It's taken a while, but chainsaws have finally been added to DayZ—and just in time for Christmas. Patch 0.52 is a particularly Christmassy one, actually, introducing Xmas trees and pressies, teddy bears, woolly dresses and, er, medieval long swords and ghillie suits. Hey, it's still the zombie apocalypse after all. In the spirit of giving, Bohemia have also introduced more ways for players to off themselves in game—you can now despawn yourself with a suitable melee weapon.
There are some nice new features in this seasonal update, including a bunch of Christmas trees in DayZ's major cities. You'll find mysterious pressies under these, just like in real life, though there's a greater chance of being murdered by a bandit as you rush to open them here. You can also now plant seeds wherever you like, rather than just in greenhouses, so long as you have the appropriate tools.
As if that wasn't enough, several new locations have been added in the update, including a load of new villages and a few new mines. Bohemia, with these Ferrero Rocher meat cleavers and pumpkin seeds, you're really spoiling us. Here's the full list o' stuff, courtesy of the DayZ forums:
New Items:
Full Ghillie suite
Stone Knife
Torch
Guts
Chainsaw
Meat cleaver
Prison uniform
Silencer east
Silencer NATO
Handgun Silencer
V3S interior
Teddy bear
Long Sword
MP5 Compensator
Prison Jacket
Prison Pants
Prison Cap
Hunting Knife
Pumpkin seeds
Pepper seeds
Wool dress (color variants)
Bomber jacket (color variants)
V3S (color variants)
New Mechanics:
Suicide (variants)
Using scopes for scouting
Redone horticulture mechanics
Redone spawn points and amount of vehicles
Exiting and entering animations for vehicles
Christmas presents
Crafting of fishing rod, stone knife, bow, with nature only resources
You can cut out seeds out of vegetables
Torch crafting
Blade sharpening
Silencers working
Using of almost all items for melee
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New locations:
Kamensk village
Stary Yar village
Location "Lysaya Gora"
"Grozovye Doly"
Krasnoe village
Christmass assets
Meadows and Farms under Svergino village
Ratnoe village
Zaptudnoe village
Zaprudnoe kolhoz
Meadows and Farms near Grishino
Polesovo village
Updated locations:
Stary Yar surrounding
Kamensk mining complex
Severograd mines
Powerlines is now connected with West part of map
Forest improvments
General bugfixing
Fixed:
Muzzle blast, Impact sounds fixed.
Small fish trap exploit fixed
Supressor visible on steyraug now
Damage transfer added to ghillie crafting
Security fixes
Telescopic Baton retracting
Improved heatpack and gut heat transfer, support for multiple heat sources
Drowning while cuffed under water surface
Heatpack and more items properly positioned in hand
Supressor visible on steyraug now
Animation polish
Loot distribution polish
and much much more.
Known Issues:
Item locked in hands slot
Items can't be picked up sometimes
Left earpice sound volume is lowered sometimes
Ghillie will probably react badly on chemlight, flare and other light sources
Some items will visually duplicate themselves if used from the ground
Server crashes
Client crash when disconnected from server
(Thanks, PCGamesN.)
Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.