1Macready

Friday 6/29, part 2: I managed to sneak in another hour right after work. Upon logging in and starting to move Four south, I was able to confirm that I'd guesstimated his location correctly. By my reckoning, if I moved Four almost directly south and just a touch west, he'd hit the body of water between Vybor and Pustoshka. But somehow he missed it, and before long I was staring down into Pustoshka, lying prone in some trees north of town. I was reaching for my map to decide where to head next when I heard rustling nearby - but no groaning. Uh oh - another player. After doing a couple of frantic 360s and seeing nobody, I decided to make a break for it. I charged Four northwest along the treeline, weaving him back and forth erratically and using free look to stare back over his shoulder. No sign of anyone. But I am positive that I didn't imagine that movement sound - it was loud and close by. There was someone there, all right. Heading vaguely northwest in order to keep to the trees, Four eventually cut north to begin approaching Lopatino. As he was heading north across a field toward the outskirts, I heard a rifle shot. WTF? There weren't any good buildings anywhere close to me. If someone was shooting, I was probably the target! Four darted north into another treeline, and followed it to the northwest until reaching the edge, where I threw him into the dirt and looked carefully behind me. No sign of pursuit. This was almost as much player action in 10 minutes as I'd collectively had in all my other playing. And worse, I still had yet to SEE another player. You know that saying about what it means when you can't spot the sucker at the poker table? I was beginning to feel a little self-conscious, here. In assessing Four's current location, it looked as if he crossed the field to the west he'd be a little ways north of the area in which he'd discovered the player camp yesterday. I was on another server now, so no camp to worry about... but I never did get a shot at that deer stand. I decided to move Four that way. About ten minutes later Four approached the stand from the north, within the treeline. There were zeds spawned, but none of them were close to the stand at all. I had Four throw a couple of flares into the field beyond for good measure, and then he climbed on up. Eureka - a dose of morphine! Four's kit was developing nicely. Aside from that, there were some painkillers and a bandage, both of which he left behind, as he had plenty of both. Consulting the map, I saw that there was another deer stand to the south, on the other side of the forest. I moved Four in that direction without seeing any sign of anyone. Upon arriving, I noticed that there was some sort of building nearby, and all of the zeds were over in that area. Four could have done cartwheels around the deer stand and he wouldn't have attracted any notice. Four climbed up into the stand, where he found a M1911 handgun with one clip. This seemed worth keeping as a backup, potentially as Four's one and only handgun if he located some more ammo for it. After eating a can of beans and drinking a soda, and then dropping two bandages, Four had cleared up six slots in his pack. In went the M1911 and the clip. His latest prize having been safely stowed, he withdrew from the stand back into the woods, and I logged off. Health: 12000 Zeds/Survivors/Bandits killed: 0/0/0 Future goals, in order of priority: obtain more Winchester ammo and a toolbox. Friday 6/29, part 3: I'm back for a third round in one day - gotta love the weekend. The deer stands are treating Four well, so after consulting the map, I saw that he could head SE to another one in the woods bisecting Pustoshka and Myshkino. The approach was easy enough, and this one contained a STANAG mag and an AK mag. Four had one slot open, so I figured that I'd have him grab the STANAG mag for now. It might be useful later. Four has been lurking in the western reaches of the map for a while now, and I'd decided that it was time to relocate. There was good tree cover available to the south as far as Zelenogorsk, so I thought I'd use it to proceed halfway between Sosnovka and Zeleno, then cut east to the little pond for water, and finally into the woods surrounding Green Mountain. This proved to take a good bit of running, particularly with me stopping Four every so often to peer east out of the woods in an effort to spot landmarks. Finally I spotted the little spur of trees leading right to the pond, and so Four made a 135 degree turn NE to follow them. I began to feel uncomfortable very quickly. Zeleno loomed large below me to the south, and although I saw nothing moving, I realized Four's current position made a very desirable sniper's nest. Further, the tree cover in reality was not nearly as thick as what I'd imagined in looking at the map. Then, the final approach to the pond left me really exposed. All this risk for a water refill when Four still had a few sodas in his pack? I should have painted a target on his back before starting this. Luckily this