Kodabar DayZ blog

Can I run DayZ standalone on this old PC?

2014-02-03T09:13:00.002+00:00

Can I run DayZ standalone? What are the technical specifications for DayZ standalone? Can an old computer run DayZ standalone? Can a laptop run DayZ standalone?

I've had quite a lot of people ask me what computer is needed to run DayZ standalone. I made a video showing it running on quite an average PC and many people have commented asking if it will run on their computer. So I'm making this article to help people answer this question for themselves.

Before I start, I have to emphasise that DayZ does not run like other games. Most games these days heavily rely on the graphics card to do most of the work, but DayZ mostly uses the processor and gets very little benefit from the graphics card. It's been like this with all the ArmA games and DayZ standalone uses the game engine from Take on Helicopters - the Real Virtuality 3 engine - which is an updated version of the engine used in ArmA 2 and Operation Arrowhead. It's because of this that DayZ very much relies on the processor to do all the work. So if your processor isn't up to the job, you won't be able to run DayZ standalone well.

What processor do you need to run DayZ?

Well, you need one with at least two cores. The more cores the better. Bohemia specify an Intel Dual-Core 2.4 GHz or AMD Dual-Core Athlon 2.5 GHz. Bear in mind that these are minimum specs and will run the game at the lowest graphics settings. If you've got two cores, you need 2.4GHz of clock speed, if you've got four cores or more, then clock speed doesn't really matter.

Also remember that laptop CPUs tend to be a bit weaker than their desktop counterparts. Due to lack of space, laptops don't have big heatsinks and fans for their processors, so they need one that runs cooler and uses less power. So a dual core laptop CPU running at 2.4 GHz is going to be a little weaker than a desktop dual core CPU at the same clock speed.

In the video, I'm using an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 running at 3 GHz and it runs the game acceptably. You can use this tool from CPU Boss to compare any processor with that one. Halfway down the right side of the page, you can enter your CPU model and it'll show you a comparison. The main stat to look at is the one marked Performance (Benchmark performance using all cores) as that shows you the overall performance level of the CPU. If you've got better performance than the E8400, your processor is up to the task of running DayZ.

http://cpuboss.com/cpu/Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400

What processor do I have?

Surprisingly, a lot of people don't seem to know what CPU is in their PC. It's quite easy to find out by using the System information display in the Control Panel.

If you don't know how to find and bring up this window, here's how to do it in Windows 7.

http://pc.net/helpcenter/answers/view-system-properties-windows-7

How much RAM do I need?

Bohemia say you need 2 GB as a minimum, but I really would recommend 4 GB. 2 GB will run it, but it leaves almost no slack. You need to close absolutely everything that is not essential to keeping your PC running and I would recommend a fresh boot beforehand just to maximise the amount of available memory. If Windows runs out of RAM, it will start using virtual memory - to make space in the RAM, Windows will copy some of its contents to the hard disk and copy it back again when it needs it. This can lead to serious thrashing of the hard disk and slow down the game. RAM is about a thousand times faster than a hard disk, so you really want to avoid any virtual memory activity when playing DayZ.

4 GB is a lot more suitable for running DayZ. Although the game will only use about 1.5 GB of RAM, Windows always needs some memory for background tasks and keeping the PC running. 4 GB is enough for all that with a bit left over.

Also, some built-in graphics don't have their own memory and use system RAM further cutting into the memory you need to run the game.

What graphics card do I need?

Oddly, it doesn't matter very much. I've tried a variety of graphics cards with DayZ and it barely uses any of them. DayZ does need a certain level of card because it uses features that aren't present on every card. Bohemia say you need an NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT or AMD Radeon HD 3830 or Intel HD Graphics 4000 with 512 MB VRAM. I have actually managed to get the game running on Intel HD graphics 3000, so Bohemia are being a little pessimistic.

It's very difficult to understand which graphics cards are more powerful than others, so I would suggest that you consult this list of relative performances:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html

It doesn't list every graphics card and the results are approximate, but you'll be able to see roughly where your card stacks up. If your card falls below the minimum, realise that you probably will not be able to run DayZ. It barely uses the card, but it relies on certain features to be able to run. For instance, if you try to run it on Intel HD Graphics or Intel HD Graphics 2000, you'll get an error about the shader mode not being supported and the game will refuse to run. You can't negotiate your way past this - if it doesn't support the shader mode, it doesn't support the shader mode and the game cannot run at all.

Almost every game relies on the graphics card to do a lot of the work, but the DayZ standalone does not. It will barely use any of your graphics card's power as thigns stand at the moment.

What graphics card do I have?

Again, it's surprising how many people don't know what graphics card is in their PC. You can find out what it is by using the guide in this article:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2406120,00.asp

What graphics settings should I use?

This is a subjective thing. Setting the right level of graphics is a trade-off between framerate and prettiness. The game will run at a higher framerate in open areas than it will in the middle of a big town like Cherno or Electro. Experiment with all the graphics settings in order to get the best level of performance for yourself. Here's a list of all the settings:

This is the main video settings window. Select Custom for overall quality and you'll be able to change all the settings individually.

The Rendering Resolution should always be set to 100%. DayZ allows you to change the resolution that 3D objects are rendered at. What this means is that it keeps the same screen resolution and renders objects at a lower resolution and scales them up. Depending on your graphics card, this can cause extra work for your computer and may make things even slower than if you use 100%. So keep this at 100% unless you have tried everything else - it will make your game look ugly and it probably won't help.

Tearing - click to view full size

VSync is much misunderstood. What it does is synchronises the game's framerate to that of your monitor. A lot of people like to boast that their computer can run a game at 200fps or something like that. It's pretty pointless as almost all monitors can only display 60fps. So vsync just locks the framerate to match your monitor. If you let a game run higher or lower than the monitor's framerate, then you can get 'tearing' - this is where the graphics card is only halfway through drawing a frame before it's time to draw the next one. See the image above for an example.

So vsync is a good thing? Mostly, yes. But vsync needs your computer to do a little extra work to check when the time is right to draw the next frame, so vsync will slow down your computer a little. And if you're getting less than 60fps, it not only won't help, but it can drop your framerate a little lower. So turn it off unless you're running way above 60fps.

The Quality settings are mostly obvious. The settings for Objects, Terrain and Shadows do just what you'd think and control the level of detail used in the polygon meshes for those things; the lower they are, the faster the game runs. The setting for Clouds is worth looking at as they do seem to have a disproportionate effect on framerate. In the tests I've run, it seems that clouds affect lighting, so turning them off can lead to surprising jumps in framerate.

The Textures settings affect how things look in the game. Video Memory should be set to Auto by default and you should keep it at that. It's possible that DayZ will not correctly measure your graphics card memory, but I haven't seen it get it wrong yet. So don't touch this.

Texture Detail and Texture Filtering are settings that can have a profound effect on how the game runs. Some graphics cards have the ability to handle texture filtering themselves and some don't. Those that don't are passing that work to the processor and, with DayZ already getting the processor to do just about everything, this can really slow down your game. Set both of these as low as you can put up with and revise them upwards until it starts to affect your framerate.

The Rendering settings affect how the game looks and how it runs. A lot of them are unnecessary. I recommend turning off postprocessing and rotation blur (motion blur) - they may look pretty, but they really disrupt your ability to see. A lot of the time, you're going to be identifying potential enemies from a couple of pixels, so anything that blurs these can lead to you missing a guy who's going to shoot you in the face. With HDR, antialiasing, etc it's mostly personal choice, but they all have an impact on framerate, so try turning them on and off and see what you're happy with.

How do I improve framerate?

The short answer is that you can't. Changing the settings will help but, if you're already running at the lowest settings, there's nothing you can do to improve things. Yeah, there are loads of videos on YouTube that claim to be able to provide miraculous boosts to performance if you just change a few settings in a confirguration file, but they're all bullshit. By mucking around with the config files (changing the number of rendered frames ahead, etc) you might at best be able to get an extra frame or two per second, but you'll get nothing like the performance boosts that the video creators claim. Those YouTubers are just making videos that will attract a lot of views in order to earn themselves advertising money. Notice that they don't reply to the hundreds of comments below their videos saying that nothing helped.

If you have more than one graphics card, I would suggest that you try disabling all but one. DayZ doesn't seem to like SLI or Crossfire very much and it seems to actually run slower with two cards than with one. This situation might be improved with future updates (Rocket has said that he'd like to use graphics cards a bit more) but right now it's worth trying to run on one card to see if it helps. Using some Nvidia 660 Ti cards in SLI, I found that they ran 50% slower than with just one card on its own.

Help! I still don't know if I can run the game

If you'd like to leave me a comment below, I'll do my best to reply to you. Please leave as much information as you can. At a minimum, I need to know what processor you have (and be specific - just saying "3GHz dual core" isn't much help), how much RAM you've got and what graphics card or built-in graphics chipset you have.

Please do try to go through the article to check if your graphics card and processor are up to running the game. I get up to a hundred emails a day about DayZ (I have an installation guide for the mod and many articles and videos about running the single player mods that my programming team put together), so I would prefer it if you can answer your own question. But if you're stuck, leave a comment and I will get back to you.

What's DayZ really like to play?

2013-07-30T10:59:00.001+01:00

A little while back, I made a video about what DayZ is really like to play and I like to think it sums up the experience pretty accurately. There's an awful lot of running through forests and across fields only punctuated by brief moments of action. Sadly, the good people on YouTube don't agree and it's pretty much my least successful video yet.

But this is pretty much the reality of what DayZ gameplay is actually like.

DayZ single player on Taviana, Lingor, Namalsk, etc

2013-07-30T09:55:00.000+01:00

A lot of people ask me about installing DaiZy (DayZ single player) for maps other than Chernarus. Well, the good news is that we've got a forum where there are lots of different versions of Daizy and they support pretty much every map. Whether you would like to play on Taviana, Lingor, Namalsk, Wasteland, Takistan, Isla Duala, Celle, Zargabad or any others, we've got you covered.

The standard DaiZy only covers Chernarus and seeks to simulate online play from official public hive servers. It's pretty good, but our forum versions have improved features that add to the gameplay. Some of them have improved AI handling, others add extra building, some have self bloodbagging (so you can heal yourself more easily), some let you build your own base and so on.

These can all be found on our forum in the "Unofficial DaiZy Releases" section. Actually, I don't know why I call them unofficial, but that's just what I called that section back when I had no idea how popular this would be.
http://kodabar-dayz-daizy-single-player-forum.1084782.n5.nabble.com/

In the video at the top, I discuss how to install additional maps and other versions. The basic process is the same in all cases, although it's Taviana I cover in the video. It goes like this:

Use DayZ Commander to download a map
Make a single player folder - eg @TavianaSP
Copy the contents of the @DayZ folder into your single player folder
Copy the map files into that folder too, over-writing as you go
Copy our files into that same folder, over-writing as you go
Make a new shortcut that includes -mod=@TavianaSP (or whatever you called it)

It's quite a simple process and, once you've done it once, you'll find it no bother at all.

I can't provide full support for every mod on our forum (I don't have time to try every single version of each one), but I will try to help if you have any problems. It's generally best to check our forums in case someone else has had the same problem. That and the author is probably better placed to tell you what's wrong. But I will help where I can.

How to install DayZ single player - DaiZy

2013-01-21T10:50:00.000+00:00

DaiZy is a mod that allows you to play single player DayZ offline. It has all the same features as the regular online version, including friendly and bandit units (controlled by AI), loot, vehicles and everything else you could possibly want. It's also allows cheating through the additional installation of one or two other files.

Before you start, you need to have DayZ installed. If you haven't got that up and running, go off and read this ridiculously detailed guide that over 800,000 others have used. Go on, I'll wait.

http://kodabar.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/how-to-install-dayz-with-arma-2-free.html

Once you've got DayZ installed it, you can just follow the video above. The files it downloads come from here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?4ro7ui087s2ca

There's a more detailed written installation guide to be found here:
http://kodabar.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/dayz-offline-single-player-practice.html

And here's a guide to installing Loki's Lost Key (that's the cheats thing):
http://kodabar.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/how-to-install-lokis-lost-key-for-daizy.html

There are other variation of DaiZy and support for other maps. Check our forum (embedded below or via the link at the top of the page) for more details of those.

Kodabar DayZ / DaiZy single player forum

How to install Loki's Lost Key for DaiZy

2012-12-27T01:23:00.003+00:00

Article last updated 17th September 2021

September 17th This article is almost ten years old, but it has been updated again. I'm surprised too. This time to add alternative linka for Loki's Lost Key and CBA since Armaholic shut down.

