SurviveTh3Dead covers survival games — what is shipping, what changed in the last patch, and what it actually takes to run the servers people play on.
The site is not new. The domain has been in use since 2013, when it belonged to a set of Arma 2 DayZ mod servers. Those servers are gone. The forum that came with them never went down, and the writing here is a continuation of the same thing rather than a fresh start on a bought domain.
What we ran
Two Chernarus and Lingor servers on the Arma 2 DayZ mod, from 2013 until June 2022, and a short run of DayZ Standalone servers late in 2022. The addresses, the maps and the dates are on the servers page, copied from the site’s own front page as it stood before this one and left exactly as they were written.
We stopped on purpose. There was no shutdown, no lapsed domain, no final post. The group agreed in June 2022 that it had run its course, the boxes came down, and the site stayed up.
What this site is now
Two kinds of writing, and they are easy to tell apart.
The Lab is server and infrastructure work — building a game server, finding out why it will not start, and what it costs to keep running. Every number in those articles is measured on a real machine kept for the purpose, not taken from a hosting company’s marketing page. When an article says a DayZ server uses 4.8 GB of RAM with nobody on it, that is what the process reported on a clean Debian container, and the terminal output in the screenshots is the actual output of the actual run.
That is the whole editorial standard here: measured beats estimated, and nothing gets published as a real result unless it was really run.
The Signal is coverage of the wider survival genre — updates, releases and the arguments that follow them, sorted by the kind of game rather than by publisher.
The forum
The forum at /forum/ has been online since 2013. It is a quiet place and it is not pretending otherwise, but it has never been taken down and the old threads are still readable.
Who writes this
The site is run by one person: the one who ran the servers above from 2013 to 2022 and now runs the machine the Lab’s numbers are measured on. Posts go out under that byline, and the author page has who that is and everything published under it.
Getting in touch
Corrections are welcome and are the fastest way to improve anything here — if a number is wrong, say so and it gets fixed and noted. Contact.