Changelog

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UPDATE — v0.4.2 | 1 September 2026

• Added Press P in the pilot seat to open the destination map — drag the header to move it, drag the corner to resize, and it remembers your size and position. Click a destination, press ENGAGE, and the helicopter flies itself there; ESC closes it
• Added It flies like a pilot, per aircraft. Nose-first with bank-to-turn, cruising at a speed derived from that helicopter’s own configured maximum airspeed, turning at a rate matched to its tail authority, never pushing into its speed envelope — and sling loads slow it down exactly as they would a human pilot
• Added Terrain and obstacle aware, and it cruises level. It reads the ground more than a kilometre ahead along the route and picks an altitude that clears the highest of it, with extra margin over scanned obstacles — trees, buildings, rocks and vehicles on the flight path raise the cruise line before they are reached. It then holds that altitude rather than following the ground beneath it, so a run of hills is crossed in level flight: it climbs only when the ground ahead genuinely needs more height, and gives height back only once well clear — and while it cruises, the altitude readout shows the altitude it is holding. Engaged low, it climbs straight up onto its safety line before moving off
• Added You are always in command. Touching any flight control cancels the autopilot instantly; STOP in the map or the Autohover key cancel it too. On arrival it hands to an Autohover hold, and landing stays manual unless your server has auto-land switched on
• Added Fully independent from Autohover. Engaging the autopilot never flips your hover state — they are two separate systems that only meet at the arrival hand-off
• Added It flies the aircraft, not just the stick. While the autopilot is in control it works the systems a pilot would: navigation lights follow the clock, on after dusk and off at dawn; the landing lamp lights a night approach and goes out once down; and retractable landing gear — the Merlin is the only airframe with it — is raised for the cruise and lowered for the arrival. Take the controls back and they are yours again
• Added A proper helicopter marker icon now marks aircraft on the admin tracker and the autopilot map, and the autopilot destination is shown as a clear red X
• Added The hold indicator knows the autopilot. The cockpit’s hold light used to watch Auto Hover alone; it now lights for the autopilot too, tinted amber so a glance tells you which of the two is flying
• Added Optional auto-land — features.autoPilotAutoLand, OFF by default. With it on, the autopilot also lands at the destination where safe: verified clear ground only, using the same site check as the abandoned-landing system. About a kilometre out it starts sizing up the ground around the point you picked, so in the normal case the site is chosen while still inbound and the arrival is one continuous approach — a straight descending line to the pad, slowing on final, settling level and touching down positively, engine left running. No safe ground nearby? It holds hover and tells you to land manually — and the map’s corner note tells you whether your server lands for you or leaves it manual
• Added Optional auto take-off — features.autoPilotAutoTakeOff, OFF by default. With it on, the autopilot owns the whole departure: engaged on the pad it starts the engine if it is off, holds the aircraft on its wheels until the rotor reaches full flying speed, lifts off and climbs onto its safety line before setting off. With it off, engaging from the ground is refused with a notice — the aircraft must already be airborne with the engine running. Shown in the Admin Panel as Auto Pilot Takes Off From Ground
• Added Master switch — features.autoPilotEnabled, ON by default. Turns the whole autopilot off for everyone; in the Admin Panel as Auto Pilot (map destination)

• Added Seat switching now works on helicopters, the same way it does in a car. Look at an empty seat and press the interact key to move into it, with the normal slide animation. Until now the only route into the pilot seat was the co-pilot control transfer, which only the person already flying can start — so if the pilot disconnected or was killed with someone else aboard, nobody could take over and the aircraft was lost
• Added It can never take the controls off a living pilot. Vanilla’s rule that you cannot move into an occupied seat still applies, so handing over while both cockpit seats are filled still goes through the co-pilot control transfer. The pilot at the controls also cannot drop back to a cargo seat while airborne
• Added Looking at a seat in flight can never throw you out. Changing seat is a press of the interact key and climbing out is a hold of that same key — so the exit stands down while you are looking at a free seat in the air, and a press held a moment too long cannot eject you from a flying helicopter. On the ground everything behaves exactly as before
• Note Not available on the Merlin. Its seat-change animation is built facing the wrong way for that airframe and carries you out through the fuselage, and an animation’s direction cannot be changed from script. Nothing is lost: the Merlin’s cockpit exit walks straight into the cabin, so you can step out, walk to another seat and get back in

• Added Press O anywhere to open your personal helicopter settings (rebindable). Mouse Flight on/off, Mouse Flight sensitivity and Keyboard Cyclic Strength — which softens W/A/S/D and Q/E stick deflection for gentler keyboard flying. Every value is stored in your own profile on your PC, applies instantly, and never touches the server or other players. ESC or CLOSE dismisses it

• Fixed Transit is real flight — nose-first, banking into turns, at per-aircraft speeds — instead of the fixed-nose sideways slide
• Fixed It lands close by, not far away. The clear-ground search now covers its full pattern honestly under load and picks the nearest verified-safe spot — no more drifting off in one direction to some distant field
• Added Water awareness. The landing site keeps a full rotor-clearance margin from the waterline, and the shore-crossing behaviour only engages when the helicopter is genuinely abandoned over water
• Fixed A single committed final descent — no more seesaw hovering over the pad — with the sink rate scaled to the aircraft
• Fixed A pilot killed at the controls no longer leaves the helicopter holding its hover until the tanks run dry. A body left in the seat counted as crew, so an aircraft with a dead pilot was never treated as abandoned. Only someone who could actually take the aircraft counts now — an unconscious pilot still does, since they may wake
• Fixed The abandonment delay is always honoured, and an abandoned helicopter still settles into its unattended sleep. If an aircraft reached the ground with its engine already dead part-way through an automatic landing — running itself out of fuel while searching for a spot, or losing a rotor — it stayed flagged as landing for the rest of that server session. The next time it was left alone it began landing immediately with the configured delay skipped, and it could never settle into the unattended hover freeze. Losing a rotor also left the autopilot armed, so a repaired aircraft would resume flying itself to a stale destination
• Fixed A disconnecting pilot no longer leaves a helicopter flying until it crashes. The unattended-aircraft logic only ran once something was already holding the helicopter, so a pilot who logged out while hand-flying left it carrying its last velocity across the map until it hit terrain — while one left on Auto Hover landed correctly. An aircraft left airborne with nobody aboard now takes the hold itself and then lands after the delay. Engine-off and shot-down helicopters still fall as before
• Fixed Clean handover when the delay elapses. Pilot leftovers — an active autopilot, stale hover targets, the open map — are cleared, and a helicopter abandoned mid-autopilot now completes its flight and then lands itself

• Fixed Sitting in a landed helicopter no longer rubber-bands. With the engine off and a pilot aboard, the stationary aircraft could visibly jolt every second or two — the pilot’s own game kept nudging the resting airframe, losing its ground contact for a few frames, and the server kept snapping it back. The at-rest hold now leaves a settled helicopter completely alone and corrects it only when it genuinely drifts, and the wheel-brake application is now identical on both sides of the connection down to its ramp-up timing
• Added No lifting off before full rotor blur. On the ground, flight controls stay inert until the blades reach full speed — the choppy partial-spool take-off regime is gone entirely. Engine-off autorotation control is untouched
• Fixed Near-ground jumpiness while tilting over uneven terrain — the ground-effect altitude smoothing had a hard boundary that stepped the forces low over rough ground; it is now continuous, and cliff-edge response is smoother with it
• Improved Smoother framerate while flying. The client re-read the config texture arrays and re-applied damage materials to the hull and every attachment twice a second on any helicopter being flown — pristine ones included — and re-applied them again on every network sync of a damaged aircraft, which during hard manoeuvring is many times a second. That constant churn was felt as hitching at low level under heavy input. A pristine helicopter now costs nothing, and a damaged one is throttled while still reacting instantly when its damage level actually changes
• Fixed Skid helicopters settle onto the ground instead of juddering. At touchdown the park brake jumped straight to full the instant the collective dropped, locking the ground colliders while the aircraft still carried motion — wheeled airframes absorb that, skid airframes judder, which matches the reported difference between them exactly. The brake now eases on over about three quarters of a second and releases quickly, so touchdowns settle rather than snatch. Full holding force and parking behaviour are unchanged
• Fixed Landing on a ship deck or a player-built floor now counts as being on the ground. Several rules that should only apply on the ground were testing for natural terrain alone: rotor blur could be held back, and the cockpit prompts that stand down in flight — Stop Engine among them — behaved as though a landed aircraft were still airborne
• Fixed Warm engine restarts are in sync. Restarting mid spin-down — for example right after an abandoned self-landing — no longer visibly slows the blades, and the start-up sound now tracks the real spool instead of finishing early

• Updated The helicopter retexture example pack has been rebuilt and re-released. The Substance Painter models now carry real materials, so each aircraft opens as proper texture sets instead of one merged sheet — the Huey correctly shows two (body and tail boom) with each of its doors painting into both. UVs are oriented the way Substance and Blender expect while sampling exactly the pixels the game samples, face normals point outwards instead of rendering the shells inside-out, and the models carry the game’s own vertex normals so they look smooth rather than faceted. The geometry is untouched full-detail LOD 0, and UV positions are identical to before, so existing paint work still lines up — but re-import the models if you have an older copy

• Fixed Players who fall out of a flying helicopter can no longer be dragged along beneath it. A passenger who slipped off a bench or deck mid-flight could stay invisibly tethered to the aircraft — hanging weightless below the hull, carried through every turn — until something finally let go. The cabin link now verifies the player is actually inside the aircraft before holding them, so anyone outside it falls free instantly; it also releases anyone already stuck
• Fixed Jumping from a moving helicopter no longer drags the jumper through the sky. Passengers bailing out of a flying aircraft could hang outside the hull for many seconds, carried wherever the pilot flew, before finally dropping (reported on the Little Bird and Blackhawk — the cause covered every helicopter). Leaving the pilot or co-pilot seat of a moving aircraft now detaches instantly, carrying the aircraft’s momentum. Passengers in the back are untouched — they still just stand up and walk the cabin as before — and landed or hovering exits keep the normal climb-out. Getting out never injures you by itself, though a jump from height is still a fall
• Improved Autopilot and abandoned landings descend like a pilot. The final descent was a crawl from any height; it now comes down briskly high up — scaled to each helicopter and always below the vortex-ring-state threshold — and flares to the same gentle touchdown below eight metres
• Fixed The abandoned landing settles onto its skids with a firm, positive touchdown. On sloped ground the aircraft could finish its automatic landing frozen slightly above the grass; the at-rest hold now waits for real ground contact before pinning anything, and the last stretch is flown down positively so the skids actually touch instead of the aircraft hanging just above the surface
• Fixed Walking into the cabin can no longer strand you outside the aircraft. If the client happened to rebuild the helicopter’s network entity in the moment you moved to the cabin — spawning or removing vehicles nearby is enough to trigger it — the parent link briefly reported your position as thousands of metres away, which read as having fallen out. The cabin session was then ended and restored several times a second: still aboard on the server, jittering in mid-air on your own screen, until it eventually recovered on its own. The check that decides you have left the aircraft now has to agree with the aircraft’s real position before it acts, and a cabin reference lost to a rebuild is recovered from the link rather than ending the session
• Fixed Cabin mode no longer counts as abandoning the aircraft. A sole pilot walking back into the cabin (or a passenger riding the deck) now counts as crew, so the hover-freeze, abandoned countdown and auto-landing all stay off while anyone is aboard
• Fixed Engine-off on a raised base floor no longer strands the rotor in a silent windmill. The height probe can now see every player-built surface (including mesh floors that swallow raycasts), and physical ground contact overrides the airborne logic — the rotor spools down normally and the aircraft goes to sleep
• Fixed Helicopters parked on player-built structures no longer end up inside the base after a server restart (reported on the Gazelle and Blackhawk — the cause was airframe-independent, so the fix covers every helicopter). On boot the server rebuilds bases over several seconds, and both gravity and the v0.3.6 mid-air restart recovery could act before a roof’s collision existed: the helicopter fell through it, or the recovery probe missed the roof, judged the aircraft mid-air and “recovered” it to the ground inside the base. A boot-restored helicopter is now held weightless at its saved position until the world around it has finished building, its parked state is saved with it so an aircraft that was at rest can never be relocated by the recovery at all, and the recovery’s support checks now recognise player-built surfaces
• Fixed Rotor downwash dust no longer floats in mid-air beneath elevated platforms. Hovering over or landing on a raised player-built floor could leave the dust cloud hanging at ground level far below the deck; the effect now stays off whenever the surface beneath the rotor is a structure raised above the terrain
• Fixed detachRuinedParts works, properly. With the setting on, ruined doors and wheels now actually fall off — breaking away right where they hang and falling with real physics, tumbling until they settle, instead of teleporting to a drop point. A dropped door also keeps its wrecked look on the ground. Scoped so batteries and cargo modules can never be shed
• Fixed Cross-mod compatibility: engine prompts on other mods’ vehicles. Our engine start/stop prompt overrides re-implemented the whole condition instead of deferring to the chain, which silently suppressed other mods’ engine actions — DayZ Expansion helicopters lost their hold-to-stop-engine prompt. The overrides now only hide the prompts on CZ helicopters and hand everything else back untouched
• Fixed MH6 and MD500 rotor blur looked blocky at full spin — the harsh solid petals are softened into faint smooth blur streaks on main and tail rotors
• Added The Admin Panel and both maps — the helicopter tracker and the autopilot map — are movable and resizable, and each remembers where every player put it

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UPDATE — v0.4.1 | 27 August 2026

• Added Five damage stages on the hull and tail of every variant and livery. Pristine, worn, damaged, badly damaged and ruined each have their own look. The livery’s panel lines and detail — including lettering embossed into the surface — survive the early stages, so your paint stays recognisable until the airframe is genuinely beaten up, and only then do dents take over
• Added A destroyed helicopter now looks destroyed. Scorched brown-black paint, blistered metal and a sooty, non-reflective finish — and the burnt look is reserved for actual destruction, so scorched paint always means dead, never merely damaged
• Added Doors and wheels wear their own damage. Each part tracks its own condition and shows its own damage and ruined looks independently of the airframe
• Fixed The damage you see is always the damage that exists. Condition is decided on the server and applied on every client — flying in from a distance, reloading, opening a door or repairing all show the correct state immediately
• Added Community retextures inherit the whole system automatically. A retexture override keeps its own paint and picks up all five stages with no extra work — and an author who ships their own damage materials alongside their livery overrides ours per stage

• Fixed Bullets passed straight through the Chinook. Its fire geometry has been rebuilt from the proven walkable shell — bullets now collide everywhere, the windows are real glass rather than armour, and rounds route into the correct damage zones. Smaller bullet-transparent patches found on every other airframe were closed in the same pass
• Fixed One bullet to the engine could destroy the whole helicopter. The engine zone’s critical-hit chance was set to 100%, so any round that reached it was instantly fatal. It now matches vanilla cars at 0.1% — engine hits do normal engine damage, with the same rare golden-BB vanilla has
• Fixed Hit components near the rotor mast bypassed the damage zones entirely, sending their damage straight to the airframe’s global health. Every hit component on every airframe is now mapped into a proper damage zone
• Added Per-blade rotor collision. Stationary rotors were an invisible solid disc; bullets now pass between the blades and only strike the blades themselves

• Fixed Destroyed helicopters revived themselves. A heli shot to zero could bounce back to 40% health the moment someone climbed in, because the write-off protection ran before the destroyed flag was set. Wrecks now stay wrecks — the protection only rescues an airframe whose hull and engine are genuinely intact
• Fixed Shooting the hull ruined all four doors at once. The door zones were absorbing hull damage at ten times the vanilla rate; they now take the same 10% share a vanilla car door does. Shooting a door directly still ruins that door
• Fixed Repair now actually clears the aftermath. Fire, engine smoke and the fuel-leak spray all stop the moment a repair lands — from the repair kit, the garage or the admin panel — instead of smoking forever
• Fixed A leaking fuel tank on an unmanned helicopter now drains. Previously the leak effect played forever without ever losing fuel while nobody was aboard; the tank now empties and the leak ends on its own
• Added Ruined wheels look ruined, the same way vanilla handles it

• Added A locked vehicle refuses the hook. Before attaching, the sling asks whichever lock mod your server runs — MuchCarKey, Trader, TraderPlus and Expansion are all understood — so a helicopter can no longer lift a car straight around its lock. Reported by PalladiumZ1
• Info Toggleable per server with the new Sling: Respect Vehicle Locks setting, in the config file and live in the admin panel

