Territory flags and base building

A surface base without a flag pole is a temporary structure. The flag claims the ground under your walls, stops them quietly rotting away while you are offline, stops any passing stranger from taking your gate apart with a hammer, and unlocks the storage furniture everyone wants. Build the pole early — everything below assumes you have one.

The building itself is vanilla — with the placement checks turned off

If you have built a base in DayZ before, you already know how to build one here. The kits, the stages, the materials and the tools are stock. Nothing has been added to the vanilla building line and nothing has been taken away from it.

What is changed sits in the mission config: the engine's placement checks are switched off. In practice that is the thing players call "build anywhere", and it means:

• Walls and gates can clip into buildings, into terrain features and into each other. You can wall off a doorway inside a house, or build a compound that overlaps a ruin.
• No roof check. You can build on the upper floor of a building, or under one.
• No angle check — a wall does not have to sit level or square to its neighbour.
• No distance check and no "is this a viable base spot" check when the part is placed.
• Another player standing in the way does not block a placement.

Three checks are still enforced, and they are the only geometry that will refuse you: underwater, inside terrain, and on top of a garden plot.

This is set per map, and it is on for every map where surface building is enabled at all — Chernarus, Livonia and Sakhal. Elsewhere the question does not arise, because there is nothing to build; see Where you cannot build below.

Raiding is vanilla too. Ammunition, explosives and melee all work on walls, with no protected window and no offline-raid rule. The flag changes who may dismantle; it does nothing about who may destroy.

What a flag pole actually does

A finished Flag Pole with a flag hoisted on it claims everything within 50 m of the pole. Inside that circle:

• Your structures stop decaying. Walls, gates, watchtowers and most containers persist as long as the flag is up. Without one they run on the normal despawn clock and eventually vanish on their own, with nobody having to raid you.
• Strangers cannot touch your build. This is the part that is not vanilla. In stock DayZ a flag pole claims ground and slows decay, and that is all — anyone who walks up to your base can take it apart with a hammer regardless of whose flag is flying. On DayZed the flag is also a permission list: unauthorised players cannot deploy building kits, dismantle your structures, dismantle your placed furniture, dig garden plots, pack or unpack vehicles, or plant and uproot trophy spears anywhere in your radius.
• The furniture line becomes placeable. Gun Locker Installation Kit, Equipment Cabinet Installation Kit, Gun Cabinet Kit, Fridge Kit, both shelves, the Workbench Kit, the Jukebox Kit and the Power Generator Kit can only be deployed inside a flag territory you are authorised on, or inside a bunker.
• The Planter Box Kit is the deliberate exception: it may stand in the open world, but if a flag covers the spot you still have to be authorised on it.
• Flags cannot be shot down. The only way to take a territory is to reach the pole.

The pole must be finished and carry a flag cloth on the mast. A half-built pole, or one with nothing hoisted, is not a territory at all — no protection, no authorisation, nothing. The permission check skips poles with no cloth entirely, so an unflagged pole is invisible to it in both directions.

A flag pole has nothing to do with bunkers. It does not protect one, does not slow a hatch's decay and does not authorise anything underground — bunkers run entirely on codelocks (Underground bunkers). Where only bunkers are allowed, a pole is wasted effort. The flag pole kit is one of the three things that cannot be placed inside a bunker at all, along with the Fence Kit and the Watchtower Kit.

Building one and authorising yourself

The pole is vanilla: place the Flag Pole Kit, then feed each stage the materials it asks for — stones for the base, a wooden log for the mast — with a shovel and a pickaxe or hammer in hand. Finish every stage, then attach a flag to the top. A custom flag cloth works just as well as a vanilla one; see Custom flags and armbands.

Standing at the foot of the pole, use Authorize myself on it, and have everyone in your group do the same on the same pole. You must be at ground level beside the pole — the action is not offered to someone looking down at it from a wall or watchtower, and the same limit applies to raising and lowering the flag itself.

Clear all users wipes the authorisation list completely, including you; re-authorise yourself straight afterwards or you have locked yourself out of your own base.

That pair of actions is how a base changes hands. Anyone who can walk up to your pole clears the list, authorises themselves, and the territory is theirs — walls and all. Put the pole somewhere a raider has to work to reach, not outside your gate.

Standing in someone else's territory

Being unauthorised inside a territory is completely safe in itself. Nothing damages you, nothing alarms, the owners are not notified. Walk through as much as you like. What you cannot do there — you get a red "authorise yourself on the nearby territory flag" message instead:

• Build or deploy anything, including your own kits.
• Dismantle any of the owner's structures, or any of their placed furniture.
• Dig a garden plot.
• Pack (Pack Vehicle - Remove containers first) or unpack (Unpack Vehicle) a vehicle.
• Plant (Plant Spear) or uproot (Uproot Spear) a trophy spear.

