Kirov (DayZ)

I couldn't find matches but sure found 2 tents not even trying (I remember I spent like 20 hrs hunting just for a tent back in 0.49). My question is: with the persistence on across the board, do we still have the Wednesday tent wipe? If so, I'm not even going to bother holding a camp.

I've started playing again since 0.53 and I'm loving the new system. I used to craft all the necessities myself so I'm not that worried about poor loot, the only thing I'm in bad need of is matches. Where do you find them these days, people? I'm seriously starting to consider eating raw meat with charcoal tablets. To craft a bow and arrows, you only need to find a rope to start with, so I see no problem with that. Grabbing a few apples first and then hunting should keep starvation away, but a matchbox (and a cooking pot, come to think of it) is really a must. I hope they get around to starting a fire with twigs soon, it seems long overdue in a world where you can craft your own suppressors. All in all, 0.55 hurts and that means it's great. Good work, devs!

I tried 0.55 after several months off the game. I love the new zeds! I love how they're tough, fast and silent, and how you need to stealth around them. I haven't managed to fight them without a scratch as it used to be (they're super glitchy now, maybe because of the speed), in fact I died twice today to zombies, which didn't happen to me since my very first dayz. The second time was when I tried to help a freshie and I was already low on blood... Lying unconcious and then dead I could only hear him crying 'help, help!'. :) Now, I think we're finally arriving at what the game should be all about. But the glitches are killing me, it's never been that bad trying to hit a zed. Also, what happened to the loot? I tried several servers and they were super poor, like 'one item per several buildings' poor. Couldn't find matches for 4 hours.

*sigh* I logged back and decided to take a nice picture of Berezhki, from those rocks yonder, I'll climb them no problem. Turned out there was a hole in the rocks and I got stuck within a small confinement 2-meter deep... Who designed that?! I had to commit a suicide with a Magnum. The gods of dayz are very whimsical, indeed.

I didn't follow for a couple of days - so now there's a gang of you, going as far as the NWAF? Expanding your operations, I see... ;) As for me, tonight I played on a night server, just what I like every now and then - a little bit spooky, not many people and tough to find your way around even with the map. Usually I play night for the mood and prefer not to run into other players, especially as they may be changing their gamma and I don't do that. However, this time I ran into a guy in a warehouse building at the NEAF. I imagine we both jumped a little. I ran out and tried to establish contact, but he was just standing there outside and not responding. Children, a free advice, for which once I had to pay with my life - if somebody is completely silent and holds still, he's either taking aim or contacting his squad. Don't you ever assume "it could be anything, like fumbling with the mic" (oh the younger me). You have just a couple of seconds to either engage or flee. Since the night was very dark, I decided to beat it and leave the guy to his own devices. Also a word about the new DYI attire - sadly, the jacket is not waterproof, as I expected. And don't try to put wet clothes in the fireplace, they get damaged before they even dry. Basically, leather garments come with a price. Then I decided to run to Berezhki and explore all the new locations they added in the North. Found and shot a flaregun, it looks so cool at night!

While we're at it, does anyone else have the impression that now fireplaces warm you up at a ridiculous distance? I snatched a pot and run away 5-7 meters from the fire and I was still 'rapidly' warming up.

