How to Install DayZ and Join a Server

You spawn on a beach with a rag, a torch and no map. The first decision DayZ asks you to make is which direction inland is, and it will not help you answer it.

Two hours later you have a rifle, a coat and a bag full of tinned food, and you are standing in a treeline watching a building because somebody might be in it. Then a voice behind you says hello and the two hours are over.

That loop is the entire game and it has survived a decade of survival games trying to improve on it. Listings collect on the DayZ hub, and this guide is about the part that matters most in this game: which server you pick, because in DayZ the server is not a venue, it is the ruleset.

Getting it

DayZ is a paid game on Steam. Buy it, install it from your Library, and set aside a reasonable download — this is a large modern game and not one of the small old ones elsewhere on this site.

There is a paid map expansion, Livonia, which adds a second official terrain. You do not need it to start. Buy it if you find yourself on servers running it, and not before.

If Steam is new to you, our guide to installing Steam covers account setup and security first.

Hardware matters here more than in most of the games covered on this site. DayZ renders a very large terrain with a lot of view distance, and the frame rate in a town is not the frame rate in a field. Turning the view distance down is the single most effective setting change if you are struggling, and it costs you the ability to spot people at range — which is a real trade rather than a free win.

The server is the game

This is the part that new players skip and then spend a week confused about.

DayZ servers fall into two broad camps, and they play so differently that describing them as the same game is close to inaccurate.

Official servers run the game as the developers ship it. Standard loot, standard timings, no additions. They are the reference experience and they are harsh — gear is genuinely scarce, and finding a working firearm with ammunition that fits it is an achievement rather than a step.

Community servers are run by anybody who wants to, and they change whatever they like. Boosted loot so everyone starts armed. Trader outposts where you sell what you find. Base-building rules that make raiding easier or nearly impossible. Rules against killing on sight. Whole additional maps.

Neither is the correct one. But joining a heavily modified server expecting the pure survival experience — or joining an official server expecting to find a rifle in the first twenty minutes — is how people decide the game is broken.

Our comparison of modded and vanilla servers is written about a different game and the reasoning transfers exactly.

The other settings that change everything

Read these off a listing before you commit an evening:

• First person or third person. Third-person servers let you see over walls and around corners without exposing yourself, which changes every engagement in the game. First-person-only servers remove that, and a lot of long-term players will play nothing else.
• Night cycle. Some servers run accelerated nights, some run permanent day, some run real darkness where a torch is a beacon that announces you from a kilometre away. This decides whether you need a headlamp or not.
• Player slots. A high-population server on Chernarus means constant contact. A quieter one means an hour of walking. Both are legitimate; they are not the same hobby.
• Wipe schedule. Community servers reset periodically, and joining two days before a wipe means your base disappears. Our piece on wipe schedules for solo players is about Rust, and the arithmetic is identical.

Connecting

The game keeps its own server browser, reachable through its launcher and from inside the game, with filters for map, population, perspective and mods.

Two habits will save you time.

Filter first, then read. Filtering to your region, to first or third person, and to servers with people on them cuts a list of thousands to a list you can actually assess.

Favourite anything you liked. DayZ characters are stored per server or per group of servers, which means the server you played on last night is where your character is. Rejoining a different one puts you back on the beach with a rag. This catches everyone once.

The browser also accepts an address typed in directly, which is how you join a community server that a friend has sent you. Take the whole address including its port — a host running several servers on one machine has moved most of them off any default, and an address without a port is the most common reason a join fails silently.

Addresses and populations gather on the DayZ server list, where entries are queried directly rather than taking a server's own word for how busy it is.

Modded servers

A modded server will need your client to have the same mods it does. The game handles fetching them, and the first join to a heavily modded server takes a while.

Do not go subscribing to mods in advance because a server's Discord listed them. Let the game work out what it needs. Manually assembled mod folders that almost match the server's are a well-known way to spend an evening reading error messages.

