The wall being gone is never the disputed part. That is the one fact in a raid report nobody argues about, and it is also the only one most players think to capture. What decides the ticket is everything wrapped around the breach — whether the raiders had approval, whether the population cleared the server's threshold, whether anyone said a word before the first shot, how long it had been since the last raid on that base. DayZ, running the configuration Bohemia ships, writes down almost none of it.
That is not an admin being lazy. It is four lines in serverDZ.cfg that arrive set to zero, and a capture buffer on your own machine that is probably shorter than the rule you are trying to prove. Both were settled long before anyone touched your gate, which is what makes a raid ticket a preparation problem rather than a reporting one. By the time the fence comes down, the evidence either already exists or it never will.
Your Server Probably Wrote Nothing Down
Those four lines are worth reading in Bohemia's own words, comments and all, because the comments tell you exactly what each switch buys:
adminLogPlayerHitsOnly = 0; // 1 - log player hits only / 0 - log all hits ( animals/infected )
adminLogPlacement = 0; // 1 - log placement action ( traps, tents )
adminLogBuildActions = 0; // 1 - log basebuilding actions ( build, dismantle, destroy )
adminLogPlayerList = 0; // 1 - log periodic player list with position every 5 minutes
Every one of them ships at zero. That is the shipped template, not a hardened config some paranoid host wrote.
There is a second gate in front of those switches, and it is easy to miss. Admin logging happens only if the server was launched with the -adminlog parameter. The file it produces is named after the server executable with a .ADM extension, and it lands in the folder named by the -profiles launch parameter. Flip all four config lines to 1 without that launch parameter and you have configured the contents of a file nobody is writing. On rented and console-hosted servers the whole thing is a toggle in the host's control panel, and the logs come down from the host's website rather than off a machine anyone in your group can reach.
Of the four switches, the one that decides a raid ticket is adminLogBuildActions. Its comment spells out the three actions it covers: build, dismantle, destroy. Destroy is the raid. Turned off, the server records nothing when your wall panel stops existing — not the panel, not the tool, not the hand on the tool.
The line under it removes the fallback you would reach for next. adminLogPlayerList writes a periodic player list with position every five minutes, which is the closest thing DayZ has to a ledger of who was online and where they were standing. At zero, that ledger does not exist either, so there is no way to place anyone near your coordinates at the hour in question. The remaining two are not quietly compensating: adminLogPlacement covers traps and tents, and adminLogPlayerHitsOnly is a filter rather than a switch, deciding whether hit logging covers players only or animals and infected as well.
Run that forward on an ordinary morning. You log in at eight to a wooden wall panel that was intact when you logged out, and the server is running the shipped defaults. An admin opens the ADM log for you and works backwards. The destruction is not in there, because adminLogBuildActions was zero. There is no five-minute roster placing a single player at your base overnight, because the player list was zero too. iZurvive's server log reader, built to make these files legible, only surfaces events that are tied to a specific location — and the location-tied events your gate would have generated are precisely the ones that were never written. The admin is not stonewalling you. The one thing they can establish with certainty is which categories were switched off, and that answer arrives too late to be useful.
This is where the report burden lands back on you, and the servers say so in writing. DayzUnderground's rules state that staff "will take reports that are not supported by evidence into consideration and begin an investigation but will not be able to take action without further proof through logs or recordings." Read that ending closely. It is two options, and on a default server the first one is not available. Logs or recordings collapses into recordings, and recordings means yours.
So find out now, while nothing is on fire. Ask staff whether the server writes an ADM log at all, and whether adminLogBuildActions and the player list were ever flipped to 1. Some communities have turned them on and will tell you so happily. Plan on the answer being none, because that is what the template hands them, and treat any logging you do get as a bonus on top of your own footage rather than the thing your ticket rests on.
Your Capture Buffer Is Shorter Than the Rule
Your own footage is running on defaults too, and those defaults were chosen by people thinking about highlight reels. A capture buffer exists so you can press a button after a lucky shot and keep the thirty seconds you did not know you wanted. A raid ticket is the opposite shape: a long, dull span of time in which one sentence spoken four minutes before the gate fell decides everything.
