glemmar

If you would skin and eat a clown mask wearing bandit meat, would you get a funny taste in your mouth? *Badum tish*

I would say pistols are pretty worthless at the moment. Appart from Amphibian (I'll get to this later), I use pistols only if I haven't been able to find a primary weapon. If you have a primary weapon there is no reason for you to engage other players with a pistol and if you shoot zombies with it you are only going to broadcast your location to everyone. Nothing is easier than killing a player who keeps announcing their location to you by firing their weapon. Nevertheless I would say that there is no such thing as "the best pistol". It really depends on what situtation you are currently in. These are pretty wise words here and that is the reason why I would suggest the magnum for a fresh spawn. The ammo is common and because it doesn't need a magazine it makes an excellent pistol at the start. But if you have a magazine for any other pistol, and you manage to find that pistol I would dump the magnum since it has only six shots in it. Slightly better choice of a sidearm would be M1911 since it has 7 round magazine and you can attach a pistol flashlight to it (which matters only if you play on night servers). But the 7 round mag is still pretty small, so the next best thing to this would be the CR75 which has 15 round mag. There is really nothing else to say about the CR75 though. At the top of "loud pistols" sits the FNX, since it has 15 round magazine of .45 ACPs and is currently the only pistol that has a red dot sight. Ofcourse this pistol will become even better when they implement the silencing effect to suppressors and if they do that before putting in silencers for other pistols the FNX will be the "end game" choice of a sidearm for everyone. Working suppressors in general would make pistols a fairly solid choice of weapon against zombies. Talking about silenced guns... This is a very solid point. Since I've been lately using the Amphibian alot I can tell that it is very inaccurate and it does very little damage. Zombies can take up to two head shots and even more if you shoot them on the chest, but on the other hand this is not such a problem with this gun. Usually if I see a zombie approaching me I'll just unload the whole magazine on to it. The .22 ammo stacks into 50 round piles and you can find them EVERYWHERE, so you don't really need to conserve your ammo with this pistol, but what Gews said about this gun is the best part about it, "it is near-silent to players". No matter what weapons or gear you or the other player has, the best weapon you can have against him is stealth. So if you are into zombie shooting, then I would recommend this gun as a sidearm. If it is a good idea to have an MP5 as a sidearm really depends on your main weapon. If you have AKM or M4 as your main weapon, then the MP5 would just be an overkill since you are already carrying an automatic weapon. But if you are using a mosin, then I would say you need to have this. If you go into a close combat with a mosin you are just asking to be killed. But if you have the MP5 with you, then I'd say you have a fair chance of survival and you can actually be useful in close quarters combat. And because the MP5 has the railings on top of the gun, you can attach any of the sights that would go to the M4 onto it. But ofcourse, the biggest flaws is of this gun are the size and the fairly rare magazines. Regardless, I'd say this is the perfect sidearm for a sniper. Fully automatic gun with red dot sights that can fit into your backpack or high capacity vest. Not too many people seemed to say anything about the sawn-off double shotty so I'll throw in my oppinion. The shotgun packs quite a punch, but at the same time you will most likely ruin everything the poor guy you just shot was carrying. And even though the size is pretty small (1x4 if I remember correctly) the ammo is gonna take up some space. Even though you can load the gun with just pellets, it can be loaded with only two of them at a time and without snaploaders the loading is slow. And carrying alot of snaploaders will eat up your inventory space. Appart from this, no one else didn't even mention the Longhorn. I've had it only once and what I can tell about it is pretty much what hotcakes said, a gimmick. It is inaccurate, loud as hell and it can chamber only one round. And the only reason why a carried it around was because it boosted my ego... until I ended up into the wrong side of the gun. I lost my longhorn when someone shot me at the NW airfield with their longhorn. The damage seems to be similiar to the mosin since I was knocked out for couple of minutes and everything appart from my hat, pants and boots were obliterated. My vest, jacket and backpack with all their contents (even those inside protector cases and ammo boxes) were ruined with a single hit. (They need to nerf that item damage!) The only reason why I survived was because I didn't start bleeding. So to summarize the longhorn, it is not a sniper rifle in a pocket but it makes a pretty damn dangerous mid range gun that is basicly one shot, one kill and it looks manly as hell. But in the end, appart from the MP5, I would consider all sidearms to be nothing more than vanity items.

