyCount 6 - 8, MaxSpawned 64 - 80 | EnemyCount 10, MaxSpawned 100 |
| 9 - 16 players | EnemyCount 4, MaxSpawned 80 - 100 | EnemyCount 6, MaxSpawned 120+ |
| 16+ players | EnemyCount 3 - 4, MaxSpawned 100 - 120 | Per-base instancing or split-server is more reliable than raising caps further. |
The "aggressive" column assumes you've validated server CPU headroom under sustained spawning - Blood Moon is the worst-case load spike on a 7D2D server, and an under-provisioned host will desync before it crashes.
You can tune when the horde happens, not just how much:
BloodMoonFrequency (e.g. 5) to compress the survival cycle - useful for servers with high turnover or session-based play.BloodMoonRange from 0 (exact) to 1 - 2 (small jitter) to keep regular players from stockpiling exactly the right amount of ammo for Day N. Don't go higher than 2 - too much randomness erodes the "preparation" loop the game is built around.BloodMoonWarning to −1 if your server runs on hardcore PvP rules and you don't want the red day-counter telegraphing horde nights.Game Stage on a multiplayer party uses diminishing returns, not averaging. The highest-stage member contributes ×1.0, the second ×0.5, the third ×0.25, and so on. Practical implication: a single high-level player joining a low-level group will still drag the party's Game Stage upward, and therefore the Blood Moon difficulty upward - even though loot rolls for each individual are based on per-player Loot Stage. See Leveling Speedrun for the full mechanic.
BloodMoonEnemyCount alone on busy servers - useless if MaxSpawnedZombies isn't raised proportionally; the map cap fires first.EnemyDifficulty - flipping from 0 to 1 makes every zombie hit harder and tank more, which is a separate scaling axis from spawn count.serverconfig.xml reference