Two different rules, and the difference is the one that bites. Building asks whether you are authorised on any one nearby flag. Taking something apart asks whether you are authorised on every complete flag whose radius touches it. If a neighbour's pole overlaps your workshop you will be refused even in your own base — the refusal names how many flags cover the spot, so "2 territory flags cover this spot" is your cue to go and get authorised on the other one, or ask them to move it.

One gap worth knowing: only the first placement and the dismantling are checked. Adding further parts to a structure that already stands is not gated at all, so a stranger can help you finish a wall — they simply can never take one off again.

The logout trap — read this one

Never log out inside a flag territory you are not authorised on. This is the single most common way new players lose an evening.

• While the logout timer counts down, a red VIOLATION warning appears telling you the sentence on return. Cancel there and absolutely nothing happens — that is what it is for.
• Go through with it and the sentence is carried out the next time you connect: you are relocated at least 100 m away from the flag and dropped on flat dry ground outside every territory. That is the whole sentence — the broken legs that used to come with it were dropped, and a character still stuck with that old fracture state is healed the next time it connects.
• A crash is forgiven. Reconnect within 10 min of dropping out and nothing happens to you. The punishment is aimed at logout-camping inside other people's bases, not at your router.
• Relocation is currently in force: on.

The same rule and the same red warning apply in the server's no-logout zones, with the same crash forgiveness window (10 min).

The check only asks whether you are on a nearby flag: if your group raised a new pole while you were away and never added you, you are a stranger in your own base.

Where you cannot build

• Nothing can be built within 100 m of a Nexus station, on any map.
• Every other no-build zone is drawn on the map site — check https://map.dayzed.gg before you haul a truck of planks anywhere. They tend to cover the busy loot hubs; Green Mountain on Chernarus is a well-known one.
• Surface base building is not enabled everywhere. Above-ground bases are allowed on Chernarus, Livonia and Sakhal; on Namalsk, Stuart Island and Zaruun there are none at all, so the flag pole question does not arise there. Where digging is allowed instead (Namalsk and Stuart Island) a bunker is the only base you get, and one map allows neither.
• Underwater and inside terrain are refused everywhere, and you cannot place a part on top of a garden plot. Those three are the only geometry checks left.
• The Fence Kit, Watchtower Kit and Flag Pole Kit are banned inside a bunker. Everything else in the furniture line is not.
• Unfinished gates are removed at the next restart — a half-built gate is never a wall.

Full detail: No-build zones.

A bare frame will not survive the restart

A Fence or Watchtower with only its frame standing is deleted at the next server restart. The frame is the logs you put up first; "only the frame" means nothing at all is built on it — no wooden planks, no sheet metal, no wire, no gate. One panel of anything is enough to make it a real structure that stays.

This exists because bare frames were being used as pens. A frame costs almost nothing, and players were boxing them into doorways, stairwells and corridors to seal a building shut. A frame with nothing built on it has no part to shoot off, so there was nothing to raid — the blockage was permanent. Deleting them on restart is what makes that not work.

Two other moments trigger the same check, and one of them is in your favour:

• A raider who destroys your last remaining panel takes the frame with it, immediately. You never end up defending a naked frame.
• If you dismantle the last panel yourself, the frame comes down in the same action and you get its materials back. Taking a fence apart is not a two-step job and costs you nothing.

The trap is the honest one: do not log off with a fence you have only framed up. Get a single panel onto it before you leave, or you come back to bare ground with nobody having raided you. This is the most common way a legitimate build disappears on its own.

Furniture, lockers and the generator

There is no such thing as "bunker furniture". The lockers, the gun cabinet, the fridge, the shelves, the workbench, the jukebox and the power generator are one line of items with one rule: they go inside an authorised flag territory, or inside a bunker. Nothing in the game distinguishes the two, and a locker you crafted for a bunker deploys in a surface base exactly the same way. Only the planter box escapes the rule and may stand in the open world.

They all come off the workbench — see Workbench for the bench itself and Lockers, gun cabinet, fridge and shelves for the line. Above ground they behave as they do underground: lockers take their own codelocks so each person can have a private stash, shelves hold crates, and the fridge slows food decay without being plugged into anything.

The Power Generator is the one piece with a real difference, and it is smaller than people assume. Feed it a Car Battery or a Truck Battery and:

• Battery charging works exactly the same anywhere. The generator carries four battery slots and splits its full output across every battery in them that is not yet full, so a surface base is a perfectly good place to keep your car batteries topped up. A damaged generator charges more slowly — it burns the same fuel either way, so repair it.
• The lights are the part that does not follow you up. The lighting circuit belongs to the bunker shell — it is the nine ceiling lamps in the rooms, and nothing else is wired to it. Turn On Bunker Lights and Turn Off Bunker Lights still appear on a generator standing in a surface base, and the switch still flips. It simply has nothing to power.
• Nothing else draws from it either. Your lockers, fridge and workbench are not wired to a generator anywhere, underground or above it — they work regardless.

So the honest reason to stand a generator in a surface base is the battery bank. If you want your base lit, use the lamps and LED strips in Base lighting and decoration, which need no generator at all. Farming is the underground exception: Planter Box Kit planter boxes grow only while bunker lights are on, so a surface planter box is on daylight like any garden plot.

