History VideoGame / DayZ

** In most games, simply wearing a gas mask by itself would be enough to protect you against toxins in the atmosphere. Here, you require a full NBC suit, ''as well as'' a gas mask. Additionally, wearing a gas mask by itself will still confer some slight protection, since you're protecting your character's airway which prevents the gas from rapidly entering the body. Also, once you've absorbed the toxin, you're dead without an antidote or blood transfusion (naturally this has to be with uncontaminated blood). There is no waiting it out - you will carry on coughing and vomiting blood until you die. [[note]]While there are substances which a gas mask will provide complete protection from, there are also ''a lot'' of toxins which can be absorbed via the skin, or attack it outright.[/note]]

** In most games, simply wearing a gas mask by itself would be enough to protect you against toxins in the atmosphere. Here, you require a full NBC suit, ''as well as'' a gas mask. Additionally, wearing a gas mask by itself will still confer some slight protection, since you're protecting your character's airway which prevents the gas from rapidly entering the body. Also, once you've absorbed the toxin, you're dead without an antidote or blood transfusion (naturally this has to be with uncontaminated blood). There is no waiting it out - you will carry on coughing and vomiting blood until you die. [[note]]While there are substances which a gas mask will provide complete protection from, there are also ''a lot'' of toxins which can be absorbed via the skin, or attack it outright.[//note]]

* DeadlyGas: Added in patch 1.14, with emphasis on the ''deadly'' part. You need a gas mask with a filter (which drains and only protects you for a few minutes), and a full [=NBC=] suit to protect you. If you're not fully protected, the gas will burn your skin, and can then enter your blood through the wound. Getting gas poisoning will result in you coughing and vomiting blood, and is pretty much a death sentence unless you can leave the area and then use a rare antidote.

* RuleOfCool: In a gameplay perspective wearing a helmet of any type (even skate helmets) significantly increases your chance of surviving a firefight, [[AcceptableBreaksFromReality even the weakest helmets can stop at least one fatal bullet from entering your skull]] however a good portion of them look really dorky and brightly coloured so lots of players avoid them anyway.
** In addition the medieval helmet [[AwesomeButImpractical is bulky, extremely noticeable, quite heavy and doesn't even last very long in combat]] ……… but it looks so damn cool that some players will go for them anyway, you get to be a zombie apocalypse crusader!

* DeadlyGas: Added in patch 1.14, which emphasis on the "deadly" part. You need a gas mask with a filter (which drains and only protects you for a few minutes), and a full [=NBC=] suit to protect you. If you're not fully protected, the gas will burn your skin, and can then enter your blood through the wound. Getting gas poisoning will result in you coughing and vomiting blood, and is pretty much a death sentence unless you can leave the area and then use a rare antidote.

** In addition to health damage, losing too much blood kills you outright. Losing blood also gradually greys out your vision due to loss of blood pressure, and makes you much more likely to be knocked unconscious from further damage, or passing out from too much exhertion.

* StandardStatusEffects: In addition to food and water, players may also need to scavenge for supplies to deal with these, such as heat packs for hypothermia, morphine for broken legs, antibiotics for infections, bandages to stop bleeding, and painkillers to stop the [[InterfaceScrew screen from shaking]].

** Further more camouflage of any type (even just wearing brown and green clothing) is extremely useful for avoiding fights all together.

* DeliberatelyMonochrome: Colors dull as your blood levels drop. Lose enough blood and all color is lost.

* HollywoodDarkness: Averted. Night time is extremely difficult to navigate, requiring the use of flares, glowsticks, flashlights, or night vision to see where you're going. The first three give away your position to zombies and other players alike, so night vision goggles are some of the most sought after items in the game. Natural night vision does however have more colour than during the mod days where vision was essentially grey-scale.

** Firearms are extremely loud, and even when suppressed all this does is make them less noisy.

*** So you've got an automatic weapon? Great, time to annihilate stuff with your superior firepower, right? Nope, RealityEnsues. Unless you're at very close range, all that will happen is that firing on full auto will mean a lot of misses, wasting vital ammo.

