Dayz Survival Tips – Water

One of the main tips when starting as a noob on the beach is to find a water pump in a town or village and drink until you can’t drink anymore. Eventually, this symbol will show indicating if you continue then you will be sick, that is the time to stop and move on with your adventure:

Dayz Full Stomach Symbol
Dayz Full Stomach Symbol

When you eat or drink, it first goes into your stomach. The stomach can hold 2000 millilitres of content. When the volume reaches 1500 the stomach symbol appears, and when you hit the 2000 limit, you’ll vomit to empty the stomach. If you stop eating before that though, it takes about 5 minutes to digest the food and turn it into energy and hydration. While the contents are being digested and drop below 1500, the stomach icon will go away. Filling up on water at the start of your journey will mean you can easily get away from the coast or do some serious looting without having to worry about your water level for a while.

If you find a water bottle in Dayz or a canteen of water I would not drink it straight away as there is a chance you could get a nasty disease, make sure you pour out any water that comes with it and refill at a pump. Receptacles can be filled and water can be drunk from ponds, lakes, dams and extracted from water pumps.

There is no need to disinfect bottles or canteens, disinfecting bottles does nothing. You can use chlorine tablets to get rid of the chance of contracting cholera from bottles of water that you have found containing water that is potentially infected. There is a chance of getting it from water pump too so using a chlorine tablet or taking a multivitamin pill before drinking is a great way to protect yourself. If you have been gutting anything and are not wearing gloves then make sure you wash your hands before drinking too as this can also lead to getting sick.

Another nice tip is to use some larger vessels like jerrycans or cooking pots to drink from, you can use 1 chlorine tablet on it but get to drink a whole lot more water. Drinking rainwater from barrels is 100% safe as well unless you pour contaminated water into it then it ruins the entire barrel and you can’t use chlorine tablets on it.

Written at Dayz version 1.13.

Dayz Survival Tips – Scrumping!

Normally when I’m a fresh spawn I’ve been close to death many times and one thing has saved my life – Scrumping! There are fruit trees everywhere in DAYZ though I will focus on three in particular the apple, pear and plum trees. You can find fruit on the floor next to the trees in various states either raw, dried or rotten.

Where are these fruity trees?

Fruit trees are everywhere and you can use one of the DAYZ interactive loot maps to find them, after a while you will start to recognise the trees and not need the map anymore. Generally I have found that most of the trees in a town and in gardens of houses are fruit trees so that is a good place to look. In some places there are orchards with loads of fruit trees in, generally with these it depends how big they are to how successful your fruit finding will be. Weirdly the bigger the orchard the less fruit you will find as I think they have the same amount spawning per area no matter how many trees there are.

What fruit can I eat?

As I said above the fruit spawns as either raw, dried or rotten. You can eat raw or dried fruit straight away without any danger of becoming sick. Though the dried fruit doesn’t look very appetising its actually very good for your food levels. Take the standard raw apple for example, when you eat it you get 100kcal food energy and 75ml of water. Eating a dried apple will give no water but 200kcal food energy which is double the raw apple. Cooking the apple does increase the food energy slightly but generally isn’t worth the effort.

Eating burned or rotten food will make you sick.

How often does Fruit Respawn?

Constantly! Pick a piece of fruit up, run around a little and come back to that same tree a moment later and it may have some more for you to pick up. There are some areas where you have a close patch of 10 or so trees where you can literally do a loop running around each one checking for fruit then it will keep respawning. Make sure you pick up all fruit, even rotten ones as doing so will allow more fruit to spawn there. Somewhere like this with a couple of houses and 10 or so trees is perfect for the scrumping loop:

The DAYZ Scrumping Loop
The DAYZ Scrumping Loop

Happy scrumping and please do leave a message below if you have anything to add to help our fellow scrumpers survive this zombie apocalypse.

Written at Dayz version 1.13.

Deadly Days – What Can I Get From Each Mission Type?

The supermarket provides mostly food so if thats what you need pick this one.

Airdrops provides weapon(s) 1-3 and normally at least one special weapon.