• Added Refuel All joins Repair All in the tools tab — every helicopter on the map, one click
• Fixed Repair and Repair All now restore everything. They previously healed only the airframe’s overall health, leaving ruined doors and wheels, a damaged battery and low internal zones untouched — which is why some smoking, fuel-leaking helicopters could never be fixed. Repair now restores every damage zone and every attached part
• Changed Auto Shutdown On Exit is now set per flight model, Simple and Advanced each getting their own value alongside its Auto Hover On Exit counterpart. Existing configs migrate automatically — both models inherit your current setting

• Fixed Vehicle recovery and flip mods no longer desync parked helicopters. Helis now follow a recovery mod’s teleport, and rescued airframes are no longer handed back at 1% health where other mods read them as wrecks
• Added Abandoned helicopters land themselves. A heli left hovering with nobody aboard descends and sets down on safe ground after a configurable delay, instead of hanging in the air burning fuel until it is lost forever
• Fixed Getting out on a rooftop or rig now behaves correctly. Exit checks measure height above the structure you are standing on rather than the terrain far below it
• Fixed Fully repairing the hull also restores the battery
• Changed The flight HUD sits slightly further left so it clears the hotbar on smaller resolutions

• Fixed UV maps normalised on every airframe. Retextures made in Substance Painter or any 2D editor now map cleanly, with the per-airframe layouts our own liveries use
• Fixed The example FBX files no longer import mirrored. Faces appeared reversed in Blender and Substance Painter; the exported geometry now matches the shipped models exactly, UVs included
• Fixed White rotor discs. The rotor blur textures were missing materials on some airframes; every blur now has a proper one

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UPDATE — v0.4.0 | 23 August 2026

• Fixed Using the Chinook’s rear ramp could crash the server and every client on it. Three independent faults stacked into a single symptom. First, 25 of the Chinook’s 27 seat reference points were absent from the model — the script asked the engine for points that did not exist. Second, the call we used to rebuild the ramp’s collision after a restart was corrupting memory rather than raising a script error, which is why the failure appeared inside the Windows allocator with no script log to point at it. Third, a ramp caught mid-travel by a server restart was restored to that exact position with its target set to match, so nothing would ever move it again. All three are fixed. Every airframe in the fleet has since had its seat wiring audited end to end — crew proxies, skeleton bones, boarding positions and seat reference points, across every level of detail — and all seven now verify clean
• Fixed A ramp can no longer be left stuck half open. The ramp takes fifteen seconds to open and twelve to close, and a restart landing inside that window captured it mid-swing. Persistence now records the position the ramp was commanded to reach rather than the position it happened to be passing through, so a restart during travel simply completes the movement. Helicopters already saved in a half-open state are repaired automatically on the next restart

• Added Every helicopter now ships five visual levels of detail instead of one. Until now each airframe carried a single full-detail mesh that the engine drew at every range, so a distant helicopter cost exactly as much to render as one filling your screen — and a server with several in view paid that cost for all of them. Each aircraft now has four progressively simplified meshes behind the original, which is left completely untouched, so close-up appearance is identical. All 66 attachment models — doors, wheels, rotor blades and hubs, skids, seats and cabin interiors — received the same treatment. At the furthest level the fleet draws 16.2x fewer triangles: UH-1H 20.7x, Merlin 18.5x, Chinook 17.9x, Black Hawk 17.4x, MD500 16.0x, MH6 13.6x and Gazelle 13.3x. The gain is largest where it matters most — busy airfields, and any server running several helicopters within sight of each other

• Fixed The jolt when rolling through level with A and D is gone. Heavier airframes hitched as the cyclic crossed centre — worst on the Chinook, present on the Merlin, and absent on the light helicopters. The control smoothing chose between two time constants with a hard switch, and a second switch halved the rate the moment the stick reversed. Because the smoothing is a spring that carries velocity, changing its rate mid-motion discontinuously altered the path it was solving for — and the size of the kick scaled with the airframe’s own smoothing values, which is exactly why it tracked aircraft weight. Both transitions now ease across a short band. Pitch and yaw carried the identical construct and received the same fix; every steady-state response is numerically unchanged

• Added The size of each helicopter’s extra cargo modules is now yours to choose. A single container is capped at 1000 slots, which is why up to ten modules can be fitted — but each module was a fixed 1000 regardless of the aircraft it was bolted to, so a Gazelle jumped from 250 straight to 1250 with no step in between. Module size is now configurable per airframe from 100 to 1000 in increments of 100, and combines with the existing module count for whatever total your server wants. Set it in extraModules.<heli>_size or live from the admin panel, where it appears beside the module count
• Info Existing servers are unaffected until they choose otherwise — every aircraft defaults to 1000, the size it already had. A module containing items is never resized and never removed: it is left exactly as it is and the change applies once it has been emptied, so a configuration change can never destroy stored gear

• Fixed A ramp left open through a server restart is no longer an invisible wall. After a restart the ramp appeared open but its collision was still closed: the doorway was blocked and the ramp itself could not be stood on until you closed and reopened it. Re-applying a saved animation position on restore never rebuilt the collision, because writing a value the engine already holds starts no animation at all. Ramps, landing gear and cabin doors restored from persistence now rebuild their collision properly on the server and on every client
• Fixed The ramp and landing gear no longer freeze part-way while crew are aboard
• Fixed Opening or closing the ramp from the pilot seat no longer judders the whole helicopter. v0.3.6 fixed this for parked, unmanned helicopters; the same smoothing and settle damping now also run on the machine of the pilot who is sitting in it
• Fixed Phantom door sounds after a restart. A parked helicopter would play its own pilot and co-pilot door sounds when nobody had touched them, and changing camera angle brought them back. The collision rebuild that runs after a restart was raising the engine’s animation event for the cabin doors as a side effect; the doors no longer take part in that rebuild, as their collision comes from their own models

• Fixed A flipped helicopter no longer stays the wrong way up for everyone else. Overturned helicopters were being put to sleep along with parked ones, and a sleeping body stops replicating its pose — so however the wreck was righted, other players continued to see it inverted until they relogged
• Fixed A helicopter hovering close to a hillside is no longer mistaken for a parked one. Proximity to terrain was being treated as evidence of rest, which could put a flying aircraft to sleep
• Fixed Flip and push mods work on parked helicopters again. DayZ 1.29 puts idle vehicle bodies to sleep, and our park handling treated every wake as a stray force — it zeroed the velocity each frame and put the body straight back to sleep, so a flip wrench, Push-a-Car or a shove from another vehicle was cancelled before it could take effect. A parked helicopter now hands itself back to the physics engine when something genuinely pushes it, keeps that momentum rather than discarding it, and the new pose reaches every client immediately

• Fixed The altimeter no longer steps as you fly over uneven ground. The HUD sampled the terrain height five times a second and used the result raw, while your own altitude updated every frame — so the needle glided between samples and then snapped. At speed over undulating ground the reading could jump eighteen feet in a single frame. The terrain reference is now smoothed rather than the altitude itself, so response to your own climb and descent stays immediate

• Fixed The downloadable server-file bundles now cover the whole fleet. The helicopter bundle had drifted out of date: the entire MH-47G Chinook was missing, as were the four Black Hawk liveries added since it was last built — Australian Army, Fire Rescue, Navy and United Nations. Forty-eight classnames have been added across types.xml, events.xml, cfgeventspawns.xml and all three trader formats, and every entry has been verified against the shipped configs
• Fixed The fuel drum was listed only under its deprecated classname. Both CZ_HeliDrum and the legacy CZAutoz_HeliDrum now ship, so existing setups continue to work while new ones use the current name

• Fixed The MH6’s tail now retextures along with the rest of the body. Anyone repainting the airframe found the tail stayed on its original scheme while everything else took the new one, which made a custom livery unusable without hand-patching it. An earlier attempt to correct this did not fully take; the tail now follows the body texture as the other airframes do

• Changed The Our Mods panel now reflects the real fleet — seven aircraft in twenty-nine variants — and mentions the Chinook and sling loading

• Fixed Zombies could ruin helicopters on servers running a global “vehicle damage off” mod — every other vehicle on the server was protected and ours were not. Our helicopters re-enabled the engine’s damage switch for themselves at spawn, after every config reload, and again after the licence check, silently overriding whatever another mod had set. We now track ownership of that switch and only ever re-enable damage if we were the one who turned it off, so a server-wide damage-off mod (Survival Tweaks and similar) now applies to our helicopters exactly like every other vehicle. If you would rather keep third-party mods out of it, setting all six dmgZone* toggles to 0 for an airframe disables its damage through our own config as before
• Fixed Repairing a helicopter through CFTools no longer mounts every extra cargo module. Admin repair tools complete a vehicle by filling any empty attachment slot they can find, which force-mounted all ten cargo modules regardless of your extra_modules_* configuration — and nothing pruned them until the next restart. Modules attached by any external tool are now reconciled against your configuration within about a second. Modules with items inside them are never removed
• Fixed Vehicle recovery mods now move the helicopter for everyone. Recovering a parked helicopter applied on the server only: players kept seeing it at its old position, collided with an invisible hull at the recovery point, and only saw the truth after relogging. Parked helicopters now follow an external teleport instantly on every client. Recovery in flight was already working and is unchanged
• Fixed Flip and push mods work on parked helicopters again. DayZ 1.29 puts idle vehicle bodies to sleep, and our park handling treated every wake as a stray force — it zeroed the velocity each frame and put the body straight back to sleep, so a flip wrench, Push-a-Car or a shove from another vehicle was cancelled before it could take effect. A rotation-only change also never reached other players even when it did land, leaving a flipped helicopter upside-down on their screen until they relogged. A parked helicopter now hands itself back to the physics engine when something genuinely pushes it, keeps that momentum rather than discarding it, and the new pose reaches every client immediately

• Fixed Free look always-on works for everyone again. v0.3.9’s Mouse Flight suppressed forced free look for any player who had ever pressed U — in every seat, including passengers, and permanently, because the choice is saved to your DayZ profile. The suppression now applies only to the crew member actually holding the controls, which is the only seat where the mouse feeds the cyclic. Passengers and non-flying crew get always-on exactly as the server intends
• Changed Mouse Flight has moved from U to K. Community Online Tools binds U to god mode, so an admin toggling Mouse Flight was silently toggling god mode at the same time. K is unused in vanilla and by the common admin tools. Like every key in this mod it stays rebindable from the control settings, and the on-screen confirmation no longer names a specific letter so it remains correct if you rebind it
• Fixed Mouse Flight now toggles on every press. The toggle was de-duplicating input purely with a half-second window, which also discarded any genuine second press inside that window — hence needing two or three attempts to catch. It now detects the key’s rising edge the same way the auto-hover toggle always has, so one press is exactly one change no matter how many times the input repeats internally
• Added Mouse Flight now confirms on screen when you toggle it, so an accidental press can no longer change your camera behaviour silently and permanently
• Fixed The free look key now carries the same repeat-press protection as every other control in the mod

• Fixed Sliding “combat” landings no longer repeat the impact sound over every undulation in the grass
• Fixed The same bumps were also damaging the hull at full crash rates, silently, on every sliding landing. Contacts are now classified by their closing speed along the contact surface rather than raw impulse: a graze while sliding counts as light wear, while genuine crashes — hard vertical impacts, and striking objects or terrain head-on — are completely unchanged

• Changed Every page on this site was re-checked line-by-line against the shipped code. A number of published instructions turned out to be wrong, and the most important one was on four separate pages: the docs stated that any control input disengages Autohover. It never did. Autohover is released by the X key, and automatically when a rotor is destroyed, the engine cuts, or you land shut down — steering while it is engaged is intentional behaviour, and the hold re-settles at whatever attitude and altitude you release it at
• Fixed The repair guide presented “within 3 m” and “within 5 m” as how close the player must stand. They are the helicopter’s maximum height above ground for rotor repairs and airframe-zone repairs respectively. The same page listed the repair kit and battery under classnames that do not exist — they are CZ_HelicopterRepairKit and CZ_HelicopterBattery, which matters for anyone who copied them into types.xml
• Fixed Damage-zone colour thresholds were documented as 75/55/35%; the real values are 70/50/30%, and a rotor stops producing lift at 15% health rather than only when destroyed
• Fixed Unit and reading errors throughout: the HUD airspeed dial shows horizontal groundspeed (not true airspeed), aerodynamics.groundEffectAlt is in metres while the altitude keys beside it are in feet, autorotation.descentCap is in knots rather than m/s, and the light and battery status icons live on the damage panel rather than the instrument cluster
• Fixed Corrected specifications across the fleet — masses, service ceilings, variant counts and per-livery classnames — and removed several superlatives that had been attached to the wrong aircraft
• Added Sling Loading and Mouse Flight now have proper pages; both shipped in v0.3.9 with no documentation whatsoever. The MH-47G Chinook has a full airframe page, the flight model gains an air density (ISA) section, and the troubleshooting guide covers every issue fixed in this release

• Info The release went through a full pre-ship audit. It caught a packaging fault introduced by the ramp fix that would have prevented servers from booting, plus three smaller hardenings, and confirmed that the save format (frozen since v0.3.8) and the network format are untouched by this update

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UPDATE — v0.3.9 | 7 August 2026

• Added The biggest airframe in the fleet: a tandem twin-rotor heavy-lifter — the only helicopter that can sling the heaviest vehicle classes
• Added A fully walkable cabin — stroll in off the rear loading ramp, with 25 cargo seats boarded from inside the hold plus the flight crew up front
• Added Rear loading ramp with a true two-stage fold — the lower ramp swings down while the upper section slides flush into the deck
• Added Real MH-47 engine audio — a full 45-second start-up and a proper shutdown, built from genuine Chinook recordings and synced to the rotors
• Added Twin-rotor downwash — two dust clouds, one under each disc, and a shot-out rotor’s cloud dies with it
• Added Multiple liveries including Night Stalkers, Royal Air Force, Australian Army, Canada and United Nations

• Added Four new Black Hawk paint schemes — Australian Army, Fire Rescue, Navy and United Nations join the base and Desert liveries

• Added Carry vehicles under your helicopter. Hook a car from the pilot seat (hover low over it) or as ground crew standing at the vehicle, winch the line up and down in steps, and release from the seat or the ground
• Added Every airframe has a real lifting class — light helis lift light cars; it takes the Chinook to move the heavy stuff. Overweight loads simply cannot be hooked
• Added The Chinook flies loads on its real fore/aft dual hooks — two chain bridles to the load’s front and rear, so long loads ride level and follow the airframe
• Added Modelled sling gear on the UH-1H, Black Hawk and Chinook — their own winch rope/chain hardware reveals when a load is hooked
• Added Anti-grief protections built in: line-of-sight checks and full server-side validation on every attach

• Added Fly the cyclic with your mouse — press U in the pilot seat to toggle; the dial cluster shows a KEYBOARD / MOUSE badge so you always know which mode you’re in. Keyboard keys keep full authority in both modes, and your choice persists between sessions
• Added Mouse feel is smoothed, and sensitivity is tunable via CZAutoz_MouseSens in your profile — an in-game settings page is planned for a future update

• Fixed The “choppy tilt” while flying with auto-hover assist on — the assist’s velocity brake handed authority back instantly and at full strength every time you released a key; the handoff now fades in smoothly, so tap-flying is clean at any speed
• Changed Auto-hover no longer fights aggressive flying — its tilt guard now only steps in past 40° instead of 25°
• Fixed Auto-hover and Mouse Flight toggles are true single-press — auto-hover’s displayed state can no longer be bounced by network timing, and the mouse toggle ignores the input echoes that previously ate presses
• Added Engine damage is now lethal in the air — an engine shot to critical cuts out mid-flight and drops you into autorotation, so guard that engine bay
• Added RPM-faithful rotor visuals — blades sag under heavy collective, droop in autorotation, and spool with real inertia instead of a fixed spin rate

• Added Air genuinely thins with altitude: roughly 9% less lift per 1,000m, so mountain flying — especially with a slung load — becomes a real pilot decision. Subtle on Chernarus, meaningful on tall custom maps
• Added Server-tunable: features.isaAirDensity in the config and Admin Panel (1 = realistic default, 0 = off, up to 3 = exaggerated); applies live to all connected players without a restart

• Changed Downwash dust now blows from every airframe’s actual rotor disc instead of the model centre — Black Hawk and Merlin clouds sit correctly under their masts now
• Added Nav-lights status icon in the damage overlay — grey off, white on, visible to the whole crew
• Fixed Virtual garage bugs: a spotlight left on no longer haunts the pad after storing, and retrieved helicopters spawn with proper parked blades instead of a frozen blur
• Fixed Parked helicopters are now perfectly inert for physics — zero residual forces while shut down

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UPDATE — v0.3.8 | 2 August 2026

