01 · Your First Half Hour
From the spawn animation to your first well, in order.
- Two stones, before anything else Pick up two small stones off a gravel patch or a field and craft a stone knife. A knife cuts rags for bandages, opens tins without spilling half the contents, butchers animals, and performs the silent kill on an unaware infected. Nothing else you find in the first ten minutes does four jobs at once.
- Leave the shoreline, do not run along it Every new character lands on the same coastal strip. Update 1.29 randomised spawn placement further so repeat deaths scatter you more widely, which thinned that crowd but did not remove it. The beach is where people with nothing kill people with nothing over an apple. Pick a bearing inland and hold it.
- Village wells are unlimited and clean On Chernarus and Livonia, a village well gives safe water with no illness risk and no container required. Drink until the Hydrated icon lights, fill a bottle or canteen, then move on. Ponds, rivers and any standing water carry cholera unless you boil it first.
- Energy is the stat that gates everything Hunger is not a countdown to the death screen. It is the switch on blood regeneration. Getting to Energized and Hydrated is the actual objective of hour one, because a character that cannot regenerate blood loses the next fight it survives.
- Clothing is inventory, not wardrobe A hunting jacket, cargo trousers and any real backpack roughly triple what you can carry and add insulation on top. Take the ugly high-capacity item over the good-looking low-capacity one every single time. You can look correct later, from a position of strength.
- Cut a shirt into rags immediately Knife plus any t-shirt gives you rags: bandages for bleeding, tinder for a fire, and the raw material for a splint when you break a leg off a ladder. Carry at least six. They weigh almost nothing and they are the most common reason a new character bleeds out standing still.
- Navigate by signs, rails and pylons There is no minimap. Chernarus road signs name the next settlement, the railway runs the coast and pushes north inland, and power lines link towns together. Those three carry you until you find a map item, and they work at night when you cannot read terrain.
- Treat the first character as reconnaissance You will die near the coast, probably more than once. Use those lives to learn one town's building interiors properly rather than half-learning six. Knowing which house has a back door is worth more than any rifle you find in week one.
02 · The Three Terrains
Each official map breaks a different part of the survival loop.
Chernarus
Around 230 km² · post-soviet coast and farmland
- Wells in most villages, so water is close to a solved problem
- Four loot value tiers running from the coast to the northern border
- Top-tier military at Tisy, the north-west airfield complex and Kamensk
- Long open fields between settlements punish lazy movement
- Suits
- Your first two hundred hours. The most documented terrain in the game by a wide margin.
- Watch
- The north-west airfield and Tisy are permanently contested. Arrive expecting company.
If you learn one terrain, learn this one. Nearly every community server, mod and community map assumes Chernarus geography.
Livonia
Around 163 km² · dense central european forest
- Tree cover is nearly continuous, so contact usually opens inside 150 m
- Permanent contaminated zones at Lukow Airfield and Radunin
- An underground bunker gated behind a Punched Card
- Fewer sight lines means fewer long shots and far more ambushes
- Suits
- Players who prefer stalking through timber to lying in a field with a scope.
- Watch
- Gas. The best static loot sits under it, and you need a sealed mask with a live filter.
Livonia is smaller than Chernarus on paper and feels larger in play, because you can almost never see across it.
Sakhal
Around 83 km² of land · volcanic arctic islands
- Cold is the primary opponent; other players are a secondary problem
- Untreated snow and hot spring water both cause heavy metal poisoning
- Rubber boats carry a driver and three passengers between islands
- Ice fishing for trout, pollock and shrimp replaces inland fishing
- Suits
- Survivors who want the environment itself to be the antagonist for once.
- Watch
- Water chemistry. The only untreated water that is safe comes from the small wells shaped like doghouses.
1.29 extended the Sakhal bunker and cut a second entrance into it, so the island's best loot now has two approaches instead of one chokepoint.
03 · The Numbers Behind the Icons
The status icons are a summary. These are the values underneath them.