The warehouse provide base items.

Rescue – Get a new teammate.

Scavenge provides lots of normal loot spots including:

  • Houses = scrap, *maybe weapon, *base item, *active item
  • Secret House = Scrap, *food, *base/active/weapon
  • Cars = Scrap, *maybe weapon
  • Trees = 1-3 food
  • Billboard = Pretty obvious based on the picture
  • HELP = New survivor

Airdrop = 1-3 Weapons

Graveyard – Weapons and can dig up a dead survivor to rejoin the party.

The hospital provides a bit of everything. While looting it, you can get food, scrap, and a guaranteed power as well.

The fire department lowers your threat level by 3-5, I normally always pick these.

Burger provides very little food and a piece of a final mission map.

Command and Conquer Red Alert Remastered Online PVP Tips, Guide and Strategy

Command and Conquer was a game I played religiously as a child in the 90s, the good news is that in May 2020 they remastered it and online play is back with a bang. The downside is that I am older now and had long forgotten all of the strategy and tools I used to use to win. Well after a couple of months playing and re-learning my methods I can share a few good tips to get you going online.

There is no one method that will beat every opponent in every scenario on every map but I’ll walk you through a good strategy thats seen me win more than I lose and should give you a good idea where you have been going wrong and what to do to correct it. Lots of other guides will tell you to do things like get an APC and fill it with tanyas/engineers then sneak it into the enemies base and that can work but that has one major problem, if they kill the APC or kill the units before you have done enough damage then you lose as they will walk over your base in a few seconds.

Most Red Alert online games basically boil down to who can build the most tanks in the midgame and use them in the most efficient way. When you attack another player with your tanks you want to outnumber them and out maneuver them to be able to take down their tank army then you will be able to roll over the base unchallenged.

Early Game

Build your command centre then build a power plant then build a barracks.

Barracks, scouts and man rushes:

Scouting is very important as revealing large parts of the map early on gives you an advantage. For scouting build minigunners and sent one to each corner of the map and some inbetween too. Sometimes a man rush can work early on so you could build 20 minigunners (in addition to the scouts) then send them to another base as quick as possible in the hope of taking down an early building or two. Watch out for other people manrushing you – If they do this make sure you spot it early and build lots of minigunners to defend against it or a well placed pillbox. A good idea is to dot a few minigunners around your base as one stationary minigunner can take out multiple enemy minigunners running past. When scouting, placing minigunners or man rushing an enemy its extremely important you are building at the same time, do not let it distract you from building your base and getting to the next stage.

Ore refinaries, war factories:

After you’ve built your barracks you need to focus on economy so build an ore refinary as close to an ore field as possible. This is one of the key things people don’t do well sometimes, they think they should have their base huddled in a corner with loads of tessla coils/pillboxes/turrets protecting it. Wrong. Only build tessla coils/pillboxes/turrets if you need to handle a situation like with the man rush example above. In terms of placing your buildings the best method is to snake them out accross the map to reach further ore fields. It may make you slightly more vulnerable if someone attacks but the benefits outweigh the risks big time as you will have access to much more ore therefore can grown your economy quicker and better economy ultimately means more tanks!

C&C Red Alert - Tips To Place Buildings and Snaking Accross the Map
C&C Red Alert – Tips To Place Buildings and Snaking Accross the Map

Talking of tanks you need to place a war factory next though first thing out of the war factory should normally be a second harvester unless you are planning on sending a load of early tanks to your opponent or defending against a load of early tanks from your opponent. Early tank attacks can be successful though you will greatly sacrifice your economy by doing so. Its best to build a couple of extra harvesters before mass producing the tanks as you will very quickly burn through your cash once you start scaling up production (covered in next section).