• Fixed Helicopters stored in a virtual garage before v0.3.7 came back corrupted on retrieval — server-wide freezes of up to a minute on each pull, helicopters coming out instantly ruined, and ruined hulls igniting, which produced invisible fire damage that hurt and killed players near parked helicopters. Root cause: v0.3.7’s battery-persistence feature appended a field to the helicopter’s save data. The engine’s own restart storage frames each entity’s data, so server restarts handled the extra field safely — but Expansion’s garage stores the save blob raw, with its own attachment and health data immediately after ours, so retrieving any helicopter stored under the old format shifted every following read by four bytes: a garbage attachment count froze the server, garbage health ruined the hull on the spot, and the ruined hull caught fire. The save format is now reverted to exactly match v0.3.6, so every helicopter stored before v0.3.7 retrieves perfectly again
• Fixed Fire damage zones can never linger invisibly — the fire’s damage area is a separate runtime object from its visible flames, and one cleanup path could clear the flame state while leaving the already-spawned damage zone alive: an intact-looking helicopter with a lethal invisible radius around it. Every fire cleanup now destroys the damage zone, the burn timers and the visuals together, on every path. Damage zones never persist across a restart, so any created during the incident were already gone the moment your server came back up
• Removed The v0.3.7 “battery charge survives storage” feature is withdrawn — it was the root cause above. Helicopter batteries now behave exactly like vanilla car batteries through garages: the charge rides the battery item itself, and whatever your garage mod does with a car battery, it does identically with ours. The feature will return in a future update, rebuilt on storage that garage mods can’t corrupt. Everything else from v0.3.7 remains: garage pulls never relocate helicopters, fuel.refuelOnRestart never fires on garage pulls, and lights cut off when the battery dies

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UPDATE — v0.3.7 | 1 August 2026

• Fixed Helicopters pulled out of virtual garages no longer get relocated — v0.3.6’s restart recovery (which grounds mid-air helicopters after a server restart) was being triggered by garage retrievals, because garage mods restore vehicles through the same persistence path a server restart uses. A heli pulled out at a base built over water was set down on the nearest land, and one pulled out on an overhanging mountain floor was placed on the cliff face below — both exactly as the recovery would treat a genuinely mid-air aircraft. The recovery now runs only for helicopters that existed at server boot: every aircraft latches at creation whether it was born during the boot restore (before any player has joined) or mid-session — and since a garage retrieval requires a player, it can never qualify again, with any garage mod, on any base. Helicopters simply parked on base floors were never affected either way — a restart leaves anything resting on a structure exactly where it was, because the recovery probes for solid surfaces beneath the aircraft before acting, and floors, piers and roofs all count
• Fixed fuel.refuelOnRestart no longer refuels on garage pulls — the same root cause quietly granted a free full tank on every garage retrieval when the option was enabled; it now refuels only across a true server restart, exactly as documented

• Fixed Battery charge can no longer be lost (or gained) through storage — some garage/storage mods rebuild the battery on retrieval without carrying its charge across, so helicopters came back with a dead battery — and no config setting could stop it, because nothing was actually draining (the investigation proved the mod has no engine-off drain path at all). The helicopter now records its battery’s exact charge in its own save data and re-applies it shortly after any restore — server restart and garage pull alike. This also closes the reverse exploit: storing a helicopter with a dead battery and pulling out a fresh full one. ⚠️ Withdrawn in v0.3.8 — this change corrupted Expansion virtual-garage retrievals; see the v0.3.8 entry above
• Fixed Lights switch off the moment the battery dies — a spotlight left on drained the battery as intended, but then kept shining on the dead battery indefinitely, which is where the “nav lights are on by default and drain everything” reports came from: passers-by kept finding lit helicopters with dead batteries. Lights now cut off at 0% (matching the rule that already applied at server boot). And for the record: nav lights never drain the battery — they are free to run; only the spotlight (per second) and engine starts (per start) consume charge, both tunable per helicopter under battery.*
• Fixed A rare start-up sound glitch source hardened away — the engine start/stop sound could compute a nonsense playback position for a single frame if the sound wave hadn’t finished loading; that path now carries the same guard its sibling code paths always had

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UPDATE — v0.3.6 | 28 July 2026

• Changed Free look is now a single press of Left Alt — press to orbit the camera freely, press again to lock it back behind the aircraft. The old double-tap gesture (and its hold-to-peek variant) is removed — and that removal is the fix for the long-standing stuck free look bug: the double-click detector could latch half-engaged and leave the camera stuck orbiting with no clean way back. Several rounds of field testing chased latch-clearing workarounds before the root cause proved to be the gesture itself. Your free look choice still persists between flights, vanilla-style, and servers can still force free look always-on via features.freeLookAlwaysOn

• Fixed A server’s settings could silently fail to apply to a player until an admin re-saved the config (field-reported twice as “free look always-on stops working after every restart — opening the Admin Panel and pressing Save fixes it”). The investigation cleared the config system entirely — the file, the boot load and the panel were all provably correct — the failure was in delivery: the packet carrying the server’s settings to each player was sent fire-and-forget at the most congested moment of their session, mid-join while the world streams in, and when it dropped the player silently fell back to compiled defaults. Pressing Save only “fixed” it because that re-sends to everyone on already-idle connections — and a relog appeared to hold the fix only because the value survives in the game client between reconnects. Join-time delivery is now guaranteed (retransmitted until acknowledged), with a second send shortly after you finish loading as insurance — every setting, every join, every time
• Fixed The per-helicopter refuel range never actually applied for players — the server honoured the setting, but the value gating the refuel action’s reach was never shared with clients, so players were always held to the default 5 m regardless of configuration. Found by the full settings audit this bug prompted: every one of the 107 mod and per-helicopter settings was traced from its config file through save, load and delivery to the exact code that consumes it — this was the only gap
• Fixed The Admin Panel’s Stats tab showed every feature as OFF in packed builds — the same class of build-tool defect as v0.3.2’s dead panel buttons, caught on four display-only lines in the audit

• Fixed Sliding or rolling downhill on slopes — parked or through the whole spool-up (field log: a Merlin drifting 8.5 metres down a hill against full brakes while its rotor wound up). The root cause was old and simple: the wheeled helicopters inherited car-scale brake torque, and a ten-tonne Merlin saturates car brakes on any real slope. Both airframes now carry real, mass-scaled brake strength — roughly double the margin needed on a 30° incline — holding from engine-off right through spool-up and releasing as you pull collective to depart. Run-on landings are unaffected: rollout braking eases in progressively with speed, so autorotation run-ons still roll out and settle smoothly instead of grabbing
• Fixed The parked micro-wobble on wheels — a tiny visible rocking while sitting still, worst while seated as the engine wound up or down. The suspension dampers were far too light for airframes this heavy; both wheeled helicopters got a damping retune. The springs, travel and terrain-hugging stance are untouched — they sit exactly as before, they just settle two to three times faster and stay settled
• Fixed Wobble/judder while the ramp opens or closes, and while landing gear cycles, on a parked helicopter — three separate mechanisms were fighting the moving ramp, found and removed one by one across a live field-test session: two anti-creep assists that hard-stop a parked hull every tick kept freezing and releasing it against the ramp’s push (that freeze/release cycle at engine rate was the judder), and with those standing down, the hull’s natural response to the ramp physically prying off the ground still read as a small rumble — so every ramp and gear animation now also runs under the same heavy damping blanket the wake-settle system already uses. All three changes only act while a ramp or gear is actually travelling; parked behaviour outside animation is byte-identical
• Fixed A persisted helicopter could wake from a server restart with the wrong physical mass (field log: a 10,100 kg Merlin flying at a 1,500 kg placeholder) — a race between physics initialisation and config load on restored aircraft; the true weight now always wins, so a persisted heli flies identically to a freshly spawned one

• Changed Lift-off now arrives right at the end of the start-up sound, and the final stretch of spool-up is smoother — the window where the flight model gains authority was widened, and the power handover now blends over most of a second instead of stepping
• Changed Cutting or restoring engine power blends progressively — v0.3.5 eased five forces across the power boundary; v0.3.6 adds a rate-limited blend on the power fraction itself, so a mid-air engine cut settles into autorotation as one continuous sink and a restart picks the aircraft back up just as smoothly. The autorotation flare’s last hard edge (a cut-off at 20% rotor) is now a continuous fade too
• Fixed Small jolts when flaring hard on a fast, steep approach — two vertical catches could each step in a hard flare: the Simple-mode vertical hold applied force proportional to sink rate with no ceiling, and the touchdown cushion switched on at a fixed height regardless of arrival speed. The hold is now bounded and the cushion looks ahead by your sink rate, so both ease in progressively however hard you come down. Every normal landing is byte-identical — both changes only act at sink rates no normal landing reaches
• Changed Auto-hover’s position freeze only engages on a level, still ship — no more snap if it caught the aircraft mid-settle at a tilt

• Added The observer smoothing filter now covers every view of a flying helicopter — v0.3.5 smoothed unmanned aircraft for observers; v0.3.6 extends the same frame-rate-exact filter to helicopters being flown by someone else, so bystanders on the ground, seated passengers and cabin walkers all watch smooth flight instead of 20-per-second network stepping. It engages only while the aircraft is actually moving, hands back to the engine the moment a pilot takes the controls, and keeps the hard snap guards so a genuinely teleported aircraft never lags

• Added A helicopter saved mid-flight is placed safely on the ground when a dedicated server restarts — previously it free-fell from its saved position on boot. If the restart catches it over water, it’s set down on the nearest land, searching up to a kilometre of shoreline (piers and structures count). Dedicated servers only, and only across a true restart — relogging never moves a helicopter

• Fixed Repairing a burning wreck didn’t put the fire out — flames, glow, smoke and the burn’s area damage all ran their full configured duration even after the hull was fully repaired (only a boot-time cleanup ever cleared fire state; no live repair path touched it). Repairing a burning wreck — Admin Panel or field repair — now extinguishes it on the spot: the damage stops instantly, flames and glow cut, smoke stops pouring (what’s already in the air drifts away naturally, as with any fire), and a repaired helicopter can catch fire again properly if it’s destroyed later

• Fixed Moving to the cabin could glitch on arrival — the transition wrote to an active physics body mid-handoff; it’s rebuilt atomic (state settles first, then a single clean attach), with a recovery clamp that lands you in the bay if the engine delivers you anywhere strange

• Info Three complete passes over every script this release — a liveness audit (every line proven to run or removed: several hundred lines of dead and legacy code deleted), a settings audit (all 107 settings traced end-to-end from file to force — the refuel-range gap above was its one finding), and a correctness audit (every division guarded, every network write verified, every timer cleaned up on deletion). The result is the leanest build the mod has ever shipped, with the best server performance — an idle parked fleet costs the server essentially nothing, and everything that runs, runs for a reason

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UPDATE — v0.3.5 | 24 July 2026

• Fixed Wind on Simple flight caused constant jitter / rubber-banding — the wind buffet read each machine’s own weather sample. Only the smoothed average was shared between client and server; the gust that actually rocks the aircraft is the difference between the live sample and that average — a small number made by subtracting two nearly-equal ones, which amplifies any mismatch. So a trivial difference between your client’s weather and the server’s became a completely different buffet on each side: the aircraft rocked one way in your prediction and another way on the server, and the engine’s correction of that gap is precisely the jitter that was felt. It was worst in Simple mode because its auto-levelling assist then applied corrective torque against the diverged attitude, compounding the error rather than damping it (Advanced, with no auto-level, stayed closer). The fix follows the same rule that solved the touch-and-go stepping in v0.3.4 — a force must be computed identically on both machines or not at all: the server now takes the weather sample, it travels with the aircraft’s network state, and both machines derive the same raw wind, the same average and therefore an identical buffet
• Fixed A v0.3.3 regression in the wind-strength curve — the altitude fade that scales wind strength had been switched to the per-machine smoothed terrain height introduced in v0.3.3. That value also scales the horizontal mean-wind push, which broke the rule that the smoothed height may only feed vertical terms. It now reads the shared, position-derived altitude, so the sideways wind push is identical on both machines too. The three legitimate consumers of the smoothed height (ground effect, the grounded lift-cut and the touchdown cushion) are all vertical-only and were re-verified

• Fixed Jittery, jumpy motion for the first seconds after taking off, and again through shutdown and autorotation — rotor and engine speed turned out to be the only flight-model inputs that weren’t shared between your client and the server, and they gate everything: below about 97% rotor the flight model applies no force at all, and it reaches full authority by 99% — a two-percent window. The server drove that from its own rotor ramp. Your client drove it from a network mirror updated 20 times a second on a best-effort channel, then smoothed again locally — leaving it roughly 200 milliseconds behind. On a six-second spool-up that two-percent window is only about 120 milliseconds wide, so the lag was wider than the window itself: at the end of every spool-up the server was applying the full flight forces while your client was still applying none, and then your client switched its entire force budget on at once. Reconciliation couldn’t heal it either, because the value wasn’t part of the shared state — a replayed correction re-ran with the current rotor speed instead of the one from the moment being replayed. Rotor and engine speed now travel with the aircraft’s shared state on the same reliable channel as its position, so both machines cross that threshold at the same instant. Heavier airframes with longer spool-ups (the Merlin most of all) had the worst of it, because they sat in the divergent window longest. Note this also means a lossy connection made it worse — the old best-effort channel simply dropped updates, and every dropped packet widened the gap; the flight path no longer depends on that channel at all
• Fixed A thrust spike partway through spool-up — the engine-stage broadcast (added in v0.3.4 so distant players hear a shutdown correctly) also snapped the pilot’s rotor mirror straight to 100%, but the server announces “running” at only 50% rotor, so the pilot’s copy jumped and was then dragged back by the next update. The broadcast still reaches distant players exactly as before; it just no longer overwrites the pilot’s own copy, which was never stale to begin with
• Fixed The two halves of the ground-slide brake read rotor state sampled at different moments — your client and the server now sample it at the same point, so the low-level engine-off settle behaves identically on both
• Fixed Autohover heading-hold could be active on one machine and off on the other — the switch that releases heading-hold while you’re steering with the pedals is a latch: it engages on pedal input and only releases once the aircraft’s rotation settles below a threshold. Each machine was making that decision from its own rotation reading, and because it latches, a momentary difference didn’t average out — it stuck, leaving the server holding your heading with real yaw force while your own client applied none, or the reverse. The latch is now shared state, so both release together

• Fixed The moment the engine dies into autorotation (and comes back) is now smooth — a single on/off switch at 50% engine power used to flip five separate flight forces at once: how much control authority you had, the vortex-ring thrust cut, the descent-speed limit (which jumps from ~16–19 m/s powered to ~8–10 m/s in autorotation), the landing cushion, and an auto-hover ground assist. Flipping all five on one hard switch could produce a bump entering or leaving autorotation. Every one of them now eases across the power transition on the same shared blend the lift already used, so the hand-off is seamless. Normal powered flight is completely unchanged — the easing only does anything while the engine is actually crossing that band
• Fixed A sag in the last few metres of an autorotation landing — the coasting rotor wound down slowly up high and switched to a fast wind-down below 3m in one step; that step is now blended across 3–6m, so the flare settles smoothly
• Fixed Auto-hover dropping abruptly if the engine dies while it’s on — it now fades out as the rotor slows through its lower range instead of cutting off in a single frame
• Fixed The last un-shared flight value is now shared — the near-ground height smoothing that feeds ground effect and the landing cushion was the one remaining value each machine tracked on its own; after a network correction while flying low it could disagree for a few frames and shimmer the low-altitude lift. It now travels in the same shared state as everything else, so every value the flight model turns into a force is now identical on your screen and the server’s

• Fixed A momentary unsmoothness every time autohover was switched on or off while moving — the toggle used to take effect on the server first, and your own machine only learned of it a network round-trip later; for that instant one side was applying the full hover-assist forces mid-manoeuvre while the other wasn’t, and the disagreement showed as a hitch (worst when switching OFF mid-move). The toggle is now predicted on your machine the moment you press it — the same treatment every other flight control already gets — with the same validity checks the server applies, so both machines ease the assist in or out together and the transition is continuous

• New Server owners can disable the top-left damage-zone panel via features.damageZonePanelEnabled in the general config (default on — nothing changes unless you turn it off)
• New Players can hide/show the damage panel themselves with a key (default H, rebindable under CZ Autoz Helicopter controls) — per-player, takes effect instantly, and only available when the server has the panel enabled

• Fixed A helicopter left flying with no pilot looked rumbly to everyone watching — including passengers still seated inside — only the pilot’s machine can own the aircraft, so while someone flies it, everyone else receives its motion through the engine’s smooth interpolation. The moment the pilot leaves the seat, the server simulates it raw and its updates reach clients as visible stepping on every move, tilt and roll. A frame-rate-exact visual filter now engages on every viewing client the instant nobody possesses the airframe, and hands back to the native interpolation the moment a pilot takes the controls again — piloted flight is completely untouched. Landed, stationary machines are unaffected (nothing to smooth), and the filter carries hard snap guards so it can never lag a genuinely teleported aircraft

