7 Days to Die Blood moon horde nights are the most CPU-intensive event in 7 Days to Die. If your server struggles during blood moons, these are the settings to adjust.
Performance Settings Reference
| Setting | Default | Small Server (2-4) | Medium Server (5-8) | Large Server (9+) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
BloodMoonEnemyCount | 8 | 8 | 6-8 | 4-6 |
MaxSpawnedZombies | 64 | 64 | 50-64 | 40-50 |
MaxSpawnedAnimals | 50 | 50 | 40 | 30 |
ServerMaxAllowedViewDistance | 12 | 12 | 10 | 8-10 |
BlockDamageAIBM | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
How to Change These Settings
All of these settings are in serverconfig.xml. Edit the file via File Manager or SFTP:
- Open
serverconfig.xml - Find each setting and update the
valuefield - Save the file
- Restart the server
Setting Details
BloodMoonEnemyCount
The maximum number of simultaneously alive blood moon zombies per player. This is the single most impactful performance setting for horde nights.
A 4-player server with BloodMoonEnemyCount 8 can have up to 32 blood moon zombies active at once. Reducing to 6 drops that to 24 - a meaningful difference for server load.
MaxSpawnedZombies
Global zombie cap across the entire server. During blood moons, most of this budget goes to horde zombies. Lowering this caps how many zombies can exist at once, providing a hard ceiling on server load.
MaxSpawnedAnimals
Animals share processing time with zombies. Reducing this during peak load (or permanently) frees resources for zombie AI during horde nights.
ServerMaxAllowedViewDistance
Controls how far chunks are loaded for each player. Lower values mean fewer chunks to process, which helps during blood moons when the server is already under heavy load.
BlockDamageAIBM
Controls how much damage blood moon zombies deal to blocks. This doesn’t directly affect performance, but higher values mean zombies break through structures faster, which can lead to more complex pathfinding recalculations. Keep at 100 unless you specifically want to change the difficulty.
Additional Performance Tips
- Schedule restarts before blood moons - A fresh server handles blood moons better than one that’s been running for days. See our scheduled restarts guide.
- Base location matters - Bases far from cities and traders have less background chunk processing to compete with blood moon AI.
- Mod impact - Some mods add background processing or new entity types that compound during blood moons. If you’re running mods and experiencing lag, test with mods disabled to isolate the cause.
For a comprehensive guide to blood moon optimization, see our blood moon performance blog guide.