pillock

Except that there aren't any zombies in Novo. Dale Winton looks a fucking reanimated corpse anyway.

I've been watching the Merino videos on food/water and blood/health. They actually contradict what I have experienced. Therefore, I think that either the mechanics have changed slightly since the videos were made, or else there is some sort of glitch with the status indicators. Merino says you need to have the dark green Energised indicator in order to regenerate blood and health; I got to full health without seeing that Energised indicator. You do not, according to the video, need any hydrated status to regenerate blood or health - only to avoid being Thirsty. What happened to me was that I ate and drank enough to avoid the Hungry and Thirsty statuses, but not enough to get the Energised and Hydrated statuses - and I ended up Healthy. I accept I may have missed the Healing indicator, but only if it was very short in duration (less than a minute, maybe). I think perhaps that blood and health do regenerate slowly when you have no status indicators (neutral water and energy). As for walking, I don't believe it has any actual positive effects in itself; however, you DO consume water much more quickly when jogging, which would take your level into the Thirsty status (and therefore arrest your regeneration) before you regenerated enough to reach Healthy Status. If you walk, it appears (to me) that you can regenerate enough blood and health while in neutral energy and water status to get Healthy before your water level drops from neutral (no indicator) to Thirsty level. As I said, either something like that, or the indicators are glitched and I was indeed Energised, Hydrated and Healing beforehand but the indicators just didn't show up.

Maybe in future we will be able to use them to craft poison arrows? But, yeah, it does seem odd that the former inhabitants of Chernarus were evidently so keen to plant row upon row of poisonous fruit bushes... perhaps they were decorative?

I will search them out again, thanks. I am convinced that walking vs running has an effect, though. Perhaps running reduces your food and water levels more quickly, so that you get hungry and/or thirsty again before you regenerate enough blood to gain Healthy status; whereas, walking allows you to regen enough blood/health without losing the food and water. I got from new spawn to "Healthy" on 2 cans of Pipsi and a packet of cereal.

Yeah, that was deliberate... But walking does seem to be a fast-track to getting the Healthy status, instead to running around looking for as much food as poss as quickly as poss. If "Healthy" is an indication that you are at full blood, you evidently do not need to be energised and hydrated in order to regain blood. I never went through "Healing" status in either of the two instances I mentioned (or, at least, I didn't notice doing so). Also, it appears to me, from what you both have said, that running significantly slows the process of regaining blood/health.

Blue berries make you sick sometimes. I think it's a diceroll or something. Red berries are ok, as far as I know. You have to be pretty persistent to find them, and they don't appear to have much food value, so I guess hardly anybody ever bothers.

Playing online games on one of them would cost an absolute fortune! They're ok for web browsing and the like, but otherwise you probably use up the data allowance in a matter of hours.

I'm not sure what the absolute damage values are - I wouldn't know where to look, even. But I know from experience that fists knock over a zombie in one hit to the head, whereas other weapons, barring the axe, don't.

Only if it's a simulated football riot. That means: melee weapons only and civilian clothes, preferably tracksuits/jeans with baseball/flat caps. 20-a-side, town centre location. That'd be excellent.

Really excited about the new melee system. Hopefully the damage values have been adjusted so that it's actually an advantage to hit hit someone with a hammer or crowbar, for example, over with bare fists? Also, not sure what the hell this sentence is supposed to mean:

I think horses are ok if they are hard to fix up and maintain like so you have to find the parts like legs and arms and ears which should be really rare and it takes a long time then they should be really difficult to drive without crashing.

or worms. They're probably easier to get hold of, too.

In your bag? Er... why?

It's incredibly easy. Gritty survival horror? It's more like Supermarket Sweep at the moment.

I like the abandoned tumbledown village with the derelict buildings and the helicopter wreck in it (can't remember the name - begins with K. Kuynrrymamuhymhhh, or something). There's fuck all loot there, or anywhere particularly nearby, but it has a cool, apocalyptic atmosphere to it.

