DayZ - ArmaII zombie mod

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The Wanderer was kind enough to make a mini-FAQ for those who want to play DayZ and hook up with the GWJ crew. First half of this post is the info he has provided. Second half of the post is my original post with a description of the game and the video that created the buzz around DayZ for those who are not familiar with the mod.

GWJ is attempting to establish a beachhead in Chernarus. Only trick is, we’re already well north of the beach. Details on how to link up with us are downthread, but immediately below we’re trying to make it a little easier to get started.

Where should I log so that I can give Rocket my “delicious tears”?
Day Z Mod Official Site

List of helpful threads from the Day Z forums.

List of key bindings.

This is the craziest inventory system I’ve ever…
Inventory tutorial.

ArmA2 Weapon and Ranging Correction Guide - Contains all the shooter's dope needed to get a round on target for every sniper rifle in DayZ. Save the CZ550.

A video on using all the sniper rifles in DayZ. Courtesy of Gumbie.

Where am I?
I don't know. You figure it out. (42.7 MB).

Okay… Where’s everything else?
SPOILERS!
Additional SPOILERS!
Hi resolution (42 mb) map. (SPOILERS!)
HTML map with loot tables, grid references. (SUPER SPOILERIFIC)

Where are you people at?
On Vent.
And in the GWJ:DZ Steam group. Post for an invite.

Dare to automate updates and such? Maybe try Day Z Commander.

ArmA Beta Patches here.

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DayZ - Average Life Expectancy: 4h 40m

Welcome to Chernarus. A 225 km2 open world post-soviet state and one of the areas hit by a new and presently unknown infection which has wiped out most of the world's population. You are one of the few who have survived and now you must search this new wasteland in order to fight for your life against what is left of the indigenous population, now infected with the disease.

Go Solo, team up with friends or take on the world as you choose your path in this brutal and chilling landscape using whatever means you stumble upon to survive.

This is Day Z - This is your story.

Official Site

I hate linking to this site but this is where I read it: http://kotaku.com/5908753/this-might...

Hilarious video

Any thoughts? I don't have ArmaII but I might pick it up to try DayZ.

I saw it and it does look interesting. I don't have ArmaII either though.

This looks amazing. So there is just like one server for this that everyone plays on? Do supplies respawn over time or will stuff just eventually empty out as it is scavenged and used up?

Also, do you just need ARMA II for this or do you also need the expansion?

There's a video up on Giant Bomb of Vinny and Drew trying to play this for a while. Seems broken as hell for now. They ended up playing Minecraft for a bit.

Blind_Evil wrote:

There's a video up on Giant Bomb of Vinny and Drew trying to play this for a while. Seems broken as hell for now. They ended up playing Minecraft for a bit.

They also played Minesweeper. And Vinny is terrible at Minesweeper.

Blind_Evil wrote:

There's a video up on Giant Bomb of Vinny and Drew trying to play this for a while.

One of the reasons Vinny was killed so quickly is that some DayZ players were using the stream to hunt him down and kill him, and they bragged about it later. With that sort of userbase I'm pretty put off.

No DayZ GWJ server?

I must be missing something. I'll ask some newbie questions:

- Half the servers I've joined have been in the middle of night. Can't see anything unless I crank the gamma or throw a flare. Fun?

- I've spent nearly an hour tramping through the woods looking for something of interest and come up empty handed. What kind of stuff can I be doing in this world beyond shooting zombies and worrying about getting murdered?

- How do I loot bodies? Seriously. Can't figure it out. I came by a corpse and there seemed to be something on it when I clicked, but the interface is kind of obtuse.

Certis wrote:

I must be missing something. I'll ask some newbie questions:

- Half the servers I've joined have been in the middle of night. Can't see anything unless I crank the gamma or throw a flare. Fun?

Nerve wracking more like it. The servers are on the same 24hr clock as the physical location of the server, so full day and night cycles. If the moon is out you can navigate pretty well, and toss flares into and around buildings you need to enter for loot. Just remember that you are highlighting yourself when you do this as I found out last night as someone delivered about 5-6 DMR rounds into me as I was leaving a minimart.

