DayZ Badlands: Everything We Know About the Expansion

Update, 15 October: Badlands and Update 1.30 are out. Bohemia's release post confirms "a full wipe across all platforms", and the Nasdara mission folder is dayzOffline.nasdara. Whether players need the DLC still isn't public. Our 1.30 and Badlands post has what changed on the day.

In the run-up to Badlands, every dev blog Bohemia dropped brought the same three questions into our ticket queue. Is it free? Will it wipe my server? Will my mod list survive it? Bohemia have now answered the first two, so here's what's been confirmed, what it means if you run a DayZ server, and where the real gaps still are.

DayZ Badlands launched on 15 October 2026. For most of the summer the date was only a month. Bohemia signed off Dev Blog 5 on 17 July with October, and said they'd confirm the exact date "later on down the line". They did on 27 August, with a Steam announcement titled "DayZ Badlands | Coming October 15, 2026", and repeated it on 31 August: "DayZ Badlands is coming to all platforms on October 15." It arrived on time, with Steam switching the game and the dedicated server to 1.30 shortly after 10:00 UTC.

The short version, before you scroll:

• Released: 15 October 2026, all platforms. Bohemia had confirmed the day on Steam on 27 August.
• Paid or free: paid, about $24.99 with regional pricing (Bohemia, 2 October), and 10% off at launch. Steam lists it as DLC against the base game, app ID 3816030.
• The map: Nasdara Province, 267 km², the biggest official DayZ terrain there's ever been.
• Version: it shipped with Update 1.30, and every DayZ server has to update to 1.30, whether or not you ever load Nasdara. Update 1.29 "Road to Badlands" had already landed on 15 July and already changed your loot.
• Wipe: Bohemia announced "a full wipe across all platforms" with 1.30.
• Code locks went official, and they arrived on every map rather than only the new one.
• The mission folder is dayzOffline.nasdara and came with the 1.30 server files. Whether hosts or players must own the DLC still isn't announced.

What Bohemia have actually confirmed

Nasdara Province is a land-locked chunk of Takistan on the western border with Ardistan, and at 267 km² it's the largest terrain the team's ever built. Not the Takistan from Arma 2 (they're clear about that) but a new one placed next door to Chernarus so the geography hangs together. Sparse vegetation in place of tall forest, deep valleys, big ridges, and settlements built mostly from mud, with the stone houses walled off behind tall boundary walls of the same stuff. Bohemia say it carries 400% more new custom assets than the whole Frostline expansion, and that road signs are bilingual, English and Farsi, because the population speaks Persian.

The climate is the mechanic here. It's the first spring season DayZ has had, and direct sunlight now pushes on your character stats, so you're managing exposure rather than only hydration. Deserts get cold at night too, so temperature swings hard both ways across a day. There's very little standing water either, which quietly kills the usual find-a-well-and-move-on loop. Goggles, dust masks, shemaghs and face wraps stop being cosmetic and start being kit.

Then there's the rebuilding system, which is the headline feature and the one I think will genuinely change how a server plays over a wipe cycle. Around 20 variants of wrecked house are scattered across Nasdara (over 5,000 of them all told) in two flavours: mud and stone. You clear the rubble, which itself yields materials, then rebuild with a new trowel tool and brick and mortar, or with the logs, planks and metal sheets you already know. It scales down as well as up. You can restore a three-storey building for a whole squad, or bolt a door and a window onto one room of a storage shack and call it a stash. Ordinary base building still works alongside it, so compounds aren't going anywhere, and broken wells can be repaired too.

And bikes. A moped and a dirt bike, the first two-wheeled vehicles DayZ's ever had. Dev Blog 7 on 11 September added the bit that matters if you're staying on Chernarus or Livonia: they aren't Nasdara-only. Bikes turn up on every map, in lower numbers. Bohemia's name for the dirt bike is the enduro, and both were rideable a month early: 1.30 went onto Experimental on 16 September with dedicated "Many Motorbikes" servers. Nasdara wasn't there, though. Bohemia held some of the expansion's assets back until release, so Experimental showed plenty of the bikes and the reworked infected and next to nothing of the new map.

The 22 September recap said every core feature was on track for 15 October, and it named a few we hadn't heard much about: sandstorms, radio signals in Morse code that lead you to underground shelters, and a new terrain-hole system for those underground facilities, which Bohemia say will also be open to other maps and to modders. The sandstorms and the Morse code bunkers are both in the release. That last one's worth keeping an eye on if you run a community map.

Is it paid DLC?

Yes. Bohemia put the price at "approximately $24.99" on 2 October, with regional pricing on top, and launched it at 10% off, about $22.50. Steam lists app 3816030 as DLC against DayZ itself, which puts it in the same bucket as Frostline.

What I can't tell you, and what people keep asking, is who needs to own it. For Sakhal, Bohemia were explicit in their Frostline release post: "access to servers running Sakhal requires a purchased copy of DayZ Frostline". They haven't said the same for Nasdara, so whether players need Badlands to join is still unconfirmed. Whether a server owner has to own it to run the terrain is a different question, and I couldn't find an official Bohemia answer for Badlands or for Frostline before it. If you're running a Nasdara community, treat both as open items and don't promise your Discord either way yet.