My first two HC characters on 0.53 died. First, I had problems with handling the cooking pot and finally decided to eat a raw steak (it doesn't say 'raw' now), which turned out to be a bad idea. I wasn't energized and hydrated so I was probably going to die. I planted some pumpkins, found a goat and killed it. Skinning failed numerous times ('cancel current action'), while my screen was getting more and more B&W and panic started to set in. Then I got shot, almost killed... I didn't even see the shooter and I'm surprised he missed at an immobile target. Nevertheless, got me bleeding dry. I managed to run away, but being 'sick' and not energized, I was doomed to die. I put my repeater in my mouth and said goodbye to this cruel world. My second HC character spawned near a big island, I thought it's the new prison so I swam there immediately, fresh as a bambi... Turned out it was the Skalisty Island, and thoroughly looted to that. I decided not to give up on my character and even started to pick berries, but all of them were blue. At that point I was hungry, thirsty and super cold. Running made me warm up but also waste precious energy, Sitting and picking berries promised some food but I was cooling off. For Christ's sake, Dayz. After some time I decided to swim back to the coast. More bushes, more blue berries, not even an apple tree. When I started to die of starvation, I decided to eat some blue berries and immediately contracted food poisoning. *sigh* Nothing could have saved me at that moment, so I decided to drown myself to see the messages and animation. About a minute of waiting, 3 big gulps and you're dead... The next character did his best to stay alive from the very start. I started farming operations in Nizhnoye and picked some apples while waiting for it. Then I moved to Berezino, which was empty (it was late night at my place). I decided to go full leather like krazypenguin above. 7 cows, 2 limes and 2 sewing kits later, I'm dressed in a pinkish leather... I hope they'll add the painting option soon. The 10-slot vest is a nice surprise, the 2-slot pants not so. Then I decided to drop my gun and go full natural with the bow. Now I'm super well-fed, equipped and ready to explore all the new locations they added. Cool!

Yep, the furnace is a good idea, it's just right now I'm toying with the regular fireplace. Funny thing, the furnace seems to be as visible at a distance as the fireplace - simply put, the stones are invisible and they only appear when you come up closer. So much for ninja cooking.... Bruderlos, I tend to check cooking times and I'm quite sure it was less than 2 minutes in 0.52 with 5 kindlings, although there were servers where you had to wait 10+ min. - I'm not sure if it was the weather or other settings. Bottom line is, right now the cooking time is ridiculously low, less than a minute.

I think I might take back words on the difficulty. While it's sure pain in the ass to start your first fire and carry the tripod all the time, this is set off by the fact that: 1) Improvised stone knives take only 1 slot and yield ca 100% meat at first skinning. 2) Cows give now 8 steaks. 3) The pot holds now 8 steaks. On HC servers I play with 'no premade food' policy and with that in mind, 0.53 is the best. It's true that when I spawn, it takes some time to find ingredients, but if I focus on it, after some time I use 8 slots' worth of inventory (3 for the tripod, 1 for the matches, 2 x portable gas stove with the pot attached) to carry 16 steaks, enough to run around the entire Chernarus probably several times. I still believe it needs adjusting, but I actually kinda like the changes, or at least the direction where they are going. Of course, the fish must come back! :)

I can further confirm that: 1) Cooking pots sure work, however frying pans not so. On the one hand, nobody promised us pans working. On the other, they do fit into fireplaces and furnaces. They just don't do anything. 2) "Raw fish fillets" never cook, at least those fished before the wipe (on a private server). It'd be nice to fish and check after .53, I'll probably do it soon. 3) The cooking time is at all time low, probably less than a minute. 4) It's possible to open the cooking pot in your inventory and then you can't put anything there. However, you get the 'replacement' option (blue icon). However still, any steak put into the pot this way simply disappears (while you get back the one switched for). 5) Don't eat uncooked steaks, they're still raw. EDIT: last point.

Good to know it works, I'll try to confirm it, for frying pans also. Guys, just a reminder - attach your cooking pot to a portable gas stove and then these two take only 2 slots. Even with a large gas canister. So the pot is actually great for carrying loads of food, especially now that it just got bigger (from 5 to 8 slots). The frying pan carries 3, so it's still a saving when combined with the stove. Nevertheless, I agree that cooking is just way too hard now and will dismay people from hunting. It should be easier and they should finally fix that bug where the gas stove always burns your meat. Alternatively ,like de_snake says: one harder and one easier option.

On the bug report, the real clown says: you cant put anything in the pot while it is in your hands/inventory/attached to the fire -- you have to place the pot on the ground then tab over it to add stuff. I dont know about the frying pan at all, ive only messed with cooking in the pots. Can you try it once more? I don't have a pot at the moment. It can't be fish, Gabe says it's bugged.

