Battle Royale Rounds on Your DayZ Server

What a Round Is

A Battle Royale round is a last-one-standing match with a ring that closes over two hours.

It runs on a temporary server we build beside yours and delete afterwards. Your own server keeps running the whole time, on the same address, and nothing on it is touched. Your players' survival characters, their bases and their stashes are on the other server, and the round never reaches them.

You set one up on your server's DayZ Tools page, under Battle Royale.

Before anything else on this page: asking for a round and starting it are two separate presses. Requesting one draws the schedule and spends nothing, but it does take your account's one in-flight round slot until you start it or cancel it. Start is the press that spends your day and builds the round server.

The ring map anybody can open

Asking for a round also makes that round its own ring map link: a web page showing the circle where it stands, which anyone can open without a GameGrid account. It is on the round's own page, and the /dayz ring-map command posts it into a Discord channel for you.

It never shows where anybody is. A ring link carries the map and the circle and no player feed at all. That is decided when the link is made rather than when it is opened, so a link cannot be talked into listing your players later.

The link lasts 24 hours, and it counts against the five live share links a server may hold at once. At the cap no link is made for that round — the round itself is unaffected and runs exactly as it would have, and the page says so rather than showing an empty box. Revoke a link on the Economy page and the next round gets one. Revoking a link, or letting it expire, closes it immediately for everybody who had it, and the page says which of the two happened.

Setting One Up

Five settings, and the schedule redraws as you change them.

Saving these applies them and redraws the schedule. Nothing is written to your own server, and no round is requested until you press Request a round.

A round has thirteen phases: a deployment phase, nine shrinks and a three-step endgame, ending inside two hours including setup. At the cap the round is scored where it stands.

The ring steps; it does not glide

DayZ cannot resize a contaminated zone, so each phase is a whole new set of areas. The boundary holds still and then jumps. That is why the settings ask for a phase length and not a shrink speed.

What the ring does to a player outside it

The ring hurts. Stepping over the edge and turning straight round costs very little: there is a short grace period, and nothing at all happens inside it.

After the grace the player coughs, and the ring puts them back inside — up to three times in a round. Each one starts the grace again, and one is not used up when there is nowhere safe on the ground to put them.

Once those three are used up, a player outside the circle loses health every second they stay out, on the game server's own clock, at the rate the schedule shows for that phase. The rate rises with each phase, so a late circle is far less forgiving than an early one.

A player the ring would take to zero health is out of the round at that moment. The placement is written down first and the player is removed from the server second, so a kick that fails cannot put somebody back into a round they have already lost.

A schedule you could not walk is refused before you start

The schedule is arithmetic, not a rehearsal. It is worked out from the map size and a walking speed. The plan assumes a player walks 180 metres a minute across real terrain, and no phase may ask for more than about 60% of a phase's walking budget to reposition. A combination that fails that is refused when you configure it, with the arithmetic shown, rather than discovered by somebody at minute 27. The fix is a longer shrink or a larger final radius, and the page says which.

One Round at a Time, and What That Costs You

One round a day, in your own timezone. The day is spent when you press Start, never when you ask for a round. A round you have asked for and not started has not spent it; a round you have started has. The checklist runs before the spend, so a host that is full or a mod that is quiet costs you nothing.

What is enforced today, and will surprise you if we do not say it:

One round can be waiting or running at a time, across your whole account — not per server. A round waiting on one of your servers refuses a round on every other server you own, and the refusal says so when it happens.

A round you have not started does not time out. Nothing advances or expires it, so it holds that slot until you clear it. Use Cancel on it, which the panel offers next to it; that is the only thing that clears it.

One round per host at a time. A busy host holds your round rather than failing it, and the panel says which of the two it is doing. Cancel it if you would rather have the slot back.

Four things give the day back: a round that fails to build, an arena nobody joins, a round abandoned at the close of the join window for being too thin, and a round the platform ends because its host stopped answering. Cancel gives it back too, at any point before the players are placed. A walkover is not one of those — a round with one real player who wins is a real round, it uses the day, and it pays no prize.

How a Round Is Scored

The order is simple and it is not negotiable: anyone still alive places above everyone who was eliminated. Among survivors, in order:

1. most kills in the round

2. best condition — health and blood together

3. least damage taken from the ring

4. earliest to join

Still tied, it is a shared win, and any prize splits. Among the eliminated, surviving longer is the better placement, and two people eliminated in the same moment with the same kills share the place.

Kills are not counted. So the first of those four separates nobody, and condition decides it instead. The round reads who is alive and who is out from the round server's own snapshot rather than from the mod's death feed, which is the only place a killer's name exists — so every scorecard shows zero kills. That is left undone deliberately rather than half-done.

A round where nobody is left standing is a draw, not a win. Calling it a win would print the same word for "somebody survived" and "the ring killed everybody".

Who counts as a participant

The list freezes when the join window closes. Somebody who disconnects after that is still a participant and is still placed. If too few people are there when the window closes the round is abandoned, your day is refunded, and the panel says why rather than leaving an unexplained "abandoned".

Why Your Survival World Is Safe

This is the part that got the most care, because the failure it prevents is the worst one available in a survival game.

If the round's server ever shared player storage with your own, every death in the round would write onto a real survival character, the round's starting kit would overwrite somebody's real gear, and cleaning up the round would delete your whole player population.

So the two are kept apart by where they live and by who is allowed to name them, rather than by a check somebody has to remember to run:

• the round's server is its own folder beside yours and never inside it, with its own ports, its own world and its own storage
• your server is never named in the clean-up. We send the host your server's id, the host works out the round server's name itself, and it refuses an id that is already a round server
• the clean-up empties storage inside the round server's own folder only, and refuses to delete through a junction or a shortcut
• the round's server is never registered as one of your servers, so nothing that sweeps, restarts or backs up your servers can see it
• a round refuses to start on a host still holding the last round's world, and says what it found

Seventeen checks run before a round starts, and they stop at the first failure — with the reason, and with the thing that would clear it. A check the host will not answer is named rather than counted as a pass. You can run the same list as a preview without spending your day, but a preview is never a clearance: the list runs again at the press, and again when the round server is built, because a host can fill up in between.

The round's deaths still appear in your ordinary killfeed, marked as belonging to the round, and they survive the arena being deleted afterwards.

What to Know Before You Run One

Four things about the shape of a round, so nothing about it is a surprise on the night.

• No gas wall is drawn. The ring is real and it hurts, but there is nothing at the edge to look at. The boundary is still enforced, on the clock, and players are told where it is by a grid reference.
• The circle moves as well as shrinks — when your server has mapped the ground. The GameGrid mod builds a height and water map of your world while your server runs. With one for the map your round is on, each phase is drawn a little off the one before it, never further than 60% of that phase's radius step, and a centre that would land in the sea is redrawn. Without one, every phase shares the centre you picked: a circle in the sea is worse than a circle that does not move. The schedule page says which of the two your round is, and the round's own page says it again once it exists.
• There is no scoreboard, ring timer or map circle inside the game. DayZ's own map has no circle to draw and its interface is not ours to add to, and your players install nothing. So the round's scoreboard is a web page, and what reaches a player in game is words: the warnings, the countdown, and the grid square the next circle is in.
• A round cannot be cancelled once the players are placed. Up to that moment Cancel gives the day back. After it, the round ends when somebody wins or at its own two-hour cap.

Who Can Do What

Previewing a round — the schedule, the phases, the refusals — needs only view access and changes nothing.

Requesting or cancelling a round needs the manage permission on your server. Both are recorded in your audit log either way.

See Server Administration.