PC Expérimental Update 1.21: Overview

Greetings, survivors!

We are happy to announce the start of the experimental period for game update 1.21! We’ve got a really interesting theme for this update. This time around we’re getting medieval and traveling back to the Middle Ages!

One of the new additions we’re introducing is the crossbow – DayZ’s first ever spring-powered weapon. It can load a variety of bolts and be fitted with a number of sights and scopes. Legacy players may recall this model originally having a quiver, a characteristic we decided to scrap in order to focus on the behavior of bolts. Our aim is to make the projectiles recoverable, as well as animate them with every entity you hit. The ballistic properties of projectiles, along with their recoverability, are the most complex parts of the crossbow, and we are interested to see how they behave on public servers.

While the crossbow itself may not be strictly medieval, we have incorporated medieval themed replicas of various items and clothing throughout the world. Don’t worry though – we’ll let you find them on your own instead of spoiling the fun for you here.

Another important addition that comes with this update is a server log-in delay when switching between multiple accounts on consoles. We hope this change will result in healthier gameplay, as it will be far more time consuming to use multiple accounts on one server during a given game.

Experimental update 1.21 also comes with rebalanced quick slots, so now you won’t have to open your inventory as often. Fall damage has been rebalanced as well and should be much more readable. Continuing with the theme of readability, you now have the option to adjust the brightness of the in-game UI. Furthermore, we adjusted the lighting of the inventory camera. These two improvements should make your inventory much more pleasant to look at. We also made a few fixes regarding thrown items falling through the ground, and we’re curious to learn how often you stumble upon this issue after this update.

One more thing we’re introducing is the ability to spawn bushes, trees, and rocks through the server-side object spawner (and script). Last, but certainly not least, we are in the final stages of testing our Linux server distribution. We encourage anyone on Steam who wants to play experimental update 1.21 to try and do so on the Linux server, as we are monitoring it closely for any issues. If you’re interested in running your own Linux server, you can already do so on the experimental  branch.

A full list of changes can be found on our official forums (Steam, Xbox). We hope to see you in the public playtests and look forward to hearing your feedback!

On behalf of the DayZ team,

Adam