BZA BZA PaintMod lets you repaint weapons part by part, along with almost all of the clothing and armour you wear. It changes nothing else: no stats, no durability, no accuracy. A painted rifle shoots exactly like an unpainted one.
The short version. Find a Paint Kit in loot. Drag it onto the thing you want to paint and hold the Paint action. Pick a colour, press APPLY. Everything past that is progression: camo is learned from cans you find out in the world.
- Cost
- Free
- Charges per kit
- 2–4
- Camo combos
- 25
- Persistence
- Survives death
- Progression wipe
- Every 6 weeks
What a fresh character has
Worth knowing before you open the menu the first time, because the grids will look emptier than the screenshots on this site:
- Four colours — black, olive, forest green and brown. More arrive by grant rather than by loot: a promo code from Discord, and the founder colour five players will earn. Colours you do not hold are not drawn in the menu at all, so the grid you see is always the grid you can use.
- No patterns. A basic kit paints flat colour, and that is the whole of it. All five camo patterns arrive the moment you find your first Advanced Paint Kit — in one scheme, with the other twenty-five combinations left to collect.
1. Find a paint kit
Paint kits are world loot. They look like a tool case with a paint-splash label. There are two tiers and the difference matters a lot.
| Kit | Where it spawns | What it paints | Charges |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic Paint Kit grey case |
Industrial, towns, villages, farms and hunting spots. Common. | Any colour you hold, as a flat coat. No patterns. | 2–4 |
| Advanced Paint Kit olive military case with a red star |
Tier 3 and Tier 4 military zones. Rare. | Everything the basic kit does, plus the five camo patterns. Required for any camo. | 2–4 |
Both kits also drop at helicopter crash sites and military convoys.
Check the quantity bar before you plan a paint run. A full kit is four charges — one paint job spends 25% of it — but kits found as loot spawn part-used, anywhere from 50% to 100%. That is two to four jobs, not always four. Kits from paint caches come full.
The kit you combined with the item is the kit that gets used, and camo painting always spends an advanced kit, even if you are carrying a basic one too.
2. Paint something
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Combine the kit with the item
Drag the paint kit onto the item, or the item onto the kit. It works on things in your inventory, on your body, lying on the ground next to you, and in nearby tents.
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Hold the Paint action
Same as any crafting action — hold the key rather than tapping it. The painting menu opens.
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Choose
A colour grid, and — with an advanced kit — a row of camo buttons that swaps the grid for the schemes you have earned, plus a Small / Large size for the pattern. The preview on the right is the actual item, updating as you click.
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Press APPLY
The paint is on. It is visible to every other player immediately, and it is saved — it survives restarts, dropping the item, and your own death.
No kit yet? You can still browse. Take the item into your hands and press K — or press ESC and hit PAINT PREVIEW, which sits in the menu’s own list with EXIT, FEEDBACK and OPTIONS, just above CONTINUE. The same menu opens in preview mode — every colour and camo you hold, live on the item — but with no APPLY button. Painting for real still takes a kit.
The key is rebindable: Settings → Controls, look for Paint preview. K is just the default, picked because it is one of the two letters vanilla DayZ leaves unbound.
The two modes of the menu
A paint job is a flat colour or a camo scheme — there is nothing in between. The in-game label on the pattern row is Camo patterns — Advanced Paint Kit, and with a basic kit the row is not drawn at all.
3. Collect the camo combinations
Camo is the long game, and the only progression the mod has. Five patterns — Pixel, Thicket, Tiger, Blotch, Hex — each in fixed colour schemes.
- An Advanced Paint Kit gives you all five patterns immediately, but only in the UA Pixel scheme.
- Every other combination is taught by a Military Paint Can, and a can teaches exactly what is printed on it: one pattern in one scheme. Learning “Thicket in Autumn” does not give you “Tiger in Autumn”.
- Combine the can with a knife or a can opener and hold Open can. The can is consumed and the combination is yours for the rest of the wipe. Opening one you already know just consumes it and says ALREADY KNOWN — no penalty.