Mhmm... improvised bambi skin backpack? Now there's a thought for bandits.

The flashlight is pretty useful if you play on night servers, which many people don't do, but I still think spawning in with just the flashlight is just perfect. Back in the day when I played the mod (and its sub-mods like Namalsk, Breaking Point, Epoch...) many servers were [CUSTOM STARTING LOADOUT] [HIGH LOOT SERVER] [MAX VEHICLES] and so on, which I personally considered game ruining since half the fun in DayZ is taken away if you spawn in with the most basic equipment (Food, compass, map, etc.) Hell, technically you already spawn in with a map if you use online loot maps, which should be more than enough for you to find your way around. Ofcourse if you use loot maps, then there is really no point in getting the in-game map. Compasses can spawn pretty much everywhere, but so far I've had most luck with the brown wooden barns. They might have time acceleration on, I think that was implemented sometime ago. I haven't experienced time misrepresentation on any of the servers that I've played on. Don't know, interesting idea though. Also how do you know that is blowing from west to east? I know that in the mod clouds always moved from west to east so it was a bit of metagamey way to find directions, but it worked most of the time. Loot doesn't respawn at the time so you can't use the old DayZ mod loot farming method where you would empty all the loot piles into a one separate pile, run +200 m from the building, waited for ~10 minutes and then came back for fresh loot. Or do you mean you actually server hopped from server to server in hopes of finding fresh/better loot? I think this might be a bug, and if it is, the server should warn (with a rather small red text) you that your character is not being loaded from the hive and you should abort your connecting if you don't wish to override your old character. In the 0.45 version they had a bug where your new character would not be saved if you disconnected right after your previous death. Ofcourse if you disconnect in bad place (fire station, barrack and so on) you might be killed by other players and/or zombies because your character doesn't disappears immidietly after you disconnect. Also disconnecting while unconscious causes your character to be reset. Anyway, I've had no problem with the character saving in this build and I've been playing on fragnet servers.

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.

I've duped myself couple of times. Usually this happens to me when I try to login and in the "Please wait" screen my DayZ client crashes. Ofcourse killing your dopplegänger will earn you all the stuff you had when you last time logged out. EDIT: In case anyone tries to deliberatly dupe yourself with this technique, I hate to break it to you but it doesn't work always.

That is a big risk to take to actually talk to someone instead of just shooting them. Lets say I am pretty well geared, full gorkas, food, can opener, binoculars, akm with one mag for example. Then I see this fully kitted player running around with an AKM. Okey he most likely has more gear than I need, but at this point I am not spesifically searching "a bunch of loot" but rather certain objects, like AKM magazines. Well how willing do you think the guy would be to give me his mags if I asked him? He could be in the same situtation that I am in that he only has the mag he has in his weapon. So there would really be no point in asking that mag from him. Also starting a dialog with another player is risky for so many reasons. First he might just rise his gun and fill me with holes, secondly he might have friend on skype and running around in the same area and as we are talking the other guy comes around behind me and shoots me in the back. On the other hand, what could you possible gain from not killing another player? Ammo and food are so common that there is really no need to trade for these. Most likely you don't need a "friend" to loot with, since you cannot really trust him. I've tried this couple of times and in the end, in 99% of the cases it has ended into a shoot out which were never initialized by me and that is why I have most often ended up dead in these situations. If you are in a high value loot area or close to a one, I would say there is a very good chance that the player running around with AKM and high cap vests has already taken everything interesting with him from that place, so why should you let him run away with gear that could be rightfully yours? Finally, the reason why many people rather take their chances in an impossible gun fight than get mugged is because currently the only thing you have is your gear. It doesn't matter if you die or if you get robbed the end result is the same, you will lose your gear. Even with impossible odds against armed robbers you still have a small chance of keeping your gear if you use flight or fight but if you submit to their demands there is no way you'll keep your stuff. All the good gear will be taken from you. Weapons, high capacity vests, magazines, ammo, scopes and all the other rare or pain-in-the-arse to find pieces and bits. All will be gone. It is funny that in DayZ mod there actually was one reason why you wouldn't want to die over your gear. The reason was stats. Many people propably didn't care about those, but to be honest, when I loaded the game and it said "Day 7" and I knew I had played from few to several hours everyday, I felt just a tiny bit proud that I had actually managed to survive that long with one character. Which ofcourse made it even more saltier when I died later that day. I am not suggesting that they should add stats or anything like that to the Standalone but I think I made my point, your gear is all you have at the moment and if you lose your gear it is basicly the same as if you would have died. Many times I have thought about how to make this game less deathmatchy, but to be honest, I don't really see any good way. Unless you use really gamey mechanics like hostility timers (if you want to be hostile to other players you'll have to activate hostility which would take some time and vice versa from hostile to friendly), safe zones, factions with forced no-friendly fire... but like I said, all these feel really gamey and I think they don't belong to DayZ.