July 22nd Changed installation method to use modfolders

May 10th Added warning about CBA and 104648 beta patch
February 7th Changed instructions after CBA was updated

Loki's Lost Key is an addon for the ArmA 2 series of games. When it's used in conjunction with DaiZy (the single player mod of DayZ), it adds a bucket-load of features and cheats.

If you haven't installed DaiZy, then I've no idea why you're reading this. Head on over to this article first:
http://kodabar.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/dayz-offline-single-player-practice.html

Before you install Loki's Lost Key, you're going to have to install the CBA addons. These are just a series of little addons that make it easier for other people to write other mods and addons. Loki's Lost Key uses them, so you're going to have to install them.

Go here and download the file (download link at the bottom of the page):
~~http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=6231~~

Armaholic shut down. This is the version of CBA you need:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-AjkiwQjJ9QaWticURZcFlIM1E/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-bPNnXG-B0rC4H0Wlcywamg

Once you've downloaded the file (it's very small), open it in whatever you use to open 7zip files (I'm using WinRar). There's one folder inside. Extract it to wherever you like.

Take that folder and copy it into your Operation Arrowhead program folder.

If you're using Steam, this is probably in:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead

If you're not using Steam, it's probably in:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Bohemia Interactive\Arma 2 operation arrowhead

Once you've pasted those folders, you need to tell the game to use them. This is done by modifying the game shortcut to include the following:

-mod=@CBA_CO

Okay, so that's the CBA addons installed. You're now going to install Loki's Lost Key and I promise it'll be easy.

First of all, you need to download the Lost Key file. Go here to get it (download link at the bottom)
~~http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=6010~~

Don't go there. Armaholic shut down. Here's a Google Drive link instead:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-AjkiwQjJ9QRXZqYTVpbG9yNTQ/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-3nHsX8Nk3A4D2Orcp8K4HA

Open the loki_lost_key.7z file in your favourite archiver (I'm still using WinRar). Extract the folder inside to anywhere you like.

Inside you'll find two folders: addons and holomap. Quite honestly, you can ignore the holomap. It's a fancy useless map that you'll never use; it creates a 3D object inside the game and (very slowly) renders a holographic map on top of it.

Inside your Operation Arrowhead program folder, you should make a new folder and make another new folder inside that. Just as you made an @DaiZy folder when installing the single player mod in the first place, so you should make a new folder beside it called @LostKey and create a folder inside that called Addons.

That sounds a little complicated. It should look like this:
OA\@LostKey\Addons
Where OA is your Operation Arrowhead program folder.

Take the loki_lost_key.pbo file and place it in that folder, just as it is in the screenshot above.

Now you need to modify your game shortcut to load Lost Key. Just as you added ;@CBA_CO to load the CBA addons, so you should add ;@LostKey to the shortcut. Make sure there is a semi-colon(;) between each item.

And that's it done. The nice thing about using this installation method (called modfolders) is that Lost Key is only loaded when called by the shortcut. When you play normal DayZ online, it won't load Lost Key, so you can be sure it won't cause any problems.

When you load DaiZy, you'll see in the centre of the screen some light blue text saying Lost Key. If you don't, that means you haven't installed it correctly. Now, assuming that you do, you can use the mousewheel menu to bring up the main Lost Key interface.

This is the main interface. Although there are a lot of headings on the left, the main ones you're going to want to use are under the section marked Work.

You'll be able to guess what a lot of the selections do just from the name. Note that the map shown is used for some of the features. You can drag the map around by holding down the right mouse button and zoom in and out with the mousewheel.

The Magick and Mischief sections contain settings related to god mode and healing. The way that DayZ and DaiZy handle health is different from most ArmA 2 mods, so many of them won't work or won't work in the way that you'd like.

This is the weapon selector. It will make available any weapon from ArmA 2 and Operation Arrowhead, not just the DayZ guns.

Loki's Lost Key has so many options and features that it's impossible to detail them all, so just explore and have fun.

DayZ: A simple way to install Lingor Island

2012-09-06T17:23:00.001+01:00

The first thing to say is that this is not as comprehensive as my article about the installation of the main DayZ mod. This is just documenting one simple method of installing the Lingor Island variant without much hassle.

You will need:

A working installation of DayZ
DayZ Commander
Patience

If you don't have it installed already, go and get yourself a copy of DayZ Commander. It's a really handy utility that makes running and updating DayZ a lot easier, as well as easing the experience of getting onto a server.
http://www.dayzcommander.com/

Once you have DayZ Commander installed, go to the top and click the yellow text that says install/update and it'll open a new panel as in the window above. There are three things to check here: ArmA 2 (the beta patch), DayZ and DayZ Lingor.

Make sure that your ArmA 2 and DayZ versions are up to date and then choose to install Lingor. This will take a while as it has to download 500+ megabytes of data.

That's it. You're ready to play. Use the server browser to find a Lingor server by dropping down the mod list on the middle of the left-hand-side and choosing DayZ Lingor only and then double-click one from the list. There aren't too many Lingor servers at the moment, so you won't have too many to choose from.

Note that it generally takes a long time to connect to a Lingor server. You may have to wait at the loading screen for several minutes.

Just chillin'

When you do get on, you're in for a bit of a shock. Lingor Island is quite different from Chernarus. It's a tropical island for a start and the next biggest difference is that you can enter almost every building. This means you can gear up pretty quickly, but so can everyone else. This gives Lingor a lot more of a PvP flavour and you're going to have to be ready for some rather energetic player encounters.

Friendly?

It's an odd experience when you realise that you're a beginner again. Sure, you know how all the kit works, but you're lost and you have no idea how to find your way around. Most of your gameplay techniques are still going to work, but it'll take a while before you get used to the types of buildings you'll encounter and the kind of loot they're likely to contain.

Friendly!

The official Lingor Island website can be found at the link below. Note that the site is mostly in Russian. You can switch to the English language section by clicking the language option at the bottom left of the page.
http://dayzlingor.tk/

Creating a shortcut

If you want to run Lingor Island without using a launcher, you'll need to make a new shortcut.

Inside your Operation Arrowhead folder is an icon marked Launch Arma2 OA Beta Patch

Right click on this icon and select Properties.

There are two lines that matter. The Target line should read something like:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead\Expansion\beta\arma2oa.exe" -beta=Expansion\beta;Expansion\beta\Expansion -nosplash

This is presuming that you're using Steam and that Steam is installed in the default location on your C drive and you're using Windows 7 64 bit. It will have a different path if you have it installed elsewhere. You need to modify the target line to say something like this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead\Expansion\beta\arma2oa.exe" -beta=Expansion\beta;Expansion\beta\Expansion -nosplash -skipIntro -mod=Expansion\beta;Expansion\beta\Expansion;ca;@dayz_lingor_island;@dayz_lingor -mod=@DayZ

If you're not using Steam or you have Steam installed in a different location the line will reflect where you have the game installed.

For the "Start in" line, make sure it says:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead\

Making a Steam shortcut (optional)

You can't run DayZ from Steam by default which is a bit annoying. Skip this step if you don't care about Steam. If you've installed the Steam version, you'll already have a shortcut or two in there, but they're not good to you any more. You need to manually make a new Steam shortcut. This will work even if you're using a boxed copy of the game. You'll then be able to access Steam chat and even open the Steam web browser in game (handy if you want to display a game map). It'll even show you on your Friends list as playing DayZ.

Open up Steam and go to the game library. At the top of the screen, select Games and then Add a Non-Steam game to My Library...

In the window that appears, click the Browse button, then navigate to the Operation Arrowhead folder and click on the Launch Arma2 OA Beta Patch shortcut. Then choose the Add selected programs button at the bottom.

Steam will create a new shortcut in your games library marked arma2oa

Go to this new icon and right click it and select Properties. We're now going to modify it in exactly the same way as we did the shortcut above.

Make sure the Target line reads like so (your folder path may be different):

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead\Expansion\beta\arma2oa.exe" -beta=Expansion\beta;Expansion\beta\Expansion -nosplash -skipIntro -mod=Expansion\beta;Expansion\beta\Expansion;ca;@dayz_lingor_island;@dayz_lingor -mod=@DayZ

And also change the Start in line to read like this (again, your folder path may be different):

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead\"

Finally, you can change the line under the icon that reads arma2oa to be DayZ Lingor instead (or whatever you like).

DayZ - Advanced playing tips FAQ

2012-08-15T11:13:00.000+01:00

You've played a bit of DayZ, you've found a few weapons, you've killed a bunch of zombies and maybe even a player or two. But how can you get better at the game and how do you get hold of the best kit? Read on and I'll have you murdering bandits with the best of them. Well, maybe not, but I will share some hints and tips for being better at playing DayZ.

All images can be clicked to make them full-size.

1. Zombies are your friends

Your greatest enemies aren't zombies, but other players. One of the best ways of tracking them down (either to kill or avoid them) is by using zombies.

Did I spawn those zombies or did someone else?

Zombies only spawn near buildings and they only do so when players are nearby. When a player is within approximately 120 metres of a building, the zombies will spawn. So if you're approaching some buildings, stop and take a look when you're a couple of hundred metres away.

Wookie suit + bush = practically invisible

Get yourself into cover. Whilst a lot of people hide behind objects, this obscures your view and makes you an easy target for anyone approaching from behind. I find it better to crouch in front of cover. This breaks up your outline so that anyone looking towards your position doesn't see a man-shaped silhouette, but a bush or tree-shaped one; and anyone approaching from behind probably won't see you at all.

Looks pretty quiet down there. Maybe just a little too quiet...

Take a look through your binoculars/rangefinders/weapon scope or just hold right click. Look around the buildings and the edges of the town. See any zombies shuffling around? Zombies = players.

Always use the Green Cross Code, because I won't be there when you cross the road

Look a little closer. See any zombie corpses? They're also good indicators of player activity. Zombies can die on their own when they fall off the roofs of buildings but a corpse out in the open (like in the picture above) doesn't happen by accident. And a pile of corpses is a dead (ha ha) give-away.

So any time you're coming up on a group of buildings, stop a little way off and have a look around. Observe any zombie activity and then decide if you're going to approach.

2. Learn to recognise loot from a distance

We all love picking up shiny new kit, but it can also be one of the most dangerous parts of the game. You might be exposing yourself to fire from other players or you might get a fuck-ton of zombies after you. And if it turns out that all that's there are some empty tin cans, you'll really regret it.

Empty tin cans, some revolver ammo, a bandage some road flare and some chemlights

Wherever possible, look at a loot pile from a distance and identify what's there. In the picture above there's nothing worth taking. Bandages are commonplace and so is revolver ammo. This loot pile is out in the open, so it's probably not worth risking it unless you really need a bandage. Do you really want to be standing motionless over that pile of crap for several seconds?

If I spot players moving around and there's lot nearby, I often wait for them to stop at a pile of loot before I introduce their faces to some Stanag rounds.

A green pouch, two heatpacks and an empty tin can

Even when you're up close, it's handy to be able to identify loot on sight. Running through a house and stopping to examine every pile of loot can take a long time. Once you get used to identifying items quickly you can move through a building in seconds. The dreaded exception is the green pouch - this is the default object model for items that don't have one of their own. Most toolbelt items appear as a green pouch, but so do Makarov mags, G17 clips and a few others.

So not only do you need to be able to work out what loot looks like, you need to know what spawns where. The picture above is taken inside a red brick house. Military grade ammo doesn't spawn in civilian buildings, so that green pouch can only be a Makarov mag or some toolbelt equipment (compass, map, etc). I don't need to stop and check what it is.

3. Which buildings have the best loot?

When you want the best equipment where should you go? What buildings should you look for? Well it depends what you're after.

An industrial building which will yield industrial loot (car parts, etc)

Residential (civilian) buildings will only ever have low grade weapons and general equipment. You won't find sniper rifles, assault rifles or night vision goggles in houses. Buildings yield pretty much what you'd expect. Military buildings have military-grade loot, warehouses and industrial buildings have industrial items and civilian buildings contain a variety of lower grade stuff.

One of only two barracks on the whole map - both on the North West Airfield

The buildings with the highest amounts of military-grade weapons are to be found on the North West Airfield (NWA). There are two barracks buildings in there and both have several potential loot piles that can contain military weapons. The only downside is that the NWA is a popular destination for a lot of players and it's wide open and flat so you're very easy to spot when you're trying to sneak in to grab the best stuff. There are several good sniper positions around it where players can easily shoot you from several hundred metres away. By all means take the risk, but don't be surprised if you end up dead.

I haven't actually seen any deer though...

A great alternative to the NWA are deer stands. There are dozens of them scattered across the map and they can contain military-grade items. They're always on the edge of wooded areas and only three zombies spawn beside them so you can raid them with confidence. In many cases, you can see from a distance what loot they contain so you don't even need to climb up into them.

