Where it started
The last road report here was the Gateway Viaduct on 31 August: one tile, one drive, one bump that was not there any more. Two weeks later the work moved into the Commandery Forge, the lab’s own build harness, and changed shape. What it produces for 7 Days to Die is the Interstate Framework, a mod of its own, separate from the two vehicles. Instead of placing tiles by hand, the lab taught the game’s world generator to place them, then wrote a planner that lays an interstate across the whole world.
The first breakthrough was small and strange. On 15 September the generator finally placed the lab’s tiles in a fresh world, and the fix was the tile names: the generator only considers a tile whose name carries one of its five shape words. Two days later a road network made only of the lab’s prefabs, seven tiles in all, generated on its own.
What got built
- 20 Sep, the ring. A closed interstate loop from the lab’s own tiles, with no lips and no severe seams where tiles meet.
- 21 Sep, the viaduct. The game routed its own roads under a 2,400-block run of interstate instead of crossing it flat.
- 23 Sep, four tags in a day. Variable piers that ride the ground and cross a lake; one ring profile proven on 15 worlds; the double ring with spokes and smooth diagonals; the first deck-over-deck interchange.
- 24 to 26 Sep, the front doors. The Hub, a cloverleaf-style centrepiece three tiles square. The Cutting, an interstate below natural ground. The deck diamond that joins interstate to local road. And the trader gateway, whose stem is the game’s own trader tile, untouched, so a vanilla trader spawns where the interstate meets the world.
- 27 Sep, mountains. Deck risers, the water rule (a road over water stands at least four blocks above it), the first tunnels, and a new Cross layout that routes its arms around towns.
- 28 Sep, the approaches. Six mountain test worlds logged 63 tunnels ending straight into a hillside with no ramp to the bores. The whole approach family was built and approved the same day: flat, climbing one to eight blocks, falling one to eight, a steep ramp eased in and out so the grade change stays gentle, and every one of them offset east and west.
How it was judged
A tile passes the automated gates first. Then it is loaded in the Prefab Editor and looked at by the person who has to drive it. Then it is generated into a world and driven. A green gate is necessary and never sufficient: most of the approvals in the history are a sentence said from the driver’s seat, like “Climb is smooth.” By 28 September, 179 tiles had generated in at least one of 171 test worlds.
What is still missing
- Nobody else can play it yet. Everything above runs in local builds. The one-folder framework has been cut but not booted as a release, and the River Crossing Pack from 13 September is still the only public download from this lane.
- The approaches are not in the planner. They are approved, but held back until more variants exist, so generated worlds do not use them yet.
- Mountain passes need more pieces. Notches for offsets and corners, tunnels on corners and offsets, a deck corner approach and an offset climber, measured by count on the mountain worlds.
- Some decks carry a crater. On mountain settings, about a third of self-grounded decks keep terrain inside them. Logged, not fixed.
- Towns connect less than they should. The flat T where a town meets the interstate is reserved until a deck spur T and a highway on-ramp exist.
Numbers
Planner 1.2.67, tiles 1.92.0: 261 tiles in the mix, 116 approved in the Prefab Editor, five milestones tagged. It targets 7 Days to Die V3.2.0 (b10) and turns itself off on any other build.