What a new map means if you run a server

Here's the mechanical part. DayZ picks its map from the mission folder, and every map is its own folder under mpmissions/ with its own economy files and its own persistence. Chernarus is dayzOffline.chernarusplus, Livonia is dayzOffline.enoch, Sakhal is dayzOffline.sakhal. Nasdara's is dayzOffline.nasdara, and it arrived with the 1.30 server update, next to the others.

The line that picks it up is the template line in serverDZ.cfg:

class Missions
{
    class DayZ
    {
        template = "dayzOffline.chernarusplus";
    };
};

On a LOW.MS server you don't hand-edit that line. The control panel has a Mission field under General on the Manage tab, and it rewrites serverDZ.cfg from that field on every start, so a hand edit wouldn't survive a restart anyway. Our map switching guide walks through it.

Two things follow. Because each map keeps its own persistence, standing Nasdara up doesn't touch your Chernarus save at all: different folder, different storage_1 inside it. And if you want both maps live, that's two servers, not one server with a switch on it.

Will 1.30 wipe you?

Officially, yes. Bohemia's release post says: "Update 1.30 will mark a fresh start for everyone, with a full wipe across all platforms." What it doesn't say is whether community servers have to follow, and that's the part still open.

It's worth splitting the question in two, because people mean different things by it. Adding the new map wipes nothing, for the reason above. Whether you reset your existing Chernarus or Livonia world is up to you for now. The last expansion is the nearest guide: when Frostline launched in October 2024, Bohemia "decided to wipe the official servers and recommend that community server owners do the same". So take a backup you can actually restore from before you decide either way. Our save location and upload guide covers which folders matter. On LOW.MS, Create backup on the Backups tab takes a copy of your world in one go.

The code lock is the one that'll bite modded servers

The official code lock runs on a charged 9V battery, unlocks itself when the battery dies, shrugs off damage while it's attached to a door, and has escalating brute-force protection so nobody can stand there guessing PINs all night. It's a thorough implementation, and Bohemia confirmed in their 31 July recap that it lands on every map, not only Nasdara.

That's the detail to sit with, because plenty of modded servers already run the community Code Lock mod. We recommend it ourselves in our DayZ mods and maps roundup. Nobody's said a word about how the official lock and the community one behave with both installed. I'd assume nothing, check the mod's Workshop page for a 1.30 note, and be ready to drop one of the two. Community maps need an update too: the 1.30 changelog says the navmesh file "is now on a newer version with no backwards compatibility", so a map such as Deer Isle isn't ready until its author ships a 1.30 build.

More broadly, 1.30's a major version, so expect most of your mod list to need an update. Bohemia said part of it out loud before release: the 16 September Experimental post warned modders they "might encounter problems with animation-related mods", because the animation systems were reworked for the motorbikes and for new infected attacks. If your list leans on anything that touches animations (DayZ-Expansion-Animations turns up on several of the servers we host), that's the first thing I'd check.

Your loot already changed, by the way

This one catches people out. Update 1.29 "Road to Badlands" went live on 15 July across all platforms, and alongside the new assets it pushed Central Economy changes into the live game. Guns and rifles are placed with more intent now, some weapons spawn exclusively around farms, vests and helmets are rarer, and NBC gear turns up outside the medical centres and fire stations it used to be confined to. Bohemia's stated aim is slowing the early game down and making that first loot run count.

It also brought Nasdara kit forward: the SCR-17 battle rifle, holo sights, tanker helmets, desert camo variants of the Combat Backpack and Plate Carrier Vest, and Nasdara military convoys spawning on Chernarus and Livonia. If your players have been asking why there are convoy wrecks that look wrong for Chernarus, that's why.

If you've tuned your economy hard, re-read your types.xml against the new baseline before you blame a mod for it. Our server configuration guide has the full file map.

What I'd do now

1. Back up first. Your world is the storage_1 folder inside your mission folder, which on a LOW.MS server lives in config/mpmissions. Create backup on the Backups tab copies it in one go. Not "there's a backup somewhere": restore it onto a second server once and walk to where a base should be.
2. Update the server. On LOW.MS it's Update on the Game updates card of the Overview tab. Your serverDZ.cfg runs with forceSameBuild = 1, so a server still on 1.29 turns away every player whose client is on 1.30. Press it even if the card says you're up to date, because the control panel only checks for new builds about once an hour.
3. Check your mods before you start. Update them on the Mods tab, starting with anything that touches animations, and look for a 1.30 build on the Workshop page of any community code lock mod or community map you run. Keep your mod list and versions written down somewhere that isn't the panel, so you can work out what broke.
4. Decide about the wipe. Bohemia wiped everything official. If you want your server to follow, stop it and delete the storage_1 folder inside your mission folder, after the backup.
5. Add Nasdara if you want it. Type dayzOffline.nasdara in the Mission field under General on the Manage tab, then restart. The server copies the mission into config/mpmissions on its first start and begins a new world there. If you've got an established Chernarus community with months of bases standing on it, I'd put Nasdara up on a second server alongside it rather than over the top.
6. Give your Discord a realistic window. How fast you're back up depends on your mod authors as much as on Bohemia, so don't promise a time until your mod list loads.

I'll come back and update this post as Bohemia fill the gaps in, and whether players need the DLC is the big one left. If you're already running DayZ with us and you'd like a hand planning the switch, or you just want someone to sanity-check a backup before you update, open a ticket and we'll go through it with you properly. New to this? Our DayZ servers are up now on Chernarus, Livonia and the community maps, and the getting started guide will have you running in about ten minutes.