• Fixed A faint wobble you could feel and see around 40–50ft on the Merlin and Black Hawk — ground effect (the cushion of lift near the surface) reaches higher on the large airframes than on the small ones, but the altitude smoothing that feeds it only reached up to a fixed height below where their ground effect ends. In the band between the two, ground-effect lift was computed from the raw, unsmoothed height, so any tiny vertical motion made it shimmer. The smoothing now always covers the full ground-effect band for every airframe, so the cushion fades in and out cleanly. The skidded helicopters never reached the affected band and are unchanged

• Changed Wind now moves the helicopter in Simple mode, not just Advanced — a gust used to push only on the aircraft’s attitude, and Simple’s auto-levelling promptly corrected that back out, so wind was felt mostly in Advanced. A gust now also nudges the aircraft’s position, which auto-levelling doesn’t hold — so you feel the weather in both modes, as a gentle live buffet on top of the steady lean into a sustained wind. It’s built from the same shared wind values as everything else, so it stays identical on your screen and the server’s (no jitter), and it scales with your wind-strength setting — zero when wind is off

• Fixed Rolling backwards while spooling up, and jumpy rotation for the first seconds of takeoff — v0.3.4 cured the rolling touch-and-go stepping by having a piloted, powered helicopter apply zero auto-brake on both machines. That reasoning holds for skids, but a wheeled airframe has nothing else holding it: parked on a slope with the engine running and the rotor turning, the Merlin and Black Hawk were left completely unbraked and crept and jittered backwards through spool-up. The takeoff symptom was the same defect seen from the other end — the two machines still disagreed during the spool window, because the server’s release was gated on rotor spool while the client’s was gated on collective. The moment you pulled collective with the rotor still winding up, the server was holding the brakes fully on while your own client had released them entirely, so the server decelerated an aircraft your prediction did not — and that gap reconciled as jumpy rotation until the rotor crossed its threshold and the two sides finally agreed. Both machines now run one brake law, driven purely by the reconciled collective: brakes hold firm while you are parked, spooling or unmanned, and fade off as you pull collective to depart. Because the input is shared state, the two sides cannot disagree at any point in the sequence — which is what removed the stepping in the first place, without ever leaving a wheeled airframe free to roll. Skid-equipped helicopters are unaffected either way, and every designed behaviour is preserved: parking clamps when the rotor stops or the crew leaves, unmanned roll-away protection stays, engine-off shutdown rollout still brakes, and autorotation rollouts still stop

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UPDATE — v0.3.4 | 23 July 2026

• Fixed A tipped-over helicopter never went to sleep — the park-sleep system (new in v0.3.2) refuses to sleep a heli that was recently disturbed, using fixed impact thresholds to detect disturbance. But a hull resting on its side (or a settled wreck lying on body geometry) generates contact events every single tick, and for a multi-tonne airframe the static resting weight alone exceeds those fixed thresholds — so the “disturbed” flags latched every tick and the heli could never sleep. Field log evidence: one tipped Merlin simulated (and physics-logged) at full rate for an entire session, adding permanent solver and script load — the kind that surfaces as delayed interactions and a desync feel for everyone. Upright helis never hit this because their skids/wheels rest on suspension, which raises no contact events. The disturbance bar now scales with airframe mass (~0.35 m/s of felt delta-v): static resting weight passes cleanly under it at any server tick rate, while crashes, rams and firm landings sail over it — every real wake path behaves exactly as before
• Fixed Physics-log spam from motionless helis — with physics logging enabled, a parked or tipped hull printed a near-identical line every second forever (plus a five-line wheel report each time for wheeled airframes). Idle airframes (engine off, not moving) now log at 1/30th cadence; anything moving, spooling or flying logs exactly as before
• Fixed Brief steppy motion during rolling touch-and-goes and wheels-low flight (field-reproduced on the Merlin) — the automatic wheel brake (the parking/settle assist) ran server-side only, every tick, gated on “grounded or below ~3 m AGL”. As a rolling touchdown slowed below ~3 m/s at low collective, the brake ramped in on the server — but the owner client never predicts it, so the server’s aircraft decelerated harder than the predicted one and the growing gap reconciled as visible stepping until lift-off and convergence. The audit then found the owner-side half of the same pair: the driver’s client applied its own full brake on a different law entirely (hard on/off at near-zero collective) — two machines, two different brake formulas, disagreeing constantly around touchdown. Both sides now speak one law: a piloted, powered helicopter applies zero auto-brake on both machines (identical prediction — divergence impossible; real aircraft don’t self-brake while flying or rolling under power), while every designed behaviour is preserved — parking clamps when the rotor stops or the crew leaves (on both sides), unmanned roll-away protection stays, engine-off shutdown rollout still brakes, and autorotation rollouts still stop

• Info The complete synchronization stack, line-audited — pilot input rides the native DayZ move pipeline (buffered and replayed on reconciliation, with the autohover toggle deliberately replay-safe so corrections can never double-fire it); all nineteen flight smoothers round-trip the network owner-state, so a correction rewinds and replays everything that feeds forces instead of snapping; network sync is entirely event-driven with zero per-tick churn; cross-helicopter state leakage is architecturally impossible (per-instance members and per-vehicle owner-state only, no shared mutable flight globals); and the full logging stack — debug, activity, physics, whitelist — runs on persistent file handles with throttled, idle-aware diagnostics. No further defects found

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UPDATE — v0.3.3 | 23 July 2026

• Fixed A momentary jolt crossing terrain steps at low altitude — the near-ground flight systems read the terrain height directly under the aircraft every tick, so flying low across a cliff lip, shoreline or sharp terrain edge changed that height by tens of metres in a single frame — sweeping their bands instantly and stepping the forces for a felt moment. Terrain-height changes now blend in at a rate faster than any real climb or descent can move (your steepest airframe descends at 19 m/s; the smoothing follows at 20), so actual flying is never affected — flat-pad takeoffs, landings and steady hovers are byte-identical — and only genuine terrain discontinuities get smoothed
• Fixed The complete family, audited — every consumer of the under-aircraft ground height was found and brought onto the smoothed value: the ground effect, the grounded lift-cut and its settling damper, the touch-and-go landing cushion (with the raw value, a terrain step up under a fast low pass teleported the aircraft into the cushion’s band and it kicked vertically), the wind-strength altitude envelope (buffet strength no longer steps at terrain edges), and the Autohover vertical hold (a cliff edge sliding under an engaged hover stepped the altitude error by tens of metres in one tick and slammed the collective — it still terrain-follows, now as a firm smooth climb instead of a violent snap). Also verified clean in the same audit: blowback’s acceleration input is properly low-passed, the wind gust model is zero-mean and reconciled, and the flight model contains zero randomness — fully deterministic
• Fixed Steppy first takeoff from rough ground — hovering low over uneven ground (a crash site, a boulder field), the terrain height under the drifting aircraft jumped every tick and fluttered the same systems — the classic case being the first takeoff after a rotor-shear crash, flip recovery and repair. Smoothed by the same fix
• Fixed Flip recovery now re-seats the airframe — flipping a rolled helicopter upright rotated it in place, so the upright hull inherited the side-resting height: either floating (then slamming down onto the skids) or clipped into the terrain, which left the contact physics fighting the ground through the next takeoff. The flip now settles the airframe cleanly onto its skids/wheels at the correct height and clears all residual motion
• Fixed Soft touchdowns no longer make the knock/contact noise — the contact tap sound armed on any airframe contact past a tiny fixed impulse floor, which on a multi-tonne helicopter corresponds to a felt bump of just a few centimetres per second — so even the gentlest skid landing clunked. The gate now measures real touchdown firmness (impulse relative to the aircraft’s mass): arrivals softer than ~1.2 m/s are silent, while firm plops and genuine obstacle strikes still knock exactly as before. Sound-only — landing physics, suspension feel and all damage thresholds are untouched

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UPDATE — v0.3.2 | 23 July 2026

• Fixed The Admin Panel was completely dead — Save stuck orange, Repair/Delete/Teleport doing nothing, only the FPS counter responding — v0.3.1 restructured the panel’s button-click handlers into a compact code construct this codebase had never used, and the build obfuscator mishandles that exact line shape: in the packed build, the button-name text on those lines reached the game still scrambled, so a click’s widget name never matched any handler and every button silently did nothing — no command was ever sent, which is why neither client nor server logged a thing. The FPS toggle was the lone survivor because it’s matched by widget reference rather than by name. Root-caused from live server logs (the server provably received zero commands while the panel was in use) and confirmed fixed in the field: the handlers are restored to the long-proven v0.3.0 layout. Alongside it, the same hardening pass shielded every role/permission text value from the obfuscator, removed the client-side permission pre-check entirely (the server is the sole authority and shows its own “Permission Declined” notice), and made a custom or mis-cased role name resolve consistently instead of silently granting nothing
• Fixed Every silent path now speaks — clicking a helicopter action with no row selected says “Select a helicopter in the list first” instead of doing nothing; a stale selection (the heli despawned/was deleted since the list loaded) logs [ADMIN_PANEL_NO_TARGET] server-side with the net-id, so “the button did nothing” is now always diagnosable
• Fixed A custom or mis-cased admin role could silently grant zero permissions — the server checks every action against the admin’s role, but a role that wasn’t owner and had no matching definition in permissions_admins_config.json (a custom name like founder, or Owner with a stray capital) was refused everything server-side, while the client still lit up every tab — so the panel looked fully usable yet nothing worked except the one command that isn’t permission-checked (the FPS counter toggle). Roles and permission keys are now normalised on load (trimmed and lower-cased, so Owner/OWNER behave as owner), and any unrecognised role falls back to the built-in admin role with a loud server-log line naming it, so client and server can never silently disagree again. Note that the admin fallback grants admin-level access, not full access — for full control an admin’s role must be owner, or a defined role that includes the all permission. You can check your own role in the panel’s Settings tab under “Your Role”
• Fixed The Script Log / Server RPT views load properly — the newest-file lookup used a $profile: path form the engine wouldn’t enumerate, so both views (new in v0.3.1) showed “no file found”. There’s also an engine reality these views now handle honestly: the server keeps its current session’s script log and RPT open and locked while it runs, so the live file often cannot be read from script at all — that’s an engine limitation, not filtering (the views never filter anything; they tail the raw file verbatim). When the live file won’t read, the view now automatically serves the previous session’s log instead, clearly labelled as such — which is exactly what’s wanted in-game for post-restart and crash checks. If neither can be read, it says so plainly rather than claiming the file is empty
• Changed The Cars and Our Mods pages got a refresh — the Our Mods showcase now carries the exact fleet numbers (6 aircraft in 19 variants, 41 vehicles in 228 colour & livery variants — every one also sold as its own standalone mod), mentions Smart Config Updates, the Merlin cabin walk and the free add-ons (the Workshop Golf MK4, Underglow and License Plates), and its footer shows the live running version plus docs, Discord and store links. The Cars page groups every detected CZ Autoz product as tiers / packs / standalones with counts, and points at the Logs tab’s fleet-wide whitelist view and the web whitelist manager. The Our Mods footer is now three clickable buttons — Website (czautoz.co.uk), Docs and Discord — that open in your browser, and both pages follow your chosen panel theme accent instead of a fixed blue. The Settings page’s About links gained Website and Whitelist Manager buttons alongside Discord and Docs

• Fixed Tumbling along the ground after shearing a rotor now damages the airframe — once a rotor stopped spinning, every contact through its geometry was swallowed with zero damage, and a helicopter rolling on its side touches the world mostly through the rotor head — so a full shear-and-crash-out could leave the global health bar untouched. A sheared or destroyed rotor’s contacts now count as the airframe scraping the world (hull damage on Body, honouring the damage-zone and crash-damage toggles), while bumping into a parked helicopter’s static blades stays exactly as harmless as before
• Changed The crash/bullet damage split is confirmed and documented: damage.heliCrashDamageEnabled gates collision hull damage only — bullets and explosions arrive via a separate path it never touches — and damage.playerCrashDamageEnabled gates crew crash injuries independently. Any combination of the two works

• Fixed A spawned helicopter simulated at full cost forever — the park-sleep system (which makes an idle heli cost nothing) required contact-based ground detection, and a helicopter placed on the terrain (admin panel spawn, CE event spawn) never generates a contact event — so it never slept and ran its full physics simulation every single frame for the rest of the session. Measured: one parked, empty UH-1H cost ~3,000 server FPS. The sleep check now also accepts terrain-height grounding (engine off, spool zero, stationary, within 3.4 m of the surface), so placed helicopters sleep within a second of settling, exactly like landed ones. Every spawn method is verified covered — trader purchases, CE/events.xml spawns, admin panel spawns, and helicopters restored across a server restart all reach park-sleep, because the simulation hooks are established in the entity’s constructor, which every creation path runs
• Fixed Burned-out wrecks no longer simulate forever — a destroyed helicopter persists as a repairable wreck, and wrecks were explicitly excluded from park-sleep, so every wreck on the map kept ticking its full physics simulation for the rest of the session — they accumulate, so this quietly grew into real server cost. Once the wreck’s fire is out and it has settled, it now sleeps exactly like a parked helicopter. Everything that should revive it still does, instantly: shooting it wakes it, a repair kit wakes it, the admin panel’s Repair wakes it, and the ramp still opens for looting (every exterior interaction — ramp, windows, refuel, boarding — explicitly wakes a sleeping airframe, verified path by path). The wreck fire itself is fully independent of the sleep (it runs on its own timers and a separate damage entity), so burns look and behave identically
• Changed Flying helicopters skip a per-frame terrain lookup they never needed — the park-sleep grounding check now runs its terrain-height lookup only once the cheap engine-off checks pass, so an airborne helicopter no longer pays it every frame. Behaviour is identical — a flying helicopter was never a sleep candidate

​

UPDATE — v0.3.1 | 21 July 2026

• Changed Pitch response brought up to match roll across the fleet — pitch authority sat at ~70% of roll on every airframe, and a helicopter’s long fuselage already resists pitch far more than roll, so W/S always felt a step behind A/D. Pitch now sits at ~82–90% of each airframe’s roll authority, the MD500, MH-6 and UH-1H are sharpened overall (the 500-family gets its real fingertip crispness back, and the Huey’s teetering rotor answers the cyclic the way the real one does), and every response constant is one step tighter — inputs bite sooner, releases settle crisper. The weight identity is untouched: the MH-6 stays the fleet’s scalpel, the Merlin its stately heavy
• Changed Climb rates and service ceilings now match the real aircraft per airframe — the MH-6 finally climbs to its real ~18,700 ft ceiling and out-climbs the fleet; the Huey honestly tops out at its real ~12,600 ft; the Merlin remains the gentlest climber, as the real heavy is

⚠️ Values you left at defaults adopt the retune automatically on first boot (see Smart Config Updates below). Only rows you deliberately customised keep your values — reset those in the Admin Panel (applies live) if you want the new tune there too. The new per-airframe defaults are listed on each helicopter’s page.