One thing that most people don't realise is that you can grab the kit in deer stands without ever getting off the ladder. As you approach the top of the ladder, look towards each of the loot piles and you'll see the icon come up so you can press G without ever getting off the ladder. This greatly reduces the amount of time you need to spend in one (I occasionally shoot people in deer stands near popular location - they make great targets when stuck in a little box). Combine this with loot recognition and you can be up and down the ladder in seconds with none of the hassle of fucking about trying to point the cursor in the right direction for the bloody climb down icon to appear.

It can also be worth your while killing the zombies that spawn by deer stands. Although zombies typically only have very basic loot on them, the military zombies round deer stands have much better kit. Although they'll never have weapons on them, they will often have ammo for military weapons. Better still, there are no other buildings nearby so you're not going to have lots of other zombies taking an interest.

If you're not confident of your shooting skills, you can always stand inside the deer stand and shoot the zombies from there. Although zombies can climb ladders, it makes them an easy target; so even if you don't manage to shoot all the zombies, you can just pop the remaining ones in the face as they climb the ladder.

Time to go shopping (yeah alright, it's actually my tent)

There are two more places to get decent loot easily: other players and tents. Most people try to hide tents in discrete corners of the map, but if you try you can soon find plenty of them. Just moving around the west and north edges of the map can find you tents galore which you can raid to your heart's content without ever having to fire a shot. Killing players and taking their stuff is quite fun too as you can see what they have before you decide to take them on.

4. Choose the right weapons for you

People obsess over getting hold of what they see as the 'best' weapons in the game, but consider what you actually need. An AS50 sniper rifle is a brilliant weapon when taking on vehicles (one or two shots through the engine will stop a car in its tracks), but it's noisy and rubbish for dealing with zombies. If you play in a group, then yes, you ought to have one guy that's kitted out with a sniper rifle, but if you're on your own then a high-power sniper rifle is possibly more of a liability.

Personally I favour the M16A4 ACOG. It's an assault rifle with a decent scope on it. It's not a replacement for a sniper rifle, but it's not far off it. Two body shots kills any zombie and a few body shots (it does approximately 3,500 blood damage per round) will take down a player. The scope is marked for range too, so with a little practice you can get headshots every time (as the above video shows). Although the gun itself can be quite hard to find, the ammo is relatively common for a military weapon. There are other M16 variants that you can find, so it can be worthwhile picking up one of those until you find an ACOG variant with the bonus of not needing to change your ammo over when you change up.

The M4A1 CCO is quite a nice assault rifle, but the scope is just a red dot sight, so it's not fabulous at a distance. The SD variant is nice and silent, but you might have trouble finding enough ammo to keep it as a workhorse gun.

The FN FAL is bloody noisy and extremely rare (pretty much helicopter crash sites only) and so's the ammo, so I find it to be pretty much useless. The damage is very high though.

The AKS-74 and AK-74 guns are perfectly decent assault rifles, but the rounds are a bit lower in power (approximately 2,700 blood damage per round) so I wouldn't regard them as keepers.

The AKM is an undersung hero of a gun. It does a lot of damage (4,500 blood) and is pretty easy to find. Although you're stuck with iron sights, you can zero it to different ranges to make it effective at medium to long range (with a bit of practice).

LMGs like the Mk 48 Mod 0 can be a lot of fun and the sheer amount of rounds they hold makes you frigging dangerous when you've got one of those in your hands. Their pretty noisy and they jump around a bit when you fire, but I shit myself every time someone unloads one of those in my direction.

That's my personal preference, but it's all about finding the right weapon for you. Shotguns are great at close range, but their utility is limited outside of that. Assault rifles can be used against players and zombies. Pistols are best for killing zombies because they make less noise than main weapons.

You'll hear people opine that various guns are the best, but it's all about what works for you. Sniper rifles generally require you to have other people to support you because you can't really take down a group of zombies with them. Assault rifles are good all-round weapons and suitable for most players.

5. SD ammo, the best kept secret in DayZ

SD guns can only fire SD ammo, but normal guns can also fire SD ammo. Now, it seems that when you fire SD rounds out of a standard gun that they aren't silent. Well they're not, but... they are silent to zombies. Zombies cannot hear SD rounds fired out of non-silent guns.

Although when you fire SD rounds from your gun, they sound like normal rounds, the sound doesn't carry very far and other players struggle to hear them beyond 50 metres away

6. Take two bottles into the shower?

Why not carry two main weapons? Players have a tendency to go around with full backpacks, but you don't really need that much stuff. A main weapon will take up 10 slots in your backpack (plus space for the ammo), but with an Alice pack (20 slots) or a Coyote backpack (24 slots), that needn't be prohibitive.

The difficult part of carrying two main weapons is swapping between them. If you put your extant main weapon into your backpack and there isn't room, then it'll vanish forever and you'll swear an awful lot. The key is remembering that when you're changing guns that you are taking the spare out of your backpack. In the picture above, I've got an M16A4 ACOG in my hands and an Mk 48 Mod 0 in my backpack. If I want to change over, I need to highlight the Mk 48 and take that out by clicking on the right arrow. This will swap the weapons over without any problem.

It's worth practising this with lower-grade weapons until it becomes second nature. You don't want to lose a valuable weapon during a crucial stand-off. Always remember that you're taking out another weapon, not putting away the one you have.

As for which combination of weapons to carry... well, that's up to you. It's probably not worth carrying two assault rifles (well, maybe the L85A2 AWS). You might like to carry a silenced gun like a Bizon or an MP5SD6 for those tricky moments when you need to kill a lot of zombies quietly. Or you might fancy a sniper rifle/assault rifle combination. But it's up to you what you carry. Experience and your playing style will dictate your choice.

7. What should you carry?

When you've got a hunting knife, matches and an axe, you can get all the food you need from killing animals, so you don't need to fill your pack with tin cans. An added bonus is that cooked meat restores 800 blood, but canned food only 200.

When you use the Fill Water action, all empty water bottle in you main inventory are filled at once

Carrying a couple of water bottles and refilling them from lakes and pumps means you don't need cans of soda. A couple of bandages is all you need as they are easy to find. Painkillers are plentiful too, but morphine is rare and it's really bloody annoying to break your legs and not have any.

Blood packs are nice, but if you play alone you don't need them because you don't have anyone else to administer the transfusion. If you've got the equipment to hunt animals, then you can survive without blood packs.

Smoke grenades are fun, but difficult to use in a tight situation. I tend to only carry one or two if I've got the space free and they're the first thing I drop if I find anything better.

Explosive grenades are a hoot. I highly recommend chucking some of those around. I once encountered a group of ten players all clustered together, sorting out their inventories. I tossed a grenade into the middle, killing four of them outright and leaving another four lying on the ground. I laughed myself to the point of tears over that. That was pretty hard to explain to my wife.

Travel light and carry only what you need. Don't stock up on lots of things that you can find easily.

8. Raiding hospitals

Hospitals are great sources of medical supplies (duh!) although there aren't many of them. I stay the hell away from Cherno and Electro because I don't want to get killed by a kid with a shotgun of some griefer with a sniper rifle. That pretty much leaves the hospital at Berezino as the only choice.

Take 'em from behind. I like my hospitals like I like my wo... (I'll just stop it there)

Hospitals can be a pest to raid as it can be difficult to get into the front. However, you don't necessarily have to get through the glass at the front to get the medical supplies you need. If you pop round the back, you'll find a ladder leading up to the roof and usually a cardboard box at the bottom. Chances are you can get all the stuff you want just from that box. If that's not enough (or it isn't there), climb the ladder onto the roof and you'll find another box up there.

Breaking the glass at the front is more difficult than you might imagine. You imagine that a bullet or two would take care of it, but it won't. I've fired an entire clip of MP5SD rounds into the glass and not had it break. It took almost an entire clip of Stanag rounds to break the window in the picture above (you can see the bullet holes on the left). The best way to break the glass is to throw empty tin cans through the glass. It's relatively quiet and it only takes a few of them.

Once you're in, there are loads of cardboard boxes in there chock full of medical stuff. Way more than you can possibly carry.

I've found that some people like to hide on the roof of hospitals, using third person view to peek over the edge to see approaching players. Watch out for them.

9. Use a map

Whilst the in-game map can be useful (especially if you're on a server that supports waypoints), nothing beats a supplementary map. There are loads of them out there.

I personally like the maps by South Coast Bean Wars:
http://southcoastbeanwars.com/day-z-maps/

If you have more than one monitor then why not display a map on one of them?

That's my computer setup there. I've got a PC with two monitors and another with just one. I tend to play DayZ with a map open on my left monitor, the game on the central one and stuff like Skype and Teamspeak running on the other computer.

Even if you don't have multiple monitors or computers, you can use the Steam web browser even if you didn't buy the games through Steam. See my installation guide (Step 8) here for details:
http://kodabar.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/how-to-install-dayz-with-arma-2-free.html

After a while, you'll find that you get to know your way around without having to look at the map, but when you're still trying to familiarise yourself with the landscape I would say it's essential.

10. Never underestimate the value of observation

It often seems that 90% of DayZ is running through trees and fields, but I'd suggest that one of the most essential tactics is that of observation. I've already mentioned the value of paying attention, but I'd like to stress that checking out any situation before you take action often makes the difference between dying needlessly and pulling off a manoeuvre that you'll bore your friends about for weeks.

There's one guy with a pistol and a Lee Enfield on his back. I can probably take him

Whenever you suspect players to be in your area, it's essential to make sure you know how many of them there are. When I play with my group of chums, we usually have a sniper or two to keep watch from a distance, a point man who actually goes into the buildings and a couple of guys with assault rifles a little way back from them in case a speedy exit is required.

In the picture above, did you spot the second player?

Ah, he's got a mate with a shotgun. I might need to plan this a bit more...

When you approach an area, consider all the other routes that people may take. Most people like to travel under some kind of cover so check out various routes that they could have taken in there and get to a position where you can see most of them. Have a good look around until you're sure what you're up against.

The picture above shows the big metal structure to the east of Stary Sobor. I'm camped out in the woods above the military camp beside it. One of my friends is raiding the military camp and then the supermarket. We've got a sniper on another hill to the west. I've been watching the eastern approach and I've seen a player come in that way, climb up the ladder and take aim over the military camp with a Lee Enfield rifle. I don't go in for shooting everyone on sight, but I will take out anyone I judge to be a threat.

This guy took a shot at my mate, but he didn't get a chance to fire a second one. Two shots from the M16 take him down and a third one makes sure. He didn't stop to look around before trying for a murder and that's what got him killed.

Always check around before doing anything. As you run about, pay attention to your surroundings. Other players can be hiding anywhere.

11. Cover your tracks

I've mentioned the value of zombie corpses in tracking and finding other players, but just as important is hiding the bodies that you leave behind.

If you have to kill a zombie and you're not going to be leaving the area immediately, then hide the body. Obviously this can be a little difficult if there are a lot of them so you need to judge this according to your situation.

Player bodies can be hidden too, but the sound of flies doesn't go away, so anyone getting close enough will still realise that a player's been killed. If you kill a player out in the open, it's a good idea to hide the body as they can be spotted from a long way off, whereas flies can only be heard when someone is relatively close.

You also have to weigh up the fairness of hiding a body. When you die, you can often run back to your corpse to recover some of your equipment. By hiding someone's body, you're denying them that chance. It's up to you what you do, of course, but I don't tend to hide bodies unless they're going to give away my position.

About half the people with whom I get into a shooting match disconnect to avoid being killed. I really dislike that, so any player that stands their ground and dies because of it I feel is worthy of my respect. I won't deny them the chance to regain their equipment. They fought and died honourably and I'd be happy to meet them again.

That's all for today. I'll be back with more playing tips at a later date.

Olympics auction site confuses Korean flags (again)

2012-08-14T18:20:00.000+01:00

After confusing the North and South Korean flags during a football match, you'd think the Olympics would have learned their lesson, but no.

Today on the official auction site (where you can buy items used during the Olympics) one can find both the North and South Korean flags from the opening ceremony for sale.

Click for full-size image

That's the North Korean flag, currently selling for a handsome £415 (not including delivery).
http://memorabilia.london2012.com/iSynApp/auctionDisplay.action?&auctionId=21672

Click for full-size

And here's the uh... South Korean flag. Only £1 so far.
http://memorabilia.london2012.com/iSynApp/auctionDisplay.action?&auctionId=21935

Just to remove any doubt (the official names of the Koreas can be confusing), the text refers to Yoon Kyung-Shin, the famous South Korean handball player.

So once again the Olympics have fucked up by confusing the Korean flags although it's the other way round this time, so maybe that balances it all out.

