emuthreat

Spawn on coast, scavenge small stones, make knife, cut stick, kill chicken, craft bone hook, loot for rope, fish. Anyone who can follow these simple steps should never have to complain about the availability of food. That is, until two people try to fish on the same server at the same time--resulting in a failure of either party to check their bait without withdrawing it from the water. Seriously, NOBODY fishes. If they did, I would know about it.

*swish, swish, swish* Awww heck, did I forget to bish?

One would almost think that the developers are trying to nudge the playerbase into learning how to hunt and fish and farm, to feed themselves irrespective of the availability of canned food. Lets face it, some people will just die after all the processed food expires, because if it doesn't come out of a can or a box or a bag, then it is not considered edible. Can"t wait until that moment when I'm running through the woods and I see a verdant sprig popping up through the leaves, and think to myself: "bitchin', free carrots boyeeee, now if only I could find some onions to round out this stew."

DayZspy.com is also an option to see what server you are on, but it shows you the entire server roster by in-game name, as well as the current time on server and a line graph of the past and current population. So if all that extra information doesn't ruin your (or anyone else's) experience, you can tab-out and open DayZspy or (use steam overlay), search for your own name, and it should tell you which server you are currently on.

The only animals currently in game are chickens, cows, deer, and wolves. Don't waste your time looking for pigs, they were removed for now because of an unfortunate potential for abuse.

Some quick tips to keep you from getting discouraged: The rain is a big hassle right now, so hang on to the flare that you spawn with, and if you are having trouble lighting a fire without a flare it helps to craft a torch from a rag and a stick, which you can use to light your fireplace; stones can no longer be gotten just anywhere, so consider stocking up while on the beach, or carrying a pickaxe or ice axe to mine the lone boulders for stones as you go; zombies are lootable now, and will often be your best source of food as you try to get off the coast; get a knife or an axe as soon as possible, and cut everything you see into rags; leather clothing will give you the best protection from wolves, and the shotgun and magnum are among the best common guns to kill the wolves. good luck

I keep hearing this from people, and I can only assume that you aren't looking in the right places. It is extremely rare for me to fail to find a player on a full server. Is there a chance that the servers you play on have some sort of meta that you aren't aware of, like PvP in Berezino, or some other such focus? The vast majority of player interactions I have been having are along the northern highway from Svetlojarsk to the western evacuation roadblock. Tisy and Kamensk bases are also good hotspots, and green mountain has a fair bit of activity in the area too, the central corridor from Vybor to Gorka is also pretty populated on this patch. Maybe give The Village a try. I have been having consistently good and frequent interactions while playing on this server.

Can you please tell your friends to stop calling me and hanging up? I don't need my student loans restructured, and my credit card debt is less than $500. This is getting out of hand. They call me five times a day, and if I stay on the line long enough to ask what it is they are even calling about, I hear the chatter of a Mumbai call center in the background for a few seconds before someone inevitably disconnects the call. Thaaaannnnnkkkkssss...

One thing that I think might help the issue with the ethereal nature of player characters on the public hive would be to split up the official servers into miniature hives in their own right; where a single public character is distinct to only a handful of servers, based on region perhaps. Anything that keeps the same players tending to the same servers seems like a good thing in terms of ensuring the existence of public servers with steady regulars. As long as most people remain warily/greedily/nihilistically trigger-happy, most new players will naturally tend to low pop servers to learn the basics. Unless it is known that the current population is distinctly different from what the Beta and 1.0 audience might look like, any changes to the server and character system that positively affect player behavior and increase average population per server should be a step in the right direction.