* RealityEnsues: As expected from a survival simulation, all over the place.
** You will die very unexpectedly, often just to random snipers desperate to get a can of beans off your corpse. The zombies themselves are often much less of a problem then actual people with guns.
** If you're in poor health (weak from blood loss, dehydrated, malnourished, etc.) you're much more susceptible to diseases.
** In addition to health damage, losing too much blood kills you outright. Losing blood also gradually greys out your vision due to loss of blood pressure, and makes you much more likely to be knocked unconscious from further damage, or passing out from too much exhertion.
** Trying to walk with broken legs results in so much pain that you're almost certainly doing to pass out, unless you have pain killers.
** Eating rotten or raw food is almost certainly going to result in food poisoning at best.
** Eating too much at once will make you throw up, losing valuable water and nutrients.
** Wearing inappropriate clothing for the elements puts you at risk of hypothermia or hyperthermia. In winter, you ideally want thick clothing and to keep it dry, and even then being out in the open or at night you'll still slowly start to freeze if you don't take shelter, start a fire, or carry warm objects. In summer you need to wear light clothing or keep cool by drenching clothing in water.
** When players engage in firefights, even if victorious, there's a half decent chance that the survivor will succumb to their wounds. It is far from uncommon to come across the corpses of multiple players as the winners subsequently die from their injuries.
** Firearms are extremely loud, and even when suppressed all this does is make them less noisy.
** Equipment in a damaged state has reduced functionality. Damaged clothing offers less protection from damage and the elements, damaged weapons are likely to jam.
** Shots to vital areas such as the brain or heart, if not stopped by any protective clothing or items like a bulletproof vest, are instant kills.
** Items can carry diseases and require disinfecting to be sure they're not contaminated.
** Unlike most video games, there are no health kits to regenerate hitpoints, the only way is to naturally heal over time, with this process being quicker the better health you are in.
** If you don't wear gloves, your hands become contaminated when skinning bodies, risking infection if you don't wash them. Wearing gloves also protects your hands from damage; if you try sliding down ladders or breaking sticks off bushes with bare hands, you will very quickly get cuts.
** While most games try to balance weapons for gameplay purposes, just like in real life, military grade weapons have much more firepower than a simple pistol or hunting rifle. On a similar note, even the most basic firearm gives players a massive advantage over an opponent with a melee weapon.
** You can have the best gear in the game, but still be killed by a barely geared fresh spawn if they catch you unaware or hit you in the right place. And if you attract too much attention from infected or hostile animals, you can still be overwhelmed and mauled to death.
** Jumping out of a moving vehicle, sounds cool, right? Even at low speeds you're going to take a beating, and above 30km/h, you die instantly.
** Firing a weapon on [[MoreDakka full auto]] is pretty much useless at unless at very close range, since all that will happen is you'll eat through ammo in seconds and probably miss almost all your shots.
* RuleOfCool: In a gameplay perspective wearing a helmet of any type (even skate helmets) significantly increases your chance of surviving a firefight, [[AcceptableBreaksFromReality even the weakest helmets can stop at least one fatal bullet from entering your skull]] however a good portion of them look really dorky and brightly coloured so lots of players avoid them anyway.
** In addition the medieval helmet [[AwesomeButImpractical is bulky, extremely noticeable, quite heavy and doesn't even last very long in combat]] ……… but it looks so damn cool that some players will go for them anyway, you get to be a zombie apocalypse crusader!

* SawnOffShotgun: If you can find a hacksaw then you can create a Sawed-off double barrel, a Sawed-off mosin, or a Sawed-off BK 18 Rifle; while reducing each weapons weight and making them small enough to hid in a back pack or even a shirt, [[RealityEnsues sawing them off has the very realistic results of making them far less effective.]]

** Another weapon (before it was DummiedOut) was the bow and arrow; it was extremely cheap to make (only 1 long stick and a rope (that can be made from 12 rags)) and its ammo was practically infinite with a never ending forest you could make arrows out of, the weapon made no rattling noise when moving, firing it made next to no sound and if you had good aim you could 1 shot pretty much anything (even fully geared players). The Dev's have said they were going to bring it back but so far it hasn't been re-implemented.

** DropTheHammer: A mason's hammer is handy for cracking zombie skulls.

* OneBulletClips: Ammunition and magazines are found separately, magazines have to be manually loaded with ammunition, and if you don't have magazines and aren't using a gun with an internal magazine, you'll have to manually chamber each round before you fire by going into the inventory and actually dragging the ammo to the gun.

