Update: BattlEye has been temporarily disabled while they address some issues with its implementation.

Along with today's H1Z1 update comes a little present in the form of anti-cheat.

Traces of this first appeared on the Test Server along with a small hotfix an hour after the main patch and wipe on the 15th December, we decided not to report anything about this in the hopes of it being silently enabled to catch cheaters unaware. However after another hotfix to to the Test Server on 19th December the service was enabled and shown on startup of the game.

With today's patch the anti-cheat is introduced to the main game, we can hope that this will have a great effect on the current state of cheating in the game.

We have checked on some popular cheat websites and the discussions regarding this addition are encouraging with quotes like this:
 

99% of everyone who reads this will not be able to cheat when Battleye does become implemented.

Battleye will detect everything, it has a sig for. Hooks, ESP, Aimbot, Cheatengine, CrySearch, OllyDBG, IDA, Reclass etc Bastian has like 35+ default global siganures.

You cannot use any cheat without a driver made by yourself. It is that simple you cannot. [...] Doesn't matter what, it is detected without a driver.

 While no measures will 100% stop all cheating in games, BattlEye seems to be one of the more effective solutions and may be even more successful in H1Z1 than it is in DayZ due to the closed nature of servers. But only time will tell and we will not get a clear picture for a few days or even weeks as the cheat developers attempt to work on new versions.

If you would like to learn more about BattlEye you can check out their website at BattlEye.com 

Servers will be coming down at 3AM PST (12/22) for approximately 2 hours. Battle Royale servers will lock at 2AM PST

Version 0.148.1.70372, Steam Content BuildID 909309

Patch Notes:

• Military Base and Hospita items now respawning
• Fixed the Craft Max bug
• Skinning timers are now all the same
• Changes made to allow skinning of various helmets and motorcycle helmets that couldn’t be skinned previously.
• Added armor to holiday helmets with correct durability.
• Rendering fix for ghillie suit leaf edges and hair shadows.
• Fixed issue when you have a Ground Tamper -> Wooden Deck base, you could not place ground-placed objects (such as furnaces) on the deck
• Fixed issue that would cause Loot Caches to seem unresponsive or provide incorrect prompt.

Source: Reddit r/H1Z1

The Live servers will be down starting at 3AM PST for approximately 2 1/2 hours. Battle Royale Servers will lock an hour before starting at 2AM PST. Because of the new base permissions and the changes to the military base this update will include a full character and world wipe.

Patch Notes:

Holiday Event

• While in survival, seek out the naughty or nice zombies to get a special holiday gift. These zombies are particularly resilient to certain damage types.
• While playing BR, keep your eyes to the sky and watch for those airdrop crates to retrieve your holiday goodies.

3 new traps for survival

One time use. Can be placed anywhere objects can normally be placed

• Fire: instant and fast dot damage
• Flash: Blind and disorient
• Gas: Snare and slow dot damage

New body sim stat called Comfort

Consuming various foods and drinks or sitting by a fire will increase your comfort level. Suffering attacks from zombies, bears, and wolves will cause your comfort to go down. The higher your comfort level, the faster you regenerate health and stamina

Foundation permissions:

Added the ability to give each foundation a separate set of permissions for construction, destruction, and container access on a per player basis.

Military Base revamp.

New buildings have been placed, vehicles and zombies spawns are now there. The item spawners have also been revamped and you should now find more items that pertain to what you would expect to find in a military base. Such as, explosives, MREs, and Rifles.