• Added Updates now ship their tuning automatically. Until now, a stored config value could never change through an update — so shipped tuning improvements only ever reached fresh installs, and every retune came with a “reset your rows to adopt” chore. From v0.3.1, on the boot where the mod version changes, any value you never changed adopts the new shipped default automatically, and any value you customised is kept exactly as you set it — per key, so someone who tuned only liftMultiplier still receives the control retune — covering the per-helicopter configs and mod_config.json’s flight-mode profiles alike. Files that adopt values are backed up to Backups\smartupdate_v<version>_<date>\ first, and a per-row Reset in the Admin Panel makes that key adoptable again in future updates. No extra files or version fields — versioning is tracked once, by the version field mod_config.json already has, and your helicopter configs contain nothing but settings. This also fixes a subtle old defect where newly-added per-variant keys seeded at a generic default on existing servers instead of the per-airframe value — and it retroactively ships the v0.3.0 Advanced aero retune to servers that never customised those rows
• Added You’re always told what you kept — when an update changes a default behind a value you customised, the server log names it per row with both numbers (control.pitchStrength (yours 2.00, new default 2.30)), so you know exactly which of your custom settings shadow new tuning and can decide per row whether to keep yours or reset it in the Admin Panel to adopt
• Added Staff are notified in-game — admins and staff joining after an update receive an on-screen notification summarising the Smart Update (how many values auto-adopted, how many customised values were kept), and an update-available notice appears every session whenever a newer release exists than the one the server is running. Non-staff players never see any of it
• Fixed Corrupt configs now regenerate properly — a per-helicopter config that fails the boot sanity checks (broken lift, fuel, airspeed values and the like) is regenerated from true factory defaults; an internal aliasing bug meant the old regeneration could re-save the corrupt values while claiming a factory reset. The broken original is also backed up first now, so nothing is ever lost
• Fixed Deleted configs regenerate reliably on restart — the boot-time config load now writes any missing per-helicopter file. Previously only variants with a live helicopter already on the map regenerated their file at restart; the other variants’ configs stayed missing until one of them happened to spawn. Delete-and-restart now guarantees all 19 files come back (mid-session, saving or resetting a helicopter in the Admin Panel regenerates its file instantly)

• Fixed Blackhawk/Merlin no longer roll away on slopes — spawn or land a wheeled airframe on a hill and it used to trundle off downhill with nobody aboard. The native driverless parking brakes now hold it, releasing automatically while someone pushes the aircraft and re-engaging after
• Fixed Engaging Autohover with a held stick no longer jitters — pressing X while feeding A/D/W/S showed a small body jitter at the engage: the heading hold was correcting against a target one network packet behind the aircraft’s own nose while in its follow state. It now stands down until the nose settles — the same treatment the position hold received in v0.2.9 — so the engage is clean whatever you’re holding

• Fixed A clean script log — the mod’s running version now prints once at the very top of the boot block, whitelist output lives exclusively in its dedicated CZAutoz_Whitelist_YYYY-MM-DD.log, and the stray engine debug prints (!!! OnError()) that DayZ’s own REST base class emits from webhook callbacks are silenced
• Added The version check answers in the script log too — a few seconds into every boot the background check reports either CZ Autoz Helicopter vX -- this version is the latest. or a loud UPDATE AVAILABLE: vX is released -- this server runs vY, so the log always tells you exactly where your server stands against the latest release (the same information staff receive as an in-game notice)
• Fixed The Admin Panel’s whitelist log view shows the whole fleet — the panel’s Logs tab previously served an internal helicopter-only buffer, so servers running other CZ Autoz mods saw none of their whitelist activity there. It now reads the shared CZAutoz_Whitelist_YYYY-MM-DD.log directly, so every product’s chain — [Helicopters], [Tier 1], [BMW X6M] and the rest — appears exactly as it does in the file
• Added View the native DayZ logs from the Admin Panel — the Logs tab gained two new views: Script Log and Server RPT. Each serves the newest lines of the current session’s live file straight from the server profile directory, so admins can check engine output, mod prints and errors in-game without remote-desktopping into the box. The read is tail-bounded, so even a huge RPT from a long uptime costs nothing to view

• Fixed Denied actions now say so — clicking a panel button your role lacks did nothing: the “Permission Declined” dialog existed but was never wired in, so the server refused silently and staff were left guessing. The dialog now appears and names the exact permission key you’re missing, so staff know precisely what to ask their owner for
• Fixed Role changes now reach online staff instantly — redefining a role’s permissions (or deleting a role) only took effect on each member’s screen after they reconnected; their panel tabs now re-sync live. Server-side enforcement was always live — this closes the cosmetic gap on the client
• Added Typo’d permission keys are rejected — the role editor is free-text, and a misspelled key (heli.list.veiw) used to be stored and displayed as if it granted something while matching no check ever. Unknown keys are now dropped on save and named in the script log
• Fixed The built-in admin role can no longer be deleted — it’s the fallback role members of deleted roles move to; deleting it stranded those members with zero permissions until the next restart re-seeded it. Its permission list remains fully editable
• Fixed “Your Role” in the panel’s Settings tab never filled in — it read -- forever; it now shows the role you actually hold
• Added A dedicated Admin Panel & Permissions docs page — every permission key, what the built-in owner/admin roles grant, staff-role recipes, and the safety rails (owners manage owners, the last owner is untouchable, self-edits are blocked, admins.manage can’t mint all). The old docs section also wrongly described per-admin “extra permissions” (never existed — abilities come entirely from the role) and claimed config pages were owner-only (they’re grantable via mod.config.edit / heli.config.edit) — both corrected

​

UPDATE — v0.3.0 | 20 July 2026

• Fixed Advanced mode was broken at release — an engine-level scripting call in an Advanced-only code path failed at runtime and could take the flight model down with it the moment those features engaged. v0.2.9’s Advanced-mode aerodynamics genuinely never flew right — this is the release where they do
• Fixed Blowback was inverted — the nose pushed down as airspeed built (accelerating into an ever-steepening dive) instead of the intended nose-up rise you trim against. Worse, at the shipped strength it could out-muscle full aft cyclic beyond ~16° — a genuine control inversion. Sign corrected: the nose now rises with speed, exactly as described
• Added Hard pilot-authority caps — blowback and anti-torque coupling are now clamped to 25% of your own cyclic/pedal authority, so no configured value, however extreme, can ever take the aircraft away from the pilot
• Changed All three Advanced tells retuned from real flight testing: blowback 0.35 → 0.08, antiTorque 0.12 → 0.04, vrsSeverity 0.40 → 0.22 — present and demanding, not punishing
• Changed Advanced input smoothing eased up a touch — still the crispest, most manual mode, minus the twitch
• Added Collective gauge on the HUD — a small dial centred below the fuel gauge showing exactly where your collective sits (needle straight up = neutral, right = pulling up, left = pushing down), and it tracks the Autohover’s commanded collective while a hold is flying, like a real torque instrument. Shown in both flight modes — in Advanced, where there is no altitude hold, it’s your vertical-power instrument

⚠️ Existing servers: config migration keeps your stored values — a server that generated its config on v0.2.9 still carries the old 0.35 / 0.12 / 0.40. To adopt the new tuning, reset those three featuresAdvanced rows in the Admin Panel (applies live) or edit mod_config.json and restart. Fresh installs get the new values automatically.

• Fixed The last near-ground jitter is gone. Tilting the aircraft in the final ~10 ft — hover-taxiing, nudging over a landing spot, lifting the nose to flare — could show a fine rotational jitter that vanished higher up. Root-caused deep in the client/server prediction handoff and eliminated at every input level, not damped over: ground-skimming cyclic work is now as smooth as cruise flight
• Fixed Skid helicopters sit like skid helicopters (MH-6, MD500, Gazelle, UH-1H) — the skid “suspension” was tuned like a car’s springs, so touchdowns squatted and wobbled and a firm autorotation arrival could bounce. The skids are now near-rigid with a purpose-tuned cushion for hard landings: touch down and the aircraft is simply down
• Fixed Wheel geometry corrected on the wheeled airframes — the Blackhawk’s front wheels and the Merlin’s wheels now match their visual size, so both sit properly on their gear
• Fixed Lift-off is one clean motion — the instant of leaving the ground could step as the flight forces snapped in at full rotor RPM; they now ease in smoothly over the last of the spool-up
• Fixed The cockpit collective lever is fixed for good — no more constant flicker while feeding collective (root-caused to the server’s lever state stomping the client’s on every network delta), and the lever now sweeps its travel like a real collective instead of teleporting between positions. The cyclic stick’s proven sync mechanism now drives both levers
• Fixed Pedal input (Q/E) no longer plays the car gear-shift animation in the pilot seat — no more phantom hand-clunk on every pedal press
• Fixed Ground Flip Recovery now works from any tipped attitude — a helicopter resting on its side (or nosed over) could fail the old upside-down check depending on the airframe’s resting angle, and a tipped hull with no wheel/skid contact could still read as airborne — the “recovery sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t” report. Eligibility is now physics-true: tipped past ~70° and at rest near the ground = recoverable, on every airframe
• Fixed Auto Shutdown on Exit is reliable after rough landings — a tipped or bouncy touchdown could leave the ground-contact flag unset at the exact moment you exited, silently skipping the shutdown; a near-terrain fallback now covers it (and stays strictly below the Auto Hover On Exit altitude gate, so the two exit behaviours can never fight)

• Fixed The Merlin and Blackhawk were running the wrong passenger animation set — v0.2.9 shipped the two big airframes on a bus animation set, which is what several of you were reporting as boarding walking you over the roof, exits dropping you under the map, and frozen ghost poses on get-out. Correct animation sets are now assigned across the whole fleet
• Fixed Merlin walk-in boarding is clean at every seat — boarding the cockpit or cargo seats from inside the cabin could flash the screen for a moment (a frame rendered at the far ocean) or visibly drag you toward the cabin centre mid-animation. Boarding now holds you at the exact spot where you pressed the action — the get-in plays from where you stood, pilot-seat smooth, every seat
• Fixed Cabin arrivals are solid at any framerate — on high-FPS clients, arriving in the cabin could land you in a stuck falling stance with a flickering camera: an internal safety window was counted in frames, so a 200+ FPS machine shrank it from 1.5 seconds to a fraction of that. The window now runs on real time, and the recovery path fully clears the falling state
• Fixed A ramp left open across a server restart no longer comes back looking open but physically closed — walking up the ramp works after every restart, and landing-gear state is re-asserted the same way
• Added Cabin crew now arrive facing the right way — each airframe’s model sets the direction you face when Move to Cabin places you in the bay (per-seat direction points), instead of whatever way the get-out animation happened to leave you pointing
• Changed The Merlin cockpit is now boarded from inside only — the pilot and co-pilot get-in can no longer be reached from outside the hull: open the ramp, walk in, and take the seat from within the cabin, the way the airframe was designed. Exits already worked this way; boarding now matches

• Fixed Engine shutdown and start now reach every player on the server, at any distance — engine state used to travel reliably only to nearby players, so someone far away could hear a shut-down helicopter “running” indefinitely and walk up to a stale “Shut Off Engine” prompt. Engine stage changes are now delivered guaranteed, server-wide: distant players hear the wind-down (and the start-up), and the prompt on approach is always correct
• Fixed After a shutdown, everyone sees the cockpit controls settle to neutral — no more sticks and levers frozen mid-air in an empty cockpit
• Fixed A wreck’s crash explosion no longer replays for players arriving (or re-approaching) later — it detonates once, when it happens
• Fixed Admin Repair / Repair All now fully revives a destroyed helicopter — the destroyed state is cleared and the physics woken: flyable immediately, no flight-mode flip or restart workaround needed

• Changed A sheared tail rotor now answers to the real emergency procedure — the failure spin is main-rotor reaction torque, which only exists while the engine is driving the rotor. Cut the power and the spin dies: autorotate down and land it straight, exactly like the real thing. And landing then shutting down no longer leaves the aircraft pirouetting on the deck while the blades wind down — with the engine off, nothing drives a spin. With the engine running, the spin fights you exactly as before
• Fixed A dead-tail wreck no longer receives a phantom permanent downforce once its rotor has stopped
• Fixed Autorotation landings now register on every surface — piers, rooftops and some map objects were invisible to the touchdown check, leaving the aircraft convinced it was still airborne and coasting forever. Landing detection now falls back to the visible surface: if you can land on it, it counts
• Fixed Touching down from an autorotation now winds the rotor audio down properly with the spool instead of hanging
• Fixed The rotor-wash dust could draw on the helicopter’s own airframe, and painted sideways dust at extreme bank angles — both screened out
• Changed Rotor and engine tone now track the flight — the v0.2.9 dynamic pitch only responded while a collective key was held, so the sound sat flat through normal cruise. The loops now also carry an airspeed term (blade bite builds as speed builds and eases off as you slow) and a tilt/load term (hard banking or steep pitch makes the disc labour audibly), with the collective term reading the same reconciliation-safe source as the cockpit lever — the change is heard consistently, pilot and passengers alike

• Added Refuel directly at fuel stations — land on or right beside a working pump (within ~12 m — the station roof counts), walk to the fuel cap with empty hands, and hold F: every airframe fills from empty in about 100 seconds, no jerry can needed. Works at vanilla and Enoch stations plus pump mods built on the vanilla fuel-station class — and it’s logged to the activity log like every other refuel

• Added Per-helicopter crash-damage toggle — damage.heliCrashDamageEnabled (Admin Panel: Heli Damage on Crash): set it to 0 and crashes, hard landings, trees and water no longer damage the airframe, while bullets and explosions still damage it normally. Per aircraft, live from the Admin Panel; default 1 keeps today’s behaviour
• Fixed The Admin Panel header now shows the real mod version — it was hard-coded to v0.2
• Fixed Activity log pilot attribution — rotor-shear, rotor-destroyed, fuel-ran-out, water-impact, destroyed and heli-deleted lines all logged an empty pilot/GUID (the internal pilot cache was never being filled; it now updates whenever someone takes the pilot seat and keeps the last pilot after they leave). Station-refuel completion now logs once with the correct tag (a full tank used to log twice as a 100% “partial”), the second engine log on spool-up is tagged ENGINE_RUNNING instead of a duplicate ENGINE_START — and the documented seat events are now genuinely recorded: PILOT/COPILOT/CARGO enter, exit and killed-in-seat, including exits by mid-flight disconnect (the combat-log signal)
• Changed A full server-side performance audit of every per-frame path, repeating timer, allocation and physics query closed out the release: parked helicopters were confirmed to cost effectively nothing (they leave the simulation entirely), the in-flight paths run allocation-free — and the rotor-safety scans were trimmed further still (constant model lookups now cached once). Lean stays lean

​

UPDATE — v0.2.9 | 16 July 2026

• Changed The server now trusts the pilot’s flown path instead of second-guessing it every tick — the last source of the occasional micro-snap under held input is gone. Combined with the v0.2.8 prediction rework, pilot flight is now fully smooth under any input
• Fixed The fine sawtooth jitter in banked turns at speed (holding A/D) — one assist filter decayed at slightly different rates on client vs server, so every correction landed as a tiny step
• Fixed The one-tick hitch when feeding in pedal (Q/E) at speed, and when first rolling into a bank — hard assist on/off gates are now smooth fades
• Fixed Holding several inputs at once (full forward + bank + pedal) could hit an internal combined-force cap and step for a frame — the cap now clears the multi-axis peak, a follow-up sweep closed the last hard on/off gates in the model, and overspeeding into the Vne limiter now settles smoothly at the cap instead of snapping
• Fixed Background sync traffic (fuel ticking down, landing gear moving, damage updates) could nudge the pilot’s collective for a frame — eliminated
• Fixed A physics spike (e.g. a hard collision or heavy desync) can no longer poison the flight model with runaway values — it’s caught and calmed instead of catapulting the aircraft, and it can no longer kill or injure the crew with phantom crash damage either
• Fixed J-hooks / combat landings work again — swinging the nose around at speed used to fight you: the stability assists (weathervane and turn coordination) kept dragging the nose back toward the flight path, so you “turned on the spot and stopped”. Both assists now release at large sideslip — and the release band was then retuned so normal cruising and coordinated turns keep their full stability, in both flight modes. Deliberately throw the nose off the flight path and the aircraft is yours: hold the swung attitude, slide through on momentum, flare, set it down
• Changed Steep attitudes now cost you altitude in Simple mode too — Simple’s altitude assist quietly held your height at any orientation, so a 90° dive barely descended and inverted flight floated along. The assist now fades out beyond ~30° of tilt and is gone before ~60°: steep dives and inverted flight drop the way physics demands (thrust becomes speed, not free altitude), and the recovery is the skill — roll out, get the disc above you, catch the fall with collective. Everyday Simple flying under ~30° is completely untouched

• Added Real wind now pushes the aircraft — strength and direction follow the world’s live weather, delivered as gust-driven buffeting rather than a constant shove: weather fronts genuinely wobble and lean you, and a hover in a storm takes real stick work. Off by default — enable it per flight-mode profile (featuresSimple.windPhysicsEnabled / featuresAdvanced.windPhysicsEnabled, or the Admin Panel)

• Added Vortex Ring State (VRS) — descend too fast into your own downwash and the rotor loses its bite: the sink rate runs away until you fly out of it (gain forward speed or reduce collective). Severity and onset are tunable (featuresAdvanced.vrsEnabled / vrsSeverity / vrsOnsetDescent)
• Added Anti-torque coupling — pulling collective kicks the nose the way a real single-rotor helicopter does; hold it on the pedals. Signed setting — flip it for opposite-rotation rotors (featuresAdvanced.antiTorque)
• Added Blowback — the nose wants to rise as airspeed builds; trim against it (featuresAdvanced.blowback)
• Note All three live only in the Advanced profile — Simple mode stays clean and assisted