- Blood and health are two separate pools Blood tops out at 5,000 and drains from bleeding and gunfire. Colour starts leaving the screen as soon as you drop under 4,500, long before you are in real danger, so treat the first hint of grey as a report rather than an emergency. Health is the slower pool underneath it. You can sit at full blood and still be dying, because an untreated illness is chewing on health directly.
- Blood regeneration has four speeds Fed and watered gives you about 18 mL per minute. Drop either one to a low state and the rate falls to roughly 11.7, and low on both drops it to about 7.6. Let either icon turn red and regeneration stops outright. Topping up a half-empty stomach is therefore worth more than half a can; it is the difference between refilling in twenty minutes and not refilling at all.
- Shock is the stat that knocks you out You carry 100 shock points. Fall below 26 and you go unconscious, and you do not wake until it climbs back over 50. Most player-versus-player deaths are a knockout followed by someone walking over and finishing you, not a single clean kill.
- Six kilograms is the stamina line Under about 6 kg of carried load your stamina bar is untouched. Every kilogram past that shaves it down. A full military kit with a spare rifle strapped on is exactly why you cannot climb the ladder or sprint the last hundred metres to cover.
- Stamina refills in about twenty seconds Empty to full takes roughly twenty seconds standing still. Learn that number, because it is the cost of the decision you are about to make: sprint into the open now, or wait twenty seconds and arrive able to aim.
- Cold is a ladder, not a switch The temperature icons escalate through mildly chilly, cold, and outright shivering. By the time the shivering stage appears you are losing health, not comfort. Wet clothing pushes you up that ladder faster and keeps you there until you dry at a fire.
- Stuffed is a genuine failure state Eat past full and your character vomits, throwing away the water and energy you just spent acquiring. Eat to Energized and stop. Do not chain four tins at a well because you found them; leave two in the bag for tomorrow.
- Condition changes what an item does Pristine, Worn, Damaged, Badly Damaged, Ruined. Firearms start jamming at Damaged, optics get harder to see through, and clothing insulates worse at every step. Repairs bring an item back up to Worn at best, never to Pristine, so a Badly Damaged jacket is a permanent tax.
04 · Illness, Medicine and Your Blood Type
Far more characters die of a bad drink than of a bad fight.
- Cholera comes out of open water Drinking from ponds, rivers and stagnant water, or from a container you filled there. Vomiting, blurred vision, dehydration, fever. Tetracycline or multivitamins clear it, and boiling the water in a pot or cooking pot beforehand prevents it entirely.
- Salmonellosis comes off your hands Uncooked meat, rotten food, or eating anything at all with bloody hands after butchering an animal. Wash at a well or a pond before you eat, every time. Charcoal tablets and multivitamins treat it once you have it.
- Food poisoning is the self-inflicted one Burnt food, rotten food, gasoline, and unmarked tins you opened out of curiosity. Charcoal tablets fix it, or you wait it out and pay in vomited water and energy. The unmarked tin is never worth the gamble when you are already fed.
- A cough escalates in three stages An untreated common cold becomes influenza, and untreated influenza becomes pneumonia, which adds stamina loss on top of health damage. The first two clear with tetracycline or multivitamins. Pneumonia needs tetracycline and nothing else works, so never let a cough sit through a session.
- Wound infection has two stages, two cures Stage one is screen blur and pain, and disinfectant handles it. Stage two adds fever and steady health damage and needs tetracycline. Disinfect your rags before you bandage with them and you skip the entire problem for the cost of one spray.
- Prion disease has no cure at all Eating steak, guts or fat taken from a dead human gives you brain prion disease. Tremors first, then uncontrollable laughter, then death. There is no treatment and no recovery. The character is finished the moment you swallow; only a new character clears it.
- Gas poisoning needs the antidote, not pills Walking into a contaminated zone without a sealed mask and a live filter brings coughing, vomiting, bleeding and eventually unconsciousness. PO-X antidote is the fix. Filters are consumable, so check the condition before you step in rather than after.