Your first hour, in order

1. Work out which way is inland. The sea is behind you. Walk away from it.
2. Find a town, but not the big one. Small villages have less loot and far fewer people. That is the correct trade when you have nothing worth defending.
3. Solve water and food before anything else. You are already dehydrated when you spawn. Wells, ponds and tinned food are more urgent than a weapon.
4. Pick up a knife and something to open cans with. A can of food you cannot open is a joke the game will make at your expense.
5. Get a bag. Carrying capacity is the actual progression system in this game.
6. Do not go to the airfield. Everybody goes to the airfield. That is where the guns are and that is where the people with guns are.

The mistake almost every new player makes is treating a firearm as the goal. A player with food, water, a full canteen and a map will outlive a player with a rifle and nothing else, because the rifle does not stop you bleeding out from a broken leg on a hillside two kilometres from anything.

The systems that will kill you before another player does

Temperature. Being wet and cold will kill you. Rain is a threat, swimming is a serious decision, and a fire is worth the time it takes to build.

Broken legs. Falling badly, or dropping from a height you thought was fine, immobilises you. Splints exist. Learn to make one before you need one.

Infection and sickness. Drinking from the wrong place, eating rotten food, or an untreated wound produce conditions that take a long time to kill you and cannot be ignored.

Your own inventory. Ammunition has to be loaded into magazines, and magazines have to be in the right weapon. Finding a rifle, ammunition for it and a magazine that fits are three separate events.

The infected are a nuisance rather than the threat. They are loud, they attract attention, and fighting one in a town tells everybody nearby where you are. That is their real function.

Voice, and the reason people keep playing

DayZ has proximity voice chat, and it is the most important feature in the game.

Meeting another player is not a combat encounter by default. It is a negotiation conducted by two people who both have weapons and neither of whom can verify anything the other says. Some of it ends in gunfire. A surprising amount of it ends in two strangers travelling together for an hour and then parting.

No other game produces this reliably, and it is why DayZ has outlasted almost everything that copied it. Turn your microphone on. Playing this game silently removes the half of it that is actually good.

Server culture varies on this. Roleplay-oriented community servers enforce rules about initiating before shooting, which sounds artificial and produces far more of these encounters. Servers that do not, produce fewer. Read the rules — and if a server has an application process, our note on whitelists people actually apply to explains why the servers with the best reputations tend to have one.

Base building and the long game

Once you have survived a while, the game becomes about holding something. Tents, barrels buried in a forest, a fenced compound with a combination lock on the gate.

The honest warning is that bases in DayZ are less permanent than they look. Codes get brute-forced, servers wipe, and a base advertises that somebody with equipment lives here. Bury a stash in a forest with nothing around it and you will lose less than the person who built a fortress.

Community servers vary enormously on how much base building they allow and how easy raiding is. That setting is often the single biggest difference between two servers running the same map.

Problems you will hit early

The browser shows nothing or takes forever. Filter harder. An unfiltered list of every server in the world is slow to query and useless to read.

You joined and your character was gone. You joined a different server. Check your favourites list against the one you actually played on.

A modded server refuses you. Mods missing or mismatched. Let the game download them rather than assembling them yourself.

The frame rate collapses in towns. Expected. Lower the view distance and the object detail before touching anything else.

You died and cannot find your body. DayZ does not mark it. This is deliberate and it is not going to change.

The neighbours

DayZ started life as a modification for Arma 2, and that original mod is still played on its own servers — the DayZ mod is a rougher, stranger, more improvised thing than the standalone, and some people prefer it for exactly that. Arma 3 is where the military simulation side of the lineage went.

For the survival side, Rust is the harder, faster, more aggressive relative where base building is the point and negotiation mostly is not. Project Zomboid trades the first-person tension for a much deeper simulation and a slower death.

But the thing DayZ does — a stranger's voice, a rifle you do not want to use, and a decision that has to be made in four seconds — remains its own. Community maps like Namalsk push it further by making the environment itself lethal, and are worth finding once the standard terrain stops frightening you.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. DayZ servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.