Is there a way to melee or anything? If I’m understanding this correctly, items spawn in town. Near the hordes of zombies that run at me as soon as I get close to town…
Or do items spawn elsewhere that I’m not seeing?
Items spawn in structures, most of which are in towns. But sometimes there are isolated barns, and there are also deer stands in the woods. I’ve found that these two are your best bets for your first equipping.
I’ve found two reliable methods so far: crawling completely prone (very slowly) into a barn with a door facing the wilderness, and running like crazy into a barn or deer stand and shooting my way out.
I’ve also found that the castles are often free of zombies, and loaded with loot, if you can manage to find them.
On probably my sixth attempt, I managed to find a hatchet. This made me feel like a total zombie-slaying baller (after I alt-tabbed to the internet to figure out how to equip it). Then I ran into two zombies who took me for a third of my health.
Left 4 Dead this game ain’t.
It’s tough at first now that you start with almost nothing. You used to spawn with a pistol, but apparently that made the spawning areas too dangerous due to other players so they stopped that. I think you should at least spawn with a melee weapon.
You’re going to want to use an external map until you find an in-game map and then probably still after. I mostly use this one. That’s not a complete list of spawnable areas - there are probably thousands - but that covers the major ones most likely to spawn something delicious.
The safest way to gear up is to hit some of the deer stands - they’ll often have rifles and only a few zombies near them, but they’re often not too close to the coast. If you go into cities, you’ll often find handguns in churches, rifles in fire stations, and sometimes handguns in grocery stores - although those are great places for food, water, and survival gear. The hospitals spawn medical loot, but I don’t think they spawn weapons. The barns often have weapons.
The zombies track you by sight and sound, so you’ll have to be stealthy. Walking is quieter than running, grass is quieter than a street, crouching and then crawling are quieter than walking standing up. If zombies start chasing you, it’s tough to lose them, but if you can break line of sight with them for a bit they’ll lose you. I really haven’t experimented much with that so I don’t know how long it takes. If you run into a building, zombies have to slow down to a walking pace to enter, so that can buy you some time to seperate yourself from them, or set up a defensive position.
When you cover yourself with a cursor you’ll often have a default action - open door, pick up gear, whatever - but sometimes there will be secondary options if you use your mousewheel. It’s kind of a clunky system. But to do stuff like get meat from animals or take backpacks (rather than search them) you’ll need to make sure you scroll up or down to bring up the full list of options.
Add me on steam, if I’m around I’ll answer your questions. Also add “shotgunderek” to your steam friends list, he’s Interconnected Series of Bongs on the boards and he’s the super dayz enthusiast who will help you get setup if he’s around.
Also, you can launch the arma 2 beta through steam if you want to retain the overlay. You’ll have to find arma 2: operation arrowhead on your list, right click it, properties, set launch options. Then add
Then go to your arma 2 directory (steam\steamapps\common\operation arrowhead), make a copy of your arma2oa.exe file, then go under expansion\beta, grab the arma2oa.exe from there and copy it over the one in the base directory.
Then you can either launch through steam, or go into the day z commander options and check “launch through steam”.
You will have to copy the new arma2oa.exe every time a new beta comes out if you do this. But it lets you retain your overlay to look at maps, talk, whatever. Or you can run the game in windowed mode and tab between windows to use your web browser.
Hassle, I know, but it makes things easier.
I know the game is difficult and confusing at first. Well, it always will be, but it does get better with familiarity.
Make that add “shotgunderek” to your friends list. Or use his profile to add him.
Also, this is one of the most interesting day z videos I’ve seen.
Hi friends.
Just letting you know that I’m the resident Day-Z supernerd. As soon as I have the time, I’ll make a detailed post that will hopefully sort out some of the common frustrations with installing and playing the game.
This game can be frustrating at times. Very frustrating. But I encourage you to all read Beef’s post thoroughly, as it’s one of the better unbiased summaries of the game out there.
For now, feel free to add me on steam as shotgunderek and I’ll be happy to help out anybody who’s having issues.
Until then, keep your beans safe.
I have succeeded in feeding myself to zombies a few times. The first time I played snuck into a town ended up running from about 100 zombies… lost most of them just a few stragglers decided I was to tasty to pass up.
The second time I went crawling, running, through the woods to find me a deer stand or a barn. Spent at least enough time to get very thirsty but all for nothing, found none. I came across a dead person, she was laying on the road and had goodies! I was in the process of looting her when the zombies ate my brains.
I started again, it was night time… I will wait for day break 
I’m not going to be around much tonight, but Tubes will be around to help people along.
Download ventrilo, go through the setup, pick a push to talk key, make sure everything works.
Then click the -> next to “server” and click new. Add our sdmb server - hostname vent3.gamespeak.com port 4303 password deathrays. Then connect.
Then talk to people, they’ll help you out.