ill-considered move didn't draw any unwanted attention, and Four successfully escaped to the treeline NE of the barn by the pond. Heading east through the woods, he approached the first of two deer stands in the Green Mountain area. Another easy approach, but the only item of interest was a smoke grenade. Four was a little hungry at this point, so he ate a can of beans to make room and then stowed it away in his pack. I had taken to scoping out the stands through binoculars prior to approaching them, just in case a player might be hiding in them looking for an easy kill. Deer stands are easy to examine even from the prone position - because they are elevated, the grass doesn't block your view. As Four approached the second of the Green Mountain stands, he saw no player, but some sort of weapon was clearly visible in the stand. Upon approaching and climbing up, Four discovered a suppressed MP5 with one clip. Wow - the quietest firearm in the game. This was a find, and one that suited Four's slinking style. Then too, a suppressed weapon made a much better tactical addition to Four's pack then did a backup handgun. So, out went the M1911, its clip, and a backup set of flares. Four then ate a can of food and drank a soda in order to clear a full ten slots in his pack. In went the MP5, and the clip went into general inventory in place of the STANAG mag, which he dropped. I need to give some thought to whether the Winchester or the MP5 should be Four's default weapon. I have a single 30 round clip for the MP5 - which isn't much at all - and replacement clips will surely be rare (or non-existent). But then, we are all living on borrowed time in Day Z. "Saving" things for too long is more of a help to the guy who ends up looting your buzzing corpse than it is to you. So I'm leaning toward moving the Winchester into the pack, but took no action as of yet. There are two deer stands on the treeline east of Pogorevka, and I thought I'd move Four into that area prior to retiring. However, it was all open field between there and his current location, so I had Four take the long way - SE through the Green Mountain woods, and then across the roads into the trees W-NW of Kustryk. From there, Four used the woods to trace a semicircle around the eastern side of Pulkovo, after which he was finally able to head NW in a straight line toward his destination. All of this was accomplished without incident. As my mind wandered while traveling, I laughed at the thought that two of my previous characters had broken legs crossing door thresholds at a crawl, but this one could sprint through the woods for hours with nary a twisted ankle. Once the first of the two stands was visible in the distance, I crawled Four between two dense trees and logged off. Health: 12000 Zeds/Survivors/Bandits killed: 0/0/0 Future goals, in order of priority: either obtain more Winchester ammo, or find more MP5 ammo and ditch the Winchester entirely. Look for an industrial site so Four can get a toolbox.

Thanks. I'd been planning to keep track of this character anyway' date=' but I went to the trouble of writing it out longhand thinking that others might like to read a game journal. [b']Thursday 6/28: As the work week wears on, I become progressively more tired. So I wanted to keep things relaxed and uneventful this morning. I planned to start by replacing the cooked meat Four had lost to my backpack slipup the day before. I think he'd taken all of ten steps when I spotted a boar in the trees some way off. While I understand the performance reasons driving the decision not to render grass far away from the player, it leads to the irony of distant objects being easier to spot. I'll need to remember that the next time I'm prone in high grass, feeling safe and hidden - the guy 600m away who has me sighted in his sniper rifle scope is probably laughing at what an easy target I am. Honestly, if you aren't moving, you aren't safe - although being in the trees does help. Four made short work of converting the boar into four cooked steaks. I knew that there was a body of water somewhere between Pustoshka and Vybor, as well as some deer stands to the west. So, west of Pustoshka in the trees, I thought that I would move Four north and see which I could find first. Four had barely begun moving when I started getting warnings about not having received any packets from the server in 20, 25, 30, etc seconds. So, I disconnected, reset my router, and then connected to a different server (remember this for later). Upon logging back in, my inventory seemed intact, although I thought I'd had eight steaks and now I had seven. Whatever. Having moved north through the trees for a while, a military zed became visible in the field east of the treeline. Deer stand it is, then. Upon moving Four in closer, it was apparent that there was a pretty good spread of hostiles. But it seems like they have a tendency to drift your way as you approach - so if you do so slowly, you can often draw them away from the target. That's how things went this time, with