- Learn your blood type before you need it Every character is assigned a random blood type at creation. A blood test kit reads it, on yourself or on someone else. Transfusing an incompatible type causes a hemolytic reaction that does not kill instantly but does kill. Test the patient; do not trust the donor's confidence.
- O negative gives, AB positive takes O- is the universal donor and AB+ the universal recipient. If your group runs blood bags, test everyone once on a quiet evening and keep the list somewhere outside the game. Doing it while a teammate is unconscious on the floor is how the wrong bag goes in.
05 · Why the Loot Is Where It Is
The server runs a world-wide budget, not a loot table bolted to each building.
- Every item class has a target count The central economy tries to hold a set number of each item alive in the world at any moment. That target is the nominal. When the live count falls under the minimum, the server prioritises that class until the count climbs back toward the nominal.
- Hoarding suppresses spawns for everyone Items sitting in your tents are still alive in the world and still counted. A clan sitting on thirty military rifles is a large part of the reason the airfield is bare for the other fifty players. This is a real mechanic, not a rumour, and it is why wipes feel generous.
- Lifetime is a cleanup clock Each class carries a lifetime in seconds. Untouched ground loot is removed when it expires, which is exactly why an old firefight site goes bare and why a body you meant to come back to is gone. Picking an item up and putting it down again restarts that clock.
- Restock controls the drip rate Restock is the delay before the economy is allowed to add more of a class back in. It is the reason high-value military gear trickles rather than floods after a server reset, and why sitting on a barracks all evening feels less productive than moving.
- Nothing spawns while you stand on it The economy will not place items into a building with a player parked on top of it. Clearing a barracks and then camping the doorway produces nothing at all. Leaving the area properly and looping back later is what actually refills it.
- Chernarus runs four value tiers Tier one on the coast is civilian basics. Tier two inland towns add mid-grade firearms and ammunition. Tier three carries most military gear. Tier four is Tisy, the north-west airfield complex and Kamensk, where the rarest attachments and plate carriers live and where everybody else is heading too.
- Crash sites and convoys are events Dynamic events place their own loot on their own timers, independent of the building tiers. That is why an untouched wreck can sit in a field two kilometres from any settlement, and why experienced groups patrol routes and timings rather than buildings.
06 · Caliber Discipline
You do not collect guns here. You collect ammunition and then find something that eats it. The Road to Badlands half of 1.29, live since 15 July 2026, added the SCR-17 battle rifle and holo sights to that pool.
| Caliber | Weapons that take it | What it is actually for |
|---|---|---|
| 7.62x39mm | KA-M, SKS, CR-527 Carbine | The workhorse. Shows up from tier two inland towns upward, hits hard at realistic ranges, and enough guns feed on it that you will keep shooting instead of carrying a trophy. |
| 5.45x39mm | KA-74, KAS-74U | Flatter and lighter than 7.62x39 with noticeably less recoil. The KAS-74U accepts a suppressor, which makes it the quiet close-range option for working through a settlement. |
| 5.56x45mm | M4-A1, M16-A2, AUR A1 and AX, LE-MAS | Military tier. Very good past 200 m with a decent optic, but every other player on the server is hunting the same magazines, so plan your route around competition, not just spawn rates. |
| 7.62x51mm (.308) | LAR, Tundra, CR-550 Savanna, B95 | The overlap caliber. It feeds a battle rifle and civilian bolt-actions alike, so hunting lodges and military sites both refill you. If you want one caliber for a long-lived character, this is the argument. |
| 7.62x54mmR | Mosin 91/30, VSD | The Mosin is a low-tier find that kills anything on the map. Five rounds, no magazine, slow bolt. A scope mount turns it into the cheapest long rifle in the game. |
| 9x39mm | VSS, SVAL | Integrally suppressed and subsonic. Rare, short-ranged, and the only rifles that do not announce your position to an entire valley. Carry it for the work you want nobody to hear. |
| 9x19mm | CR-75, MP5-K, PP-19 Bizon | Police and civilian spread, weak per round but genuinely abundant. The Bizon's helical magazine holds far more than anything else available at that tier, which matters more than damage indoors. |
| .45 ACP | FNX-45, USG-45 | Heavier pistol round with real close-range authority. The FNX-45 takes both a suppressor and an optic, which makes it an actual sidearm rather than a placeholder until you find a rifle. |
| 12 gauge | Izh-18, MP-133, Vaiga | Doorway insurance. Loud, slow to reload, decisive inside a room. Pellets spread quickly, so treat it as a tool for distances under 30 m and never as an answer to someone in a field. |
07 · How Fights Actually End
Two or three hits, then a knockout, then somebody standing over you.