Strange... after I logged back to the game, it was out of a sudden possible to put food in the pot. However, it was after I'd eaten a "cow steak" (it is definitely raw, don't eat it), so I contracted food poisoning, then got shot at and died without testing this thing further. I decided to go back to my private character and I found 2 frying pans. It was definitely possible to add "raw fish fillets" to a pan and add it to a furnace/fireplace, However, nothing happened after more than 30 min. of waiting. Gabe says fish is bugged, though... We need to find pots and give it more testing, I'll be on it soon.

I tried everything in every combination - a fireplace with and without additional 5 sticks, tripod, cooking pot/frying pan, and a furnace likewise with any possible combination (without the tripod). Whatever I do, the stuff just gets ruined. This applied also to guts. I thought I was doing something wrong, now I see everyone gets the same results. As you say, nothing goes into the pot or the pan and the fireplace just ruins stuff (and warms you up super rapidly). You can find cooking pots in those big city two-floor residential buildings with staircases; upstairs there is a kitchen which very often yields cooking-related stuff (pots, pans, stoves, knives, etc.). However, it seems like you don't need to bother right now. I really miss it, where do I sign to upvote this issue?

There were many instances when my character had a much better overall diet than me in RL at that moment. ;)

I had no idea about soft skills. Are these on the roadmap? I thought it's a very specific devs' idea that there are no skills, we all know the same theory and differences in practice boil down to players' know-how. I think I like it that way. I guess I will adapt to soft skills if I have to, but if killing people gives you better precision or weapon handling... I hope somebody will give this a second thought.

I hear ya, sometimes I mix kinds of food myself and pretend it's a dish. Small thing, but funny when me and my friend discuss how boar is more tasty than cow and with which veggies. :) Currently you can also put potatoes in fire and they warm up like guts, nothing really happens, but I guess roasted potatoes will be implemented in the future.

I'm not sure if I follow you on those "soft skills". What do you mean by them? All I can say is that I picture such in-game help as very basic "rope. useful for making bows and fishing rods" so that people still have a lot of exploring by themselves. I wouldn't easily give away stuff like where to hunt, for example. I remember it took me several hours to find my first ashwood tree (as I was looking in the forest, chopping down many a greenish tree) and this is a very natural part of the learning process to me. Alternatively, the ingame Survivor's Guide could come in volumes with varying degree of rarity and spawn location. Volume One: Bow Crafting for Dummies can be found in any supermarket. In Volume Two you may find descriptions of various animals (use of pelts, kcal per steak, etc.). Give a good search to feedshacks for Volume Six and you just might learn where my favourite hunting grounds are... When preparing such help, you need to have in mind a lot of survival-related aspects which a beginner doesn't have a change to get a clue at. Try to figure out for yourself how to craft a stone knife, for instance. Searching for kindlings is also something you may or may not notice, along with searching for stones. And without external help I would never put any berries in my mouth to check which ones are good - I cared too much for my character to experiment on him. On the topic of cooking (sorry for hijacking the thread, but we are still close enough) - cooking books come as a very obvious choice, along with some rare grandma recipes (Steak and Potatoes' Steak and Potatoes) which spawn only in simplest residential buildings. :)

That's a very good point, the non-PvP aspects of the game got too easy for me now and I tend to forget that newcomers can easily die of hypothermia, or even starvation on looted servers. However, instead of adding resources (which can be easily consumed by vets) with beginners in mind, what would you say about in-game survivor manuals, like "how to read the Cyrillic"? Think The Survivor's Guide to Chernarus: "combine a rope with an ashwood stick to make a bow or fishing rod". Alternatively, you can add such hints to item descriptions (shovel: "a basic melee weapon, useful for making gardening plots and digging up worms"). This way the beginners can try to figure it out with trials and errors and don't have to google stuff, which they need to do right now anyway (I don't know about you, I had to look up most of survival-related to-do's).

