Great advice, would add:

• Don't trust any humans not in your TS, most of us started friendly but a couple of weeks of being doublecrossed has made all of us killers just to avoid being doublecrossed
• Winchester is a loud zombie dinner bell too now that they rebalanced it
• Military garb zombies usually drop ammo
• Night time can actually be a good time to go into medium danger areas, as most people log off and NVG bandits are staking out the high value locations
• Before picking up a new backpack drop your old one somewhere close by that is flat, I've lost both backpacks when trying to swap them via inventory UI, maybe the recent right click UI fixed that but I don't know for sure
• Don't count on hiding in the grass from far away humans as the grass only draws in for close by people, from far away in the middle of a field you will be obvious without grass around you.
• If you finish killing some zombies and are injured, try to go somewhere defensive to heal if you can, bad humans are attracted to the shooting and will watch to see if the zombies get you and kill you while healing if you survived the zombies

I found a hatchet, what do I use it for? Cutting up cows?

Matches to cook cow meat?

*EDIT*

Hatchet is to get wood from trees. Combine with matches and you can make a fire. Use fire to cook meat. Get meat from dead animals if you have hunting knife.

Heh I wish we could chop zombies with it, helluva lot quieter than my usual Winchester or 1911, alas the hatchet is for chopping wood so you can make a fire, assuming you have matches.

Can I get firewood from any tree in the forest?

Do I need to cook the meat I get from animals?

I need a knife to butcher the animals?

Thanks!

Yes to all 3

You can kill the wildlife and stash the meat in your pack as long as you have a knife, i think meat is 800 blood ? as opposed to only 200 for tinned food. Then you just need wood and matches, but at least you can have steaks ready to go. Enough times i have run by animals because i did not have matches to cook it up..and then as soon as i do find a box, voila..not a damn rabbit to be seen for hours

one more tip, if you go bandit or want to kill some bandidos..

Place a tent in a not to obvious piece of ground (3m x 3m clear ground required) near Electro or Cherno, then stake it out in the forest line with a scoped rifle. Trust me , you will get bandits checking it out

Played on a server last night where the death notices were broadcast. So I guess that is one of the only global messages now.

That is welcome since that global chat really got spammed with all sorts of useless info. Like who connected or who disconnected. Now if rocket would lose that debug monitor or at least make it a toggle. That actually has some useful info on it.

Thanks for all the advice, most useful!

However I thought I should point out that this tip might not actually be correct. As far as I rememebr from Arma2 it doesnt matter if your graphics are turned down or that the grass isnt "painted" after a few metres, you still have a hidden value displayed, its just displayed as a flat green texture.

Though might be best test this out with a mate first just to be on the safe side