Torch

Torch is a 7 Days to Die mod which works to optimize one of the game's most inefficient areas -- the lighting engine. It is designed to improve lighting quality and frame rates in situtations where there are many lights in an area in game, it does so without compromising on how the game looks. Depending on the hardware running 7 days and the situations, performance increases can be anywhere from 5 fps to 40 fps. For example, in the images the comparison is taken with almost 150 lights enabled in the POI Jeffelon Zuckergate Estate and in the bunker on a i7-12700k and a 4090.

Currently Torch is in an alpha stage, more optimization updates will come in the future.

Installation Guide

Torch is a client side only mod. All that is needed is to download the Mod and simply drop the mod into your Mods folder where 7 Days to Die is installed. Then launch the game with Easy Anti Cheat disabled. Check to see if Occlusion is on in the main menu Video Settings, if it is off, turn it on. No other work is required in order to take advanatage of the mod, besides having shadow distance turned on.

Not sure if you installed the mod correctly? Try checking the console in game by pressing F1 and scroll up to the part where the mods are loading. If the mod is installed correctly, these following lines should be shown.

Trying to load from folder: Torch

Found ModAPI in Torch.dll, creating instance

Loaded Mod: Torch (mod version)

Loading Patch

Light Occlusion: Awake

Loaded Patch

Compatibility

Torch uses the built in Occlusion Culling System in 7 Days to Die. As such, a GPU that supports DirectX 11. 0 is required, which covers most graphics cards released after 2010. If you have one of the following GPUs you likely do have a GPU that will support Torch

INTEL HD Graphics 2500/4000 (Ivy Bridge) or newer

NVIDIA GeForce 400 Series (Fermi) or newer

* AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series (TeraScale 2) or newer

While Torch does support GLCore and Vulkan, it is recommended to use DirectX 11 to get the best experience and performance out of Torch.

If you encounter issues with Torch, make sure that your graphics drivers are up to date.

If your GPU doesn't support some features required by Torch, an error message will appear in the console in game. You will see one of two error messages.

Light Occlusion: GPU doesn't supports Async GPU Readback

Light Occlusion: GPU doesn't supports Compute Shade

Technical details