Over the past few days I have been explor­ing the hor­ri­bly pun­ish­ing world of Day Z with a friend who I could rarely find, and after all of these adven­tures I learned two key things about the mod.

               1.Never trust ANYONE you don’t already know. EVER.

I have been shot by other play­ers for no rea­son at least 4 times, play­ers who I never shot at, attacked, threat­ened, or spoke too. But nonethe­less I was shot…several times. When run­ning around in Day Z any­thing you carry other than the start­ing equip­ment is of value and it only takes one shot to the head for some­one to steal your val­ued trea­sures. Never run around in plain sight, in par­tic­u­lar avoid the shore­lines with a pas­sion, peo­ple will pick you out along the beach and drop you like  they’ve dropped oth­ers. Death is per­ma­nent and it only takes that one mis­take to lose every­thing. Shoot on sight and don’t be afraid to trick peo­ple with­out weapons into believ­ing you’ll help them, some­one IS going to take their stuff even­tu­ally so… why not you? That hunt­ing knife in par­tic­u­lar looks pretty damn shiny doesn’t it?

             2. A weapon is the most impor­tant thing to find first

Ban­dages, food, water,survival tools, vehi­cles. None of these things com­pare to the impor­tance of a gun or even an axe or crowbar.

Alerted Zom­bies will fol­low you until they lose sight of you entirely and you are too far away to be heard, and if you can’t lose them it won’t mat­ter how far or fast you run they will fol­low you for­ever. The eas­i­est way to deal with this is to run straight for a dock, pull out that hatchet you found and chop the legs of the zom­bies as they slowly wan­der around the dock ( for some rea­son Zom­bies can’t run on the games’ docks only walk ).

Pis­tols will always be far more use­full than rifles or machine guns when it comes to zom­bie slay­ing as well, ammo is more plen­ti­ful and the guns are mostly very quiet.

Day Z is star­tlingly com­plex. From the out­side it often seems like a sim­ple re-skin and re-purpose of ARMA 2 but the tiny changes in the way the game works let play­ers add all the depth that count­less pro­gram­mers never could add. The scarcity of weapons and the preva­lence of zom­bie infested areas quickly turns each and every player against the oth­ers in a war to con­trol the maps key sup­plies and weapons, any player with a matches, water bot­tles or a hunt­ing knife is an instant tar­get as all of these items allow you to sur­vive in the wilderness indefinitely.

Arma 2 was a less than stel­lar, and an unknown to many game. But thanks to this one mod­der the game now sits in steams top sell­ers at #1 for almost 2 weeks straight rivalling the leg­endary Skyrim.

More to come over the next few weeks.