Update: They spotted the error (after I emailed them) and have now corrected it, but didn't acknowledge ever making the error in the first place. Hopefully the South Korean nationalist nutjobs will be all over them.

DayZ - Graphics comparison: ArmA 2 Free & ArmA 2 (full)

2012-08-06T12:36:00.000+01:00

A lot of people ask me about the difference in graphics between using ArmA 2 Free and ArmA 2 (full) and it's hard to persuade people that there really isn't much difference. So I've taken some screenshots of the different versions in order to show the difference.

Now before I start, I should show you what my graphics settings are. I keep mine fairly low in order to keep a good framerate even on a dodgy server in the most heavily-populated, dense urban environments.

Now on to the screenshots. Note that I went out of my way to find the most stark examples that I could. For the most part, the differences aren't that marked. DayZ uses Operation Arrowhead for its game engine and most of its graphics, models and textures. ArmA 2 is mostly used for the level map (Chernarus) and a few models and textures. You can click each screenshot to see it at full size.

ArmA 2 (full)

ArmA 2 Free

Building textures look the same, roads look slightly better, wrecked (decorative) vehicles have better textures.

ArmA 2 (full)

ArmA 2 Free

Inside a red brick building. Wall textures slightly improved, debris texture much better, some (but not all) furniture has slightly better textures and the floor is a little nicer.

ArmA 2 (full)

ArmA 2 Free

Another interior from a red brick building. Wallpaper and door textures are much better, furniture and ceiling a bit better, outdoors largely unchanged.

ArmA 2 (full)

ArmA 2 Free

Inside a log cabin. Floor debris much better, furniture and fittings better, pictures on the wall oddly unchanged.

ArmA 2 (full)

ArmA 2 Free

Vegetation and barrier unaltered, road slightly better.

So there you have it. That's the difference between ArmA 2 Free and full. Most of the time you're going to be running through trees and undergrowth and won't see a bit of difference. The most obvious variance comes with the interiors of certain buildings and you're probably not going to be hanging around long enough to be admiring the décor.

The Addons folder from ArmA 2 Free is 1.54GB and the same folder from ArmA 2 (full) is 8.21GB. So that's six and a half gigabytes of extra disk space and fifteen pounds/dollars/euros of extra expense. Is it worth it?

Vi Hart explains the Higgs Boson

2012-07-09T08:00:00.002+01:00

As regualr readers will know, I very much enjoy the work of Vi Hart. The recent discovery of the Higgs boson (probably) is something that has rather amused me. It's been quite hilarious listening to newsreaders desperately try to deal with the science despite clearly not having a clue what the frigging thing is.

So here to the rescue is Vi Hart with a rather clever little sonnet explaining the place of the Higgs in the whole scientific scheme of things.

Chinese pirate DVDs: Star Wars

2012-07-02T08:00:00.000+01:00

Over in mainland China, DVD piracy is rife to the point where the pirates actually have their own shops. Far from offering shoddy service and poor quality as those childish anti-piracy adverts allege, the Chinese pirate DVD stores offer money-back guarantees and excellent service. However, the English on the packaging can leave a lot to be desired.

These are the first three Star Wars movies as obtained from a Beijing pirate DVD store (thank you, Ally!). Click the images to read the text properly. It seems like someone has cut and pasted them in there with little regard for what the English actually says.

F1 Rejects - the best of the worst

2012-06-18T08:00:00.000+01:00

There's a number of Formula 1 websites that I read, but a warm favourite is F1 Rejects. This is a site where they have a special interest in the least successful drivers in Formula 1 history. It's a true affection though and they don't mock the drivers, as they say themselves:

"...we know that even the worst driver on our site has bucketloads more skill than we could ever hope to have, and represent the best of the best in the international motor racing scene.
Let us take this opportunity to state that this site is about F1's least successful drivers - not those whom we consider to be its least talented. There is a BIG difference."

I've got a real soft spot for several drivers who have never troubled a podium, such as Takuma Sato and Eppie Wietzes so it's great that F1 Rejects caters to the fans of the bottom runs and provide profiles, articles and insights into these unsung heroes of F1.

As well as a lively forum, the guys who run the site do a semi-regular podcast which is a terrific antidote to all the very serious coverage out there.

The main site is here:
http://www.f1rejects.com/

The forum is here:
http://www.f1rejects.com/forum/index.php

The podcast link is here:
http://www.f1rejects.com/podcasts/

Alnwick Olympic Flame Day 2

2012-06-15T08:46:00.002+01:00

Day two of the Olympic flame in Alnwick and it was early in the morning and raining quite hard. But the older generation were more than happy (well, one of them was) to carry the torch.

PC Awesome and the Alnwick Olympic Torch

2012-06-15T08:00:00.000+01:00

The Olympic Torch visited Alnwick yesterday and passed directly outside my house. There were a lot of vehicles, cyclists, PR people oh and some guy carrying the torch itself. I didn't think much of any of them to be honest, but there was one guy who I simply loved and that's PC Awesome, the world's best motorcycle cop.

He rode down the street and high-fived every single person. Young, old, tall, short, one characteristic, the opposite of that... he had a high five for everyone. And just look at the sheer delight on everyone's face! Sod the torch, PC Awesome made everyone's day just by being... well, awesome.

Oh and there was this guy too, I suppose...

The Moscow Metro is really beautiful

2012-06-14T08:00:00.001+01:00

The London Underground isn't so pretty - genuine sign I found at Bank station

You may have heard about how pretty the Moscow Metro system is, you may have seen a couple of photographs, but I finally managed to find a decent set that really shows what it's like.

DayZ - How to fix a helicopter, the easy way

2012-06-12T08:00:00.000+01:00

If you've been playing DayZ for while now, you're probably keen to get your hands on a helicopter. It seems like a pretty daunting task as there's a huge number of parts you need. You need several panes of windscreen glass, scrap metal, a rotor assembly and about thirty(!) jerry cans of fuel. So when you find a helicopter, how on earth can you get all that stuff to the chopper before some toolboy pops up and shoots you in the head?

It was like that when I got here. Honest.

The first problem you have is actually finding a helicopter. It seems that some servers don't spawn vehicles, no matter what, due to some kind of bug. But if you can get on a server where vehicles do spawn, you can possibly find them in some of the locations listed on the wiki. Vehicles don't necessarily spawn at all those locations all the time, but you've maybe got a better chance of finding them there than just wandering around hoping to bump into one.

http://dayzwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Vehicles_and_Aircraft

There are two helicopter types that can be found and only one of them is fixable. Check the rotor blades. The grey helicopter in the picture above has bent rotors and can never be fixed. You need the green kind with intact rotor blades.

I found this video, made by a Cockney* zombie that explains the easy way of fixing a helicopter. You can actually fix a chopper with only a few parts that can all fit in a single backpack. This method won't restore a helicopter to full showroom condition, but it will get it patched up enough for you to fly it out of there to a safer location where you can then take your time completing it.

* Zombie only sounds Cockney if you're from America or have a serious head injury

My Day Z Story

2012-06-11T08:00:00.000+01:00

Today's post was written by Lex, a long-time online game partner of mine and a jolly good chum too. And let me tell you, you do not want to be in his gunsights...

I hear gunshots. I think to myself “fuck”. I’m in a terrible place and am horribly exposed. The shots come closer and closer and then I see him, a lone gunman being chased by a horde of zombies. All he can do is fire wildly into them hoping to take as many of them down as he can. As I’m looking at him through my sniper rifles’ scope I can see that he’s bleeding massively. This brave Survivor sees me and turns to run for his life. I pull the trigger.

Long range execution.

A few weeks ago I’d have felt remorse at this killing. I’d have been disgusted with myself for not helping him. I’m not the person I was a few weeks ago. Day Z has made me numb to the suffering of others. As I have travelled mostly alone over this post-apocalyptic wasteland I’ve drawn the conclusion that I have to shoot first. I call it prevenge. I don’t even bother to loot his body for supplies. I leave him there to rot and move on.

This is Day Z and this is my story.

Just over 2 weeks ago during a steam conversation with a friend he mentioned that he was reading about a new mod for Arma 2 called Day Z. A couple of links to articles followed and my curiosity was aroused. One quick trip to youtube confirmed everything I needed to know. I had bought the game within an hour of first hearing about the mod.

Personally I was getting really tired of the mass-produced shit that the gaming industry kept telling itself and anyone who’d listen, was “epic”. Generic shooters are ten to the dozen now. The only innovation left in the gaming industry primarily comes from the actual gamers themselves and now their platform for expression is limited since publishers and developers realised that releasing Mod-Tools for these games will result in them not being able to sell crappy DLC’s at extortionate prices.

So bored of this same crap and bored of being told how good it is (it’s only considered good because the market’s so poor), this mod was a welcome breath of fresh air. It seems that it’s been a breath of fresh air to a lot of others as well. Arma 2, a three year old game, topped the best seller list on steam within a few days of news of this mod taking flight and some developers actually say that ‘modding is a declining trend’.

I managed to install everything reasonably problem free, though it did take a few attempts and then I jumped straight into this bold new world. I was in for a shock.

I think I managed to stay alive for around 5 minutes on my first life. All I could think to myself was “finally a challenge!” I threw myself into this mod and started to learn my way around. Ever since then I have died. I have died a lot.

Get used to seeing this.

It has to be said though, I’ve killed a lot. Not at first, in fact I think it was a week or so into playing before I actually killed my first players. I’d been killed a lot by others players but had generally ignored it as being their problem and tried to learn from any mistakes I’d made. Then I came to the realisation that to survive means I’m going to have to kill.

The above video shows the first time I ever shot and killed a fellow survivor. That was at the North West Airfield, a high traffic area as there is a lot of good equipment up there. If they had left in a different direction I would not have shot them. As it was they started to walk in my direction and I was not inclined to take any chances.

After I had done the deed I felt awful. Thinking on about what I had actually done, those poor chaps could have been alive for weeks, avoiding confrontation as they went. They could have been looking for others to team up with for all I knew. I wasn’t willing to take the chance of them seeing and killing me.

I stayed alive for a long time game wise. At least 48 hours. I was very well equipped and learning my way around the landscape choosing stealth over confrontation. That all ended in a second. I was caught searching another high traffic area. Shot in the back of the head without ever knowing there was another player near me.

Good Job he's my friend!

Another life later and I had been alive for an even longer time and was much better equipped than I had been before. I was an unseen survivor operating mainly at night who preferred to sit back and observe areas for a lot longer before going in. I avoided high traffic areas for a long time. Then I ran low on ammo. Against my better judgement I went back to the NW airfield alone.

It had gone well at first, I’d been in and grabbed the ammo I needed and a few other supplies to keep me going. Then I heard shooting. A lone survivor was fighting a desperate battle against a huge amount of zombies. He was pleading over the in-game chat for anyone in the area to help him. The poor guy was low on blood and ammo and the wave of zombies was unrelenting. I continued to watch him through my rifle scope.

Something inside of me changed. I felt compassion towards him and his plight. I told him I was going to help him.

So I started shooting the zombies from a distance giving him time to patch himself up and recover his composure. The zombies quickly changed their attention to me and began massing upon me. I dispatched them with a calm cold efficiency that this game has taught me to maintain at all times. It was a slaughter. When I had finished shooting I stood over around thirty corpses. The un-dead had become plain-dead.

The player who I had saved then began begging me for help. His blood levels had dropped right down and he was slipping in and out of consciousness. I told him I didn’t want to go anywhere near him as I didn’t know or trust him. He continued to beg for help, for me to save his life.

Random groups of survivors keep things interesting.

His begging was pitiful so I told him I would help him. That he had to face into a corner of the wall of the building he was in like a naughty child would be told to in a school classroom. After he did this I went in and gave him a blood transfusion.

Thanking me again over chat, he continued to face the wall. He hadn’t even seen me. I typed “goodbye” and wished him luck over chat. I turned to leave the area and as I did so he shot me in the back.

I don’t bear any grudges towards him. That player taught me a valuable lesson.

Now I kill everyone who isn’t in Teamspeak with me on sight.

You can see more of Lex's handiwork on his YouTube channel. http://www.youtube.com/user/BandOfScrubs

Who are you?

2012-06-06T13:57:00.000+01:00

You're British, your web browser is Chrome and you own a mobile phone running Android.

I was having a glance at the statistics for visitors to this blog. I rarely look at these, but there were some vaguely interesting bits. The graphs and figures below relate to a period from the 1st of January 2012 to the 1st of June.

I've seen various reports about the web browsers that people use and I've never really understood how they compile them. I've got several browsers installed: I primarily use Opera, but I use Google Chrome for a few things (mainly writing this blog) and I'm forced to use Internet Explorer for badly-programmed software related to my work.

