DayZ: Food and Drink, Health and Blood Guide

In DayZ, food and drink are essential necessities you must maintain in order to survive the vast and unforgiving wasteland of Chernarus.  Blood and health levels also play a key role in your survival. Whether you are a seasoned veteran with experience going back all the way to the mod, or a lowly noob like me who just started their post-apocalyptic adventure on the standalone, you’ve probably realized by now that your true enemies in the game are hunger, thirst, and sickness – not the actual zombies themselves.

How do we know for sure if our character is in need of food and drink?  Where do we look to see our blood and health levels?  The answer is… well, nowhere.  The game provides no way of reading your character’s health and needs through bars, graphs, or other graphical representations.  Sure, your character will inform you when he or she is thirsty or hungry, but there is no way of truly telling weather or not you are at “healthy” levels.

Fear not survivors, I have combed the Googles and YouTubes for the best guides that teach you how to be fit for survival, and how maintain proper eating and drinking regiments in order to withstand the harsh conditions of DayZ.

Food, Drink, and… Energy?

This is where things get a bit tricky.  Three bars dominate your intake here: Stomach, Thirst, and Energy.  By eating and drinking, you’ll fill your stomach bar – which in turn, passively fills your thirst and energy meters.  Now, if you let the energy or thirst bars fall to zero, you can passively lose both blood and health.  It is important to maintain these bars by eating and drinking almost everything you find.  The only time you shouldn’t is if you see indications from your character stating their stomach is full.  Overeating will cause vomiting (been there IRL) and will result in a loss of fluids.  Keeping your energy and thirst bars full will help with blood and health regeneration, thus eliminating the screen blur and color loss.

What to Eat and What to Drink.

Thanks to YouTuber Merino, we find that:

• Baked Beans: Good all-around food.  Provides a healthy balance of both energy and water.  Highly recommended staple in your Day Z diet.
• Rice: Provides substation energy, but in turn, because we mostly eat it raw, it drains a lot of water.  Contains the most volume when it comes to filling your stomach.  Be sure to take a swig of your canteen or a couple of drinks from a well to balance out your stomach’s water loss.
• Soda:  Provides a quick burst of energy, can cure minor hunger, and has as many hydration benefits as Baked Beans.
• Water from Canteens, Wells, and Water Bottles: Fills the stomach and is great for filling your thirst bar and hydration, but will NOT give you energy.  

Blood and Health

In the original DayZ mod, blood and health are combined; you could get shot, bandage, and then blood bag your way back up to normal.  In the standalone, however, things are quite different. 

There are now two meters: health and blood.  When you get shot, you will lose a portion of both your blood and health bar (both of which can’t physically be seen).  Once you bandage yourself and you stop bleeding, in order to regain your lost blood you can do one of two things. 

First, find another character, extract their blood, and use a blood bag to intravenously inject it into you.  You must find a character that matches your blood type – botching this step can easily cause an untimely death.  A visual cue to look out for when you are low on blood, is a de-saturated screen.  As your screen becomes less colorful (or even full on black and white) it’s an indication that you have lost a majority of your blood.

A blurry and desaturated screen.  This indicates you are low on blood AND health. 

As far as health, you lose bits of your bar each time you are hit – whether it be by zombie, bullets, or fists – and the only way to regenerate it is through, food, drink and time… lots of time.  Losing health will result in a blurry screen.  If you were one of the many people who turned off Post-Processing in the graphic settings for higher FPS rates, do yourself a favor and turn it back on.  With it off, you lose the visual cue of low health blurriness, therefore putting you at a disadvantage in-game.    

Here’s a nifty infograph I recommend keeping around while playing:

That’s all for now, if you would like to see more DayZ tips let me know below.  And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter!