Hello survivors!

We’re thrilled to announce that DayZ began the new year with a bang, setting an all-time record in January in average player count for the PC on Steam! We couldn’t be happier that so many of you are enjoying the game!

Our main news, however, centers around the release of 2021’s first game update, 1.11. A huge thank you to everyone who participated in the experimental phase of the update on both the PC and Xbox. For those of you who already checked out our changelog (PC, console), you know that this particular update wasn’t focused on any significant additions to the game. DayZ is a complicated beast, and since we had a fair-sized backlog of issues, we decided to focus on bug fixes and improving the game’s stability instead. With that in mind, let’s take a quick look at what this update actually contains.

One of the things we looked at was how the infected collide with players during melee fights and adjusted it so that the infected no longer go inside the player’s character. Getting out of cars had proven tricky in the previous update as well, as some players were randomly teleported onto the car’s roof. This has been fixed and your feet now remain exactly where you’d expect them to be after leaving your vehicle. Sea fishing would also be interrupted at times, but we squashed that issue too and play should now be as smooth as the calm waters. Finally, we improved horticulture in a number of areas, including removing garden plots with the shovel and the infestation of plants.

Moving on, we paid close attention to area damage triggers (used on barbed wire and fireplaces) and players should no longer receive damage when moving out of the area. Speaking of barbed wire, we disabled its dismantling action on any built fence or watchtower from the outside. The maximum heat range for the fireplace was also adjusted and now gives a constant maximum heat bonus within a slightly larger radius, which lowers a player’s chances of burning their feet during warmup sessions.

Our efforts continued with the infamous hand slot desynchronization issues, though we can’t claim victory on that one yet as there are multiple sources that can trigger the problem. Rest assured that this remains a top priority for the team this year and we’d really appreciate your feedback while we work to solve it. The best way to help is by recording a few minutes of gameplay prior to first encountering the issue and getting in touch via our feedback tracker.

If you’re part of our thriving modding community, then you’ll be pleased to learn there’s been a massive improvement on the engine script side of things, which now allows the game server to load more mods than ever before. This, of course, increases the options for community server owners who can now utilize even more creations from our awesome community.

But not all in 1.11 can be simply considered as bug fixing. That is mainly because not everyone on the team can actively contribute to these efforts, which means that even throughout the 1.11 cycle, we were able to continue with limited asset production and balancing efforts. This includes new flags, which are being awarded to player groups from all three platforms (PC, Xbox, and PlayStation) for winning the base building contest.

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Another thing we took note of were the central economy setups for both Chernarus and Livonia. We wound up making a huge balance pass over the number of available magazines and ammo because the economy was way too saturated with spare magazines and ammo boxes in previous versions of the game. This change will reduce the occasionally extreme difference between the number of weapons in the world v.s. the availability of magazines and ammo.

While we’re on the subject of weapons, there’s a new “badass” rifle spawning at helicopter crash sites around Chernarus and Livonia. We decided to name it SVAL, which is the Czech word for muscle. The weapon is derived from the existing VSS rifle, uses 9×39 ammo with an integral suppressor, and has been modified for close-range combat, with the added ability to attach a flashlight and universal sights (western types). We also added a new 20 round magazine for 9×39 ammo, which can be used with both the SVAL and VSS. And we responded to your feedback regarding the signal pistol (introduced in 1.10), so flares should fall much slower now.

One final bit of news – paired with the update, we had a complete wipe on all official servers. The wipe is meant to compliment the update 1.11 for a fresh start into 2021. It also secures us a clean foundation to monitor the changes made with previous economy updates. You can read our official announcement on the wipe here.

As usual, this article provides just a snippet of what is inside of this game update. If you are interested in more details, head out to our forums for changelog notes (PC, console).