Best 7 Days to Die Skill Magazines and Books Guide: All Series and Where to Find Them

Crafting skill magazines raise one skill by one point each time you read one, and at set skill levels they unlock new recipes for that skill. If you want better shotguns, you read Shotgun Weekly; if you want better food, you read Home Cooking Weekly. Perk books work differently: each series has several volumes, each volume grants a perk, and reading the full set grants a bonus. Magazines are a ladder you climb one point at a time, while books are a collection you complete. Confusing the two is the most common reason players waste books: reading a magazine you do not need is a small loss, but spending a rare book volume without knowing which set it belongs to can cost you a set bonus.

Both systems reward specialization. Reading every magazine you find spreads your points thinly across skills you never use, while focusing on the magazines for your main weapon, your main crafting line, and your base defense will unlock the recipes that change your game first. Decide your build early, even loosely: a shotgun and fortitude survivor reads different magazines from a rifle and agility survivor, and both read different books from a builder who lives in the crafting hall.

The crafting magazine series below follow community-tracked lists, and their maximum levels should be checked in-game for the current version, because level caps and recipe ladders shift between versions. Tools Digest teaches harvesting tools, Handy Land teaches repair tools, and Scrapping 4 Fun teaches salvage tools. Furious Fists covers knuckles, Knife Guy covers blades, Big Hitters covers clubs, Get Hammered covers sledgehammers, Bow Hunters covers bows, Sharp Sticks covers spears, and Handgun Magazine, Shotgun Weekly, Rifle World, and Tactical Warfare cover handguns, shotguns, rifles, and machine guns respectively.

Explosive Magazine covers explosives, Tech Planet covers robotics, Armored Up covers armor, Pack Rat Magazine covers backpacks, and Medical Journal covers medical crafting. Home Cooking Weekly covers food, Southern Farming covers seeds, Wiring 101 covers electrical work, Electrical Traps covers traps, Forge Ahead covers workstations, and Vehicle Adventures covers vehicles. As a working guide, community lists give maximum levels around 100 for most weapon, tool, and crafting series, 75 for several melee and medical series, 50 for repair tools, and 20 for seeds, but treat those caps as a starting reference, not as verified current-version data, and confirm the cap for your chosen series before you plan a long grind around it.

Each magazine series unlocks recipes at set levels, so progress feels like a staircase rather than a flood. Older-version examples illustrate the shape: the workstation series unlocks a dew collector early, then a forge, a workbench, and later a cement mixer, a chemistry station, and a crucible at high levels. The medical series unlocks basic bandages early, then casts, herbal antibiotics, and advanced medicines at higher levels. The exact thresholds in the current version may differ, so use these examples to understand the shape of progression, not as a shopping list to memorize. The practical lesson is to read magazines as you find them for your chosen lines, because a recipe you unlock three tiers early changes what you can build for the next week.

Perk book series each run to several volumes, commonly seven per series in community lists, with a bonus for completing the set. Series reported by players include The Art of Mining, The Automatic Weapon Handbook, Batter Up, Bar Brawling, The Fireman's Almanac, The Great Heist, The Hunter's Journal, Lucky Looter, Magnum Enforcer, The Night Stalker, Pistol Pete, Ranger's Guide to Archery, Shotgun Messiah, Sledge Saga, Sniper, Spear Hunter, Urban Combat, Tech Junkie, and Wasteland Treasures, with Needle and Thread also appearing in some lists. That creates a 19 versus 20 series discrepancy that is not resolved here, so count the series in your own game rather than trusting either total. The set bonus is the reason to keep books organized: store volumes by series in a labeled chest instead of reading them the moment they drop, so you can see which set is one volume away from completion.

One version note matters more than the rest. The current version line changed four items alongside the new backpack capacity: Night Stalker volume 4, Steroids, Chicken Nuggets, and the full Fireman's Almanac set. Do not copy older per-volume effects for those from an old guide, because the current version may have changed what they do. If a Night Stalker volume or a Fireman's Almanac set bonus behaves differently from what you remember, that is the version change at work, not a bug, and your in-game description is the authority.

Magazines and books turn up in mailboxes, newspaper boxes, bookshelves, bookstores such as Crack-A-Book, libraries, and schools, and themed loot locations match themed magazines: food magazines in food piles and kitchen cabinets, tool magazines in workshops, and medical magazines in clinics. Traders sell magazines and books, and quest rewards can include crafting magazine bundles. The highest-yield single habit is to loot every bookshelf and mailbox on a trader quest route instead of sprinting past them, because a route you already travel is a free book run. Check schools and libraries on purpose, not by accident: a dedicated book run to a Crack-A-Book store will usually beat a week of incidental finds.