Additional Updates

• New Crate
• New Character Select screen with new Player Characters to choose from
• The spawn rate of guns and ammo has been adjusted. Weapons and ammunition should be more scarce than before.
• Vehicles in regular BR (not team) have been set to single occupancy

Other Fixes

• Fixed half-second pause when bringing up inventory
• Zombies will attack exposed players on ATVs and in the back of the Pickup Truck
• Rearranged vitals overlay to match how vitals are listed in inventory
• Fixed spurious attacks when the player is repeatedly using the Push special ability.
• Fixed bad raycast that was associating items placed under a structure with the structure above the items.
• Fix for Ground Tillers that have been placed on Ground Tampers
• Fix object "previews" being left behind during construction for very quickly-placed objects.
• Added build permissions to the Ground Tamper
• ARs disappearing in gas clouds fixed
• Pixel Hoodie is now exchangeable
• Fix for build permissions being inconsistent
• Fix for item spawning oddities
• Added check to allow building safely on deck expansions
• Fix for UI button not responding in build permissions menu
• We know of the "Craft Max" bug and will address it soon. We didn't want it to gate this upcoming patch.
• The H1Z1 Showdown Shirt grant will not be a part of this publish. It will happen as soon as possible but not a part of this update.

Source: Reddit r/H1Z1

Along with the holiday items and other content we also see the addition of a new crate which you can see detailed below.

The following items were also added to the game files but are not in the crate above. We may see these are new rewards in game modes or in a future crate.

On top of that the following icon image was also added, but as always icon images can mean nothing, we've seen an orange version of this same AK over a month ago but that also is not in game.

Hi all,

First, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Garrett Fern, or bronstahd, and I’m a Game Designer at Daybreak. My primary responsibilities include combat mechanics, game economy and item spawning, and improvements/added features for base building. Today I’m here to talk about upcoming changes to the spawning of items in Survival mode in H1Z1 (note: these changes aren’t being made in Battle Royale).

Why are we changing things?

It’s currently possible to acquire and keep a large amount of resources. While some amount of resource accrual is good, and is in fact important to creating a sense of accomplishment in the game, too much accrual can become a problem. In particular, this can become problematic with survival items (items like food, water, guns, and ammo) because survival can become too easy if these items are readily available to acquire and hoard. Item scarcity helps create a sense of tension, and the need to scavenge should be a big part of survival. We believe many survival items are currently too common in H1Z1 and this change is intended to begin improving the position of those items within the game’s economy and, by extension, survival as a whole.

What is changing?

Our initial adjustment is focused on reducing the amount of guns and ammo that are spawned in the world. Because we understand that there’s no silver bullet for reigning in the game’s economy, this will be a measurable but conservative adjustment. We’re playing it safe, because we don’t want to break the game as we try to fix it, but we need to start making impactful changes. The initial adjustment will be to reduce the spawning of guns and ammo by 30%. This sounds like a big number but, as I will discuss below, we have robust data on the spawning of items which was used to arrive at this number.

Why guns and ammo?

The main reasons are that our ultimate goal is the improvement of H1Z1’s survival game mode and that spawning the right amount guns and ammo is absolutely critical to the enjoyableness of survival. It’s something we have to nail, so it became a logical starting point.

Another important reason we chose to start with guns and ammo is that we have great data on the spawning, looting, and use of guns and ammo. We’re able to look not just at individual items on individual servers for individual days, but aggregate data across multiple servers and multiple days. Being able to say, definitively, that over the last 5 days an average of 524 Hunting Rifles spawned, 280 of which were looted, per day on servers with an active population is incredibly empowering when making a change like this because it allows us to anticipate the outcome and reasonably predict its impact. We’re able to say, with relative surety, that what we’re planning won’t break the game because we have a pretty good idea of what will happen.

What’s next?

Having good data doesn’t just help us plan; it helps us analyze the outcome. Once this change goes live we’ll be able compare data from before and after the adjustment to see how far our adjustments impacted the game and determine whether we moved too little, too much, or just enough in the direction we were hoping to go. This analysis, along with player feedback, will inform our next steps, so it’s premature to talk about specifics right now, but it’s the biggest reason we’re taking the steps we are. In the past, we’ve seen the benefit of basing changes on factual data rather than instinct and intuition. It’s not just about this change, which is important; almost more important is how much we’ll learn about the game through this analytical, data-driven design philosophy and how that will allow us to make better, more reasoned choices as we continue improving survival in H1Z1.

Source: h1z1.com

The Test Server has been updated with a quite substantially sized patch coming in at around 2.7GB, the reason for the large size is due to changes to the terrain for the military camp, you can read the patch notes here.

