How Your DayZ Server Fits Together, and the Order to Set It Up In

The Three Things Your Server Is Made Of

Everything on this page is one of three things, and knowing which one you are looking at answers most questions before you have to ask them.

1. DayZ itself. A vanilla 1.29 dedicated server, the same game your players already own. It reads a pile of its own files when it starts — serverDZ.cfg for how the server behaves, and the mission files for what the world contains: types.xml, events.xml, cfgeventspawns.xml, cfgeffectarea.json, env/zombie_territories.xml. Most of those are read once, at start. That single fact explains more of this page than anything else on it.

2. The GameGrid panel. Where you do everything: settings, mods, files, backups, the console, schedules, the live map, the shop. Nothing in the panel edits your world directly — it asks the machine your server runs on to do it, and tells you what came back.

3. The GameGrid server mod. A small mod we load on the server side only. Your players install nothing — they join with an ordinary DayZ client, and there is no version to keep in step. It is what makes the live map show people rather than an empty grid: it reports positions, vehicles, joins, leaves, deaths with a cause, and in-game chat, and it is the thing that hands an item to a player when the shop sells one.

Which of the three is doing the work tells you when a change lands. The panel is instant. The mod is live while the server runs. DayZ's own files wait for a restart.

The Order to Set Things Up In

Doing these out of order is not dangerous, but several steps depend on an earlier one and you will otherwise spend an evening wondering why a control is greyed out.

1. Get the server up and reachable. Order it, start it, and join it yourself once. Setting up your DayZ server covers the first hour, and why your server is not in the list covers the usual reason it is not.

2. Name it and set the basics on the Settings page: server name, description, player slots, password, time of day, weather. How DayZ settings behave is the one to read before you change anything in bulk — it explains which settings apply live, which need a restart, and which ones DayZ is not reading at all.

3. Make yourself an admin and check the console answers. Becoming an admin.

4. Add mods, if you are going to — and decide now, not later. A mod that stores things in your world becomes part of your world. Removing one afterwards is the single most damaging thing you can do to a DayZ server: see DayZ mods before you install, not after.

5. Set up restarts and the warnings that go with them. Restarts and messages. Do this before the loot work, because everything in step 6 lands at a restart and you want restarts to be a routine thing your players expect rather than a surprise.

6. Shape the world. Loot in types.xml, events, vehicles and helicopter crashes, cleanup and base decay. This is the slow, satisfying part and it is where a server gets its character.

7. Draw your map. Areas — the trader hub, the arena, the contaminated town, the notes for whoever is on duty next. Read that article's last section before you announce any of them to your players.

8. Turn on the things that need a linked account. The economy — wallets, the shop, kits and earning — comes last because it depends on a player linking their account, and linking depends on your Discord bot being set up.

Presets short-circuit most of steps 6 and 7. The preset library is fifty-nine ready-made configurations with a verdict beside each one saying when it takes effect — now, or at your next restart. Start there and change what you do not like.

Now, or at the Next Restart

This is the operating rule of the whole system. Every DayZ tool on the panel is one of three kinds, and the panel tells you which as you use it.

Which is which:

The trap this table exists to stop. It is very natural to draw a contaminated area, press Write the files, look at the map in game and conclude the feature is broken. It is not — DayZ has simply not re-read the file yet. Anything in the middle row is a permanent change once it lands: DayZ's own economy owns it from then on, it respawns by itself, and it survives every restart until you take it out again. That permanence is exactly why it is the wrong kind of thing to put on a ten-minute timer, and why we do not offer one.

What an Event Is Made Of

An event is the piece that ties the rest together. Instead of drawing an area, writing an announcement, setting a timer and working out who won, you describe all of it once and arm it with one press.