I don't think that's the right way of looking at it. In gameplay terms, we don't actually need hunting yet in order to survive (because lootable food is so abundant) but we've still got hunting mechanics. It's not a case of balancing gameplay elements, it's a case of just getting features in the game. DayZ is (apparently) on course to be "feature complete" by the end of 2014: zombies, as a feature, are technically in the game already so I wouldn't expect them to be perfected until well into next year; whereas, we should have barricading, vehicles, and everything else - in some clunky and unfinished form or other - all in the next 4 months.

Dean Hall spoke about it briefly in an interview I saw a month or so ago. Didn't give much detail, but they are working on it. I can't remember where I saw it, unfortunately. But anyway, they obviously need to get the persistence mechanics working much, much better before barricading can be implemented, otherwise it'd be pointless. I agree though, this is the most important upcoming feature as far as I'm concerned.

While I recognise that DayZ is not intended to be a driving sim, I do think the physics and handling need to be somewhat believable. I think skidding/sliding is essential so that it is possible to lose control of the vehicle if, for example, you go from road to grass at high speed. Crashing into solid objects should cause significant damage to both vehicle and occupants, too. Perhaps seatbelts could be one of the vehicle parts that you can find or fix on the car, and have an effect on your injury level in an accident. In reality they have a huge effect and shouldn't be something that's ignored, in my opinion. Off-road driving ought to be difficult and slow for unsuitable vehicles like ordinary road cars - in reality fields are very bumpy, making driving at speed pretty damaging to a car even if you don't crash, which you are fairly likely to do because the tyres have very little grip. Weather could also play a part in this, once those features are fleshed out, especially when it comes to going uphill off-road. Driving is not something that everyone can just do, especially with manual gearboxes (as cars most commonly have in Europe, to my knowledge), and there should be a fair degree of difficulty in learning to do it well.

Have you found a jet pack yet? I got mine from the secret cave network underneath Green Mountain. Also like the new tree-climbing ability - it's useful when you need to escape from a pack of wolves.

I appreciate that the final balancing of loot will come much, much later down the development line, but I do think they could make some crude changes right away. Mostly: we don't need this much food, and we don't need this many guns or ammo spawns. Even as testers, we don't need every survivor running round on full health with 3 guns and a backpack full of ammo. If they cut the numbers of food, firearm and ammo spawns by half, there'd still be more than enough to go around for everyone to survive and probably for everyone to have a weapon - it's just that you might not (hopefully) have ammo coming out of your ears. They could use the extra space for spawns to give us more everyday stuff like rope and knives and basic tools (stuff that really would be everywhere in DayZ's scenario), and it'd just make everything much more interesting, while still allowing us to 'test'.

Hacksaws: apart from garages, check the little wooden sheds in gardens, check the greenhouses, check car wrecks (scrapyards are fucking goldmines atm), barns, agricultural warehouses, industrial buildings, workshops, etc. I tend to stick to the smaller towns and out-of-the-way villages, and I check every room in every building. I find a lot of worthless shit, but I never go very long before seeing ropes, matches and hacksaws; I also find more guns and ammo than I could ever possibly use or even carry. I just don't find assault rifles or military clothing. But I don't want or need them, anyway. The only nuisance item to find is magazines, but SKSs are everywhere so I don't tend to give a shit. EDIT: Oh, and binoculars. I have no fucking idea where they spawn, haven't seen one for about the last 3 patches, and am starting to doubt whether they even exist anymore.

Bleh. I was being pedantic about the difference between pitchforks and garden forks. But it's not worth pursuing. Sorry to have bothered you.

Digging the ground with a pitch-fork is a ball-ache. You'd be better off using a machete or an axe, to be honest.

Well, I think you'r either trolling me, or you're completely bonkers. No offence or anything.

Your conscience, man! Either that, or your psychotic split-personality "other".