DayZ Patch Notes — February 19, 2026
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
Hello Survivors! We hope you are having a great start to the year. We are happy to announce that update 1.29 is now re-entering the experimental phase on PC.
We reverted this update last year to further improve and focus on the stability of the build. The long delay was unprecedented for us in recent years, and we appreciate all your patience and support during this period. But now that update 1.29 is back in the experimental cycle, let’s jump into what you can expect. Here are some of the notable improvements, changes, and additions to the game:
Torso wear with color variants: Long Coat, Military Sweater, Gulag Jacket, and Pilot Jacket
Long Haul Backpack with variants
Animal headwear: Fox Hat and Bear Hat
New footwear: Traditional Boots and Cold Operation Boots
Extension to the bunker on Sakhal and an additional entrance into the bunker
Better blending of terrain surfaces across all maps
Audio overhaul for assault rifles and pistols
You can read more about this in the experimental release article we published last year, written by our creative lead, Adam.
We tackled the aspects of the game that cause performance issues, especially on high-population servers. The main problems were with how the game handled physics and player data; both were inefficient and heavy on performance. To fix these, we extended the experimental period to over two months. Thanks to our team and extensive, large-scale playtests, we identified key issues and implemented impactful optimizations that increased the servers' performance by 400%. In the beginning, servers under heavy stress tests were running at just 9 FPS. By the end, they reached 50 FPS (see the graphics below). You should now notice significantly less lag, fewer performance warnings, and smoother gameplay overall. If you’d like to learn more, check out this stream highlight with our programmer, Filip.
Rejoice, Modders! We have added significant updates to our modding tools, specifically to our animation editor, as well as many more changes and improvements for the modding community. One important thing to address is that with the release of 1.29, some of the changes we’ve made to the game will affect mods and framework mods. This means many of them may not function properly at first. We are in close contact with several mod owners, and there should be test versions of their mods available on the Steam Workshop that are compatible with the experimental version. For server owners, we highly recommend reviewing your dependencies and checking in with the respective mod authors. This experimental period will serve as a buffer for the PC modding community, giving everyone time to identify and address any issues with mod compatibility.
Once again, we must extend our apologies for the long delays, periods of silence, and changes to our plans in recent months. This level of unpredictability has been unprecedented for DayZ and for us in the past few years. It has served as a much-needed reality check as we address technical debt, upcoming platform support, and, most importantly, the game's stability. We will try to do better and to communicate better.
We love you and thank you for your continued support and infinite patience.
On behalf of the DayZ Team,
Lynn