Spray paints and weapon skins
Recolour your clothing, your gear and your bunker hatch with looted spray cans — how the paint action actually works, what it costs, and how to strip it off again.
Everything you loot looks like everything everyone else looted. Spray paint is how you fix that. It is purely cosmetic — a painted vest stops exactly as much as a plain one — but on a first-person server with no nametags and no group markers, a jacket your squad recognises is worth the paint.
What you can paint
Anyone can spray clothing of every kind (jackets, pants, boots, helmets, gloves, backpacks) and plate carrier pouches.
VIP Premium members can also spray weapons, magazines, optics, suppressors, weapon furniture — stocks, handguards and pistol grips — and containers: barrels, crates, sea chests, protective cases and the like. Membership is at https://dayzed.gg/vip, and it is cosmetic too: nothing you paint shoots straighter.
A few things are never paintable, whatever you pay for: ammunition, armbands, ghillie gear and bunker hatches. If the option will not appear on your ghillie suit, that is why, and it is not a bug.
How you actually paint something
The action is not in your inventory screen. This is the part everyone gets wrong:
- Put the spray can in your hands.
- Drop the item you want to paint on the ground in front of you.
- Look at it and open the scroll menu.
- Pick the pattern you want, and hold the action while your character sprays.
The drop is the step people miss. The paint options only show up when you are holding a can and looking at a target item lying in the world, never from the inventory screen.
The first time a colour and pattern combination is used, the spray keeps going until it is ready. The paint textures are made for your exact item and downloaded while you spray; the circle shows a percentage and your character keeps spraying until they have arrived, then the new look appears. A combination somebody has used before is quick. Do not cancel it halfway — just let it finish.
What a spray costs
Each spray takes 15 out of the can. VIP Premium members spend 5 instead, so one can covers a whole loadout rather than a jacket and a pair of boots.
Cans are looted, never crafted, and a can's colour is fixed — you cannot tint or recolour the can
itself. If you want a particular colour, you have to go and find a can of it. The colours in
circulation are 
Spray Can (Black), Spray Can (Brown), 
Spray Can (Green),
Spray Can (Pink), 
Spray Can (Red), 
Spray Can (Tan) and Spray Can (White).
Spray Can (Blue) and 
Spray Can (Orange) cans do not paint; items already painted in those
colours keep their look. Part-used cans of the same colour combine
into one, so keep the dribs and drabs rather than dropping them.
Spraying a weapon or a piece of clothing sprays everything attached to it in the same pass — the optic, the suppressor, the stock, the pouches — for no extra paint. Attachments your account is not allowed to paint are quietly skipped rather than blocking the spray.
Colours, patterns and what membership buys
There are eight patterns — Regular, Angular, Digital, Fragmented, Frogskin, Pinetree, Urban and Woodland — but only Regular is open to every account. The other seven are members-only, on any item at all. Items painted in the Organic pattern keep it, but no can offers Organic.
So without a membership there is exactly one thing you can do: spray a piece of clothing or a plate carrier pouch in the Regular pattern, in whatever colour of can you found. Everything else — every other pattern, and every weapon, magazine, optic, suppressor, container or piece of weapon furniture — needs one.The [VIP] tag in the craft menu is attached to the pattern, not to the item on the ground:
the seven members-only patterns carry it in their name wherever they appear. When the game refuses,
it tells you which of the two rules stopped you — the pattern or the item.
A painted item shows two colours of yours, and the pattern blends in a matching third tone of its own. Your first spray paints the whole item in that can's colour. Spray it again with a different can and that becomes the second colour. The first colour stays put from then on: every later can replaces the second one, and spraying the first colour again turns the item back into a single colour. To change the first colour, strip the paint and start over. Spray order matters and there is no preview — plan the sequence before you burn the paint.
The paint is worked onto each item's own shape, with the wear showing where that item really gets scuffed, so the same pattern sits differently on a rifle than on a jacket. There is no gallery of preset skins to unlock, and no way to type in a colour you have not found a can for.
While a painted item is still loading in — someone else's gear walking into view, say — it can show a flat colour for a moment before the full pattern appears.
Parts that have to stay readable are skipped on purpose — glass, reticles, red dots, barrels and carry handles keep their original look, so a painted optic still has a clear lens and a working reticle.
Taking the paint off
Paint is not permanent. Removing it takes alcohol tincture, disinfectant spray or iodine tincture rather than a can:
| Remove Spray Paint | |
|---|---|
| Makes | SprayRemove when looking at item |
| Needs | 10 ×  Alcoholic Tincture (or Disinfectant Spray, Iodine Tincture) |
Same routine as painting — hold whichever of the three you have, drop the item, look at it, pick the option from the scroll menu, and the item goes back to its factory textures.
Stripping a weapon or a piece of clothing also resets every attachment on it. Take the optic, suppressor and stock off first if you want the body back to stock but the rest of the set kept.
Stickers
Stickers are a separate layer on top of the paint: a picture you place exactly where you want it.
- World stickers — Skull Sticker, DayZed Sticker, DayZ Sticker and Joker Sticker — are found in the loot and are free for everyone on weapons: one sticker per gun, as its first sticker.
- Elite members can put stickers on clothing and other gear as well, stack several on one item, and turn their own uploaded images into a Sticker (the upload is on the website; making and applying your own needs an active Elite membership).
To apply one, hold the sticker in your hands, look at the item and use Apply Sticker. That opens a placement view of the item: click where it should go, set the size and rotation, and press Apply. The view shows a preview of the result before you commit.
Peeling a sticker works like stripping paint — alcohol tincture, disinfectant spray or iodine tincture on the item — and brings back whatever paint was under it.
What goes wrong
- No paint option in the menu. Either the item can never be painted (ghillie, armband, ammunition), it is a members-only item type and your account is not a member, or the can is in your inventory instead of your hands.
- My Blue or Orange can will not paint. Those two colours cannot be sprayed — find another can.
- The spray takes ages. It is waiting for the textures of a new combination — see above.
- The colour came out wrong. You sprayed over an item that already had paint, so only the second colour changed. Strip it and start again.
See also: Custom flags and armbands for putting your own image on a flag or armband, and https://dayzed.gg/vip for what membership covers.
Last updated 2026-09-28