DayZ Zones: Naming Areas of Your Map, and What Each One Does

What a Zone Is

A zone is a named area of your map. You draw it on the live map, give it a purpose, a colour and a priority, and GameGrid keeps it for you — so your team can see it, so you can see who is standing in it, and so three kinds of area can be written into your server's own mission files.

What an area does depends on what you made it for. A protected area is handed to the GameGrid server mod, which cancels damage between players inside it, warns the shooter, and moves a repeat offender to a point you pick. A no-build area refuses an object being put down inside it — a tent, a fireplace, a garden plot, a base-building kit — and tells the player in chat. A marker is drawn for you and your staff and reaches the game in no other way, and neither does a "something else" area — only protected and no-build areas carry a rule. Nobody can ever be stopped from walking in — DayZ gives a server no way to refuse a movement — so everything an area does happens after somebody is already inside. Nobody is ever kicked for breaking an area's rule: a kick is a disconnect, and a rule that disconnects people teaches them to disconnect.

You reach it from your server's DayZ Tools page, at Zones. The area itself is drawn on the Live Map tab; everything else about it lives on the Zones page.

Drawing One

Open the Live Map, right-click any point, and choose Draw a circular area or Draw a rectangular area. A circle is drawn from its centre — drag outwards and the distance is the radius. A rectangle is drawn corner to corner. Escape cancels. Those two shapes are the whole set: the map has no free-form outline to draw or to drag, and an area is never approximated into one.

When you let go, a short dialog asks for the only five things it needs:

• a name
• what it is for (see the table below)
• a preset to start from, if you want one
• a priority
• whether it is in force now or saved for later

Everything else is on the Zones page. Moving and resizing an area is done on the map too, by dragging it, and that drag only ever sends the new shape — so one person can move an area while another edits its settings without either overwriting the other.

The Zones page never asks you for a coordinate. It tells you where an area is in words and gives you a link back to the map to change it.

What an Area Can Be For

The purpose decides whether the area reaches your game at all.

The first three are what the page calls permanent map character: they go into your own mission files, DayZ's economy then owns them, they respawn by themselves and they survive every restart. That is what makes them right for "this town is always dangerous" — and it is also why they appear at the next restart and are not something to put on a timer.

An area belongs to one map. Coordinates from Chernarus mean nothing on Livonia, so each map keeps its own areas. A preset is different: it holds no place, so it works everywhere.

One purpose is refused outright, and the refusal is worth reading:

• Safe zone. We do not use the words. They promise more than any server can deliver: a player can always walk in, because DayZ gives a server no way to refuse a movement, and a shot fired at somebody still looks like it lands on the shooter's own screen even when it does nothing.

No-build areas are offered now. They were refused on this page until 2026-09-24, and the reason given was cfggameplay.json — DayZ's own no-build primitive needs that file, and ignores it unless serverDZ.cfg has enableCfgGameplayFile = 1. Your server mod does not use that primitive: it refuses the placement itself, so no file and no restart is involved. Draw one and it is in force about ten seconds after you save, exactly like a protected area.

Two things a no-build area does not do, so that you draw it in the right place. It does not remove anything already standing — it refuses a NEW placement, and a base that is already there stays there. And a wall added to a frame that is already up is not refused either, because that is a different action in DayZ. Draw the area before the base rather than around one.

Priority, and Which Area Wins

Areas overlap. Where two of them share ground, the higher priority is the one in force, and every row on the Zones page tells you which areas it beats and which beat it.

Two overlapping areas on the same priority are a coin-flip: nothing you have set decides which of them applies where they meet. That gets a red banner with both names in it, because otherwise the mistake stays invisible.

Two areas that share ground but not height do not overlap at all. The height limits — a floor and a ceiling in metres — are how you put one area above another.

Presets: Copied, Never Linked

A preset is a named set of settings — purpose, colour, priority, who can see it, height limits and rules. It carries no place and no name, so one preset works on every map.

There is a gallery of ready-made ones (Trading Post, Event Arena, Contaminated Area, Event Spawn Point, Infected Territory, Admin Marker, Objective, Members Only and others). Adding one puts a copy in your own preset list, where you can change anything about it.

Applying a preset copies its settings onto the area there and then. Editing the preset afterwards changes no area that was made from it, and deleting the preset changes none either — each area keeps exactly what it was given. Where an area no longer matches the preset it came from, the page says so and offers to apply it again.

Writing Areas Into Your Server's Files

At the bottom of the page: Show me what would change (which writes nothing) and Write the files.

Three files, and only these three:

Your own edits are kept. We write our block between two markers, back the file up outside your mission folder first, compare the bytes afterwards, and put the backup back if anything looks wrong. Everything outside our markers comes back exactly as it was, down to the indentation and the line endings.

We never write a file we cannot read first. If one of them has an error in it we say where, and change nothing.

We never create `env/zombie_territories.xml` or `cfgeffectarea.json`. They are your map's own files, and creating one would replace everything the map already has — hundreds of areas we did not put there. If a file is missing, add it yourself first and we will merge into it.

The change appears in game at the next restart, because that is when DayZ reads these files. Deleting an area, or taking it out of force, removes it from the files at the *next* write, not immediately.

What to Know Before You Announce an Area

These are facts about DayZ itself, not about how far we have got, and none of them will change however much we build. Read them before you tell your players what an area means — a reader who skims the first half and calls their trading post a safe zone has been misled by us.

• A player cannot be stopped from entering. DayZ gives a server no way to refuse a movement. Everything a protected area does happens after somebody is already inside: the damage is cancelled, the shooter is warned, and on a repeat they are moved to your point.
• A cancelled shot still looks like it landed. The impact and the blood are drawn on the shooter's own computer before the server ever sees the hit. Their screen will always show a hit; the rule is applied on the server, where the damage is thrown away.
• Damage is cancelled outright, never reduced. There is no way for a server to halve a hit, so there is no "25% damage" setting and we will not pretend there is.
• No ring on the player's in-game map. The map a player opens is drawn by the game's own interface, and a circle on it would need a download on every player's computer — and players install nothing to play on your server. Words are a different matter: a chat line and a notification need no download, and warn is one of the four things an area can do.
• There is no "more loot here". DayZ spreads loot by building and tier, not by coordinate. Loot at a place comes from the event system, which is what zone loot and supply drops use.
• A contaminated area is gas, not a kill box. DayZ's own contamination harms a player slowly, and full protective gear stops it almost completely.

Infected Pressure, and Why It Is Offered Disabled

Two different things share a word here, and it is worth keeping them apart.

Infected numbers here is a zone purpose, and it is real: it is an entry in your own env/zombie_territories.xml, DayZ's economy does the spawning, and it takes effect at the next restart like every other mission-file change.

Hot spots are the other thing: a circle the GameGrid mod fills with infected while the server runs, with no restart and no file written. The panel lists six — Light pressure, Standard, Heavy, Horde Night, Town ambience, Objective defence — and all six can be applied.

The one thing to know before you set one up. Replacing a killed infected takes about five minutes. The circle waits for your server to remove the body, and that wait is CleanupLifetimeDeadInfected in your own db/globals.xml — 330 seconds by default. Lower it and hot spots refill faster.

Your own ZombieMaxCount, in the same file, still caps every infected on the server — ours and DayZ's own together. A hot spot is checked against your real number when you apply it, and half of your cap stays reserved for the Central Economy.

What Reaches Your Players

An area can be set to tell players in game when it is switched on and off, in your own words. That goes out as a server broadcast the moment you press the button.

Switching one on and off does not have to be by hand. Your Command Manager carries Switch a zone on and Switch a zone off as saved commands, so an area can be put on the same timetable as your restarts. An event does it for you as well: arming one switches its chosen areas on, remembers what they were before, and puts them back exactly as they were when it ends.

If the broadcast could not be sent — usually because the GameGrid mod is not reporting — the panel says so rather than letting you assume it went out.

Who is inside an area is read live from the mod. When it cannot be read, the column shows a dash and the reason, never a zero. "Nobody is in there" and "we could not look" are different answers.