most of the zeds ending up on the approach side of the deer stand. Hoping to keep them there, Four threw a few flares into their midst a ways off... except for one whose angle I misjudged and planted right next to the deer stand. Sigh. After a while waiting for that one to go out, Four threw a couple more away from the stand. Once the close one was gone, the remaining flares did a nice job of keeping the zeds away. I'm hoping with practice I become better at using flares for a diversion - this approach took about twenty minutes, and I'd rather spend five or less. Anyway, the way was clear, so Four climbed up. He found a hunting knife and a few military weapon mags (an M9 mag, a STANAG, and something else). Four didn't keep any of it, as I didn't want to use pack space on ammo for weapons he might never get (and for which he has no real use - I'm not planning on assaulting anything). Having located this deer stand, I had also pinpointed Four's location on the map, and knew there was another stand to the northwest. So, I moved Four in that direction. Once I'd found it (the zeds telegraph these things quite nicely), I spent a few minutes scouting the best approach. Moving in from the west offered almost total cover, but the trees were so thick that I worried about Four crawling into a zed. Approaching from the south along the edge of the tree line seemed a better compromise between cover and clarity of vision. At this point I looked at the clock and saw that I only had about ten minutes left to play. Remembering how slowly the last deer stand had gone, I decided to postpone the attempt until my next session. It occurred to me that I hadn't given a lot of thought to what I'd do if I found a really nice firearm that I just had to have. I know I wouldn't get rid of the Winchester - a powerful, semi-quiet rifle with plentiful 15 round mags is perfect for Four's style. So I decided to use my final minutes to inventory my pack and think about what Four would dump if he needed to clear space in a hurry. I was deep in the midst of considering this when a sound began to intrude upon my awareness. At first it was so faint that I paid it no mind, distractedly thinking it was coming from somewhere outside the house in my neighborhood. But it began to get louder, and the unfamiliar nature of it suddenly brought it to the foregound of my mind - it was coming from in-game! Some sort of vehicle! Four immediately hit the deck, and in that same instant I spotted a motorcycle crossing the field to the east, on a northwest heading toward the deer stand. I repositioned Four so that there was a tree between him and this new arrival. My first thought was that the player was planning to hit the deer stand, and since he was making no attempt to be stealthy, I waited for the sound of the engine to stop and shooting to start. But the sound of the engine never did stop, and it began to sound as if it was now north of me, inside the tree line. And although I had lost sight of the cyclist, I did see a military zed sprinting in the trees to my north, heading west. There must be a player base around here! I can't say that I'm very surprised at the thought. When I surveyed the game map looking for good places to lone wolf it, it had occurred to me that those same places would be desirable for hiding tents, vehicles, and what have you. But I still wasn't expecting to actually stumble onto such a camp. Remember when lag pushed me to switch servers earlier? I wouldn't have had this encounter if that hadn't happened. So - what to do? If this were all real, I'd probably clear out of the area, having been influenced by movies in which these ad hoc civilizations that spring up in apocalypse situations are filled with survivalist nutjobs who wind up seeming creepier than the damn zeds. But it is a game, and something about players banding together to hoard weapons and vehicles in remote corners of the map just seems a little goofy to me - like they're taking it all just a touch too seriously. Which, of course, begets the temptation to f*ck with them. So I'll probably go looking for this camp. One of the questions you have to answer in Day Z is just what you plan to do with your time once you've become self sufficient, and Four is already there. This little adventure promises to be fun. But what would my goal be? Pillage tents? Maybe, but Four already has everything he really needs (NVGs and a GPS would be nice, but still... a tent to tent search takes time, and being greedy is a good way to get killed). Quickly in and quickly out should be the guiding principle here. A joy ride in one of their vehicles sounds like just the thing. Health: 12000 Zeds/Survivors/Bandits killed: 0/0/0 Future goals, in order of priority: Mess with the survivalist nutjobs. Use the Arma tutorials first to make damn sure I know how to interact with vehicles. Then, if I find one without getting myself ganked, have a plan for what I'll do if chased, and if not, where I'll head. Aside from that, look for Winchester ammo, morphine, and a toolbox.