I've put in few hours after the hotfix and so far I can't really tell if the desync is better or at the same level as it was in the 36. Obviously the session loss, desync and slow connecting issues that came with the 42. patch seem to be completely fixed, but as I was playing yesterday I got randomly rubber banded back into a building I had just left and later my friend complained that she had some problem with getting stuff into her inventory. It is worth noting that we both were behind the same router and I had no problems with my inventory. Also as I was playing alone today I had the broken yellow chains for couple of minutes and in the players list my desync value was about 3500. Ofcourse all these could have just been random connection problems or something.

The faster zombies are an improvemt, because now they are more of a threat than just a mild annoyance. The animation looks good most of the time, but if they do really sharp turns they tend to look a bit spazzy. Of course the zombies still need a lot of work to improve the spawning, from how far they can spot/hear you, wall glitching and so on, but all this has been gone through so many times that I don't need to address it any further.

Check DayZ Reddit with the devs filter on. http://www.reddit.com/r/DayZ/search?q=flair%3Adevs&sort=new&restrict_sr=on Or look through Hicks' twitter. https://twitter.com/Hicks_206 Here is also couple of Hicks tweets that address the session lost issue.

It doesn't have to be called trading system. Just make a way where you could give, or rather hand over, stuff to other players more easily. In real life when I hand my friend a drink or something, I don't throw it on the ground and then make them pick it up from down there.

I don't think ingame currency has no place in this game. I don't want to go around picking bottle caps or something, but I think that pristine ammo could be used as a sort of unofficial currency between players. Sort of like in the Metro 2033. Also regular item exchange "I'll give you two cokes for that can of beans" would be good. To support these we definetly need a "trading system" or something that would make giving items to other players or exchange items with other players easier. The current dropping items on the ground is just silly.

Okey I came out too blunt I admit and I was in a bit of a hurry so I apologize for being so rude. Anyway now that I have time, what I ment to say was that devs will not add NPCs or any non-player generated stuff like the helicopter crashsites from the mod. Apparently they (the crashsites) might not appear in the game at all. So there is no way that any sort of questing system that is familiar from other titles will make an appereance in the game. What could be more appropriate way to approach this would be that you could have "stuff to do". Like these guys said. Especially the power station thingie is something I like. These would not be proper quests like you might be hoping for, but I think that would be the only acceptable way to go with this game. Also why wouldn't you be able to have "player generated" quests. A real person wants you to find something for him you know. I don't think this would be impossible later in the game when we have more players in the server and more things to do rather than just run around and shoot each other with the few guns we have. EDIT: With the word "quest" I mean "mission", but they are pretty much the same thing anyway. And finally I would like to say that NPC don't really have a place in DayZ, in my oppinion. I can tell this from a personal experience from the time when I played DayZ Epoch mod. The NPC traders made everything so boring when you could just buy everything from them. And atleast for me the NPC break the immersion. They just act so unnaturally or something, I don't really know. Also I have come to notice that in most of Bohemias games the voice acting is terrible. To me all the characters and lines sound awkward and weird. Should have propably held back from posting that first post because I didn't have time to write a proper post.