* GradualGrinder: The zombies themselves. They do very little damage with their clumsy attempts to claw at the player. However, they are very good at getting the player to start bleeding with every strike they make. Their lethality does not come from hitting the player hard, but from causing them to slowly bleed out over time. If the player has bandages or rags they can bind themselves to stop the bleeding, but that requires being safely out of combat (by which time they may have lost a lot of blood already) and having enough bandages on hand (which is not always the case, especially early.) Even if the player does stop the bleeding, blood is slow to regenerate and requires them to stay satiated with food and water, which they may not have access to. Death by zombie often comes at the end of a long test of endurance rather than a sudden attack.

* EarlyGameHell: Surviving the initial portion of the game (without well-provisioned friends to help you get on your feet) can be [[NintendoHard absolutely brutal]]. In addition to starting with [[WithThisHerring almost no storage space, no protection, no equipment, no medical supplies, no food, and no weapons]], the spawn rate for basic items is low and the coastal areas are often well picked-over by other newly spawned survivors. This results in the initial portion of the game being a DroughtLevelOfDoom. Early survivors will be living a hand-to-mouth existence just to get enough food and water, often contracting food poisoning or infection by [[PoisonMushroom eating gone-bad or contaminated sources]] when [[MortonsFork the alternative is starvation]].

* IdealIllnessImmunity: A player in sufficient good health is immune to all diseases in the game, except for brain prion damage -- this being a function of hydration, nutrition, health, and blood levels. If you're in this state you can drink unsterilised water, and raw meat with impunity. This said, players are immune to TheVirus in the first place, so they might naturally have very strong immune systems.

* PowerFist: Brass knuckles can be equiped to increase the damage of punches.

* AntiFrustrationFeatures: While not overly common given the game generally strives for realism, any long fence or wall, particularly those around military bases, will have multiple gaps in. Since a player may be carrying too much to climb over tall objects, this prevents one from having to run all the way around the outside until they find the one gap.

* BearsAreBadNews: Bears are very tough, taking multiple rounds even with high calibre weapons.

** You can have the best gear in the game, but still be killed by a barely geared fresh spawn if they catch you unawares or hit you in the right place. And if you attract too much attention from infected or hostile animals, you can still be overwhelmed and mauled to death.
** Jumping out of a moving vehicle, sounds cool, right? Even at low speeds you're going to take a beating, and above 35km/h, you die instantly.

* HollywoodSilencer: Averted, in the standalone game suppressed shots are still easily audible and will attract attention from players and infected alike, suppressors merely reducing the range your shots can be heard from. They are still beneficial however, since unsuppressed weapons can be heard an extremely long distance, and attract infected from a great distance. Supersonic ammo also will still have the distinctive crack of the sonic boom.

* BilingualBonus: Actually has an effect on gameplay. All road signs are in Russian and, naturally, being able to read them is a big help when trying to get your bearings.

** On the other hand, without a flashlight or night vision goggles, playing at night is all kinds of ''terrifying'' since the default vision level at night is slightly further than your own nose, but you can still hear the zombies, and you know there are players out there that can see you.

* DiegeticInterface: This has come and gone during development. The mod had gauges on the screen to indicate hunger, thirst, etc, but early on in the standalone the player had to rely on their PlayerCharacter ''telling'' them they feel hungry/thirsty/cold etc. Later on the minimal gauges came back, and certain information can only be inferred from seeing how your character acts.

* HollywoodSilencer: Averted, in the standalone game suppressed shots are still easily audible and will attract attention from players and infected alike, suppressors merely reducing the range your shots can be heard from. They are still beneficial however, since unsuppressed weapons can be heard an extremely long distance, and attract infected from a great distance.

* SavageWolves: If you stick to the wilderness, you're much less likely to encounter infected or enemy players, but you will likely have to fight off wolf packs instead. Not only do they attack in packs and are often difficult to hit due to fast movement, but they're most often encountered in forest terrain instead of open areas where you can get clear shots. God help you if you encounter a pack at night with no means of seeing.

* SimpleYetAwesome: A humble backpack may not seem very impressive on the face of it, but it drastically improves a survivor's odds of surviving further by allowing them to carry much more than they could with only the pockets on their cloths. Useful items that got passed over before can now be hoarded and saved for when the situation calls for them if you have one of these.