I was quite surprised to see that Chrome hasn't just beaten IE, but also left Firefox behind. Obviously results for my blog aren't universal, but I was interested to see what people are using.

I'm delighted to see almost no one using the dreadful, and dreadfully-named, Windows Phone - which I loather with a passion. Stay away from my blog, you technological lepers! Although Android came out top, when one adds up all the Apple devices, they're really dominating the mobile sector.

Half the people arriving here are via a search engine and the other half are clicking links to get here - I don't imagine anyone's typing in page addresses despite Google's claims of "direct traffic", so I reckon those are links that don't carry page-referrer information over. I've no idea what "campaigns" are and I can't be bothered hunting through the Google Analytics site to find out.

I rather think that the clicks v search graph is a bit inaccurate at the moment because a lot of people are coming here via searches for DayZ or through other articles about DayZ that link here. Comparing an earlier time period shows that normally about 75% of traffic comes through searches.

I don't quite know how to take this final chart. I'm delighted to be attracting new visitors but I'm equally happy to have returning ones. Which are the more desirable though?

And that's just a little look at the numbers behind this site. I'll have a look at them again in another six months to see if anything has changed. One stat I didn't mention is that Australians spend more time on this site than any other visitors. If I was talking to my mate Ryan, I'd be suggesting that it's because Ozzers have difficulty reading. Sadly, it turns out that they're the most likely to read several articles at a visit which accounts for the longer duration of their stay, but I'm not going to tell Ryan that.

Sauber cut an F1 car in half to give a cutaway cross-section view

2012-06-04T08:00:00.000+01:00

The Sauber F1 team have spent the last two years cutting an F1 car in half. It's quite amazing to see a cross-section of the whole car although they do skip over the engine and gearbox. They also get Sergio Perez in to show just how the driver sits inside it.

It's not the first time we've seen inside a car, as other teams have suspended Formula 1 parts to let us see an exploded view, but I'm pretty sure it's the first time anyone has sawed a car in half.

A couple of useful translation and pronunciation websites

2012-05-31T08:00:00.000+01:00

An unpronounceable Northumberland market town yesterday...

Ever struggle to work out how to pronounce a word? My (evil foreign) wife is always asking how to pronounce things. I'm fine with most words, but some place names can be a real horror. I live in the small town of Alnwick - can you guess how to say the name? It's ah-nick - silent L, silent W. The next town along is called Alnmouth (both towns are on the River Aln) so one might presume that it's pronounced an-mouth, but it isn't, for reasons that no one can explain to me. It's pronounced alan-mouth.

And this is why I like Forvo. It's a website that lists lots of words from lots of languages and has recordings of people actually saying them. It even rather handily will show the location of the person doing the pronunciation. You can vote for what you regard as the best ones and even add your own voice if you feel like it. You don't have to register to join the site.

One of the most popular words in the UK section is Alnwick, so it just goes to show how flipping annoying it is as a placename:
http://www.forvo.com/word/alnwick/

Give Forvo a go for any word in any language and chances are you'll find what you're looking (listening?) for.
http://www.forvo.com/

Ever need to translate a whole Office document without having to repeatedly cut and paste small sections? I often have to work with French and German documents and I get on just fine most of the time, but I recently had a French document full of financial terms with which I was unfamiliar. So thank goodness I found DocTranslator.

Just fire up their website, select the document type, allow the little app to open and point it at your document. What I particularly like is that it doesn't upload your file to the site (just as well as I had a 400MB Excel file), but does it all on your own computer using the Google Translate API. It is machine translation, so it will be a bit clunky, but it gets the job done and remarkably quickly too.

Give it a try. It's good for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenOffice, Acrobat PDF files as well as plain old text and now even subtitle files.
http://www.onlinedoctranslator.com/

DayZ single player / practice / training / (not really) cheating - DaiZy

2012-05-30T08:00:00.002+01:00

Once upon a time there was a single player mod file for DayZ written by a chap named Kronzky. It was pretty good and added a whole new dimension to playing DayZ. Sadly, for various reasons Kronzky and Rocket (the DayZ developer) fell out and they both decided that the file should be discontinued.

There are videos out there on YouTube that explain how to get single player working with DayZ. Most of them are patched-up versions of the original Kronzky single player file (which only worked up to DayZ version 1.7.2.5). So most of those videos are concerned with downgrading your version of DayZ and will mess up your online DayZ folder. They also lack AI units, helicopter crashes and all kinds of stuff.

DaiZy works with any version of DayZ, but you're advised to use the most recent one. We also test against future versions of DayZ before they're released to make sure this keeps working.

DaiZy (yes, it's a stupid name) has been written from scratch and is completely different from those patched-up versions. It is designed to be a simulation of online play and includes vehicle spawns, helicopter crash sites and even has AI bandit units.

This is not the only version of DaiZy. We have a forum where we have many other versions with different features (better AI handling, bandit groups, extra weapons, base-building, built-in cheats, etc) and supporting different maps (Namalsk, Lingor, Taviana, etc). The version I'm detailing here is the default Chernarus one
http://kodabar-dayz-daizy-single-player-forum.1084782.n5.nabble.com/

This article was last updated on the 26th of September 2013

Changelog:
September 26th Updated for DayZ 1.8
July 22nd Added launcher utility information. Change Support Call installation to use modfolders
June 12th Complete rewrite of article
February 25th Updated information on Support Call
February 7th Changed the CBA installation process due to the updated version and took account of DayZ 1.7.5.1
January 21st Added a video and rewrote guide for new install location
January 3rd Added bit about DayZ base version
December 27th Added Loki's Lost Key installation instructions and a video
December 3rd Completely rewrote page to include changes to DaiZy

October 6th Added manual installation instructions, updated article for 043
September 29th added section on Lingor Island shortcut, removed section on Depositfiles
September 28th Completely rewrote the whole article
September 16th Added Chernarus single player file with dogs
September 20th Added DaiZy 0.38b links, Desposit Files guide and mirrors

Guarantee

This single player mod will not cause you to be banned from online play. Even the cheats (if you choose to install them) have been carefully selected so they cannot be used online. Servers will refuse to let you connect if you have them installed. You will not be banned.

If you are banned from online play because of this mod, I will personally buy you another copy of the game. I've only ever had one person try to claim and they had installed a completely different version of single player that was supplied as an exe file from an entirely different site.

I have complete confidence in DaiZy and all the variants on our forums. We don't present them as exe files or installers so that you can know that there is nothing that can harm your computer. If you need further reassurance, feel free to ask.

Before we start

Before you start, you need to have DayZ installed. If you haven't got that up and running, go off and read this detailed guide that over a million others have used. Go on, I'll wait.

http://kodabar.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/how-to-install-dayz-with-arma-2-free.html
If you're using the Six Play / Play with Six launcher, it will put your DayZ files in a folder located within My Documents. I caution against using Six because of this. Every other launcher and installer places the DayZ files within the Operation Arrowhead program folder.

If you're using Six, please download and use DayZ Commander instead. If you want to keep using Six, then just use it to play online multiplayer, but use DayZ Commander for single player.

http://www.dayzcommander.com/

DaiZy exists separately from DayZ and does not interfere with it. They use separate folders,

I get asked this a lot: it is possible to run DaiZy with pirate versions of ArmA and Operation Arrowhead, but I will not provide support or encouragement for people to do so. In using a pirate version, you may come up against errors when installing beta patches or updates.

Where to get it

The files are hosted on DropBox. I have previously had them on Mediafire, but I'm sorry to say that Mediafire have repeatedly taken down my files in response to incorrect and invalid DMCA notices. It's pretty frustrating when I get told that a ten megabyte zip file is a copy of the film Avatar and then have to wait thirty days for them to respond to a counter-notice. Sigh.

There are two files to download. These are:
DaiZy+_v[Rz0].rar
DaiZy_v042c.Chernarus.pbo

Get there here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qew6q975jamesve/DaiZy%2B_v%5BRz0%5D.rar
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3zn95ugved0b5bk/DaiZy_v042c.Chernarus.pbo

Here are the original Mediafire links in case you have problems using DropBox:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/nmcbaam2wmo9znt/DaiZy%2B_v%5BRz0%5D.rar
http://www.mediafire.com/download/7uee6ei93ge2mq4/DaiZy_v042c.Chernarus.pbo

Right. You've got both files that you need. We're finished downloading.

How to install it

The video above will take you through the whole process of installing DaiZy. It's all you need. Below are step by step instructions with screenshots that go into more detail than the video.

1. Open the DaiZy+_v[Rz0].rar file you've downloaded. I'm using WinRar. You may be using something different, but I'm using WinRar. Extract the files to a temporary folder

2. Go to your Operation Arrowhead program folder. Depending on from where you've got Operation Arrowhead the location may be in one of several places.

If you got it from Steam, it's most likely in:

C:\Program files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead

If you used a boxed retail copy, it's most likely in:

C:\Program files (x86)\Bohemia Interactive\arma 2 operation arrowhead

Inside there is a folder called @DayZ and inside that is another folder called addons where the actual files from DayZ are stored. Check the image above to make sure.

Create a new folder called @DaiZy. Copy the addons from the @DayZ folder to this new folder. Take the files you've just extracted and place them in the @DaiZy\addons folder, over-writing the files inside.

DayZ disables the single player menu and these files will re-enable it as well as provide access to extra features.

3. Go to your Operation Arrowhead program folder and locate the Missions sub-folder. Take the map file you've downloaded and place it in that folder.

Done that? Good. You've installed all the files.

Creating a shortcut

If you're using a launcher (like DayZ Commander) to launch DayZ, I'd suggest creating a shortcut in order to play single player. The launchers are great, but they're not designed for offline play. This is how to create a shortcut.

Inside your Operation Arrowhead folder is an icon marked Launch Arma2 OA Beta Patch. Right click on this icon and select Properties.

There are two lines that matter. The Target line should read something like:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead\Expansion\beta\arma2oa.exe" -beta=Expansion\beta;Expansion\beta\Expansion -nosplash

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead\Expansion\beta\arma2oa.exe" -beta=Expansion\beta;Expansion\beta\Expansion -nosplash -skipIntro -mod=@DaiZy

If you're not using Steam or you have Steam installed in a different location the line will reflect where you have the game installed.

For the "Start in" line, make sure it says:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead\

Or again, wherever your Steam folder or game folder actually is. Make sure that it points to the main Operation Arrowhead folder and not to the beta folder. Yeah, it's running the exe from the beta folder, but it's running it in the main folder as that's where all the rest of the files are.

Copy this shortcut to your Desktop or some other place from which you'll want to run the game. The shortcut in the Operation Arrowhead folder will get over-written every time you update the beta patch, so do not rely on using that one.

How to run it

Fire up DayZ as normal and select Singleplayer for a change.

Choose Scenarios now.

Click to enlarge

On this screen, you have several files from which to choose.

Select the DaiZy_v042.Chernarus file. Note at the bottom left of the screen is a box that probably says Recruit. This is the difficulty level. Click it until it displays the difficulty you'd like. There's little difference between the difficulty levels, but the highest difficulty will disable vision dots, crosshairs, your position on the map and third person view. I suggest you use Veteran which gives a similar level of options to those available online. Then choose Play.

You may find that, if you've installed DaiZy before, it doesn't say Play, but instead offers Resume and Restart. Choose Restart.

Ooh, how exciting.

Right. We're in. That's it - everything's working.

Known bugs

Warning: if you spawn in with this skin (headphones, scarf, etc), there is a problem. In trying to include more content from ArmA 2, the player skins were included. If you spawn in with this skin, you won't have a backpack or be able to pick one up. This is because backpacks weren't included in ArmA 2, but first showed up in Operation Arrowhead.

There are a few things you can do:

1. Play as a female. In online play, most people avoid playing as a female because they can't wear ghillie suits. But in single player, ghillie suits and other clothes are purely cosmetic and do not affect how visible you are to AI units.

2. Select Restart from the menu until you appear with the normal skin and a backpack

3. Use the SupportCall addon (details in the section about adding cheats) to choose a new skin. Ones marked with a (B) support backpacks.

You can also use the rMod addon to allow backpacks with any skin, but that's getting a bit beyond the scope of this article.

There is also another bug when it comes to chopper crash sites. The loot that spawns there is just normal loot, not the military grade stuff that should be found there. There's nothing that can be done about that other than to use a different version from our forum.

AI units

There are AI bandits within the game. You'll encounter then pretty much anywhere on the map and they will fire at you. They have a variety of weapons and outfits.

