DayZ has taken the gaming scene by storm, offering what many gamers have been eagerly calling out for in a zombie post-apocalyptic setting since the recent rise in popularity of titles such as Fallout and RAGE. Dean "Rocket" Hall and his team have worked together to create a world where the rules have been thrown out, and survival is the only thing on people's minds.

This guide will help you setup ARMA 2: Combined Operations and the DayZ mod without the need of any installers or special patches. If you have any trouble while installing simply drop a comment in the current DayZ thread on AusGamers. Please note that it is recommended that you have ARMA 2: Combined Operations, however you can use ARMA 2 Free and ARMA 2: Operation Arrowhead, for which there is a guide here on how to successfully get DayZ working..

Before we begin please make sure you've ran ARMA 2 and Operation Arrowhead at least once to go through the installation steps. After you have DayZ working you can then tweak the graphical and audio options to ensure a solid play-through.

DayZ installation guide:

Download the latest DayZ files here.

Extract the file and inside you should have 15 files with extensions .pbo and .bsign

Create a folder in your steamapps -> common -> Operation Arrowhead directory titled @DayZ

Inside the @DayZ folder create another folder titled Addons

Inside the Addons folder you just created, move the 15 files that you previously downloaded and extracted

Download the ARMA II Beta Patch here (I strive to have the most up-to-date beta patch so keep an eye on AusGamers files)

Once you've downloaded, extracted and installed the patch, we now have to ensure when you launch the game that it is running the beta version of ARMA 2: OA.

Locate the Operation Arrowhead folder again, and you should see a file called _runA2CO_beta

Right click the file and create a shortcut, calling it whatever you would like, I called mine DayZ

Right click the shortcut and choose the "edit" option

Now scroll down to the bottom of the notepad file, and you'll see :run and then a line below ending in %9

Select from :run all the way to %9 and past it over with this code here

And that is it! Just run the shortcut and it will automagically run the game for you and you should see in the main menu on the right hand side "Expansion @DayZ". If you don't, make sure you haven't missed a step.

If you are interested in wanting to run DayZ through Steam, there is also a guide over here that will guide you through the process.