If you are looking for interactions, whatever the kind, it is mostly determined by the types of servers you choose. After I hit my "basic proficiency level" at surviving more often than dying from player encounters, I took a strategy of getting set up on boring public servers, with dwindling populations, just to go out and meet newer players who were still weary of being wary. There is some strange reward in contacting a player who is just so grateful that i didn't KOS them, and helping guide them to the place they want to explore, or help them to find or craft that thing they have been wanting to see. More recently, The Vilage has been one of the more rewarding servers I've ever played. You can find pretty much every playstyle extant in some form or another on that server, and the player movements are as diverse and widespread as their intentions. I don't think it is productive to wait for the game to change player behavior, though I am certain that contamination zones and limited spawns for increasingly varied transportation and basebuilding loot will do plenty to mix things up. A large part of the stagnation of gameplay and lack of emergent player behaviors has been directly due to the regression of the average player towards being an asshole--completely devoid of empathy, rational forethought, or goals that go any further than looting your dead corpse or despawning every camp they find. Players choose the destructive option at an alarmingly high rate, almost as a rule in DayZ. Many rationalize it as meta strategy for the good of the server; despawning gear to put it back into circulation, or killing geared players to give them something to do again; and others use the survival strategy of denial, removing batteries from vehicles they cannot take to prevent others from using them as easily, or despawning camps to deprive their potential enemies of the weapons and food. Spending time on the village was a pretty good indicator, that no matter how many people you got to try to contribute to building something special and different, there were twice as many people who would abuse it to get easy kills, or log on overnight and disassemble everything that had been built. So far, no encampment has lasted more than a couple weeks, and not for lack of trying. It is simply impossible to maintain 'round the clock protection effectively and indefinitely, from the hundreds of random players who make it their life's mission to destroy anything that anyone else has made on a DayZ server. So with these things in mind, i find it far easier to blame the lack of interesting thing to do in DayZ on the players, rather than the game; people are trying to make gameplay interesting and emergent, but there are even more people out there trying to stop us.

I'm not sure if you have found out yet @Max Head, but the zombies are now dropping items in their inventories. If you kill and loot every one you find, you have a high chance of getting a cutting tool and some food before you leave your first town. There is only one permanent solution to rainy server, and that is rain gear; raincoats, firefighter gear, and gorka are all waterproof. Getting to a firehouse is my main go-to in the rain, but you can always blanket search a couple small towns to maybe eventually find a raincoat soon. Things that I find useful when running in the rain might include staying under tree cover to block 60-80% of the rain as you travel. It is also helpful to avoid wearing a wet shirt or jacket if you are already wet and getting cold, because wet clothes will sap away more heat faster than rain on skin; not sure if wind is a factor yet. You would be surprised how far you can travel and less often you have to light fires if you get dry and just keep moving. Sprinting when you are wet and cold buys you time, and looting costs you time before you have to light your next fire. NEVER wait until you are hypothermic; shaking means you've waited too long already. If you have an extra rag and want to start a fire on the first try, you can use one stick and a rag to craft a torch, which will light on the first try with a hand drill and then light fireplace on first try. It's an extra step, but it is surefire. Good luck out there, and don't forget to loot your zombies.

That is exactly the reason for the extra set of gears behind the hubs; to gain extra ground clearance with the axles. As anyone familiar with kinematics will understand, 4 extra gearboxes will create a fair amount of friction at each wheel, and this is the reason the top speed is 60, rather than around 80km/h. This truck was designed to reliably move cargo over rough terrain, and the design suits the need quite well. The reduction gearbox could just as easily been 1:1 ratio, but the design opted for power over speed.

Hopefully they will address this when they implement the V3s with the intended technology, instead of current placeholder... Look carefully at the rear axles where they meet the hub, and you will see that the axle is offset above the center of each wheel, and a gearbox is affixed behind each hub. This is why the top speed is limited to <60 km/h.

It still seems alien to me how much hate the DayZ dev team has gotten over the years for putting their figurative noses to the grindstone and committing to the unbelievably difficult task of making a post-apoc zombie survival simulator of this scope. I find it admirable that BI had the foresight to stand behind this project and see it through to the end, when so many other games will end up mediocre because of release deadlines and quarterly earnings goals. Watching this project come along since I bought-in way back in .51 has been a uniquley interesting experience. I can't help but look back and laugh at myself for buying DayZ because I thought the game was half-done, and wanted to learn the ropes before it hit the mainstream. Keep up the great work, I can't wait to be able drive over twigs in the road again.

