A 7 Days To Die mod. A crawler zombie is a half-eaten corpse dragging its guts across the ground, so it loses a little health for every block it drags itself after you — 1 HP per block by default, down to a floor of 10% of its max health, with a chance of starting a bleed on the way.
It costs the crawler nothing while it is idle, wandering, or chasing something that is not a player. Only the chase is paid for.
Download the zip from Releases and extract
it into the game's Mods/. The mod folder is the root of the archive, so it lands as:
Mods/CrawlerGuts/
├── ModInfo.xml
└── CrawlerGuts.dll
Load order does not matter, and nothing needs building.
cg prints the menu and changes nothing — crawlerguts is an alias. Every line names the command
that changes it and says what it is for, so the menu is also the reference:
CrawlerGuts is ON
cg on|off : [ >on< | off ] - a crawler loses health for every block it drags itself after you
cg dmg {hp} : 1 health per block dragged
cg floor {pct} : never dragged below 10% of max health (a bleed can still kill)
cg bleed {pct} : 10% chance per block to start bleeding, if not already
cg credit : [ on | >off< ] - drag damage and bleed count as your kill
cg flavor fw : [ >on< | off ] - FletchWounds: a dragging crawler works your arrows deeper
cg arrow {pct} : 10% chance per block to work a FletchWounds arrow deeper, if not bleeding
cg on and cg off are the master switch — with it off the tick hook returns immediately, so
every other setting is inert. They say which state you want rather than toggling, so the command
reads the same whichever state you were in and repeating it is harmless.
A setter called with no arguments prints its usage and current value. Changes are saved — see Settings file.
Two more: cg info prints the same block with the patch state and counters added, and cg reset
zeroes those counters.
The game's own floor-crawler walk type. That is the spawned crawlers (zombieSteveCrawler and its
feral variant), any crawler another mod builds on the same rig, and a walker that loses a leg
and drops to the floor mid-fight — from then on it is dragging itself too. The wall-climbing
spider zombie is a different rig and is not affected.
- Damage per block. Every block of ground a crawler covers while locked onto a player earns
it
cg dmghealth of damage. The setting may be fractional — 0.5 is one point every two blocks — and whole points come off as they are earned. 0 switches the drag damage off but leaves the bleed roll running. - Never below the floor. Drag damage takes at most the health the crawler has above
cg floorpercent of its max health, so it lands on the floor rather than through it: 20 HP on a 200 HP crawler, 30 on a 300 HP feral.cg floor 0removes the floor and lets dragging kill. - A chance to bleed. Once per block, a
cg bleedpercent chance to start the game's own bleed — one health a second for twenty seconds, the same as one cut from a blade. Only a crawler that is not already bleeding gets one, and a bleed that is already running, from this mod or from a blade, is never refreshed, extended or stacked by this mod. The bleed is a buff and pays no attention to the floor, so a bleeding crawler can still die. 0 switches it off. - Nobody's kill. By default the drag damage and the bleed are owned by nobody: being chased
is not the same as fighting back, so a crawler that dies of either is not your kill and pays
no XP.
cg crediton gives the damage and the bleed the chased player's id, so such a death counts as that player's kill for score, quests and XP. - Nothing else. No knockback, no hit reaction, no stun, no dismemberment from the drag damage itself.
With FletchWounds installed, a crawler dragging itself along with one of your
arrows still stuck in it gets a second, separate cg arrow percent chance per block to work
the arrowhead deeper. That is FletchWounds' own arrow effect, exactly as if you had pulled the
arrow: its damage, its stab sound and its one stack of bleed, credited to you and tuned with fw.
It is rolled half a block out of step with cg bleed, so the two never roll on the same block, and
only a crawler that is not already bleeding is handed over, so a bleed that is already running,
from a blade, from dragging or from FletchWounds itself, is never added to or refreshed by it. An
arrowed crawler hurts itself more often, not harder.
cg flavor lists the interactions with the other mods in this family, one switch per mod, on
by default, and changes nothing; cg flavor fw toggles this one and cg flavor on|off sets them
all. The switch is a pair: cg flavor fw and fw flavor cg set each other, and touch nothing
else, so FletchWounds' interaction with DoorSlammer is unaffected. cg arrow 0 switches just
this roll off. Without FletchWounds the switch and the setting do nothing, and cg info says so.
All settable in-game, and all written back to the settings file as soon as you set them:
| Setting | Default |
|---|---|
| damage per block | 1 HP |
| never-kill floor | 10% of max health |
| bleed chance per block | 10% |
| credit the chased player | off |
| flavor with FletchWounds | on |
| arrow chance per block | 10% (needs FletchWounds) |
Every setting survives a restart. A change made with cg is written straight out to:
%APPDATA%/7DaysToDie/CrawlerGuts/settings.txt
— the game's own user data folder, next to Saves, rather than Mods/CrawlerGuts/, so updating
the mod does not take your settings with it. cg info prints the full path and whether the last
read or write worked.
It is plain key = value text, one line per setting, each naming the command that sets it:
enabled = on # cg on|off
damage = 1 # cg dmg {hp} - health per block dragged
floor = 10 # cg floor {pct} - percent of max health
bleed = 10 # cg bleed {pct} - chance per block, 0 = off
credit = off # cg credit
flavor.fletchwounds = on # cg flavor fw - interaction with FletchWounds
arrow = 10 # cg arrow {pct} - chance per block with a FletchWounds arrow in, 0 = off
Edit it by hand with the game closed — it is rewritten whenever a cg command changes something.
A line that will not parse is logged and ignored rather than fatal, and deleting the file brings
back the defaults above (which live in Settings.cs).
Not required — the mod works fine on a plain install, and is built to sit alongside UL without modifying anything of UL's. Tested against UL 2.7.32. UL does not change crawler health, so the defaults mean the same thing with and without it.
Rage. UL rolls a chance to enrage a zombie on every bit of damage it takes, however small, and drag damage is many small bits. A crawler chasing you a long way therefore has a fair chance of raging on the way in. This is UL's rule and the mod does not suppress it.
Bleed. Vanilla and UL share one bleed model, and UL's bladed weapons stack it. This mod only ever starts a bleed on a crawler that has none, at the lowest tier, and leaves any existing stack alone.
- Dedicated servers. The drag damage and kill credit are server-side and work anywhere. With
cg crediton, XP for a crawler that dies of the bleed comes from the game's own buff-death path, which only pays out on the local player — so on a dedicated server a bleed death is credited but grants no XP. A credited drag-damage death always grants XP. - Clients on a dedicated server cannot use
cg— the settings live on the server.
Requires the .NET SDK; there are no NuGet dependencies. The mod builds in place inside the game install, against the game's own assemblies.
dotnet build src/CrawlerGuts/CrawlerGuts.csproj -c Release
That restages dist/CrawlerGuts/, ready to copy into Mods/. To also build the release archive:
dotnet build src/CrawlerGuts/CrawlerGuts.csproj -c Release -t:Package
That writes release/CrawlerGuts-v<version>-<date>.zip, taking the version from ModInfo.xml.
Neither dist/ nor release/ is tracked — the zip is published as a GitHub Release instead.
MIT — see LICENSE.