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Cross-Server MySQL Hive
Gear, wallet, bank balance, and lifetime stats travel with the player across multiple server instances. A Wasteland-Z architecture choice, not a port — prior wasteland mods were single-server.
Where Wasteland-Z's understanding of the engine came from, the open-source mods consulted during research, and the independent audits that confirm no code was copied. Receipts, not marketing.
Many engine behaviors in Arma Reforger are undocumented in Bohemia
Interactive's published API surface. Modding the game seriously means
reading BI's officially published script source (the
BohemiaInteractive/Arma-Reforger-Script-Diff
repo on GitHub), consulting BI's Doxygen API documentation that ships
with the Workbench install, running live runtime experiments, and
occasionally consulting the modding community's public open-source
mods to confirm a given API path is viable before committing to an
implementation. This page records that research lineage — what was
consulted, what shaped Wasteland-Z's understanding of the engine, and
what was not used.
The wasteland genre is a lineage — that part is acknowledged below in "Standing On Team Wasteland's Shoulders." But the specific game-system designs in Wasteland-Z were not lifted from any prior mod. Every mechanic on the map started as a written design note, was iterated as a TODO item, and was reviewed across multiple development sessions before code shipped.
These specific game systems were designed for Wasteland-Z and do not exist as direct ports from any prior wasteland mod. Each one traces back to written design notes and TODO entries in this project's documentation tree.
Gear, wallet, bank balance, and lifetime stats travel with the player across multiple server instances. A Wasteland-Z architecture choice, not a port — prior wasteland mods were single-server.
Towns light up red on the map when occupied, lore-anchored to the abandoned military radar grid. High-loot zones, full visibility cost. A Wasteland-Z mechanic.
A solo operator can take the entire ATM banking grid offline by destroying a single relay. Repair requires time on-site and a kit. Original system — not in any prior wasteland mod we've reviewed.
Players who cross an admin-configured wealth threshold get their area broadcast on a timer to the lobby. Wealth becomes a target. Tunable, can be flipped off entirely.
The three-faction frame (Red Bandits / Blue Military / Green Survivors) is genre-inherited. The specific shape — GREEN groups forming breakable alliances with shared map visibility — is Wasteland-Z's design.
Runs on top of any Game Master scenario via per-map config files. Towns, stores, vehicle anchors, loot pools — all admin-authored per map. No prior wasteland mod shipped a fully map-portable implementation.
Server-defined catalog sets per store, stock rotation, proximity radar, map countdown. The chunked-replication design solves the "catalog too big for a single RPC" problem at Wasteland-Z's scale.
Navmesh → terrain trace → furniture cluster → physics drop → door anchor → final composite. Six versions deep before the algorithm placed crates correctly inside every building type. Hard-won and original.
Loot and vehicle respawn cadence driven by tracked player activity, not fixed clocks. Quiet servers respawn slower; contested servers respawn faster. Wasteland-Z design.
Two-pipeline server-side validator, nesting guards, full-container blocks, weight-multiplier server config. Designed and engineered specifically for Reforger's Enfusion inventory contracts — catches edge cases BI's own samples don't handle.
Every system above traces to a written design specification in docs/design/, a research investigation in docs/research/, and multiple session iterations in docs/sessions/ and TODO logs across this repository. The design log is the receipt.
Wasteland-Z is a successor in spirit to the A3 Wasteland family of mods. A3 Wasteland is an Arma 3 mod written in SQF. Arma Reforger uses a different engine (Enfusion) and a different scripting language (Enforce Script). No code, configuration, or asset can technically transfer between them — the lineage here is at the level of gameplay concept. Heavy Forge tips its hat.
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.
AgentRev's A3 Wasteland master is open-source under AGPL-3.0 at
github.com/A3Wasteland/ArmA3_Wasteland.Altis.
Cited in Wasteland-Z's design docs for gameplay-loop reference only —
no SQF could transfer to Enfusion even if we wanted it to.
The canonical sources every Reforger mod is expected to use. Bohemia ships these openly with the Workbench install — they are the modding API surface.
~17,000 HTML pages of API documentation shipped with the Workbench. Mirrored locally for offline grep. The primary reference for every method, class hierarchy, and component contract in the mod.
BI's published source diff repo on GitHub. Verbatim base-game source for SCR_MapEntity, SCR_MapMarkerBase, SCR_MapDotCircleHandler, and the entire marker pipeline. The primary reference for ground-truth API behavior.
