Dayz Survival Tips – How do you identify and solve the sickness?

Infection

Symptoms: Your character is occasionally grunting, your vision blurs, you have no blood gain and persistent health loss.

Cause: Getting a cut or treating a cut without disinfected bandages.

Cure: Use alcoholic or iodine tincture on the wound to disinfect it but that only works in the early stages of infection. In any case take Tetracycline as that should help it clear up.

Cholera

Symptoms: Your vision blurs, you are being sick and getting dehydrated.

Cause: Drinking unclean water.

Cure: This one takes a few days to cure, use Tetracycline. When you need to eat or drink take small bites or sips to avoid being sick again straight away.

Cold

Symptoms: The only symptoms are sneezing. If you have more than sneezing then its probably flu (influenza)

Cause: The common cold can be caught from other survivors or you can get it by being exposed to the elements i.e. not wearing warm clothes.

Cure: Use Tetracycline. It can go naturally but takes ages so tetracycline is the best method if you can find some.

Flu (influenza)

Symptoms: The main symptoms are coughing but you can sneeze and have a fever too.

Cause: The flu can be caught from other survivors or you can get it by being exposed to the elements i.e. not wearing warm clothes.

Cure: Use Tetracycline. It can go naturally but takes ages so tetracycline is the best method if you can find some.

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.