0 makes that helicopter completely invincible.
See Repair & Battery for repair requirements, hold times, and repair settings.
The 6 Zones
Defaults
Skid-equipped helicopters have chassis damage disabled by default. Wheeled helicopters (Blackhawk, Merlin, Chinook) have it enabled.
Turning the body zone off also blocks damage to the helicopter’s global health — hits that are not attributed to a specific zone are rejected along with body hits.
Zone Health Levels & HUD Indicators
Each damage zone progresses through four states, shown as colour-coded indicators on the in-cockpit damage panel:
Repair of the four airframe zones (body, engine, chassis, fuel) is progressive — each repair hold advances the zone one level upward (e.g. Red → Amber), so a critically damaged zone needs multiple holds to fully restore. The two rotor zones are not: one hold restores a rotor to full and clears a sheared blade. See Repair & Battery.
Visual Damage Stages (v0.4.1)
Damage is no longer invisible until the wreck fire. Every airframe shows five visual stages on its hull and tail, on every variant and livery:
The stage follows the worse of the Body zone and the overall hull, and the burnt look is reserved for a genuinely destroyed helicopter — scorched paint always means dead. Doors and wheels track their own condition and wear their own damage and ruined looks independently of the airframe. The state is decided on the server and shown identically to every client — flying in from a distance, reloading, opening a door or repairing all display the correct condition, and a repair reverts the look immediately.
Community retextures inherit all five stages automatically while keeping their own paint — see Retexturing.
Rotor Damage
Main Rotor Destroyed
The helicopter immediately loses lift and falls. There is no recovery.Tail Rotor Destroyed
The helicopter enters an uncontrolled yaw spin. Spin rate is set bytailRotorFailure.spinRate and a forced descent is applied at tailRotorFailure.descentRate.
Since v0.3.0 the spin is driven by engine reaction torque, like the real thing: shutting the engine off stops the spin — the genuine emergency procedure is to cut power and autorotate down. With the engine off nothing drives a spin on the ground either, so landing and shutting down no longer leaves the aircraft turning on the spot while the rotor winds down.
These are the uniform defaults across all seven helicopters and are editable per variant in each helicopter’s JSON config.
Stationary Blades (v0.4.1)
A stopped rotor is no longer an invisible solid disc. Collision follows the individual blades, so bullets pass between them and only strike the blades themselves — and on the ground you can walk beneath a parked rotor without an invisible ceiling.Rotor Blade Shear
Rotor blades can shear off on contact with geometry (trees, buildings, terrain):Rotor Disc Collision & Player Kill
Blade shear and the rotor-disc player kill are global toggles under the
features section of mod_config.json, not per-helicopter JSON. The spinning disc is sampled from the rotor’s centre and tip memory points rather than the model’s collision geometry, making strike detection cheaper and more reliable.Engine Critical Hits
Matching vanilla vehicles, a round that lands in the Engine zone carries a 0.1% chance of destroying the aircraft outright — the same rare golden BB a vanilla car engine has. Every other hit does normal zone damage. (v0.4.1 — earlier versions could lose the airframe to a single engine hit.)Making a Helicopter Invincible
Set all 6 zone values to0 inside the damage.zones section of the helicopter’s JSON config file:
Rotors-Only Damage
Enable only the rotor zones and disable the rest — the rotors can be shot or damaged (they degrade and shear) while the hull stays invulnerable. This is ideal for servers running AI that fire on helicopters: gunfire knocks out the rotors (costing lift and control) without ever destroying the airframe.Ruined Parts Fall Off
Whenfeatures.detachRuinedParts is enabled (a global toggle in mod_config.json — it moved out of the per-helicopter configs in v0.2.3), a door (or any attachment) that becomes ruined detaches and drops off the helicopter onto the ground, instead of sitting ruined in its slot. Default off.
Impact Damage
damage.contactCoef (0.05) and damage.crashThreshold (15.0) carry the same default on every airframe — the fleet is not pre-tuned for toughness. Both are still editable per variant in each helicopter’s JSON config if you want a specific aircraft to be tougher or more fragile.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 or cargo seat.
New in v0.4.0 — the mod now tracks ownership of the engine damage flag. It only switches damage back on if it was the one that switched it off (for example after you re-enable a zone on an all-zones-off helicopter). If another mod or an admin tool has disabled damage on a helicopter, CZ Autoz leaves that alone instead of fighting it.
Wreck Fire
When a helicopter is destroyed, it catches fire and burns for a configurable time — a flickering fire light plus a fire-damage area that hurts players standing too close. The fire is suppressed underwater, and a destroyed wreck will not re-ignite if shot again. Repairing a burning wreck extinguishes the fire immediately (v0.3.6) — Admin Panel or field repair alike — and a repaired helicopter can catch fire again properly if it is destroyed later.
Both keys live in the
damage.burn section of each helicopter’s JSON config, so burn time and area can be tuned per variant.
Setting
damage.burn.duration = 0 fully disables the wreck fire — no fire or smoke particle, no fire light, and no area damage. A destroyed helicopter simply becomes a static wreck.