Skull trophies

DayZed has no kill feed. Nobody watches your name scroll past in chat when you drop someone, and five minutes later there is no evidence you were ever there. So the server lets you keep the evidence. The dead carry their names on their bones, and you can take one home on a stick.

Getting a skull

Skulls do not fall out of a body by themselves. Take a blade to the corpse — the same skinning action you would use on a deer — and a skull comes off with everything else, stamped with whoever the body belonged to. It does not care who did the killing: skin a body you merely found and the skull still names the victim.

What the skull remembers

• In your inventory it is simply named after them: their name, then "'s Skull".
• Examine it and it tells you roughly how long that character lasted, in words instead of a clock: a couple of hours, half a day, a day and a half. It counts the time they actually spent playing that life, so it resets every time they die.
• A fresh spawn who never got going reads They never made it....
• A skull the server cannot put a name to sits in your inventory as unknown Skull, and examining it reads the skull of an unknown survivor.
• Crafting a skull into a skull mask carries the name across. The mask becomes their name, then "'s Skull Mask", and examining it still tells you how long they lasted. Wearing a face you took is the loudest version of this.

Mounting one

Planting a spear is an Elite VIP feature. Everyone can carry skulls, craft the mask, and pull somebody else's trophies out of the ground, but putting a spear in the ground yourself needs the top membership tier — see https://dayzed.gg/vip. Without it the plant animation runs all the way through and then a message tells you what you are missing, which reads exactly like a bug and is not one.

The order trips people up, so start here: the spear goes in the ground first, the skull goes on afterwards. A spear in your hands has nowhere to hang a skull.

1. Hold a bone or stone spear, aim at the ground within arm's reach and take the plant-spear action (Plant Spear). Stand still for a few seconds and it takes root.
2. What you get is a Planted Bone Spear or Planted Stone Spear — locked in place, impossible to simply pick back up, and it takes no damage at all. Shooting one, burning one or blowing one up achieves nothing.
3. Now hold the skull, look at the planted spear, and Place Skull. It goes straight onto the point, visible from a good way off.
4. The name is readable from the world, not just from your inventory. Aim at a mounted skull and the prompt gives you whose it is and how long they survived. That is the whole point of the display — a raider at your gate can read every name in the row without touching anything.
5. One skull per spear. A row of names is a row of spears.

Locking and taking back

Hold Pliers or a Screwdriver, aim at either the spear or the skull sitting on it, and a single action (Unlock Skull) does both jobs — the prompt offers to lock a loose skull and to unlock one already fastened, so read which way it is pointing before you hold the button. Locked, no one can lift the skull off by hand.

The uproot action (Uproot Spear) pulls the whole spear out again. It needs a digging tool in hand — Shovel, Field Shovel, Pickaxe or Farming Hoe — and it costs the tool a little wear. The spear comes back as an item and the skull drops on the ground next to it.

Uprooting ignores the lock. The lock stops hands, not shovels.

Authorisation

On top of the Elite VIP gate on planting, both planting and uprooting run through Territory flags and authorisation, and that part cuts both ways:

• Inside range of somebody's flag you must be authorised on it. Otherwise the action runs its course and then does nothing but tell you to go and authorise yourself. You cannot decorate a base you do not hold — and nobody can decorate yours.
• With no flag in range, anyone can plant and anyone can uproot. A trophy row in an open field belongs to the next person along with a shovel.

Locking is stricter: it needs a nearby flag and your name on it, so out in the wild it simply refuses. The practical version — keep your trophies inside your own flag's 50 m.

What goes wrong

• A skull lying loose on the ground is on a short clock — leave it and it despawns within about an hour. Mounted on a spear it keeps for a very long time. Pick up anything you uproot.
• The plant action finishes and nothing appears. Check your membership tier before you blame the ground: planting is Elite VIP only, and the refusal arrives at the end of the action rather than stopping the prompt from showing up.
• Locking with no flag in range gives you a message, not a locked skull. Raise the flag first.
• Broken legs stop you planting.
• Anyone can uproot. There is no membership requirement on pulling a spear out, so a raider who could never plant a trophy of their own can still take yours.
• There is no way to write a name onto a blank skull. Anonymous is permanent.

Why bother

Because it is the only public record of anything you have done out there. The website counts your kills; the world does not. A raider at your gate reading four names off four spears learns more about you than a leaderboard ever would — and if they take the base, the first thing they will do is dig your row up and plant it somewhere else.

See also: Territory flags and authorisation, Base building on DayZed, stats and leaderboards.