- Armour covers the body, not a hitbox Vests and helmets apply protection across the whole character rather than to a modelled panel. A plate carrier does not leave your legs bare; it reduces every incoming hit. That is why the marginal value of a second vest layer is small and the value of a helmet is enormous.
- The ballistic helmet is the best single item Roughly 75 percent reduction against bullets and around 45 percent against melee for the part it covers. It can absorb a rifle round at close range and leave you conscious, which is the only outcome that matters, because conscious means you can still shoot back.
- Plate carriers turn deaths into knockouts Multiple hits into a good plate carrier tend to put you on the floor rather than kill you outright, and a high-caliber hit makes you stagger. That is survivable with a teammate standing over you and completely fatal when you are alone, which should change how you play solo.
- Your inventory soaks up damage Incoming hits can be applied to items your clothing is carrying. A ruined tin of beans or a shredded jacket is a bullet that never reached your health pool. Replace ruined clothing rather than keeping it out of sentiment; the wrecked item has already done its one job.
- Bandage first, reposition second Bleeding removes blood continuously and does not care how tactical your plan is. Stop the bleed, then move. Players die at effectively full health every day because they sprinted 200 m to cover while leaking the whole way.
- Set your zero, then leave it alone Zeroing steps in 100 m increments. Pick the value that matches the ground you are actually fighting on and then stop adjusting mid-engagement. A wrong zero at 300 m is a clean miss and a free reposition for the other person.
- Damaged firearms jam A weapon at Damaged or Badly Damaged will fail to cycle, and it will do it at the worst possible moment rather than on a range. Carry a cleaning kit. Never keep a Badly Damaged rifle purely because it matches the ammunition you happen to be holding.
- Do not push a wall you cannot trade through If you cannot see a teammate's angle onto the same doorway, you are not pushing, you are donating a kit. Wait for the second gun to arrive or wait for them to move first. Patience is free; the rifle in your hands took two hours to find.
08 · Sound Is the Real Detection System
The infected and the players find you the same way.
- The infected have a search state When one first senses you it grunts and switches into a hunting state, heading for the last place it noticed you and becoming much more alert. Crouch or go prone at that exact moment, stay still, and if you are far enough away it will often drop back to idle.
- Breaking line of sight resets them Put a wall, a hedge or a building corner between you and hold position. They commit to the last known point rather than tracking you through cover. Running in a straight line away from one does the opposite; it keeps you visible the entire time.
- The knife kill is silent and instant Approach an unaware infected from behind with a knife and you get a unique animation that kills it outright without alerting the others nearby. It is the single most useful stealth tool in the game and it is available from a stone knife in your first ten minutes.
- Melee beats gunfire inside a settlement A knife or machete costs the least stamina per swing and does not pull the whole street down on you. Two or three swings settle a single infected, and the crafted options are stronger than their reputation, so the stone knife you made on the beach stays useful long after you have found a rifle you are not willing to fire indoors.
- One unsuppressed shot is a public invitation Gunfire drags infected in from well outside your view and hands every player in the area a bearing on you. If you have to shoot inside a settlement, be moving out as you fire. The loot in that building is not worth being the loudest thing in the valley.
- Suppressors wear out They degrade with every round fired and stop working entirely at Ruined. Treat a suppressor as a consumable with a round count rather than a permanent attachment, and take it off before you spray at an infected horde you could have walked around.
