Armour, gear wear, and what members get
Clothing here takes a fraction of the damage it would in vanilla, so a firefight wears gear down instead of ruining it — plus what armour does, and member kit.
Two questions come up constantly, and they have different answers because they are two different systems: "is my armour actually doing anything?" and "why is my jacket still in one piece?"
Your gear stops dying in one fight
In vanilla DayZ a hit puts its full damage straight onto whatever you are wearing. One gunfight ruins a set, and you spend the next hour looting a replacement instead of playing.
DayZed changes that where it happens. When a garment is hit, only a share of that hit lands on its condition — and which share depends on the condition the garment is already in, not on how good or expensive the garment is. Ghillies are the one family with their own, gentler curve:
| Condition when the hit lands | Ordinary clothing lands on it / lasts | Ghillie lands on it / lasts |
|---|---|---|
| Pristine or Worn (above 50 %) | 30 % / 3.3× | 20 % / 5× |
| Damaged (50 % to 30 %) | 10 % / 10× | 5 % / 20× |
| Badly damaged (below 30 %) | 0.3 % / 333× | 0.3 % / 333× |
| Pristine to Ruined (the whole garment) | 104× | 107× |
Read the first row as: a Pristine jacket takes 30 % of what that bullet would have cost it in vanilla, so it soaks up more than three times as much shooting before it drops to Damaged. By the time it is Badly damaged it is taking 0.3 % — close enough to nothing that badly damaged is, in practice, where a garment stops.
The bottom row weighs each band by how much of the bar it covers — half the bar at the top rate, a fifth in the middle, the last third at almost nothing — and comes out at what a garment survives here against what the same garment survives in vanilla. That single multiplier is the whole change, and it is why a fight now walks your kit down Worn → Damaged → Badly damaged instead of skipping straight to Ruined.
The table is built from the servers' own settings when you open the page, so it stays right when the balance moves. It applies to every hit a garment takes — bullets, melee, infected, blasts. Wear the game applies outside the damage system is untouched, which is why boots still grind down as you run and gloves still shred on a ladder.
What it covers
Tops, trousers, vests, masks, headgear, gloves, belts and backpacks, plus the modded WindstrideClothing outfits, which sit outside the vanilla class tree and are opted in as a block.
Boots, eyewear and armbands are not in it, and neither are bandanas or shemaghs — they sit in the mask and headgear slots but are built on a different base class, so they wear at vanilla speed. Boots are the one you will notice, because footwear also grinds itself down as you run.
What it deliberately leaves out
Real armour keeps its own model. These are opted back out on purpose, so they degrade exactly the way they do in vanilla:
- hard helmets — anything built on the game's helmet class, the
Space Helmet
included. Soft headgear that is only called a helmet, like the 
Tanker Helmet, is built
on plain headgear and stays in the system - the
Plate Carrier, the 
Stab Vest and the 
Ballistic Vest - the WindstrideClothing Defender vest
- the Nexus stealth suit — the jacket, trousers and gloves are opted back out by name, the boots are footwear and never qualified, and the headstrap is a helmet so it goes out with the rest of them. The pouches and the holster are containers rather than clothing
That is a design decision, not an oversight: those pieces exist to stop damage reaching you, and their durability is part of what they cost. The practical version is worth planning around — after a fight, the thing you replace is your plate carrier, not your shirt. Carry a spare vest, not a spare set.
Ghillies run on their own curve
A vanilla 
Ghillie Suit, cloak or shrug starts on a third of a
Hunter Jacket's condition, so the whole ghillie family runs on its own, gentler set
of numbers rather than the standard ones. That is the second column of the table above, and it is
why a ghillie survives a fight it has no business surviving. DayZed's own black ghillies are a
different animal — far more condition to begin with, on the same gentle curve.
What armour actually does
None of the above changes the share of a hit that gets past an item and into you. That is a separate, config-side number: a piece of gear carries its own armour block, setting what fraction of the bullet, the swing, the bite or the blast reaches your health, your blood and your shock. Most ordinary clothing carries a token block or none at all — protection is a property of the piece, not of the slot it sits in.