An event carries five things:

• Where. One or more areas. You can point at an area you already drew, or draw one just for this event — a temporary area that is created when the event arms and cleaned up when it ends. A temporary area is a real area: it carries the same purpose and the same protection rule as a permanent one, so an arena drawn for tonight can cancel damage between players inside it for exactly as long as the event runs, and take itself away afterwards.
• When. How long it runs, from five minutes up to two days, and the warnings you want before it starts. An event can be armed by hand or handed to the same schedule you already use for restarts, so a weekly event is something you set up once.
• What players are told. Three pieces of text in your own words, up to 200 characters each: the one that goes out when it starts, the one that goes out when it ends, and the one used for the warnings beforehand.
• How it is scored. There are four kinds. An open event just runs. A scored event counts player-versus-player kills, and only inside the area and the window you set — measured from the victim's position, so somebody shooting into your arena from a hill outside still counts. A capture and hold event ranks people on the seconds they spend standing inside your areas, counted once a second by the server mod, with kills as the tie-break. A Battle Royale round hands the whole thing to a round on a temporary server built beside yours: arming the event asks for the round, and you start it from the Battle Royale page.
• What it pays. Three kinds of reward, in coins: a bonus per kill (with a per-player cap you must set), a flat amount for taking part, and a placement table — first, second, third and so on. Every reward is currency; there are no item prizes.

Arming it does all of this in order: it works out the most the event could possibly pay and freezes that as the budget, it switches your chosen areas on and remembers what they were before so the end puts them back exactly as they were, it places the crates and the live loot you attached, and then it announces the start. Ending it sends the end message first, restores the areas, then scores and pays. Only one event runs on a server at a time, and that is enforced rather than merely checked.

What Arming an Event Actually Does

Arming does everything in the event that can be done to a running server, and refuses the rest out loud rather than recording it and going quiet. Before you press it, the panel lists every ingredient with what arming will do to it, so there are no surprises.

Three things are armed live, on a running server, with nothing restarted and no file written:

• Your areas are switched on for the window, and put back exactly as you had them at the end.
• Supply crates are placed on the ground, already filled with the contents you chose, within seconds.
• Zone loot is scattered across its areas as filled containers, a few at a time so a busy server does not stutter. They clear themselves when their lifetime runs out.

Two are refused when you arm, with the reason and with what to do instead — because neither can honestly be done for the length of an event:

• An infected hot spot. Infected are pushed to your server by writing the hot-spot configuration, and only the Hot Spots page does that. Turn it on from its own page and run the event alongside it.
• A settings window. Your server reads serverDZ.cfg once when it starts and holds it open while it runs, so a window costs a restart to begin and another to end. The Presets tab of the Event Manager owns that restart.

A loot table set to write mission files is refused for the same reason: those files are read once at start, so the scatter cannot be switched on for an hour. Set that table to place its loot live and it arms with everything else.

An event has a timeline of its own, so it is not just a start and an end. Up to eight steps sit inside the window — at the open, so many minutes in, so many minutes before the close, or at the close — and each one either announces a line to every player or runs one of your own saved Command Manager schedules. Move the event and its steps move with it, because they are worked out from the run's own window. A warning before it opens is a Commands tab job instead: the run does not exist until it is armed, so there is no clock of its own to hang one on.

An event arena is a circle, a line in chat, and — if you made it a protected area — a rule. This is the same behaviour areas describes and it applies here in full: a protected arena has your server mod cancel damage between players inside it, and a plain one does not. Nobody can be stopped from walking in either way. An event is a reason for players to go somewhere and a way to count what happens when they do.

A prize needs a linked account, and an unlinked one is held rather than lost. Event rewards, shop purchases, kit claims and earning by the hour all sit behind one step: a player linking their in-game character to their account, which finishes when your Discord bot is set up. There are three ways to finish one — the player runs /link in your Discord and types !link in game with the code it gives them, you mint the code yourself on the Customer API and hand it over, or you link the account by hand from the Economy page. Until that link exists, a prize is held against the player's name with the reason shown — a placement, a share for taking part and a per-kill bonus alike — and it is paid out with the same record the moment the link exists, so nothing is lost by running an event before then.