This update sees the introduction of booby traps, revamped military base, new character select screen and base permissions.

The patch also comes with christmas event content which works exactly the same as the Halloween event, there will be christmas themed zombies to kill which will either be naughty or nice, naughty will simply give you an in game item version of the holiday hat while the nice one will award you the permenant skin version.

Additionally in Battle Royale airdrop crates will be the antlers helmet. You can see both of these detailed below.

You can check out the new crate and item here, moved to its own article because this one got a bit long.

The Test Server is currently undergoing an update to include the following:

Client Version 0.139.1.69551, Steam Content BuildID 900434

Holiday Event

• While in survival, seek out the naughty or nice zombies to get a special holiday gift. These zombies are particularly resilient to certain damage types.
• While playing BR, keep your eyes to the sky and watch for those airdrop crates to retrieve your holiday goodies.

3 new traps for survival

One time use. Can be placed anywhere objects can normally be placed

• Fire: instant and fast dot damage
• Flash: Blind and disorient
• Gas: Snare and slow dot damage

New body sim stat called Comfort

Consuming various foods and drinks or sitting by a fire will increase your comfort level. Suffering attacks from zombies, bears, and wolves will cause your comfort to go down. The higher your comfort level, the faster you regenerate health and stamina

Foundation permissions:

Added the ability to give each foundation a separate set of permissions for construction, destruction, and container access on a per player basis. We are currently aware that destruction permission for the demolition hammer is not functioning correctly on the TEST server. This will be addressed before this feature goes to LIVE.

Military Base revamp.

New buildings have been placed, vehicles and zombies spawns are now there. The item spawners have also been revamped and you should now find more items that pertain to what you would expect to find in a military base. Such as, explosives, MREs, and Rifles.

Additional Updates

• New Character Select screen with new Player Characters to choose from
• The spawn rate of guns and ammo has been adjusted. Weapons and ammunition should be more scarce than before (a dev blog explaining this further will come out later today or tomorrow.)
• Vehicles in regular BR (not team) have been set to single occupancy

Other Fixes

• Fixed half-second pause when bringing up inventory
• Zombies will attack exposed players on ATVs and in the back of the Pickup Truck
• Rearranged vitals overlay to match how vitals are listed in inventory
• Fixed spurious attacks when the player is repeatedly using the Push special ability.
• Fixed bad raycast that was associating items placed under a structure with the structure above the items.
• Fix for Ground Tillers that have been placed on Ground Tampers
• Fix object "previews" being left behind during construction for very quickly-placed objects.
• Because of the new base permissions and the changes to the military base this update will include a full character and world wipe.

Source: Reddit r/H1Z1

Came in on Saturday to finish this revamp. Gonna have better item spawns as well. Coming next game update patch. pic.twitter.com/4TWp98wIfL

— Adam Clegg (@Arclegger) December 6, 2015

click on images for high resolution versions

From the looks of the above screenshots there also appears to be at least three Offroader and two Pickuptruck spawns placed too.

Adam Clegg has been working on fixing the bug at the Military Camp that allows players to place gates on the tent foundations, while he is there he has taken the opportunity to revamp some areas to make the location more relevant. He just posted on twitter a small preview of a firing range that he is working on.



Source: Twitter

You just spent a good amount of time surviving the wilderness, collecting important resources, and building a base. The next thing you are going to want to do is find a way to keep these things safe, because in this world, there are always people looking to take what you have. Next time you leave your base unattended, you’ll be able to make sure it’s still defended with these new traps.

Each of these new traps will have different debilitating effects on your attacker, such as leaving them blind, coughing uncontrollably, or even lighting them on fire. Take these opportunities to get the upper hand over those who seek to get in the way of your survival!

Source: Reddit r/H1Z1

The traps will require a workbench to craft and will be made from the following materials:
Metal Shard, Wood Stick, Gunpowder, Duct Tape, Spool of Twine? and grenades.

We have preliminarily added these items to our database and will update them with icons and recipe data as soon as they are added to the game files.