Land Claims on Your 7 Days to Die Server
Claims are what stop your base being taken apart while you are offline. Size, count, expiry and how tough blocks are when you log off are all set in the panel.
4 min read · Updated Oct 25, 2026 · By GuavaHost Team
Land claims are the single most important group of settings on a shared server. They decide how much of the map each player owns, how tough their base is while they are offline, and what happens to it if they stop playing. They are all on the Server settings page under Land claims.
What a claim does
A keystone placed in the world protects a square around itself. Inside that square, other players cannot damage blocks, and the owner's own blocks are made tougher by a multiplier that depends on whether the owner is online.
That last part is what matters on a server where people play at different times. Without it, a base is only as safe as the hours its owner keeps.
The settings, and sensible values
Claims each player may place. How many keystones one person may have out at once. More claims means more of the map locked up; fewer means people have to choose where they actually live.
Claim size, in blocks. The square a keystone protects, measured across. The default is 41, so a little over twenty blocks in each direction from the stone. Raise it for a server where people build big and there is room; lower it on a small map where claims would start overlapping.
Gap between players' claims. How much space the game insists on between one player's claim and another's. This is a quiet anti-griefing setting: it stops somebody placing a claim right up against your wall.
Claims expire after, in real days offline. When a player has not logged in for this many days, their claim stops protecting anything. This is how a server reclaims the land of people who have moved on. Seven days is the default; on a server for a group of friends who play in bursts, longer is kinder.
How protection fades as a claim expires. Three choices: it fades steadily, it holds and then drops away quickly at the end, or it holds completely until the moment it expires. The last one is the most predictable and the kindest to somebody who comes back after a fortnight.
Block strength inside a claim, owner online and owner offline. Two multipliers for how tough the owner's blocks are. The offline one is the important number on a PvP server: a low value means a base can be taken apart while its owner is at work, and zero in either field means nothing inside the claim can ever be damaged at all.
Count the owner as offline after, in minutes. A grace period, so logging out for a moment does not immediately drop a base to its offline strength.
For a friendly server
Turn Who players may kill to no killing, under Players and PvP on the same page, and the claim settings mostly stop mattering. Leave them at their defaults, set the expiry longer than your group's longest holiday, and set the decay mode to full protection until expiry so nobody comes back to a half dissolved base.
For a PvP server
Here the numbers are the game.
- Set Block strength inside a claim, owner offline deliberately. High means bases are effectively safe overnight and raiding happens when people are around to defend. Low or 1 means a base is only as safe as its owner's attendance.
- Keep Gap between players' claims generous, or people will build claims as weapons.
- Keep the expiry short enough that an abandoned base is not a permanent no-go area in the middle of the map.
Announce whatever you choose. A server where nobody knows the offline multiplier is a server where somebody feels cheated.
Changing them later
Every one of these takes effect at the next restart and applies to claims that already exist, so you can tune them as the server settles. Save on the Server settings page, then press Restart.
A couple of settings in this game can only be set when a world is new. If one of these ever refuses to change, the console commands setgamepref and overridemaxplayercount are the game's own escape hatch, and you can type them in the Console tab.
Common questions
Does a claim stop zombies?
No. Claims protect blocks from other players, not from the horde. Zombies will happily take the same wall apart on day seven whatever your claim settings say. The settings for that are in the Sandbox code and in blood moon lag and what actually fixes it.
What happens to a base when its claim expires?
The claim stops protecting it. The building is still there and still standing; it is simply no longer immune to other players, and zombies treat it the same as before. Nothing is deleted.
Can I protect my own base permanently?
Set Block strength inside a claim, owner offline to 0, which means nothing inside a claim can ever be damaged by anyone. That turns off raiding entirely and is a reasonable choice for a building server, but say so up front: it is a different game from the one most players expect.
Why can one player not place a claim near mine?
The gap setting. The game refuses a claim that lands within that many blocks of somebody else's, which is deliberate: it stops a claim being used to box another player in. Lower it if your map is small and people genuinely need to live close together.
- 7 days to die
- land claims
- pvp
- griefing
- settings
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