* StealthBasedGame: In many ways. The player can lower their profile and move slowly and on soft surfaces to avoid their chances of being seen or heard. Distracting objects like flares, or even empty soda cans, can be thrown to lure away zombies and let the player slip by. Weapon sounds are a major consideration as well, since light and noise attract zombies. Plus other players might be attracted to the sound of gunfire and be looking for an [[PlayerKilling easy mark]]. Recent updates have [[WithThisHerring removed any starting weapons]] from the player's inventory to encourage this.
** On the other hand, at the beginning of the game players have so little to lose most just run for it, counting on being able to lose zombies in the cities or find something useful quickly, completely ignoring the much slower, stealthier paths.

''[[http://www.dayzmod.com/ DayZ]]'' is originally a [[GameMod mod]] for the video game ''VideoGame/{{ARMA}} II'', converting the realistic military sim into a [[SurvivalSandbox post-apocalyptic zombie-survival simulation]].

The game takes place in a fictional 225 square kilometer post-Soviet state called Chernarus (carried over from ''ARMA II'') after an outbreak of an [[TheVirus unknown infection]] that has wiped out most of the world's population. Players can stay out of the way and fend for themselves, team up with other survivors, or be a bandit and murder everybody they come across, or anywhere in between. Whichever they choose, they will also have to contend with what's left of the indigenous population, turned into shambling infected.

At the moment, the game is still in alpha, so bugs are to be expected. Regardless, ''[=DayZ=]'' has given ''ARMA II'' a huge boost in popularity, shooting it up to one of the top ten games on Steam. On August 7th 2012, the official ''[=DayZ=]'' blog announced that ''[=DayZ=]'' would become a standalone game to be released sometime in 2012.

On December 16th, 2013 the Standalone game was released in alpha on Steam Early Access. You can get it [[http://store.steampowered.com/app/221100/?snr=1_7_15__13 here.]]

On December 13th, 2018 the standalone came out of Steam Early Access and was released as a full game. You can get it [[https://store.steampowered.com/app/221100/DayZ/ here]]

!!Provides Examples Of:

* AnAxeToGrind: The hatchet can be used to harvest firewood, but can also be equipped as a primary weapon. Considering how easy it is to find in common areas like barns, and that it is completely silent, kills in one or two hits, and has virtually unlimited uses, it can be a freshly-spawned character's best friend.
** Amusingly, since ''ARMA'' doesn't have melee weapons the sound and impact effect are the same as if you were firing a gun. Once [=DayZ=] went standalone, they managed to fix this issue.

*** The mod is infamous for the somewhat random loot spawning mechanics, making it entirely possible to find military-grade .50 sniper ammunition in a common garden shed.

* BagOfHolding: Certain container types can be fit into other containers, while carrying more slots of internal space than they actually occupy in a GridInventory. The caveat is that they can only be used to hold specific item types. Examples include things like first-aid kits which can only hold medical items, and ammo boxes which can only hold [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin ammunition]].

* {{BFG}}: The anti-material rifles and light machine guns are extremely powerful, but the tradeoff is that they are extremely loud, giving away your position immediately.

* BoomHeadshot: The most efficient way to kill zombies. Even the extremely weak Makarov PM can achieve a OneHitKill this way.

* CallAHitPointASmeerp: Your health is measured in "Blood." See CriticalExistenceFailure below.
** Averted in the stand alone release. Blood is still in, but now exists alongside "health." Running out of either will kill you, though.
* CommonplaceRare: Antibiotics, justified in that during a zombie outbreak demand will be high. So, if you get an infection then you better get used to the symptoms.
** You can find a lot of Coke and Pepsi but Mountain Dew, ''forget about it''. (The differences are only cosmetic in their item icon.)
*** Somewhat justified by the {{Ruritania}} setting: Mountain Dew is apparently much harder to find in Europe than in the US while Coke and Pepsi are common.
** Taken up to 11 in the standalone, where even something as simple as finding rocks can be difficult.

* CrazyPrepared: [[PlayerCharacter You]] if you happen to be even a halfway decent survivor. Ammo counted to the bullet for your weapons, morphine for broken bones, painkillers for trauma and, well [[DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment pain]], bandages for bleeding, all balanced out with food and water along with munitions and other misc. supplies in a very limited inventory space (12 slots primary, 8 secondary weapon bandolier, and 24 tops in a backpack. Oh, and it's a damn [[GridInventory grid style inventory]]. A small bottle of painkillers taking up the same space as a STANAG magazine for an AR platform rifle.)
* CriticalExistenceFailure: Averted. Health is measured by the amount of blood in your body. As it gets lower, [[InterfaceScrew your vision deteriorates, your character begins breathing harder]], and at the lowest levels may begin to randomly fall unconscious and eventually die. Blood can be raised by eating or having another player give you a blood transfusion.
** Partially played straight, however, with regard to most anything with a scope. Sniper rifles usually kill in two hits anywhere and the [=AS50=] and M107 will kill you from 3 to 15 times over ... if they hit you in the toe. But then, those weapons are designed for "[[InstantDeathBullet one shot, one kill]]".

