Greetings, Survivors!
The first milestone of the new year is here - the experimental release of game update 1.27! As with previous first-of-the-year updates, the focus is primarily on the stability of the build, as well as various internal tools and processes that will help us prepare for the rest of the year. Considering the scale of our previous update, however, we couldn't leave things totally untouched. So we made a few changes and additions based on our data and your feedback.
Here are some of the improvements we made to DayZ Frostline:

• We reinforced the eastern coast with more places to loot. Aniva city has been expanded, Baikovo hamlet has been turned into a village, and other smaller locations have been added along the eastern coast.
  
• The main island of Sakhal has been populated with more new snowy variants of broken down houses, which offer loot opportunities in the wilderness.
  
• Navigation between the vast sea ice plains has been simplified thanks to the addition of buoys and small military outposts which can be found on small islands, primarily around the island of Burukan.
  
• A minor deforestation pass was conducted on Burukan island in order to make the area a bit more dangerous to move around in.
  
• New static outdoor thermometers were added to Sakhal; curious players can now understand why their characters are freezing, even when the weather appears sunny and warm.
  
• Lastly, we added a major point of interest on the southern island of Shantar, and coupled it with a simple game mechanic as well.

If you’re a fan of the changes we made to bandaging (i.e. the ability to bandage multiple bleeds with the single hold of a button), then you’ll be happy to hear that we have implemented the continuous factor to more actions, such as repairing. Domestic animals like cows, goats, and sheep are now more likely to run away than before. Speaking of animals, we also looked at your feedback on fishing and decided to make an additional balancing pass. Fishing takes longer and is less effective now with incomplete fishing tools.

We also took a look at the mechanics behind bloody hands and food poisoning while cutting up freshly obtained fish. Bloody hands will now result in different diseases depending on which animal was processed. For example, bloody hands from fish will almost always give food poisoning now, and not salmonella as before. It’s still highly recommended to wash your hands before eating, though some animals aren't as dangerous as before. Meanwhile, food poisoning has been reworked to reflect different types and quantities of food more accurately. It will no longer decay on its own. Rather, it will now disappear slowly as a player battles its symptoms.

One of the things we anticipated when we added boats to the game was that they would be left in places that are hardly accessible without the use of another boat. To make sure new boats continue being spawned, we implemented a boat decay mechanic, which is fully configurable on the server-side as well. Furthermore, as a follow-up to update 1.26’s inventory cargo size reduction pass, we decided to increase your ability to carry a bit more with the addition of new tool slots to most backpacks. We also generalized the glowstick and radio slot, which now accept both, as well as more items!

The audio side of the game received a lot of attention as well:

• We heard your feedback regarding the boat audio and overhauled the audibility from both close-up and far points of view.
  
• We balanced the audibility of character footsteps by boosting the middle range so they would be more audible and not get lost in the mix of the environment’s sounds. Some surfaces (like forests) now have the additional sound effect of stepping on clutter.
  
• Adding to the intensity of your survival struggles, you can now hear your character’s teeth chattering while they’re cold.
  
• Bullet cracks were reworked and all submachine guns had their shot and tail sounds updated.
  
• Sakhal also received a number of tweaks to environment sounds. An example of this would be the fact that when a character walks through an evergreen tree (with branches on the ground), it will make a sound. We believe this is going to be a healthy change to PvP interactions, particularly on Sakhal where these trees are plentiful.

We also focused on various particle effects. There are Sakhal-specific ones, like snow falling off trees when interacting with them, as well as one for explosions on snow. Considering our recent focus on the cold weather, we couldn’t help changing the breath vapor effect, so we completely reworked it. That led us to updating vomit and bleeding effects. Finally, a number of our firearms received brand new particles. We’re certainly not done working on firearms and hope to make more changes in the future.

Last but not least, for anyone who’s ever tried to re-texture a certain vanilla item and found that some just do not work: we updated a large number of our assets to support re-texturing using configs. If you find any more issues with this, or with anything else mentioned in this article (or in our usual forum change notes), please report your findings to our feedback tracker. You can do so easily by using the feedback tracker link implemented in the game menus.
You can find the change logs here[forums.dayz.com]!

Thank you and see you on Sakhal!
On behalf of the DayZ team,
Adam