• Changed The level-out is back to its original buttery-smooth self — arresting to a hover (nose comes up, wings level, settle) is one clean motion again. A “smarter” controller introduced during the rework turned out to ring against itself — the stepped/jumpy settle some of you felt — and it has been retired outright in favour of the original smooth control law
• Fixed The hover no longer slowly pivots on the spot by itself (as if a pedal were held) — the heading hold was chasing its own correction
• Fixed Pedal turns (Q/E) under hover now stop clean on release — no yank-back to the old heading after a maneuver
• Fixed Releasing a sideways nudge (A/D) settles back to level smoothly instead of in visible steps
• Fixed Climbing and descending inside the hover is smooth — the vertical hold now yields while you’re on the collective and re-captures your new altitude on release (it used to fight you in jumps), and the choppy feel when hovering close to the ground is gone
• Changed Hover on and off are now a true crossfade — toggle off while already feeding in input and the aircraft hands over seamlessly: the hold eases out exactly as your stability assists ease back in, over the same fraction of a second (and engaging at speed melts them away just as smoothly). The last one-tick jump when leaving a hover into motion is gone
• Fixed Engaging auto-hover mid-flight could instantly flick back off (green icon flashes, nothing happens) — a state bug treated a flying aircraft as parked. Engaging now reliably holds anywhere in the air
• Fixed Engaging on the ground with the engine off is now refused up front — the HUD icon tells the truth. Airborne engine-off engage still works (autorotation practice, ocean-restart recovery)
• Fixed Releasing collective as the hover catches you no longer slams the vertical hold in — it blends
• Fixed The hover refuses to engage inverted, and its authority fades sensibly when far from level — no more fighting the aircraft mid-aerobatic
• Added Move to Cabin now engages auto-hover on the way out (same rules and toggle as Auto Hover On Exit) — a solo pilot’s aircraft holds position while they walk the cabin
• Fixed A helicopter left hovering unmanned now reads perfectly still for everyone — spectators and anyone walking around inside it: the held aircraft streams a truly motionless state to every client, so the slow phantom lean/climb remote viewers could previously see is gone for good

• Fixed The AW101 Merlin spooled up far too fast — its 60-second start-up sound was rejected by a safety cap by a tenth of a second, so it fell back to a 6-second spool and was flyable long before the start sound finished. Start-up timing follows its sound again
• Fixed The v0.2.8 engine-start failsafe no longer trips on genuinely long start-ups — only when a start is actually dead
• Fixed Engine start is now refused while the main rotor is sheared or destroyed — no more start-up sound spooling a rotorless airframe
• Fixed Alt-tabbing out during a start-up no longer leaves the start sound playing after the rotors are already at full RPM — while minimized your game pauses the sound but the server keeps spooling in real time; the lagging sound is now retired when the rotor reaches full

• Fixed Navigation lights — fixed for good this time. Beyond the earlier flicker fixes, the engine itself was continuously re-applying the model’s default (dark) light textures during active simulation — so lit faces went dark in flight, the beacon only showed for a blink, and a parked aircraft looked fine while a flying one didn’t. The lights now assert themselves every frame while switched on: solid, steady navigation lights in flight and on the ground, near and far — with the beacon still strobing as intended
• Fixed A destroyed helicopter now properly extinguishes its navigation lights and spotlight
• Fixed Toggling the headlight/spotlight no longer causes a momentary flight jitter under auto-hover

• Added Dynamic engine & rotor pitch — the loops now re-pitch with rotor spool and collective load instead of playing flat: pull hard and the rotor bites deeper, unload and it relaxes, and spool-up/down sweeps through your ears instead of stepping
• Fixed Losing the tail rotor no longer plays the engine-shutdown sound — the engine is still running, and now it sounds like it

• Fixed The 3rd-person camera no longer snaps sideways at the end of a roll or loop — it holds a truly constant heading through the whole aerobatic and re-engages seamlessly
• Fixed A second gimbal case — diving steeply while twisting with free-look held — could flip/fling the view; now gimbal-safe too
• Added A subtle speed-lag on the chase camera — it trails the aircraft slightly with velocity (the same formula the native vehicle camera uses), adding speed-feel and absorbing the last visual micro-corrections

• Fixed Move to Cabin arriving glitched/floating for the co-pilot — the cabin attach ran on a fixed 1.5-second timer that could fire mid get-out animation on the co-pilot’s side, and the still-running animation fought the placement (the float). The attach now waits until the get-out has actually finished — both cockpit seats, there and back to your reserved seat
• Fixed Walking the cabin in flight is clean — arrival no longer dips into a fall, moving around no longer black-flickers the camera, and the aircraft’s audio no longer warbles as you walk
• Fixed Move to Cabin is reliable at any attitude — entering during a hard maneuver or onto a steeply banked deck could wedge you in a falling pose with a flickering camera: a safety net misread the split-second of a steep arrival as a crashed session and tore it down mid-placement. Arrivals now land you standing every time, and the recovery layers underneath were rebuilt to restore your full physical state should anything ever blip
• Fixed Cabin walking works at any bank or pitch — the floor, wall and edge sensing was world-aligned, so a steeply tilted deck (a pilot maneuvering hard while you’re in the back) could freeze you in place until the aircraft levelled out. The whole sensing rig now tilts with the airframe: walk freely through the maneuver, with the walls and edges still protecting you
• Fixed You can hear your helicopter from the cabin again — moving to the cabin in flight silenced the engine and rotors entirely (nothing left but birdsong); the aircraft’s sound now correctly follows you inside
• Fixed Walking the cabin of a held, hovering aircraft is now a rock-steady, level deck — what you see from inside finally matches what the pilot seat sees (the unmanned-hover fix above)
• Fixed Reconnecting can no longer leave your character’s controls locked from an earlier cabin walk — movement inputs are now restored on every exit path, including crashes, death, and the aircraft being destroyed while you were aboard (previously a full game restart could be needed)
• Fixed The cabin walk now cleanly self-recovers if the helicopter is deleted or destroyed under you
• Fixed Passengers and co-pilots no longer feel the airframe rumble in flight — non-pilot clients were running local physics against the network feed; they now ride the feed cleanly, exactly like native vehicle passengers
• Changed Passenger get-in animations and seated poses are now assignable per helicopter, with a first pass shipped on all six airframes (1.29 removed helicopter-specific animation sets entirely; refinement continues)
• Note “Transfer Controls” remains disabled — the 1.29 pilot-only limitation from v0.2.8 still applies (only the pilot seat can fly; this is engine-wide for every CarScript helicopter mod). The rebuilt handover — whoever holds control priority transfers it to the other cockpit seat via a physical seat swap, the only arrangement 1.29 allows — is in development and returns in a future update once it has been fully proven in multiplayer testing
• Note Remaining passenger-view micro-stepping during aggressive maneuvers is the engine’s proxy update-rate ceiling — a dedicated smoothing layer for non-pilot viewers remains in development

• Changed mod_config.json features are now three blocks: features (universal — applies in both flight modes), featuresSimple and featuresAdvanced (per-mode profiles). The server’s flightMode picks which profile is live — so you can pre-configure two personalities once (e.g. assists on and calm skies in Simple; wind, harsh VRS and no auto-hover in Advanced) and swap the whole set by flipping the flight mode, live from the Admin Panel
• Note Migrated automatically on first boot — both profiles start seeded from your existing values, so behavior is identical until you deliberately edit one. Field names are unchanged — they only moved home
• Note The Advanced-only aerodynamics (VRS, blowback, anti-torque) live only in the Advanced profile — they never functioned in Simple mode, so they no longer pretend to
• Changed The Admin Panel now mirrors the config files one-to-one — the mod page gains Simple Flight Features / Advanced Flight Features sections, and the per-helicopter page’s sections now match the per-heli JSON blocks exactly (Flight Dynamics / Altitude / Aerodynamics / Control / Autorotation / Tail Rotor Failure / Damage / Fuel & Battery / Audio / Camera). Reset-to-default per row works across every new section

• Added Twin-rotor (tandem) foundation — the flight model, damage system and rotor collision now natively understand Chinook-class helicopters: two counter-rotating main discs (front and rear) with no tail rotor. Torque cancellation (no anti-torque pedal dance), yaw by differential cyclic, a rear-disc failure emergency in place of the tail-rotor spin, and correct blade-strike geometry for both discs — all wired as a base class a future tandem airframe plugs straight into. Nothing changes for the current fleet; this is the runway for what’s coming

• Added FoXyNoFlyZone support — our helicopters now respect FoXy no-fly zones out of the box, following the zone owner’s configured behaviour (warnings, engine shutdown, etc.), with the shutdown correctly driving our custom start-up/spool system. Nothing to configure — it activates automatically when both mods are loaded
• Note Verified against the new DayZ stable update (“Road to Badlands” Update 1, 1.29.163401) — no mod changes were required; update DayZ and fly

• Changed Admin entries and roles moved to their own file — $profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\permissions_admins_config.json now owns the admin list, roles and whitelist retry setting. Your existing admins are migrated across automatically on first boot; the old admin block in mod_config.json is retired
• Fixed Admin rights occasionally missing after joining (the panel refusing a real admin until relog) — the client now pulls its admin status itself if the join-time grant was missed, and an admin-panel save can no longer wipe custom roles
• Fixed A network blip during a whitelist re-check can no longer disable flight on an already-verified server — connection problems (public IP lookup or registry temporarily unreachable) now retry quietly without touching the verified state. Boot verification and genuine registration checks are unchanged
• Fixed Water-ditch crew damage now respects the playerCrashDamageEnabled toggle and the damage cap — ditching with crash damage disabled no longer hurts the crew
• Fixed Destroyed hulls now come fully to rest (a wreck could previously keep hover state alive and never settle), plus a pass of internal timer-leak fixes and dead-code removal — a little lighter on the server every hour it runs — capped by a full end-of-cycle audit of the entire codebase (every subsystem reference-verified; the mod ships lean)

• Fixed Touch-and-goes are smooth — a descent-rate cushion removes the jolt on powered wheel contact, and rolling through no longer gets grabbed by the parking brake mid-run
• Fixed A seated, idling helicopter no longer slides down slopes — sitting in the pilot seat was silently releasing the parked brake
• Fixed Freshly spawned unmanned helicopters no longer roll or slide during spool-up on uneven ground
• Fixed Wheeled helicopters (Merlin, Blackhawk) no longer creep slowly backwards while spooling up on the spot — the parking brake now holds until you actually pull collective, and grounded idle rotor thrust can no longer push the airframe horizontally. Slopes stay planted through start-up too
• Fixed Operating the ramp or doors on a parked, sleeping helicopter no longer makes it visibly wobble as it wakes — it settles invisibly and stays put
• Fixed Ramp/gear animations no longer freeze if the pilot leaves the seat mid-motion, and boarding a long-parked helicopter no longer has a delayed get-in action

​

UPDATE — v0.2.8 | 9 July 2026

⚠️ DayZ 1.29 limitation — co-pilot flying controls: on 1.29, only the pilot seat can fly (this applies engine-wide to every CarScript helicopter mod). The co-pilot Take Controls / handover feature is therefore disabled for now, and engine start/stop is pilot-only — the co-pilot seat is a full passenger seat with instant actions. If Bohemia opens this up, handover comes back.

⚠️ Running @Vehicle3PP? 1.29 made helicopters subject to its third-person whitelist. Add CZAutoz_Helicopter_Base to your $profile:3PPVehicleWhitelist.json (or empty the list) to keep third-person flight.

• Changed The entire flight simulation now runs on a physics force model with native client prediction — the pilot’s aircraft responds instantly and smoothly to input, with no server round-trip feel, no rubber-banding, no “stepping” while holding a turn
• Fixed The low-altitude stutter/instability near the ground under input — several force transitions (altitude hold, ground lift blending, landing braking) flipped on hard thresholds the client and server could disagree on; all are now smooth ramps
• Fixed Lift-off is smooth — the jolt as the helicopter left the ground is gone
• Changed Attitude holds on stick release — bank into a turn, let go, and it stays banked like 1.28. Auto-level-on-release is gone from free flight in both modes
• Changed Full aerobatics — loops, rolls and inverted flight in both flight modes; tilt past vertical and you lose lift realistically until you roll back out
• Changed Per-helicopter rebalance, real-life-informed: MH6 and MD500 the agile light birds, SA342M fast and nimble, UH1H steady, Blackhawk a stable fast heavy, Merlin a stately heavy-lifter. Top speeds raised to realistic values (up to ~138 kt where appropriate)
• Changed Autorotation, properly — cut or lose the engine and the rotor windmills: glide, flare with collective, and set it down; the landing settles cleanly. The autorotation tuning values (autorotation.*) are now fully functional on the new model
• Changed Tail rotor failure is a real emergency — lose the tail and the aircraft winds into an uncontrollable spin with extra sink (tailRotorFailure.* tunables now fully live), while the main rotor keeps flying; lose the main rotor and you’re going down — no lift, no authority, the healthy tail keeps spinning until shutdown
• Fixed Weathervane (nose-into-wind at speed) now actually works — the value existed but was inert on 1.29

• Fixed Cabin Walk is fully working again and enabled by default (cabinModeEnabled = 1). The in-flight rework promised in v0.2.3/v0.2.4 is done — move to the cabin in flight and you track the moving aircraft smoothly: no snapping, no teleporting, no flicker, at any speed
• Fixed The black-screen/camera flicker when moving in the cabin is gone, you stay crouched, and edge & wall blocking holds you inside the airframe
• Note Your cockpit seat stays reserved while you’re in the cabin — return to it any time
• Note Available on the cockpit-door helicopters (UH1H, MH60L Blackhawk); the AW101 Merlin and cabin passengers already walk the cabin natively

✅ If you disabled Cabin Walk on our earlier advice, turn it back on: config migration keeps your custom values — so if you set cabinModeEnabled = 0 back in v0.2.3/v0.2.4, it will stay 0 after updating. Set features.cabinModeEnabled = 1 (or flip it live in the Admin Panel) to get the finished feature.

• Added A new mod-config setting flightMode — "Simple" (default) or "Advanced", switchable live in the Admin Panel
• Added Simple — forgiving assists: releasing collective holds your altitude, turns auto-coordinate, inputs are smoothed
• Added Advanced — raw and manual: altitude is yours to manage, minimal turn coordination (fly the pedals), crisper input response
• Note Both modes fly the identical physics and share the same per-helicopter tuning — the mode only changes the assist layer

• Changed Engaging at speed now decisively counter-tilts and brings you to a clean stationary hover — fast, straight and smooth; engagement ramps in rather than snapping on
• Fixed The curve/bank while arresting to a hover is gone — turn coordination and weathervane no longer act under auto-hover
• Fixed Altitude hold works properly (terrain-referenced) — no more diving or climbing away on engage
• Changed You can nudge the hover to reposition — the hold suspends while you steer (capped at a safe tilt), then re-arrests where you release, not back at the original spot
• Fixed The heading twitch on engage and the “fights every small input” feel

• Changed Start-up is now real: no lift and no control authority until the rotor reaches full RPM — exactly when the blades blur. Spool time follows each helicopter’s start-up sound automatically, or set it with the new spoolUpTime / spoolDownTime overrides (rotorSpoolRate remains the visual blade-spin rate only)
• Fixed Engine start can no longer get stuck (radial menu stuck on Start, rotors never spooling) if the start-up sound failed to play — with a server-side failsafe behind it
• Changed Main and tail rotor are properly independent — shear the main and the engine keeps running with the healthy tail spinning until you shut down; the reverse holds too
• Fixed Gunfire can kill rotors again — sustained fire on a rotor disables it in-session (the basis of rotors-only damage mode for AI servers)
• Fixed Rotor shear detection is snappier (~100 ms), and a sheared rotor repairs correctly — no more “reappears but doesn’t spin”
• Fixed The repair actions show reliably for every player when zones are damaged — and disappear the moment the repair completes (no more repeatable ghost repair)
• Fixed A damaged engine smokes and a holed fuel tank visibly leaks — and now leaks in flight, not just on the ground
• Fixed Wreck fire no longer re-ignites on an old wreck after a server restart — and a fully repaired helicopter can burn again if destroyed later. Fire only ever ignites on genuine destruction, never on a live airframe
• Fixed Crew crash damage setting renamed playerCrashDamageEnabled — your existing value migrates automatically

• Added True park-sleep: a parked, unoccupied helicopter now stops simulating entirely (matching native 1.29 vehicle parking) and wakes instantly on any interaction — doors, windows, ramp, refuel, repair, damage, boarding. Big server-tick savings on heli-heavy maps
• Fixed Parked helicopters no longer run per-frame physics checks on every nearby client — a fleet of parked helis at a trader is now nearly free
• Fixed Parked helicopters no longer slowly sink into the ground over time
• Fixed Gear/ramp animations and lit nav-lights no longer spam network sync / material updates every frame

• Fixed Players no longer fall through BaseBuildingPlus floors (and other elevated structures) on relog or server restart
• Fixed Autorotation landings, rotor dust and low-altitude warnings now correctly detect base-building floors and rooftops as ground — not just terrain
• Fixed A helicopter that persisted mid-air (server went down while flying) now falls and autorotates on restart instead of teleporting to the terrain below

• Fixed Co-pilot actions are instant — getting out, doors, everything (previously delayed, flickering or vanishing from the co-pilot seat)
• Added Your own door opens instantly as a passenger (client prediction)
• Added Survivor Animations support (optional soft-dependency): run @Survivor Animations on server + client and pilots sit in a proper helicopter pose instead of holding a car steering wheel
• Fixed Pilot cyclic sticks animate correctly in flight for all viewers, and the collective lever no longer flickers while held
• Fixed A warning now appears again if another mod’s keybinds clash with the collective controls (input pinned)