* DeadCharacterWalking: Bug leaves husks of dead corpses standing and actually reacts to hits and such by looks but just quiet otherwise. [[http://www.cracked.com/article_21694_6-creepy-glitches-that-turn-famous-video-games-horrifying.html Cracked covers this.]]
* DeliberatelyMonochrome: Colors dull as your Blood (health) drops. Lose enough blood and all color is lost.
* DiegeticInterface: The mod has gauges on the screen to indicate hunger, thirst, etc, but in the standalone the player must rely on their PlayerCharacter ''telling'' them they feel hungry/thirst, etc. In both versions, the inventory has its own pop up window though.
* DrivenToSuicide: In addition to 'unofficial' methods like deliberately leaping from a height, drowning yourself, wandering into a pack of infected, or blowing yourself up with a grenade, there's also an 'official' way of doing this providing you have a firearm or some sort of sharp implement. Shooting yourself in the head isn't too bad, stabbing yourself in the throat with a knife or a spear is a bit brutal. The worst method involves getting a tool such as a pickaxe or hatchet and slicing your arm open lengthwise with a tearing noise that is not for those with a faint heart or weak stomach.

* EarlyGameHell: Surviving the initial portion of the game (without well-provisioned friends to help you get on your feet) can be [[NintendoHard absolutely brutal]]. In addition to starting with [[WithThisHerring almost no storage space, no protection, no equipment, no medical supplies, no food, and no weapons]], the spawn rate for basic items is low and the coastal areas are often well picked-over by other newly spawned survivors. This results in the initial portion of the game being a DroughtLevelOfDoom. Early survivors will be living a hand-to-mouth existence just to get enough food and water, often contracting food poisoning or infection by [[PoisonMushroom eating gone-bad or contaminated sources]] when [[MortonsFork the alternative is starvation]].
* EarnYourFun: Since the game is designed around the realistic scenario of a zombie outbreak, new players may be overwhelmed with the concept of trying to gather supplies to stay alive and trying to avoid other players due to high paranoia amongst everyone else. Unless you're friends with other players, the only way to acquire better loot is to keep playing and wandering around until you can find better gear. Assuming that the zombies and other players don't kill you first.

** The Lee-Enfield rifle was dubbed the "Dinner Bell" due to its loud report.
* EverythingIsTryingToKillYou: The Game. Zombies will kill you and hunt you down, no matter the distance. Human players might be a bit more merciful, unless they blow your brains out the next time they spot you. And you probably won't even know what killed you, if you haven't already succumbed to starvation, thirst or worse.

* FallenHero: Not every 'shoot-on-sight bandit' started off that way, some players start off intending to kill only in self defense or even hoping to team up with others and form a co-op group. After getting gunned down one too many times (or worse, getting killed by someone pretending to be a friendly), some just decided that the only way to survive in this game is to be equally ruthless.

* ForWantOfANail: One of the most frustrating ways to die is to have a can of good food, and starve because you have no tool to open it with...
* GameMod: One that managed to singlehandedly make ''ARMA II'' extremely popular. To the point that Steam's store pages for both ''ARMA II'' and ''Operation Arrowhead'' specifically point out that [=DayZ=] requires both of them to run. This may also count as an example of an Ascended Game Mod, since the development team licensed the engine from Bohemia Interactive to publish it as a standalone product.

* {{Hammerspace}}: ''Ruthlessly'' {{averted|Trope}}, especially in the stand-alone where every square of the GridInventory can be accounted for somewhere on the PlayerCharacter's person. [[AndYourRewardIsClothes Finding good cloths]] is more than just a cosmetic thing: having more pockets on you allows you to carry more. [[SimpleYetAwesome A backpack is indispensable for this]].
* HollywoodDarkness: Averted. Nighttime is extremely difficult to navigate, requiring the use of flares, glowsticks, flashlights, or night vision to see where you're going. The first three give away your position to zombies and other players alike, so night vision goggles are some of the most sought after items in the game.
* HollywoodSilencer: Mostly averted. The silenced M9, the Bizon and the [=MP5SD=] are extremely quiet, but the [=M4A1 CCO SD=] can still easily give away your position; all of them however ''do'' follow the trope in that zombies do NOT "hear" suppressed weapon shots at all, in the mod. In the standalone game suppressed shots are still easily audible and will attract attention from players and infected alike, suppressors merely reducing the range your shots can be heard from.

