Flipping a stuck vehicle

Youtube Guide: Video

A ditch, a fence post or a bad landing off a bank, and your car is upside down. In vanilla DayZ that is the end of the car — there is no flip action, and no amount of ramming it with another vehicle reliably rights it.

DayZed adds one. Hold the right tool, stand next to the wreck, and you can put any car or boat back on its wheels on your own. The whole thing takes about a minute.

The five tools that work

Exactly these five items offer the flip. Nothing else does, however sensible it looks:

• Pipe Wrench
• Tire Iron — in game this one is called the Tire Iron, the same tool you use to pull wheels
• Crowbar
• Shovel
• Pipe

A Field Shovel does not work. This is the trap that catches most people: the field shovel digs a bunker entrance perfectly well, so it is the shovel everyone carries — and then there is no flip option on the car. Only the full-size Shovel counts.

A ruined tool is refused as well, so check its condition before you hike across the map to a flipped car.

Empty hands only get you a hint

Walk up to an overturned vehicle bare-handed and the only prompt you get is Flip Vehicle (Need tool in hands). That is a hint, not an action — it tells you what you are missing and does nothing else.

The tool has to be in your hands. Sitting in your backpack it does nothing.

Doing the flip

• Take the tool into your hands. Any one of the five.
• Stand up, right beside the vehicle. The action needs you within arm's reach and standing — it is not offered while crouched or prone.
• Aim at the vehicle and start Flip Vehicle.
• Hold still until the bar fills. Moving cancels it and you start over from the beginning.

When it finishes, the vehicle is set upright on the ground where it already is. It is a righting, not a tow: nothing drags the car out of the hole it fell into.

Boats count too

The same tools and the same action work on boats. A boat flipped on a beach or wedged upside down in the shallows can be righted exactly like a car.

Boats now carry cargo of their own, which makes this worth more than it used to be. A capsized boat is a loaded container lying on its back, and righting it brings the boat and everything stowed in it back up together. Do not write one off and swim away.

What goes wrong

• You do it on a slope. The vehicle lands upright and immediately rolls back over, and you have wasted the whole action. Where you can, get the vehicle onto flat ground first — even pushing it a little downhill onto level dirt is worth doing before you start.
• You are stuck in the open. For the whole action you are standing still in a full-body animation next to a very visible landmark. You cannot shoot out of it. On a road near a town, watch your surroundings first or bring someone to cover you.
• It is still in the ditch. If the car went over because it slid into a gully, flipping it leaves it upright in the same gully. Expect to drive it out, or to flip it, move it, and flip it again.
• Nothing happens at all. Almost always the tool: a field shovel instead of a shovel, a ruined tool, or the tool still in your backpack.

If the vehicle is somewhere you simply cannot drive out of, packing it is the other way home — see Vehicle packing. That one is pickier about tools: the only thing that packs a vehicle is a Pipe Wrench, and it has to be in your hands, or all you get is the hint Pack Vehicle - Need PipeWrench. Take the containers off the vehicle before you start as well — while any are still fitted the prompt tells you so and nothing else happens (Pack Vehicle - Remove containers first).

See also: Vehicle packing, Vehicle limits and automatic cleanup.