- Wolves commit and you cannot outrun them They arrive as a pack, circle, and take turns. Open ground is the worst possible answer. Get your back to a rock, a vehicle or a doorway so only one can reach you at a time, and fight there. Firing into the pack scatters them far more reliably than running does.
- Bears end the conversation A bear closes ground faster than its size suggests and a couple of swipes finishes most characters outright. Engage at range with a rifle you trust or do not engage at all. Never take one on while a wolf pack is still somewhere behind you.
09 · Sakhal Runs on Heat and Clean Water
The arctic map inverts the priority list you learned on Chernarus.
- Untreated snow poisons you Melting snow and drinking it, or drinking straight from a hot spring, causes heavy metal poisoning. This is a volcanic island, so the contamination is mineral rather than bacterial, and that single fact breaks every water habit you brought with you.
- Boiling does nothing here Boiling and chlorine tablets kill pathogens and leave heavy metals exactly where they were. Chelating tablets or a filtering bottle are the only two things that actually work, so one of them belongs in your kit before you own a rifle.
- The doghouse wells are the safe water The small well structures that look like doghouses are the only source you can drink from untreated. Map their positions on your regular route the same way you would map a military site, because they decide where you can afford to travel.
- Do not take chelating tablets too early At stage one or two, heavy metal poisoning clears on its own in around forty minutes, faster with high immunity, and taking tablets at that point actually slows the recovery. Save them for stage three, where they are the only route back down, and even then they only take you to stage two.
- Frozen food has to be thawed Food found frozen is worthless until you warm it at a fireplace, in the same way wet clothing has to be dried. Build the fire into your route plan rather than hoping one appears. On this map a fireplace is a meal, a dry jacket and a body temperature reset in one.
- Fishing moved onto the ice Inland lakes are frozen solid, so fishing means ice holes and the coast. Steelhead trout and pollock come to a rod, and shrimp come out of a small trap. Unlike on the other maps this is a genuine food supply rather than a novelty.
- Boats are the real vehicle here A rubber boat with an outboard motor takes a driver and three passengers between islands. It is faster than any shoreline route on foot and it keeps you out of deep snow, which means it also keeps your temperature where you want it.
- Hunt the reindeer, not the wolves Frostline put reindeer, hares and foxes on the island, and a reindeer is a large amount of meat plus a pelt you can turn into warm clothing. A fox pelt and a leather sewing kit craft the fox headdress. Hares are the quiet option: no gunshot, no pack circling you afterwards.
10 · Bunkers and Bad Air
The highest-value ground in the game is gated behind an item, not a rifle.
- The Livonia bunker wants a Punched Card Punched Cards turn up inside the permanent contaminated zones at Lukow Airfield and Radunin, and drop from the military infected officer wearing a hip holster at convoy sites roughly four times out of ten. They are small items, so search bodies and floors carefully rather than at a jog.
- Every read degrades the card A Punched Card drops one condition step each time you use it on a reader, and a Ruined card is dead weight. Plan on a couple of entries per card and bring a second if you intend to make two trips in an evening.
- The tower entrance needs two people One player works the card reader at the top of the tower while a second waits at the door below to take control of the inner switch. The main door can be opened solo. The tower route cannot, so do not walk that way expecting to improvise.
- The Sakhal bunker is a four-step chain Find the dead scientist in white protective gear and take the briefcase; collect the scientist camp keys from the camps near the volcano; open the case for the glow plug; then fuel and start the generator on the southern military peninsula. Skip a step and you have walked the island for nothing.
- Throw the vault switches one at a time The generator powers four vault door switches. Operating more than one at once shorts the circuit and resets your progress. Work them in sequence, loot one room, come back for the next, and accept that this is a slow job in a loud place.
- Contaminated ground wants a full seal A mask with a working filter plus protective clothing, and PO-X antidote in the bag for the moment the seal fails. Filters are consumables with a visible condition. Check it before you walk in, because there is no checking it once the coughing starts.
11 · Territory, Flags and the Forty-Five Day Clock
A base is not a building. It is a set of expiry timers you are choosing to maintain.