Start with the ceilings on the three tools most players already have, because they are lower than people assume. NVIDIA's Instant Replay length setting spans 0.25 to 20 minutes, and 20 is not a conservative default someone picked for you — it is the maximum the feature offers. PS5 sits at the other end: gameplay is continuously and automatically recorded, and you can save anywhere from the last 15 seconds up to 1 hour. Xbox is the harshest of the three, and only in one specific configuration: at 4K HDR, game clips can be up to 30 seconds when capturing to your console's internal storage.
Now put the rules' numbers next to those. DayZRP's rule 4.5 requires you to remain online for at least 30 minutes after breaking line of sight with the other players or leaving the location of the raid, and being involved in a raid is named explicitly in the list of situations it covers. That single obligation is ten minutes longer than the longest buffer Instant Replay can hold — which means no buffer setting, at any value, covers a DayZRP raid. Save it at the instant you walk away and the file holds the twenty minutes leading up to that moment and nothing after it, while the half-hour that determines whether you combat logged runs on past the end of the recording. That best case has also spent the entire buffer on the approach and the breach, leaving nothing for the part before, which is where the initiation lives.
The initiation is the second problem, and it is not about length at all. DayZRP's rule 4.1 requires initiations to be made through voice and not through text roleplay, clear, unambiguous and specific to everyone they were aimed at. That puts the decisive evidence on the audio track rather than in the picture — a silent clip cannot establish that an initiation happened, and it cannot refute someone's claim that one did. On PS5, that track is a setting rather than a guarantee: captures can include your mic's audio and your voice chat audio, configured from the Create Menu under Capture Options, or through Settings > Captures and Broadcasts > Captures > Video Clip Format > Audio sharing Settings. Leave it alone and you can end up with immaculate video of a standoff that proves nothing about the only rule the standoff turns on.
The Xbox case is the one worth sitting with, because it fails silently. A player at 4K HDR, capturing to internal storage, watches the gate go down, hits capture, and gets their 30 seconds — the panel breaking, the first player through, all of it clean. The initiation four minutes earlier is not degraded or noisy. It was never held by anything. Thirty seconds of buffer cannot reach four minutes back, and no amount of care afterwards recovers it. The two ways out are both settings: turn off Allow HDR10 under Profile & system > Settings > General > TV & display options > Video modes, or move Capture location to external storage under Profile & system > Settings > Preferences > Capture & share, where, depending on available storage, external clips can be as long as 60 minutes.
Max the buffer anyway — 20 minutes on Instant Replay, the full hour on PS5, external storage or non-HDR on Xbox — and turn capture audio on deliberately rather than assuming it is there. But treat what you have built as what it actually is: a net for events you did not see coming, not a system that satisfies a thirty-minute rule. A raid announces itself in its first minute, and from that minute the rolling window is the wrong instrument, because it will overwrite its own beginning while you are still fighting. Start a manual continuous recording instead, and let it run through the breach, through the conversation, and through the half hour DayZRP expects you to stay online afterwards.
The Conditions That Decide a Raid Never Render
Point a camera at a base and you capture the base. How many people were on the server when the raid started, whether a leader signed off on it beforehand, how long it had been since the last raid on that target, how many bodies were in the raiding party — none of that renders, and all of it is what the ticket turns on.
StalkerZ makes this concrete in a single sentence: "The server population must be 60+ at the start of the raid, and the raid must be approved by the faction leader in the relevant attack log." Two conditions, joined by an and, and neither one is a thing your gate footage can speak to. The population figure exists for a moment and then moves; by the time staff read your ticket the server has emptied and refilled twice over. The approval is stranger still, because it lives in the attack log rather than in the world — a raid on StalkerZ becomes legitimate in a document, signed by a faction leader who does not have to be standing at the wall when it happens. A player watching the raid from inside the base has no way of seeing whether that entry exists. Neither does a player carrying out the raid, unless they went and looked.
The interval rule has the same off-world character. StalkerZ allows factions to raid another faction's base every 24 hours, with Free Stalkers held to 72 hours, and excludes faction FOBs from the restriction entirely. An interval is not a thing you observe — it is arithmetic between two timestamps. Somebody has to be able to date the previous raid to argue the current one was legal or was not, which means the useful evidence for today's ticket was generated during a raid that already ended, possibly one you filed nothing about because you won it.