So both halves are true at the same time, and they do not contradict each other:
- Your jacket protects your jacket. It walks out of a firefight now.
- Your armour protects you. It pays for that by wearing out at the old rate.
Every item page for a piece that stops anything now opens with its own Protection card. This is the whole field, best bullet protection first:
| Item | Bullets | Melee | Infected | Explosions | Bleeding from bullets |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Nexus Nano-Composite Jacket | 82 % | 85 % | 90 % | 85 % | can't cut you |
 Nexus Nano-Fiber Trousers | 82 % | 85 % | 90 % | 85 % | can't cut you |
 Nexus Nano-Tech Gloves | 82 % | 85 % | 90 % | 85 % | can't cut you |
 Nexus Nano-Tread Boots | 82 % | 78 % | 90 % | 80 % | can't cut you |
| Space Helmet (+6 colours) | 82 % | 82 % | 90 % | 82 % | can't cut you |
 LEHS Mk3 | 80 % | 75 % | 75 % | 75 % | can't cut you |
 LEHS Mk3 Helmet | 80 % | 75 % | 75 % | 75 % | can't cut you |
 NAC Plate Carrier | 80 % | 75 % | 75 % | 50 % | can't cut you |
 Assault Helmet (+2 colours) | 75 % | 65 % | 65 % | 50 % | can't cut you |
 Ballistic Helmet (+3 colours) | 75 % | 45 % | 45 % | 50 % | can't cut you |
 Camouflage Helmet (+4 colours) | 75 % | 45 % | 45 % | 50 % | can't cut you |
 Combat Helmet | 75 % | 45 % | 45 % | 50 % | can't cut you |
| T65 Helmet (+1 colour) | 75 % | 65 % | 65 % | 50 % | can't cut you |
 Tactical Helmet | 75 % | 45 % | 45 % | 50 % | can't cut you |
 Plate Carrier (+5 colours) | 70 % | 70 % | 70 % | 50 % | can't cut you |
 Stealth Suit Headstrap | 69 % | 69 % | 69 % | 69 % | reduced |
 OMON Ballistic Vest | 55 % | 40 % | 40 % | 55 % | can't cut you |
| Ballistic Vest (+2 colours) | 50 % | 25 % | 25 % | 50 % | can't cut you |
 Flight Helmet | 50 % | 35 % | 35 % | 50 % | can't cut you |
 Great Helm | 50 % | 65 % | 65 % | 50 % | can't cut you |
| Stab Vest | 50 % | 25 % | 25 % | 50 % | can't cut you |
 Chestplate | 45 % | 70 % | 70 % | 45 % | can't cut you |
 Norse Helm | 45 % | 45 % | 45 % | 35 % | can't cut you |
 Armored Hood (+2 colours) | 30 % | 35 % | 35 % | 35 % | reduced |
 Chainmail | 30 % | 40 % | 40 % | 35 % | reduced |
 Chainmail Coif | 30 % | 35 % | 35 % | 35 % | reduced |
 Chainmail Leggings | 30 % | 40 % | 40 % | 35 % | reduced |
 Enduro Helmet (+6 colours) | 25 % | 35 % | 35 % | 50 % | can't cut you |
 Firefighter Helmet (+2 colours) | 25 % | 45 % | 45 % | 50 % | can't cut you |
 Motorbike Helmet (+16 colours) | 25 % | 65 % | 65 % | 50 % | can't cut you |
 Welding Mask | 25 % | 35 % | 35 % | 50 % | can't cut you |
Three things worth reading out of that table:
- Stopping damage and stopping shock are different jobs. A Plate Carrier
takes 70 % off a bullet's damage and only 40 % off its shock — it keeps you alive and still lets
you be knocked out. A motorbike helmet is the mirror image: a quarter of a bullet, two thirds of
a swing.
- "Can't cut you" is not a percentage. The game rolls for a cut using the blood damage that got through, so a piece that passes none of it cannot open a wound on what it covers. That is most real armour, and it is worth more than the numbers next to it suggest.
