For The Players Who Stayed
This is for the survivors of A3-Wasteland — the ones who put thousands of hours into the original and never quite found a successor. We built it for ourselves first. Everyone else is welcome at the campfire.
A hardcore PVP open-world wasteland. The viral outbreak ended. The cities emptied. What survived now scavenges, fights, and trades for what's left.
Wasteland-Z is our love letter to the A3-Wasteland era of Arma — the hardcore PVP scarcity loop pioneered by Team Wasteland. We're rebuilding that gameplay natively in Arma Reforger's Enfusion engine, with the same uncompromising spirit and zero shortcuts. Tribute, not a port. Same soul, new engine.
This is for the survivors of A3-Wasteland — the ones who put thousands of hours into the original and never quite found a successor. We built it for ourselves first. Everyone else is welcome at the campfire.
Money, inventory, weight, every state change — validated server-side from day one. The world is one shared truth, replicated to every client. No client trust. No exceptions.
Runs on top of any Reforger map. Towns, stores, loot pools, mission anchors — all per-map config files. Drop the mod onto Arland, Everon, or your own custom terrain and ship. The game travels with the admin.
Log off on Arland, hop into Everon, your gear travels with you. A shared MySQL hive backs the entire server cluster — wallet, bank, inventory, lifetime stats. Different maps. Different sessions. One persistent operator.
The Wasteland genre is a lineage. Tonic started it. Sa-Matra evolved it. 404 Wasteland and GoT Wasteland built on top. Team Wasteland — a cross-community collaboration between GoT, TPG, KoS, 404Games and others — gave us the version we grew up on. The genre exists because they made it. Heavy Forge tips its hat.
The multi-map A3 Wasteland community (Altis · Stratis · Chernarus · Taviana) where Heavy Forge cut its teeth and built our own Wasteland variant with help from Lodac. That's the home server this team grew out of. Wasteland-Z carries the lineage forward into Reforger. New engine. New systems. Same soul.
Arma Reforger Wasteland clones flatten progression by spawning gear everywhere — the store becomes pointless. We refuse to make that mistake. Each tier has a clear role and doesn't step on the others.
Starter loadout guaranteed — pistol, mags, food, water, cash, clothes. No exceptions.
World loot in random houses. Town crates with basic weapons. Loaded vehicle trunks for transport between towns.
Mid-tier gear plus serious money. The bridge between scavenger and operator.
227-item catalog. Top-tier weapons, armor, optics, vehicles. Stock rotates on a timer.
Stay alive. Stay rich. Climb the server leaderboard. The longer you last, the bigger the target on your back.
Four loot streams feeding three stores, all running on a real server-side wallet and bank. A light survival layer underneath. Every pickup matters because every pickup competes with the others.
Immobile crates spawn in town hubs — weapons, ammo, gear. Polar-sweep placement, roll-per-building, finite stock until respawn. Towns light up red when occupied; everyone sees the contest.
Random houses across the map carry survival items — food, water, bandages, backpacks. Lazy per-building scanner. No waypoints, no minimap pings. You search or you don't.
Trunks ship loaded with starter weapons. Find a working ride, find your next gun. Spawn anchors driven by per-map config. Idle despawn after one hour.
Capture, defend, eliminate, retrieve, convoy, crash site, airdrop. Crate rewards driven by named loot sets. The bridge between scavenger and operator.
227-item top-tier catalog. Server-defined catalog sets assigned per store. Stock rotation timer, map countdown, proximity radar. The endgame target.
Typed by stock — cars, trucks, APCs, aircraft, boats, mixed lots. Each store has spawn points per vehicle type. Buy, drive, lock, persist.
Basic supplies — food, water, bandages, repair kits, ammo. Always stocked, lower margins. The safety net for the scavenger between paydays.
Server-side wallet. ATM network across the map. Bank balance persists across the entire hive. Comms relay sabotage takes the whole grid offline until repaired.
Food, water, stamina drift over time. Drains affect regen. Tuned for tactical pressure, not DayZ-grade hardcore. You feel it. You don't dread it.
Wasteland-Z isn't a fork. It isn't a port of someone else's mod. Every system was investigated, designed, and engineered specifically for Arma Reforger's Enfusion engine — much of it on territory no public mod had documented before. This is the work of trial, error, and hours-on-end research.
Built from scratch over 17+ sessions. Server-side weight validation, unified Validator, two-pipeline drag-and-drop architecture. Catches engine edge cases — floating attachments, sub-storage rerouting, cross-container moves — that BI's own samples don't handle.
227-item catalog hardened across 30+ sessions. Chunked replication for delivery at scale. Admin-defined catalog sets assigned per store. Stock rotation, proximity radar, sell-all flow, full transaction logging. Built in this engine, in this mod, by this team.
Original research on the Reforger map system — figuring out how to render runtime markers inside the engine's native draw stack, between terrain and text labels. The kind of engine detail no other public mod had cracked when we shipped it.
Six versions deep: navmesh → terrain trace → furniture cluster → physics drop → door anchor → final composite. The result places loot crates correctly inside every Arland building type. Hard-won and original.
Nine reference documents covering Enfusion APIs that ship under-documented — RPC patterns, replication semantics, math3D transforms, vehicle slot internals, world API. Reference-quality, written so any other modder could read them.
5,800+ lines of session-by-session handoff log. 18 locked design decisions kept the project from drifting. Every config key triple-documented: inline comment, admin guide, repo. Boring. Effective.
Six headline systems already in production, plus a shipping spawn pipeline. Every one of them designed against the same anti-cheat-from-day-one rule.
Multiple servers, one shared MySQL hive. Log off in one, join another, your gear, wallet, and stats are waiting. Different maps, different sessions — same operator. The map changes; your loadout doesn't.
Chunked replication. Weapons, ammo, gear, vehicles. Rotating stock with countdown timers. Server-defined catalogs. Map markers when fresh stock hits.
Towns light up RED on the map when occupied. Lore-driven by the abandoned military radar grid. High-loot zones, but everyone sees you go in.
Cross the admin-configured wealth threshold and your area gets broadcast on a timer. Wealth becomes a target. Tunable, can be flipped off entirely.
A solo operator can disable every ATM on the map by destroying the relay. Banking goes dark. Chaos follows. Repair costs a kit and time on-site.
RED Bandits, BLUE Military, GREEN Survivors. GREEN groups can form alliances with shared map visibility. Faction switches queue until death — no combat-swapping.
Wasteland-Z runs on top of any Reforger map. Towns, stores, loot pools, vehicle anchors — all driven by per-map config files. Arland, Everon, your custom terrain.
Production v3.2 Discord bot. Ban management, status broadcasts, status cards. Same gateway pipe future-ready for the Zeus AI Director layer.
Time-based or admin-triggered round end. Map rotation between scenarios. Wallet keeps. Bank keeps. Inventory wipes archive — never delete. Audit trail forever.
Choose at spawn. Switch between deaths only. Every choice changes your relationships, your spawn zones, and who shoots at you on sight.
Take what you want. Kill on sight. Remote spawn zones. Aggressive playstyle. Other RED appear on your map — coordinate or compete.
Organized. Disciplined. Protect territory. Military-grade spawn areas. All BLUE see each other on the map. Built for team play.
Independent operators. Solo players are truly solo. Small groups form alliances — shared markers, no friendly fire, breakable at any time.
300+ hours, 111 build sessions, and counting. Most core systems are in production. Spawn pipeline shipping now. Live release on the horizon.
Hosted by Tactical Xcellence (TAC-X) — a 10+ year milsim community — and built by Heavy Forge Inc. Sign up to track launch, find a server, or join the Discord.