The Last of Us Survival Guide

What Rebirth changes, and how this guide is sourced

Rebirth is FuriousRamsay's overhaul of 7 Days to Die, and it replaces far more than it tweaks. Your stats grow from what you do, you earn a class by using its weapons, crafting runs through a chain of benches that need the right tools, zombies get stronger as you do, and some of them get back up after you kill them. This guide is a running reference for all of it.

The mod's author says it plainly: set aside what you know about vanilla. You won't be scrapping everything, building walls from bare wood, or throwing up a fortress on day two. Progression is deliberately slow.

The biggest differences from vanilla

• Stats come from activity, not skill points. Five "genetics" stats level up from the matching actions, and player levels give no perk points at all. See Genetics & Perks.
• Classes are earned. Fight with a class's starter weapons to build its class book. There are ten classes, and you can hold two or three in a normal playthrough. See Classes.
• Leveling makes the zombies stronger too. The "misery" systems scale zombies with your level and kill count, so rushing levels makes the game harder. See World & Progression.
• Crafting starts from a Toolbox, and each bench needs specific tools slotted in. See Crafting & Benches.
• Armor is deep. You learn it by scrapping it, fit it with tiered mods, and in 2.6 can reroll its random bonuses at the Integration Workbench. See Gear & Armor.
• Food and water can make you sick, and farming has real requirements. See Survival & Farming.
• You have allies. A starter dog, hireable survivors, and mercenaries. See Companions & Hotkeys.
• Zombies revive, adapt, and support each other. See Zombies & Scenarios.
• Don't trust every item description. Many items still carry vanilla's text but work differently in Rebirth. See Stale Descriptions.

New to it? Start with Getting Started.

Starting a game

• Jumpstart sets your starting kit. The default gives a stone pick, stone shovel, torch, bone knife, bedroll, and a first-aid bandage, and you earn your class book yourself. Book/Weapon adds a class book and a matching weapon. Book/Essentials also adds an iron pick, iron fire axe, iron shovel, and a wrench. On a first playthrough, the video guides recommend earning the class the normal way.
• Scenario. Besides the standard game there are two scenarios that change the whole loop, covered in Zombies & Scenarios. Everything else here assumes the standard game.
• Rebirth settings let you adjust nearly everything: XP rates for genetics, class, and player level; whether zombies revive; screamer nights; POI risk; fire; tornadoes; health bars; and more.
• Use a randomly generated world. Rebirth ships no pre-generated maps. Maps from elsewhere, Navezgane included, can be missing Rebirth's custom POIs and the traders it depends on.

Install notes that trip people up

• Your game version must match the mod's, or you'll get bugs and crashes.
• The Mods folder should hold nothing but Rebirth and 0_TFP_Harmony.
• It's distributed through the Rebirth Discord, whose FAQ also has community guides.

How this guide is sourced

Three kinds of sources feed this guide: the installed game files, the official wiki, and transcripts of six videos, two of them from the mod's author. When they disagree, I weight them in this order:

1. The installed game files (Rebirth Core build 2026.03.30, Utils build 2026.07.02): recipes, trader stock, localization text, and the mod's scripts. Where a file gives a number, it wins.
2. The author's own videos. One is current (2.6, April 2026) and one is from late 2024.
3. The official wiki. Most of its pages were updated within the last few months.
4. SnowBee's videos from late 2024, when Rebirth ran on an older game version.

Details that only appear in a 2024 video are marked (2024 video), since they may have changed. Where sources conflict, the page says so rather than picking one quietly.