Set your crates up in plain English, check it for mistakes, then export the JSON files your server reads.
Select all three files at once — each is detected automatically. They live in
<ServerProfile>\HackedCrate\ and are created the first time your server boots with the mod.
Set in minutes; the file stores seconds. These are the numbers players feel.
Waves only run at crates with waves switched on (see Crate Locations).
Map markers need the LBmaster Groups mod; notifications use Expansion if it's loaded, otherwise the vanilla popup.
Turn both off before going live — otherwise crates spawn every minute and hacks finish in seconds.
Dynamic crates are the roaming event: one appears at a time, at a random one of your locations, on a timer. Players get a warning, race there, and it's gone once looted.
Static crates sit permanently at fixed spots. Players learn where they are and camp them, so they become known contested locations. They respawn on their own timer after being looted.
Type coordinates as three numbers — x y z, the same order DayZ gives them. The easiest way to get them is to stand where you want the crate in-game and read off your position, or place an object in an editor and copy its coordinates. Rotation is optional; leave it at 0 0 0 if you don't care which way the crate faces.
After a server restart, each crate finds its settings again by its name. Two crates sharing a name will confuse it, so keep every name unique. The checker warns you if you slip up.
Optional. They let one crate hand out different loot depending on how many players are online — serious gear when the server is busy, ordinary gear when it's quiet. You define player-count bands and pick which pools each band uses.
If you set no tiers at all, a dynamic crate uses the default pools ticked below, and a static crate uses its own pool list.
Every pool already has its own setting for how many items it hands over. Next to each pool on a crate you can override that for this crate only — which is how the same "high tier weapons" pool gives 1 item at a quiet location and 4 at your endgame location.
Leave the boxes blank and it uses the pool's own setting. The column beside them always spells out what you'll actually get — including any guaranteed items the pool adds on top — and the line underneath totals up the whole crate.
One dynamic crate spawns at a time, cycling through these locations in a shuffled order.
Always present at fixed spots. Grouped into sections purely for your own organisation.
A pool is a themed shopping list — "high tier weapons", "medical supplies". Crates don't contain items directly; they point at pools, and the pool decides what actually appears.
This trips everyone up. The number you type is a weight: an item at 20 is simply twice as likely to be picked as one at 10. Weights don't need to add up to anything, and an item at 80 is not "80% likely to appear".
So the tool works the real odds out for you, live, in two columns:
Want the weights to read as plain percentages? Rescale weights to 100 rewrites them so they add up to 100 without changing any of the odds.
How many random items this pool contributes. 1–2 means a crate gets one or two things from it. Remember a crate usually pulls from several pools at once, so the totals add up quickly — that's how a crate ends up with a weapon, a scope, some ammo and a vest.
Anywhere you type an item you can put either a plain classname like
M4A1, or the name of a preset. Anything starting with Preset_ is
treated as a preset reference, and gives you a fully built item — a rifle with its optic and a
loaded magazine — instead of a bare one. Presets live on the next tab.
What state the item spawns in, from Pristine down to Badly Damaged. There's also Random, which rolls anywhere from 30% to 100% health. Items never spawn ruined, whatever you pick.
Bolts extra items onto that specific spawn — a scope on a rifle, or contents inside a bag. You can give each one its own chance, so an attachment only shows up some of the time.
Import your server's types.xml and pick items straight from it —
modded items included, because it's your server's own list. Filter by category, where it spawns and loot tier,
then drop the lot into a pool with weights worked out from how rare each item is on the map.
Opens a crate over and over using the same maths the mod uses, so you can see what your loot actually produces before touching the server.
A pool is a shopping list. Guaranteed items always spawn.
Then the crate rolls between min and max random picks from the weighted list — chance is that item's
weight when a roll happens. Names starting with Preset_ point at a preset instead of a raw classname.
Preset_Weapon_M4_Tactical; that
preset's optic slot points at Preset_Optics_Military; that attachment pool holds
six scopes and a "nothing" entry. Result: every M4 is recognisable, but no two are identical.Everywhere you list attachments or cargo, each entry can be one of four things:
M4_RISHndgrd — attach this item, alwaysM4_RISHndgrd:0.5 — attach it half the timePreset_Optics_Military — roll one from that attachment pool, alwaysPreset_Optics_Military:0.25 — roll from it a quarter of the timeThe editor writes that format for you — type the name, set the percentage, press Add.
Inside an attachment pool each entry has a weight, exactly like loot pool chances — bigger number, more likely to be chosen. Adding a "nothing" entry gives the slot a chance to come out empty, which is usually what you want; otherwise every single gun gets a scope.
Optional overrides for that one entry: spawn condition (fixed or a random range), battery type and charge for anything electronic, how full a magazine is, fixed sub-attachments, and nested pools that fill a slot on the item you just rolled. Leave anything at -1 to use the default.
Presets are grouped by what they are — weapons, magazines, gear, optics, clothing, containers, food & drink, tools, and generic for anything else. Pick the type that matches the item; each one exposes the settings that make sense for it, so a weapon offers a magazine and ammo, and a food item offers how full it is. (Legacy is an old format kept only so older configs keep working — don't add new presets there.)
A weighted bag of attachments. Anything referencing Preset_PoolName
rolls one entry from here. Add a "nothing" entry to give a chance of an empty slot.
A preset is a pre-built item — a weapon with its optic and loaded mag, a vest with cargo, and so on.
Loot pools spawn them by name. In any attachment or cargo box you can write
Item, Item:0.5 (50% chance), Preset_Pool, or Preset_Pool:0.5.
The three files reference each other constantly — crates name pools, pools name presets, presets name attachment pools. Nearly every "it isn't working" turns out to be one of those names pointing at something that no longer exists, which fails silently in game and just spawns nothing. The check follows every reference across all three files and tells you which ones are broken.
It also catches empty tiers and gaps in player-count coverage, min values above max values, duplicate crate names, crates still sitting at 0 0 0, waves with no zombie types, and test timings left switched on.
Red items will break something. Amber ones are worth a look but won't stop the mod working.
Downloads give you the same three files back, in exactly the format the mod wrote them, with only your changes applied. Replace the originals, restart, done.
Put them in <ServerProfile>\HackedCrate\ (overwriting the old ones) and restart the server.
The files are read once at boot. Keep a backup of the originals first.
<ServerProfile>\HackedCrate\ folder.QueueDoNotEdit.json alone — it's the shuffle state, not settings.script_*.log for [HackedCrate] lines. Turn on debug logging in Setup if you need detail.