Middle Game

Extra ore refineries and extra war factories

Ok you got the first bit sorted, scouts have flown to all corners revealing roughly where your opponent is, moneys coming in and tanks are rolling out. Building another ore refinery is good as you get a harvester with it and somewhere new to dock, it also makes it easier to farm some of the new ore fields you have been building towards (see snaking above). We need to speed up production now and build a radar at some point too. The way you speed up production in this game is by building more of the same type of buildings. So next thing to do is build a second war factory, this will double the speed your tanks are created. Obviously this is good as will mean massing huge army quicker but also it will eat more funds so make sure you have the ore refineries and harvesters to support it. A good rule of thub is one war factory to one ore refinery plus extra harvester. I don’t normally do this but you can even build a second command centre which means you can create buildings at twice the speed too!

Radar

Radar is important but its very difficult to guage exactly when to build it. Radar will mean you have a heads-up when opponents are moving towards you and also makes it easier for you to move your units accross the map. By this point your opponent may start to prod your defenses and you may have prodded your opponent a bit and movement is key to getting to the end game. Sometimes rather than battling your tanks in the middle of a map they may drive straight past into your base to try to take down a building or two and you then need to decide do I defend my base or do I counter attack? Whatever you do make sure the whole time you are building new buildings and mass producing the tanks. Often if someone tries to brute force into your base past your army they will get a building but while they are doing that you can destroy the majority of their tanks which in turn will leave their base vulnerable.

End Game

The end game is when you and your opponents have set up a nice base, your production lines are flowing and now its time to seal the deal. Most of the time I play the destroy structures mode which means when you have destroyed all of your opponents structures then the game is yours. You can also play where all units and structures have to be destroyed but this can become tedious trying to find that minigunner hidden in a tree.

This phase mostly boils down to who has built the best economy, you will have had some battles by now losing some units and even some buildings, its who can build up again after that and get the advantage. You need to think about being proactive, not waiting until your opponent makes a move. If you see a load of tanks coming towards your base do you use all of your resources defending? Or do you send all of your resources to their base? The answer very much depends on which option is most likely to result in a win but defending alone is not going to win, you need to be able to launch an attack after defending. If you are playing with team mates and you see an opponent make a move like that it means their base is vulnerable so could have one defending the attack while the other sneaks in behind and attacks their base.

Don’t give up, sometimes it may look like the opponent is winning, they have destroyed your command center and you have lost a lot of your army but they often pay a heavy price driving a load of tanks through your base and would have lost a good portion of their army too. I’ve seen games won with only one building left on the map so do everything you can with the bits you have left!

A Good Example Build Order

  • Command center
  • Powerplant
  • Barracks -> scouts -> base perimeter protection -> man rushes (optional)
  • Ore Refinery
  • War factory -> Extra harvester -> 8 tanks -> Extra harvester -> TANKS TANKS TANKS
  • War Factory
  • Advanced Powerplant
  • Radar
  • War factory
  • Ore Refinery
  • Advanced Powerplant
  • War Factory
  • Ore Refinery
  • Etc….

Runescape – The most efficient route for elite scan clues

I seem to do clue scrolls in waves, specially now they stack nicely and go in the clue carrier. Every time I got back to doing a batch I’m never sure which route to take when running the elite scan location clue scrolls. The images below should help! One of the missing maps is is Menaphos – For this one start at the lode then run to imperial district and right click the tomb entrance, go to one of the other districts then repeat for all three. Most of the time the clue will show but if not then you only have a few places out of range you need to run to.

Runescape - Varrock - Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape – Varrock – Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape - Zanaris - Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape – Zanaris – Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape - Tirannwn Elf Lands - Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape – Tirannwn Elf Lands – Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape - The desert, east of the Elid and north of Nardah - Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape – The desert, east of the Elid and north of Nardah – Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape - Taverley Dungeon - Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape – Taverley Dungeon – Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape - Piscatoris Hunter Area - Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape – Piscatoris Hunter Area – Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape - Mos Le'Harmless - Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape – Mos Le’Harmless – Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape - Kharazi Jungle - Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape – Kharazi Jungle – Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape - Keldagrim - Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape – Keldagrim – Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape - Haunted Woods - Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape – Haunted Woods – Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape - Fremennik Isles - Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape – Fremennik Isles – Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape - Brimhaven Dungeon - Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape – Brimhaven Dungeon – Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape - Ardougne - Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape – Ardougne – Elite Clue Scan Route

The chaos tunnels below has now been removed as a scan path (thank the lord!). here is the old map:

Runescape - The Chaos Tunnels - Elite Clue Scan Route
Runescape – The Chaos Tunnels – Elite Clue Scan Route

Runescape – How Does Lootshare Work and What Are Lootshare Points?

