Settings

In *DayZ*, there are four categories of **Settings** accessible from the game's menus. Here, we will cover settings for gameplay, audio, and video. You can find information about the game's controls in a separate article.

## Game

* **Language** - Changes the language used for the game interface.
* **Update in Background** - There is currently 3 available options: None - prevents game for updating its graphics and sounds while running in the background; Graphics - prevents game for updating its sounds, but allows updating graphics while running in the background; Graphics and sound - doesn't prevents game for updating anything, while running in the background, user can hear in-game sounds and makes graphics always up-to-date.
* **Bleeding indication** - As it's name implies, this makes blood splatter appear on players screen while getting bleed.
* **Connectivity warnings** - This option makes special icons appear on users screen if server or player having troubles with connection/or server is under heavy strain.
* **Field of View** - Changes the resting (default) field of view.
* **Show HUD** - If enabled, player can see character status icons (stamina, hunger, thirst etc.) at all times. If disabled, player can see all icons only while the inventory menu is opened.
* **HUD Brightness** - Slider box for changing the transparency/brightness of all HUD elements.
* **Show crosshair** - As it's name implies, turn on/off in-game crosshair (note: some servers have crosshair disabled, as server-side option that affects all players in this particular server).
* **Show quickbar** - Shows or hides quickbar during gameplay. If disabled, quickbar will only while inventory menu is opened.
* **Show server info** - This option shows or hides server information (server name, IP-address) in game menu.
* **Game messages** - Global chat visible to all players, used for general in-game messages.
* **Admin messages** - Globat chat visible to all players, used by server administrators.
* **Player messages** - Local chat, visibility depends on reach of direct, radio or public address system communication channels.

## Sound

* **Master volume** - Changes the volume level for every noise made in-game. This includes ambient sounds, weather, animals, zombies, gunfire, voice etc.
* **Effects volume** - Changes the volume level for every noise made in-game, but excludes volume of voice chat.
* **Music volume** - Changes the volume level for every music in the game.
* **Voice volume** - Changes the volume level for in-game voice chat (VOIP).
* **Input mode** - Changes in-game voice communication mode. There is two options available: First - push-to-talk button option; Second - by voice activation.
* **Activation threshold** - Slider box that changes threshold of voice activation in-game.

## Video

### Overall quality

This is the first thing you'll see when looking at the Video settings and is used for making high-level changes to your graphics.

* **Overall Quality** - Changing this will adjust all other settings to fit preset levels (from Low setting up to Extreme). Making changes below will reset current preset level to "Custom"

### Screen

* **Display mode** - The fullscreen mode makes the game to cover whole display in exclusive access. In the windowed mode, the game behaves like typical window application with borders but without exclusive access. Using the windowed mode with highest resolution available to you results in a fullscreen borderless window.
* **Resolution** - Sets the game resolution. Available resolutions are derived from display-native resolution and its aspect-ratio.
* **Brightness** - This will exaggerate all existing colors towards either dark or light extremes in a uniform manner, including black and white. This brightens and dims everything on your display.
* **V-Sync** - Short for the term "vertical sync." By enabling this setting, the game does its best to match the framerate (FPS) to the refresh rate of your monitor (i.e. 60Hz). This can mean a perceived reduction in performance, but the idea is to eliminate visual artifacts from your display. This setting will only potentially affect screenshots which include a moving subject or those which are taken while you are on the move.

### Scene complexity

Changes made to this group affect how terrain, textures, shadows and objects are rendered.

* **Object detail** - Changes the level of detail (LOD) for things like buildings, trees, etc.
* **Terrain detail** - Alters the level of detail (LOD) for terrain, also affects render distance of grass (Note: this setting is forced to all players by server configuration setting in multiplayer).
* **Texture detail** - This is a master setting to change the mipmaps on all textures. This will mostly affect the clarity of textures up close.
* **Shadow detail** - Adjusts the level of detail (LOD) and render distance for shadows.

### Rendering

The most advanced settings available in-menu, these are for tweaking the various visual "tricks" employed by the renderer for smoothness, color, etc.

* **Texture Filtering** - Brings clarity to textures (especially ground textures) which are viewed at an angle. Where a given pixel on a texture (2D) doesn't correspond neatly to a pixel on a model (3D), this samples the pixels around it to determine color much like antialiasing. Filtering primarily affects how you view things at a distance.
* **Terrain Surface Detail** - The amount of details for the surface on the ground, "Low" setting is just a texture with leaf and grass, from "Medium" to "Extreme", these will have a own geometry and poligons (Parallax-mapping).
* **Postprocess Antialiasing** - A different kind of antialiasing: FXAA or SMAA. This is an edge smoothing technique applied after the game is rendered, rather than before like MSAA. FXAA will give you blur around the edge and with a lower quality, SMAA will not give you blur effect and have better quality.

* **Hardware Antialiasing** - Refers to a specific kind of antialiasing: MSAA. Smooths jagged edges by supersampling nearby pixels, but ignores most large surfaces to minimize performance loss.
* **Foliage Smoothing** - Edge smoothing of foliage using ATOC technique.
* **Ambient Occlusion** - This attempts to simulate the effect of ambient light on objects for more advanced shading, resulting in softer shadows.
* **Postprocess Quality** - A master setting that effects several others, such as bloom and AO. This adds a softer tone to the entire display and also allows for effects of rain, god rays and bokeh.
* **Water reflections** - The overall quality of water reflections (SSR).

## See Also

* User Interface
* Server Browser
* Game Controls