Thanks for all the help DayZ survivors! My tips are below, I am not very good at the game but I survive for quite a while and the things I have found are below.
- If you are found by zombies before weapons or even after you find a weapon run in the woods, you can lose them after about a minute of running through the woods with little chance of picking up other zombies.
- If you find a barn, raid it and camp it for about 20-30m and raid it again. I have found all manners of weapons, fire wood, sodas, canned goods in a barn. Be aware of other players, if someone comes in with a weapon, your call either shoot first and ask questions later (bringing in the zombies…) or try to work out something. Depends on you AND the other player!
- Low crawling allows you to get close enough to hear the flies buzzing the zombies, they don’t look down much! If they spot you though, don’t lay down, you’d just be a prone buffet.
That’s all I can think of, I am sure others have more in depth help!
So I finally managed to get a decent session in, I survived about 1 hour. I found a hatchet and killed a few zombies with that, then found an Enfield. Question, can I have two weapons? Cause I could only see options for dropping the hatchet to pick up the Enfield. Anyways, game ended when I bumped into some survivors and after a few seconds of watching each other he shot me, I shot him in the face and dropped him, and his buddy killed me. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
You can only have one primary and one secondary (handgun) weapon equipped at one time. You can’t have a secondary one sitting in your regular inventory, but you can pack away one in your pack, if you have enough space open. (Ideally I carry a .50 sniper and M4 like this and switch depending on situation). You need 10 slots for a primary weapon and 5 slots for a secondary.
But Arma 2’s inventory system can be glitchy. If you try to put a primary weapon into a bag that doesn’t have enough slots, it will dissapear. Also, the mags/ammo for a weapon will automatically try to stay with that weapon - if you drop your AK, you’ll drop all your AK mags - if you stick it in your backpack, you try to pack all the mags. So if you have an AK with 4 mags, and you try to put it in your backpack, you’ll need 14 open slots. If you have 8, you lose everything. If you have 12, as far as I know, you’d keep the AK and 2 mags but lose 2.
It’s stupid, I know, but just work within the system.
Also, if you’re switching a weapon out of your pack to put back in your primary weapon slot, open the bag first and then pull the weapon out. This will automatically swap your weapons out and put your currently equipped one in your bag. If you just try to put your current one in the bag first, it won’t automatically swap with the bagged one and will likely dissapear unless you have a ton of bag space.
I want to give people a few days to get used to the controls and mechanics and navigation before we start any organized SDMB activities - otherwise we’ll spend the whole night just trying to find each other.
But if you happen to be around the zelenogorsk area tonight - on the western end of the map - a few of us are going to be active in that area. Or if you need help learning the game, hop on vent and we’ll help.
What server do you guys play on?
We hop from server to server, but we coordinate through the SDMB Vent and using DayZCommander.
Well, the Cannibalistic Rape Squad* had its first adventures tonight. We looted the towns all the way from Zelenogorsk up through the northwest airfield. We had a 3v3 firefight in the open field which we won decisively. We had an encounter up at the airfield which we did not win decisively. But we did manage to get a legit machine gun in the process, so that’s something.
All together, that went smoother and more awesome that I expected. It was pretty awesome getting 5 of us together. Maybe in the future we can get more.
In the meantime, I leave you with our first encounter with other players. (Video won’t be uploaded for another hour or so).
Pretty awesome.
- name is a work in progress. But you know, it’s the apocalypse. Might as well go all out.
Woops, ignore above link, there was a problem. Watch this one.
Among other things it looks like an interesting social study of how it would actually go down, kinda like how that plague thing in WoW gave people ideas about real-life epidemics. Once bitten twice shy and all that, less plucky survivors banding together and more isolated paranoid wrecks who have learned the hard way to shoot first and ask questions later.
Youtube didn’t like something about the videos I posted earlier, so I re-encoded it and I’ll try to post later.
We’re going to be playing tomorrow I think - Wednesday. We’ll probably loot around the westernmost road - starting around Zeleno and going up towards the airport. It’s a good route and reasonably easy to navigate to.
If you’re interested in playing with us, try to get some basic gear and make your way up to Zeleno - that’s the town with the grocery store on the road north of Kamenka, which is the westernmost town along the coast. We can help you gear some, but bring what equipment you can.
Okay, exciting news in the world of SDMB day z.
I won my 2 day battle with youtube and finally managed to get our group fight videofrom Monday up. That was the first battle I’ve ever been in (rather than 1v1 or 2v2 sudden ganking) and it’s pretty cool.
And bigger news, Interconnected Series of Tubes and… b… whatever his SDMB name is were looting grocery stores when they managed to see a guy in a car and take it. It’s now parked off in the woods. We have our first car. Figure out where you are in the world, try to get somewhere westish, and we can pick you up if we have room. Starting in a few hours.