What is lootshare?

Lootshare is a way to split up drops for a team or friends chat.  Its used a lot for masses (whether it be the friends chat or group system).  To use lootshare, you need to be in the friends chat with lootshare enabled or group at all times.  You can turn on lootshare by clicking on the little icon at the bottom right corner of the friends chat interface:

Lootshare Icon - Toggle - Money Bag
Lootshare icon Toggle

Lootshare will split drops between the players that have lootshare enabled. You will see in game messages such as “You have received: 63,166 Coins” or “Junglebiscuit has received: 1 Bones” for all drops a boss drops at a time. The player with the highest lootshare points (discussed below) will have the best chance for the drops. For the formal write up on the RS wiki, check out: https://runescape.wiki/w/LootShare

What are lootshare points?

Lootshare points, also called LSP or lootshare potential, is the background system that determines who gets drops in a lootshare group.  Each person has a certain amount of points.  No one is able to check or see how many points they have; this is why there is sometimes mystery behind people’s LSP as there’s no real way to ever know yours or anyone elses.  Basically the higher your LSP, the higher chance you have at getting drops!

Lootshare points reset down to zero eventually.  Jagex has confirmed that this is at 10% per day.  So, if you don’t use, you lose it!  If you are at 10m LSP and do not boss for a day, tomorrow you will only have 9m LSP, then the next day you’ll only have 8.1m LSP, then 7.29m, and so on.  The same works with negative LSP going closer to 0 from the other side.

Pets are NOT effected by lootshare and are instead based on the top dpser or highest damage dealt by a single person.  This person will be the one who gets a roll at the boss pet.

Another important note: you have to be within 16 squares of a boss for lootshare to work, same as normal drops, and you will not see or receive anything if you are too far away.

Here are some examples:

1. There is a 10 person mass. One person gets a 10m drop (say a Cywir wand or similar). The person who got the drop is lootshare picks up the drop and owns the 10m item. Everyone in the group, including the person who got the drop, now gets a split of the lootshare points. This is the item value divided by the amount of people with lootshare turned on (i.e. 10m/10=1m). Each person gets 1 million lootshare points, but the person who got the wand also loses 10m points to have a net of -9m lsp.

2.  A 23 person AoD mass gets a Praesul Codex worth 493m.  Each person gets 21.43m LSP points.  The person who got the codex is now at -471.57m LSP.

3. A Vindicta mass is going on with 9 people. There is an uber rare drop of 1 dragon bone.  Each person gains about 263 gp of LSP.

Runescape – Adding Perks To Weapons and Armour To Help In Combat – A Beginners Guide

Invention is tricky to understand with all the different components and its difficult to know what combines with what to get something that may help you get a bit more damage in combat or a few useful perks.  There are lots of spreadsheets out there and posts but they seem to be written in code most of them so I’ll try to go through from a beginners point of view to help you understand how to start perking your armour and weapons and a suggest few nice ones to add to help start out.

First Step – Augmenting

The first thing you need to do to your weapon or armour is augment it.  You can make an augmentor or buy it on the grand exchange.  To make it you need divine energy, base parts, flexible parts, tensile parts, enhancing parts and powerful components.  These all take time to get so if you don’t have time or have money then just buy one on the grand exchange.  Once you have one just use it on your weapon or armour piece you want to augment and it will turn into an augmented version ready for the next step.

Second Step – Gizmos

So gizmos are things you need to make and on them you can generate perks which then attach to the augmented armour or weapon to provide a bonus.  To start with you need to make gizmo shells (you can’t buy them).  There is a weapon gizmo shell and an armour gizmo shell, you can also get a tool gizmo shell which I won’t be covering in this post.  You make the weapon gizmo shell with blade parts, crafted parts and strong components at the invention bench.  You make the armour gizmo shell with deflecting parts, crafted parts and protective parts at the invention bench.  Once you have the shells then you can click on them “add materials” to get to the next step.