Not gonna happen, and personally I don't want this game to turn into a scavenger hunt with NPC that give you missions like "Greetings Survivor! Bring me 20 lesser zombie farmer ar*es." or "My cellar is infected by zombier rats, can you kill them for me sir Survivor?"

Feedback welcome! I'd propably add notification or something to tell people on which version these experiments were conducted since everything you have tested here might and most likely will be subject to change in future versions. Anyway, pretty nice video. Edit: Fixed a typo

They need to add tin foil hats to the loot table.

I agree with OP. The medical system needs to be more complex. Gun shot wound shouldn't be something you can just shrug off with a bandage and couple of sodas. I was shot near Balota couple of weeks ago with mosin. I ran behind some houses, bandaged my self, flanked and killed the sniper and hid into a hole and drank some sodas. I admit that everything looked bit Chernarus Noir for a while but after about 15 minutes of sitting in a hole drinkin' Pipsi I was good as new. Also last week I took a 5.56 into the knee, and I didn't even have to stop being a survivor like you guys. Flanked the bandit that shot me and killed him. Surviving gun shot wounds is way too easy at the moment. Half the time when I get shot I don't even need to bandage and that is just silly. Getting wounded should be serious bussiness in my oppinion. And gun shot wound should be one of the worst things that can happen to you since it can cause serious pain, internat damage, bleeding and infection. The harder it is to survive, the more rewading it is when you do.

The Art of War. It is a very enjoyable and rare book and it contains a lot of useful information which I can use to annoy the s**t out of my crew. Also it is an excellent status item and if found on your dead body, atleast your killer knows that you were an eduacted scholar and brilliant military strategist regardless of your obvious failure in the latter since you are dead.

I had exactly same problem for a while, but I cannot remember how I fixed it though. I'm guessing the fuzziness has something to do with the Render_W and Render_H. Still I wouldn't go as far as "not doable" since I am currently running my DayZ with those settings and I don't have any problems, but like I told you I can't remember how I fixed it. Unfortunately I don't know. Anyway I'm glad that I could help you. :)

Go to Steam and right click the DayZ in your Library, then select Properties and under the General tab there should be SET LAUNCH OPTIONS..., add -noPause in there then press OK. Now the game won't pause if you alt+tab out or if you have it in the windowed mode and click on your other monitor. Also if you want to have the game in a sort of borderless windowed mode, you can mess around with the config files. EDIT: Also if you make any changes in the config file, I don't take any resposibility if something goes wrong. Go to C:\Users\[YOUR USERNAME]\Documents\DayZ Make a backup copy of the DayZ.cfg Now open the original DayZ.cfg with notepad. Scroll down until you find the following: winX=0; winY=0; winW=1920; winH=1050; winDefW=1920; winDefH=1050; Most likely you have different numbers in these than I have. Set the winX and winY to zero. Rest of them you can to your monitor resolution. I have the winH and winDefH slightly lower than my actual resolution because sometimes the DayZ window clips behind the Windows taskbar, which is pretty annoying. After that find the following two lines. Render_W=1920; Render_H=1050; Set them to the same resolution with the rest. After this save the file and then set it to Read only since sometimes DayZ can change these back to default values on its own. Also note that if you set this file as Read only then you will not be able to make any permanent changes in the ingame options menu since it will not be able to save them to this file after each session. I hope this will help you.

This sounds reasonable. I remember back in the mod when I was playing on a customized Namalsk server where you could tag your friends by standing next to them and choosing "Tag as friendly" from the action menu. After that the other player was notified about this and if he tagged you as friendly, a red ball was attached to both players model that could be seen from some distance if nothing obstructed your view. This wasn't permanent though and you had to do it all over again everytime you reconnected to the server. Something similiar could be done with the name tags and propably wouldn't cause too much flak from people.

