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When Dev Blog 6 mentioned “the newly added motorbikes” in a single throwaway clause, it was the only detail anyone got. Dev Blog 7 is the payoff: two bikes, a two-wheeled leaning simulation, the return of ragdoll physics, and a test server coming in Experimental 1.30 so you can ride them before Badlands even launches. The best part for everyone not buying the expansion? Bikes are not exclusive to Nasdara. They are coming to all four maps. Note: Bohemia’s standing disclaimer applies: “The information shared in our development blog reflects a work in progress. The details discussed are subject to change before release.” Catching up? See our Dev Blog 6 coverage and the full Nasdara rundown. On this page Bikes on every map, and a test server before launchLeaning, steering lights, and walking your bike homeRagdolls are back, and they are for crashingThe Jana: a Czech moped with three colours and no ambitionsThe Enduro: 130 km/h and parts you can mix and matchRamps, suspension, and no air control (for now)They recorded a real oneMaintenance, and what bikes cannot doWhat is next, and where the schedule wentWhat motorbikes mean for your serverFrequently asked questions Dev Blog 7 is entirely about motorbikes — a third mode of transport for the biggest map DayZ has ever had. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 84) Bikes on every map, and a test server before launch Motorbikes were not part of the original Badlands plan. Bohemia says they became a natural fit once the scale of Nasdara became clear — it is the biggest map the studio has ever built, and a third option between walking and driving a car makes crossing it far more interesting. Two things follow that matter well beyond the expansion: Bikes reach all terrains, not just Nasdara — though in lower numbers elsewhere. The team says they want to watch how players use them on each map. The developers’ own video for this section is titled “Motorbikes On All Four Maps,” which is about as clear as it gets.Experimental Update 1.30 will introduce “Many Bikes” servers, purpose-built so you can test them in advance. That second point is the one to circle. It means bikes land on Experimental before Badlands releases, and a dedicated high-spawn server type exists to hammer them. Bohemia calls the release date of Experimental 1.30 “the elephant in the room” and says it will be announced as soon as possible. Bikes are coming to all four maps, with Nasdara getting the highest numbers. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 84) Leaning, steering lights, and walking your bike home This is a genuine two-wheeled simulation rather than a reskinned car. The character leans into turns, the handlebar-turning animation drives the feel, and Bohemia had to upgrade its animation systems to make it work. Even the front-mounted light follows the direction you are steering. Interestingly, the groundwork was already laid: the team credits the car networking upgrade shipped in Update 1.28 as what made motorbikes possible at all. Gears work as they do in other vehicles, but there are new animations for “walking” the bike — pushing it on foot to reposition it, or, as the blog cheerfully puts it, to drag it into the shade when your spark plug is busted. You can walk it with the engine off or in neutral. DayZ Badlands Dev Blog Week 84 - Motorbikes On All Four Maps Video: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 84) Ragdolls are back, and they are for crashing Here is the one that will get clipped and shared: ragdoll physics are returning to DayZ, reserved specifically for bike crashes. Crash at relatively high speed and you get ejected. The mechanics are worth reading carefully, because the two perspectives differ: PerspectiveWhat happensOther playersThe ragdoll animation triggers and plays out — and crucially, all clients see the character in the same position.YouYou briefly fall unconscious. That consistency detail matters more than it sounds. A ragdoll that lands differently on each client would be a desync nightmare in a game where your body is lootable. Everyone agreeing on where you ended up is the hard part. DayZ Badlands Dev Blog Week 84 - Ragdoll Physics For Motorbike Crashes Video: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 84) The Jana: a Czech moped with three colours and no ambitions Bohemia leans on its home country again. The Jana moped is directly inspired by the Jawa 50/05, one of the most commonly owned bikes in rural Czechia — in the late ’60s, as the blog puts it, either the bike every teenager had or the one every teenager wanted. Three fixed colour variations: blue, red, and yellow.Top speed around 70 km/h.Distinctive rounded bodywork, unusual proportions and a characteristic large double seat. On the art side it was built with a Sub-D workflow for the smooth curves, with hard-surface parts like the metal panels and wheels modelled in Blender and the seat sculpted in ZBrush. The texturing layers on rust, dust, dirt and grime, with fuel and oil stains around the tank and engine — a vehicle that has “seen extensive use and survived years of neglect.” The Jana is modelled on the Jawa 50/05 and comes in blue, red or yellow. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 84) The Enduro: 130 km/h and parts you can mix and match The Enduro is the serious one, based on the Jawa 500 682 Bitrak — and it is the bike with the customisation hook. Some parts are removable for cosmetic customisation. Base colours are red, yellow, green and blue, and you can mix and match parts however you like.Top speed around 130 km/h — nearly double the Jana.Bohemia also linked an old Jawa performance test advertisement from the Jawa Yezdi Motorcycles channel as period reference. The real machine is a 362cc two-stroke single-cylinder with strong torque, complex sport suspension and large 270mm all-terrain tyres. Front shocks and the rear swing arm both have long travel, the rear riding on springs and shock absorbers. The in-game version takes a few deliberate liberties: the real bike runs two spark plugs for redundancy because fouling is a problem, but DayZ simplifies it to one. It has longer gears than a motocross setup for a higher top speed across the map, and aftermarket gauges that let you manage the bike and its optional lights at night. The modeller’s own notes are a nice touch — tracing every switch and cable line to work out where it connected, recreating the cast shape of the engine and the rear suspension linkage, and importing the frame into ZBrush to sculpt the welds. It was, they say, their first time doing hard surfaces in ZBrush. The Enduro tops out near 130 km/h and has removable parts you can mix and match across four base colours. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 84) Ramps, suspension, and no air control (for now) Bohemia has placed ramps all over Nasdara for small jumps — but sets expectations immediately: there is no air control for now. You can get airborne; you cannot steer once you are. The suspension demonstration is worth watching for what the long-travel setup actually does under the bike. DayZ Badlands Dev Blog Week 84 - Motorbike Suspension Demonstration Video: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 84) Careful: Bikes are small-framed with powerful engines, and you can damage the spark plug if you push too hard. Bohemia says the balancing has been adjusted so cautious players should not need to worry — which is a fairly clear hint that reckless ones will. They recorded a real one The audio team went hunting for an actual Jawa 500 682 Bitrak, which is a rare racing variant produced in very small numbers. They were seriously considering recording a different bike with matching engine specs before they managed to get hold of the real thing. What they captured: a wide range of engine RPMs, the exhaust note (“spot-on,” they reckon), all the small incidental sounds on the bike, and several new tyre recordings. DayZ Badlands Dev Blog Week 84 - Behind The Scenes Of Recording Motorbike Audio Video: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 84) Aftermarket gauges let you manage the bike and its optional lights while riding at night. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 84) Maintenance, and what bikes cannot do Bikes are deliberately simpler to keep running than cars, and deliberately limited in what they offer: AspectDetailRepairsBoth bikes are repaired with a blowtorch.BatteryNeither bike has a separate battery like cars do, so assembling one is less hassle.TyresReplaceable, as always.Spark plugA single plug on the Enduro, and damageable if you ride carelessly.InventoryNone. Neither bike has any cargo space — they are purely transport.PassengersOne character only. No passenger seats. No inventory is the big one. A car is a rolling stash; a bike is not. That makes bikes a movement tool rather than a base-building logistics solution, and it is a deliberate trade against their speed. The Jana was built with a Sub-D workflow in Blender, with the seat sculpted separately in ZBrush. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 84) What is next, and where the schedule went Bohemia opened the blog with an apology for missing its own three-week cadence, citing two causes: it is “the final hurrah for most of the team,” and the marketing department was tied up with a Gamescom showcase. They say everyone is back and they will try to increase blog frequency as release approaches. Two topics are named for upcoming blogs: The music production behind DayZ Badlands.Animals coming to Nasdara. Combined with Dev Blog 6’s “release window just a few months away,” and an Experimental 1.30 date promised as soon as possible, the runway is getting short. Rust, dust, grime and fuel staining sell a vehicle that survived years of neglect. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 84) What motorbikes mean for your server This is the rare dev blog where almost everything lands on existing servers rather than only the expansion. Bikes are coming to all four maps, and Experimental 1.30 gets them there ahead of Badlands. A new vehicle class means new economy entries. Two bikes, multiple colour variants and removable Enduro parts all need spawn rates, lifetimes and loot placement in your mission XML.Your vehicle caps need rethinking. Bikes are cheap, fast and disposable in a way cars are not, and a limit tuned for sedans will behave very differently once mopeds enter the pool.No inventory changes player behaviour. Bikes will not replace cars for hauling, so expect them to be used as scouting and rotation tools — which tends to mean more contested-area traffic, not less.