I'm afraid it's still too early to 'weep' for them. As it is right now, new survival options have nothing to do with making the game harder or more survival-oriented; in fact, they only make our life easier. One example is the multi-tool stone knife which is quite possibly the best use of a single slot there is in-game. Don't get me wrong, I love stuff like that, but make it come at some cost. As it is, find a stone path and most of your survival-related problems are gone. Another example is raining, or more specifically, the gorka jacket. I was really happy that rain and temperature would discourage people from at least camping and sniping. What happened instead? The best jacket in the game, 6 slots and coming in camo, not only is completely waterproof but also available in abundance in tent areas. Yet again, just run to a military base and you're impervious to one aspect of the game - who needs a raincoat? At least they should make you choose - better protection vs. fewer slots/brighter colours, something like that. As it is, you're punished for not getting military loot by a "realism" feature. I see from YT movies about .53 that the cooking pot has now 8 slots. Combined with the gas stove, the entire contraption takes only 2 slots in your backpack. This means you can kill one cow and eat it, kill another cow and store it in your cooking pot; add a gorka jacket and you can lie on a sniper hill for roughly two days. You know, like people tend to do when the civilization collapses. We won't feel any pressure until most premade food is gone and guns/ammo is so rare that every bullet counts. My opinion is that every weapon should spawn with ammo, but it should be a challenge to get more than 10 rounds for it. As for food and drink, cutting its spawn by four or more is completely fine by me. I realize that's not gonna be a popular opinion, but I hope I can express mine. If I could say one thing to the devs, it would be Tyler Durden's "I want you to hit me as hard as you can". If I wanted a game where you replenish your health by swallowing medikits, I'd go somewhere else.

I'd only like to point out one thing: on one of the loading screens of DayZ, it says "zombie survival game". Currently it is not the case. However, we can and should expect it to be. When that time comes, why exactly do we need to allow for a gameplay that is not really that big on this "zombie survival" thing? When I play strategic games, I don't need an option to play them in a non-strategic way; for that matter, I believe it would only hurt them.

Beans as well, although I'd say the results are actually not that discouraging. Some freshies were bound to attack you no matter what, because that is what some of them just do, even with the odds 1:1,000,000. And high-pop servers tend to attract hackers, at least in populated areas, so there you go. When I helped freshies it was in smaller villages in towns like Msta and Dolina, there are more honest looters in lieu of berserk bambis there.

I thought it's just a matter of persistence? So they don't always spawn in the same place on pers off servers?

A nice topic. On HC servers I tend to play with no premade food, only what I pick/grow/hunt/fish. This usually means that I start with apple picking until I'm close to full, which buys me enough time to find hunting/fishing tools. However, I must say that I find dayz very immersive and this whole food aspect is somewhat puzzling to me. When you're starving, eating 3kg worth of apples is not going to get you energized, but rather put you on the shitter for the better part of the day. We can eat too much in one sitting and can live too long on only one food (after the initial period, I tend to live solely to steaks). Now, I fully understand that this is for gameplay reasons and most people would strongly oppose any restrictions on that. But, once when I was busy picking apples, an idea occurred to me that certain foods or combinations of food should give an energy bonus or take less stomach volume. Steak + warm potatoes + tomato = bonus, chase canned food with some fruit = bonus, eat something warm after a long break = bonus, etc. On the other hand, eating the same kind of food all the time could take progressively more stomach volume, simulating the "one more apple and I will puke" experience. I know this is not a game about diet, but this whole "eat 4 cans of beans at once" is right now one of the most un-immersive elements in the game, next maybe to the shot of morphine healing fractures (which is why I believe it should be renamed the "Potion of Limb Restoration"). These ideas are only half serious, I understand there will be much bigger issues in dayz for a long time than planning realistic diets. I sure am waiting for more recipes, though. Along with tea and coffee, our avatars would be very grateful for that. ;)

For that matter, you can carry any stuff you want in the fireplace kit, ammo included. I imagine this is slight abuse (cooking pots and pans do carry only food).