You've come out of a sandstorm coughing, your vision keeps blurring and fading, and nothing in your inventory seems to fix it. Or you're two hours into Nasdara, drinking constantly, and your character is throwing up anyway. Badlands added two new conditions to DayZ, heatstroke and silicosis, plus sand in your eyes and some very tempting water underground, and Bohemia's launch material says what they are but not much about how to get rid of them.
Everything below comes from Bohemia's own posts or from the 1.30 game scripts Bohemia publishes, which spell out exactly what each condition does. Those scripts are from the 1.30 experimental build in September, so the stable build that launched today may have small tweaks. Where the game doesn't offer a cure, I'll say so rather than guess.
Why Nasdara makes you ill
Bohemia's release post puts it plainly: "Danger is always in the air in Nasdara, from overexposure to the ever-present sun to gusts of wind that can build into large sandstorms." It names "the new medical threats: heatstroke and silicosis", and warns that scarce water makes both harder to manage, because you need it to drink and also "to cool down and rinse sand from your eyes after getting caught in a sandstorm."
Its earlier dev blog on Nasdara's hazards adds the rest. Direct sunlight now affects your character's stats, so covering up and staying in the shade matter alongside drinking. Glasses, goggles, shemaghs, dust masks and face wraps are "functional and essential", because "you never know when a breeze of dust can turn into something sinister." And if you can't find water, you "will suffer increasing consequences, starting with sweating and ending with death."
That gives you four separate problems, and they don't share a cure.
Heatstroke: what causes it
Heatstroke isn't an infection, which is why antibiotics do nothing for it. In the 1.30 scripts it's driven by a hidden build-up of heat that rises while your character is overheating and falls once you cool down. Your temperature indicator is the warning light, and how much you've drunk decides what happens next. While the indicator is only in the warm (yellow) range, a well-watered character doesn't build heat at all, and a half-watered one tops out at the first stage. Short of water, or once the indicator goes red, it climbs regardless.
Heatstroke has four stages, and each one stacks on the last:
- First stage: nothing you'll notice on its own. You're already sweating water away in the heat, and that's your cue to act.
- Second stage: blurred vision, worse stamina, and the odd overheating animation or sound from your character.
- Third stage: vomiting, which costs you water and food you can't spare and drains your stamina for a while afterwards.
- Fourth stage: your vision fades in and out, you lose health, and you pass out for short spells.
Don't bother hunting for a thermometer to check. It only reports a fever, and heatstroke doesn't register on it.
How to cure heatstroke
There's no pill for this one. You bring it down by cooling off and drinking, and the scripts reward both:
- Get out of the heat. Shade, a building, or swapping heavy gear for the lighter, looser clothing Bohemia designed for Nasdara. Once your temperature indicator drops out of the hot range, the build-up drains away on its own, but slowly: from the fainting stage it takes a long time, so don't rely on waiting alone.
- Drink, and keep drinking while you cool down. Being hot and short of water is what drives it up quickest.
- Use Wash face at a well or any body of water, or with a bottle of water in your hands. One wash knocks the heat build-up down by about as much as half an hour of waiting in the shade, and wets your clothes, mostly around your face and head. It then freezes the build-up for about 30 seconds, so it can't rise, but more washing won't lower it either. Wash once, give it 30 seconds, then wash again.
- Use Wet clothing on a piece of clothing in your hands while you're at a well or the water's edge. Soaking it there lowers the build-up as well, outside that 30-second window.
If you're already at the fainting stage, get under cover first and drink second. Passing out in the open sun is how this goes from annoying to fatal.
Silicosis and sandstorms
Silicosis is the sandstorm illness. While a storm is on top of you, the game feeds silicosis into your lungs and grit into your eyes at a rate that depends on how strong the storm is where your head is.
Shelter is what stops it, and the scripts are fairly strict about what counts:
- Inside a building: the game checks that you're both under a roof and inside the building's interior. A porch, a carport or a ruin with no walls may not be enough.
- Underground: bunkers and tunnels shut the storm out as you go down.
- Inside a car: sitting in one fades the storm out too. A motorbike doesn't count, no matter how fast you ride.
Out in the open, a mask or face wrap with dust protection cuts how much you breathe in and how hard you cough, and glasses or goggles protect your eyes. How much each item helps depends on a per-item value I couldn't read, so I'd treat the best face covering you own as a way to buy time until we know better, not a reason to stay out.
The symptoms: coughing while you're in the storm, then heavy breathing as silicosis builds. Further in, your stamina gets worse, you start losing health if you're still breathing dust, and at the worst your vision fades and you pass out.
How to cure silicosis
This is the one launch-day threads keep asking about, and the honest answer is that there's no medicine. Antibiotics don't touch it, and I couldn't find anything in the 1.30 scripts that treats it directly.
What clears it is your own body. Once you're out of the dust, silicosis fades by itself, but only while your immune system is in reasonable shape. DayZ works out immunity from your health, blood, food and water, so a well-fed, hydrated character recovers and a starving, half-dead one stays stuck where they are. It also doesn't fade while you're unconscious.
So the practical cure is: get to shelter, eat, drink, patch up, and wait. Vitamins help here, because they push your immunity to the top tier for five minutes, which is enough to get recovery going if you're in a bad way.
Sand in your eyes
Bohemia's line about needing water to "rinse sand from your eyes" is a separate condition from silicosis. Your character squints in the storm, and as grit builds up the game lays an eye-irritation effect over your screen (its own files call it "eye veins").
The fix is Wash face again. At a well or a pond each wash halves the irritation, so two or three clear it. A bottle works too, but each wash clears only a sliver, so it takes many times longer. The irritation also wears off on its own once you're out of the sand, under the same "be in decent health" rule as silicosis.
Why the tunnel water made you sick
Nasdara's irrigation tunnels are one of its headline features, and Bohemia's release post lists them next to wells as structures you can rebuild. What it doesn't say is whether the water inside them is safe.
The scripts are clearer. When you drink straight from a water surface, the game checks what kind of water it is. Water from wells is safe. Any other surface water you drink by hand adds cholera to what you've just drunk, every time. So if you drank from standing water in a tunnel rather than a well, cholera is the most likely culprit. I haven't been able to confirm from Bohemia's files which water type the tunnels use, so treat that as an educated reading of the code, not gospel. And if you were throwing up despite drinking plenty, check your temperature too: heatstroke's third stage causes vomiting as well.
Cholera symptoms: fever and blurred vision, losing water quickly, and repeated vomiting that drains your water and food.
The cure: tetracycline antibiotics. Cholera has no resistance to them in the 1.30 scripts. Vitamins help your body fight it too.
Prevention: drink from wells, or fill a bottle and drop in purification tablets before you drink from anything else. In the game's recipe, purification tablets remove everything from the water except heavy metals.
Running your own Nasdara server
If you host a community server, sandstorms are the one part of this you can tune without mods. The Nasdara mission's cfggameplay.json already has a SandstormData block near the bottom, and the 1.30 scripts read its sandstormFrequency value as a multiplier: 0 means no sandstorms at all, 0.5 makes them half as likely, 1.0 is normal (the default) and 2.0 doubles them.
"SandstormData":
{
"sandstormFrequency": 0.5
}
The game only reads that file while enableCfgGameplayFile is on in serverDZ.cfg, so add enableCfgGameplayFile = 1; there to be sure, then restart.
There's no heatstroke or silicosis setting in cfggameplay.json; those rules live in the scripts. The closest lever is environmentMaxTemps in the same file, twelve monthly maximum air temperatures that the Nasdara scripts read, so lowering them should make overheating less likely. I haven't tested how much difference it makes.
Tip: On a LOW.MS server both files are on the Files tab of the control panel. The Nasdara folder appears once your server has started on Nasdara at least once, and our guide to switching your server to Nasdara covers that part. Then open cfggameplay.json inside config/mpmissions/dayzOffline.nasdara and change the number in the SandstormData block that's already there, rather than pasting in a second one. The editor doesn't check JSON, so a missing comma or bracket can stop the file loading. Put the enableCfgGameplayFile line under Your additions when you open config/serverDZ.cfg, because the panel rewrites the rest of that file on every start, and if there's already an enableCfgGameplayFile line there, change it instead of adding another.
If you haven't got a server yet, DayZ server hosting with us comes with the control panel, backups and Workshop mods. For everything else that changed on launch day, our Update 1.30 and Badlands breakdown has the full list, and our server configuration guide explains the other files in a mission folder.
FAQ
Does a gas mask stop silicosis?
I couldn't confirm it. The scripts check each mask for a dust protection value, but those values ship packed inside the game's data files, and I couldn't read them. Bohemia's own advice names face wraps, shemaghs and dust masks.
Why did I get sick sheltering indoors?
Most likely the building didn't count as shelter. The game needs you under a roof and inside the interior at the same time, so a half-open ruin can leave you exposed. If you'd been drinking from a tunnel or pond, it could also be cholera rather than silicosis.
Are sandstorms on every map?
Bohemia only describes them on Nasdara, and of the four official missions that ship with the 1.30 server (Chernarus, Livonia, Sakhal and Nasdara), only Nasdara's cfggameplay.json has a SandstormData block. The sandstorm weather itself is scripted only into Nasdara, so adding the block to another map won't create them.
Sources: Bohemia Interactive's DayZ Badlands release post (15 October 2026), Dev Blog (Week 67) on Nasdara's environmental hazards, Bohemia's published 1.30 experimental script source (build 1.30.164014), and the 1.30 scripts and Nasdara mission files that ship with the DayZ dedicated server (Steam app 223350), read on 15 October 2026.