0 and that helicopter cannot be damaged at all.
See Repair & Battery for how repairs work.
The Six Areas
Defaults
The helicopters on skids, and the player-built Barrel Helicopter, have chassis damage off by default. The other aircraft on wheels (Blackhawk, Merlin, both Chinooks, the Mi-24 and both Ospreys) have it on.
Switching the body area off also protects the helicopter’s overall condition — any hit that is not pinned to a specific area is turned away along with body hits.
What Stops A Bullet
Every aircraft in the table is plated to match the real thing. How far a bullet gets depends on the plating it meets first, using DayZ’s own figures for steel plate of that thickness. The UH-1H, Merlin and MH-47G keep the armour they had in v0.4.5 for now and are not in the table yet.
Doors are plated like the aircraft they fit. Windows, on the airframe and on the doors, break when they are hit and let the bullet carry on into the cabin, so the people inside can be hit through the glass. The one exception is the Mi-24’s armoured front windscreens, which stop most rounds, as on the real Hind.
Condition Levels And The Damage Panel
Each area passes through four states, shown as coloured lights on the in-cockpit damage panel:
The four airframe areas (body, engine, chassis, fuel) repair one level at a time, so a critically damaged area needs several repairs to bring it back. The two rotors do not: one repair puts a rotor back to full and clears a snapped blade. See Repair & Battery.
The panel names the two rotor lights after the aircraft: MROT and TROT (main and tail) on the single-rotor helicopters, FROT and RROT (front and rear) on the two Chinooks, and LROT and RROT (left and right) on the two Ospreys. The repair actions use the same names. A destroyed or snapped-off rotor shows red.
Visual Damage Stages
Damage shows on the aircraft. Every airframe wears five looks on its hull and tail, on every variant and livery:
The look follows the worse of the Body area and the aircraft’s overall condition, and the burnt look is kept for a genuinely destroyed aircraft — scorched paint always means dead. Doors and wheels wear their own condition separately from the airframe. The state is decided by the server and looks the same to everyone, so flying in from a distance, reconnecting, opening a door or repairing all show the right condition, and a repair cleans it up straight away.
Community retextures get all five looks automatically while keeping their own paint — see Retexturing.
Rotor Damage
Once every rotor on the aircraft is destroyed, the engine shuts itself down.Main rotor destroyed
Lift goes immediately and the aircraft falls. There is no recovery.Tail rotor destroyed
The aircraft starts spinning, and a downward push is applied on top. The spin is driven by the engine, like the real thing: shut the engine off and the spin stops — the genuine emergency drill is to cut the power and autorotate down. It also means a helicopter that has landed and shut down will not sit spinning on the spot while the rotor winds down. With the tail rotor gone, Auto Hover and the autopilot will not engage, and the engine will not start again until the tail rotor is repaired.
Out of the box each aircraft has its own figures: the small, light helicopters spin faster and are pushed down harder, the big ones spin more slowly. Both can be changed per variant in its JSON file. Raise
spinRate when you want a tail-rotor hit to be a genuine emergency; lower it to make it survivable. Only the helicopters with a tail rotor have this section. The Chinooks and the Ospreys have none, so their files leave it out: see On the Chinooks and On the Ospreys.
On the Chinooks
The MH-47G’s and CH-47D’s two rotor areas are their front (rotor1) and rear (rotor2) lifting rotors. Losing either one takes away about half the lift, the aircraft sinks at 2.5 m/s², and it pitches toward the lost rotor at up to 120° a second: the tail drops and the nose comes up if the rear one goes, the nose drops if the front one does. Those two rates are fixed on the Chinooks, whose files have no tailRotorFailure section. Lose both and it falls.
On the Ospreys
On both Ospreys the two rotor areas are the two proprotors, one on each wingtip, rather than a main and a tail rotor. Losing one does not bring it down: the other still flies it, lopsided and on half the thrust — in a hover it rolls hard toward the dead side, and at speed it rolls and yaws toward it. With both gone it still glides on its wing if it has speed; lose both in a hover and it falls. See CV-22B Osprey.Stopped rotors
A stopped rotor is not an invisible solid disc. Bullets pass between the blades and only hit the blades themselves, and on the ground you can walk under a parked rotor without hitting an invisible ceiling.Blades Snapping Off
Rotor blades can snap off when they hit something — trees, buildings, terrain:
From v0.4.7 a rotor counts as spinning — and can snap on a tree, a wall, the ground or water — once it is above about 30% of its speed, on the way up and on the way down (it used to be 50%). A knock only counts as a rotor strike when it lands inside that rotor’s disc. The airframe touching something — an Osprey’s nacelle or wingtip scraping, or the Mi-24’s tail skid touching down in a flare — is not a rotor strike.
