Greetings survivors!

Hold on to your loot because the biggest game update of the year has arrived on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation! Believe us when we say it’ll change your adventures in DayZ forever. Before we dive in, however, we’d like to thank everyone on PC and Xbox who participated in the update’s experimental phase and submitted their feedback. It really helped us out a lot! Now let’s get to the update.

We’re introducing a new type of passive environmental threat – Contaminated Areas. These areas come in two variants: static and dynamic. Static areas are meant to lock away high tier loot, while dynamic areas make the world more dynamic. We’ve worked hard to make your experience as immersive as possible through various visual / sound effects. These areas will also finally make use of already present NBC gear such as suits and gas masks. Should anyone enter these areas unprepared, they’re going to face the deadliest disease we’ve ever implemented.

All you wilderness survivalists out there will be happy to learn that we’ve added hunting traps. This includes a bigger fishnet trap, a small fish bottle trap, and a snare trap. Each trap is capable of catching its own unique animal based on where the trap is placed and the type of bait that’s used. We’ve also added a new booby trap – the tripwire – everyone’s favorite trap to stumble over in the most unwanted situations.

Helicopter crash sites have received some long overdue attention. The Russian site has received a significant model update, alongside the addition of the smoke particle, which is now visible from a greater distance. Every helicopter crash site now makes a sound, which can be heard from far away, thereby alerting anyone in the vicinity. We’ve also increased the chances of finding rare loot at these sites.

Our animations department has prepared a new set of animations for the bullpup rifles. This has allowed us to introduce a first in DayZ – the LE-MAS assault rifle! This exotic looking assault rifle uses 5.56x45mm ammunition in its unique 25 round magazine and offers single, burst, and automatic fire. Why did we choose to focus on this rifle and not the bullpup present in the legacy version of DayZ, you ask? Sadly, all of the weapon assets from the legacy version need to be reworked, while the LE-MAS was made with the new animation system in mind.

This update features a lot of changes that were made for our talented modding community. Make sure to check out the complete change notes (PC, consoles) for all the details. In addition to that, Linux server distribution has entered the experimental phase of development. While we’re not ready to deploy it to the stable branch just yet, we would like to thank everyone who has already provided feedback from their own testing of the server on their Linux machines.

And in case everything we’ve already mentioned still isn’t enough, we’ve also raised the FPS cap for all our PlayStation 5 players to 60 frames per second!

We really enjoyed working on this update and we hope you’re going to have a ton of fun adventures!

On behalf of the DayZ team,

Adam