A fair criticism. I'm too far along to switch now' date=' though. If I ever do another one of these I'll stick to the first person. [hr'] Wednesday 6/27: Upon logging back in, I decided my first order of business now that I had a full hunting kit should be to bag some game. It can be a real help to have a pack full of steaks if you get yourself in trouble (it always amuses me that gorging yourself on protein is the answer to gunshots and zombie wounds - eating could certainly use a cooldown timer to prevent using steaks to heal so fast). I moved Four further west into the trees, and before too long I simultaneously spotted a boar within the trees, and a cow a little ways into a field alongside. The boar was obviously the safer target, but after looking through my gear I saw that I had seven tins of food to replace, so I decided I'd incur the risk to get the extra steaks from the cow. I moved Four to the edge of the treeline, scoped the field and saw nothing hostile, and then dropped the cow with one shot from the Winchester. After looking around again and seeing no reaction to the shot, I crawled Four out and gutted the corpse. Then Four quickly ate a can of food, stuck his remaining six tins inside the cow corpse, and took seven portions of raw meat. Once back within the safety of the trees, he made a fire and cooked the steaks. My original intention was to hit Vybor next, but in reviewing the map, I noticed that it is uncomfortably close to the NW airfield. I felt like it was a likely place to run into players sporting serious military hardware who were looking for a nearby objective to hit next. So instead, I decided I'd backtrack to Pustoshka and check the market one more time. I will admit that it feels a bit lame to work the same target twice in a row, but there was no more or less risk to doing so than there had been the night before, so I figured, what the hell. This approach ended up being an even more extreme example of what I had experienced the day before. The field leading into town was literally overrun with zombies. As I slithered Four between them, I felt sure he was going to be noticed. He definitely had some close calls. But he managed to slip through, and once again the market area was dead quiet. Inside, I hit paydirt again. For starters, an Alice pack! For all intents and purposes, this was my first real backpack. My first two characters didn't even live long enough to need a pack. My third spawned on an island and lost his swimming to shore, and never found a replacement. So this was going to be a treat. Unfortunately, one aspect of getting your first backpack upgrade is not knowing how to take it properly. I greedily scrolled to the "take pack" option, and my existing pack promptly vanished from the universe, along with all of its contents. A brief inventory of my gear suggested that I'd lost three steaks, two Winchester mags, and two or three sodas. I wish I'd been less stupid, but I wasn't going to let it get me down. I had an Alice pack! In inventorying the rest of the market, I found sodas to replace the lost ones, and then a full water bottle. Moving along, I then found an empty water bottle. Valuing that over a fourth soda, I elected to drink a can and grab the bottle. I selected the drink option - and nothing happened. Oh, crap. This had happened to me once before. It seems to be a sign of lag which can result in a lost conection, along with your character being rolled back in time a few minutes - which might mean that Four would lose his awesome new swag! But this time, no disconnect occurred, and after waiting a bit, the drinking animation finally played, and things seemed responsive once more. Next I found a revolver, along with two sets of rounds to go with another Four had been toting around, so that was nice. But a bit further in, I found a Makarov with three clips. I already had one clip on me, and I'd seen two more elsewhere in the market. I know that the Makarov is not a popular weapon, but it suits my purposes very nicely. The ammo is plentiful. Plus, it's quiet. If Four pulls zed aggro on approach to a target, my response would be to run into the nearest building. In addition to the one that spotted him, he'd probably pick up a few more en route. In the close confines of the building, headshots are easy, and the quietness of the Mak means you generally only pick up one or two more zeds from the noise, if that. Done properly, you can often free youself of zed aggro at the cost of a single Mak clip. So, Four dropped the revolver and its rounds, picked up the Mak, and collected five clips (for a total of six) from around the market. I headed out again, and although Four's departure path wasn't too far off from his approach, the zeds had thinned considerably. Four retreated to the treeline, and I disconnected. Health: 12000 Zeds/Survivors/Bandits killed: 0/0/0 Future goals, in order of priority: replace the steaks I lost in the backpack mixup. Get a bit more Winchester ammo, and perhaps hit industrial areas for a toolbox. Start actively seeking out deer stands. Some morphine would be nice so that Four has a "get out of jail free" card in case of broken leg crapulence, but I'm not sure that there's a hospital outside of PVP hotzones.