- The fence chain is kit, then soil, then timber A fence kit is two wooden sticks and a rope. Placing it achieves nothing until you dig the foundation with a shovel or pickaxe and add logs on top. Bring the digging tool before you bring the wood, or you will carry logs to a site you cannot start.
- Frames and panels are nail-hungry Budget roughly eight planks and sixteen nails for a frame, and ten planks and twenty nails for the wooden panel over it, with a hammer or hatchet in hand. Nails are the bottleneck, not timber. Loot industrial and farm buildings for them well before you start building.
- Sheet metal roughly doubles panel durability Covering a wooden panel with sheet metal is the cheapest meaningful upgrade a wall can get. Do the side someone would realistically attack first, which is usually the one facing the treeline rather than the one facing your own door.
- Watchtowers cost four logs per level The kit is a rope and four wooden sticks; each level takes four logs, with planks and nails on top for stairs and flooring. A two-level tower is a multi-session project, not an afternoon, and it is visible from a long way off once it exists.
- A raised flag refreshes timers inside 60 m A completed flag pole with the flag hoisted resets the expiry timers on structures and containers within a 60 metre radius. Everything you actually want to keep belongs inside that circle, which is a good reason to build compact rather than sprawling.
- Forty-five days without a flag, up to ninety with one Fences, watchtowers and tents expire after roughly 45 days untouched. A maintained flag can stretch that toward 90. The flag itself lowers gradually over about 45 days and has to be re-hoisted, so a base is a subscription you pay in visits.
- A combination lock is a delay, not a wall A three-dial lock on a gate costs a raider with a pickaxe or a sledgehammer time, and nothing more. It does not stop anyone. What it decides is whether they are still working on it when you or your group log back in.
- A vehicle is the loudest thing you can own A car wants a battery, spark plug, radiator, fuel and four working wheels, and getting one running is a full session. Park it inside a treeline and away from your actual site, because a parked car in the open is a sign saying somebody lives within walking distance.
13 · Habits That Get a Character Past Week One
None of these are clever. All of them compound.
- Carry medicine before a second rifle Tetracycline, charcoal, disinfectant, six rags and a splint weigh almost nothing and cover most of the ways this game actually kills people. A spare rifle covers none of them and eats the stamina you will want when something goes wrong.
- Learn one settlement's interiors properly Knowing which building in a town has a second exit and which has a blind staircase is worth more than knowing where the airfield sits. You cannot fight well in a room you have never stood in, and you cannot leave one either.
- Keep a second cache Your main site will be found eventually; assume it. A small buried case or a single tent two kilometres away holding one working rifle, one medical kit and a full canteen is the difference between a bad evening and starting the whole character again.
- Log out somewhere boring Never disconnect inside a military building, on a road, or in a town centre. A treeline 300 m from anything interesting is worth the extra two minutes of walking, because you rejoin exactly where you left and you rejoin blind.
- Write down what killed you Location, time of day, what you were carrying, and what you did in the ten seconds before it happened. Six entries in and the pattern is embarrassingly obvious, and it is almost never your aim. It is usually stamina, noise, or impatience at a doorway.
- Fight at full stamina or do not fight Your sights sway with an empty bar and you cannot disengage from anything. If you are breathing hard, break contact, take the twenty seconds, then decide. The fight you skip costs you nothing; the fight you take winded costs you the character.
- Talk first on low-stakes contacts Direct voice only carries a short distance and most players are as nervous as you are. Two calm sentences resolve more encounters than a raised rifle, particularly with a new spawn who has nothing you want and everything to lose.
- Know what is coming next 1.29 has been the stable build since 8 April 2026, with the Road to Badlands half landing on 15 July. Update 1.30 brings the Badlands expansion and Nasdara Province, a 267 km² arid borderland that is the largest terrain Bohemia has built, on 15 October 2026, along with the game's first two-wheeled vehicles. Water scarcity is the stated design pressure there, so the habits above get more useful, not less.