DayZ Supply Drops, Airdrops and the Rotator

What a Supply Drop Is on DayZ

A crate on the ground at a point you choose, with the loot you choose, announced to your players. No aircraft, no parachute, no smoke — every one of those needs a mod that each player would have to download, and on GameGrid players install nothing.

That is worth reading twice, because it is the opposite of what the phrase usually promises. An airdrop here is a supply drop with an announcement and optional wreck dressing. DayZ has no airdrop of its own: there is no crate that falls, because nothing in the game ships one.

What you get instead is real and useful: a container the game spawns and respawns on its own rates, at positions you picked, holding a loot table you wrote, with infected around it if you want them and a message to your players when it happens.

You build one on your server's DayZ Tools page, under Supply Drops.

Building One

A drop is one record with five parts.

The crate. Pick a container from your own server's item list — a supply box, an airplane crate, a barrel. There are five recommended ones, each with a note on what it is actually like. A sea chest, for instance, lives for 45 days and also spawns as ordinary loot, which is usually not what somebody wants for an event crate.

The pins. Up to 64 positions in world metres, each shown with its 100 m grid square so you can check it against the live map. A pin outside your map is refused, and the refusal names your map's size. Leave the height off and DayZ puts the crate on the ground itself.

The loot. Up to 40 lines, each an item class, one of DayZ's own eight categories, and a maximum count. The category matters more than it looks: DayZ does not check it for you, and a wrong category gives you an empty crate, so we refuse one that is not a real category name. And we never claim an item class is unknown when what we actually know is that we could not read your catalogue. If the list could not be read, nothing is flagged.

The rates. Nominal, minimum, maximum, lifetime, restock, and the three radii DayZ's own event system uses. The defaults are modelled on the game's own airplane crate.

The announcement. A title and a message, on or off, and whether the position is given exactly or as a grid square. Coarse is the default, for the same reason kill positions are coarse by default.

Rates are a rate, not a clock

Nominal and restock are a rate, not a clock. "Two alive at a time, thirty-minute cooldown per slot" is what the file can say. For a drop at a chosen minute, use Drop one here now, or put the drop on a rotation.

And turning an event off means DayZ does not load it at all, so it is not a live switch.

The Two Ways It Reaches Your Server

A drop you build is not in your server. Saving keeps it in the panel. Writing it into your mission files is a separate press, and it lands at the next restart.

Written into your mission files

This writes into your mission files. DayZ reads them once, when the server starts, so a change here takes effect at the next restart — not now. You are shown what would change before anything is written.

Four files:

The last one is the one people leave out when they do this by hand. A crate event takes its loot from `mapgroupproto.xml`, keyed on the container class name — not from `cfgspawnabletypes.xml`. Without that group the crate spawns empty, so we always write it.

Your own edits are kept. We write our own block into each file between two markers, back your file up outside your mission folder first, check it before and after, and put the backup back if anything about the result looks wrong. Everything outside our markers comes back exactly as it was.

If your file already has an entry under the same name outside our block, we refuse and say so rather than overwriting it — DayZ would end up with two of something it reads one of.

Writing one drop writes every drop on that map, because our block is replaced whole. Nothing is stopped or restarted by a write: when to take your server down stays your decision.

Drop one here now

The exception. It goes through the GameGrid server mod and puts a single crate on the ground straight away, at one pin, with no restart and no file change.

This is the only part of a drop that needs a running server and a reporting mod — that, and putting the drop on a repeat. Everything else can be built and written on a stopped server.

If the game answers "partial" or "uncertain", the crate may already exist. We never send it again on your behalf — check the map before you try once more. There is deliberately no retry button.

Deleting a drop removes the panel row only. Anything already written into your mission files stays there until it is removed there.

The C-130, the Smoke, and Why They Are Off

The C-130 flyover is a vanilla wreck model flown past as a prop. Our mod cannot yet move an object smoothly through the air, so this is off. It would be scenery only: it never carries or releases the crate.

