Loot and tiers

Loot in DayZ is not random. The Central Economy decides what may spawn where from two labels: what kind of place a building is, and how valuable the area around it is. Once you know both, you know where to look for what.

How the economy places loot

• Buildings carry usage tags. A police station is Police, a barracks Military, a farmhouse Farm; many buildings carry several tags.
• The map carries tiers. Every area is painted with a value tier, from Tier 1 for the poor areas to Tier 4 for the richest, plus a few small Unique spots.
• Every item lists the usages and tiers it may spawn in. It only spawns where both match. An item without a tier fits every tier; an item without a usage fits every building.
• Inside the building it also needs a free loot spot of the right kind — shelves for small things, the floor for big ones.

An example: on vanilla Chernarus the KA-M is Military and Tier 4. A barracks on the coast never holds one, and a supermarket in a Tier 4 town doesn't either. Only military buildings in the Tier 4 north-west do.

The reverse is just as true: a military base in a Tier 1 area holds Tier 1 military loot — clothing, helmets, pistols, attachments — not the best rifles. A big base is not automatically a good base; its tier decides.

Usage tags

The wiki's item list filters by tag, for example military loot, medical loot, industrial loot or hunting loot. Flags for your base come from offices and schools — see Base building.

Some maps add tags of their own. Livonia and Sakhal mark their underground bunkers as Underground and a few special places as Special, and Nasdara splits its military sites into two groups with partly different weapons. The tags in use on your map show up in the item list's filter.

Two tags don't come from the building at all but from the area it stands in: buildings inside a contaminated zone get ContaminatedArea, buildings at a castle get Historical. That is why the M4-A1 on vanilla Chernarus and Livonia only turns up inside contaminated zones.

Tiers on each map

The rule of thumb on every map: fresh spawns start in Tier 1, and the farther you get from them, the higher the tier. The map shows the tier zones of the chosen map — or your server's, when it shares its loot data.

Chernarus

The coast towns — Chernogorsk, Elektrozavodsk, Berezino, the Balota and Krasnostav airfields — are Tier 1. Inland it rises to Tier 2 and Tier 3: Stary Sobor, Severograd, the Zelenogorsk, Pavlovo and Kamensk military bases. Tier 4 is the far north-west: Tisy military base, Novaya Petrovka, Sinystok, Topolniki, Vavilovo, Lopatino, Tri Kresta, and part of the north-west airfield near Vybor, which is otherwise mostly Tier 3.

Livonia

Livonia has no Tier 4. Its best areas are Tier 3, all in the south: Nadbór, Dolnik, Konopki, Polana, Kulno and the military positions on the southern hills such as Skala and Swarog. The military bases in the middle of the map — Radunin, Borek, Lembork — are Tier 2.

Sakhal

Sakhal defines Tier 4, but vanilla paints it on a single place: a large shipwreck in the far south-west. Everything else tops out at Tier 3 — the capital Petropavlovsk-Sakhalskiy, Nogovo, Dudino, Burukan, Tugur, Neran and the big military site at Chernyy Mys. The east and north, where you spawn, are Tier 1.

Nasdara

Nasdara uses Tiers 1 to 3. The north, where you spawn, is Tier 1 — including the large Dashtabad airbase, so expect basic military loot there. The middle is Tier 2. The whole south is Tier 3: the capital Nasdara and its districts, Dar-e Ardis, Ma'bar Ardistan, FOB Atlas, Bustanshahr and No Abad.

Unique spots

Unique is not "better than Tier 4" — it is a small set of marked spots for a few special items. On Chernarus and Livonia they are mostly workshops, quarries and factory buildings, and that is where Plastic Explosive and the Remote Detonation Unit spawn. On Nasdara the Unique spots are around the Fostkova Mehran tunnel.

How loot respawns

Every item has a few numbers in the server's economy file. Using the KA-M on vanilla Chernarus:

• Nominal (3): how many copies the economy wants on the map. While that many lie around, it spawns no new ones.
• Min (2): when fewer copies than this lie around, the economy starts to replace them.
• Restock (1 hour): how long it waits before it tops the item up again.
• Lifetime (2 hours): a copy that lies untouched in the world for that long is cleaned up, and its slot can go to a new copy somewhere else.