Update:  If you have invention level 85 then you can use ancient gizmos.  These need to be unlocked via a blueprint you can make or buy on ge but give access to more material slots and allow the use of ancient materials.

Third Step – Adding Materials

So clicking “add materials” on a gizmo shell will bring up a new window:

Runescape Adding Materials To a Gizmo Shell
Runescape Adding Materials To a Gizmo Shell

As you can see from the image above, you click or drag the materials onto the five slots to see what possible perks you can get and then can create it if happy.  When you click create you will not necessarily get the top one and may have to re-roll it a few times until you get what you want, you can also fail it.  If you have enough materials to try again it will let you re-roll on another gizmo shell but it will use a new one, not the previous one.  “But how the hell do I know what materials to add for what perks?”  I hear you cry.  Well that depends what you want to get out!  In the next section I give some tips for those who want to add stuff but don’t want to research the full ins and outs of whats available.

Non-elitist Ok Perks To Get Started

On an augmented two handed weapon you can add two weapon gizmos, otherwise you can add one gizmo to main hand and one to offhand.  Generally I would aim for precise and aftershock perks on weapons if you are after adding extra damage.  The pros go for Precise 4 + Equilibrium 2 in one slot and aftershock 3 in the other but you don’t have to get those exact numbers, even aftershock 1 is better than nothing.

On armour you can have two gizmos on legs and two on tops.  The main ones to aim for are crackling, enhanced devotion, impatient and biting.  The pros will go for things like biting 3 which requires nox components and is too expensive for my tastes but you can get biting 2 for nowhere near the cost and is very helpful.

Weapons – Precise Perk

So to make the first one you want precise really, you can use precise 1-5 on its own instead if you can keep re-rolling until you get what you want.  To get precise 5 add 5 armadyl components to the gizmo shell.  You can’t get that many have a look at the other suggested combos on the wiki page which includes getting equilibrium with it:

https://runescape.wiki/w/Precise

Weapons – Aftershock Perk

Now aftershock perk can seem expensive as you need to use Ilujankan components which come from Anima Core Zaros items which are 18mil at the time of writing but only get you 1 component for disassembling but don’t panic, there is a way to get more.  You buy an Anima Core Legs of Zaros and Anima Core Body of Zaros then augment them both (you don’t need gizmos on them).  Then level them up to level 9 in combat and disassemble which will give you more Ilujankan components and enable you to make this expensive perk.  More details and combos on the wiki page:

https://runescape.wiki/w/Aftershock

Armour – crackling

Crackling 3 is great and can be reasonably cheap to get by using explosive components gathered by disassembling hand cannons.  Even if you only have crackling 1-2 its better than nothing.  You can get it with secondary perks too as shown on the wiki:

https://runescape.wiki/w/Crackling

Armour – Enhanced Devotion

This one is gained by using Faceted components which can be gathered by disassembling crystal items.  A cheaper way to do it is by disassembling crystal flasks or light orbs.  You can get enhanced devotion 2-3 quite easily:

https://runescape.wiki/w/Enhanced_Devoted

Armour – Impatient

Now this one can cost some money as it needs Zaros components and Zamorak components specially if you are after 3, I would go for 1-2 to start with as its a lot cheaper:

https://runescape.wiki/w/Impatient

Armour – Biting

Now as I said above biting 3 is not worth it for most people but biting 2 can be got quite easily and cheaply using direct components.  You can also try to get it with a secondary perk like venonblood/reflexes/mobile.  The compnents you need for this are suggested on the wiki:

https://runescape.wiki/w/Biting

Summary

Now if you have learnt anything from this I hope it is that perking is worth it and doesn’t have to be expensive.  Start with adding a few small cheap perks to get the hang of it and you can easily replace them over time when you get more cash or components.