No. 7 Days to Die V3.0 Dead Hot Summer does not have bandits. Bandits are not part of V3.0 stable, and they are not in V3.1 either. They remain in active development with no committed version. If you saw a clip of someone fighting bandits and assumed they were in 3.0, you saw the viral JaWoodle footage - and that did not come from the public experimental.
During a streamer weekend, content creator JaWoodle was filmed fighting bandits in 7 Days to Die, and the clip "Bandits Found in 3.0" spread fast. What actually happened is that a misdistributed internal build was sent out by mistake - it was never meant to be part of the public experimental branch. The bandits in that footage were from an internal development build, not from the version you can download.
So the bandits are real in the sense that The Fun Pimps are building them. They are not real in the sense that they shipped in 3.0. The clip created a lot of confusion because it looked like proof, but it was a behind-the-scenes build escaping early, not a feature reveal.
There is no committed version for bandits. The Fun Pimps have shown them in development for a long time, and they remain a stated goal, but no patch has them locked in and no firm release has been promised. V4.0 is reportedly in development concurrently with the 3.0 cycle - on a separate team, targeted loosely at later in 2026 - but treat any "bandits in 4.0" claim as a guess until there is an official announcement. The honest answer is: in development, no committed version, do not plan a server around them yet.
3.0 is a large update even without bandits. The headline additions are:
For the full breakdown of what is confirmed, see the V3.0 Sandbox Siege release notes and the 7d2d.net/3.0 hub.
If raiders and human enemies are what you are after, several community overhaul mods already add them on the current stable build. The Darkness Falls overhaul is the best-known example of a mod that brings human enemies and faction-style threats to the game today. See the mods hub for what runs on V3.1.