There are friendly AI units too. You encounter them by approaching a church in Chernogorsk or Electrozavodsk. As you get near the doors, you'll probably hear them report in and you'll see a couple of icons in the bottom right of the screen. By default they will shoot at nearby zombies and will follow you (although not too closely). You can command them as well, although it does involve using ArmA's slightly clunky order system. Full details can be found in the ArmA 2 documentation, but the basic method is to press their respective F keys and using the mousewheel menu to issue an order. For instance, if I have two companions and I want them to board a vehicle with me, I'd press F2 and F3 to highlight them and then select Get In from the mousewheel menu.

There are limitations to the AI units. Friendlies may not shoot at every zombie in sight and they probably won't fire at bandits (there's only so much that can be done within the ArmA 2 engine - remember, this is a mod of a mod of an ageing game). They can get hurt and you can heal them as you would any normal player, but they won't heal you. Just think of them as stupid and selfish friends.

Adding cheats (optional)

By default, DaiZy plays just like online multiplayer. Some players would like to use cheats to be able to spawn in units, weapons, etc.

The recommended way of adding cheats is to use the Support Call addon as written by Kronzky.

http://kronzky.info/addons/supportcall/index.htm

Go and download the file from the link above.

Open the zip file that you've just downloaded and extract the KRON_SupportCall.pbo file

Now go into your Operation Arrowhead program folder. You need to create a folder alongside the @DaiZy folder in just the same way as before. Call this new folder @Kron. Inside it, create an Addons folder. Inside that, place the KRON_SupportCall.pbo file

That sounds a little complicated. The structure is like this:
OA\@Kron\Addons
Where OA is your Operation Arrowhead program folder.

With the file in there, you now need to add a bit to your shortcut. Open up the shortcut just as you did earlier and add ;@Kron behind the -mod=@DaiZy part, so it reads -mod=@DaiZy;@Kron

Make sure the semi-colon(;) is in there. Now when you load the game it'll load Support Call. It won't interfere with your normal DayZ game because only that shortcut loads Support Call.

Using Support Call

When you're playing the game, press Escape to bring up the main menu and you'll see a new button at the bottom marked Call for Support which you can press to bring up the cheat menu.

There are several sections to the menu, but I'm not going to go into them all here. You'll find pretty full documentation on Kronzky's page although you should note that not every feature will be available in DaiZy. Also note that the first time you access it, there will be a delay as it builds a list of the available equipment.

Equipment or vehicles that you request will be air-dropped near your current position.

Adding Loki's Lost Key (optional)

Loki's Lost Key adds even more cheats. It allows you to teleport, spawn aircraft (SupportCall doesn't allow this), go skydiving and a lot more besides.

It involves several steps, so I wrote a separate article for that. Click the link below:

http://kodabar.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/how-to-install-lokis-lost-key-for-daizy.html

Using launcher utilities

Dave UK pointed me in the direction of an excellent mod launcher for the ArmA games. The ArmA II Game Launcher by Spirited Machine is very simple and rather easy to configure. It allows you to add and remove any mod folder from your startup options. As you can see in the screenshot above, it detects all possible mod folders and allows you to turn them on and off with just a tick in a box. You can save different configurations and even create shortcuts with it. It saves a lot of hassle when you're using multiple versions across multiple maps (see Other versions of DaiZy below).

You can download the launcher from here:
http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=8241

There's also this launcher which works in a similar way:
http://arma2.paro-technology.com/?page_id=18

Other versions of DaiZy

We've got a forum. There's a tab up the top of this page marked DayZ single player forum which you can click to go there or click the link below.

http://kodabar-dayz-daizy-single-player-forum.163.s1.nabble.com/

There are several people working on different versions of DaiZy that have features or maps that aren't in the official version. This is also the place to go to ask questions about using other maps, etc. This page is really just for installing the basic Chernarus single player mod.

Troubleshooting

What if it doesn't work? I should mention that this is very much an ongoing project and that there are bugs and problems. The author of the single player file does read this page so please report any problems or bugs you encounter. Heck, let us know if you've got any ideas for inclusion in a later version.

"...content deleted...Chernarus" errors

The game is unable to find the Chernarus content. DayZ and DaiZy use Operation Arrowhead for just about everything, but the Chernarus files come from ArmA 2.

Go into your ArmA 2 program folder. Locate the Addons folder, right-click on it and select Copy. Now go into your Operation Arrowhead program folder and Paste it there.

If you're comfortable with using a command line, you can use an elevated command prompt and the mklink command to create a symbolic link to the Addons folder and save some disk space. I'm not going to provide any details about this as it's a powerful command and you should only use it if you know what you're doing.

"...content deleted...dayz.whatever" errors

If the game complains that there is deleted content, then it's for one of three reasons:

1. The shortcut used to start the game is incorrect. Got back and make sure it has the bit -mod=@DaiZy in it.

2. The files are in the wrong place. They should be in:
OA\@DaiZy\Addons
(Where OA is your Operation Arrowhead program folder)
It's all too easy to put them in OA\@DaiZy and miss the Addons sub-folder. The sheer preponderance of Addons folders doesn't help.

"CA" errors

When this error comes up, it's because you didn't update Operation Arrowhead before installing DayZ. Go to this page and follow Step 2 onwards. Continue through the other steps too. Although you may have installed the beta patch, etc already, installing the update has over-written these, so you'll need to do that again.
http://kodabar.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/how-to-install-dayz-with-arma-2-free.html

"PMC" errors

When this error comes up, it's because you didn't update Operation Arrowhead before installing DayZ. Go to this page and follow Step 2 onwards. Continue through the other steps too. Although you may have installed the beta patch, etc already, installing the update has over-written these, so you'll need to do that again.
http://kodabar.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/how-to-install-dayz-with-arma-2-free.html

You're invisible when you spawn, can't move, can't kill zombies

You need a more recent version of the beta patch. Use DayZ Commander or follow this link and install it yourself.
http://www.arma2.com/beta-patch.php

You don't have the "Launch ArmA 2 OA Beta Patch" shortcut

You need to install the beta patch. Use DayZ Commander or follow this link and install it yourself.
http://www.arma2.com/beta-patch.php

You've switched to a newer version of DaiZy, but you can't access the new features

Unfortunately whenever you change or update the single player mission file it tends to have problems with existing save files. You either won't be able to load the save file at all or you'll be able to load it, but you won't be able to use any of the new features or the results may be unpredictable. This also happens when there's an update for the main DayZ files as well.

The only thing you can do is to select Restart rather than Resume and lose your save file.

This is a limitation in the way that ArmA 2 works with save files and nothing can be done about that. Sorry. DaiZy is a mod of a mod of a game that's primarily designed to be an online multiplayer game, so not everything is going to work in the way we would like it.

If you need my help

Playing around with these files does require a certain familiarity with copying and moving files around and it can sometimes be a little complicated and confusing.

If you need help, leave a message in the comments. There are many different ways in which you could have DayZ and the ArmA 2 games installed, so please try to leave as much useful information as possible.

What version of DayZ are you running?
Are you using a launcher (Six Play, DayZ Commander, Worrom's Updater, etc) to run the game?
If you're getting an error message, what does it say?
Are you using Steam?
From where did you obtain your copies of the ArmA games?
Are you able to run vanilla DayZ multiplayer?

It's pretty time-consuming to answer all these comments, so if you can leave information like the stuff listed above, it saves a lot of time. I answer every comment or question on this article and several others and a pile of YouTube videos as well. That adds up to dozens of questions a day. Please at least try to solve your problem before you ask for help. Writing in capitals, using txt/leet speak or writing "plz help!!!" just annoys me and does not make me want to help you.

I help everyone and I make sure that everyone's problem is fixed. I have never failed to sort anyone's problems yet. If you get totally stuck, I can even be persuaded to use Teamviewer to install it for you.

I have anonymous comments enabled (I hate having to register for stuff too), but if you're going to leave an anonymous comment, please add a word or a name or something to distinguish you from all the other anonymous commenters. It can get pretty confusing trying to sort out who's who.

If you leave comments as a user/identity it asks for your email address. The only reason it does this is to send you a notification when a reply is left to your comment. I don't have any way of seeing the email addresses and they don't get given to email spammers or anything like that.

I only provide support on here for the version from this article. If you need help with any of the versions from the forum, ask on there.

Comments

I try to make sure that every question in the comments is answered. If you haven't had a reply after a couple of days, try asking again - I've probably just overlooked yours in the pile of others.

Note that the comments system gets a bit broken when there are over 200 comments displayed, so I regularly have to delete some of them. I do try to make sure that useful comments are left in place though.

Kodabar DayZ / DaiZy single player forum

Jpop: Heavy metal by tiny girls

2012-05-29T08:00:00.000+01:00

One might be forgiven for thinking that all contemporary music in Japan is jpop. A lot of it is, but there's a large rock scene, punk has never quite gone away and there are a surprising amount of metal bands. What is peculiar is the recent rise of entirely female metal bands.

Aldious look like the resultant offspring of Louis XIV shagging an exploding wedding cake factory. No one appears to have told them the cardinal rule of metal (look sodding miserable all the time) and everyone seems to be having a delightful time, except the singer. Seemingly composed of an endless parade of guitarists, I think there are actually five of them at the moment but it's jolly hard to tell as at least two of them were (and perhaps still are) simultaneously in another all-girl metal band called...

G∀LMET are a more guttural metal band with a lead singer who does that weird shouty throat roar so beloved of Napalm Death and their ilk. I really don't know how these bands choose their names, but there does seem to be a real trend among Japanese groups at the moment for characters that aren't on a computer keyboard (I've lost track of the number of bands that have a star in their name - not an asterisk, an actual five pointed star shape). G∀LMET are like the cheaper, sluttier and noisier version of Aldious which is odd considering how many members they have in common. The singer's bloody terrifying though.

It does make me laugh that there's an Australian range of anti-corrosion products with the same name.

Onmyouza are actually quite easy to listen to and perform a more conventional type of metal, often combining traditional instruments and folk music. Probably the most outstanding thing about them (which first drew my attention) is that they dress in clothing from the Heian period which is jolly nice to see. This is probably the period when Chinese influence was at its strongest and so I very much enjoy their costumes. Oh and their name translates literally as "a gathering of yin and yang" and all their songs are about Japanese folklore (dragons, lake monsters, ninja, etc) and the duality of the cosmos. What's not to like?

Flagitious Idiosyncrasy in the Dilapidation deserve a special mention just for their name alone. Managing to combine the art of looking very normal indeed with grindcore shouting, they're not a band for the faint of heart.

I had to look up flagitious to see if it's a real word and it apparently is:

fla·gi·tious [fluh-jish-uhs]
adjective
1. shamefully wicked, as persons, actions, or times.
2. heinous or flagrant, as a crime; infamous.
Origin: 1350–1400; Middle English flagicious < Latin flāgitiōsus, equivalent to flāgiti ( um ) shame, scandal

Yellow Machinegun manage to combine noisiness with really cheap video production to ensure that the resulting mess is as difficult to watch as it is to listen to. And their name's entirely composed of actual words that people actually use, so I've no idea why they're on this list.

Exist†trace might just be the ultimate Japanese metal band:
Dress like homeless French nobility? Check.
Name includes untypeable character? Check.
Band made of guitars? Check.
Actually look miserable? Check.

Oh but there's one other group that have to be mentioned in any article about Japanese metal. I almost feel the need to apologise before showing them to you. Let's start with a short interview as you'll probably want a close look at them. Brace yourself.

If your first thought was "What the fuck? Are they like twelve or something?" then you're absolutely right. The ones in black are indeed twelve years old. The lead singer is fourteen. And what the fuck is indeed an appropriate reaction. In fact I'd posit that it's the only reaction possible.

BABYMETAL is made up of SU-METAL, YUIMETAL and uh... MOAMETAL. They're a sub-group of Sakura Gakuin (whom one of them mentions in that interview) who are going down the Morning Musume / AKB48 route of amassing a literal army of members. Whilst it may appear that they're doing the standard devil's horns (or whatever it is) metal gesture, they're actually doing it the other way round to resemble a fox because foxes are way cuter (kawaii!). And that's pretty much symptomatic of just what BABYMETAL are about. They're a bizarre mish-mash of the most bubblegum of jpop with metal.

Okay, now I suppose you're going to need to see one of their music videos. I'm going to have to end this article here. They are much, much worse than you might imagine...

I secretly quite like them.

Comics: The Kameoka Diaries

2012-05-28T08:00:00.000+01:00

Today, maybe I'm being a bit lazy, but there's not too much I can say about this. Lars Martinson is a cartoonist whose autobiographical strips are simply charming. I particularly like his Kameoka Diaries. Here's one. Others can be found at his website and there's even versions that can be downloaded to mobile devices if you're into that.

http://larsmartinson.com/

DayZ - how to stay alive for more than five minutes

2012-05-25T08:00:00.000+01:00

This is the last of the DayZ articles (for now). Regular blog posts resume next week. Today we're going to look at tips and strategies for staying alive.

