pillock

When vehicles are in, there shall be banger racing. Hopefully the driving mechanics are up to the job.

This video's explanation matches exactly my experience of the effects of eating the wrong stuff. It also shows the health mechanics to be much more in-depth than I'd thought they were. I do think the health mechanics and the relevant notifications of your status need to be refined, but it looks like the foundations are in place for some really interesting gameplay features coming in down the line. It's well worth a watch, even if it is quite long and the narrator's "jokes" are pretty rubbish.

There's two types, right? There's "spawned" crash sites that supply loot, and "environment" ones that are just scenery? Cos I've seen a crashed helicopter in stable recently (Saturday), but there was no loot there.

This is so true. Once it becomes difficult to stay healthy, injury free and properly nourished, and when sickness and injury have longer-lasting effects, it's going to make the game way more interesting in every aspect.

Plus, you could adapt the guitar case into a disguised RPG launcher.

As I see it, there isn't an 'end game'. There is just 'game'.

My idea of the purpose of persistent storage is so that you can keep a bigger variety of equipment to perform different tasks than you can fit into one backpack - not so that you can hoard spare guns to gear up with quickly as some sort of way to 'cheat' death. If you want to go hunting or fishing, or you want to build a fire, or useful items, you can't carry everything you need in one go alongside all you weapons, ammo and medical supplies. So storage allows you to leave what you don't need for whatever specific task, and return later in the knowledge that it hasn't been wiped out by a server reset. Hopefully, inventory size and weight will, in future, affect your character's ability to move quickly and quietly over longer distances: so if you're going to a gunfight, you travel light in order to be fast and stealthy, and not tire too quickly; you don't lug around fireplace kits and tools, which you leave back at 'camp'. As I understand it, the devs' goal regarding persistent items is to eventually make everything persistent, not just things you put in certain 'storage' containers such as tents or vehicles. You could leave fishing equipment in a backpack near a lake so that you can always go there if you need/want to; you could hide a gun somewhere near your location so you can run there if threatened; you could collect books; etc. Regarding persistent storage as as means to defy death: in my view, you should be locked out of the server you died on for 24 hours, to prevent people re-gearing off their old corpse or stored items. It would also force you to start afresh in a new server where you don't know the whereabouts of other players and loot, and you can't rejoin a gunfight that you were fairly and squarely eliminated from. This'd mean you properly have to start again from scratch after a death - as it should be. The only exception to this would be server admins on their own server - you have one steam account nominated as admin for each server, and they and only they get to respawn on that server after death, as a perk for providing others with a place to play for free.

I ate worms recently and got sick. I'm not certain, but I assume the mechanics for 'worm poisoning' and 'rotten fruit poisoning' are the same. My sickness status indicator progressed to dark orange in colour and I was getting messages saying 'I feel faint' and 'I feel unsteady'. I kept eating and drinking whenever I could, though, and managed to maintain the 'Energised' and 'hydrated' status. After a while, the sickness indicator disappeared, and I stopped getting the messages about nausea/unsteadiness/faintness. I did take me over an hour after this of maintaining the energised and hydrated status to regain the 'Healthy' status, but I now seem to be fully recovered.

As long as you hadn't stumbled across two other servers in the previous hour, you'd be fine!

Sounds fuckin awesome. I want.

I think they should introduce landmines into the game. And if you manually change servers more than twice in a 1 hour period, you "randomly" spawn on top of a land mine. And the explosion breaks your arms and your legs and it ruins all your gear and leaves you crawling about with nothing to heal yourself with. And they should introduce this feature without telling anyone. This forum would be fucking brilliant if they did that!

I would like to be able to bring down birds with me shotgun. Jolly good sport.

No. The game shouldn't force you to do nothing in order to recover from something like exhaustion, injury or sickness. But it should force you to play differently. I believe a more detailed set of animations are on the way that show to a better extent what a character's status is (limping and such) - I'd really like to see them go to town with this. So, you might see someone who's shattered from running, malnourished and bleeding, stumbling about desperately in the rain, trying to find food, shelter, medicine or help. This would give other players a visual indication of the potential threat of someone they come across, and lead to far more likely and interesting player-to-player interactions. New spawn bambis should be weaker than hardened, long-lasted survivors, and their body language (ie. animated movement) should show it, ideally. Surviving should be difficult and punishing - not because "it's realistic", but because it adds depth to the gameplay and makes DayZ better than the competition.