Certis wrote:

- I've spent nearly an hour tramping through the woods looking for something of interest and come up empty handed. What kind of stuff can I be doing in this world beyond shooting zombies and worrying about getting murdered?

Finding food, water, better weapons, items that can help you out (maps, compass, watch, gps, hunting knife (for butchering animals to regain blood), matches (lighting fires to cook your butchered meat), collecting items to repair cars, helicopters. Here is a good map showing locations of buildings that have better then average loot.

Spoiler:

The deer stands also have a chance of popping military grade equipment.

Each town will have a couple of enter able buildings to search for basic supplies but I've found a lot of my supplies by hitting the general stores shown on that map, pretty much everything listed above but the GPS.

Certis wrote:

- How do I loot bodies? Seriously. Can't figure it out. I came by a corpse and there seemed to be something on it when I clicked, but the interface is kind of obtuse.

Someone has already covered this really well on the DayZ forums.

Certis wrote:

I must be missing something. I'll ask some newbie questions:

- Half the servers I've joined have been in the middle of night. Can't see anything unless I crank the gamma or throw a flare. Fun?

- I've spent nearly an hour tramping through the woods looking for something of interest and come up empty handed. What kind of stuff can I be doing in this world beyond shooting zombies and worrying about getting murdered?

- How do I loot bodies? Seriously. Can't figure it out. I came by a corpse and there seemed to be something on it when I clicked, but the interface is kind of obtuse.

Try getting on a European server if you are logging in at night.

El-Producto wrote:
Certis wrote:

I must be missing something. I'll ask some newbie questions:

- Half the servers I've joined have been in the middle of night. Can't see anything unless I crank the gamma or throw a flare. Fun?

- I've spent nearly an hour tramping through the woods looking for something of interest and come up empty handed. What kind of stuff can I be doing in this world beyond shooting zombies and worrying about getting murdered?

- How do I loot bodies? Seriously. Can't figure it out. I came by a corpse and there seemed to be something on it when I clicked, but the interface is kind of obtuse.

Try getting on a European server if you are logging in at night.

Problem is since space is a premium seems most the EU servers have their ping thresh holds pretty low. every time i'd join i'd get kicked for my ping.

So is this mod actually worth paying $30 for? I don't have ARMA II at the moment, but I am very intrigued. I might just have to wait for a Steam sale, especially with Diablo 3 around the corner.

I must have picked up ARMAII during one of the Steam sales as I checked and I had it in my list. Note, you must have ARMAII: Combined Operations to play this mod (ARMAII and Operation Arrowhead combo pack), not just ARMAII vanilla. You install the mod in your Arrowhead install and when you launch Arrowhead you have the choice of playing Arrowhead or Combined Operations; which you need to pick Combined Operations.

So, I installed both games and then the mod and got to play maybe 30 minutes or so. I didn't meet a single person in-game but had a lot of fun. Extremely limited resources, hunger, thirst, bleeding, etc. I definitely love the survival aspect of it. It makes wandering through the countryside and coming upon a building all the more tense. I want to go in there to maybe find some ammo or food, but I'm scared sh*tless about the thought of going inside because I don't know what's in there. These zombies move fast. These are like the 28 Days Later variety and if they hear or see you they get very, very angry. By the end of my run I've somehow managed to not die just yet, but I made it to one of the bigger cities and alerted way too many Walkers by firing my pistol at one in a doorway. Luckily I chanced upon finding an Enfield rifle and I climbed to the top of a large smokestack near the port section of the city. So, there I sit listening to the random screams of pissed off Walkers below me, a bottle of water and a couple cans of beans to sustain me, 10 rounds in my rifle, and wondering what am I going to do now. But that will have to wait for another night as I have to go to bed now.