* HyperactiveMetabolism: Largely averted. The measure of "[[HitPoints health]]", if you can call it that, is how much blood is in the player's body. To the extend that this is played straight, eating food does restore a small amount of blood, but not enough to use it as a quick healing method, and food is rare enough that a player will not want to chomp it down unless they are also hungry. This practically insures that healing is done slowly over time.
** However, this is played much straighter with cooked meat taken from animals one might come across and slaughter. The large source of fresh protein is much better for restoring lost blood, regaining back four times as much as canned food. A player with low blood and the equipment to do so (a weapon to make the kill, a hunting knife, wood and/or hatchet, and a matchbox) may find themselves gorging after finding a large animal and regaining a substantial blood in a short amount of time by doing so.
** And then averted completely in the Standalone version. Food doesn't heal you directly at all, either via health or blood levels. Instead, being well-fed allows your body's natural healing process to slowly regenerate blood and heal wounds. Food merely serves to fuel your body's natural repair process, rather than directly increasing your blood or health.

* ImprovisedWeapon: There are a few melee weapons in the game that are not, strictly speaking, weapons, like a fire extinguisher. Some examples with tropes of their own:
** AnAxeToGrind: Both a log-splitting axe and a more powerful fire axe are available, and some of the better melee weapons.
** BatterUp: Wooden baseball bats are uncommon (though still more common than would be expected for a former Soviet-bloc country) and are useful in a pinch, but not especially powerful compared to other weapons.
** DropTheHammer: A mason's hammer is handy for cracking zombie skulls.
** WrenchWhack: A smaller spanner is better than nothing, and a larger pipe wrench is substantially better than your own fists.

* InterfaceScrew: Happens at lower blood levels.
* ItIsPronouncedTroPAY: According to WordOfGod, the game's name is properly pronounced "Day-Zee".

* MoreDakka: The light machine guns. Recoil is high however, so too much dakka will result in not being able to hit anything; this is right out of vanilla ''ARMA 2'' though.
* {{Nerf}}: [[DiscOneNuke Early-availability handguns.]] Players used to spawn on the beach with pistols that could kill other players in 5 or 6 hits and zombies in two. Then ''[=DayZ=]'' took their pistols away. Still, if they found a handgun while looting it would take only 1 (if you have a revolver) to 2 (if you have a Makarov) shots to kill a zombie. So, after further nerfs, it now takes an entire mag of Makarov bullets to kill a zombie (short of a headshot) and two full magazine to kill another player.
* NoBikesInTheApocalypse: A DoubleSubversion. Bicycles do exist and are a more efficient way to move around than being on foot, but players tend to rarely use them because, thanks to the ''ARMA'' engine, it's near impossible to dismount and return fire against anyone attacking you before they kill you.

* [[ObviousBeta Obvious Alpha]]: To be expected. The mod is still in Alpha and still immensely popular.
** Its original incarnation was a "proof of concept" of the persistence aspect which was tried out by an ARMA 2 player community to test server implementation and capacity, only for word-of-mouth and hype to spread before he'd implemented much of anything else about the mod.
* OneBulletClips: Averted in the mod and ''heavily'' averted in Standalone.
** In the mod, all ammunition is in magazines, and reloading in the middle of a magazine will simply move the half-full magazine into your inventory. Do this often, and you'll end up with an inventory full of half-used magazines.
** In Standalone, ammunition and magazines are found separately, magazines have to be manually loaded with ammunition, and if you don't have magazines and aren't using a gun with an internal magazine, you'll have to manually chamber each round before you fire by going into the inventory and actually dragging the ammo to the gun.

** In addition to health damage, losing too much blood kills you outright. Losing blood also gradually greys out your vision due to loss of blood pressure, and makes you much more likely to be knocked unconscious.