DayzUnderground puts the same problem on a different axis. Its offline-raiding test is not "was the owner asleep" but a statement about the raider: "It is considered to be offline raiding if you log in outside of your usual play hours in an attempt to raid when you believe the victim is offline." Read what that asks a ticket to establish. Not a moment — a habit. Your defence, if you are the accused, is a pattern of your own login times across weeks, and the accusation against you is the same pattern read the other way. A clip cannot show a pattern. The headcount rules have the same shape from the other side: groups and factions on DayzUnderground are limited to 15 active members at a time, with "active" meaning "that member played within the past month (at least every 4 weeks)", and the rules add flatly that "Double digit roaming, attacking, raiding, etc. should never be happening." Whether ten people were on that raid is a countable fact, but only if someone counted at the time, and only from footage wide enough to hold them all.
Then there is the contradiction sitting inside DayzUnderground's own rulebook. Its metagaming rule forbids you to "check server listings to see who is online." Set that beside the offline-raiding rule and look at what it does to your evidence. The rule that could get you banned turns on who was online; the rule that governs how you may gather information forbids the one out-of-game tool that would tell you. The prohibition is written flatly, with no carve-out for someone assembling a report, so opening a server browser to prove the victim was in fact online is not a safe move to make there. Anything you know about the population on DayzUnderground has to come from what you legitimately saw in game — voices in the world, players you passed, chat you were present for — and it has to have been recorded as you saw it, rather than reconstructed afterwards from a listing you went and consulted.
Here is how a clean raid dies anyway. A StalkerZ faction gets the raid approved by its leader in the relevant attack log, waits out the full 24 hours since it last hit that base, and goes in with the server busy. Everything about it is legal. The defenders file, claiming the population was well under the threshold when it started. The raiders have superb footage: the approach, the breach, the firefight, the withdrawal. What they do not have is a single frame from the start of the raid showing what the population actually was, because at that moment they were watching a gate rather than a number. The approval survives contact — it is written down, it is dated, someone else can confirm it. The population condition has no such record, and the defenders' account of it is the only account there is. The raid was legitimate. The ticket is not winnable.
Screenshot the Rule, Not the Link
Rulebooks are dated files that change, which makes the version you played under a fact in its own right. The DayZRP rules page is stamped with a LAST UPDATE date — 2025-07-23 on the version checked for this article — and every DayZRP page prints server time in UTC in its header alongside the restart countdown. Both details matter more than they look. If your ticket rests on a clause, link the page and the clause may have been reworded by the time staff read it. Screenshot the clause instead, with the update date in frame, and you have the rule as it read on the night. The UTC clock solves the other half, because a timestamp is only useful if everyone agrees what time zone it is in, and the server's own header will tell you in the same image.
DayzUnderground spells out what it wants around that: "A useful report should contain evidence in the form of in-game names, timestamps, chat logs, screenshots, and video," and for base tickets specifically, "images of the structure(s) as well as coordinates to its location." Both nouns in that second quote are load-bearing. In-game names, not display names, because a character is what the rules govern. Coordinates, not a description of where the base is, because staff have to find the structure themselves to check anything about it.
None of this survives being remembered. Treat the first minute of a raid as a capture in its own right, separate from the recording of the raid itself: the clock and the server time zone, the population as your own client legitimately puts it in front of you, a wide shot that shows how many of you there are, the coordinates of the structure and images of it before anyone touches it, and the clause you believe you are complying with, dated. That first minute is the cheapest evidence in this entire article and the only kind that cannot be reconstructed once the fence starts falling.
The Breach Is the Easy Part — Record the Conversation
Inside the raid, the camera goes where the noise is: the gate, the panels, the moment the fence gives. What is genuinely in dispute is somewhere else — what was said when the two sides met, and what state the base was in when you found it and when you left it.
Start with the exchange, because DayZRP's rule 4.8 makes it an obligation on both sides at once. The raider "must clearly communicate your intentions as the raider, either verbally or by leaving evidence" on coming into contact with the base owner. The owner, encountering raiders, "must identify yourself as the owner and either request that the raid ceases or initiate before engaging in any hostilities." Read those two sentences as a pair and notice what they do: they turn the meeting itself into the regulated act. There is no version of the encounter where only one party is under scrutiny. A raider who says nothing and keeps swinging has failed the clause. An owner who comes around the corner and shoots without saying who they are has failed the other half of it, and the raid being unlawful does not excuse it — the duty attaches when the two sides see each other, not when someone decides they were in the right.
