Season 2 Open Beta — September 1st, 6:00 PM EST
Four months ago this was an empty folder and an idea. On Monday, September 1st at 6:00 PM EST, it opens its doors.
It's still a target — if the last week of testing turns up something that would wreck your first night, we move the date rather than ship it broken.
EARN. LOOT. SURVIVE. REPEAT.
The rules of the beta
It runs two weeks, then it gets wiped. Your base, levels, chips, gear, progress — all of it. No small print. We're saying it now so nobody sinks sixty hours into something they thought was permanent.
VIP is off for the entire beta. Taking your money for perks and then wiping the character wearing them isn't something we're willing to do, so the store simply doesn't open until launch day.
Every number is still moving — health, damage, prices, drop rates, timers. All of it is mid-tuning, and all of it will change based on what two weeks of real players show us. That's exactly why you won't find a single stat quoted below. What follows is what things are. What they're balanced at on launch day is partly up to you.
The Undercity
A dead city, buried. You'll fall into it by accident long before you go looking for it — then it starts trying to kill you.
Spike pits, covered pits that give out underfoot, flooded sumps, one-way chutes that drop you a band deeper with no way back up. Sealed ambush pockets — a blank wall that bursts open with a pack already coming. Guarded caches that trigger when you loot them, not when you walk past. See one, leave it, walk away clean. Greed is the mechanic.
Six districts, six bosses, each calling its own strain of minion. A trader who has never seen the sun, holding a stall in a ventilated cavern town. A forced arena cut into bedrock. Bad air in the deepest workings, countered by a hand-crafted filter — and the world plants the coal to make it right down there.
And THE VAULT DOOR. One grand bedrock chamber per map. The House's vault of legend. Go find it.
You won't be entirely on your own. Exits and safe districts paint onto your map while you're underground. A five-quest chain walks you from your first sinkhole to the Deep Trader. And once you've found your feet on the surface, the House invites you personally.
The Seven
Seven half-turned survivors serve a blood moon god. They can't do the work anymore. They need runners.
A complete story-driven RPG overhaul — 125 quests across twelve chapters, and it doesn't end where you expect, because the god is never defeated. What changes is your standing with it.
Seven skill lines, one per member. A cult ladder you climb — Open Hand, Witnessed, Red Debt, Elder Hand, Black Seat — granted by chapter milestones, not bought from a menu. A second economy running in parallel, paid for in Blood Coin, Dead Shards, Moon Ash and Dead Letters. Seven identity bosses, each escalating with a new mechanic rather than a bigger bar. And at the end of chapter ten, you choose a road — three genuinely different endgames, not three cutscenes.
For open beta, The Seven runs the first five chapters.
PvE everywhere. PvP only where you choose it.
The map is PvE — and not just because a config line says so. Player-versus-player damage is denied at the engine unless both of you are standing inside an armed zone. You cannot be griefed.
Then there's The Pit — opt-in PvP built like a real arena. Warnings and a grace period on the way in. Combat-tagged, so quitting while tagged kills you anyway. Die in there and you wear a Recovering penalty, respawn away from your bag, no instant re-entry, no corpse-camping. It drops the richest bag on the server, and it's the only source of Pit Rounds.
The Vault
Play, earn TLL Coins, spend them at The Vault on thelootlounge.com — and the items come to you in-game. Type /claim and they arrive on the spot with a server-wide announce. Every order is acknowledged with an ID, so a crash or restart can never double-deliver or lose a purchase.
Twelve collections, all built in-house — gold weapons, signature melee, armour sets, legendaries, base kits, premium beds, three building materials above vanilla steel, gold tools, weapon mods, effect rounds, and rotating seasonal drops.
One rule we won't break: the store sells convenience, prestige and gold. Never power. Effect rounds add no damage. Every mod sits at or below the strongest equivalent already in the game. You will never lose a fight in the Pit because someone spent money.
Power is earned — in Chips
Six physical tokens — White, Red, Blue, Green, Black, Gold — earned only, never buyable. They stack in your inventory, which means they fall into your death bag, and another player can loot them off your corpse. You take them off the Pit and off the hardest House Contracts, and you spend them in the Vault's High Rollers section on gear that beats the best equivalent in its slot.