- Every figure is per piece, for hits that land on that piece. A vest does nothing for your head.
DayZed authors armour of its own, too — the Tactical Helmet's block is DayZed's rather than
Bohemia's, and the whole Nexus suit is custom.
The space helmet
Space Helmet is a sealed helmet with built-in night vision, the best
bullet protection of any headgear on the network, and full contamination immunity.
That last part is the one worth understanding. It is not a protection level that gets compared against the air — wearing it returns a flat zero from the agent transmission entirely, so contaminated air does nothing to you at all, with no separate mask and no filters to burn through. A ruined helmet stops protecting, and that is the only condition on it.
It is a helmet, so it is outside the clothing wear system and degrades at vanilla speed. It carries more condition than an ordinary helmet to compensate, and it runs the night vision off a 9 V battery. One of the four Zaruun altars is where it comes from — see the Zaruun guide.
The stealth suit
The Nexus stealth suit is a four-piece outfit — jacket, trousers, gloves and boots — plus two pouches and a holster. The four wearable pieces come only from the Zaruun altars, two to an altar, and exist nowhere else in the game. The pouches and the holster are ordinary military loot, on Zaruun and on no other map.
It is also the best armour on the network: each of the four pieces stops 82 % of a bullet and passes no blood damage at all. Their item pages carry the rest.
Two things people find out the hard way:
- The jacket blocks vests. You cannot wear a plate carrier — or any other vest — with the Nexus jacket on, and you cannot put the jacket on while a vest is equipped. The suit is the armour.
- None of it is in the clothing wear system, so every piece degrades like vanilla gear. The set is protective, not indestructible — treat a full set the way you treat a plate carrier, not the way you treat a shirt.
Where each piece comes from is covered in the Zaruun guide.
Gear-set crates
Gearset Crate is a pre-packed loadout in a box. Open it and you have a
complete kit rather than an afternoon of looting.
Packing a vehicle
Vehicle Package is the one people do not believe until they see it: you can pack a vehicle into a carryable package and set it down somewhere else.
- Pack it with Pack Vehicle - Remove containers first, put it down again with Unpack Vehicle, and line up the placement with Place Vehicle.
- These vehicle types can never be packed: none — read live from the server. Anything else can still refuse for a reason you can fix: cargo in the vehicle or in an attached crate, sea chest or barrel; the engine running; somebody sitting in it; the vehicle ruined; or the wrong territory. The prompt says which.
This is genuinely strategic rather than convenient. A packed vehicle is a vehicle nobody can find, follow or steal, and it turns "I have to leave the truck somewhere" into a solved problem. It also means the vehicle limit and the cleanup rules still apply — those are in the vehicle guide.
What goes wrong
- "My armour did nothing." Two different complaints hide in that sentence. If the item survived but you did not, that is the item's armour block, and low-end clothing has almost none. If the item was ruined, check whether it is one of the pieces listed above as outside the system.
- "My plate carrier is ruined again." Working as intended — armour is deliberately not covered.
- "My jacket went straight to Ruined." The reduction scales a hit, it does not cap one — a hit that would have done more than three times a healthy garment's whole bar in vanilla still ruins it outright. That is a rare, very large blast. Below it, a garment that jumped to Ruined is almost certainly one of the pieces listed above as outside the system.
- "My boots keep wearing out." Footwear is not in the system, and it takes damage from running as well as from being shot.
- "I can't put a vest on." Check whether you are wearing the Nexus jacket.
- "I got gassed wearing the space helmet." Check its condition — the immunity is switched off once the helmet is ruined. It has no other exception, on any map.
- "I can't pack this vehicle." Empty it first, then check the engine is off, nobody is aboard, and it is not ruined. If it is one of the blacklisted types, nothing will help.
- "I packed a vehicle and lost it." The package is an item. If you drop it or die holding it, it behaves like any other item.
See also: Clothing damage rework, Space helmet, Stealth suit, Gear set crates, Vehicle packing, and Discord.
Last updated 2026-08-25