Both halves are duties discharged by doing something, and something you did is proved by showing it. That is why the decisive footage is a few unglamorous seconds of two players talking in a doorway. The raider's alternative route through the clause has the same property: intent can be communicated verbally or by leaving evidence, and evidence left is an act that happens somewhere, at a particular moment, and can be filmed being left.
Then StalkerZ removes your ability to help the footage along while it runs. Its rules are explicit: "You must stay in character and finish the RP scenario when another player is breaking a rule. Do not go out of character (e.g. tell the player OOC that he is breaking a rule). You may report the rule break to Staff after the RP scenario has concluded." This is a stricter constraint on evidence than it first appears. The natural reflex when you watch someone break a rule is to say so — on mic, on the spot, so the recording carries a marker exactly where you need one later. On StalkerZ that reflex is itself a violation. Worse, you are required to keep playing the scenario out, so the recording runs on for however long the raid takes while the moment you actually care about recedes into the middle of it. The tape has to be legible to a staff member with no narrator. Nothing in it can rely on you having pointed at anything.
DayzUnderground closes the other end of the same trap after the fact: "If we discover you did not file a report for a rule break you witnessed or withheld incriminating evidence related to a rule break, you will be considered to have broken that rule as well." Withheld, not fabricated — the offence is subtractive. Put that beside StalkerZ's gag order and the shape of the obligation becomes clear. You cannot argue your case while it happens, and you cannot trim your case after it happens. What survives is a recording that has to include your own conduct, including the parts that damage you. That is not moral advice, it is a description of what a usable tape looks like: a camera that only ever finds the other side's mistakes and never once catches your own group is a tape a staff member is entitled to be suspicious of, and on DayzUnderground the missing footage is itself chargeable.
The state of the base is the second half of the recording, and it turns on two things that vanish quickly. Locks first. DayzUnderground requires that "You are required to remove ALL locks on a base BEFORE you can claim ownership and/or change a lock combination," and its base rules require dial locks to be visible and operable from both sides. Those two rules together mean lock state is a filmable fact by design — a compliant base wears its locks on the outside — and that a claim of ownership is decided by how many of them were still fitted at the moment somebody changed a combination. That moment is unrecoverable, because vanilla DayZ disposes of the evidence for you: there is no cutting or lockpicking action for a Combination Lock, and the lock simply drops on its own once the parts holding it are destroyed. By the time you are standing inside the base with the gate in pieces, the locks are on the ground or gone, and nothing in the world tells anyone what was on which door twenty minutes earlier. Only footage taken on the way in has it.
How you got through the wall is filmable in the same way, and DayzUnderground's list of permitted methods is written as though someone will be watching. A lock hammer on the lock, explosives, guns and ammo, melee weapons and objects, guessing the combination by rolling the dial — and boosting on no more than one other player, a vehicle or another structure, one player at a time, never on shelters, tents, backpacks, fireplaces or mannequins. Every entry on that list is a visible physical act, which is what makes the rule enforceable at all. It also means a teammate standing on a tent is a frame that exists, and one you will later be forbidden to cut out.
The same rule 4.8 that governs the conversation also governs flags, and it decides the other recurring dispute. Lowering a flag pole with valid in-character reasoning is allowed, and a player who has gained entry by legal means may lower the flag to reach the loot and placeable items inside. Once that has happened, items despawning on the normal timer are not griefing, because "it would then be on the owner to raise the flag." That single clause is where most despawned-loot complaints live and die. The owner logs in to an empty base and files, describing destroyed property. The answer depends on three facts in sequence: whether entry was legal, whether the flag was lowered with reasoning that holds up, and how much time passed before the owner came back to raise it. The burden shifts to the owner at the moment the flag comes down — but only if someone can show it came down that way, in that order. Film the pole on arrival, film it being lowered, and film the state you left it in.