• Changed The health bar is now continuous and accurate (white → yellow → amber → red), synced from the server
• Fixed Damage-zone boxes are accurate for the co-pilot and passengers, not just the pilot
• Fixed The 3rd-person camera no longer whips/flings during flips and rolls with free-look — and a client crash-log flood on entering/exiting vehicles is fixed (plus another from helicopter sound effects)

• Fixed The Blackhawk no longer leans and sinks onto its front-right wheel — its centre of mass was off in the model
• Fixed Wheeled helicopters sit flush and stable on their suspension, with proper tyre grip (no more sliding on slopes)
• Fixed The Merlin’s ramp no longer sinks the hull into the ground when operated while parked

• Fixed Admin panel slider ranges now match what the config accepts — edge values no longer silently reset a setting to its default
• Fixed The per-helicopter config Edit flow applies correctly
• Changed Admin panel input handling security-hardened
• Fixed The startup Discord webhook fires reliably on boot
• Changed A server that boots without internet now recovers its whitelist the moment someone starts an engine — no waiting out the retry timer

• Changed The fuel drum classname is now CZ_HeliDrum (matching the other items). The old CZAutoz_HeliDrum still works everywhere — existing drums, types.xml and traders unaffected — but please migrate; the legacy name will be hidden in a future release
• Removed Dead config values tiltLiftComp and b2tRampRate (superseded by the new flight model — cleaned from your configs automatically)
• Note Config migration is in place as usual: custom values kept, new keys added at defaults, originals backed up to $profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\Backups\

​

HOTFIX — v0.2.7 | 20 June 2026

• Fixed A v0.2.6 regression in the wreck‑fire delete‑cleanup that could fail to compile the World script module — on boot (server) or on join (client), shown as Undefined function CZAutoz_WreckFireStopEffects. The cleanup now runs entirely client‑side where the effects live; the v0.2.6 wreck‑fire, burnDuration = 0, and rotor‑shear fixes are all unchanged and intact

​

HOTFIX — v0.2.6 | 20 June 2026

• Fixed Deleting a burning wreck (admin tools, server cleanup, etc.) now removes the fire, smoke and light with it — previously the flames could keep burning at the spot until the next server restart
• Added Setting a helicopter’s burnDuration to 0 now fully disables its wreck fire — no flame/smoke particle, no light, no burn damage. Handy for servers with lower‑end clients, since the fire particle is the FPS‑heavy part. Set it live in the Admin Panel or in the per‑helicopter JSON

• Fixed With rotor damage turned off (damage.zones.rotor1 / rotor2 = 0), a crash no longer shears or deletes the rotors — they stay intact, consistent with the toggle. With rotor damage on (including rotors‑only mode), shearing works exactly as before

⚠️ Cabin Walk (Move to Cabin) is unchanged in this release — still off by default and still being reworked. Keep it disabled (cabinModeEnabled = 0) until a future hotfix.

​

HOTFIX — v0.2.5 | 19 June 2026

• Fixed Helicopters pulled from a garage (e.g. LBmaster Garage) now keep their fuel instead of arriving empty — and topping one up before you store it now sticks. The helicopter reads its fuel from the same native tank the garage restores, exactly like a vanilla car

• Fixed Helicopters parked on a BaseBuildingPlus floor (or any elevated structure) no longer drop through to the terrain after a server restart or when pulled from a Virtual Garage. A restart re-positioning step meant only for helicopters left in mid-air was wrongly snapping parked ones straight down through the base

• Fixed Getting out of a helicopter with Autohover engaged no longer makes it climb away — it now holds its altitude cleanly. The hover was mistaking the just-exited pilot beneath it for the ground “rising”; a player walking under a hovering helicopter could nudge it the same way, and that’s fixed too

⚠️ Cabin Walk (Move to Cabin) is unchanged in this release — still off by default and still being reworked. Keep it disabled (cabinModeEnabled = 0) until a future hotfix.

​

HOTFIX — v0.2.4 | 04 June 2026

⚠️ Cabin Walk (Move to Cabin) is still being reworked — and is now OFF by default. New or first-time-generated configs set features.cabinModeEnabled = 0 automatically. Please keep it disabled (set cabinModeEnabled to 0 in mod_config.json) until a future hotfix completes it — when enabled it does not yet hold the pilot/co-pilot inside the cabin correctly. Cabin passengers and AW101 Merlin seats are unaffected.

• Fixed Helicopters already persisting on the map are now reliably operable immediately after a server restart — starting the engine, flying, and getting in and out all work first time. Previously they could load in a disabled state (engine wouldn’t start, you couldn’t get out of the seat) until the world was wiped — even though freshly-spawned and Virtual Garage helicopters were unaffected
• Fixed A persisted helicopter that went idle/parked before the server finished its startup checks no longer stays stuck disabled

• Changed The startup integrity check now resolves earlier and recovers quickly from a transient network hiccup at boot, so a whitelisted server never leaves its map helicopters briefly inert after a restart
• Fixed An edge case where certain server network setups (multi-homed / NAT) could be momentarily mis-flagged at startup — a correctly-registered server now stays enabled

• Changed Cabin Mode now defaults to OFF (features.cabinModeEnabled = 0) — first-time and regenerated configs set this automatically. When off, the “Move to Cabin” action simply does not appear
• Known issue The in-flight Move-to-Cabin rework is not finished and should stay disabled until a future hotfix. Existing servers: set cabinModeEnabled = 0 in mod_config.json to be safe
• Note Affects only the pilot/co-pilot Move to Cabin action. Seat Exit Free Walk and Walk-On linking (cabin passengers, AW101 Merlin) are engine-native and unaffected

• Fixed Getting into a helicopter in 3rd person no longer zooms the camera far out and back in on entry — and the brief freeze / black-screen some setups saw at that moment is gone. The chase camera sits at the right distance from the first frame

​

HOTFIX — v0.2.3 | 03 June 2026

✅ Good news — version updates no longer reset your configs: every previous version regenerated all configs from defaults on update, so you had to re-apply your settings from the backup afterward. From v0.2.3 the mod migrates your configs in place — new settings are added, removed ones cleaned up, and all your custom values are kept. Your originals are still backed up first to $profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\Backups\, just in case.

⚠️ Known issue — Cabin Walk (Move to Cabin) is still being reworked: moving to the cabin while the helicopter is moving, hovering or in flight can repeatedly snap or teleport your character as the aircraft moves, instead of holding you cleanly inside the cabin — the in-flight “ride the deck” attachment is not reliable yet. For now it is most stable while the helicopter is landed and stationary (or held still with Autohover before you leave the seat). A proper fix is in active development and is the top priority for the next update. This affects only the pilot/co-pilot Move to Cabin action — Seat Exit Free Walk and Walk-On linking (used by cabin passengers and on the AW101 Merlin) are engine-native and unaffected.

• Known issue Moving to the cabin while the helicopter is moving or in flight can repeatedly snap/teleport you as it moves — it does not hold you cleanly on the airframe yet. Most stable while landed and stationary, or with Autohover engaged first
• In progress The in-flight attachment model is being rebuilt so you stay locked inside the cabin and bank/pitch with the aircraft smoothly at any speed — this is the top priority for the next update
• Note Cabin passengers and all AW101 Merlin seats use Seat Exit Free Walk / Walk-On linking, which are engine-native and not affected by this

• Removed @CommunityFramework is no longer a dependency — the CZ Autoz whitelist now runs natively inside the mod. Remove it from your server’s Required Items / load order if nothing else uses it

• Added New Our Mods tab — an at-a-glance overview of the CZ Autoz range
• Added New Cars tab — appears automatically when CZ Autoz car content is detected on your server, and lists what’s installed
• Changed Config edits now apply live — saving in the panel updates already-spawned helicopters and every connected player instantly (cabin-mode toggle, action hold-times, refuel rates and more), with no respawn or reconnect
• Fixed Helicopters spawned from the panel now land on BaseBuildingPlus floors and other structures instead of dropping through to the terrain

• Changed Version updates now migrate your configs in place instead of wiping and regenerating them — custom values kept, new keys added, removed keys cleaned up, originals backed up first
• Changed Ruined Parts Fall Off is now a single global feature toggle (previously per-helicopter)

• Fixed A co-pilot can now start the engine on a parked helicopter with no pilot in the pilot seat
• Fixed The first crew member to board now always receives controls immediately — no occasional “no control” until you exit and re-enter
• Fixed Wheeled helicopters now brake the instant the engine is switched off — no more rolling on a slope while the rotors wind down
• Fixed Engine and rotor audio no longer briefly drop out when changing seats or camera

• Fixed Helicopters already persisting on the server are now reliably operable after a restart
• Fixed A healthy helicopter restored from a Virtual Garage no longer shows wreck smoke/fire

​

HOTFIX — v0.2.2 | 28 May 2026

⚙️ Please read — a version update resets ALL configs to defaults: updating the mod regenerates every config from defaults — both mod_config.json (admin roles, feature toggles, and all server settings) and every per-helicopter config. Your existing configs are automatically backed up first to $profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\Backups\v<oldversion>_<date>\, and only client_prefs.json carries over. Re-apply your settings and per-helicopter tuning after updating — copy them back from the backup folder.

• Fixed Walking the cabin in flight no longer flickers — you’re now bound into the helicopter’s local-space render hierarchy and track the moving aircraft smoothly (the 1.28 cabin walk, migrated to the 1.29 API)
• Fixed You now stay crouched while moving in the cabin instead of standing up on the first movement key
• Fixed Cabin mode behaves identically on every entry, not just the first — a stale state flag was bringing back the stand-up and flicker after returning to the cockpit
• Fixed Edge & wall blocking restored — you can’t walk off the helicopter, and the white-screen flicker at edges is gone
• Fixed Moving to the cabin reliably teleports you onto the interior position (no more ending up outside or below the floor)
• Added A pilot or co-pilot who moves into the cabin reserves their cockpit seat — nobody else can take it while they’re out walking (both cockpit seats reserve independently and at the same time)
• Fixed Parked/idle helicopters no longer go to sleep (and drop you) while someone is walking the cabin

• Changed Realistic inverted flight — tilt past vertical (loops, flying upside-down) and you lose lift and fall under the aircraft’s own weight, recoverable by rolling or pitching back upright. Loops and aerobatics still work, with no artificial tilt limit
• Added Tilt Lift Compensation (tiltLiftComp) — a new per-helicopter value, live-editable in the admin panel, controlling how much lift is retained as the aircraft tilts

• Fixed The per-zone damage toggles (Chassis / Body / Engine / Fuel / Rotor 1 / Rotor 2) now gate all damage — gunfire and explosions, not just collisions. Previously a helicopter with its damage zones turned off could still be shot to a wreck
• Added True rotors-only damage — enable only the rotor zones so AI or players can damage (degrade/shear) the rotors while the hull stays invulnerable; ideal for servers running AI that shoot helicopters
• Changed Turning all damage zones off is full invincibility, now enforced reliably in both directions
• Added Ruined Parts Fall Off — new per-helicopter toggle: a door (or any attachment) that becomes ruined detaches and drops off the helicopter instead of sitting ruined in its slot (default off)

• Fixed AW101 Merlin no longer wobbles or jitters while the cargo ramp or landing gear is moving
• Fixed MH-60L Blackhawk side windows no longer open and close on their own when using movement or flight inputs
• Fixed Animation states (gear, ramp, fuel, windows) are no longer incorrectly driven by player input or movement

• Fixed DayZ Expansion Car Keys — locking a paired helicopter works again; it no longer reports “close all doors to lock” when every door is already shut

• Fixed Cabin collision — interior geometry that previously had no collision now blocks correctly, so the cabin edge/wall protection works as intended

​

HOTFIX — v0.2.1 | 24 May 2026

⚠️ Please read — flight smoothness (important): This hotfix makes the flight simulation — the motion that actually carries you through the world as you bank and turn — smooth and kinematic again. It does NOT yet make the helicopter visually 100% smooth. The body-frame transforms during flight can still visually rumble. This is a known, separate issue and needs a dedicated rework against the DayZ 1.29 native rendering/prediction API to appear fully smooth on-screen. In short: your helicopter flies and moves through the world smoothly — the remaining rumble is purely visual, and it is actively being worked on for an upcoming update.

• Changed Restored the smooth, kinematic flight feel from 1.28, rebuilt on the 1.29 engine — fluid world movement, banking and turning
• Changed Rebalanced per-helicopter top speeds (in knots), tuned to sit below the engine’s FPS-drop threshold
• Removed Auto-leveling in both powered flight and autorotation — the aircraft now holds the attitude you set
• Added Altitude retention through banked turns
• Fixed Autorotation tilt smoothed to match powered flight

• Changed Helicopters inherit CarScript again (Transport in v0.2). The v0.2 force-based flight model, autorotation, tail-rotor failure, control feel, admin panel, lights, particles and audio are all unchanged — only the base class changed
• Changed Wheel suspension, movement prediction and contact damage now use DayZ’s native CarScript systems instead of the custom Transport-era replacements

• Removed The manual <rootclass name="CZAutoz_Helicopter_Script" act="car" reportMemoryLOD="no" /> entry that v0.2 required is no longer needed — as a CarScript vehicle the helicopters are covered by DayZ’s native vehicle Central Economy root automatically
• Upgrading from v0.2: safely remove that <rootclass> line from your mission’s cfgeconomycore.xml
• Important Wipe helicopter persistence once on update — the save format changed with the base class, so existing saved helicopters will not carry across

• Changed DayZ Expansion (get-in, safe zones, locks), MuchCarKey, TraderPlus CarLock, VPP Admin Tools and Community Online Tools now recognise the helicopters natively as CarScript vehicles
• Removed The v0.2 Transport-era compatibility shims that hand-rolled this recognition — no longer needed
• Changed All mod compatibility stays optional & auto-detected — no hard dependency

• Changed A sheared rotor no longer shuts the engine off — unless fully ruined, the engine and tail keep running and the aircraft stays powered; you only lose control authority
• Fixed Fuel leaks now start the moment the tank is damaged (previously only once a player boarded) and stop once the tank is empty or repaired
• Fixed Wreck fire now triggers when an unoccupied helicopter is shot to ruined — it no longer requires a player to board first

• Added Adding an admin or changing a role now applies live — no rejoin needed to open the panel
• Added Removing an admin now revokes access instantly and closes their panel

• Fixed Rotors creeping/spinning slowly forever after shutdown or a server restart
• Changed Netsync optimisation — lower bandwidth and fixed the Blackhawk camera/rotor desync
• Changed Parked/idle helicopters stop ticking to save server FPS

• Changed Two per-helicopter config keys were renamed for clarity: inputSmoothRate → b2tRampRate, and playerCrashDamage → playerCrashDamageEnabled
• Important Regenerate your per-helicopter configs so the new keys populate — those two fields revert to defaults until you do. Note that updating to a new version regenerates all configs from defaults (including mod_config.json); your previous configs are backed up to $profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\Backups\v<oldversion>_<date>\ first, so re-apply your settings afterward

​

UPDATE — v0.2 | 21 May 2026

• Changed Flight system migrated from CarScript to Transport — the correct DayZ 1.29 base class for script-driven aircraft. The old CarScript wheel, suspension and gearbox subsystem has been removed from config
• Changed All helicopter motion is now driven by force and torque (ApplyForceAt, dBodyApplyTorque) — direct velocity and orientation assignment has been removed from the flight code
• Added Native client-side prediction — pilot inputs are tied to physics ticks and replicated through DayZ’s own prediction pipeline, replacing the previous custom 40 Hz input RPC
• Changed Passengers, co-pilots and bystanders now receive helicopter movement through native Transport interpolation between network updates
• Changed Pilot/owner detection moved from seat-index checks to the native Pawn API (IsOwner() / IsProxy()), matching the 1.29 network model
• Removed 10 physics-state network-sync variables (velocity, orientation, angular velocity) — physics state is now handled entirely by the native Transport system
• Fixed On 1.29 only the pilot’s client was simulating the helicopter — the moment the pilot left the seat, nobody else saw the rotors spin or heard the engine. All clients now see and hear the helicopter whether or not a pilot is seated
• Fixed Physics body going dormant between network updates and stopping simulation — the body is now kept active while in use

Still being worked on: hard snapping during flight is gone, but some rumble on tilt and rotation can still be seen and is being actively worked on. This is the first phase of the 1.29 flight rebuild — further smoothing and refinement is coming in the next phase.