Once you've read this article, there's also:

How to install DayZ (with ArmA 2 Free, Operation Arrowhead or Combined Ops)

DayZ - How to get on a server

How to play

DayZ offline single player / practice / training / (not really) cheating

This is displayed on the homepage of the DayZ mod. It's not kidding either. It was running a bit higher until the recent influx of new players. And people like me who've survived for much longer periods through out that average quite a bit. You really are going to die soon. So what can you do to improve your chances? Read on after the jump...

Don't shoot zombies unless you have to

It took three of us to kill this many zombies and we ran out of ammo and two of us died

This might seem a bit odd as you run around with a gun and it's a first/third person shooter after all, so why not shoot zombies? There are several reasons:

Guns make noise. A lot of noise. There are silent weapons, but good luck finding them - they're usually only found in military buildings and those are a magnet for other players who won't hesitate to kill you thanks to the shiny loot. So you're mostly going to be shooting at zombies with noisy boomsticks. The noise will attract any other zombies in the area. It's rare that you'll fire and only have to kill one zombie. Plus the noises can be heard by other players. And if they hear you firing a lot, they'll maybe just reason that you're low on ammo and decide to kill you for your stuff.

Rare ammo is rare. If you've just got a Makarov pistol or a shotgun then it's not so very hard to find ammo. But if you've got anything better, then it's likely that you'll have a hard time finding more ammunition. Killing zombies doesn't really get you anything so is it worth emptying your hard-to-find MP5 at a bunch of zombies?

Zombies don't carry good loot. Most zombies don't have any loot on them at all and those that do tend to only have one thing and it tends to be rubbish like empty tin cans. So when you shoot a zombie all you do is lose ammunition.

Thanks for killing all those zombies and... ooh is that a Lee Enfield rifle? Thanks for that too

One hit can kill you. Although zombies will usually only do a limited amount of damage to you if they get close enough, sometimes one hit will knock you unconscious and then him and his mates will kick you to death like Chinese police at a student protest. Even if you don't fall over and die, zombie hits stand a good chance of getting you bleeding and you won't be able to pause the firefight to bandage your wounds so you'll have to kill all the zeds before pulling out the elastoplast. And when you're busy with bandages, that's when I'll walk through the door and shoot you in the head like a Chinese policeman at a student protest.

Shots tell everyone where you are. There are groups of bandits that go around just looking for players to kill so they can take their stuff. And nothing tells them where you are better than gunshots. If they only need to expend a single bullet to your head to get a tin of beans, they'll do it... like a Chinese policeman in a decreasingly funny simile.

Gunshots tell experienced players what gun you have and what kit you're carrying. I can tell from the sound of most shots what you're carrying. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop - that's a Makarov. You've just started the game, have five clips containing six shots each, two bandages, two morphine phials, a box of painkillers, two tins of beans and a water bottle. You've only got four clips now and I'll be counting the shots until I walk in and slot you like a Chinese policeman at a.... no, uh an American soldier on... uh... sod the similes, I'm still going to kill you and rob your corpse. Why should I spend a tense half hour crawling through a hospital looking for morphine when I can just rob you like a Thai hooker with knockout drops on her nipples? Go simile!

I might just have to shoot these two

So what should you do? Try to sneak past every zombie you can. It's amazing how close you can get to zombies if they're looking in the wrong direction and you're lying flat in good cover. Look how close that zombie is in the picture above. I probably can't get much closer than that, but I felt safe enough to take the time to snap a screenshot. Because I managed to crawl past those two, I made it inside the building behind the and found a ton of great gear. If I'd shot them, I may well have had to run off instead.

Don't stay on the coast

You'll initially spawn on the coastline, probably on the south coast. Lots of bandits will hide out near the coast just waiting for new players to appear so they can kill and rob them. Equally so, newly-spawned players tend to hang around on the coast, so you've a good chance of bumping into them. And they're probably trigger happy loons.

The two largest towns are on the coast (Cherno and Elektro as people call them). When you spawn, you're likely to be very near these places. They have several buildings in them that contain decent loot so they're a magnet for other players.

Head inland and you'll find smaller towns that are spread out a bit more. You've got a much better chance of being alone and there will be less zombies around.

Don't assume you can't be seen

Just because you've taken every precaution and the noise and vision meters are showing nothing that no one is watching you. In the pictures above, I was sitting on a cliff-top, quite far away watching a group of buildings for zombies and other players before I decided to go in. They were being very careful and looking around the whole time, but I could easily have shot one of them in the head with my sniper rifle and the other would have no idea from where the shot came. Even if they'd spotted me, I could see they had a shotgun and a Lee Enfield rifle, so I was way outside their effective range.

Look around before entering a town or building

So there's one zombie in the road and another in the distance, so I reckon I'm good to do some shopping

Every building has zombies spawn near it. Take a good look around before going near one, just to make sure you know where the zombies are. You don't want to et stuck inside a building because there's a ton of zombies outside. Usually there are anything between 2 and 4 zombies outside a building.

Some buildings (like fire stations, hospitals, military bases) have particularly good loot and they attract a lot of players looking to improve their inventories. So when you're going near those, it's really important to check around and make sure you're alone before sneaking in to loot.

I lied - you can outrun zombies

Come back! They just want a hug

It's not easy to outrun zombies, but in the right circumstances you can. Going through doorways forces zombies to temporarily slow to walking pace. You can take advantage of this in buildings that you know have more than one door by simply running through them. The zombies will soon catch up with you again though, so it's best if use this as a bit of breathing space and a chance to turn and shoot them in the head like William Tell's less successful brother (eeh, I'm ashamed of that one). It's also worth running inside a building and popping the zombies as they shamble through the doorway.

The best way to outrun zombies is to run up a steep hill. It has to be steep enough to slow you to walking pace too, but you can then tack back and forth in a zigzag pattern to keep you running up the slope whilst the zombies shamble after you nice and slowly. You can use this time to turn and give them a lead overdose with comfort.

Only shambling zombies will run after you quickly, but monkeys (the crouched, hopping ones) and the crawlers will head in your direction too, so when you think you've resolved your zombie problem, it's worth taking the time to have another look. Those monkeys might be on their way still.

If you spot another survivor, it's maybe worth running towards them as you might just foist your zombie pursuers onto them. If they look friendly (or you know they are), then run in a wide circle around them (not too close) and they'll be able to shoot enough zombies that you can probably take care of the rest.

Trust no one

Friendly!

The best way to get dead fast is to trust other people. It's amazing how devious people can be in DayZ. Often as you approach another player, they will type "Friendly" in the chat thing. You can do the same. Just because they say they're friendly doesn't mean they are.

You know, now that we're alone and I'm behind you, I'm thinking that I quite like that gun you've got...

I've heard tales from many people of the dastardly lengths people will go to. Here's one story I heard.

A group of three players encountered another survivor. He called out "Friendly" and they all lowered their guns. After a brief chat, they decided to take this new guy along with them - safety in numbers, right? Well it all went swimmingly and they headed off to raid an airfield together. There was some excellent loot to be had and with four in their party, they killed all the zombies and ran around helping themselves to some of the best gear they'd seen.
When they emerged from a particularly large building, there was a group of bandits waiting for them and they shot all the survivors dead and looted their corpses. Shot them all dead apart from one. Yeah, that friend they'd picked up along the way was part of the group of bandits. He'd been talking to his bandit chums on Skype the whole time telling them where they were. Having had the base cleared of zombies and all the loot gathered in one place, the bandits stepped in and did what bandits do. The "friend" didn't do any of the shooting, allowing him to keep his non-bandit survivor skin and dupe some more innocents. Ooh, nasty.

I can also tell you a story that happened to me:

I was on the outskirts of a town when a bit of shooting went on near me. Suddenly there were zombies everywhere, running towards the sound of the gunfire. Unfortunately I happened to be between the zeds and the shooting so they found me an easier target. I took to my heels and ran out into the empty fields surrounding the town. There were no steep hills nearby and a glance over my shoulder showed about thirty zombies in pursuit. Suddenly in the middle of a field, a guy stood up and started shooting at the zombies behind me. I ran in a wide circle around him as he took out zombie after zombie. Three other unseen people started firing at the zombies too. Pretty soon there were only a couple of zeds after me, so I turned and dealt with them.
As soon as the shooting was over and the zombies went back to being dead, I turned to thank my saviour and his friends only to find them all pointing guns at me. "Place all your gear on the ground and step away." they said. Ouch. I turned and ran, zigzagging across the field. Shots hit the ground all around me and one hit me causing a fountain of blood to burst from my neck, but I made it to the treeline and kept running until my blood loss was becoming serious. A quick bandage and I was on my way, a little wiser than before.

It may seem unfair or even unjust, but other players can spell the end of you much more easily than any zombie. To many, you're just a walking loot pile. There are a great many friendly players out there, but you're better off teaming up with people you already know. You'll probably be able to trust them a little more.

Dead zombies = other people nearby

My friends and I did this, but if you find a pile of bodies like this and you didn't do it, watch out!

If you find a group of dead zombies on the ground, it means that someone else killed them quite recently. They're probably not far away. Equally so, if you're approaching a town or building and there are no zombies around, it's because someone else shot them in the not too distant past. Are you that desperate to find a can of beans?

Discretion is the better part of valour

I'm sure I'll be fine

If you're not sure about a situation, run away. Better you leave alone than with a group of zombies on your tail. There are always other places to try.

Dying isn't the end of the world

Meeting yourself is always an awkward experience

This is a tough game and there is no player alive now that is going to live forever. We are all going to die many, many times before this is over.

If you know where you died and you know where you've respawned, it might be worth paying a visit to your corpse and robbing it. If a player killed you, there's a good chance they stripped your body of everything worthwhile, but if it was a zombie and there weren't any players around to witness your demise, your prostate form may lie unsullied.

As I was halfway through this article, I managed to get myself killed when a zombie glitched through a doorway and his first hit knocked me unconscious. I bled out and died. I respawned about three kilometres from where I ate the zombie sandwich and I realised that the journey there would be quite easy. So I ran and ran and ran and found my body. That's me in the picture above. I got all my kit back. Phew.

Teamwork helps

Go team!

Much as I loathe the constant refrain of second-rate educators and shitty middle managers concerning the importance of teamwork, in DayZ working together is very helpful. You can play out the game on your own, but it's easier to play with other people.

Two pairs of eyes are always better than one. When raiding buildings, I remain outside to provide covering fire for my chum. He goes in and grabs as much useful stuff as possible and I keep an eye out for zombies and other players. If he needs to run out the door whilst being chased, I'll be able to take out most of his pursuers before he catches up with my position, greatly increasing our odds of survival.

If you're using blood packs (obtainable from hospitals), you need another player to administer them to you. Better to have a friend along than have to approach a stranger for help.

But to zombies, team is just an anagram of meat so don't go thinking you're invincible just because there's a couple of you.

Live off the land

If it's good enough for Asterix...

Whilst you can find cans of food in buildings, you're taking a risk every time you go into one. Find yourself a hunting knife, matches and wood and you can start hunting animals like the wild boar in the picture above.

Stalk an animal and shoot it to take it down.

Once you've killed the animal, stand over it and use your hunting knife to gut it. Once you've done that, you'll be able to loot the corpse. Depending on the size of the animal, you'll have anywhere between one and eight units of raw meat to collect.

Build a fireplace (right click on matches in your inventory) and then light it (right click on matches again) and you'll see a small fire on the ground. Not everywhere is suitable for building fires, but relatively flat ground will pretty much always work. You can light fires inside buildings, but this sometimes cause glitches. When looking at the fire, there will be a choice in the context / square brackets / mousewheel menu to cook the meat. This transforms the raw meat into cooked meat which you can then eat in the normal manner.

Note: Cooked meat recovers 800 blood versus the 200 you get from canned food.

Water bottles can be re-filled by standing on the edge of ponds (new feature, may be a bit buggy) or beside water pumps and wells. They can no longer be filled in the sea.

Don't write blog articles telling other people how to play better

You don't want to be telling potential opponents how to... oh, bugger.

DayZ - How to play

2012-05-24T08:00:00.000+01:00

Okay, so you've got the mod installed, you've managed to connect to a server. So just how do you play DayZ?

DayZ is a mod for ArmA 2 which is a complex military simulator with a horrible control system because it's trying to cater to every eventuality. There is a PDF manual in the Operation Arrowhead folder, but that'll only take you so far. Read on to find out a bit more.