Prizes are created, not taken from a pool. Nobody's wallet is debited to pay a winner. Coins come into existence when an event pays them, which means a server with nothing to spend coins on will inflate over time. That is your decision to make, so it is stated rather than buried: give the shop enough in it to matter, and keep the placement table modest.

Two ceilings exist so a mistyped number cannot run away with your economy: a per-event budget worked out from your own numbers before the event arms and then frozen, and a daily total across your whole account. When either is reached the event stops paying — cleanly, with a record of it, rather than paying part of a prize.

The Money Side, and the One Link It All Hangs On

Everything with a number attached — the shop, kits, earning by the hour, earning for a kill, the death penalty, selling, and event prizes — hangs off one step, so it is worth understanding on its own rather than as a footnote to six features.

A player has a DayZ character and a GameGrid wallet, and nothing connects the two until they say so. They ask for a code, they type it in your server's chat while they are in game, and the two are bound together from then on. The binding is made against their durable platform id, never their character name — DayZ's own default name is "Survivor", so a name match would hand one player's wallet to another.

What follows from that:

• A player with no link cannot be paid and cannot buy. They can play perfectly happily; they simply have no wallet attached to the character standing in your world.
• A prize for an unlinked player is held, not lost. It sits against their name with the reason, and it is released when the link exists.
• A purchase is handed to the player in game. It goes into their hands, and anything that will not fit is put at their feet. It needs them to be connected, alive and conscious at the time.
• Selling back to the shop is the same story from the other end. A player holds an item, types the sell command, and until their account is linked the server refuses it, tells them how to link, and takes nothing out of their hands. That refusal is the right answer rather than a fault: we would far rather hand an item back than remove one we cannot pay for.
• Some answers are deliberately final. If a delivery comes back uncertain — it may have arrived, we cannot prove it did — we never silently try again and never automatically refund it, because either of those can hand out a second copy of a real item. It is shown to you to decide.

Earning and the economy on DayZ has the detail: what pays, how much, the daily limit, and how a player asks for their code.

What Reaches Your Players, and What Stays With You

A short, blunt table, because this is the thing worth being certain about before you write a server description or promise something in your Discord.

Why a control you cannot use is shown rather than hidden. If a preset or a button were simply missing from the panel, you would reasonably conclude GameGrid does not do that thing. Shown with the exact thing it is waiting on — your server being up, a file it has not read yet, a permission you do not have — you know what to go and change, and whether it is yours to change at all. Every greyed-out control on a DayZ page names its own blocker for that reason.

A First Week That Works

If you want a concrete plan rather than a menu, this one gets a server from ordered to populated without any of the traps above.

Day 1. Start it, join it, name it, set your slots and your time of day. Set up scheduled restarts with warnings. Tell nobody yet.

Day 2. Decide on mods — all of them, now — and install them. Restart. Play for an hour and check the log for anything unhappy.

Day 3. Loot. Pick a preset from the library or tune types.xml by hand, write it, restart, and walk a town to see whether it feels right. Repeat until it does. This is the day that decides what your server is.

Day 4. Draw your map: the trader hub, the arena, the places you want your staff to be able to point at. Nothing here changes the game, so you can do it while people are on.

Day 5. Set up your Discord bot and link your own account. Then link a friend's. This is the step that turns the economy on, and it is much easier to do calmly on day five than under pressure on launch night.

Day 6. Put something in the shop, make a starter kit, and try buying something on your own character.

Day 7. Open it. Announce the restart times, announce what your areas mean, and be honest with your players about what an area does and does not do — the wording in the areas article is there to be borrowed.

The one thing not to leave until launch night: removing a mod. If you are going to change your mind about a mod, do it on day two while your world is empty. After players have built, it is the one action on this platform that cannot be undone.