Getting there means the contract ladder — five tiers of casino-themed wave defence, climbing floor after floor and getting meaner each time, ending on the Pit Boss and the House payout crate. Above them sit three gear-gated raid bosses, each sheathed in dead-man's-luck armour that only House-Marked Rounds can bite. Biggest chip payouts on the server.
Gas Station Refuel
Fuel stops being a menu item and becomes somewhere you go. Drive up to any pump and your vehicle refuels while you sit there. Three grades plus Duke's Octane Booster. Stations have DNA — stock regenerates and prices move, so drain one dry and it costs more until it recovers. Take a wrench to a world pump and you siphon it. Tanker restock events roll through. Traders hand out fuel delivery contracts.
Server-side. Nothing to install.
7 Days to Life
The long game — a full life-framework for 7 Days to Die, the kind of thing Arma servers have had for a decade and this game has never had.
In for beta: persistent gangs with ranks and roles, saved across restarts. A gang bank holding real physical casino tokens, with per-rank daily withdrawal limits and an audit log. A gang house bound to a member's land claim, with rank-gated door access that actually works. And the Black Market — contraband trading and laundering, where marked tokens are dirty money that won't spend at the Duke's vendors until they're cleaned at the Lounge cage, at the house's cut.
Built, and coming soon: gang progression and perks (not one point of combat power in it), capturable gang territory with skim income, the Duke's Rackets — a still, a chem lab, a scrap yard, a gun runner's cache — each skimming a cut of trader sales into your gang bank and each drawing enforcer raids that scale with how much you're holding.
One rule governs the whole framework: we will never build a mechanic that needs an admin or a second faction online before you can play it.
One more thing — and it isn't for our server
We're also releasing an earthquake mod, for everybody else's worlds. Scheduled earthquakes with camera shake, ground splitting open, real structural collapse, dust kicking up over everything. It carries its own progression — Seismic Mastery, five archetypes, top ranks that stay sealed until you've earned the achievement behind them.
It will not run on The Loot Lounge, because everything on our server is server-side only so you install nothing. The earthquake mod needs a client-side install to do what it does — so it goes out as a public release for other server owners and single-player worlds. We're mentioning it here because it comes out of the same effort. We want to be a house that ships mods, not just a server that runs them.
About the two of us
That's the whole team. No studio, no publisher, no contractors. Four months, one coder, plus every fix to the third-party mods we run. We're trying to be a house — original systems, built here, pushing on what's actually possible when you can't ship a client install and the anti-cheat never comes off. Some of what's in this build we genuinely couldn't find anyone else doing.
That has cost an enormous number of hours, a real amount of money, and a frankly stupid number of nights that ended after sunrise. We're not saying it for sympathy. We're saying it so you know that when you file a bug report, it lands in front of the person who wrote the line.
We need you to break it
This is what open beta is actually for. We've soaked this build across blood moons with nobody on it. None of that is the same as a full server doing a full server's worth of unreasonable things at once.
You are going to find bugs. That's the point. Every one of those is a win if it gets reported and a disaster if it doesn't — because the alternative is finding it on launch night with a full server watching.
The bug report system on thelootlounge.com is open now and stays open through the beta. Please use it instead of chat — chat scrolls, reports don't. Tell us what you were doing, where, when, what you expected, what happened, whether you can make it happen again, and a screenshot if the screen was wrong. Short and specific beats long and vague every time.
On feedback: we want it, and we want it constructive. Tell us something is too hard, too slow, too expensive, too confusing, unfair or just not fun — and tell us why — and we will read every word and change our minds where you're right. Balance is the single thing most likely to move between now and launch, and your beta feedback is the main input we have for it.
What we won't engage with is abuse, or "this is trash" with nothing attached. There are two of us. Aim it at the mechanic and we'll do something about it.
The short version
September 1st, 6:00 PM EST. Two weeks. Then a wipe. VIP is off until launch. The Seven runs five chapters. Every number is still being tuned.
Come dig. Come find the Vault Door. Come lose your chips to somebody in the Pit, and come back and take them off them.
Then tell us everything we got wrong.
— The House is already watching.