I think the game needs to feel realistic, intuitively, even if some elements of it are toned down for the sake of "fun". Being able to jog and sprint for unlimited distances without any penalty just feels wrong to me. So does being shot several times and still being able to run around as if nothing happened. There's no good reason why the game should allow players to traverse the entire map in a single, short play-session, just because "it would be annoying to meet up with friends otherwise". Forcing us to spend more time in a single portion of the map, and making long journeys into a real mission/adventure is something that adds to the fun, not detracts from it. Similarly, stamina affecting your ability to carry heavy equipment would add to the enjoyment. It would give you more decisions to make, give much more variety to the lives of your character and between the lives of different players. Complicated (not necessarily ultra-realistic) medical, health, injury mechanics add to this variety to scope for different play methods. Having weather and terrain affect your character more adds to the experience, adds to the fun. The assumption, when deciding whether or not some new feature would be too realistic in order to maintain fun gameplay, should be that, actually, it would not be. Start with the game being as realistic (and therefore potentially very difficult) as possible, and then tone it down if it's proving to be annoying, rather than starting with the assumption that realism will be bad, and then under-cook the authenticity.

I tried taking the test on the linked website, but then it started asking me questions about my orc-killing preferences. So I sacked it. From your descriptions, I chose 'Spades'. Good poll!

Be honest: would you really ever pick Chef?

You know you can tear blank pages out of books, don't you? That's an easy source of note paper for your party invitations.

Novo is the place to be. Lots of buildings, lots of place to explore, lots of loot, lots of people. The constant crackle of gunfire, snipers, axe maniacs, random nutters. It's fucking cool, and fucking dangerous. Love it.

Tried what? Collecting rain in a canteen? I'll have you know this has been my main source of drinking water since I started playing again recently. Admittedly you get your clothes soaked through doing it, but that doesn't matter yet. I agree wilderness is getting sparser by the patch, but what will be will be - I assume there are already plans for the northern valley and urbanisation of the area is inevitable. Water will not be a problem in that area as time goes on, and it really isn't now anyway - wasn't that your point? [Edit: there will be lakes up there as well, eventually]

You aren't honestly complaining about airfields being too open and flat, are you?

Given how often it rains, you're never going to be short of water, wherever you are. It takes less than a minute to fill a canteen to 100% from 0% when it's raining. And anyway, it doesn't take long to jog to a water pump from any point in your designated area. On top of that, the NW area will probably not remain wilderness for long, given the road layouts up there strongly suggesting planned urban sprawl.

I'd recommend collecting the pieces of the in-game map and combining them. When you have the full set, it's better in my opinion than using the DayZ DB one, because you don't have to Alt+Tab out of the game. This is especially important at the moment, as DayZ seems to be more susceptible to crashing in the current build - but even ignoring that, it allows you to carry on moving while looking at the map, and also listening to the environment around you, so you can tell if some nasty is approaching. I have actually ditched my compass since I got used to using the map, because I find the map is all I need to navigate, even at night.

The sickness mechanics could do with a lot of refinement. There needs to be different types of illness with different causes, symptoms, effects and cures. I'm hoping that once the game gets nearer to its finished state, players being almost permanently in "Healthy" status will be a distant memory. Survivors will be lumbering about the map carrying a variety of illnesses and injuries with them that slow them down and restrict/dictate their choices. Illness and injury should be part and parcel of the experience, and the rare, short-lived periods when you are fit and healthy will be a boom time that you treasure, make the most of and do your damnedest to maintain as long as possible. Non-lethal illness and injury will make the game much more dynamic and interesting, giving variety to your gameplay experience over the course of your character's life, and also between different players.

Basically: how? I recently started playing DayZ again after a couple of months off, to try out some of the new survival features. I managed to dig up worms by equipping the shovel, looking at the ground and middle-mousing (tip: don't eat the worms!) but this technique doesn't appear to work with the pickaxe when I tried to break some stones off a big rock. Am I being thick? How do you get stones using the pickaxe?

Right! I've done it, finally. What I've concluded is this: It doesn't matter if you're in first-person view or not and you don't need your axe raised; you just need to be in the right place relative to your boulder, and this appears to be somewhat random. I tried several different rocks, and only found one that would cooperate out of about 5 - and even with that one, I could only get the middle-mouse action to appear on one particular side of the rock. Probably the system doesn't work properly yet; but it could be that they've deliberately designed it to be awkward for some unfathomable reason. Anyway, persistence pays off.