So point the camera at the parts of a raid that feel like dead air: the locks before anyone touches them, the flag pole and the reasoning, every encounter with anyone who might be the owner with audio running from the first second of contact rather than from the moment it turns hostile, and what your own group stands on and swings at. Then keep rolling after the interesting part ends, because on StalkerZ you are required to play the scenario out, and on DayzUnderground the footage you leave out is the footage you are answerable for. What you end up with is long, mostly boring, and unflattering in places, which is the point at which the real problem starts: that file now contains other people, and you.
File It Without Exposing Anyone
The first thing to get right is where the file goes, because on StalkerZ the route is written into the rule itself: "Players must open tickets (and not DM Staff) to report rule breaks and must submit video evidence. Staff will not take any action and will not provide compensation unless video evidence is submitted." Two separate obligations are stacked in that sentence. The channel is fixed — a staff member you happen to know is not a faster door into the process, and a report handed to them privately is not a report that has been filed. And the evidentiary bar is absolute rather than preferential: no video, no action, and no compensation for what the raid cost you.
That bar runs straight into the problem you created by meeting it. The recording that satisfies it is long, it is continuous, and on PS5 its whole value sits on an audio track carrying every voice in your channel — the people who were with you, the ones arguing about something unrelated, the one who said something in the last hour they would not say to staff. PlayStation's own capture guidance treats that as a question you are supposed to have asked: "When including voice chat audio, make sure to ask the voice chat members if it's alright to include their voice in your video clips." It is written for people sharing highlight reels, and it lands harder here, because you are not sharing a clip for fun. You are handing a recording of your friends' voices to a stranger with the power to ban them, in support of a ticket most of them have no part in.
DayzUnderground has already settled the standard for handling exactly that material, and it is stricter than the one most players apply to their own uploads. When reports are investigated or concluded, staff "do not release personal information that will aid in identifying another player's identity in game or out of game to anyone," and cases are "frequently handled by keeping suspects entirely anonymous." Read both halves as an instruction to yourself. The people running the ticket will not name the accused publicly, will not surface anything that ties a character to a person, and are prepared to resolve the whole thing without anyone learning who was on the other end. If the evidence you attach hands them the real names, the Discord tags and the voices anyway, you have not met their standard — you have simply made them the ones who have to contain it.
On a real file that looks like this. You have the initiation: voice, unambiguous, timestamped, the single clip your ticket lives on. You also have, in the corner of the frame for its whole duration, a Discord overlay showing four accounts with real first names and one with a full name, and on the audio, a friend who is not in the raid at all talking about their day. What stays is everything that proves the clause — the spoken initiation in full, the in-game names, the clock, the coordinates, enough of the approach that staff can see the sequence rather than a fragment you chose. What goes is the overlay, cropped or covered, and the stretch of audio belonging to someone who is not party to this. DayzUnderground asks for in-game names, and in-game names are what a character is called; a Discord handle attached to a face is a different category of fact and is not evidence of anything the ticket turns on. Trimming it costs your case nothing. Leaving it in costs someone else something you were never asked to spend on their behalf.
The obvious objection deserves taking seriously, because DayzUnderground charges you for withholding evidence as if you had broken the rule yourself, and every cut you make to a file is technically a subtraction. The way through is not to guess where the line falls. Keep the untrimmed original on your own drive, file the version that proves the clause, and say plainly in the ticket that you cut for privacy and still have the whole recording if staff want it. That move is already inside the rules: DayzUnderground punishes purposefully fabricated reports and forbids lying to staff out of character, but leaves an explicit door open — "If you do not want to answer for any reason, just decline to answer with your reason." Declining out loud, with the reason attached, is permitted. A silent edit that staff discover later is the thing that looks like concealment, and it will not matter that your motive was somebody else's privacy.
File it even when you are certain it will go nowhere. Reports that are entirely valid and fall short only on evidence do not evaporate at DayzUnderground — they are noted in the server's "naughty list", which means a pattern no single ticket could prove accumulates across the tickets that could not prove it. That cuts both ways, and it is worth remembering if the file in front of you is one you are answering rather than filing: every ban there except ban evasion can be appealed, and the clip that clears you contains whoever was in your channel that night just as surely as the clip that convicts someone else.
Which is the decision actually in front of you, and it is not about filing. Before anything leaves your machine, play the recording through twice — once holding the clause you are invoking, to mark the span that proves it, and once looking only for people. Staff on DayzUnderground will not release a name to anyone, in game or out. Neither should the file you send them.