Spare kits are not wasted — Scrap a kit for nails turns any kit back into part of its nails.

Codelocks on surface structures

Gates, tents and the crafted lockers all take a codelock, and the lock is what actually keeps people out of your gear.

• Only keypad codelocks exist here; the three- and four-dial combination locks do not spawn at all. They cannot be crafted and are rare loot — treat every one you find as valuable.
• Anything with a codelock on it can only be dismantled by someone who knows the code.
• Hacksaws do nothing to a codelock. If you ever see a lock showing a health bar, report it.
• When a locked gate is destroyed by raiders, the codelock drops on the ground as loot.
• A lock that refused to go onto an upgraded gate was a bug, and it is fixed — including on gates that were already stuck. If one still refuses, report it instead of tearing the gate down.
• A locked slot now stays locked across a restart. Before the fix, a codelock could be pulled straight off its gate, hatch or locker after a reboot without ever entering the code.

More at Codelocks and, for tents, Tents — locks and raiding.

An alarm for your walls

The SecureZone Defense Unit is usually described as bunker equipment, and it is built and tuned around a hatch — but it works on a surface base too, and most people who own walls should have one.

• Fences and gates ring it. Anything a raider does to a wall — rifle rounds, Plastic Explosive, melee — wakes a nearby station, and the station pings every subscribed player on Discord whether or not they are in the game.
• Watchtowers do not. Neither do tents, nor any of the crafted furniture. If a watchtower is the outer skin of your base, the alarm will not speak until the raider reaches an actual fence.
• Decay never rings it. Only a player doing damage will.
• Put it inside your walls. It is not armoured, and a raider who spots it can simply break it — a broken alarm is a silent one. Somewhere covered, near the wall line, not on the approach.
• Everyone who wants alerts has to subscribe at the station themselves with Subscribe to Alarm System, with their account linked to Discord on the website first. Building the unit signs nobody up, including you. Fire Test Alarm afterwards to prove it reaches you.
• Put a codelock on it. An unlocked station lets anyone subscribe themselves, fire a test to count your defenders, wipe your subscriber list, or pick the whole thing up and walk off with it.

Building it, finding the parts and the full alert behaviour are in Bunker raid alarm.

Raiding, in plain terms

• Raiding is allowed around the clock. There is no protected window, no offline-raid rule and no time of day when your base is safe.
• The enabled methods are ammunition, explosives and melee. Any calibre will chew through a wall; heavier calibres just do it faster. Plastic Explosive is the fast option.
• Gas grenades do nothing to structures. They hurt players and that is all.
• Boosting off a teammate is allowed, and an exposed gate frame can be attacked directly without clearing the rest of the panelling first.

Your flag stops casual dismantling and decay. It does not stop a raid.

Vehicles parked in your territory

A flag protects 3 vehicles, using its own radius for them — 60 m, slightly wider than the build territory. If you park more than the cap allows, do not assume you get to pick which ones keep their protection — the safe habit is to park your good cars tight to the pole and leave the junkers on the outside. A vehicle nobody drives despawns after 48 h, flag or no flag.

The full rules — what counts as a vehicle, what happens over the cap, how packed vehicles are treated — are in Vehicle limits and automatic cleanup and Vehicle packing.

The garbage bin

The Garbage Bin is the tidy-up tool. Use Do the cleaning on it and every loose item within 50 m of the bin is deleted.

• That radius is large — comparable to a whole territory, not to a room. Place the bin at the edge of your camp, never in the middle of it.
• Fireplaces, barrels and other garbage bins are spared, and built structures are left alone.
• It does not ask who owns what it deletes, and it does not warn you first. Anything you care about belongs in a locked container, or well outside the radius, before you press it.

Use it after a raid, when the ground is carpeted in ruined clothing. See Garbage bin.

What goes wrong

• The flag is not raised. No cloth, no territory, no protection — and you find out when your walls are already gone.
• You cleared all users and forgot to re-add yourself. Do it in the same breath.
• A new group member was never authorised. They cannot build, and they get relocated if they log out at home.
• You ignored the red warning and logged out anyway. Cancel, leave the circle, log off.
• The pole sits outside the walls. Anyone can stroll up and take the base without a shot.
• You framed a fence and logged off. Nothing built on the frame means it is gone at the restart. One panel is all it takes.
• A neighbour's flag overlaps yours. You can still build, but neither of you can dismantle until you are both on both poles.
• The generator's lights do nothing. Above ground there is nothing wired to them. It is still charging your batteries — that is what it is for up here.
• The alarm stayed silent while your watchtower came down. Only fences and gates ring it.
• Nobody got the alert. Subscribing is per player, at the station, with Discord linked.
• You ran the garbage bin next to your loot. It does not ask twice.

See also: Territory flags and authorisation, Base building on DayZed, Lockers, gun cabinet, fridge and shelves, Skull trophies, and the no-build zones on the DayZed map.