The other night I played for about two hours. I got into a rough gunfight with a bandit (anyone wearing a mask is someone you should should on the spot). He died but I lost a lot of blood. I stumbled away from Cherno and tried to head north toward Stary Sobor. Along the way, I found a lot of great stuff including a watch, binoculars and a shotgun with a lot of ammo. I made it to Stary during the day and entered town, spotting only one zombie.

I was still suffering from blood loss, so my screen was fading in and out of sharpness. I killed one zombie and heard the moans of several more. I fled behind a church and took my position to take out the other zombies I heard.

Turns out I heard a lot more than two.

I killed about twenty of them before I finally bled to death.

Dying is nothing short of epic in this game.

In one game, a survivor (not a bandit at that point I guess) shot me in the back of the head as I was targeting zed in Elektro.

In another game, I ran cross-country in the dead of night to an abandoned industrial complex. I only had three bullets left and ended up falling off of a roof, breaking both of my legs. That was when the seven zombies turned the corned and spotted me.

Very, very cool mod. One that I hope gets developed in conjunction with the base game's real devs. It's still janky as hell, but a really interesting study in player psychology. Survivors tend to hunt in small packs, running around coastal towns while lone wolf-type bandits prey on them. I would say that 20% of the players are bandits and everyone else is just trying to get by.

I spent about six hours slowly trekking north, using my knowledge of local landmarks to head in roughly the right direction until I could find a map. With no compass, I circled round on myself once by accident, ending up at a tower I'd passed two hours previously. Eventually I found a map and a compass in the ruins of a castle.

Having reached the far north, I headed east via a "nearby" dam so I could refill my water bottles. I eventually found the military airfield I'd been trekking towards. I looped round on it from the north, as areas containing valuable supplies are usually hives of scum and villainy.

Having sprinted through the bushes on the deserted airfield to avoid any snipers that might be watching, I started searching the control tower. Looking up from a pile of tin cans, I came face to face with another equally surprised survivor. We both opened fire at the same time.

He came out on top of that, and was delighted with the huge amount of good stuff I had been carrying. He seemed a nice enough fella on the global chat, but I still felt a glow of satisfaction when, twenty minutes later, he was wandering through a nearby town and got taken out by a sniper.

The game is incredibly fun, and the zombies are exceptionally deadly. One of my first deaths came from a stealth trip through a town, where an ill judged shot with my rifle brought the wrath of forty zombies down on my head. They broke my legs and beat me to death in a nearby barn.

It's great to find a group to cooperate with, as lone bandits don't like attacking groups of players, but I tend to prefer the stealthy approach.

The map is vast (225 square km). I created a series of missions on the Chenaurus landscape this mod is using, and still have no clue where I am at any point in time. Maps are gold dust.

Very cool stories guys. Diablo 3 is about to unlock and here I am daydreaming about the DayZ mod.

If your new to DayZ I recommend avoiding any of the big towns and airfileds, they are sniper heaven, head north and just raid the smaller towns, the deer stands normally have soilder zombies around them with maybe some nice drops. The dev 'Rocket' was in a live stream chat the other day, bears are incoming, and so is hypothermia/temperature weather effects.

I play this game with a map open on the third monitor (2nd is reserved for Steam and music). Played this with Kevvoski last week, and things were awesome until he glitched on a stairwell and fell to his death. Once we met back up near that same spot, we decided to loot the castle again. He knocked me off the same stairwell as he ran past...

Fortunately I didn't die, but we used some of our combined 10 bandages and a couple units of food to patch me up.

The psychological behavior in the game is fascinating. Only a few days after release many players degraded into banditry, and after the 1st week zombies were no longer the biggest concern.

I'm always looking for other folks to join up with. Having just graduated college this past weekend, I now have lots of time for Day Z.

This reminds me of No More Room in Hell, which had a similar feel. Does anyone know if Track IR works in this? Because that might be amazing.

SortingHat wrote:

Does anyone know if Track IR works in this? Because that might be amazing.

It works for regular ARMAII so I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work for this.

