hey are you cool

The first person I met in DayZ said "hey are you cool" What he meant was "You're not going to try to kill me, right?" This is a record of the other players I've encountered in DayZ (and a few other odds and ends). by Christopher Livingston: twitter / website

[heyareyoucool]

We approached each other and both put up one hand to wave hello.

I put mine down. He never did. He just stood there, in a frozen greeting, until I finally left.

[heyareyoucool]

They charged out of the trees, barking orders almost before they were close enough to be heard.

"Stop, boy. On your knees, boy. If you don't follow our instructions, you're dead, boy. You got friends? Where are your friends, boy?"

I only had two things of value on me, a morphine injector and some antibiotics. I knelt and injected myself, then began eating the antibiotics. Just so they couldn't have them.

They shot me.

[heyareyoucool]

I was newly spawned and traveling with another fresh arrival. We were overwhelmed by zombies while looting a town and my companion collapsed from his injuries. As I ran to him from one direction I saw three other players running at him from another. One had a defibrillator.

They attempted to revive my companion but it was too late.

They helped me out with spare bandages, food, and even helped me find a rifle and gave me some ammo before moving on.

[heyareyoucool]

I found someone. He was lying face-down on the second floor of an airfield building. I talked to him but got no response. I examined him. He had no pulse, but his body was still warm.

I took his carbine and clip and slowly walked back downstairs. As I crept outside my screen went black and I was dead.

I checked the server screen. There were only three players online at the moment, and one had just killed the other two.

[heyareyoucool]

I spawn on the beach and immediately see a man in a cowboy hat sprinting toward me. I’ve popped into existence directly in his path. He sees me and steers around me, then stops and turns.

"Hey," he says in heavily accented English. "Hey. Buddy. What… what you… doing?"

"I just spawned," I say. "I’m not really doing anything."

"Hey. Buddy. I no kill you. I… no kill you. No problem, buddy."

"Thank you," I say.

"No… no problem, buddy," he repeats. He turns and starts to run again.

[heyareyoucool]

We're running toward each other through the rain. I stop. He stops. I wave. He doesn't. We stand there for a while.

"Hello," I say.

There's a long pause before he says: "What."

"Umm... how's it going?"

Another long pause. "Do you need food or something?"

"Um, yeah, actually. If you can spare some."

Another long pause. Then he looks at the ground.

"I dropped some tuna."

"Thank you," I say. I don't approach him.

"Well, come on," he snaps. Then he runs off.

I look around on the ground where he was standing but I never find the tuna.

[heyareyoucool]

I've been playing another survival game lately, Rust, which has a lot in common with DayZ. I've also been keeping a game diary about it, which will be posted on pcgamer.com over the next few weeks.

You can read Part One here.

[heyareyoucool]

He's running up the road, right past me, seemingly without seeing me. I call out. I wave. I ask how he's doing. He stops and slowly turns to face me. He raises his fists.

"It's okay," I say. "I'm not going mess with you or anything."

He runs up and swings his fists, missing. I begin backing away.

"Please don't," I say. "It's okay."

He keeps running at me, swinging his fists. I continue backpedaling, and bring out my revolver.

"Don't," I say. Please stop."

He says nothing. He doesn't stop. I fire one shot.

I look down the road in both directions. No one else is around. I don't bother looting him. I suspect he doesn't have much. I look at him for a while, then leave.

It's the first time I've ever killed another player. As I reach the treeline, it begins to rain.

[heyareyoucool]

I meet him on the road north of Nizhnoye. We chat a bit, laughing at how my bright yellow raincoat and his orange hardhat make us easy targets for snipers. He says he's taking part in a scavenger hunt, looking for specific items -- duct tape, a hacksaw, and so on -- to take pictures of. I offer to help, and we run around searching houses for a while.

At the construction site near Berezino, we meet a woman in a red T-shirt, who asks if we've seen a spare backpack anywhere. While we're helping her search the site, bullets begin ricocheting off the walls. Someone is taking shots at us from the field to the east.

"I see him," my friend says, lying prone and aiming his rifle. With no gun of my own, I crouch behind him. The woman in the red shirt comes up the stairs to join us. She suddenly starts punching me, knocking me unconscious.

Either she was taking an opportune time to relieve me of my backpack, or she was working with the sniper all along.

[heyareyoucool]

I dropped one of my two cans of beans on the ground for my new friend, and we engaged in the DayZ tradition of staring at the ground and hoping it would eventually appear. It didn't.