“Many Bikes” is a preview of demand. A dedicated high-spawn server type on Experimental is the perfect excuse to test your own spawn balance before it matters. All of it runs through the same mission files and config you already manage. Our loot economy guide covers editing spawns safely with the built-in XML validator, and the serverDZ.cfg reference walks through every server setting you can tune. Not running a server yet? A new vehicle class dropping on every map at once is a good moment to start — our getting started guide takes you from order to a running server in about fifteen minutes, and the Workshop mods guide covers load order and auto-updates so a patch day does not catch you out. Note: We will cover the music and Nasdara animals blogs as they land, and the Experimental 1.30 date the moment Bohemia announces it. Frequently asked questions Are motorbikes only in DayZ Badlands? No. Bohemia confirms bikes will be found across all terrains, though in lower numbers outside Nasdara — the developers’ own video for this section is titled “Motorbikes On All Four Maps.” They arrive on Experimental with Update 1.30. What are the "Many Bikes" servers? A server type coming with Experimental Update 1.30 that lets players test motorbikes in advance. No release date for 1.30 has been given — Bohemia calls it “the elephant in the room” and says it will announce one as soon as possible. How fast are the two bikes? The Jana moped should reach approximately 70 km/h, and the Enduro dirt bike around 130 km/h. Both figures are the developers’ own approximations and could change before release. Can motorbikes carry loot or a passenger? Neither. Bohemia is explicit that neither bike has any inventory space and that both carry a single character with no passenger seats — they are designed purely as transport. Are ragdoll physics coming back to DayZ properly? They are returning specifically for bike crashes. Crash at speed and other players see a ragdoll animation — with all clients agreeing on the final position — while from your own perspective you briefly fall unconscious. How do you repair a motorbike? With a blowtorch. Neither bike uses a separate battery like cars do, tyres are replaceable, and the Enduro runs a single spark plug that can be damaged by careless riding. Related guides Dev Blog 6: dust, the Lee-Enfield and a release windowDayZ Badlands: everything we knowGetting started with the control panel

Dev Blog 6 landed on 7 August, and buried in the housekeeping is the line every DayZ player has been waiting for: the release window is “just a few months away.” That is the closest Bohemia Interactive has come to dating DayZ Badlands, and it arrived alongside two features — a dynamic dust system that reacts to wind, weight and footsteps, and the Lee-Enfield rifle. There is also a quiet bombshell in a subordinate clause: motorbikes, described in passing as “newly added,” with no fanfare whatsoever. Here is everything from the blog, including both official videos. Note: As always, Bohemia attaches a disclaimer: “The information shared in our development blog reflects a work in progress. The details discussed are subject to change before release.” New to the expansion? Start with our full rundown of everything confirmed about Nasdara. On this page The headline nobody put in a headline: a release windowWait — motorbikes?Dust that actually reacts to the worldWatch the dust system in motionGood news for every other mapThe Lee-Enfield: a Great War rifle with an Indian accentSee the rifle in actionWhat is nextGetting your server ready for BadlandsFrequently asked questions Dev Blog 6 covers dust particle effects and the Lee-Enfield rifle. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 79) The headline nobody put in a headline: a release window Bohemia did not write a press release about this. It appears in the middle of a paragraph explaining why future dev blogs may feel less thematically tidy: Two things follow from that. First, there is still no confirmed date — “a few months” is a window, not a launch day, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Second, a team openly describing itself as under pressure with a window in sight is a team in the back half of development. The cadence is holding regardless: a dev blog every three weeks, plus surprise recap posts in between that recap previous blogs, answer community questions, clarify details, and — in their words — “cheekily sneak in new information that didn't appear in the main dev blog.” Those recaps are worth watching, because that is exactly where the code lock news turned up last time. Wait — motorbikes? The dust section opens by listing what kicks up dust: “cars, trucks, and the newly added motorbikes.” That is the entire announcement. No section, no screenshot, no elaboration. It is a genuinely significant addition. DayZ has never had a two-wheeled vehicle in the base game, and a motorbike changes the calculus on a map Bohemia has described as large and punishing to cross on foot — fast, fuel-efficient, able to thread the alleys and dried riverbeds that a truck cannot, and almost certainly far more fragile. Careful: Beyond that one clause, nothing about motorbikes has been detailed — no handling model, no repair or fuel specifics, no screenshots. Treat everything else you read about them as speculation until Bohemia says more. Dust that actually reacts to the world The dust system splits into two vehicle effects that work together: EffectBehaviourTrail cloudA big cloud that follows the vehicle for a period. Size and duration scale with vehicle type and weight — a value the team set artificially so it can be tuned per vehicle and per event.Wheel dustA smaller ambient trail attached to each individual wheel, for immersion while driving. On foot it goes further. Footsteps kick up their own clouds, and stepping inside a building can make the floor creak and dust fall from the ceiling — potentially giving away your position to anyone listening on the floor below. That is a genuine stealth mechanic hiding inside a particle effect. Trail cloud size and duration scale with vehicle weight, and each wheel adds its own ambient dust. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 79) Watch the dust system in motion Bohemia published a demonstration reel showing the effects across several situations — vehicles, footsteps and falling ceiling dust. DayZ Badlands Dev Blog Week 79 - Dust Particles Video: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 79) The performance engineering behind it is more interesting than particle effects usually are. Both dust effects are client-side only, so nothing is synchronised over the network — with one telling exception: the dust that falls from the ceiling when someone is walking overhead. That one has to be networked, because it is information about another player. Rather than simulating dust across the whole map, the system only generates particles in a localised area around you, and then predicts your direction and speed to shift that area ahead of you. Drive somewhere and the game is not wasting effort spawning dust in the space you have already left. Airborne dust uses the same trick from a different angle: particles spawn upwind of your view so they drift toward and past the camera, making dust feel omnipresent without being simulated everywhere. Weather drives all of it. Wind intensity directly controls ground-dust spawn frequency — stronger wind, more dust kicked up — while wind direction decides where airborne particles originate. Good news for every other map This is the part server owners should note. The dust effects are not locked to Badlands: Dust is a surface property with adjustable behaviour. That is the second time in two dev blogs that a Badlands feature has been confirmed to reach the wider game — the code lock was the first. Whether it gets retrofitted to Chernarus or Livonia officially is not stated, but the capability is engine-side rather than map-side, which is the part that matters for modding. Dust is implemented as an adjustable surface property rather than a Nasdara-only effect. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 79) The Lee-Enfield: a Great War rifle with an Indian accent The second half of the blog is a deep dive into the Lee-Enfield, modelled on the most common Great War variant: the Model No. 1 Mk. III*, better known as the SMLE (Short, Magazine, Lee-Enfield). That asterisk is doing real work. In the British system it denotes a design update — here, a redesigned bridge and the removal of the volley sight, a long-range aiming device that real-world combat distances had made pointless. The woodwork was also thickened considerably after reports of cracking, producing the distinctive look where the barrel band and shroud sit sunken into the stock. The specific rifle Bohemia modelled is not a British-made example, and the details give it away: It is built from lighter teak wood, which was far more available in India than walnut — walnut being rare in that climate.It has a cross bolt through the rear of the forewood stock, known to collectors as the Ishapore screw.An extra stud sits through the wood in front of the receiver to help distribute recoil force.It is stamped “R.F.I.” — Rifle Factory Ishapore. Those modifications existed to extend the life of the stock, and the team modelled them faithfully enough that the rifle tells you where it came from. The Lee-Enfield is based on the Model No. 1 Mk. III*, the most common variant of the Great War. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 79) See the rifle in action DayZ Badlands Dev Blog Week 79 - Lee-Enfield Video: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 79) The technical details are where it gets interesting for gameplay. The rifle feeds 10 rounds of 7.62×54mmR from a 10-round detachable magazine — not the .303 British you would expect from an original. That is a real-world conversion, not a liberty. Because .303 British is rare today, owners who want to shoot these rifles regularly convert them: the barrel is set back a couple of millimetres, planed down at the chamber end to restore headspace, and a new chamber is cut with a Mosin chamber-cutting reamer. The magazine already fits the cartridge and the bullet diameter is identical, so nothing else needs changing. Bohemia is explicit about why this matters in game: “This makes the gun ideal for our economy, as using a shared cartridge is better for gameplay.” A Great War bolt-action that feeds from the same ammo pool as the Mosin is far more likely to stay in your hands than a rifle with its own orphan calibre. The R.F.I. stamp marks it as a Rifle Factory Ishapore build, matching its teak stock and cross bolt. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 79) What is next Bohemia is hedging on the next blog, but named two candidates: public infrastructure and possibly the highway. Nothing is set in stone, and they have asked the community to weigh in when the next recap drops “in a week or two.” They also acknowledged the balancing act openly — that choosing what to show has been difficult because they do not want to oversell or spoil the surprises. Dev Blog 6 was, by their own admission, a quieter one than the rebuilding system reveal that preceded it. Thickened teak furniture and the sunken barrel band are faithful to the Ishapore-built original. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 79) Getting your server ready for Badlands “A few months away” is close enough to start preparing. A new official map resets the entire server scene — no established bases, no entrenched clans, no memorised loot routes — and the communities that are configured and running on day one are the ones that keep the players who show up looking for a home. Three things from this blog that land directly on server owners: Dust is engine-side, not map-side. A surface property with adjustable behaviour is exactly the kind of thing modders reach for, so expect it to surface on community maps well beyond Nasdara.Motorbikes change your vehicle economy. A new vehicle class means new spawn rates, new parts and new repair loops in your mission files — and a new headache for anyone running vehicle limits.The Lee-Enfield shares the Mosin's cartridge. That is a deliberate economy decision, and it will shift 7.62×54mmR demand on your server the moment the rifle spawns. All three run through the same mission XML and config you already manage. If you are setting up now, our getting started guide takes you from first login to a running server in about fifteen minutes, the serverDZ.cfg reference covers every setting you can tune, and the loot economy guide explains how to adjust spawns safely when the new weapons and vehicles arrive. Running mods on top? Our Workshop mods guide covers load order, server-only mods and auto-updates — the three things most likely to break a server the week a major expansion lands. Note: We will cover the next dev blog and recap as they land. Bohemia has asked for community input on what to showcase next, so if you want to see public infrastructure or the highway, the recap post is the place to say so. Frequently asked questions Has DayZ Badlands got a release date? Not a date, but for the first time a window. In Dev Blog 6, Bohemia wrote that “the release window is just a few months away.” No specific day, month or quarter has been confirmed. Are motorbikes really coming to DayZ? Yes. Dev Blog 6 refers to “cars, trucks, and the newly added motorbikes” when describing which vehicles kick up dust. That single mention is all the detail given so far — no handling, fuel or repair specifics have been published. Will the dust effects come to Chernarus and Livonia? The capability will. Bohemia states dust “can be applied as a property to any surface with adjustable behavior” and that a designer can apply it to existing surfaces and maps. Whether the official older maps get updated is not confirmed. What ammunition does the Lee-Enfield use? 7.62×54mmR, fed from a 10-round detachable magazine. It is modelled as a real-world calibre conversion of a .303 British rifle, and Bohemia says the shared cartridge is deliberate because it suits the game's loot economy. Do the dust particles affect server performance? Both effects are client-side only and are not networked, with one exception: dust falling from a ceiling when another player walks overhead. The system also only spawns particles in a predicted area around each player rather than across the map. Where can I watch the official videos? Both are embedded above and come from the official DayZ YouTube channel — one demonstrating the dust particle effects, one showing the Lee-Enfield. The full write-up is in Bohemia's Dev Blog (Week 79). Related guides DayZ Badlands: everything we knowGetting started with the control panelinstalling Steam Workshop mods

DayZ Badlands is taking survivors somewhere the series has never gone: Nasdara, a Middle-Eastern-inspired region that Bohemia Interactive calls the hottest official map it has ever built. This is not Chernarus with a sand filter. The sun itself is a threat, water is scarce enough to plan your route around, and for the first time you will be able to rebuild and lock down a ruined house instead of nailing planks to a tent. Four dev blogs are out so far. We have read all of them and pulled together everything the developers have actually confirmed — the survival mechanics, the new gear, the weapons, the rebuilding system, and what it all means if you are planning to run your own Badlands server on day one. Note: Bohemia attaches the same disclaimer to every dev blog: “The information shared in our development blog reflects a work in progress. The details discussed are subject to change before release.” Everything below is what has been shown or stated publicly, not a promise of the final game. On this page The sun is now something that can kill youYour loadout finally has a real trade-offThe infected got a ground-up reworkScimitars, jambiyas, and a 2,500-year-old bladePvP in a concrete jungleThe Bazaar: a modular market with a gun shop insideThe Rebuilding System, and the code lock everyone asked forWhen can you play it?What Badlands means if you run a serverFrequently asked questions Nasdara, the new region coming with DayZ Badlands. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 73) The sun is now something that can kill you Bohemia has been blunt about this: Nasdara is the hottest official map ever made for DayZ, and the heat is a gameplay system rather than a colour grade. Direct sunlight will affect your character’s stats, so staying alive means paying attention to more than a hunger bar. Cover up or find shade. Staying hydrated is only part of it — keeping your body covered and getting out of direct sun both matter.Nights get cold. The developers confirm severe temperature swings between day and night, though they stopped short of freezing conditions.Dust is a hazard. Glasses, goggles, shemaghs, dust masks and face wraps become functional items, not cosmetics. As the team put it, you never know when a breeze of dust can turn into something sinister. Water is the other half of the squeeze. Nasdara has very little standing water, so the well-hopping routine from Chernarus does not transfer. Bohemia researched how water is actually distributed across Middle Eastern regions, historically and today, and built “new and more interactive ways” to drink. Ignore it and the consequences escalate — the blog spells out the ending: starting with sweating and ending with death. This is the part that should excite anyone who thinks modern DayZ has become too survivable. On Chernarus and Livonia, the environment mostly means bad weather and poor visibility. On Nasdara it is a constant tax on every decision you make. Direct sunlight will affect your character’s stats — shade and cover become tactical decisions. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 67) Your loadout finally has a real trade-off Because heat and dust are mechanics, clothing stops being a fashion choice. The Badlands wardrobe leans regional and light: Kameez tunics — lighter shirts, with what Bohemia describes as a huge range of variantsShalwar pants, vests and sandalsDust goggles and other protective eyewearKeffiyehs, turbans and pakol hats, plus assorted face coverings The interesting design consequence is that low-insulation clothing finally has a purpose. In colder maps everyone gravitates to the heaviest, most pocket-heavy jacket available because there is no downside. In Nasdara you are weighing insulation against inventory space against how much skin is exposed to the sun. A military jacket might still win for storage — but you will feel the cost. There is regional military gear too. The OBR uniform is a standard field uniform with roll-up sleeves, epaulets and flap pockets. The FNO jacket is the specialised one: a longer field-jacket silhouette with a hood, fishtail back extension, drawcords and a night desert camouflage pattern. Police clothing rounds it out, with fictional-but-plausible local patches designed from real regional badges. The palette shifts to beige, olive, faded blue and night-desert tones, weathered with dry dust and sun-bleaching rather than the wet mud of Chernarus. Lighter regional clothing gives low-insulation gear a genuine role for the first time. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 67) The infected got a ground-up rework This is quietly one of the most ambitious parts of Badlands. The art team rebuilt its approach around a single goal: make the infected look and feel more human. The reasoning is lore-accurate — the infected are ordinary people who caught a disease in the outbreak, not generic horror-movie undead, and the visuals should say so. Three pillars drive it: PillarWhat it means in practiceRegional InfluenceEvery scrap of clothing hints at who they were before — their home, their work, their culture.Progression of DecayEvery visual element tells a story of sickness, neglect and deterioration.Visual StorytellingSilhouette, texture and shape should express that story at a glance. The guiding principle was subtlety, and there is a line in the blog worth quoting in full: “Every stain has a source. Nothing is decorative. Everything is a clue.” A torn uniform tells you where someone worked. Bruises, vomit, cuts, sunburn and sweat show how far gone the body is. Nasdara’s infected also wear the climate. Instead of the dark, wet, mud-like dirt that suits Chernarus, they carry lighter dust, dry grime, faded fabric, sweat staining and heat-damaged skin. Because several artists worked on different models, the team built shared visual guidelines to keep skin treatment, dust, sun marks and colour grading consistent across the whole set. The Nasdara infected were reworked around three pillars — regional influence, decay, and visual storytelling. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 70) Scimitars, jambiyas, and a 2,500-year-old blade The melee collection is the most characterful thing in Badlands so far, and it is drawn from real regional history: Shamshir-styled scimitar — one-handed, described by the team as a fearsome, damaging, long-reaching option with a quick swing.Jambiya curved dagger — given a higher condition value than regular knives, so it survives longer before needing a sharpening tool.Akinaka — a Scythian double-edged design that has existed for over two and a half millennia, recognised as a Persian weapon since ancient times. Bohemia calls it “an exceedingly rare artifact” that should signal its holder has mastered survival in Nasdara — or bested someone who did.Police Baton for knocking out assailants, and the Döner Knife, which the developers cheerfully note is ideal for slicing meats. The research came from museums, auction houses and documentaries on the region’s art heritage — in real life every jambiya is unique in its materials and decoration, speaking to its origin and its owner’s prestige. The stated hope is that players find something special enough to drop their old blades for. On the firearms side, two are confirmed with an unusual relationship. The MP-18 is a submachine gun firing 9×19mm from a 32-round drum magazine — and that drum has an indicator showing roughly how many rounds remain. Its companion is the Luger P08 pistol, and the neat part is that magazines can be freely swapped between the two. A third weapon, the SCR-17, arrived ahead of the expansion (more on that below). The Badlands melee collection draws on Persian Gulf and South Asian blade traditions. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 70) PvP in a concrete jungle The obvious worry with a desert map is that it becomes a sniper’s paradise with nowhere to hide. The environment team went out of its way to address that, and the short version is that Nasdara is densely packed — farmland housing, small settlements, large villages and cities, many of which offer tight CQB in interiors, multi-story apartments and rooftop access. Cover comes from several directions. There is less vegetation than other maps but still plenty of bush coverage, plus trees, walls and fences across fields. The dried-up rivers Sefid-Darya and Siyah-Darya form natural protected paths through the landscape. Cities are deliberately labyrinthine — the team cites Kabul as the reference — packed with street vendors, vehicles and clutter you can break line of sight with. Verticality is the headline change. City blocks reach higher than anything on previous maps, and the developers are direct about the camping problem: taller neighbouring structures exist specifically to give attackers an angle, and certain buildings that will obviously attract campers have props placed to help you deal with them. As the blog warns, watch your back if you begin to make yourself comfortable in a building. Interconnecting rooftops are the other new toy. They overlook the busy streets below, and they let you cross into neighbouring buildings to enter from an unexpected angle — faster looting, faster hunting, and no guarantee it is safer. City housing dwarfs the streets, turning urban areas into what the team calls a concrete jungle. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 73) The Bazaar: a modular market with a gun shop inside The Bazaar is a set of modular buildings based on traditional Middle Eastern covered markets. Six pieces connect together — an entrance, straight sections, turns and a corner — so designers can assemble markets of different sizes and shapes. Inside you get arched walkways, domed ceilings, varied shopfronts, hanging signs, carpets and scattered goods. For looters, the important detail is that one shop type is a fortified gun store that spawns military loot. You can identify it on sight: signs with guns on them, and iron bars over the windows. Regular shops carry generic loot, and some loot spawns along the corridors purely to reward exploring. Ladders provide rooftop access, and their heights were deliberately matched to neighbouring assets so you can traverse across connected rooftops. The research list reads like a travel diary — Muy Mubarak Masjid and Haji Bahudin Market in Kandahar, Taktak Street Bazar, Marko Bazar in Pakistan studied via drone footage, the famous Dara Adamkhel gun market, and Turkish street bazaars in Istanbul. An early inner-courtyard concept was scrapped because it made the space feel like a palace rather than a chaotic marketplace. Gun shops are marked by signage and iron bars — and they spawn military loot. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog (Week 73) The Rebuilding System, and the code lock everyone asked for This is the feature most likely to change how communities play. In Nasdara you will be able to rebuild and barricade select houses — and Bohemia frames it as deliberately more forgiving than the existing base building system, because you choose the scale of the project. Rebuild an entire three-storey house for your squad, orsimply add doors and windows to a small storage building to make a stash house. Crucially, the existing base building system is not going away — the team confirms you will still be able to build compounds the way you do now. Rebuilding is an addition, not a replacement. Then there is the one the community has been requesting for years: the code lock is coming. And the detail worth shouting about — Bohemia has confirmed it will be available on all other maps, not just Nasdara. If you run a Chernarus or Livonia server, that lands on your server too. The Rebuilding System lets you scale a project from a stash house to a three-storey squad base. Image: Bohemia Interactive — DayZ Badlands Dev Blog Recap (1) When can you play it? Bohemia has not announced a release date for DayZ Badlands, and we are not going to invent one. What has been confirmed is more useful than a rumour: The SCR-17 firearm shipped to the Experimental branch on 1 July as part of the Road to Badlands update — so pieces of the expansion are already reaching live branches ahead of launch.Dev blogs now run roughly every three weeks, up from monthly, with recap posts in between that also carry new information.Dev Blog 6 (Week 79) is confirmed to cover dust particles and a firearm.Community members were flown to Prague to play DayZ Badlands hands-on — usually a sign a build is in reasonable shape. The pattern to watch is Road to Badlands. Content is landing in Experimental in pieces rather than all at once on launch day, which means server owners get a runway to test rather than a scramble. What Badlands means if you run a server Every DayZ expansion reshuffles the server scene, and Badlands looks like a bigger reshuffle than most. A brand-new map means brand-new territory: no established bases, no dominant clans, no memorised loot routes. That is the single best moment to launch a community, and the servers that are up and configured on day one are the ones that keep the players who arrive looking for somewhere to settle. A few things worth thinking about now rather than at launch: The code lock is not Nasdara-exclusive. It is coming to all maps, so your existing Chernarus or Livonia server inherits a base-security change whether or not you touch Badlands.Rebuilding changes your raid economy. Reinforced houses and stash houses behave differently from tents and fences, and your loot and raid tool settings will want revisiting.Heat and hydration are tunable survival pressure. A harsher map gives you far more room to define your server’s identity, from brutal hardcore to a friendlier ruleset.New loot means new economy files. Bazaar gun shops, regional melee weapons and the MP-18 and Luger all pass through the same mission XML you already manage. If you have never run one before, the good news is that hosting a DayZ server is no longer a weekend of batch files. On DZSERVERS.HOST your server is provisioned automatically the moment you order — our getting started guide walks you from first login to a running server in about fifteen minutes, and the serverDZ.cfg reference covers every setting you can tune, including the time acceleration and gameplay toggles you will want to dial in for a harsher map. Planning a modded Badlands server? Our Workshop mods guide covers load order, server-only mods and automatic updates — the three things most likely to break a server on patch day, which matters a great deal when a brand-new expansion is landing. Note: We will keep this article updated as Bohemia publishes more dev blogs, including Dev Blog 6 (Week 79) on dust particles and the next firearm. Frequently asked questions When does DayZ Badlands release? No release date has been announced. Bohemia is publishing dev blogs roughly every three weeks with recap posts in between, and content is already arriving in stages — the SCR-17 rifle reached the Experimental branch on 1 July as part of the Road to Badlands update. What is Nasdara? Nasdara is the new region introduced with DayZ Badlands: a Middle-Eastern-inspired map drawing on real geography from Afghanistan, Iraq and the wider Persian Gulf. Bohemia describes it as the hottest official map ever made for DayZ, with sunlight and hydration as active survival mechanics. Is the code lock only on the new map? No. Bohemia has confirmed the code lock will be available on all other maps, not just Nasdara. Existing Chernarus, Livonia and Sakhal servers get it too. Does the Rebuilding System replace base building? No. The developers have explicitly confirmed you will still be able to use the base game base building system to create compounds. Rebuilding houses is an additional option that lets you choose the scale, from adding a door to a small stash house up to a three-storey squad base. What weapons have been confirmed so far? The MP-18 submachine gun (9×19mm, 32-round drum with a remaining-rounds indicator), the Luger P08 pistol that shares magazines with it, and the SCR-17 which is already on Experimental. On the melee side: a Shamshir-styled scimitar, the Jambiya dagger, the Akinaka short sword, a Police Baton and a Döner Knife. Can I run my own DayZ Badlands server? DayZ community servers have always supported official maps, and Badlands content is already flowing into Experimental through the Road to Badlands update. Getting set up in advance is the sensible move — our control panel guide covers provisioning, configuration and your first start. Related guides Getting started with the control panelinstalling Steam Workshop modsevery serverDZ.cfg setting explained