Lahndon wrote:

If your new to DayZ I recommend avoiding any of the big towns and airfileds, they are sniper heaven, head north and just raid the smaller towns, the deer stands normally have soilder zombies around them with maybe some nice drops. The dev 'Rocket' was in a live stream chat the other day, bears are incoming, and so is hypothermia/temperature weather effects.

I had been surveying one of the air strips and was making my through the hangers looting nice gear and weapons when the server reset.

Logged back on and finished grabbing gear and turned a corner to run into a bandit. We both let fly and we both gunned each other down... Was amusing.

I forgot to mention the one thing that I really really do not like about this game. The fact that the in-game day-night cycle is based on the real time local to wherever the server is.

In general, being a gamer with a job and having other family duties, most of my gaming tends to occur at night. This means that every server close to me that I have fantastic pings to are all pitch black and I can barely see where I'm walking. No exaggeration, night time in this game is like walking in a cave. You can hardly see the gun you're holding. So, if I want to walk around in the daylight, I instead have to connect to servers on the other side of the world with pings close to 200ms.

I hope some people start setting up servers and purposely run them 12hrs off their actual time zone. Or the developers of the mod let server operators choose to run in real-time or 2-3x time compression or something.

I actually prefer that I am able to play the game at nighttime on the servers, because I feel much less exposed than in the daytime.

Farscry wrote:

I actually prefer that I am able to play the game at nighttime on the servers, because I feel much less exposed than in the daytime. ;)

I feel the opposite since the only way to see 2 feet in front of you and actually navigate is to have a light source. May as well be shouting "I'm right here! You zombies are welcome to my face and you bandits can come take all my stuff!"

Maybe they just need to fix the harshness of the darkness. Being outside, especially when there's stars and the moon, is just not that dark.

Vega wrote:

Maybe they just need to fix the harshness of the darkness. Being outside, especially when there's stars and the moon, is just not that dark.

The darkness in Arma 2 depends on the time of year, the weather, the lunar cycle, and the map's location in the world. A cloudy, moonless night will be completely pitch black, whereas an open sky with full moon and stars will be similar visibility to day but in shades of grey/purple.

They should do something about the time acceleration. Night and day in the mod are two completely different games. Night is fun, but it goes on a bit too long

I think they should just have a 3 hour or so day/night cycle. The game has the ability to have some beautiful lighting moments but if you spend the whole game wandering in the darkness because you happen to play in the evening that's no fun.

Ah-ha! After spending some more time on their forums it appears there are servers running inversed time cycles. And it looks like at least one is in my state.

Apparently vehicles persist on servers even after resets, so if you salvage and fuel a car (or a helicopter!) it will be yours for as long as you can keep it.

Which probably won't be too long, but still.

Met up and survived with a couple of friends today. Just had one of them gunned down in front of my eyes as he was entering a barn.

Waited inside the barn behind some boxes, with the rainstorm going on outside and zombies moaning, and the bandit crept in to loot the corpse. Gunned him down with my shotgun.

Had to deal with a small horde of zombies afterwards, but it was WELL worth it.

Found this gem in the comments section of RPS:

As a hardcore veteran Arma 2 player of several years, and a huge Stalker fan, I feel like all my Christmases have come at once with this mod. I know Chernarus like the back of my hand, and I’m familiar with most of the weapons. In game, I’ve become a dedicated bandit hunter. No one kills me, because no one ever sees me. Today I lay at a good vantage point perhaps a click out of Elektro, for maybe 15 minutes, watching a shady looking character under my crosshairs. He was on the roof of the hospital. He didn’t have a bandit skin but I was sure he was up to no good. Sure enough, he took a shot at a survivor in the street, and I pulled the trigger. I’d zeroed my scope perfectly, no need for a rangefinder. Perfect headshot. I hate to brag, but I felt like the goddamn Batman*. And then the rage in global chat while I smirked and disappeared back into the woods.

*I realize that Batman would not, strictly speaking, shoot someone in the head from a kilometer away.

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