We'd met near a construction site a few minutes ago and decided to explore together. On the roof of the parking garage, we found a blue backpack. I put my last can of beans in the pack, hoping he could then take the pack and find the beans inside, and open them with his machete.

While he waited hopefully for the beans, I ran off to loot a couple warehouses. We agreed to meet back at the site in five minutes. When I got back, I found him at the bottom of the site, dead, most likely from a fall.

In his pack were the beans. He'd opened them but only eaten half. He'd saved the rest for me.

[heyareyoucool]

There are two of them, one well-outfitted and holding a rifle, the other, like me, in just jeans and a T-shirt.

"Hi," says T-shirt. "Who are you?"

"Hi," I say. "I'm Chris."

"Okay," says T-shirt. "See that guy there?"

"Yeah," I say.

T-shirt punches me in the face. My vision blurs. The one with the rifle watches silently.

"He said I had to kill you or he'd kill me," T-shirt says, punching me again. Everything goes black as I fall unconscious.

T-shirt keeps talking. "He said I had to. He said he'd kill me if I didn't kill you. That's why... that's why. He said I had to."

[heyareyoucool]

I step out of the last building at the airfield. In the distance, barely visible, two tiny figures are running around near the road that leads up the hill. I can't tell if they're approaching or retreating.

As I watch, they suddenly stop running. They shrink to half their size. Then again, to half that.

They've crouched, then gone prone.

I hit the deck, expecting rifle fire. None comes. I bring up my own rifle, aiming as best I can at the two specks in the distance. I have no scope. I don't move. They don't move. A minute passes.

I consider crawling backwards around the corner of the building, then fleeing. Instead, I stand and wave at the two specks. Nothing happens. I keep my arm up, bending my body from side to side to make sure they see. Nothing.

I wonder if they're simply waiting for me to leave so they can raid the airfield. I turn and run the other way, looking back only when I'm at the hangar. I see them, two tiny figures, running up the hill in the other direction.

[heyareyoucool]

I turned to find a man holding an axe standing in the doorway. I waved and said hello. He dropped to his belly and crawled across the kitchen floor.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"Yeah. I'm starving to death, though. Do you have any food?"

I gave him the only thing I had, a packet of powdered milk. He ate it while standing on the coffee table.

"Yay," he said. "Now I'm not starving to death, I'm just extremely hungry. I'm gonna go find more food. Thanks."

He started to leave, but turned back.

"You know," he said gravely, "it's not easy finding friends in the zombie apocalypse."

[heyareyoucool]

A heavily armed player pointing a rifle at a new spawn: I figure it must be a hold-up. But they're just chatting. He points his gun at me as I hustle over, but lowers it once I wave hello and start talking.

The armed player warns me against visiting Electro, since I've just spawned. "It can get pretty crowded there," he tells me. "You might want to head inland instead. Maybe you could two could go together."

"Be careful out there," the armed player says as we prepare to leave. "I don't know how much you've played this game, but here's a tip: everyone is an asshole."

[heyareyoucool]

It's raining when I stop to drink from a pond north of Solnichniy. I hear a rifle shot and my vision blurs. I'm hit and I'm bleeding.

I whirl around, trying to rise from a crouch, trying to spot the shooter, trying to run for the treeline. I hear another rifle shot and I fall unconscious.

[heyareyoucool]

After running through the woods for ten minutes, I find a town. I find a dead player in the road. I find another player pointing a gun at me.

"This is a hold-up," he says. "Here's what's gonna happen. You're gonna put your hands up. You're not gonna move. I'm gonna put handcuffs on you. You're gonna -- oh, wait, uh. My handcuffs are ruined. Uhhh... okay, forget it. You can just go."

I don't go because it took me ten minutes to get here.

"Actually," he says. "Here's what's gonna happen. You're gonna start running, and I'm gonna count to three, and then I'm gonna shoot you."

I don't start running. He doesn't start counting.

Finally, I run, because I need to start looking for food.

"Yeah, that's right. Run," he says.

I run into a house. He doesn't follow. I don't see him anywhere when I come out.

[heyareyoucool]

"Helllooooooooooooo."

A man in a cowboy hat came running up the hill, greeting me, just north of Elektro. He said he hadn't looted the town so there should be plenty for me to find. He dropped some spare rifle ammo for me, though it vanished (as it tends to) and we both searched the ground for it for a minute. He dispatched two zombies with his axe (I did not yet have a suitable melee weapon).

I warned him of a bandit who had held me up in Kamyshovo (the next town up the road) but he wasn't heading in that direction.