- Six schemes are obtainable: UA Pixel, Woodland, Autumn, Desert, Urban and Night. Five patterns × five earned schemes = 25 combinations to collect.
- Military Paint Cans spawn in Tier 3–4 military zones, at the airfield, and with a boosted rate inside contaminated gas zones. Bring an NBC suit.
4. Paint caches
Four fixed locations each roll a 35% chance every restart to hold a stash: three Military Paint Cans stacked up with an Advanced Paint Kit lying beside them.
Rify shipwreck
On and around the wreck, north-east coast.
Pavlovo bunker
The military bunker complex in the south-west.
Tisy military base
Far north-west. The hardest of the four to hold.
NWAF airfield
Runway and aprons — a wide area, worth a sweep.
The four spots above are the whole list. The gas is where loose Military Paint Cans drop most often, so an NBC suit in the tent keeps its point.
Restart warnings start at 01:00, 07:00, 13:00 and 19:00 CEST, and the server goes down about fifteen minutes later. Caches roll at restart, so the run is worth making early — and so is expecting company.
5. Promo codes
Colours outside the free four are granted, not looted. That happens through promo codes handed out in Discord during events and giveaways.
Sign in here with Steam
No separate password — Steam is the identity, and it is what tells us whose palette to add to.
Enter the code on your account page
The game server picks it up within a couple of minutes, and the colour is in your paint menu on your next connect.
Each code can be claimed once per account, and the colour it gives lasts until the next wipe — like every other colour on this server.
You have to be signed in to redeem a code. That is what tells us whose palette to add the colour to — there is nothing to type but the code itself. The button below opens your account page and asks you to sign in with Steam first if you are not already.
The founder race
The first five players to complete a full camo pattern
— all five earned schemes of any one of Pixel, Thicket, Tiger,
Blotch or Hex — earn the exclusive colour #A056F5
for the rest of the wipe.
Progression wipes every six weeks, and the colour goes with it: a wipe clears every colour on the server, the founder one included. The race then runs again from nothing, and the five slots are open to everybody.
The scheme that ships with the Advanced Paint Kit does not count towards the set — everybody has it. Standings are posted in Discord.
Good to know
- Paint is permanent. It survives server restarts, stays on items you drop, and stays on gear looted off a body — including yours.
- Density adapts to the item, and you get a say. The same pattern is packed tighter on a jacket than on a mask, so it reads at about the same size everywhere. On top of that the menu offers Small and Large — Large draws the same camo one step bigger, whatever the item.
- Your progression is per account and survives death. The camo combinations you have learned are tied to your Steam ID, not to your character. Dying costs you gear, not knowledge.
- Progression wipes with the server, every six weeks.
- Painting is server-side. The mod is public on the Workshop, but paint only applies on servers running our private server component.
Questions
Does painting give any advantage in a fight?
No, and that is deliberate. No stat, no durability and no hitbox changes. Ghillie gear and fur headdresses are excluded from painting on purpose, precisely so paint never becomes real camouflage you can buy or grind.
Do I have to buy anything?
No. Every kit, can, pattern and scheme described on this page is found in loot, and that never changes — camouflage is not sold here. A shop is coming, now that Bohemia has approved our programme, and it will hold two things: priority in the login queue, and the bright end of the palette, which makes you easier to see. Details on the monetisation page.
The Paint action does not appear on an item.
Either the item is excluded by design (pistols, shotguns, low-tier civilian guns, optics, ghillie, fur headdresses, leather moccasins), or the vanilla model has no paintable texture zone. This is a vanilla-only mod — we do not modify models to add one. The full list is here.
I lost my rifle. Do I lose the camo I learned?
No. Learned camo combinations belong to your account for the whole wipe. Only the paint on that particular rifle is gone — along with the rifle.
Can I use the mod on another server?
You can subscribe to it and it will load, but painting will not work: the component that validates and applies paint is private to this server.
Why can I not choose the colours of a camo pattern?
Because a scheme is a curated set of three or four tones that work together, the way real camouflage is designed. Free colour choice is what flat paint is for — any colour you hold, on any part you like, and no colour is restricted.