BI's official sample mods repo. Reference patterns for modded classes, RPC dispatch, replication, persistence, and Workbench integration. Patterns observed; no code imported wholesale.
The official Arma Reforger / Enfusion wiki. Setup guides, scripting best practices, multiplayer scripting rules, entity catalog reference. Cross-checked against the Doxygen for authoritative API.
BI's official Reforger modding update articles at
reforger.armaplatform.com/news.
Authoritative source for scripting version changes, replication
updates, and API breaking-change notes between Reforger releases.
Community-hosted Reforger source viewer widely used by the modding community for cross-reference during development. Useful as a structured fallback when Doxygen and the Script-Diff repo don't surface the answer directly.
The following public, open-source Reforger mods were read for the purpose of understanding undocumented engine behavior. No code, configuration files, prefabs, layouts, or assets from these projects were imported into Wasteland-Z. What we took was understanding; what we shipped is independent.
During a 16-hour debugging session on Reforger's poorly-documented map marker pipeline, Kex's public PlayerMapMarkers mod was cloned to a scratch directory and read to understand the working shape of BI's SCR_MapMarkerManagerComponent + SCR_MapMarkerEntryDynamic pattern. Wasteland-Z's marker implementation chose a different official BI API path (SCR_MapEntity.CreateCustomMapItem) and was built independently from BI's Doxygen and live runtime testing — verified by an explicit provenance audit. Verbatim .conf syntax snippets quoted in Wasteland-Z's internal research documentation are educational citations of Kex's public source for explaining BI's config inheritance pattern; they live in markdown documentation, not in any shipped configuration file.
Referenced as a working example of the modded-class overlay pattern — a mod that activates on top of any Game Master scenario. Wasteland-Z uses the same architectural pattern (which is BI's documented modding approach), implemented independently for the wasteland gameplay loop. No code, classes, or files imported.
Consulted at the architecture-concept level during Wasteland-Z's vehicle store design phase to understand the working shape of a Reforger vehicle store. Observed: per-merchandise spawn anchors relative to the shop entity, engine collision rejection when spawn positions are missing, a PlayerController-side component handling client-side purchase requests, and a split between static-shop and runtime-shop components. Wasteland-Z's stores diverge in design — menu-driven UI instead of physical merchandise display, server-defined named catalog sets instead of per-shop merchandise lists, chunked replication for the 227-item gun catalog, purchase routing through HFPlayerStateComponent instead of a dedicated shop manager. No ADM classes, files, or assets are in the Wasteland-Z tree. ADM is named only in internal reference markdown documentation as a "see also" pointer for any future modder reading the source.
These short Workshop mods were referenced during research to confirm that a particular engine API path was viable before Wasteland-Z committed to an implementation. Confirmation-only — Wasteland-Z's implementations differ in design.
A ~2 KB workshop mod that sets m_fMaxWeight = -9999999
to bypass weight limits. Confirmed that the weight-bypass API path
was shippable. Wasteland-Z's inventory system uses a different
approach: modded class overrides of IsAdditionalWeightOk()
on three storage component types, a server-configurable
WEIGHT_MULTIPLIER, nesting guards, and full-container blocks.
Confirmed that the inherited-prefab-with-boosted-m_fMaxWeight pattern exists in the wild. Wasteland-Z does not use this pattern — Wasteland-Z works via runtime modded class overrides rather than new prefab variants.
Briefly surveyed to understand the shape of admin tooling and gameplay loops in adjacent communities. None could share code with Wasteland-Z — they target different engines (Arma 3 SQF, DayZ Enforce).
Arma 3 / SQF. Gameplay-loop reference for the wasteland genre — spawn, scavenge, mission, store, fight. The genre's living master repo, AGPL-3.0.
Arma 3 / SQF. Surveyed for admin-menu dialog structure in adjacent dynamic-sandbox communities.
Arma 3 / SQF. Surveyed for owner-tier admin tooling shape.
DayZ / Enforce. Surveyed for admin-tool tab structure (Player Manager, Teleport, ESP, Bans, Permissions, etc.).
The toolchain. All design decisions and final code review performed by the project author. AI assistance was used as a research and pair-programming aid throughout — every line shipping in the mod was reviewed by hand.