Poor idea and never going to happen. The only way this would be acceptable is if you had to shake hands with the other player. When you shake hands with someone it would give you a message. Maybe something like "You shook hands with xXxWilliam98xXx".

I've never understood the hate for 3rd person. I see absolutely nothing wrong with it. Yeah I can look over walls and around corners with it, but so can everyone else. I look inside the Jail building from the safety of standing next to the door, but it does me little help if someone is behind the stairs looking around the corner with 3rd person and when I walk in he just leans out and fills me with lead. This is why I actualy consider hardcore servers easier than regular servers. a, I have never suffered from any sort of headache in first person. As long as I keep the head bobbing off because that just makes me sea sick. b, I disagree, travelling is always boring c, I actualy prefer taking my screenshots from first person because my own guy is just in the way of the shot if you take screenshots in 3rd. Different hives for regular and hardcore servers is currently the best and only solution.

Agreed. With DayZ the development is very fast and pretty steady. By steady I mean you can almost anticipate that "the next patch comes out next week" rather than patches comming out semi-randomly every once in a while which seems to be pretty normal with other early access games.

You can open them with can operner, kitchen knife, bayonet, combat knife, screwdrive and axes. Altough you will end up losing 10-70% of the food if you use anything other than can opener. Tuna can be opened without any tools though. Well you wouldn't eat an rotten apple in real life would you? Most of the spawns are in the east and south coast between Berezino and Elektro. If you spawn closer to Elektro, I would suggest you proceed there. Don't bother with the buildings in the center of Elektro since they are most likely picked clean. Instead head to the coast of Elektro behind the industrial buildings since you have about fifty-fifty chance that they aren't looted. After that head to Cherno and from there to north towards inland. If you are closer to Berezino, you might as well head there. Most likely it is looted and if you see any open doors just find a water pump (I'll go into this later) and then head out towards Stary Sobori and loot all the towns in your path. There are water pumps and ponds scattered through out the map. Drink from one of those until you have light green text "Hydrated" reading in your inventory. After that you should start to look for food. Eat everything (except for rotten fruits of course) you can find until you get stuffed. After that eat only when you are no longer stuffed. Also remember to drink something every once in a while. Sodas are great since they help you with hydration AND hunger. When these basic needs are in order, it is time to find a weapon. Fire axe is the best melee weapon since it one hits zombies. Spliting axe is also good. DO NOT use one handed melee weapons (machete, kitchen knife, hammer, etc) they are horrible. When killing a zombie, what you want to do is you run straight at it and whack it what ever melee weapon you have found. If you had fire axe and you hit it, then the zombie should be dead. With any other melee weapon, try to get some distance between the zombie and then turn back and run straight at it and whack it again. Repeat this until the zombie is dead. You could also try running around the zombie and maul it with your melee weapon. If you start bleeding while batteling the zombies, put your t-shirt in your inventory and tear it into rags, you can use those to bandage yourself. Now you have killed few zombies and you are hydrated and boasting with energy it is time to find a firearm. They are easy to come by if you know where to look. Military buildings obviously have them but other buildings that might contain weapons are: Schools: A grey three story building with a ladder on the side and a huge windowed wall in the front. Piano buildings: A grey building with one side showing visible bricks and green wooden things sticking out of it. Dark red brick buildings: They are made out of dark red bricks and they have a fridge in them that is lying on it's side. Brown barns: They are long and wide and look bit crappy to be honest, but they might have a weapon in them. TEC office buildings: Grey hospital looking building with several floors and on the side of the building reads TEC in big letters. There are many more buildings that have weapons in the, but those are just few I could name from the top of my head. When you have all the equipment and supplies you need, you can easily stay alive for as long as you want if you avoid cities, big towns, military bases and airfields. EDIT: Also note that other surviving tactics are also available and may work just as well as these.