** Eating too much will make you throw up, losing valuable water and nutrients.
** Wearing inappropriate clothing for the elements puts you at risk of hypothermia or hyperthermia. In winter, you ideally want thick clothing and to keep it dry, and even then being out in the open or at night you'll still slowly start to freeze. In summer you need to wear light clothing or keep cool by drenching clothing in water.
** When players engage in firefights, even if victorious, there's a half decent chance that the survivor will succumb to their wounds. It is far from uncommon to come across the corpses of multiple players as the winners then die from their injuries.

* ReducedToRatburgers: Well, not ''rats'', but rotten fruit is relatively frequent, satisfy only a little hunger and are likely to [[PoisonMushroom give you food poisoning]]. Only desperate players ([[EarlyGameHell typically freshly spawned ones]]) will engage in this, but the alternative is often death.[[note]](Seriously, it is not worth eating the rotten stuff, its food value is extremely low and its chance of inflicting sickness is comparatively high.)[[/note]]
* SavageWolves: If you stick to the wilderness, you're much less likely to encounter infected or enemy players, but you will likely have to fight off wolf packs instead. Not only do they attack in packs and are often difficult to hit due to fast movement, but they're most often encountered in forest terrain instead of open areas where you can get clear shots. God help you if you encounter a pack at night with no means of seeing.

* [[WizardNeedsFoodBadly Survivor Needs Food Badly]]: Emphasizing the CentralTheme of survival, players must find food and water, lest they die of hunger or thirst. Some of these values go down faster than others, and the rate at which they decrease can shift depending on how active the player is being. Running around everywhere will dehydrate the player faster than walking at a modest pace, for example. There used to be a series of gauges in the corner of the screen that would change color to indicate how desperately the survivor needs these, [[CriticalAnnoyance blinking red]] when really low. Since going standalone, the gauges have disappeared completely.

* ViolationOfCommonSense: Despite the mod's efforts at being as "realistic" as possible, morphine somehow fixes broken legs as good as new.
** Word of God actually says the mod is aimed at being "Authentic" ''rather than'' realistic. However, crude splints were eventually added, crafted by the player out of cloth rags and wooden sticks.
** Also qualifies as RuleOfFun, since realism would require a splint/cast and hobbling around on crutches while your broken leg took several weeks or months to heal fully.

* WithThisHerring: Recent updates spawn new characters with no weapon and minimal supplies.
* ZergRush: Can and will happen if you get too trigger happy with zombies nearby.
** Especially prevalent during the 1.7.1.4 Patch, known as the "Nightmare Patch", which saw an temporary heavy buff to zombies' detecting abilities. If you fired any kind of gun near a major city or even a small town, you had to get out of there fast.
** Firearms are more or less audible depending on the calibre. The .303 bolt-action Lee-Enfield - the most common full-power rifle in the game - is often referred to as the "[[FanNickname dinner bell]]" because of its tendency to attract zombies from far and wide.

* * DrivenToSuicide: In addition to 'unofficial' methods like deliberately leaping from a height, drowning yourself, wandering into a pack of infected, or blowing yourself up with a grenade, there's also an 'official' way of doing this providing you have a firearm or some sort of sharp implement. Shooting yourself in the head isn't too bad, stabbing yourself in the throat with a knife or a spear is a bit brutal. The worst method involves getting a tool such as a pickaxe or hatchet and slicing your arm open lengthwise with a tearing noise that is not for those with a faint heart or weak stomach.

* HollywoodSilencer: Mostly averted. The silenced M9, the Bizon and the [=MP5SD=] are extremely quiet, but the [=M4A1 CCO SD=] can still easily give away your position; all of them however ''do'' follow the trope in that zombies do NOT "hear" suppressed weapon shots at all.

* RealityEnsues: You will die very unexpectedly, often just to random snipers desperate to get a can of beans off your corpse. The zombies themselves are often much less of a problem then actual people with guns.

* ArtificialBrilliance: Zombies don't just run straight at you, instead zig-zagging in an unpredictable pattern making it very difficult to get a headshot.
* ArtificialStupidity: Zombie pathing still has some issues. Zombies will occasionally get stuck on the smallest of obstacles.

** Taken up to 11 in the standalone, where even something as simple as fincing rocks can be difficult.

* OurZombiesAreDifferent: Generally Type F.

'''Note:''' [[InternetBackdraft For your own sake]], do not confuse ''[=DayZ=]'' with its {{Mockbuster}}, ''The War Z'' (later renamed ''Infestation: Survivor Stories'').

** Also be careful of looting bodies, which either could of been a poor soul a sniper just shot and may still be looking around the corpse.