Once you've read this article, there's also:

How to install DayZ (with ArmA 2 Free, Operation Arrowhead or Combined Ops)

DayZ - How to get on a server

DayZ - how to stay alive for more than five minutes

DayZ offline single player / practice / training / (not really) cheating

Article updated 7th July 2012.

Viewpoint

First person view, looking down the iron sights

Third person view

You can switch to third person view by using Enter on the numeric keypad. Note that some servers block third person view and (you can usually identify this by them having Expert, Veteran or Hardcore in the server name).

Stance

Standing

Crouching - the difference is more obvious when you're moving

Another player crouching

Prone / crawling

Use Z (standing) X (crouching) and C (prone) to change stance. Note the ear and eye icons on the right of the screen. They show how visible and audible you are to zombies.

Vaulting

You can also press V to vault over some obstacles (like low fences). All your stances lie in a strip on the bottom left of your keyboard. Z, X, C & V

Moving

Two players crouch running

You move around with the standard W, S, A & D keys. By default you run. You can hold Shift to walk or double-tap Shift to toggle between running and walking. Running is noisier and more visible, so save it for when you're not close to zombies. I tend to leave the game on running by default and I hold shift to walk. If something happens from which I need to run (and that happens often), I prefer to have the minimum number keys to press; easier to let go of one than try to find another when I'm in a panic.

Note that other players will be able to see and hear you much more easily than will zombies.

Inventory

The inventory

Managing your inventory and understanding how it works is a big (and needlessly shonky) part of the game.

Press G (gear) to open your inventory and it'll look something like on the screen above. I've got much different kit to what you'll start with, so don't expect yours to look exactly the same. ~~You begin with some morphine, painkillers, bandages, a Makarov pistol, some ammo, a water bottle and a couple of tins of food.~~ You now begin with hardly anything, just a torch, a bandage and some painkillers. You still have the Coyote patrol backpack, but you have no weapon at all.

You're wearing a combat vest which has a number of pockets, but the pockets are specialised, which is to say that you only have a certain number of ammo pouches, general pockets, etc. You cannot alter this.

This is the pistol section of the inventory. That's a G17 pistol. Only a pistol can go in the pistol slot and you can only have one. Note the eight slots to the right of it. These slots hold your pistol ammo (you'll have several mags to begin with), but they can also hold other things too. In the example above, I've got four clips of G17 ammo and two bandages, so I can only pick up another two bandages or two pistol clips before I'll have to drop something. And when you try to pick up stuff when you don't have a free slot, the game will drop existing things on the ground. And if that happens, they'll disappear and you won't be able to pick them up again so don't get it wrong.

The twelve slots below the pistol inventory section are for general camping equipment. Yours will all be empty to begin with. As you can see, I've got a map (not very useful), some matches (for lighting campfires), a hunting knife (for gutting animals for meat) and a watch. If I find a compass, it'll appear in one of those slots. Those twelve slots are pretty generous and I've never come close to filling them all.

This is the rifle inventory. My assault rifle has a slot of its own and there are twelve slots next to it. Two of mine are blanked out because that green tube (a tent) takes up three slots so the to next to it are unavailable. Those twelve slots hold your rifle ammo, food, medical supplies, grenades (rare) and pretty much everything that the pistol inventory doesn't hold. To begin with, almost everything you find will go here. You might also notice that below my gun is a rucksack. You also have a rucksack to begin with - more on that later.

Looking down my inventory list, you can see various items and a number next to them on the right. I've got a can of pasta selected and you'll notice that there are little arrows on either end of the highlight bar. Clicking the arrow on the left will drop the item on the ground.

Now that I've clicked on the left arrow, notice that the 1 figure on the right has disappeared and there's now a 1 on the right. You'll also notice that the pasta icon from my rifle inventory has disappeared. The can of pasta is now on the ground. I can pick it up again by clicking on the right arrow (a 1 will appear on the right and I'll see the icon in my rifle inventory).

I've quit the inventory (G to close or click the Close button). There's the can of pasta on the ground. You'll just be able to see under my crosshair that there's another icon with a picture of a rifle with a couple of arrows. This will appear when you're pointing at something you can pick up. Just press G and you'll go into the inventory and be able to pick it up by clicking on the arrows just as we did when dropping something. Make sure you have space before picking something up - if you don't, the game will make room by discarding something and you won't be able to pick that back up. I cannot emphasise this enough; it's one of the biggest problems encountered by new players. You're always better moving a few steps away and dropping an item before picking something else up that might replace it.

The horrors of the inventory aren't over yet. Remember rucksacks / backpacks?

I've pressed G to open my inventory again and I've scrolled down to the bottom of the list. I've click on my ALICE pack. You'll have a different backpack to begin with, but they all work the same way. You might notice that there's an extra button down on the bottom now marked Open bag. Click on it and your backpack will open.

Okay so that's the backpack open. In the top left corner you'll see that it says ALICE pack (9/20) - that means I have nine spaces available out of twenty. You'll also see that there's a column of numbers to the left of my kit - these are the items in my backpack. I click the left and right arrows to move things in and out of my pack just as we did earlier to pick up and drop things.

I've highlighted cans of Pepsi. I've got four in my rucksack.

I clicked the right arrow and one of the cans moved to my combat vest and I can see the can in my rifle inventory. Once again, you must make sure you have space to put stuff in as the game will discard things to make room and you won't be able to pick them up again. Once you're finished mucking around with your rucksack contents, you can click the Close bag button.

I find that there are sometimes problems if you try to play with your rucksack when standing beside stuff on the ground. It's always best to move a couple of steps away before opening your bag. I think it's possible to pick things up and directly place them in your rucksack, but I don't recommend trying as the game's buggy enough that this could be a problem.

Note that some items take more than one slot, some considerably more. For instance, a pistol takes up four rucksack slots and, when you attempt to put one in there, the game will also try to put all the ammo for it in there too - anything that doesn't fit will vanish forever. A rifle or shotgun will take up a whopping ten slots of a backpack which is bigger than the rucksack you start with.

When you find another backpack, there's an option to pick it up. This will automatically drop the one you're carrying and won't transfer your stuff across. So you'll have to go through the tedium of crouching over it and picking everything up one at a time. Not a good thing to do when zombies are close or shots are going off.

I recommend dropping the backpack you're carrying before picking up another. There shouldn't be any problem with swapping them over, but sometimes a bug in the game can cause your current backpack to disappear when you swap over.

UPDATE: Since 1.5.8.2 some item activation has been moved from the mousewheel menu to the inventory. To use most items you now do so in the inventory by right clicking on them. In the above screenshot you can see that I've right-clicked on a can of sardines and have the option to Eat Food. For some players this is a welcome change as they sometimes select the wrong thing in the mousewheel menu, but other find it a pest as you have to click a bit more.

Note that you can now consume items that you don't need to. For instance, you can take painkillers when you're not in pain, bandage yourself when you're not bleeding, etc. So you now need to be a bit more careful about what you click on.

The mousewheel menu

There's an extra menu system that you need to know about and it can be accessed in two ways: either through the mousewheel or by using the square brackets. I thoroughly recommend avoiding the mousewheel. It's a bit imprecise and it's easy to choose the wrong thing.

You won't see all these options since 1.5.8

Press one of the square brackets and various options are presented. Scroll through the options with either the mousewheel or the square brackets keys and then hit Return on the one you want to perform. Firstly, you can change to another weapon (if you have one and it's not in your backpack). I also have the option to eat food (it only appears if you have food handy). There's also the option to drink water (this includes Coke and Pepsi), but as mine is in my backpack, I don't get the option. I can make a fireplace (because I found some matches) and I have the option to pitch a tent (likewise).

If you're hurt and bleeding, you'll need to apply a bandage and the option will be in this menu too, but it only appears if you're bleeding. The options for using painkillers and morphine work in the same way. If you're hurt and shaking badly, painkillers will stop that. If you've broken a limb (surprisingly easy to do by stepping off ramps and ladders) then morphine will magically solve that.

It's also this menu that you need use to use when picking up new backpacks.

UPDATE: The latest version (1.5.8.2) has changed the way that some items work. Although you still use the mousewheel or square brackets for some things, for other things like eating food, drinking, applying bandages and other stuff you now do this in the inventory menu. See the inventory section above for more details on that.

The icon strip

The icon strip gives you information about your character's status. When things are good, an icon is bright green, but it gets redder as the situation worsens, eventually flashing red when things are critical. ~~The first icon isn't used (yet) and I don't know what it's for - probably your humanity, but that's a guess (more on humanity later).~~ The humanity icon is no longer visible so you won't have that on your screen. There is still humanity in the game, but it's a lot more subtle. If someone has low humanity (because they've murdered other players), you will hear a heartbeat when you look at them (you need to be quite close). The faster the heartbeat, the lower their humanity - and thus the more people they have murdered.

1.5.8 introduced the use of the temperature icon. Being outside in the rain or wind will lead to your temperature dropping and going swimming will induce a large loss of heat. You can regain heat slowly by sheltering indoors. You'll regain a large amount if you light a fire (requires matches and now also wood). You can potentially catch a cold when your temperature drops. You'll know this has happened because your character will begin coughing regularly. Your blood will also start to fall, but it won't go below 6,000. Antibiotics will cure your infection - they can only be found in hospitals and are quite rare.

The third icon is your hydration level. When it gets low you need to drink water. It appears that your movement speed is reduced when you're thirsty and long runs will deplete it quickly. I usually wait until mine is blinking red before I drink. Coke and Pepsi are relatively plentiful, but water bottles are usually found empty. You can refill water bottles by swimming in water (not recommended as there's a high chance you'll drop all your stuff) or at water pumps (I've only ever seen one). More on water management in tomorrow's article.

The next icon down shows your blood level. Effectively your blood is your health. It doesn't regenerate but you can recover some (not much) by eating food or a bit more by hunting, gutting and cooking an animal (requires a hunting knife and matches - rare items). The only other way is to use blood packs (which can be found in hospitals), but you can't apply them to yourself so you need another player to apply them for you.

Not the best time to start fainting

If your blood level gets too low, your vision starts fading to grey. I don't know the exact level it happens as the effect is quite subtle, but in the picture above my blood level is around 5,300. If your blood gets much lower, you start falling over unconscious. This is especially bad as you can't move until you revive a bit. An hourglass appears on the screen and slowly drains. When it gets to the bottom you'll be able to stand up again, but if you're in a fight that's not likely to happen. I found that when my blood level was down around 2,000 or so that I started fainting. Another player can revive you instantly by jabbing you with an epipen, but those are relatively rare items.

If you're in a scrap with some zombies and you start bleeding, your blood level will fall to the point where you're falling unconscious and then dying, but it takes a few seconds to apply a bandage so you need a bit of breathing room in which to safely apply it.

The last icon is food and it works in just the same way as the water. When it gets low, eat some food. Tins of food will also regain 200 blood whereas meat cooked over a fire will regenerate 800 blood.

The debug monitor

The debug monitor gives you more game information. Don't expect it to always be there - chances are it'll be removed when the mod is a bit more stable. Although it tells you how many zombies you've killed, this isn't anything to boast about. My one here shows 49 zombies wasted and that's after about fourteen hours of playing. It was at 21 just a couple of hours earlier but a friend and I got into a bit of a situation where we had lots of zombies chasing us and we had to blaze away at them. You can get through the game without killing any zombies at all and killing one often leads to others coming for you. The headshots number is self-explanatory.

The next thing is a little odd: murders. This is the number of players you've killed without being fired upon first. Every time you do this, it alters your humanity. I'll skip ahead a little and explain humanity. You start with 2,500 but every time you murder someone your humanity level drops. Kill enough people and your humanity drops to zero and you become a bandit.

Dead bandit spurting blood out of his arse - he'll not be messing with us again. Unless he respawns and messes with us

Bandits are players who have killed a number of other player in situations that were not self-defence. At the moment, if you're a bandit, your character skin will change to the one in the picture above. Most players will shoot bandits on sight, so there's that too. Bandit skins are going to be removed in the next update which is going to make encounters with other players even more tense.

You can regain humanity by helping other players in certain ways. I gained 20 points (yes, just 20) for bandaging another player. I got another 50 for injecting them with morphine. So it's a long journey back to righteousness...

UPDATE: The 1.5.8 update changed some things. You will no longer see the Unsaved line in the debug monitor window. It doesn't mean much to players anyway, but it's now gone and everything gets saved when you exit a server anyway.

That's about all there is to playing. There are a few features I haven't detailed here, but they won't matter until you're much further into the game. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments and I'll try to answer.

Come back tomorrow for tips on staying alive for more than five minutes.