• Added Only one cockpit seat holds flight control at a time — the first player into either cockpit seat receives it
• Added Press T (rebindable) to hand control to the other cockpit seat — the receiving player must be seated and alive
• Added Control passes automatically if the holder leaves or dies, and resets when both cockpit seats are empty
• Added Without control, all flight and systems inputs (cyclic, collective, yaw, autopilot, lights, engine) are locked out
• Added HUD control indicator — green when you hold control, red when you do not

• Added Full controller / gamepad support for flight — cyclic on the left stick, collective on the triggers (right raises, left lowers), and rudder/yaw on the shoulder buttons. Autohover stays on X by default. Every binding is rebindable in the controls settings
• Added New rebindable keybinds: open the admin panel (default F10) and transfer cockpit control to the other seat (default T)
• Changed All flight inputs are now read locally and delivered through the native prediction move pipeline rather than a synced input action, removing input latency

• Changed The pilot control indicator and the auto-hover icon have been repositioned on the HUD
• Changed The airspeed readout is now smoothed to remove needle and number jitter, and shows true airspeed in knots (the old per-helicopter speed display factor has been removed)

• Added The 3rd-person chase camera now smooths its position and gently leans with the helicopter’s pitch and roll, for a less rigid, more cinematic feel
• Added Free-look can now be held momentarily as well as toggled with a double-tap
• Changed The 1st-person cockpit view now updates every frame, smoothing it at the physics-tick rate

• Added In-game admin panel for server owners and admins — manage the whole helicopter fleet without leaving the game
• Added Fleet actions — teleport to a helicopter, repair, refuel, reset, delete, repair all, delete empty, and reload configs live
• Added Roles & permissions — assign admin Steam64 IDs to roles and grant granular per-action permissions; the owner role always has full access
• Added Live map view of active helicopters
• Added Server-side validation on every panel action — nothing can be triggered by a modified client

• Changed mod_config.json reorganised into clear sections (logging, features, gameplay, repair, refuel, extra modules, admin) under the new CZAutoz_ naming
• Added Admin roles & permissions block — define which Steam64 IDs are admins, their role, and the exact panel actions each role may use
• Added Physics logging toggle for flight diagnostics
• Added Automatic config backup on version change — existing configs are copied to $profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\Backup\v{version}_{date}\ before regenerating, so no settings are lost when updating
• Removed In-game config guide generation — configuration is now documented at docs.czautoz.co.uk
• Changed All config files regenerate on the first server start after updating — your old files are backed up automatically so custom values can be re-entered

• Changed Per-helicopter configs reorganised into clear sections — flight, altitude, aerodynamics, control, autorotation, tail-rotor failure, damage, fuel, battery, audio and camera — under the new CZAutoz_ naming
• Changed Control feel rebuilt — the old per-axis acceleration/decay multipliers are replaced by a time-constant (Tau) smoothing model per axis (rollAccelTau/rollDecayTau, pitchAccelTau/pitchDecayTau, yawAccelTau/yawDecayTau)
• Added Aerodynamics tuning — ground effect, effective translational lift (ETL), and flight-envelope drag
• Added Altitude tuning — lift fall-off start altitude and hard ceiling
• Added Bank-to-turn strength (b2tStrength)
• Added Autorotation coast duration (coastMinutes) — how long the rotor keeps turning visually and audibly after a mid-air engine cut
• Added Tail-rotor failure tuning — spin and descent behaviour
• Added Per-zone damage toggles (body, engine, fuel tank, both rotors, chassis) and post-destruction burn tuning (duration + radius)
• Removed Per-helicopter mass key — mass is now read directly from each model’s physics body, set via mass in config.cpp per variant
• Removed Speed display factor
• Changed Tuning units are now more natural — altitude values are entered in feet and maximum airspeed in knots — and the previous hard caps on top speed and climb/descent rate have been removed (each tuned per variant)

<rootclass name="CZAutoz_Helicopter_Script" act="car" reportMemoryLOD="no" />

• Changed Script files reorganised into Client/, Server/ and Shared/ folders by compilation layer — easier to locate and hotfix systems
• Changed Server-side physics, systems, damage and rotor safety consolidated into a single server module
• Changed Preset loading unified into one generic loader, replacing six separate dispatch chains
• Changed Wheel attachment slots for wheeled variants (Blackhawk, Merlin) moved from the CarScript SimulationModule block to standard attachments — wheel items still work as normal
• Added Server FPS overlay, toggleable from the admin panel, for live performance monitoring
• Fixed Spawning a helicopter could drop the server or client to ~1 FPS until relog — wheel and inventory initialisation was running inside the physics tick; it now runs deferred, outside the simulation loop
• Changed Rotor strike detection — used for blade shearing and the rotor-disc player kill — has been optimised: the spinning disc is now built as a circle sampled from the rotor’s centre and tip memory points instead of relying on the model’s collision-geometry disc. This is cheaper to run and more reliable
• Changed General optimisation pass across the server simulation and client visual/HUD paths

• Fixed Some variants could not be started at all — a faulty condition in the start sequence was blocking startup for certain configurations

• Fixed Rotor spin no longer snaps to a stop after a mid-air engine cut — the rotor now coasts down gradually over the configured coast time
• Fixed The shutdown chime no longer plays on a mid-air cut when the rotor has enough energy to autorotate — it only plays on a normal grounded shutdown
• Fixed Engine and rotor audio now fade together over the full coast instead of the engine cutting to instant silence
• Added Tilting the cyclic during autorotation now translates the helicopter — you can glide forward and steer the descent, instead of only rotating in place

• Added Destroyed helicopters now catch fire and burn for a configurable time — a flickering fire light plus a fire-damage area that hurts players standing too close (burn duration and radius are set per helicopter). Suppressed underwater, and a destroyed wreck will not re-ignite if shot again
• Added Crash and hard water-impact damage now also applies to players moving in the cabin or standing on the airframe, not only those buckled into a cockpit/cargo seat

• Added New built-in pump-refuel action — fuel a helicopter directly at a working fuel station (vanilla, Enoch, or a Simple Gas Pump) with no jerry can needed, at a faster fill rate
• Added Helicopters spawned by the Central Economy (types.xml / events.xml) now start with a partial fuel load rather than empty or full

• Removed The Emergency Recovery reconnect action has been removed — it was never meant to be player-facing, and the situation it covered is now handled internally with no player action needed

• Added Every integration below is auto-detected and optional — there is no hard dependency. The mod runs standalone, and each integration only activates when that mod is also loaded
• Added DayZ Expansion — helicopters register as Expansion vehicles: respected by Expansion safe zones (no damage inside a safe zone), routed through Expansion’s damage and explosion system, and persisted through Expansion ModStorage
• Added MuchCarKey — lock and unlock helicopters, assign keys, show the owner’s name on the vehicle, and optionally require the correct key to start the engine
• Added TraderPlus CarLock — password lock/unlock with an on-screen lock menu, attach and detach a CarLock, lockpick attempts, and lock/unlock/alarm sounds
• Added VPP Admin Tools — the /refuel chat command now fully repairs and refuels a CZ helicopter and maxes every damage zone
• Added RaG Core — helicopter enter/exit, door open/close, deletion and weapon-hit events are written to RaG’s vehicle activity log
• Added Community Online Tools (COT) — helicopters appear in the COT vehicle manager, “spawn with attachments” picks the correct doors for each variant, and bulk delete (all / destroyed) now includes them
• Added Push — the vanilla push action works on a grounded helicopter, scaled by a per-helicopter push-force multiplier

• Fixed Exit/get-out actions on doorless cockpit seats no longer appear both centre-screen and in the cockpit hints panel — they now show only in the cockpit hints panel

• Fixed Spotlight (landing/search light) and navigation lights (port, starboard, tail and beacon) now work correctly on DayZ 1.29 — the move to Transport dropped the old CarScript light handling, so both have been reimplemented as independent, network-synced toggles that every nearby player can see
• Changed The spotlight also lights the cockpit dashboard, and lights require a fitted, charged battery to switch on

• Fixed Rotor downwash now appears over buildings and other objects, not only over terrain
• Fixed Water spray no longer spawns beneath a structure the helicopter is landed on over water — surface detection now uses what the helicopter is actually resting on

• Fixed Touching down while still moving and holding descend could send the helicopter skidding across the ground at very high speed — body tilt was still feeding flight thrust after ground contact. A helicopter on the ground at idle or descending collective no longer accelerates from its attitude, and instead bleeds off any remaining landing speed and settles to a stop
• Fixed Stationary helicopters with the engine off are climbable again — a damping value was being rewritten every tick and preventing the body from settling
• Fixed Helicopters restored from persistence (server restart) or pulled from a virtual garage onto an elevated structure — such as a BaseBuildingPlus floor — could drop straight through it to the terrain below. The ground check now starts above the airframe and reliably detects the structure underneath, so the helicopter stays where it was placed

​

HOTFIX — v0.1.5 | 05 April 2026

• Added CZH_autoHoverOnExit — controls whether autopilot automatically engages when the pilot exits their seat while the helicopter is airborne. Default: 1 (on — existing behaviour, no change for current servers)
• Changed Default refuel action distance increased from 4.2 m to 5.0 m — the action now triggers from slightly further away, making it easier to refuel without needing to stand directly against the airframe. Note: servers with existing per-helicopter config files must delete them and restart once to pick up the new default, or manually update CZH_refuelDistance in each file

• Changed JSON configuration system, internal class structure, variable naming conventions, and config map pipeline have been fully rebuilt from scratch — the CZH config architecture is now entirely distinct and independently authored with no structural overlap with any third-party helicopter mod implementation

• Fixed Players reconnecting after a mid-flight crash over ocean were being snapped to the ocean floor
• Fixed Players reconnecting after a mid-flight crash above a rock, cliff or building were snapped to terrain level and placed inside or below the object — they are now correctly placed on top of it

• Fixed Helicopters that were airborne at the time of a server restart now land safely on the nearest terrain or geometry surface on the first simulation tick after restart — engine and rotor are shut down, physics are reset, the helicopter settles as if it had been parked
• Fixed Helicopters that were airborne over ocean at restart no longer fall into the water — autopilot is automatically engaged to hold their position until a pilot returns
• Fixed Helicopters parked on the ground bouncing for several seconds immediately after a server restart

• Added Pilots who reconnect after a game crash or server restart while their helicopter is airborne now receive an Emergency Recovery hold action (3-second hold)
• Added The action is exclusive to the pilot who was last in control — tracked by a persisted GUID on the helicopter that survives server restarts; no other player ever sees it
• Added On activation, the pilot is placed directly into the pilot seat with no extra button press required
• Added The action disappears automatically the moment another player enters the pilot seat, the helicopter lands, or the helicopter is destroyed — it is never permanently visible

• Fixed Servers using the War Dogs 3PP mod crashed when a player held the native free-look key inside a CZH helicopter — no effect on servers not running War Dogs

• Fixed Turning the engine off while airborne caused the helicopter to freeze completely in place — it now correctly enters autorotation and descends under its own mass
• Added Autorotation descent rate now scales with helicopter mass — heavier helicopters descend significantly faster than light scouts, reflecting real rotor disc loading behaviour. The existing CZH_autoRotGravityFactor preset still lets admins tune the base rate per aircraft

• Updated Ground wash particle effect — rotor downwash now kicks up dirt and dust when flying close to the ground, replacing the previous effect

• Updated Simulation module adjusted — suspension and wheel behaviour improvements
• Fixed Geometry adjustments to reduce entry blocking on both sides of the helicopter — players could previously get stuck or prevented from climbing in

• Fixed Landing gear and cargo ramp sounds remaining fixed at the location where they were first triggered instead of following the helicopter — audible when flying away after activating them mid-flight

​

HOTFIX — v0.1.4 | 04 April 2026

• Added CZH_autoShutdownOnExit in mod_config.json — when set to 1, the engine shuts off automatically when the pilot exits their seat while the helicopter is grounded and the engine is running. Default: 0 (off)
• Added CZH_engineHoldTime in mod_config.json — controls the hold duration in seconds for the Start Engine and Stop Engine action circles. Default: 1.0

• Added Ramp, landing gear, and exit actions on doorless pilot and co-pilot seats now display on the side of the screen — removes centre-screen clutter during flight

• Changed Door open/close action while seated now only appears in 1st-person view — prevents the action cluttering the screen during 3rd-person flight

• Fixed Suspension compression animation playing in the wrong direction on takeoff and landing
• Fixed Cargo ramp auto-closing the moment the pilot entered the seat after a server restart
• Fixed Cargo ramp showing “Open Ramp” when the ramp was already open after a server restart
• Fixed Cargo ramp state now correctly restores after a server restart — open stays open, closed stays closed
• Fixed Landing gear spawning retracted on server restart — gear now always lowers on server boot regardless of its state at shutdown

• Fixed Wheeled helicopters (Merlin, Blackhawk) rolling down slopes during engine spin-up
• Fixed Suspension and wheels not settling correctly when the engine is stopped during landing — the helicopter would freeze mid-settle with wheels at uneven heights
• Fixed Wheeled helicopters (Merlin, Blackhawk) no longer snap level when landed on a slope
• Fixed Stationary helicopters no longer jitter or shift when a nearby helicopter spins up or flies past
• Fixed Damping and ground contact stability improvements across all variants

• Fixed Severe FPS drops on spawn — simulation module adjustments applied across all helicopter variants
• Fixed Client FPS drop during engine spin-up — a broken startup effect was silently failing 60 times per second throughout the entire startup sequence

• Changed Wheel radius and wheel hub radius adjusted across affected variants

• Changed Move to Cabin and Return to Cockpit actions changed from press to hold — prevents accidental activation while moving around inside the cabin

• Removed Switch seats temporarily removed — will return fully working in a future update

​

HOTFIX — v0.1.3 | 03 April 2026

• Fixed SA342M, UH1H, MD500 and MH-6 suspension constraint was collapsing server FPS to 1–6 during flight

• Fixed Action not always appearing or completing correctly
• Fixed Jerry can refuelling instantly on second use instead of gradually
• Fixed Fuel drum draining at the same rate as a jerry can
• Fixed Fuel leak not draining correctly with engine off
• Fixed Repairing the fuel tank now fully stops the drain — fuel was continuing to drop silently after the effect stopped
• Fixed Helicopters spawned via admin tools with no fluids selected were spawning with a full tank
• Added Fuel pump mods (Simple_Refueling, Gas-Pump-Refueling) now work with CZH helicopters
• Added Helicopter Fuel Drum (CZH_HeliDrum) — 2 drums fill any helicopter from empty by default
• Added Refuel amounts and drain speed per container type now configurable in mod_config.json

• Fixed Clipping terrain at speed caused a full instant stop
• Fixed Helicopter spinning to 90° on engine start after landing

• Fixed Helicopter jumping or tilting when interacted with while parked on a slope

• Added New CZH_freeLookAlwaysOn option in mod_config.json

• Fixed Safety snap firing every second near any helicopter — now fires once on connect only

• Fixed No hub spin on startup with sheared rotors
• Fixed Admin repair now correctly restores blade geometry

• Fixed Remote players saw rotors instantly jump to full speed on startup and shutdown

• Fixed Standing on a hovering helicopter caused constant camera shake — 50/50, awaiting confirmation

• Fixed Helicopter nearly inaudible when facing away from it

• Added Damaged fuel zone now shows a drip particle at the fill point

• Fixed Running out of fuel froze all simulation — now enters autorotation with full control

• Added Going past 90° bank applies downward force — full cyclic retained to flip back

• Fixed Bounce on touchdown after autorotation
• Fixed Opening a door with engine off jolted the helicopter post-autorotation

• Fixed Damage HUD now shows base name only — variant suffix no longer squishes text

• Fixed JSON float values writing at full IEEE 754 precision — now clean
• Fixed New config keys from updates now appear automatically on restart without deleting files
• Recommend deleting all JSONs in $profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\ to regenerate clean — we are still in early builds

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HOTFIX — v0.1.2 | 02 April 2026

• Fixed Cargo modules not appearing as extra cargo space
• Fixed Cargo modules respawning empty on server restart — contents are now preserved across restarts

• Fixed Engine startup and shutdown sounds not heard by players outside the helicopter — remote clients now correctly receive engine transition sounds

• Fixed Pilot and co-pilot seats could not be entered from outside when the helicopter was on a natural slope

• All helicopter classnames now use the CZ_ prefix (e.g. CZ_UH1H, CZ_MH60LBlackhawk). Any existing types.xml entries, trader configs, or persistence saves referencing old classnames must be updated. Pre-existing helicopters on the map will despawn if classnames are not updated before loading this version.

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HOTFIX — v0.1.1 | 02 April 2026

• Fixed Flight system conflicting with cars causing them to jitter on the spot

• Fixed Opening a door or leaving a seat while landed on a slope caused the helicopter to reset position into the ground

• Fixed When using no-damage mods (e.g. Hunter’s Improved Vehicles), a sheared rotor would instantly respawn — now fully controlled by CZH and toggleable via CZH_rotorBladeShear in mod_config.json

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v0.1.0 | 01 April 2026