Most items only count while they lie in the world. Once you pick one up, it no longer counts, and the economy can spawn a replacement. A few keep counting even after someone has picked them up or set them up — tents, barrels, flags and some big backpacks like the Field Backpack. On a busy server where many tents are pitched, fresh ones become hard to find.

A few more vanilla rules worth knowing:

• Loot doesn't spawn right next to players (vanilla keeps about 100 metres away), so waiting inside a building won't refill it in front of you.
• A restart doesn't throw the loot away and roll it fresh. The economy simply carries on.
• Loot spawns anywhere from pristine to badly damaged, never ruined.

Dynamic events

On top of buildings, the economy places events: wrecks and scenes that appear at one of a fixed list of spots, stay for a while and then move somewhere else. Their wrecks carry a usage tag like a building and fill with items marked as event loot — some guns and gear spawn only there. Most event-only items have no tier, so a crash anywhere can hold them.

• Helicopter crashes. You hear a new one come down in the distance, and the wreck smokes. Each holds 10 to 15 items of military loot and draws infected soldiers. Vanilla keeps 3 crashes on the map on Chernarus, Livonia and Sakhal, and 8 on Nasdara. On Chernarus almost all of them fall in the western half of the map.
• Military convoys. Wrecked military trucks and armoured vehicles with 2 to 3 items each, guarded by infected soldiers (Chernarus, Livonia, Nasdara).
• Police scenes. Roadblocks and traffic accidents with police cars on Chernarus and Livonia; single police car wrecks on Sakhal and Nasdara.
• Trains. Abandoned and crashed trains on Chernarus and Livonia, with a little loot in the wagons.

Some maps have their own:

• Chernarus: supply crates with food at the north-west airfield.
• Sakhal: ambulance wrecks, fishing boats, military patrol boats, locked shipping containers, and a frozen scientist with a locked Scientific Briefcase. A container opens with the Container Key of its colour; the wrong colour breaks the key.
• Nasdara: large transport helicopter crashes in the east, locked armoury containers that need a green key, and water trucks.

Vehicles are placed by the economy in the same way — see Vehicles.

Contaminated zones

Contaminated zones come in two kinds.

• Static zones sit in the same place all the time, and the buildings inside them have their own loot list — some of the best rifles and attachments in the game. Vanilla has them at Pavlovo military base and the big shipwreck at Rify on Chernarus, at Radunin and Lukow airfield on Livonia, and in the Fostkova Mehran tunnel on Nasdara. Sakhal has none.
• Dynamic zones appear where an artillery shell lands: you hear it fire, then a gas cloud forms. They exist only on Chernarus and Livonia, last for a limited time and visibly thin out before they vanish. Each leaves a few gas vials (PO-X Vial) near its centre.

Don't walk into either without protection: a gas mask and a full NBC suit. The Combat Gas Mask has its filter built in; the Gas Mask needs a Gas Mask Filter fitted. See Diseases for what the gas does and how to treat it.

Combat Gas MaskGasMaskGas MaskGP5GasMaskGas Mask FilterGasMask_FilterNBC JacketNBCJacketGrayNBC PantsNBCPantsGrayNBC HoodNBCHoodGrayNBC GlovesNBCGlovesGrayNBC BootsNBCBootsGray

NBC gear comes from fire stations, hospitals and military sites.

On your server

Everything above is vanilla. Server owners change the economy all the time — more or fewer copies, other tags, items added or removed — and some repaint the tiers. The map above then shows your server's tier zones, and so does the "Loot tiers" layer on the full map. On the wiki, every item page shows how rare the item is on your server, in how many places it can spawn, which tags it uses and how that differs from vanilla, and it can show you the spots on the map. The server overview shows the server's own values.

New to the map? Start with Your first hour, and see Weapons and ammo for what to do with what you find.