Perhaps that is your play style, but plenty of people prefer to survive using their wits; this means avoiding any avoidable challenges, and only taking risks when you control the situation. For instance, I prefer to run through the woods rather than use the roads, because wolves won't kill me instantly from hundreds of meters away as soon as they see me. When I am fresh spawn and don't have a good enough gun and enough bullets to kill wolves quickly, I will avoid wolf territory and take my chances on the roads. I also tend to run through the woods when it rains, because the trees keep me from getting wet as fast, and provide both fuel and cover for when I have to stop and dry off in my leather clothing. Nobody is supposed to do anything except for survive, and a number of people will tell you that finding frequent PVP interactions is more important than survival to them. Maybe the goal is to have fun, because it it a game. But why then do I sometimes get stressed and have to play for hours longer than I wanted to, just because someone found my base and I need to move it NOW, or risk losing everything I have worked for? Why do I scream obscenities at the top of my lungs when lag decides to move my V3s off the road and into a tree? Why do I spend hours looking for the legendary FAL to gain an edge in battles, only to avoid battles once I have found it because I don't know how many people there are and don't want to die and lose it? For some people the object ot the game is to survive, and for others it is to kill; while some people care to do neither, and approach everyone they meet to see if they are friendly. Fun is subjective, and DayZ need not even be "fun" to be enjoyable, if that makes any sense to you.

Even in the last patch running on legacy DayZ, it is good to see so many dedicated players come together to test the one thing not dependent on development speed--the camaraderie and organizational skills of the players themselves. A big thanks to Bohemia, Barely Infected, and Spaggie for making this experiment possible. Hopefully we can continue to apply the concept of the village throughout the home stretch of development and see what this game can become.

I think they put all the AI on the new player controller as well, that's why zombies hit you from 1.5 meters away and push you through walls. But yeah, this patch appears to have basically crammed in anything that didn't rely on the new tech, just to get it in the game and tested on a large scale.

FTFY This patch is the one most cobbled together between the old systems and new tech. It's a wonder that it is working at all. But yes, you can relish the knowledge that this will likely have been the worst patch in DayZ history.

Yeah. I'm already on the radio as of yesterday. Talked a bit off and on to a guy whose name I couldn't quite catch; said he was by Novy headed to the village. I ran a barrel down last night after stuffing a barrel with cow and wolf meat. The wolves have been attacking me every half hour up north because of the frequent resets, so I had to keep running back to dump the meat.

One thing to remember about the zombies in this patch, is that their first attack of a windmill style is both the longest ranged, and strongest attack. ALWAYS dodge their dash attacks, then whomp them during their overswing for the kill. There is nothing I hate more than a fresh set of leather clothing getting downgraded by one bad hit from a zombie. Come to think of it, I haven't died to zombies once since I started wearing leather clothing. A couple times by wolves, maybe, but I'd sooner blame the ten beers...

I think running around the castle demanding to speak to the person in charge kinda does count as having lost my cool. It was fun though. Apparently yelling demands at a confused anarchic village that just randomly shot my companion is not the best way to handle the situation. But hey, at least I managed to save Chappie (and steal most of his ammo), amid the chaos of people running across my UI prompt constantly...

yeah. I had a bit of trouble tracking down the rules of the server at first, that was before the village got its own webpage. I even made the mistake of using direct text chat once in the tower when I was pissed about Baroness getting shot for wearing the wrong colors. LoL Do you know if it is outright bannable to use ts while trying to link up, or if it is okay for friends to chat on 3rd party while separated, but just not in mixed company? I've got a radio now anyways, but I'd rather be safe than sorry. Suppose, the only way they'd know is if my dumb ass posted it again... At any rate, I met a nice fellow named "Tuna" (23) up at Tisy while the server was having some issues. I saw him run past my position at a few different places, and finally called out to him at the tents. We had a nice chat, and he gave me a couple full 60 rd stanags, and assured me I'd be wasting my time looting the rest of the base. I definitely have a dozen steaks waiting for him next time we meet.

I've gone with the strategy of setting up an outpost of my own from which to work, and hopefully can gain reputation among the villagers as a competent hunter and scavenger. Last time I was there, I would have started hosing people down if I had an automatic rifle. It was that bad.

I believe so. I haven't submitted any bug reports since around the time they made matches destroy vehicles. Space bar and left click seem to do the trick. Make sure any nearby friends take cover if your game crashes while you have an automatic rifle in hands....

This exact thing happened to me yesterday, and I lost my established character on The Village. I can only assume that I logged in punching, or that the anarchic denizens of that village truly have no respect for the man who brings home the beef.