The Spinning Rotor
Blade snapping and the rotor kill are global switches in the
rotor section of mod_config.json, not per-helicopter settings. Crew in seats, players walking in the cabin, players linked to the airframe and players getting in or out are all safe from the rotor. Getting out, you stay safe until the rotor has wound down and you have had a few seconds to step clear. Anyone just standing nearby is not protected.Lucky Engine Hits
A round that lands in the Engine area carries a 0.1% chance of destroying the aircraft outright — the same rare lucky hit a vanilla car engine has. Every other hit does normal damage to that area.Making A Helicopter Indestructible
Set all six values to0 in the damage.zones section of that helicopter’s JSON file:
Rotors Only
Leave only the rotors on and switch the rest off. The rotors can then be shot out — costing lift and control — while the hull cannot be destroyed. This suits servers running bots that shoot at aircraft: gunfire can force a helicopter down without ever blowing it up.Ruined Parts Falling Off
Withrepair.detachRuinedParts switched on (a global setting in mod_config.json), a door or other fitted part that becomes ruined drops off onto the ground instead of sitting ruined in its slot. Turn it on when you want battle damage to be visible on the ground; leave it off if you would rather players kept their parts.
Crash Damage
damage.contactCoef and damage.crashThreshold carry the same default on every aircraft — the fleet is not pre-tuned for toughness. Both can still be changed per variant if you want one aircraft tougher or more fragile than the rest.What counts as a crash. A hard impact needs a real jolt, and the bar is the same for light and heavy aircraft. A ramp resting on the ground, a gentle nudge or rolling over a kerb does no crash damage, and a rolling or sliding landing does not chip damage off as it slides. When a crash does happen, the hull damage scales fairly with the aircraft’s weight, so the heavies are no more fragile than the light helicopters. Parking with the wheels in shallow water does not drown the engine.
Crash and hard water-impact damage also reaches people walking in the cabin or standing on the airframe, not just those strapped into a seat.
The mod keeps track of whether it was the one that switched damage off on a helicopter. It only switches damage back on if it turned it off itself — so if another mod or an admin tool has made a helicopter invulnerable, CZ Autoz leaves that alone instead of fighting it.
Crash Explosions
New in v0.4.7. A helicopter that flies into something fast — the ground, a building, another vehicle — no longer just breaks: it blows up on the spot.- It happens when the helicopter hits at
damage.burn.explodeSpeedor more (50 knots by default), or drops onto the ground that fast. The helicopter itself has to be moving at nearly that speed, so a car driving into a parked helicopter, or a player walking into one, can never set it off. It never happens in water, in the first few seconds after a helicopter appears, or whendamage.heliCrashDamageEnabledis0for that helicopter - The blast is bigger with more fuel aboard — three sizes, by how full the tank is
- It hurts people nearby, most at the centre and less further out, within
damage.burn.explodeRadius(12 m by default, more for big aircraft and less for small ones). The crew and passengers are only hurt whendamage.playerCrashDamageEnabledis on, and never by more thancrew.playerCrashDamageMax - Shooting a helicopter never makes it explode, however much damage the engine takes — only a fast crash does
- The helicopter is destroyed, and its wreck fire starts straight away, already spreading across the aircraft. Everyone within about 1.5 km hears it, and players close by feel the shake
- With crew still in their seats, the rotor, engine and blade sounds fade out within a couple of seconds and the blades stop
- Each one is written to the activity log as
CRASH_EXPLOSION, with the speed, what it hit, the fuel left, the blast size and how many people were hurt
damage.burn.explodeSpeed to 0 to turn crash explosions off for that helicopter. Both settings are in the Wreck Fire group of the Admin Panel’s Heli Config tab.
Engine Fire
New in v0.4.8. A running engine can catch fire when it is badly damaged (below a quarter of its health, and more likely below a tenth) or running with no turbine oil. The crew get an ENGINE FIRE warning.- Pull fire handle puts it out. Anyone aboard can use it, from any seat or from the cabin. It shuts the engine down and empties the fire bottle, which is refilled when the engine is repaired with a repair kit (or by the Admin Panel’s Repair)
- Left alone, the fire burns the engine out in about 90 seconds, then spreads, and the helicopter is lost in about 4 minutes
- Landing in water deeper than about half a metre puts it out too
- Servers can switch engine fires off with
parts.engineFireEnabled = 0(see Global settings)
Wreck Fire
A destroyed helicopter catches fire and burns for a set time, with a flickering fire light and an area around it that hurts anyone standing too close. From v0.4.7 the fire follows the shape of the aircraft: it starts at the fuel tank and the engine, spreads along the body, nose and tail (and to both engines on the Ospreys), burns at its fiercest about a quarter of the way through, dies down and ends in embers, which no longer hurt anyone. Things cook off with pops and bangs while it burns, and the wreck blackens step by step as it goes. A wreck that has burnt out comes back from a server restart quiet and fully charred, with no fire. The fire does not start underwater, and a burnt-out wreck will not catch light again if it is shot. Repairing a burning wreck puts the fire out immediately — repair kit, virtual garage or Admin Panel alike — and a repaired helicopter can catch fire properly again if it is destroyed later. The engine smoke and the fuel-leak spray stop at the same moment, so a repaired aircraft is visibly clean straight away.
Both live in the
damage.burn section of each helicopter’s JSON file, so burn time and area can be set per variant. Set duration to 0 when burning wrecks are a nuisance on your server — with it at zero there is no fire, no smoke, no fire light and no area damage, and a destroyed helicopter simply sits there as a wreck. If you like the look of a burning wreck but not the damage, keep the fire and set radius to 0 instead. A negative radius is replaced with that helicopter’s default and reported in the server log.