There is no smoke and no flare either. A server-side mod cannot create a light or an effect on a player's own screen, and nothing about GameGrid asks a player to install anything.

Both are shown in the panel, dimmed, with that reason next to them — rather than hidden, so you can see what exists and what it would be if it did.

The Rotator

An ordered list and a place in it. Something else takes the turns.

A rotation does not run anything itself — it hands the next item to the scheduler you already have. The timing, the retries, the history and the alerts stay on the Event Manager. The Rotator is deliberately not a second scheduler, and it will not grow a "runs at" box.

Nothing on the Rotator page takes a turn by itself. A rotation advances only when something else fires it, so building one and stopping does nothing at all — the step that makes it move is Take the Next Rotation Turn, on the Event Manager.

Deleting a rotation undoes nothing. A settings window that is open stays open; a crate that is on the ground stays on the ground.

Five kinds, all built, and the page lists them all with what takes each turn:

The rotating message, which you can use today

Put the token straight into a scheduled message on the Event Manager:

{rotList:Server restarts in 15 minutes,Trader is open at Green Mountain,Report cheaters on Discord}

Each time that message is sent it takes the next entry in order — where {randList:…} would pick at random. The place in the list is kept per message and per token, so two tokens in one message rotate independently.

The place only moves when something really reached the game. A message that went nowhere — nobody online, or an error — does not spend a turn, so the entry that was due is still due.

A rotating message is one line and at most 240 characters, and it may not contain a comma, because a comma is what separates the entries inside the token.

Rotating a map, and what a loot profile does

All five kinds are built. Rotating a map and rotating a loot profile both land at a restart rather than straight away, and both carry truths worth writing down before somebody tries:

• Each map is its own world. Your bases, characters and stashes stay with the map they are on — when Chernarus comes round again, everything you built there is exactly where you left it. We do not move a base, a character or a stash from one map to another. Nobody can.
• A map change is a restart: everyone online is disconnected for a few minutes, and we warn before it. A map whose terrain is not installed on your server cannot be rotated to: the turn is refused, by name, before your server is stopped.
• Gameplay settings live inside each map's own files, so each map keeps its own. Your server settings, like its name, slots and passwords, are shared and do not change.
• "Economy" in a loot profile means DayZ's loot economy. It has nothing to do with your players' coins or your shop. A loot change needs a restart at each end, and loot already lying on the ground does not change — the new rates decide what spawns from then on.

Repeating a Drop Without a Restart

Set a drop to repeat and crates keep appearing, with nobody pressing anything and no restart. It goes down the same live path as Drop one here now — the GameGrid server mod puts a crate on the ground — so it needs your server running and the mod reporting.

A repeat is a schedule in your Command Manager, not a second clock on this page. We create the entry; you can see every run in its history, and edit or delete it there. The gaps on offer are the ones a person says out loud: every 5, 10, 15, 20 or 30 minutes, every hour, every 2, 3, 4, 6 or 12 hours, or once a day.

The arithmetic worth doing before you arm one. A live crate clears itself away within the hour — that limit is the game mod's, not ours — so a repeat slower than the crate's own lifetime leaves that spot bare in between. We never ship that gap quietly: you are told how long it is, and which faster gap would close it.

The two routes are for different jobs rather than being rivals. The mission-file route hands your crate to DayZ's own economy, which respawns it on its own rates for as long as it is in the files — and lands at a restart. The repeat places one crate at a time, by our hand, on your timetable, and stops the moment you stop it.

Who Can Do What

Reading the drops and rotations, and previewing what a write would change, needs only view access.

Saving a drop and writing the mission files need the settings permission on that server; Drop one here now needs manage. Somebody without them sees the feature and one sentence saying what it is for, rather than a screen of dead buttons.

See Server Administration and Scheduled Restarts and Server Messages.